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

A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.

Goldwater was, in other words, a candidate for voters in Boston as much as those in Birmingham—catering to white voters who were against the idea of federal civil rights legislation but at the same time desperate to receive assurances that this didn’t make them bad people.

Ronald Reagan was just as angry. But he made you want to stand right alongside him and shake your fist at the same things he was shaking his fist at.

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.

Scranton describing Sen. Robert A. Taft's conservatism as compared to Goldwater's said Taft was "a conservative in the truest sense of the word. He sought to conserve all the human values that have been carried down to us on a long stream of American history. He saw history as the foundation on which a better future might be built, not a Technicolor fantasy behind which the problems of the present might be concealed.

Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964.

And so a strange, cosmic unity bodied forth that week in American political history, as Lyndon Johnson came off his first campaign tour: the FBI and the Warren Commission asserting that all it took was one man to tear a social fabric asunder; Mississippians bombing their way past illusions about the American way of reconciling conflict; Berkeley students saying no to “neutrality”; a third of the nation still stubbornly insisting on backing Barry Goldwater—all of them, at the same time, making the idea of an American consensus seem little more than a stubborn, fanciful mythology.

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all alone to endorse Goldwater without a fight. “Fanatics of the Birch variety have fastened their fangs on the Republican Party’s flanks,” Nelligan told reporters, “and are hanging on like grim death.

The audience in Bakersfield was battle-tested. Conservatives had suffered razor-thin defeat for control of the party’s premier volunteer group, the California Republican Assembly, at the convention in March of 1963—a convention, conservatives were convinced, that San Francisco union leader and Rockefeller stalwart William Nelligan had stolen from them. Redeeming that loss became the focus of conservative energies for the rest of the year. The efforts developed along three fronts. One, led by Newport Beach optometrist Nolan Frizzelle and S&L magnate Joe Crail, worked to take back the CRA. “It was like facing a howling mob,” a liberal said of the one hundred conservatives who set upon the Oakland chapter’s convention in December—and, after Nelligan declared the the conservatives’ victory in Oakland null and void, did it again in January. The scene was repeated across the liberal northern tier of the state. And at the 1964 convention, Frizzelle won the presidency of the CRA near dawn with 363 out of 600 votes. (There were only 569 registered delegates.) The next day, portly right-wingers held sit-ins in front of the mikes. Liberals stalked out in a rage. That left the conservatives

One did not argue with people who denied reality. Which was why the pundit Stewart Alsop wrote that conservatism was “not really a coherent, rational alternative at all—it is hardly more than an angry cry of protest against things as they are”;

As in all his little rhetorical dialogues, victory for one side was foreordained. 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. One of the aides Nixon brought with him to Chicago, a thoughtful young political science instructor named Chuck Lichenstein, had produced a campaign book, The Challenges We Face, from Nixon’s speeches. When Nixon had thumbed through it and got to the section on agricultural price subsidies, he asked, “Have I really said all of these things?” “Yes, every word,” replied Lichenstein. “Well, that’s interesting, because I can’t tell.” “But do you accept this as your views?” the nervous deputy asked. “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” Nixon reassured him. The internal dialogue continued: I am not going to waste your time on a dispute over the details of domestic policy, for these things take care of themselves.

the task of preserving capitalism was too important to leave to the capitalists.

Manion’s people did what conservatives always did when the going got tough: they started a new group. “For America

They reported how when he took over as president of Phoenix Country Club in 1949, he said if they didn’t allow his friend Harry Rosenzweig to join he would blackball every name. Rosenzweig became the first Jew the club ever admitted. Left out of the tale was that another Jew wasn’t allowed in for a decade.

Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.

They made strategy at 33,000 feet (on) the campaign plane.

For the first time on Planet Earth (in 1964 America), a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. An unheard-of 42% of high school graduates sought higher education.

Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.

Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB (ad men) found nothing to lament and the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to KNOW about a product, which in this case happens to be a human being, in half a minute – the speed not of thought but of emotion.

Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.

The head of Goldwater's California operation "what was so uncomfortable around people that he worked up a routine to deal with employees with whom he was forced to share an elevator: "Taken your vacation yet?" he would ask when they entered; answer took just long enough to deliver him to his fourth-floor office.

Richard Nixon's conversation was "loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.

A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.

One of the ladies asked about that awful Bobby Kennedy, and Goldwater responded by speaking about the attorney general with touching affection. (Mary) McGrory recalled how Jack Kennedy behaved at a similar stage in his campaign: spouting statistics, attacking carefully chosen enemies and puffing all the right friends, quoting dead Greeks, never cracking a joke lest he remind the voters how young he was.

Must, never, must avoid, must guard: the minatory commands came the eleven times (from the departing Eisenhower). In contrast, Kennedy's rhetoric on January 20 with a cascade of permissions: the word "let" rang out 14 times.

Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.