Rick Perlstein

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

Rick Perlstein

• 2001 LATimes–History winner
• Score: 10.51

Before the Storm begins in a time 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—editor William F. Buckley, Jr., John Birch Society leader Robert Welch, and thousand 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…