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in the 1970s, Americans witnessed an important political transformation —what historians describe as a rightward turn in national life— and this is a subject that historians in recent years have begun to explore in considerable detail. Much of the new literature on modern conservatism has stressed the grassroots nature of a wider social and political shift occurring during the 1960s and 1970s, and scholars have emphasized the convergence of issues that united conservatives around the country. Still, little of this literature has fully accounted for the signiWcance of national-level leaders of the American Right, how a national network was forged in dedication to upending the liberal state. For many modern conservatives Barry Goldwater’s run at the White House in 1964 was an epochal event. Although trounced by Lyndon Johnson’s landslide majority, Goldwater articulated a political vision that included antistatism and hostility to the vestiges of the New Deal, unqualiWed opposition to the Soviet Union in foreign policy, and a spectrum of resistance to the civil rights revolution. These were all 238 10 Time Is an Elusive Companion Jesse Helms, Barry Goldwater, and the Dynamic of Modern Conservatism william a. link issues familiar to conservatives of the 1940s and 1950s, and they had already appeared prominently in congressional and presidential politics . The mid-1960s proved crucial in deWning the political coalition leading up to the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan, but the subsequent ascent of modern conservatism disguised signiWcant divergence within the movement. Jesse Helms charted his political career from the election of 1964. Switching from Democratic registration to Republican in 1970, he subsequently was elected as North Carolina’s Wrst Republican senator since the nineteenth century. Both longtime members of the Senate , Helms and Goldwater served as heroes to conservative activists from the 1960s to the 1990s. At the same time, the two men represented the diversity existing in modern conservatism, and their careers suggested strands that characterized the modern American Right. Goldwater and Helms shared core political values, but Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy assembled only one part of the modern conservative coalition. Although Helms remained an admirer of Goldwater, their differences by the early 1980s help to illustrate signiWcant tensions. For although Goldwater provided a deWning moment in 1964, by the time that the conservative ascendancy took hold—from the late 1970s to the turn of the twenty-Wrst century—the American Right had reimagined itself. Goldwater enjoyed a deep reservoir of aVection among conservatives ; in this regard, Helms was no exception. By the time that Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, Goldwater had become what the New York Times called an “old-school elder statesman” of the conservative cause.1 “There wouldn’t even be a conservative movement,” Helms liked to tell people, “if it hadn’t been for Barry Goldwater.” Had it not been for Goldwater’s “terriWc Wght” for the conservative cause, he wrote, “I’d be in Raleigh running a television company.” Without Goldwater, said Helms, “it never would have crossed my mind to run for the Senate.2 Nonetheless, there were signiWcant ideological diVerences dividing Jesse Helms and Barry Goldwater. In policy, and especially in domestic policy, they sometimes diverged. Barry Goldwater served as an icon for Jesse Helms and other movement conservatives; his politics , seemingly representing principles rather than politics, deWned the Time Is an Elusive Companion 239 ideological purity of the American Right. Goldwater’s anticommunism , his unstinting opposition to a big federal government, and his dedication to individual freedom provided an umbrella beneath which diVerent elements of modern conservatism could reside. In the 1960s, when Helms worked in North Carolina as a television broadcaster and editorialist, he often used Goldwater to represent a wider conservative coalition. Helms’s admiration for Goldwater and what he stood for thus makes their relationship all the more illuminating in explaining the complicated, shifting dynamics of modern conservatism.3 Growing up in the small North Carolina town of Monroe during the 1920s and 1930s, Helms spent two years in college and then dove into a career as a newspaper journalist, radio announcer, and, beginning in 1960, full-time TV conservative. Between November 1960 and February 1972, Helms broadcast more than 2,700 television editorials . These “Viewpoint” editorials provided Helms the chance to shape a political message that was rooted in opposition to the civil rights movement, hostility to liberal elites and student protesters, and suspicion of changes accompanying the 1960s counterculture. Although Helms would later seem a southern hayseed to his...

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