Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

Rick Perlstein

Mar 2009 · Sold by Bold Type Books

About this ebook

“A detailed and dramatic narrative of the rise of the modern right...It's an amazing story, and Perlstein, a man of the left, does it justice” (William Kristol, The New York Times Book Review)

Before the Storm begins at the tail end of the 1950s, with America affluent, confident, and convinced that political ideology was a thing of the past.

But when John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960, conservatives—editor William F. Buckley Jr., John Birch Society leader Robert Welch, and thousands of students—formed a movement to challenge the center-left consensus. They chose as their hero Barry Goldwater—a rich, handsome Arizona Republican who scorned the federal bureaucracy, reviled détente, despised liberals on sight—and grew determined to see him elected President.

Goldwater was trounced by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But by the campaign's end the consensus found itself squeezed from the left and the right; and two decades later, the conservatives had elected Ronald Reagan as President and Goldwater's ideas had been adopted by Republicans and Democrats alike.

The story of the rise of conservatism during a liberal era has never been told, and Rick Perlstein's gutsy narrative history is full of portraits of figures from Nelson Rockefeller to Bill Moyers. Perlstein argues that the 1964 election led to a key shift in U.S. politics—from concerns over threats from abroad to concerns about disorder at home; from campaigns plotted in back rooms to those staged for television.

About the author

Rick Perlstein is the bestselling author of Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980,  The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. His reviews, reporting, and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Observer, The New Republic, The Washington Post, London Review of Books, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, and The New Yorker. He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for independent scholars. He lives in Chicago.