Reviewed by Stanley I. Kutler

Sunday, March 18, 2001; Page BW06

BEFORE THE STORM

Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking Of the American Consensus
By Rick Perlstein
Hill and Wang. 671 pp. $30

John F. Kennedy's narrow victory over Richard M. Nixon in 1960 provoked a bitterness and divisiveness that have characterized American politics ever since. Henry Adams's trenchant observation more than a hundred years ago remains appropriate: "Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds." Hatreds now seem to multiply with an implacable force in today's politics, fueled by a communications revolution far beyond anything Adams imagined.

One side of today's passions arose in the postwar conservative backlash to the then-prevailing New Deal liberal consensus. Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm is an engaging narrative of an important early salvo in the backlash, Barry Goldwater's 1964 nomination. Perlstein traces the origins of the conservative movement to a well-financed, well-placed and articulate opposition that nourished the politics of resentment. Such critics denounced as socialistic such New (and Fair) Deal landmarks as Social Security, labor's right to organize and bargain collectively, public housing, various welfare programs, government-sponsored medical insurance and federal aid for education. When the Republican Party ran Wendell Wilkie and Thomas E. Dewey, that opposition derided them as "me too" candidates, contending that the party must project a real alternative -- "a choice not an echo," as the Goldwaterites would say. Dwight Eisenhower's "moderate Republicanism," with its incorporation of most New Deal programs, aroused contempt from many traditional conservatives. Nixon's defeat in 1960 energized that group, many of whom blamed Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller. And four years later a determined band of skilled political operatives dramatically transformed the Republican Party -- and to some extent the political process.

Perlstein makes clear that Goldwater's nomination was nothing less than a coup on the part of the rock-ribbed conservatives. The political operative Clifton White may not be much remembered now, but without his Rolodex and shrewd organizing, Goldwater would have faded away after his early defeat in the New Hampshire primary. Although polls showed that a mere 14 percent of Republican voters favored Goldwater, White nailed down the delegates.

Perlstein diligently resurrects this story, traces the futile, pathetic efforts to stop Goldwater, and concludes with a wonderful account of the ineptness of the Goldwater campaign, which often resembled a Marx Brothers comedy. Goldwater's campaign was doomed from the outset, for a variety of reasons, but White's organizational effort is crucial to understanding the Republican Party and our politics since then.

Perlstein sets his story against the backdrop of 30 years of determined conservative opposition to the prevailing consensus. The godfathers of the Goldwater movement included Dean Clarence Manion, Robert Welch and his John Birch Society, former Utah governor J. Bracken Lee (who wanted to dissolve the federal government when the debt reached $6 trillion) and William F. Buckley.

A visceral, festering hatred for the New Deal -- along with opposition to unions, to governmental assumption of responsibility for the economy, to increasing American involvement in international affairs, and to anything "liberal" that could be labeled as communism -- united disparate people and movements. In California's Orange County, a breeding ground for such notions, the leading newspaper railed against "tax-supported schools, roads, and parks," and demanded the abolition of child-labor and pure food and drug laws.

Goldwater began his political career in reaction to the New Deal and what he believed were its infringements on American liberty. Roosevelt, he complained, had abandoned the working man "to the racketeering practices of ill-organized unions," and the Arizonan preferred to have "[Jimmy] Hoffa stealing my money than [Walter] Reuther stealing my freedom."

Perlstein capably accounts for the convergence of these forces in the '64 Goldwater crusade. But he is on shakier ground in his evaluation of the post-mortem liberal dismissals of Goldwater and conservatism. The real irony, he insists, is in the subsequent conservative electoral successes. But those successes are not grounded in Goldwater's program or ideology: Goldwater denounced the Tennessee Valley Authority as socialism but passionately pushed the Central Arizona Project, without which much of Arizona would have remained undeveloped desert. In Goldwater's day, conservatives reflexively denounced all federal aid to education, but the Republican presidential candidate in 2000 called for more federal aid to and intervention in public education.

But then Goldwater himself changed, as well. He opposed Reagan's proposed constitutional amendment in 1985 permitting public school prayer -- a reversal of his strong condemnation in 1964 of the Supreme Court's ruling; in the years before his death, he alienated his old constituency, now heavily laden with "cultural" concerns, with his renegade views on abortion and gay rights.

Yet Goldwater's campaign did affect future electoral coalitions. Nothing counted more in this realignment than the melancholy story of race. Racial resentments, North as well as South, fueled the rising conservative movement. The party of Lincoln "was increasingly becoming a redoubt for those who either wished blacks ill or viewed them with indifference," Perlstein properly notes. George Wallace nationalized the race issue when he successfully appealed to blue-collar ethnic voters in Wisconsin and Indiana -- the folks who later acquired respectability as Reagan Democrats. Goldwater carried four states of the Old Confederacy and his native Arizona -- a portent of today's powerful Republican coalition of the South and interior West.

Goldwater himself straddled the race issue. In 1963, he told a Southern audience: "We haven't turned over to the federal government the power to run the schools. . . . I don't like segregation. But I don't like the Constitution kicked around, either." The next year, he publicly supported a proposed anti-discrimination ordinance in Phoenix. William Rehnquist, his legal consigliere, openly opposed him, faithfully reflecting his then-longstanding support of segregation. Later that year, as the U.S. Senate voted on the landmark Civil Rights Act, Goldwater rejected the measure as an unconstitutional exercise of federal power with Rehnquist's brief in hand, as Perlstein reminds us. While Republican voters fled Goldwater in droves in 1964 (largely because of fears he would widen the war in Southeast Asia -- there's irony), he won over a new electorate in the South, which is where the real American political revolution took place.

Who and what "unmade" the liberal consensus? Perlstein largely credits the rise of an appealing conservatism. But he tends to ignore liberalism's self-inflicted wounds. The Vietnam debacle, the white backlash to the civil-rights revolution, the resulting urban riots, the burgeoning role of government that resulted in perceived burdens of taxation, not-so-subtle revival of charges that liberals were soft or uncomprehending regarding the dangers of communism, and a stagnating economy trapped in a diminished industrial base all undermined the liberal consensus.

The decline of that order was governed by a demand that "law and order" take precedence over justice, and not by the triumph of the ideological rigor postulated in 1964. If Barry Goldwater had a second chance in 1968, would he have won? Or did it take Richard Nixon's carefully calculated ambiguity to capture Goldwater and Wallace's vote, North and South, and provide the alternative to that liberal, Democratic consensus? Goldwater's rejection cleared the way for Nixon; in turn, Nixon and Wallace in 1968 gave the winning strategy to Ronald Reagan. Reagan lent an appealing face and voice to the conservative imagination, won over important elements of the liberal consensus and propelled conservatives to power. But even Reagan retained much of the program and spirit of the New Deal. His tempering and refinement of the Goldwater crusade is his ongoing legacy. •

Stanley I. Kutler is the author of "The Wars of Watergate" and "Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes."