Conservative journalist Noel Parmentel Jr. was not optimistic about the future of American conservatism. In a 1963 National Educational Television (NET) telecast, The American Conservative, Parmentel lamented the noble fight but predicted the dim prospects for success of the American right. "Pulling for the right wing in the end," he stated, "is like pulling for the New York Mets." He continued, "It's the Alamo, it's the German Army at Stalingrad, it's Horatio at the bridge." This view would have resonated with a number of American conservatives in the early 1960s. They perceived conservatism as a necessary refutation of what they saw as the postwar liberal consensus and believed mainstream American institutions -- especially the major political parties, the mainstream media, and higher education -- as so hostile to conservative views that the fight for influence within them would be Herculean.
Conservatives in the decades after World War II were part of a heterogeneous movement, bound together in part by this shared sense of grievance and outsider status. Opposed to the expansion of federal power inaugurated during the New Deal, hostile to a modern secularism that they felt rejected traditional sites of authority, suspicious of a Cold War foreign policy they thought to be insufficiently aggressive in its fight against the spread of global communism, fearful of the expansion of collectivism domestically, and outraged by a perceived increasing permissiveness that seemingly tolerated civil disobedience and disrespect for the nation’s laws, conservatives adamantly believed that the country was headed in multiple wrong directions.1
The nomination of conservative senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 as the Republican candidate for president seemingly proved Parmentel wrong. Goldwater’s nomination signaled an early victory for conservatives seeking to move the party, and the nation, to the right; yet Goldwater’s staggering electoral defeat indicated that conservatives still had work to do to make their ideas and ideology attractive to a larger public. Over the course of the 1960s, but especially in the second half of the decade, NET would dedicate a number of telecasts to this burgeoning movement and accordingly would provide a remarkable window into the history of conservatism, especially in the period in which conservatives were in the process of building the institutions and influence that later would enable them to become a major political force from the end of the 1970s onward.