He was right: Looking back at the Goldwater moment.

• Author: Garvin, Glenn
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein, New York: Hill and Wang, 671 pages, $30

CURSED WITH TWO plundering, rapacious younger sisters, I grew up with a highly developed sense of private property (it's my room, get out) and freedom of association (I don't want to have a tea party with you and Mrs. Flopsy).This did not always put me in good stead with my parents, or with an angry sixth-grade teacher who insisted that no decent human being could question the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My doubts--if you own a restaurant, aren't you entitled to decide who can eat there Isn't that what it means when something is yours?--were dismissed as callous racism, not only by the teacher, but by the other kids as well. Imagine my astonishment when I heard the Republican presidential candidate on TV agreeing with me. Barry Goldwater quickly became my passion. I wore his campaign button to school, handed out leaflets door to door, and watched the returns election night in crushed disbelief as he absorbed the most hideous beating in American political history.

As it turned out, my experience was by no means unique. Goldwater's doomed candidacy was the political awakening for millions of young Americans thrilled by his promise of a campaign that was "a choice, not an echo." They did not go back to sleep when he lost. They would shift the tectonic plates of the two-party system, forcing a profound realignment; remap the political landscape, drawing boundaries that 40 years later show no signs of change; introduce the concept of ideology into American elections; create sharp tensions within the Republican Party that persist to this day; and, eventually, elect a president, Ronald Reagan, whose rhetoric, if not his actual policies, would dominate the nation's political discourse for the last two decades of the 20th century.

Before the Storm, the first book by Rick Perlstein, a regular contributor to The Nation, is only the first part of this tale--Barry Goldwater's rise and fall as a national political figure. The former was wildly improbable-- the ascent of a half-Jewish department store owner from a distant state that most Americans thought of as a rattlesnake-infested desert. The latter was utterly inevitable--the self-destruction of a politician who was maddeningly, hilariously, lovably impolitic. You may remember that Goldwater went into the South and off-handedly mentioned that the Tennessee Valley Authority ought to be sold. But it's only when Perlstein describes him taking a swig of Gold Water, a soft drink bottled by an ardent supporter, and barking, "This tastes like piss! I wouldn't drink it with gin!" that you realize how insanely unsuited for politics Goldwater really was.

Yet he connected with many Americans in a deeply personal way. Lyndon Johnson may have creamed Goldwater at the polls, but it was Goldwater who was truly a grassroots phenomenon. About 3.9 million Americans worked in his campaign, twice as many as in Johnson's. More than 1 million individual donors gave money to Goldwater, almost 20 times as many who contributed money to John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon combined four years earlier. Worried LBJ operatives reported to headquarters late in the campaign that Goldwater bumper stickers outnumbered those of Johnson by a 10-to-1 margin. Clearly, Goldwater touched something in the American consciousness.

To understand what it was, you have to consider the dreary state of American politics in the early 1960s. The Republican Party had never really recovered from the shellacking it took in 1932. The Democrats had controlled Congress almost continuously for three decades and had won six of the last eight presidential elections; only the decision of war hero Dwight Eisenhower to run as a Republican had kept it from being eight straight. Because of the relentless battering--or perhaps it was viceversa--the GOP was mostly dominated by FDR wannabes like Thomas Dewey and Wendell Wilikie, "the simple barefoot Wall Street lawyer." Both parties essentially accepted the New Deal precept that modern society (particularly its economic component) was too complex to be left to its own devices; the federal government had to provide an ever-stronger guiding hand. Eisenhower's victory in 1952 only offered more of the same: He set up the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court.

Onto this arid terrain, Barry Goldwater burst like a spring shower. An unenthusiastic politician elected to the Phoenix city council as part of a reform slate, he became a U.S. senator almost by accident, running in an unwinnable race as a sacrificial lamb as a favor to Arizona's tiny Republican Party. He then pulled off an upset when the overconfident incumbent barely set foot in the state during the election. He took the national stage for the first time during the McClellan Committee hearings on mob control of labor unions in 1958.

Goldwater was less interested in Jimmy Hoffa's trickery with Teamster finances than he was in Walter Reuther's ambition to couple the AFLCIO and the Democratic Party in an effort to...