Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is the first volume in a 4-volume set about the rise of the far right in America, and it is very full of the backgrounds and people who made that happen. Interestingly, Goldwater himself had less to do with it than I had thought. There was a longstanding project among the right going back to the FDR administration, to somehow erase everything FDR did. This was impossible, of course, and unwise, but it was there. Long before Goldwater you had the John Birch Society and Joseph McCarthy. They had both been rejected by the mainstream of American society, but persisted in the margins. And in 1964 they succeeded in temporarily taking over the Republican Party.

A lot of the conflict in this book is really between wings of the Republican Party, rather than between Republicans and Democrats. It is interesting to read about this now in a time when the worst elements have take over the Republican Party and made it essentially a fascist movement, but in 1964 the fight for the nomination of the Republican Party was between the conservatives and the moderate/liberals. Just 4 years earlier the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower had finished his second term and was still popular. In his term in office the Republicans were basically a moderate party. His Vice-President, Nixon, came very close to winning election in 1960, and while Nixon had made his name as a staunch anti-communist, in terms of policies he was basically a moderate, as his later Presidency illustrated. Contenders like Nelson Rockefeller, William Scranton, and Henry Cabot Lodge were considered strong contenders, but as you may notice they all represented the Eastern establishment.

So this story is partly about the conservative rising in the Republican Party, and also about a realignment where the West becomes more important. And it is also pertinent to note that this election was the beginning of the movement of the once solid Democratic south into the Republican column. It features the entry into politics of a certain actor named Ronald Reagan, and while Johnson managed landslide victory, the seeds of his fall in Vietnam are apparent. In 1964 Johnson ran as the peace candidate while concealing from the public what he was doing in Vietnam. That would finally drive him out in 1968.

If you have any interest in American political history you will want get this book and read it.



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