Goldberg, Robert Alan 1949-

views updated

GOLDBERG, Robert Alan 1949-

PERSONAL: Born August 16, 1949, in New York, NY; son of Philip J. (in business) and Ruth (Dickler) Goldberg; married Susan Kralick (a clinical specialist), August 8, 1976 (marriage ended); married Anne Freed (a social worker), January 14, 2001; children: (first marriage) David, Joshua. Education: Arizona State University, B.A., 1971; University of Wisconsin—Madison, M.A., 1972, Ph.D., 1977. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of History, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University of Texas, San Antonio, TX, assistant professor of history, 1977-80; University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, assistant professor of history, 1980—.

MEMBER: American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, Western History Association, Utah Historical Association, Colorado State Historical Society.

WRITINGS:

Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado, 1921-32, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1981.

Back to the Soil: The Jewish Farmers of Clarion, Utah, and Their World, University of Utah Press (Salt Lake City, UT), 1986.

(Compiler, with L. Ray Gunn) Perspectives on American Civilization, third edition, Simon & Schuster Custom Publications (Needham Heights, MA), 1990.

Grassroots Resistance: Social Movements in Twentieth Century America, Wadsworth (Belmont, CA), 1991.

Barry Goldwater, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1995.

Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America, Yale University (New Haven, CT), 2001.

Contributor to history journals.

SIDELIGHTS: Robert Alan Goldberg's biography of conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater won much attention from reviewers when it was published in 1995. One reason for this was because it was released at the same time as another Goldwater study: Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution, by Lee Edwards—Goldwater's press aide during his unsuccessful 1964 campaign for the presidency. Goldberg's book was also noteworthy because it was the first major biography of the senator by a professional historian. Both studies emphasize that Goldwater is important in modern U.S. political history for more than just his 1964 race for the presidency, indicating that his views strongly influenced modern Republicanism. "Far from being forgotten," wrote an Economist reviewer, "Mr. Goldwater is today an icon of the political right."

Many of the ideas that Goldwater espoused in the 1960s were later taken up by other conservatives. "There is not a candidate in the current [1996] Republican Presidential race," stated Jonathan Rauch in the New York Times Book Review, "who does not mouth themes that Mr. Goldwater pioneered in his own campaign of 1964." "Ronald Reagan hailed him in the 1980s as 'a prophet in his own time,'" the Economist contributor explained; "as a John the Baptist who walked a lonely road in support of conservative ideals." Goldwater spoke up for an end to big government intervention in private affairs, for a 25 percent tax cut, for a space-based missile defense system, and for school prayer. He spoke out against sex and violence in the media, against "reverse discrimination," and for the "forgotten American"—middle-class taxpayers who felt that entitlement programs unjustly stripped them of their rights. By appealing to white Southern voters, Goldwater's campaign also mapped out the strategy for success that brought Richard Nixon to the White House in 1968. "He served, when no one else would or could," wrote National Review contributor William A. Rusher, "as the political rallying-point for a conservative movement that was quietly gathering its strength to take over the country."

Despite his declared intention to eliminate government intervention in state affairs, Goldberg shows that Goldwater himself benefited from Federal programs. His family's fortune was founded in the nineteenth century on funding for Federal troops sent to fight the Apache Indians. "The economic boom in Arizona," Rauch explained, "came on the back of untold billions of dollars in Federal subsidies—defense subsidies, water subsidies, New Deal subsidies that Mr. Goldwater fought to keep." "As a man who longed to have studied at the military academy at West Point, and as a senator from a state that benefited mightily from defense and aerospace spending," the Economist reviewer stated, "he also campaigned for a big military budget and for a government-subsidised supersonic aeroplane to compete with the Anglo-French Concorde. He lobbied, too, for subsidies for Arizona's cotton farmers and for solar-energy research."

Despite his conservative ideology—or perhaps, Goldberg suggests, because of his firm belief in individual responsibility—Goldwater has spoken out for causes associated more with liberalism than with conservatism. Chicago Tribune contributor Stanley I. Kutler declared, "As he watched what he called a 'bunch of kooks' take over his beloved party—with their demands that the United States be recognized as a Christian nation, that Martin Luther King's birthday not be made a state holiday in Arizona and that civil rights protection not be given to gays and lesbians—he sadly told his daughter, 'perhaps I'm one of the reasons this place is so redneck.'" Overall, however, Goldberg recognized that it was probably Goldwater's personal integrity that contributed the most to his lasting image. The biographer acknowledges Goldwater's basic decency in refusing to take advantage of the 1964 inner-city riots in his presidential campaign. He also suffered vicious personal attacks from Lyndon Johnson's Democrats. "As long as honesty, and courage, and patriotism, and straightforwardness are honored," Rusher concluded, "people will respect the name of Barry Goldwater."

In his book Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America, Goldberg examines the paranoia over possible conspiracies that has periodically gripped the American people throughout their history. Even in Puritan times, Goldberg points out, paranoid fears took hold of the conservative people of the day, resulting in the Salem witch hunts. The author goes on to point out other paranoid thinking throughout U.S. history. He gives particular attention to worries over the alleged Communist master conspiracy; conservative Christians who believe that the U.S. government will be the agent of an apocalyptic collapse; black paranoia about other races; suspicion about the assassination of John F. Kennedy; and suspicion about an alleged crash of a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

Although the word "conspiracy" originally meant a secret plot toward a nefarious end, it has been "denatured by use" and is now used to "describe any insufficiently explicable phenomenon that provokes anxious distrust among Americans," explained Andrey Slivka in American Scholar. Slivka stated that "few fields of study are as desperate in need of clarity as conspiracy theory. What precisely are we talking about when we talk about conspiracy? At what point does a healthy distrust of government cross the threshold into neurosis?" Yet Slivka did not believe that Goldberg's book addressed these questions satisfactorily, suggesting that it merely "gestures in the direction of confronting such questions," yet ultimately "avoids careful analysis to indulge in the same broad generalities and imprecision that plague the field." A more positive opinion was expressed by a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who stated: "Goldberg's exhaustive research, evident in the impressive notes and bibliography, makes this the authoritative book on a curious national proclivity."