Voice in the Wilderness

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein (Hill and Wang, 671 pp., $30)

AS Alan Brinkley observed in the American Historical Review in April 1994, “American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship.” This should be no cause for surprise; most contemporary historians are liberals, and there was no obvious reason why they should devote themselves to the objective study of a phenomenon they found it positively painful to contemplate— especially since the tale, as it unfolded across the decades, turned out to be a success story. So the modern American conservative movement has been left, for many years, to the tender mercies of writers who had something very different from objective historical scholarship on their minds.

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About the Author

William A. Rusher

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Republican Party

Presidential Election

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein (Hill and Wang, 671 pp., $30)

AS Alan Brinkley observed in the American Historical Review in April 1994, “American conservatism has been something of an orphan in historical scholarship.” This should be no cause for surprise; most contemporary historians are liberals, and there was no obvious reason why they should devote themselves to the objective study of a phenomenon they found it positively painful to contemplate— especially since the tale, as it unfolded across the decades, turned out to be a success story. So the modern American conservative movement has been left, for many years, to the tender mercies of writers who had something very different from objective historical scholarship on their minds.