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

by Rick Perlstein

The best measure of a politician’s electoral success was becoming not how successfully he could broker people’s desires, but how well he could tap their fears.

The only condition for membership in the Society was that members follow his dictates absolutely. They could quit if they didn’t like it.

People like James Wallace cursed Washington at John Birch Society meetings after spending their days inside firms built lock, stock, and barrel with government contracts and after earning their engineering degrees in California’s tuition-free, state-run university system, or buying them with GI Bill money.

In 1961 his schedule included a well-publicized debating victory over Pennsylvania’s liberal senator Joseph Clark, who was reduced to spluttering that his opponent was a “neo-anarchist” who would make “a fine candidate for the next President of the John Birch Society.” The next year Friedman published a popular treatise, Capitalism and Freedom. It was so iconoclastic—and so lucid in its iconoclasm—that some Keynesians successfully lobbied to have it purged from their universities’ libraries. Among its off-the-deep-end arguments were that corporations should not make charitable donations (lest stockholders be defrauded by this economic irrationality); that the Post Office should be sold off; that licensing procedures for professionals like doctors should be banned (the market would take care of the problem of quackery on its own)—and that the government should disburse educational “vouchers” to force public schools to compete in the marketplace.

Moyers was instrumental in pioneering an innovation in presidential campaigning: the full-time espionage, sabotage, and mudslinging unit.

point, on September 29, after four bombings in eight days in the town of McComb, Mississippi, three Klansmen were arrested off the street. They admitted that they chose bombing victims weekly out of a hat. They were released on suspended sentences. The judge ruled that they had been “unduly provoked” by “unhygienic” outsiders of “low morality.” And, that same day, thirteen civil rights workers were arrested for the crime of Southern hospitality—“serving food without a license,” the charge read.

Mrs. Eugene Talmadge’s famous Coca-Cola-marinated ham.

And what had Barry Goldwater done for Culpeper? He had voted against the Civil Rights Act; nothing else. For that Southerners seemed willing to turn back the clock on every social gain of the past thirty years—just for the chance to vote nigger-nigger-nigger. It made Lyndon Johnson heartsick.

Just as in the wake of the election the nation’s voting booths knew only two numbers—Johnson’s 61.2 percent to Goldwater’s 38.8—newspapers tended to stop at two as well: the $17 million raised by Lyndon Johnson, versus the $12 million raised by Goldwater. What that ignored was that in 1960, 22,000 people donated to JFK’s campaign and 44,000 to Nixon’s. Over a million gave to Barry Goldwater. And that made all the difference.

Walton had a malign brilliance for that sort of thing. Singing groups and massed choirs had their uses. But voters in 1964, he instinctively understood, were afraid. To reach them you had to exploit those fears. That was the technique by which Johnson was holding crowds in the palm of his hand: convincing them that he was the true conservative in the race—the calmer of fears, the bringer of order, the preserver of peace; the father tucking a vulnerable electorate in after banishing the monsters from under the bed with a bedtime story.