Arizona senator Barry Goldwater was a staunch conservative more interested in advancing the conservative cause than running for president. A "Draft Goldwater" campaign three years in the making catapulted him to the Republican nomination in 1964, despite bitter opposition within the party. He was defeated in a landslide by Lyndon Johnson but the right had established itself as a reinvigorated force in the years to come. This is a chronicle of the 1964 Republican convention and the beginnings of the modern conservative movement.

Reflecting on his fifty-year effort to steer the Grand Old Party toward black voters, Memphis power broker George W. Lee declared, "Somebody had to stay in the Republican Party and fight." As Joshua Farrington recounts in his comprehensive history, Lee was one of many black Republican leaders who remained loyal after the New Deal inspired black voters to switch their allegiance from the "party of Lincoln" to the Democrats. Ideologically and demographically diverse, the ranks of twentieth-century black Republicans included Southern patronage dispensers like Lee and Robert Church, Northern critics of corrupt Democratic urban machines like Jackie Robinson and Archibald Carey, civil rights agitators like Grant Reynolds and T. R. M. Howard, elected politicians like U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke and Kentucky state legislator Charles W. Anderson, black nationalists like Floyd McKissick and Nathan Wright, and scores of grassroots organizers from Atlanta to Los Angeles. Black Republicans believed that a two-party system in which both parties were forced to compete for the African American vote was the best way to obtain stronger civil rights legislation. Though they were often pushed to the sidelines by their party's white leadership, their continuous and vocal inner-party dissent helped moderate the GOP's message and platform through the 1970s. And though often excluded from traditional narratives of U.S. politics, black Republicans left an indelible mark on the history of their party, the civil rights movement, and twentieth-century political development. Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP marshals an impressive amount of archival material at the national, state, and municipal levels in the South, Midwest, and West, as well as in the better-known Northeast, to open up new avenues in African American political history.

In 1981, a Right Wing Republican at long last resided in the White House, presiding over what may prove to be the most fundamental restructuring of American political life since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Fortunately, The Republican Right since 1945 now provides us with the necessary historical understanding of conservative Republicans. David Reinhard's dispassionate yet lively book recounts the Republican Right's political struggles from the death of FDR in 1945 to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Younger readers will discover that Right Wing Republicans are older than Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater and that some conservative Republicans once feared the overextension of American power abroad and the rise of the "garrison state" at home. Those old enough to remember when the Republican Right was called the "Old Guard" will rediscover the events and personalities of those earlier years, thanks to Reinhard's use of more than thirty five manuscript collections and the most recent historical writing. Not content to let this history end where traditional manuscript sources run thin, Reinhard has brought the story of the Republican Right Wing forward to President Ronald Reagan's inauguration, placing Right Wing Republican reaction to the Johnson and the Nixon-Ford years within the context of the earlier period and chronicling the electoral triumph of Ronald Reagan and the Republican Right. Students of the past and observers of the present will appreciate Reinhard's treatment of the always-troubled Nixon-Republican Right association; challenger Ronald Reagan's battle against President Gerald Ford in 1976; the decline of GOP moderation; and the rise of the New Right-Moral Majority forces and their relationship to the now ascendant Republican Right. Reinhard illuminates the conservative Republican past and thereby makes the current political scene more understandable. Thoroughly researched and brilliantly written, The Republican Right since 1945 will fascinate scholars and general readers alike.

Nelson Rockefeller's Dilemma reveals the fascinating and influential political career of the four-time New York State governor and US vice president. Marsha E. Barrett's portrayal of this multi-faceted political player focuses on the eclipse of moderate Republicanism and the betrayal of deeply held principles for political power. Although never able to win his party's presidential nomination, Rockefeller's tenure as governor was notable for typically liberal policies: infrastructure projects, expanding the state's university system, and investing in local services and the social safety net. As the Civil Rights movement intensified in the early 1960s, Rockefeller envisioned a Republican Party recommitted to its Lincolnian heritage as a defender of Black equality. But the party's extreme right wing, encouraged by its successful outreach to segregationists before and after the nomination of Barry Goldwater, pushed the party to the right. With his national political ambitions fading by the late 1960s, Rockefeller began to tack right himself on social and racial issues, refusing to endorse efforts to address police brutality, accusing, without proof, Black welfare mothers of cheating the system, or introducing harsh drug laws that disproportionately incarcerated people of color. These betrayals of his own ideals did little to win him the support of the party faithful, and his vice presidency ended in humiliation, rather than the validation of moderate ideals. An in-depth, insightful, and timely political history, Nelson Rockefeller's Dilemma details how the standard-bearer of moderate Republicanism lost the battle for the soul of the Party of Lincoln, leading to mainlining of white-grievance populism for the post-civil rights era.

