Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein

Since McCarthy’s day, liberals had been wondering why apparently intelligent people could believe that the wrong kind of politics in the United States would inexorably hasten its takeover by the USSR. It was concluded that these were people who feared for their status in a rapidly changing, complex urban society, who pined for a simpler past (they were for the “repeal of industrialism,” said Commentary, which was odd, since most Birch leaders were industrialists). The cognoscenti neglected the simplest answer: people were afraid of internal Communist takeover because the government had been telling them to be afraid—at least since 1947, when George F. Kennan argued in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the founding document of U.S. Cold War doctrine, excerpted in Reader’s Digest, that “exhibitions of indecision, disunity, and internal disintegration within this country have an exhilarating effect on the whole Communist movement.” Through the 1960s, AFL-CIO president George Meany loved to flatter rank-and-file members that they were the first line of resistance against the Communists: in Czechoslovakia, he said, “they controlled the trade union movement, and within seven days they controlled the country.” Attorney General Robert Kennedy told a 1961 press conference, “Communist espionage here in this country is more active than it has ever been.” (There had been none to speak of since World War II.) Army recruits saw films like Red Nightmare, narrated by Jack Webb, which depic...