The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics

Description

Ronald Reagan's first great victory in the 1966 California governor's race is one of the pivotal stories of American political history, a victory that seemed to come from nowhere and has long since confounded his critics. Just four years earlier Governor Edmund Pat Brown was celebrated as the Giant Killer for his 1962 victory over Richard Nixon, and his liberal agenda reigned supreme. Yet in 1966 political neophyte Reagan trounced Brown by almost one million votes, marking not only the coming-of-age of Reagan's new conservatism but also the first serious blow to modern liberalism. Drawing on scores of oral histories, thousands of archival documents, and personal interviews with participants, Dallek offers a gripping new portrait of the 1960s that is far more complicated than our collective memory of that decade. Contents Introduction: The Critical Years One The Giant Killer Two The Anticommunist Three “Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been, a Liberal?” Four “Rim Ronnie Run” Five “You've Got to Get Those Kids Out of There” Six “A Bunch of Kooks” Seven “Charcoal Alleys” Eight The George Wallace of California Nine The Search for Order Ten Prairie Fire Epilogue Afterword Notes Acknowledgments Index