watcha readin, crispy?
re-readin before the storm: barry goldwater and the unmaking of the american consensus, by rick perlstein. it's work i deeply admire and that fills me with a sense of my own inadequacy. the research is unbelievable: there are tens of thousands of facts: every page bristles with them. and in the course of setting the context, perlstein gives crisp, smart summaries of all sorts of national and international events of the period, from civil rights to the history of anti-communism, to the cuban missile crisis, to the free speech movement in berkeley, etc. but with all of that, the book also has narrative shape and momentum and a light touch in the writing that keeps you reading. not only that, but though i'd say it's pretty evident that perlstein doesn't share goldwater's politics, he's fair about barry and more or less everyone else even as he can be brutally critical as well. as you may know, i wrote about goldwater as one of my heroes in extreme virtue. that would be a better book if i'd had before the storm when i wrote it.
if you're wondering how i could admire barry goldwater, i might say that the thing i hated most in american politics circa 2000 was its pervasive falsity: the empty focus-grouped catch-phrases, the manufacturing of a perfectly polished jive persona over a massively flawed human being like, let's say, clinton or gore. (let's just say that mitt's reminding me why i was pissed off.) well searching for the opposite of that, one must land on barry, who actually hated the whole process and was always saying precisely the wrong thing. just to take a random example: when reporters showed up at his ranch for his announcement that he was running, he said that he was there to announce that his daughter had been knocked up. during the campaign, he specifically told each audience what they didn't want to hear: you know he'd travel to tennessee and start into selling the tva. he drove his own advisors ape with this sort of stuff. well, one reason for all this was that he didn't actually want to be president, which is a pretty good qualification to be president.
in x-virtue i was clear that goldwater's opposition to the 1964 civil rights bill, which outlawed segregation in public facilities including businesses, helped make him the tool and hero of racists, though actually goldwater expressed anti-racist and anti-segregation convictions throughout his life, and had integrated his own department store.
perlstein documents extremely elaborately two things which i didn't have on board: (1) goldwater's campaign was very possibly the most incompetent ever run by a major candidate in a general election; he ignored every person on his staff or party who had any expertise and surrounded himself with drinking buddies from arizona. from the smallest details to the biggest matters of strategy, the campaign fucked up everything and pretty much alienated everyone who wished it well. (2) lyndon johnson's campaign against goldwater was quite possibly the very dirtiest in the history of american politics, under the auspices of...bill moyers. indeed he had the full nixonian plumbers thing going, including some of the same plumbers, such as howard hunt.
however, hunt in 1964 was the director of domestic covert operations for the cia. that is, moyers brought the total resources of the government - start with the irs - to bear to destroy goldwater.
Moyers was instrumental in pioneering an innovation in presidential campaigning: the full-time espionage, sabotage, and mudslinging unit. The Johnson "Anti-Campaign" was an all-star Democratic team, including Daniel P. Moynihan of Labor; White House counsel Myer Feldman; the assistant postmaster; the assistant secretary of agriculture; labor lobbyist Hyman Bookbinder; a claque of top D.C. lawyers; the Pentagon's Adam Yarmolinsky (one of the Admistration's strongest liberal voices); even Clifton Cooper, the CIA liaison to the White House.
goldwater supporters in the business community and elsewhere reported getting personal calls from johnson, saying that he was reading their tax returns right then and they were very interesting. the moyers op got up a very elaborate program to create the narrative that goldwater was literally insane, and had various psychiatrists diagnosing him as paranoid and schizophrenic and psychopathic, and then by hook and crook and blackmail getting this stuff into major newspapers and magazines and the work of the main political columnists for the main newspapers in the country. they orchestrated a campaign to get various professors to call him a fascist. they tried to screw up his events and even his travel in a hundred ways. etc etc.
and even though goldwater did lend fuel to the fire of the daisy commercial and many other spots suggesting that he would lead the world into nuclear holocaust with his belligerent anti-communism, it is worth pointing out that during the campaign johnson manufactured the gulf of tonkin pretext to dramatically escalate the war in vietnam, and that the admistration was engaged in many covert forms of escalation including massive bombing of civilian targets, explicitly intending to keep the reality secret until after the election. johnson is portrayed by perlstein as governing from a place of massive personal insecurity, as a boozer with bipolar disorder. in other words, johnson was what he tried to portray goldwater as being.
