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

by Rick Perlstein

You hated Franklin Roosevelt. In 1932 he ran on a platform of balanced budgets, less bureaucracy, and removing the federal government from competition with private enterprise. Then the New Deal threw money at everyone and everything—everyone and everything, that is, but you and your plants. You thought it was a godsend to industrialists who managed thousands of workers, instead of hundreds, and their friends on Wall Street. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration authorized executives in every industry to regulate their own. The men he picked were inevitably from the biggest companies, no one you knew. You had no say when they set floors so high that they destroyed the only edge you had over them in accessing the market—you could no longer undercut their prices. You had no say when your taxes ballooned to pay for Roosevelt’s deficits, which you knew would only bring inflation.

Refering to those who started the initial Goldwater campaign.

Rockefeller was a Cold War hawk almost to the degree (if not exactly the kind) of Goldwater. An early proposal he put forward as governor was to assess each New York family the over $300 it would require to build a bomb shelter for every household in the state. The argument was the same as in Conscience: whichever side was able to render nuclear war less unthinkable had the advantage. “Are we going to arrive at a point some day,” he asked at a civil defense seminar in March, “when the president will say: ‘Well, how can we afford to stand for freedom? With the people exposed, can we run that risk?’ ” He introduced a new phrase to the American lexicon that summer: “missile gap”—the assertion that the Soviets had hundreds more nuclear projectiles than did the United States.

Lyndon Johnson’s relationship with his traveling press corps was altogether different: they protected him. The President’s tongue was if anything more undisciplined than his opponent’s. At one point he would say that the American people wanted nuclear control “vested in a civilian. They do not expect to abandon this duty to military men in the field, and I don’t think that they have ever considered that since the Founding Fathers drafted our Constitution” —though surely the control of nuclear weapons never made the Founding Fathers’ agenda. “If it hadn’t been for Goldwater,” Johnson aide Kenny O’Donnell recalled afterward, the press would have “just murdered him.”

The man with his finger on the nuclear button sometimes weaved off his campaign plane stinking drunk; he made mistakes on the stump; he contradicted himself in interviews. On his way to opening day in Detroit, in order to squeeze as many VIPs into his plane as possible, he booted onto an accompanying plane the military aide who kept the briefcase handcuffed to his wrist that contained the codes to launch a nuclear strike.

The man who'se campaign made the "Daisy" add, totally safe with his hand on the button.

The President held crowds to a hush as he dramatically related the tale of sitting beside Kennedy (he hadn’t) in October of 1962, as Khrushchev and Kennedy came “eyeball to eyeball, and their thumbs started getting closer to mash that nuclear button, the knife was in each other’s ribs, almost literally speaking, and neither of them were flinching or quivering”—“until Mr. Khrushchev picked up his missiles and put them on his ships and took them back home.” He told, in other words, bedtime stories: the child’s deepest fears are aroused, to be safely assuaged when the scary monster under the bed is vanquished and everything turns out right at the end.

The candidates set the example. The President sat up all night on October 30 reading noted Republicans’ FBI files, the next day burbling excitedly to Bobby Kennedy about which tidbits he planned to leak to the press.