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Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP. By Mary C. Brennan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 'ress, 1995. Connelly, Jr., Washington and Lee University
William F. Connelly, Jr., Washington and Lee University
Mention of the 1960s typically evokes thoughts of JFK and LBJ, the Great Society and the counterculture, the Civil Rights movement and antiwar protests. Mary C. Brennan chooses instead to tell the less frequently told story of that orphan of the sixties, the conservative movement. Brennan provides an interesting and very readable account of the minuet between the conservative movement and the Republican Party during the tumultuous sixties. At times she seems to be reflecting upon the 1960s in light of the 1980s, though perhaps this is appropriate given her conclusion that "if there had been no Barry Goldwater, there could have been no Ronald Reagan" (p. 141).
Brennan's thesis can best be framed by two key quotations she borrows from conservative thinkers M. Stanton Evans and F. Clifton White. Evans concluded about the 1964 Goldwater defeat that the "relatively young conservative movement in America flexed its muscles, achieved things the experts and oracles said could never happen, and moved part-way down the road to political maturity" (p. 102). Many years later White observed that "conservatives won...