BEFORE THE STORM: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.

• Author: Wicker, Tom
• Position: Review

BEFORE THE STORM: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus By Rick Relstein Hill & Wang, $25.00

RICK PERLSTEIN HAS ADDED A provocative subtitle to his fascinating new book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. But its suggestion that Barry Goldwater did the unmaking is at least partially misleading.

The liberal consensus that originated with the New Deal and dominated American politics for the next 30 years (including Dwight Eisenhower's two terms) was broken--shattered, in fact--by the Republican party's nomination of Goldwater for president in 1964. ("AUH20" bumper stickers called him.) The evidence of Perlstein's book, however, is that Goldwater himself was less the cause of the demolition than the nascent black movement and the Civil Rights legislation that captured America's attention in the '60s, brought George Wallace out of the woodwork, converted the old "Solid South" into a Republican stronghold, and did more than anything else to turn the nation rightward, ultimately to Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The amiable and courageous (if irascible) Goldwater, of course, was a principal player. He was challenging the liberal consensus and preaching a brand of conservatism that was, at the time, about as popular as damning motherhood. In 1960, he roused much of the GOP from its Eisenhower-induced me-tooism; in 1964, though not a segregationist, Goldwater caught the anti-black tide by voting against the great Civil Rights act originated by John F. Kennedy and passed by the blandishments of Lyndon Johnson; and he never retreated from that or such other unpolitic notions as selling the Tennessee Valley Authority.

For his iconoclasm, Goldwater became in those years (roughly 1957-1964) a godlike hero to the right, which was growing exponentially, at a time when few Americans knew it existed beyond the John Birch Society and, say, Clarence Manion's radio talks. Ironically, owing to his integrity and his relative political restraint, Goldwater--along with William F. Buckley's National Review--became a sort of conservative's conservative and an alternative to the likes of the wild-eyed Birchers, Billy James Hargis, Kent Courtney, J. Evetts Haley et al. Even in Perlstein's telling, however, he seems more of a symbol than a root cause.

The major author of the Goldwater revolution--not too strong a word--was not Goldwater himself, however; it was a man little known to the public, to whom Perlstein...