Two Suns of the Southwest: Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the 1964 Battle Between Liberalism and Conservatism by Nancy Beck Young (review)

In Two Suns of the Southwest: Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and the 1964 Battle Between Liberalism and Conservatism, Nancy Beck Young juxtaposes 1964 presidential campaign contenders Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry M. Goldwater as symbols of a contest between consensus liberalism and the emerging politics of resentment—philosophies, she argues, that were rooted in the southwestern backgrounds of each man. While both men, the 1964 campaign, and the issues dominating early 1960s politics have long been studied, Young's dichotomous approach offers a fresh lens with which to consider a much-examined period.

The means by which both men approached their campaigns and sought to advance their issues reflected two competing visions of the Southwest, according to Two Suns of the Southwest. Young argues, "Johnson's remedy [for preventing intraparty division], the frontlash, was a nationalized version of what LBJ had learned years ago in one-party Texas: elide ideology and party, emphasize pragmatic goals and results, and turn campaigns into contests about personality" (p. 4). Meanwhile, Goldwater sought to amass votes from the Democratic Party backlash fueled by those who refused to support Johnson's civil rights platform. For Johnson, strategy, more so than issues, found its roots in the Southwest, while Goldwater's southwestern influence reflected a Far Right ideology that was "antistatist, oriented to the Sunbelt, and brimming with moral resentment of liberalism" (p. 54).

The election-year maneuvering further accelerated the forces emerging to make 1964 a pivotal year in United States politics—the realignment of the Democratic and Republican Parties over civil rights issues in general and over the impending 1964 Civil Rights Act specifically; the expansion of the Republican Party's southern strategy; and the emergence of unyielding ideology over political consensus.

Young's analysis of Goldwater conservatism expands on scholarship that in recent years has demonstrated how Far Right political movements in midtwentieth-century America were not anomalous; rather, these movements built on and were informed by mainstream conservatism. "Goldwater conservatives did not 'invent' their movement, but instead reconfigured what they had 'learned' from the previous generation to apply to the conditions of the 1960s," she writes (p. 7). As such, while the study does not clearly illuminate the genesis of the extensive grassroots campaigns that emerged around the country to support Goldwater, it highlights the extent to which the popularity of these local movements could have narrowed Johnson's victory—if not for Goldwater undermining himself by conducting a diffident campaign and making outrageous proclamations, like engaging in nuclear war, that his handlers were unable to walk back.

The Dwight D. Eisenhower presidency—often presented by scholars, including Young, as the apogee of consensus liberalism—masked the battle within the Republican Party among Nelson A. Rockefeller liberals, Robert A. Taft conservatives, and the extreme Right. Young contextualizes the 1964 campaign with a chapter examining these dynamics, one that elucidates how, through a combination of Rockefeller's personal liabilities and the Republican National Committee's methodical plans to eclipse party moderates by statelevel outreach to governors in charge of state party convention delegates, the Republican Party's liberal wing lost ground, paving the way for the previously unimaginable: the nomination of Goldwater for president.

Clearly written and accessible to the lay reader, Two Suns of the Southwest ably synthesizes the extensive scholarship on Goldwater, Johnson, and the civil rights era, while drawing from archival research to present a straightforward study that would especially benefit undergraduates focused on history and political science. It is a welcome addition to the historical canon on U.S. political conservatism.