In an astute and surprising history of the 1960s as the cradle of the conservative movement, Perlstein's gutsy narrative history profiles the rise of Barry Goldwater, the rich, handsome Arizona Republican who scorned the federal bureaucracy and despised liberals on sight.16 pp. of photos.

In Still Seeing Red, John Kenneth White explores how the Cold War molded the internal politics of the United States. In a powerful narrative backed by a rich treasure trove of polling data, White takes the reader through the Cold War years, describing its effect in redrawing the electoral map as we came to know it after World War II. The primary beneficiaries of the altered landscape were reinvigorated Republicans who emerged after five successive defeats to tar the Democrats with the ?soft on communism? epithet. A new nationalist Republican party?whose Cold War prescription for winning the White House was copyrighted to Dwight Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan?attained primacy in presidential politics because of two contradictory impulses embedded in the American character: a fanatical preoccupation with communism and a robust liberalism. From 1952 to 1988 Republicans won the presidency seven times in ten tries. The rare Democratic victors?John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter?attempted to rearm the Democratic party to fight the Cold War. Their collective failure says much about the politics of the period. Even so, the Republican dream of becoming a majority party became perverted as the Grand Old Party was recast into a top-down party routinely winning the presidency even as its electoral base remained relatively stagnant.In the post?Cold War era, Americans are coming to appreciate how the fifty-year struggle with the Soviet Union organized thinking in such diverse areas as civil rights, social welfare, education, and defense policy. At the same time, Americans are also more aware of how the Cold War shaped their lives?from the ?duck and cover? drills in the classrooms to the bomb shelters dug in the backyard when most Baby Boomers were growing up. Like millions of Baby Boomers, Bill Clinton can truthfully say, ?I am a child of the Cold War.?With the last gasp of the Soviet Union, Baby Boomers and others are learning that the politics of the Cold War are hard to shed. As the electoral maps are being redrawn once more in the Clinton years, landmarks left behind by the Cold War provide an important reference point. In the height of the Cold War, voters divided the world into ?us? noncommunists versus ?them? communists and reduced contests for the presidency into battles of which party would be tougher in dealing with the Evil Empire. But in a convoluted post?Cold War era, politics defies such simple characteristics and presidents find it harder to lead. Recalling how John F. Kennedy could so easily rally public opinion, an exasperated Bill Clinton once lamented, ?Gosh, I miss the Cold War.?

Failure should not be an option in the presidency, but for too long it has been the norm. From the botched attempt to rescue the U.S. diplomats held hostage by Iran in 1980 under President Jimmy Carter and the missed intelligence on Al Qaeda before 9-11 under George W. Bush to, most recently, the computer meltdown that marked the arrival of health care reform under Barack Obama, the American presidency has been a profile in failure. In Why Presidents Fail and How They Can Succeed Again, Elaine Kamarck surveys these and other recent presidential failures to understand why Americans have lost faith in their leaders—and how they can get it back. Kamarck argues that presidents today spend too much time talking and not enough time governing, and that they have allowed themselves to become more and more distant from the federal bureaucracy that is supposed to implement policy. After decades of "imperial" and "rhetorical" presidencies, we are in need of a "managerial" president. This White House insider and former Harvard academic explains the difficulties of governing in our modern political landscape, and offers examples and recommendations of how our next president can not only recreate faith in leadership but also run a competent, successful administration.

The most comprehensive biography of Barry Goldwater ever written is back by popular demand with a new foreword by Phyllis Schlafly and an updated introduction by the author. Lee Edwards renders a penetrating account of the icon who put the conservative movement on the national stage. Replete with previously unpublished details of his life, Goldwater established itself as the definitive study of the political maverick who made a revolution.