The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics

by John A. Andrew III

What were young conservatives doing in the 1960s while SDS and SNCC were working to move the political center to the left? The Other Side of the Sixties offers a gripping account of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), an organization that became a leading force in promoting conservative ideas and that helped lay the groundwork for today's conservatism. John Andrew has mined unique archival material to document YAF's efforts to form a viable organization, define a new conservatism, attack the liberal establishment, and seize control of the Republican party, all while battling voter hostility and internal factionalism. The author also uncovers the Kennedy administration's use of the IRS to subvert YAF and other right-wing organizations through tax audits and investigations. By painting a more balanced portrait of political thinking in the sixties, Andrew offers a new and much needed look at the ideological atmosphere of a vibrant decade.

Genres: History, Politics, American History, American

304 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 1996

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books that does its job in a workmanlike manner, presenting information that's not readily available anywhere else in an unremarkable style. Andrew is correct in presenting YAF as the right wing's equivalent of SDS, a group of highly motivated, essentially ideological young people disillusioned with the self-satisfied middle-of-the-road consensus of the Eisenhower era. He tracks the internal dispute between the various sorts of conservatives-- traditionalists ideologues, John Birchers--from the defeat of Nixon (who they viewed as the heir of Ike's "modern Republicanism"--to the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964. He correctly identifies the Sharon Statement of 1960 as the conservative equivalent of SDS's Port Huron Statement, which came a couple of years later. (One thing that's probably beyond the purpose of his book is a detailed comparison of the two documents. For all the conservatives' claim to the moral and intellectual high ground, there's no question about the superiority of the PHS in intellectual terms. It's the difference between a detailed engagement with the issues and a somewhat windy rhetorical statement.) Like SDS, YAF was riddled with both ideological and personal conflicts, and it never really quite figured out how beholden it was to its elders, particularly William F. Buckley and the group surrounding the National Review.

The book itself is a bit pedestrian. Each chapter reads like an essay from an academic journal, detailed, cogent and basically safe. I was never quite sure to what extent Andrew sympathized with his subjects, and it really doesn't matter. The one place it became problematic involved race. The YAF leadership rarely talked about race in other than abstract terms, claiming to be against discrimination but in favor of "state's rights." At the time that was clearly a code for white supremacy, and it would become the centerpiece of the post-Goldwater conservative attempt, largely successful, to redraw the map of American politics. Andrew gives the YAF cadre a pass on that and it's a real flaw in what is otherwise a useful monograph on a subject that deserves a great deal more attention.