Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein

Author:Rick Perlstein
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Politics, bought-and-paid-for, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780809028580
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Published: 2001-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Goldwater’s official campaign headquarters was on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. To run it, the Arizona Mafia decided they needed a big name. The particular name they chose, alas, belonged to the stony, charmless man many California Republicans believed had crushed their party in 1958 when he selfishly abandoned his Senate seat for his unsuccessful run for governor. William Knowland, now retired to the the family business, the conservative Oakland Tribune, was so uncomfortable around people that he worked up a routine to deal with employees with whom he was forced to share an elevator: “Taken your vacation yet?” he would ask when they entered; the answer took just long enough to deliver him to his fourth-floor office. (Once he experimented. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” he asked a photographer. “Yes, Senator,” came the answer. “I’ve worked for you for thirty years.” Knowland then went back to the routine.) Now it was Knowland’s job to coordinate multitudes—and he couldn’t even get the staffers who had supported Nixon in 1962 in the same room together with the ones who had been for Shell. On Wilshire Boulevard Knowland held court as a figurehead. The flesh of the Goldwater campaign in California was hung on the skeleton of the conservative volunteer groups like the one the candidate was addressing now.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.