ONE MAN'S FREEDOM

A study in contrasting political philosophies.

For nearly a decade spanning the 1950s and ’60s, two visions of American life developed in tandem, each articulated and embodied by a charismatic leader. Martin Luther King Jr. gained international prominence as a high-flown orator of the Civil Rights Movement committed to progressive social justice; Barry Goldwater, the blunt-spoken Arizona senator who ran as the Republican candidate for president in 1964, rallied conservatives to the cause of “extremism in defense of liberty.” The pair engaged in a “years-long debate over the meaning of freedom, without ever being in the same room,” writes Buccola in this successor to his earlier dual biography, The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America (2019). The author sifts through speeches, interviews, and writings by King and Goldwater to elucidate the ideologies that continue to hold sway—and divide Americans—to this day. For Goldwater, freedom meant “no Federal regulation of any segment of our free economy…or any aspect of our lives as citizens”; this conception grew from his background as a businessman who was opposed to “Big Labor and Big Government.” While the author asserts that Goldwater was not a white supremacist, the senator found common cause with that group’s championing of states’ rights, a pressing issue as the federal government was called upon to enforce desegregation in the South. King, of course, saw things differently: State’s rights, he argued, “are only valid as they serve to protect larger human rights.” The minister would ultimately urge “every Negro and every white person of good will” to vote against Goldwater, who suffered a stunning electoral defeat at the hands of Lyndon B. Johnson. The conservative movement, however, was just gathering steam.

This readable and relevant intellectual history is grounded in a dramatic narrative of American politics.