Voice in the Wilderness. - Review - book review

National Review, April 30, 2001 by William A. Rusher

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein (Hill and Wang, 671 pp., $30)

As Alan Brinkley observed in the American Historical Review in April 1994, "American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship." This should be no cause for surprise; most contemporary historians are liberals, and there was no obvious reason why they should devote themselves to the objective study of a phenomenon they found it positively painful to contemplate-especially since the tale, as it unfolded across the decades, turned out to be a success story. So the modern American conservative movement has been left, for many years, to the tender mercies of writers who had something very different from objective historical scholarship on their minds.

Sheer silence was the treatment of choice in the 1950s, though a few liberal commentators weighed in with snide observations. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose judgment in these matters is dependably poor (we shall hear from him again, later in this review), assured readers of the New York Times Magazine in mid-decade that the movement had no significance, being merely "the ethical afterglow of feudalism." John Fischer, the editor of Harper's, was kinder, writing in its March 1956 issue that National Review, the movement's leading (indeed, only) journal of opinion, might "serve a useful purpose in feeding the emotional hungers of a small congregation of the faithful, and it will have a certain interest for students of political splinter movements."

By the early 1960s, the growth of the conservative movement, and its consequent higher visibility, prompted certain other liberals to tackle the subject. Now the analysis tended to be clinical: Conservatism did not need to be understood so much as diagnosed. Richard Hofstadter, in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, turned to psychology for an explanation, suggesting that a sense of "persecution" characterized conservatives.

No doubt Barry Goldwater's landslide defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 reconfirmed serious liberal historians in their belief that there was nothing here worth studying. In any case, another 16 years rolled by without any objective history worthy of the name. (An important exception, written by one of the few conservative historical scholars in the country, was George H. Nash's magisterial study, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, published by Basic Books in 1976.)

But one might suppose that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, which ratified the ascendancy of the conservative movement in American politics, would surely inspire, at last, serious attention to the movement's history. Alas, no; another two decades passed in virtual silence, prompting Professor Brinkley's comment, quoted above.

It is only now, with the appearance of a whole new generation of political historians who were born too late to participate in the ideological wars of the 1950s and subsequent decades, that we are being vouchsafed the objective attention the conservative movement has deserved for more than forty years. And it is good news that one of the earliest of these studies, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein, is comprehensively researched, well written, and basically fair.

Although focused on Goldwater, this is no mere biography; it is a comprehensive account of the growth of the conservative movement from its origins to Goldwater's crushing defeat in November 1964. Perlstein makes no bones about being personally liberal, but he is honest enough to admit that the founders of the conservative movement "set the spark that lit the fire that consumed an entire ideological universe."

Perlstein prefers politicians to intellectuals, and this bias misleads him into spending an unnecessary amount of time on various conservative political efforts in the 1950s that got nowhere-notably the brave but doomed efforts of Dean Clarence ("Pat") Manion of Notre Dame Law School-while giving relatively short shrift to the central conservative event of the decade: the founding of National Review by Bill Buckley in 1955. Conservatism was preeminently a movement of ideas, and ideas took precedence over political action in its first decade. In the beginning was the Word. But once the political actors begin arriving on the scene in the late 1950s and early '60s, there is little that Perlstein misses.

The attempt to nominate Barry Goldwater at the 1960 Republican convention was premature and predictably failed. But his Conscience of a Conservative (actually written by L. Brent Bozell Jr.), which had to be published by a corporation set up for the purpose if it were to see daylight at all, sold 3.5 million copies in hardcover and paperback, and by 1961 the woods were full of young political activists ready to do battle in his name. Young Americans for Freedom, the youth arm of the conservative movement, was founded in September 1960. The Conservative party of New York was launched by a couple of Young Turks to challenge Nelson Rockefeller in the 1962 gubernatorial election. And in October 1961, 22 men who had honed their skills in the Young Republican politics of the 1950s reunited quietly in a Chicago motel to found the nameless committee that, incredibly, would capture the Republican party in 1964 and hand its presidential nomination to Barry Goldwater.