Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American… (2001)

by Rick Perlstein

Members	Reviews	Popularity	Average rating	Mentions
351	10	31,129	(4.09)	14

Add to Your books

Add to wishlist

all members

▾Members

Recently added by

LitaVore, TheEndofCinema, VnBookDrive, rmdmphilosopher, TruthSeeker, gayla.bassham, EarthSong1

numbers

show all

▾Tags

▾LibraryThing Recommendations

refresh

▾Member recommendations

00
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein (mattries37315)
mattries37315: Perlstein's first and second books in his series studying the history of Conservatism and the Modern Right in American political history that began in the 1950s.
00
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 by Taylor Branch (Jestak)

▾Lists

1960s (81)

▾Will you like it?

▾Conversations (About links)

No current Talk conversations about this book.

» See also 14 mentions

▾Member reviews

date ▼ | votes

Showing 1-5 of 10 (next | show all)

2016 is not the first year Republican presidential politics seemed batsh*t crazy. Once before we had a nominee whom pundits and analysts considered an unqualified lunatic; who caused foreign observers to question the sanity of the American electorate and worry about the global future; who resolutely flew in the face of accepted wisdom about how to run a campaign. How such a candidate emerged not (as now) in a climate of polarization but in one of placid liberal consensus is the subject of this book. Along the way you'll meet players such as Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Phyllis Schlafly and William Rehnquist, and learn how at one time both Democratic and Republican parties included both reactionary and progressive elements, so that neither organization could be simply labeled "conservative" or "liberal." The Democrats partnered Northern labor-movement activists with Southern racists. The Republicans paired Western might-makes-right libertarians with Eastern elitist intellectuals. How Goldwater's candidacy was made inevitable by a mostly unknown cadre of true believers flying under the radar is the central drama.

The book reads like an ironic thriller, its twists and turns always surprising despite the overall tone of amused disbelief, punctuated by earnest excitement. Perlstein loves his subject and every page includes a great story. The day after I finished Before the Storm, I went out and purchased his next book, Nixonland. I have a feeling I'm going to be crediting these books for keeping me sane and giving me perspective during interesting times. (

)

john.cooper | Jul 3, 2016 |

In 1964 the political establishment of both parties were terrified that conservative firebrand Barry Goldwater would sink the Republican party. The Republican establishment tried to rally behind several different candidates to derail Goldwater, to no avail. Out of touch with the mainstream electorate and crippled by his own missteps, Barry Goldwater went on to lose the general election to LBJ in one of the most epic defeats in Presidential politics.
Instead of being the end of the story for the conservative movement though, Barry Goldwater was a harbinger of things to come. In many ways the Republican party of 2016 is the party of Goldwater. His anti-government, take no prisoner stances have become party dogma. It was the Goldwater campaign that moved the GOP away from it's historical support of civil rights and wrote off the minority vote in favor of disaffected southern Democrats. This was the campaign that repudiated moderate Republicans such as Eisenhower. To truly understand why the Republican party is the way that it currently is, a study of Barry Goldwater and the movement he spurred is crucial. (

)

queencersei | Apr 5, 2016 |

A great book about the politics of the Goldwater campaign. The book also explains the roots of today's right-wing American politics and the people that are currently making headlines.

A strong recommendation for an election year. (

)

M_Clark | Mar 12, 2016 |

This book focusses on the 1964 election, which looked like disaster for the American conservatism, but turned out to be its seedbed. "Before the Storm" is of course the first volume in a three volume trilogy on the rise of the conservative movement in the U.S., and it does show very clearly that things changed a long time before 1980. Perlstein shows that Goldwater didn't create that movement, but did galvanize it, inspiring a passionate group of believers who became the conservative ground troops in the years ahead. And he also shows that Goldwater's crushing loss in 1964 wasn't just about a still-powerful American consensus. It was about Democratic skullduggery, brilliant advertizing, and an amazingly badly run Republican campaign. Goldwater himself comes across as a remarkably decent person, but as one who never really got into being a Presidential candidate.

Overall, this book is well worth reading, for anyone with an interest in American politics -- present as well as past. It does at times get a bit bogged down in the granular detail of the campaign: that sort of who said what to whom on what phone call is more interesting when you know who most of the characters are, and a lot of the players from 1964 have slipped into the mist. Still, I enjoyed the book, and am looking forward to the next two in the trilogy. (

)

annbury | Dec 24, 2014 |

This is a fascinating tale of how the conservatives seemingly highjacked the Republican party in 1964 to nominate Barry Goldwater for president. The election of that year proved to be a disaster, but, of course, the tale won't end there. The organizations, individuals and ideas taking form in 1964 will revive with a renewed vigor later (there are two more volumes in this trilogy). And now, the liberal Republicans that the Goldwater contingent battled that year (Rockefeller, Javits, Scranton etc) long gone and as is their strand of political thought.

At times I found the details of campaigns to be tedious and I would skim a bit, but by and large, this is a very informative and enjoyable book. (

)

gbelik | Oct 2, 2014 |

date ▼ | votes

Showing 1-5 of 10 (next | show all)

▾Published reviews

no reviews | add a review

▾Other authors

» Add other authors

▾Work-to-work relationships

view history

▾Common Knowledge

You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.

For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.

Series (with order)

Canonical title

Original title

Alternative titles

Original publication date

2001

People/Characters

Barry Goldwater

Important places

Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Massachusetts, USA

Arizona, USA

Important events

United States presidential election (1964)

Related movies

Awards and honors

Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2001.06|History, 2001)

Village Voice 25 Favorite Books (2001)

Epigraph

Dedication

First words

Quotations

Last words

Disambiguation notice

Publisher's editors

Blurbers

Publisher series

Original language

▾References

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (7)

Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, 1964

History of the United States Republican Party

Movement conservatism

Rick Perlstein

Robert W. Welch, Jr.

Robert Waring Stoddard

The Shelter (The Twilight Zone)

▾LibraryThing members' description

Book description

Haiku summary

▾Book descriptions

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0809028581, Paperback)

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

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:14:16 -0400)

(see all 2 descriptions)

▾Library descriptions

"Before the Storm begins in a time very much like the present - 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 - Midewestern businessmen, Sun Belt suburbanites, Southern segregationists, and thousands of college students - formed a movement to challenge the center-left consensus. They chose as their hero Barry Goldwater - a rich, handsome Arizona Republican who hated liberalism even mor than he did Moscow - and they grew determined to see him elected President." "Goldwater was trounced by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The pundits left conservatism for dead. But by the campaign's end, the consensus found itself squeezed from the left and from the right. As early as 1967 Johnson's Great Society programs were blocked by conservatives in Congress, and the movement had arrived; by 1980 a new conservative standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, was elected President. Today many of Goldwater's ideas are conventional wisdom for Republications and Democrats alike." "Rick Perlstein's original account of the 1960s as the cradle of the conservative movement is also about a revolution in political culture; fears of threats abroad giving way to concerns of disorder at home; campaigns plotted in back rooms giving way to those staged for television; Americans beginning to think of their nation as divided, not united. Filled with portraits of figures from George Wallace to Nelson Rockefeller to Bill Moyers, Before the Storm is a narrative history that adds greatly to our understanding of that controversial era - and of our own."--BOOK JACKET.… (more)