'Glorious Disaster' recounts conservatism's start

Middendorf was a member of the inner circle "from the start" and, during the campaign, coordinated finances and traveled with Goldwater. His narrative, remarkable for its color, detail, and the still-vivid impressions, draws on his own extensive archives.

The Goldwater campaign looms large in US political history because it set the stage for a Republican and conservative ascendancy that has lasted, with brief interludes, to the present day.

And, as Middendorf writes, it "changed American politics forever" by "[bringing] about a marked shift in Republican philosophy and geography, from liberal to conservative, and from the Northeast to the South and West."

His account of that overturning of the liberal Eastern establishment -- personified by governors Nelson Rockefeller of New York, George Romney of Michigan, William Scranton of Pennsylvania, and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts -- is Middendorf's most valuable contribution.

Rockefeller was the acknowledged early front-runner, and President Kennedy was expected to seek reelection. The landscape would change with Kennedy's assassination and Rockefeller's divorce and remarriage.

By mid-1963, Goldwater -- still considering whether instead to seek reelection to the Senate from Arizona -- was being seen as a likely nominee, the result, as columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak put it, of "a quiet revolt" of conservative young Republicans "seizing power, displacing the Eastern party chiefs."

That Eastern establishment fought back in the New Hampshire primary . And Goldwater provided its ammunition, pushing two issues that would dog him "to the very end" in the campaign against Lyndon Johnson -- voluntary Social Security and nuclear capability for NATO forces.

Goldwater narrowly edged Rockefeller, but Lodge, still ambassador in Saigon, won as a write-in. Goldwater, however, began winning a string of primaries not just in the South and West, but in New Jersey and Ohio. He lost in Oregon, but squeaked past Rockefeller in California. The Eastern establishment's last hope was William Scranton, governor of Pennsylvania. Rockefeller turned over his campaign staff to him and Lodge resigned his post in Vietnam to join the campaign.