The 1964 presidential campaign lives on in conservative circles as an origin myth for the modern conservative movement. Even though their preferred (and now revered) candidate lost to Lyndon B. Johnson by a landslide, Barry Goldwater's failed presidential run was a major turning point of the twentieth century. Without Goldwater's philosophy to pave the way -- and, just as importantly, without the strategic and political infrastructure created by the "Draft Goldwater" movement that preceded it -- there likely would have been no Reagan or Bush administrations, and possibly no Nixon administration either. The policy positions and electoral strategies of the Goldwater campaign became standard tenets of Republican politics. William Middendorf had better than a ringside seat for this pivotal campaign. A key member of the "Draft Goldwater" movement as early as 1962, he was Goldwater's campaign treasurer and, afterwards, a major force within the Republican Party. No one knows the real inside story better, and A Glorious Disaster tells that story in all its rollicking, agonizing, and never-before-published detail.

Traces how the Republican Party in the South after Reconstruction transformed from a biracial organization to a mostly all-white one.

All the Way with LBJ examines the LBJ tapes, analysing the 1964 presidential campaign and the political culture of the mid-1960s.

With a new postscript on the 2016 presidential primaries, this is the story behind today's headlines. In an absorbing narrative, E.J. Dionne Jr. illuminates the history of Republican politics from the Barry Goldwater era through the Reagan Revolution to the crisis of the 2016 presidential election. With that perspective and contemporary reporting, he explains the unrest and discontent on the Right and the Republican Party's bitter civil war while illustrating why a radicalized conservatism has made governing our country so difficult.--back cover.

Over time the presidential election of 1964 has come to be seen as a generational shift, a defining moment in which Americans deliberated between two distinctly different visions for the future. In its juxtaposition of these divergent visions, Two Suns of the Southwest is the first full account of this critical election and its legacy for US politics. The 1964 election, in Nancy Beck Young’s telling, was a contest between two men of the Southwest, each with a very different idea of what the Southwest was and what America should be. Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona, came to represent a nostalgic, idealized past, a preservation of traditional order, while Lyndon B. Johnson, the Democratic incumbent from Texas, looked boldly and hopefully toward an expansive, liberal future of increased opportunity. Thus, as we see in Two Suns of the Southwest, the election was also a showdown between liberalism and conservatism, an election whose outcome would echo throughout the rest of the century. Young explores how demographics, namely the rise of the Sunbelt, factored into the framing and reception of these competing ideas. Her work situates Johnson’s Sunbelt liberalism as universalist, designed to create space for all Americans; Goldwater’s Sunbelt conservatism was far more restrictive, at least with regard to what the federal government should do. In this respect the election became a debate about individual rights versus legislated equality as priorities of the federal government. Young explores all the cultural and political elements and events that figured in this narrative, allowing Johnson to unite disaffected Republicans with independents and Democrats in a winning coalition. On a final note Young connects the 1964 election to the current state of our democracy, explaining the irony whereby the winning candidate’s vision has grown stale while the losing candidate’s has become much more central to American politics.