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.

In fact, data from U2 spy planes had demonstrated that the USSR’s arsenal of bombers and missiles that could reach the United States was nearly nonexistent. But that intelligence was top secret, unknown even to a New York governor—a rule of espionage being that you can’t let your enemy know what you know about them.

Nixon wanted to become President to command America in the Cold War. He was obsessed with the details of foreign affairs; domestic policy, he said famously a decade later, just takes care of itself.

The Central Intelligence Agency was training Cuban exiles deep in the Guatemalan bush for an invasion to overthrow the Castro government; on January 17 the files were closed on a completed CIA mission in which rebels led by a military officer named Joseph Mobutu hunted down and killed the Republic of the Congo’s Soviet-leaning prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, on the country’s 203rd day of independence.

A force of 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs for an assault on Fidel Castro’s government. Cuba’s meager air force, which was supposed to have been wiped out in air strikes that President Kennedy scaled back at the last minute so he could plausibly deny American involvement, strafed the force’s landing boats, and 1,000 survivors made a quick surrender. Kennedy’s advisers saw him weep.

owned lol