A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
Barry Goldwater was only quoted that Social Security should be "made voluntary"--or "privatized," as we would say now--once, during the New Hampshire primary in 1964. The backlash was so ferocious he never mentioned it again.
-- Rick Perlstein, historian and author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Paperback Published March 16, 2009) by Rick Perlstein. Buy liberally from the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace.
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Paperback - A Whopping 896 Pages) by Rick Perlstein. Buy liberally from the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace.
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BuzzFlash: We tend to think of the "hard conservative" movement as a relatively recent phenomenon. But isn’t it more like a subterranean stream that started during the New Deal, manifested itself in the ‘50s with groups like the John Birch Society, and first took control of the Republican Party after Nixon’s defeat in 1960?
Rick Perlstein: A couple of weeks ago I spoke on a panel at the Organization of American Historians on the "state of the field" (video) in writing about conservative history. And yours is exactly the argument I made. Conservatives themselves speak of a "modern conservative movement" that supposedly sprung relatively fully formed from the minds of the editors upon the founding of National Review in 1955. Actually, a lot of what Goldwater and William F. Buckley were up to is utterly continuous with political streams going back, indeed, before the New Deal. For instance, the attempt to sabotage the modern state.
Take this quote that Tom Frank dug up from an officer of the Chamber of Commerce in 1928:
"The best public servant is the worst one. A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast--a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world--the black plague is a housepet by comparison."
You can read the same thing in Heritage Foundation position papers eighty years later: that the goal of conservatives in government should be, in fact, to sabotage government.
BuzzFlash: Goldwater ran for president as television was starting to become the primary factor in campaigning. How was Goldwater as a television campaigner?
Rick Perlstein: Mixed record there. When Barry Goldwater first came to national prominence in the 1950s it was practically as a sex symbol—the chiseled, handsome jet-jockey. Time praised him for his youth, charm, and vigor, as opposed to a previous generation of conservatives they called "the neanderthals," and ran a picture of him wearing a Brando-esque T-shirt toting a load of lumber. One of the reasons people imagined him in the early 1960s as a strong presidential competitor against John F. Kennedy was because both were seen as equally charismatic. So you would think he would have been great on TV in 1964.
But something got in the way: the candidate's orneriness, his quite honorable refusal to play the modern game of image politics. I interviewed one of his young aides who told me about the time Goldwater was presented the idea of campaign literature featuring his glamorous hobbies--a very Kennedyesque sort of move. He barked back, "Lee, we're not going to have that kind of crap in this campaign. This is going to be a campaign of principles, not of personalities. I don't want that kind of Madison Avenue stuff, and if you try it, I will kick your ass out of this office."
Well, his campaign commercials certainly reflected the sentiment--they were crude and archaic, like something out of the 1950s, especially when compared to LBJ's famously state-of-the-art spots like the famous "daisy" ad.
And very little of his charisma showed up on the campaign trail: he came off as a dour, angry jeremiah. He just wasn't cut out for the humiliations of modern campaigning. My favorite example: when one of his supporters presented him a can of the "Goldwater Soda" ("the right drink for the conservative taste") at a campaign rally. He took a sip, then spat it out, in defiance, no doubt, of the TV cameras: "This tastes like piss! I wouldn't drink it with gin!"
BuzzFlash: How did the conservative movement react to Goldwater’s defeat in terms of setting up think tanks, buying up media, grooming Reagan, etc.?
Rick Perlstein: After the landslide defeat a sticker began showing up on the bumpers of cars owned by conservatives: "27 Million Americans"--the number who had voted for Goldwater, comprising only 38 percent of the electorate--"Can't Be Wrong." In other words, they refused to even consider it a defeat. It was the crucible for the modern conservative political infrastructure that's still with us today.Here's how I describe it in the book:
"Scratch a conservative today--a think-tank bookworm at Washington's Heritage Foundation or Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation (the people whose studies and position papers blazed the trails for ending welfare as we know it, for the school voucher movement, for the discussion over privatizing social security); a door-knocking church lady pressing pamphlets into her neighbors' palms about partial-birth abortion; the owner of a small or large business sitting across the table from a lobbyist plotting strategy on how to decimate corporate tax rates; an organizer of a training center for aspiring conservative activists or journalists; Republican precinct workers, fund-raisers, county chairs, state chairs, presidential candidates, congressmen, senators, even a Supreme Court justice--and the story comes out. How it all began for them: in the Goldwater campaign."
BuzzFlash: How did Goldwater become involved in politics?
You could see it coming in the angry open letters to Franklin Roosevelt he used to publish in Phoenix newspapers, railing against "the men thrown out of work, the riots, the bloodshed, and the ill feeling between labor and capital" the New Deal had supposedly brought about. His proximate concern in that particular letter, by the way, was the imposition of the first minimum wage legislation. He wasn't a fan.
BuzzFlash: What impact did being raised in Arizona, when it was still relatively unpopulated and remote, have on Goldwater?
