How the 1964 Republican Convention Sparked a Revolution From the Right
Rick Perlstein, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2008; Perlstein’s short-form version of the argument from Before the Storm (2001), narrating the Cow Palace convention as the GOP’s “Woodstock of the right” — the moment “entrenched moderates faced off against conservative insurgents” and the insurgents won.
Why It Matters Here
This is the wiki’s most efficient narrative source for the 1964 Republican National Convention: it gives the texture (logy elevators at the Mark Hopkins, conservatives baiting NBC’s Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, telegram-flooding strategies) that the analytic pieces don’t, and it preserves Goldwater biographer Robert Alan Goldberg’s “Woodstock of the right” coinage.
Perlstein’s framing is structurally identical to his self-revision in I Thought I Understood the American Right (2017): the conservative grassroots are the wave, not the undertow. Smithsonian is the popular-audience digest; the NYT Magazine self-reckoning later concedes the framing was still too narrow.
Core Claims
- Convention as “Woodstock of the right.” Robert Alan Goldberg’s phrase. The first Republican convention in which broadcasters outnumbered delegates two to one; the first since Kennedy’s funeral redefined television-and-politics. Alan Brinkley’s later analysis (Perlstein cites him): “transitional — managed by politicians who were accustomed to backroom deal-making and high-pressure crowd tactics and were caught up short to learn that they were suddenly in the business of producing a TV show.”
- Rage at media as novel and definitional. “The volume of right-wing rage at the media was novel at this Republican convention.” David Brinkley forbade his son Alan from showing his NBC insignia. “These nighttime news shows sound to me like they’re being broadcast from Moscow.”
- Phyllis Schlafly’s A Choice Not an Echo. Self-published; several hundred thousand copies distributed in summer 1964; some delegates received more than 60 copies in the mail. The framing: “a few secret kingmakers in New York” had stolen previous nominations for moderate “Wall Street Republicans.” The book is the prototype of what becomes Curtis Yarvin’s “The Cathedral” half a century later — same elite-conspiracy structure, different villain set.
- Goldwater campaign tradecraft. Bill Middendorf’s A Glorious Disaster memoir documents the operational paranoia: “the 1952 tricks will be used again — planted stories, whispering campaigns, threats, cajolery and the ‘shanghaiing and spiriting of delegates and alternates to distant points’”; warning of “unexpectedly easy companionship from new-found female friends”; pre-timed routes in radio-equipped cars; walkie-talkies as backups because they could be tapped — as the campaign had tapped Scranton’s.
- The Rockefeller booing. When Nelson Rockefeller “advocated a platform plank denouncing extremism, galleries full of exuberant conservatives booed him.” This is the moment the conservative-insurgent identity as oppositional rage at fellow Republicans became visible on national television.
- Daniel Schorr’s CBS Der Spiegel-Bavaria report — Schorr “report[ed] that ‘Senator Goldwater’s interview with Der Spiegel… was only the start of a move to link up with his opposite numbers in Germany,’ basing his assertion simply on the fact that Goldwater would be vacationing after the convention at an American military installation that was, coincidentally, in the former Nazi stronghold of Bavaria.” Schorr later said he did not mean to suggest “a conscious effort.” The smear’s effect was to consolidate delegate loyalty.
- Pat Brown’s verdict. California’s liberal Democratic governor: the “stench of fascism is in the air.”
- The structural lesson. Out of the 1964 disaster came “a Republican Party surer of its identity and better positioned to harvest the bounty — particularly in the South — when the American mood shifted to the right during the cacophonous years that followed.” Middendorf’s “Glorious Disaster” was self-aware of this from the start.
Cross-References
- 1964 Republican National Convention — the event
- Barry Goldwater — the nominee
- Phyllis Schlafly — A Choice Not an Echo
- Rick Perlstein — author
- I Thought I Understood the American Right — Perlstein’s 2017 self-reckoning
- He Knew He Was Right — Menand’s review of the underlying Before the Storm
- How Jackie Robinson Helped Defeat a Trump-Like Candidate — Black-Republican angle on the same convention
- The Republican National Convention That Shocked the Country — Holden’s 60th-anniversary version