politics-from concerns over threats from abroad to concerns about disorder at home from campaigns plotted in back rooms to those staged for television. Perlstein argues that the 1964 election led to a key shift in U.S. 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. 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. Goldwater was trounced by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. They chose as their hero Barry Goldwatera rich, handsome Arizona Republican who scorned the federal bureaucracy, reviled detente, despised liberals on sightand grew determined to see him elected President. Buckley, Jr., John Birch Society leader Robert Welch, and thousand of studentsformed a movement to challenge the center-left consensus. Kennedy was elected President in 1960, conservativeseditor William F. Before the Storm begins in a time much like the presentthe tail end of the 1950s, with America affluent, confident, and convinced that political ideology was a thing of the past.īut when John F.
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