Rick Perlstein’s last book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, got mostly rave reviews, including mine.
I’ve only recommended it repeatedly to every sentient being I’ve ever met till friends and family begged me to please shut the hell up for godssake already. (But yeah, some of them read it.)
Perlstein’s 2001 (pre-9/11) Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus recently came back into print. Not a minute too soon in the world of wingnut attacks on Obama. The crazies also ran wild in the late 50s and early 60s, instilling fear in politicians of both parties, pushing the President of the United States to do things he shouldn’t have (like, say, escalate the Vietnam War). History may not repeat, but it does rhyme.
Before the Storm deserves just as much attention and praise as Nixonland. Here Perlstein recounts the 1964 Presidential election, the events leading up to it, and the aftermath. As with Nixonland, he shows how the ghosts of elections past haunt us still.
I was nine in 1964, and vaguely remember seeing Goldwater commercials on TV: "In your heart, you know he’s right." (It wasn’t till years later that I heard the comeback: "In your guts, you know he’s nuts.") I seem to remember seeing the infamous atom-bomb commercial at the time, but of course that can’t be right. Like Nixonland, then, I found this book fascinating if only because it puts half-familiar and new-to-me information in context.
Perlstein's thesis isn’t all that new: The Republican Party and the far-right movement, left for dead in the ashes of Goldwater’s defeat, was biding its time, learning to organize, and quietly growing, finally getting the hardliner President it really wanted in 1980.
It’s the details that bring this book to life. Only Perlstein could write about a Young Republican meeting and give it the verve of a chapter from The Iliad.
Except during my brief and now-clinically-documented infatuation with the novels of Ayn Rand, I would never have voted for Goldwater.
Still, I found it impossible to dislike the Goldwater that Perlstein presents. And I did try. Slinging "socialist" and "communist" around was pretty much standard procedure. Goldwater comes across as a sincere, bemused, distracted, somewhat bumbling true believer, who can’t understand why people think he’s a racist just because he cares more about states’ rights than integration (turning a blind eye to the police states that the Confederacy had become), and who didn’t really behave like a man who wanted to be President anyway.
It seems unlikely that Goldwater could have beaten Johnson under any circumstances. Perlstein shows how it could have been done, though. September polling showed that people knew little about Goldwater, didn’t love LBJ as much as LBJ chose to think they did; to boot, more than 40% called themselves conservative:
"...giving his campaign team an enormous, unexpected opportunity to shape his image in the public mind....Goldwater could ride these numbers to a historic upset [by] communicating in clear, attractive ways that the public could understand....Goldwater’s Arizona Mafia could have cared less." (p. 417-18)
Goldwater advisors included Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, Bill Rehnquist, and men who would later go to work for right-wing fact-laundering operations like the American Enterprise Institute. "They found the very idea of consulting polls contemptible." In retrospect it seems the same kind of wishful thinking and willful stubbornness that led to Iraq.
Perlstein reacquaints us with a now-extinct extinct species: the moderate-to-liberal Republican. It’s both sad and comic to watch George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, and William Scranton jockey for the 1964 Republican nomination. They come across like jilted homecoming queens.
We also see the beginnings of direct mail as a political weapon, as well as small donations from a large number of people. Ronald Reagan steals Goldwater’s thunder with his electrifying speeches and tv appearances. Phyllis Schafly stacks the shelves with self-published books. Richard Nixon schemes behind the scenes, biding his time.
And the wingnuts. The wonderful wingnuts. The "Impeach Earl Warren" backlash over Brown v. Board of Education is here. So is the anti-government rhetoric in all its breathtaking hypocrisy. "Johnson never heard...George Wallace complain about what the federal government’s TVA and Rural Electrification Administration had done to bring their people out of darkness..."
(Indeed, railing against the Tennessee Valley Authority was a Goldwater reflex, but he didn’t seem to mind the Central Arizona Project. He’s not the only Arizonan who relied on it to make him a self-made man.)
Perhaps millions of people really did believe that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Soviet agent, perhaps in daily contact with the Kremlin. The wingnuts sparked the Goldwater campaign, but became an embarrassment as the campaign season dragged on.
Today we hear that the birthers and town-hall haters are an aberration, not the real face of the Republican party at all. The book gives a lot of ammunition to those who believe otherwise. Accuse me of liberal bias, but it seems that racism, fear, ignorance, and truthiness were the heart and soul of the Republican party then, just as they are now.
Most telling of all, though, is William F. Buckley Jr.’s swan song for the Goldwater campaign. But how far Buckley saw:
"The point, he said...was now to win recruits. ‘Not only for November the third [1964], but for future Novembers: to infuse the conservative spirit in enough people to entitle us to look about us...not at the ashes of defeat, but at the well planted seeds of hope, which will flower on a great November day in the future’..." (p. 473)
So, is it reassuring or depressing to watch history rhyme itself today? The haters, like the poor, we will always have with us, and there seems to be no recourse but to outorganize and outvote them.
It’s hard to find an up side if even one voter believes Obama is the Antichrist, let alone that sizeable numbers do.
As Eric Boehlert recently reminded us, the last time the hate flowed this freely, a President was killed.
Perlstein addressed this himself recently:
So, crazier then, or crazier now? Actually, the similarities across decades are uncanny. When Adlai Stevenson spoke at a 1963 United Nations Day observance in Dallas, the Indignation forces thronged the hall, sweating and furious, shrieking down the speaker for the television cameras. Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. "What's the matter, madam?" he asked. "What can I do for you?" The woman responded with self-righteous fury: "Well, if you don't know I can't help you."
The difference between then and now, Perlstein points out, is that today, that woman would be plastered all over cable, to try to explain herself. The Republican nominee might even be urged to name her his running mate.
The Republicans are being counted out again today, just as they were in 1964. Let's not make that mistake again.
Perlstein seems to be in the middle of a trilogy. I'm hoping his next book will be about a subject worthy of his talents, ripe for deconstruction and debunking: Ronald Reagan.
P.S. Did I mention that Before the Storm is a page-turner, like Nixonland almost impossible to put down? I am about to recommend it to every sentient being I meet.
Late-edition addition:
Perlstein talks about ACORN. h/t digby