Read it and understand where the mad public faiths of our own day came from.' -Thomas Frank, editor of THE BAFFLER and author of ONE MARKET UNDER GOD 'Before the Storm is one of the finest studies of the American right to appear since the days of Hofstadter. A truly landmark study.' -Douglas Brinkley, author of THE UNFINISHED PRESIDENCY: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House Perlstein illuminates how conservatism erupted into a mass political movement while the academic scholars and media pundits were embracing Great Society Liberalism and Counterculture Despair. Rick Perlstein's remarkable BEFORE THE STORM: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus is such an achievement: elegantly written, copiously researched, brimming with fresh anecdotes. 'Occasionally a book comes along which causes historians to rethink an entire era. An army that could lose a battle, suck it up, regroup, then live to fight a thousand battles more.' -John J. But something remained after 1964: a movement. Bush in 2000-might not have been possible without the glorious failure of Barry Goldwater in 1964. The victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980-to say nothing of Newt Gingrich in 1994 and George W. 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. For conservatives, the rough indoctrination came in 1964, and Perlstein (who is not a conservative) tells their story in detail and with panache. These were practical lessons that anybody in politics must pick up. 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. 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. 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. 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 1964 race was different, though, and author Rick Perlstein knows exactly why.

Not every presidential election is worth a book more than a quarter-century after the last ballot has been counted.

Before the storm goldwater