Rick Perlstein: It instilled in him a deep-seated devotion to a myth: that his state had transformed itself from a deserted frontier into a modern commercial paradise by dint of the independent labors of hard-working pioneers like the Goldwater family. "We didn't know the federal government," he'd claim. "Everything that was done, we did it ourselves."
That was, to use the sort of language Barry Goldwater favored, bulls**t. Again as I write in the book, the Goldwater family's rise, and Arizona's, "came from knowing the federal government intimately." Arizona Territory was "a virtual ward of the federal government." It was a base for hostilities against Indians "kept up with a view of protecting the inhabits," one general sardonically observed, "most of whom are supported by the hostilities." Next, of course, came government-built dams, government-built Cold War military bases, goverment-subsidized suburbs, and all the rest. According to one biographer's calculations, federal funds to Arizona totaled $342 million during the New Deal, for which less than $16 million in taxes were remitted in return.
BuzzFlash: Of course, it’s now conventional wisdom among progressives that many of the ideas that were considered radical when Goldwater proposed them became “mainstream” policies under Reagan and Bush. Is that an accurate perspective?
Rick Perlstein: Absolutely. The best example is Social Security. Barry Goldwater was only quoted that Social Security should be "made voluntary"--or "privatized," as we would say now--once, during the New Hampshire primary in 1964. The backlash was so ferocious he never mentioned it again.
When California conservatives were filming a Ronald Reagan speech they wanted shown in the last week of the Goldwater campaign, the Goldwater managers balked, because Reagan repeated the criticism of Social Security. The show ran anyway because top donors insisted--and Reagan's speech, who of course possessed in spades the television charm Goldwater so sorely lacked--brought in such a staggering load of donations that a campaign that had been running a deficit ended up in surplus. Reagan had packaged--and would continue to package--the heretofore verboten attack on Social Security so charmingly that his "arguments," as Paul Krugman demonstrated last year in his Conscience of a Liberal, are the exact same ones not just conservatives, but self-described "centrists," use today.
BuzzFlash: This, like your marvelous book Nixonland, is a lengthy, engaging read. You are an avowed progressive. What was it that interested you in spending so much time researching and writing about Goldwater and Nixon?
Rick Perlstein: I've always been fascinated by the way Americans can seem so similar to each other on the surface but disagree with each other so fundamentally on the largest possible questions of social organization. I feel like each one of us, liberal or conservative, cohabitates alongside a foreign tribe that happens to speak the exact same language as we do, but thinks radically differently than we do. I find plumbing the terms of this strange modus vivendi that we've simultaneously devised to keep from devouring one another endlessly fascinating.
BuzzFlash: “Conventional wisdom” has it that the Johnson “Daisy Ad” about nuclear war decimated the Goldwater campaign? Is that fair to say?
Rick Perlstein: It's not a bad surmise. What that famous ad did was take an idea vaguely present in the public mind--that the hawkish Goldwater was vaguely strange, "off," dangerous, irresponsible, and reckless--and bundle it into an easily understood and digestible image: the mushroom cloud. Without, of course, ever mentioning Goldwater by name--which kept it just within acceptable bounds of "taste." But only acceptable enough, of course, to show it once--after which the fact that LBJ pulled the ad from the air became a news story that earned the commercial endless free showings on the evening news.
Among so many other innovations, then, the 1964 presidential campaign gave birth to the idea of "earned media," by which campaigns circulate "controversial" commercials that they have no intention of spending money on to get on the air, but hope will get covered as news events.
Rick Perlstein: I think Goldwater took an impish, almost neurotic, pleasure in defying the expectations of those close to him. The thought of being a "maverick" was what got him out of bed in the morning. Part of it was sheer provocation--so who knows, maybe he'd keep us all guessing by coming out in 2009 for the nationalization of the means of production!
BuzzFlash: Finally, as you conclude: "You lost in 1964. But something remained after 1964: A movement. An army. An army that could lose a battle, suck it up, regroup, then live to fight a thousand battles more." What lesson is there in that for progressives?
Rick Perlstein: This wasn't my intention in writing the book, but one of the greatest honors bestowed upon me because of its writing was the fact that so many progressives, following the doldrums of the 2002 off-year elections, in which a headlong rush to the "center" and loyalty to the Bush administration led to electoral disasters for the Democrats, took Goldwater's story as a role model for the possibility of an independent movement putting pressure on a political party.
The argument, then and now, is that a party better identified with its core principles can enjoy great political success in the long run. It's been an uneven and rocky road, but I think we're beginning to see the vindication of that wisdom, for example, in the popularity of President Obama's refusal to back off from the principle that we need a newly energized federal government, committed to expanding its investments in the common good instead of contracting them, in order not only to rescue us from our current economic doldrums but to building a stronger, freer, and more secure America for our children and grandchildren.
BuzzFlash interview conducted by Mark Karlin.* * *
Resources:
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Paperback Published March 16, 2009) by Rick Perlstein. Buy liberally from the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace.
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Paperback - A Whopping 896 Pages) by Rick Perlstein. Buy liberally from the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace.
http://rickperlstein.org/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Perlstein
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
