THE RIGHT MOMENT: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point In American Politics.

• Author: Waldman, Michael
• Position: Review

THE RIGHT MOMENT: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point In American Politics by Matthew Dallek Free Press, $25.00

AS YOU DRIVE PAST THE RONALD Reagan Federal Building in Washington to Reagan National Airport, it is sometimes hard to remember just how extreme, even radical, the Californian appeared when he plunged into big-time politics in the 1960s. Today we remember him as a twinkling grandfather, wrapping hard-edged policies in "there you go again" gauze. But when he first ran for public office, defeating incumbent governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown by one million votes in 1966, he was the avatar of an angry backlash--a precursor to the campaign waged by George Wallace two years later.

In The Right Moment, a history of the Reagan-Brown race, Matthew Dallek marks a moment very different from our received memories of the 1960s. For all the "Behind the Music" documentaries and Baby Boomer nostalgia, the most important political legacy of that turbulent decade was a sharp turn to the political right. After that 1966 election, Dallek argues, liberalism has never been the same.

This is a refreshing and well-written book, and it tells a good story. It focuses unapologetically on electoral politics, chock-full of striving candidates, scheming local officials, and colorful party operatives--all of which would mark it as highly unfashionable in many academic history departments. There are signs of a backlash among the youngest of historians, a return to history in the grand style reflected not only by this book but by Jeff Shesol's Mutual Contempt (about the LBJ-RFK feud), among others. Interestingly, both Dallek, who now works for Richard Gephardt, and Shesol, who works for Bill Clinton, went into speechwriting rather than academia.

Today's Democrats are still grappling with the anti-government tide that began surging in 1966. Pat Brown represented the self-confident liberalism of the post-New Deal decades. He was the "giant-killer" who beat Richard Nixon and drove him to his "last press conference" in 1962. He built California's public university system into the best in the nation, spent lavishly on public works and improvements, and championed civil rights. Californians are still living off the social capital accumulated during those years.

Brown foundered not on taxes, or the economy, or even on the Vietnam war, or the other issues we think of as being Reagan's battle flags but on social disorder. The Watts riots in 1965...