![]() ![]() ![]() The troops are what’s important here: Goldwater the man is just one aspect of Goldwater the movement. Perlstein documents every backroom meeting, every press conference, every turn of events that led to the Goldwater troops realizing that goal. He enjoyed the backing of a cadre of marginal party officials, led by expert political operatives like Clif White, who were preparing to seize the nomination. While the Rockefeller Republicans haggled with Nixon (Perlstein describes Rocky as a “collector of chits”), Goldwater waited. His rhetoric gained an audience, Perlstein argues, because of the many fractures present in the Republican Party at the time. He argued that civil-rights legislation would create a police state he felt the US should be prepared for an all-out nuclear war he saw unions as oppressors of the working class. Goldwater’s crusade was against moderation, and his jeremiads convinced millions to support him. He was a relative outsider who knocked heads with the greats of the past (Kennedy, Johnson, Rockefeller, and Nixon), but more important were his associations with the heroes (Ronald Reagan and William Rehnquist) of more recent conservative triumphs. ![]() The second most charismatic politician alive in the early 1960s (after John Kennedy), Goldwater was a man before his time. The era of Perlstein’s Goldwater is not so far from ours. An analysis of the forces that led to Barry Goldwater’s nomination as the Republican presidential candidate of 1964. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |