There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The gritty details of a chapter of American history that still resonates strongly.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Perlstein, who writes for the Nation clearly delights at relating Johnson's landslide defeat of the Arizona senator, yet he conveys the mindset of a Goldwater supporter with respect, asking readers to put themselves in the shoes of small businessmen bogged down by unions and the New York financial establishment. The attention to detail and the cast of characters is at times tiresome, but will be a marvelous resource for political scientists. The troops are what’s important here: Goldwater the man is just one aspect of Goldwater the movement. Perlstein documents every backroom meeting, every press conference, every turn of events that led to the Goldwater troops realizing that goal. He enjoyed the backing of a cadre of marginal party officials, led by expert political operatives like Clif White, who were preparing to seize the nomination. While the Rockefeller Republicans haggled with Nixon (Perlstein describes Rocky as a “collector of chits”), Goldwater waited. His rhetoric gained an audience, Perlstein argues, because of the many fractures present in the Republican Party at the time. He argued that civil-rights legislation would create a police state he felt the US should be prepared for an all-out nuclear war he saw unions as oppressors of the working class. Goldwater’s crusade was against moderation, and his jeremiads convinced millions to support him.

He was a relative outsider who knocked heads with the greats of the past (Kennedy, Johnson, Rockefeller, and Nixon), but more important were his associations with the heroes (Ronald Reagan and William Rehnquist) of more recent conservative triumphs.

The second most charismatic politician alive in the early 1960s (after John Kennedy), Goldwater was a man before his time. The era of Perlstein’s Goldwater is not so far from ours. An analysis of the forces that led to Barry Goldwater’s nomination as the Republican presidential candidate of 1964.

Before the storm goldwater