Not every presidential election is worth a book more than a quarter-century after the last ballot has been counted. The
1964 race was different, though, and author Rick Perlstein knows exactly why. That year, President
Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Democrat, trounced his opponent,
Barry Goldwater, a Republican senator from Arizona, in a blowout of historic proportions. The conservative wing of the GOP, which had toiled for so long as the minority partner in a coalition dominated by more liberal brethren, finally had risen to power and nominated one of its own, only to see him crash in terrible splendor. It looked like a death, but it was really a birth: a harrowing introduction to politics that would serve conservatives well in the years ahead as they went on to great success. Conservatives learned a lot in 1964: It was learning how to act: how letters got written, how doors got knocked on, how co-workers could be won over on the coffee break, how to print a bumper sticker and how to pry one off with a razor blade; how to put together a network whose force exceeded the sum of its parts by orders of magnitude; how to talk to a reporter, how to picket, and how, if need be, to infiltrate--how to make the anger boiling inside you ennobling, productive, powerful, instead of embittering.These were practical lessons that anybody in politics must pick up. For conservatives, the rough indoctrination came in 1964, and Perlstein (who is not a conservative) tells their story in detail and with panache.
Before the Storm is not a history of conservative ideas (for that, read The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, by George Nash), but a chronicle of how these ideas began to matter in politics. The victory of
Ronald Reagan in 1980--to say nothing of
Newt Gingrich in 1994 and
George W. Bush in 2000--might not have been possible without the glorious failure of Barry Goldwater in 1964. As Perlstein writes, "You lost in 1964. But something remained after 1964: a movement. An army. An army that could lose a battle, suck it up, regroup, then live to fight a thousand battles more." --John J. Miller
Background Information
In 1964, the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater, an archconservative, who was roundly defeated by Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon B. Johnson, a powerful Democratic Senator from Texas, was JFK's vice-president in the 1960 election and succeeded him in November 1963. Barry Goldwater was a conservative senator from Arizona who captured the hearts and support of the conservative movement and was nominated for President in 1964. Ronald Reagan moved from moderate success as a movie actor to become governor of California and president of the United States. George W. Bush was elected president in a hotly contested election in 2000, becoming only the second son of a president to gain the office.
