A Single Spark Can Touch Off a Prairie Fire

The conservative movement has become such an established part of American political life that only the ancient can recall when it was written off as dead, buried and soon to be forgotten. The year was 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson had just defeated Barry Goldwater, the "voice of conservatism," whose followers had seized the Republican Party from the Eastern bankers, stock brokerage presidents, lawyers and industrialists in control since before World War II.

The word "defeat" does not adequately describe the immensity of Goldwater's loss or the blow seemingly suffered by the conservative cause. Goldwater won only six states, and his loss gave Democrats huge majorities in the House and Senate, clearing the way for passage of Johnson's Great Society legislation. The time had come, it seemed, to mark the demise of the conservative crusade, with its fierce anti-communism and unrelenting opposition to social programs dating to the New Deal.

Pundits and academics, analyzing the election results, did exactly that. Richard Rovere predicted at the time in The New Yorker that "the election has finished the Goldwater school of political reaction." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. summed up a commonly held view that the two-party system was endangered. Citing the twice-beaten Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey, Schlesinger wrote: "The election results of 1964 seemed to demonstrate [Dewey's] prediction about what would happen if the parties were ever realigned on an ideological basis: 'The Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election.' "

"At that," writes scholar Rick Perlstein in an elegantly sarcastic phrase that concludes "Before the Storm," his study of the era, "there seemed nothing more to say. It was time to close the book."

But, as history has proved, it was, in fact, time to keep the book open and fill the pages with the story of a movement that, though defeated, was not destroyed and within two years had captured the governorship of California with a candidate who would be elected president in 1980. The story of this remarkable fall and rise is told in two excellent books that delve into the roots of the conservative movement and explain its staying power and growth.