Few people have had the impact on the American political scene that Barry Goldwater made during his career. Born into one of the wealthiest families in Arizona, his embrace of the Western myth and his opposition to increased role the government played in economic management after the Great Depression (one influenced by his experience managing the family's chain of local department stores) combined to shape his political philosophy. After service in the Army Air Force in World War II, he entered politics and became a leader of the effort to "clean up" the Phoenix city government -- though Robert Alan Goldberg writes that, as most of the members of the effort themselves acknowledged, the charges of civic corruption that led to their victory were largely overstated.

After winning election to the United States Senate in 1952, Goldwater quickly emerged as one of its most prominent conservatives, becoming chair of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee just three years later. The role played to Goldwater's gift for marketing, and he quickly developed a national following among thousands of Americans. He benefited as well from the emergence of a new radical right, fueled by growing concerns over race and embodied in organizations like the John Birch Society. With the publication of his 1960 book Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater cemented his position as the leading figure of the movement, their natural candidate for the presidency.

Goldwater got his chance in 1964. With the front-runner for the Republican nomination, Nelson Rockefeller, politically damaged by his divorce and remarriage, Goldwater was the front-runner. He accepted the nomination at a convention that Goldberg terms "the Woodstock of American conservatism," with a speech that galvanized his supporters. Goldwater's nomination became a pivotal moment in the history of the Republican Party. While Goldwater himself was defeated in the subsequent campaign by Lyndon Johnson (who succeeded in depicting Goldwater as an unstable reactionary ideologue), his candidacy signaled the party's ideological, social, and political shift away from its traditional base in the Northeast towards its new home in the South and West.

Yet Goldberg sees Goldwater's candidacy as the high-water mark of his role as a conservative leader, as he began moving away from the ideas of the radical right and towards a more libertarian style of conservatism. Though he returned to the Senate in 1968, his support for Nixon's opening of relations with China and his backing of Gerald Ford over Ronald Reagan in their race for the Republican nomination in 1976 led many former Goldwater supporters to turn on their former champion. By the 1980s, Goldwater had become a leading opponent of the growing role of the religious right in the Republican Party, and he remained an uncomfortable gadfly after his retirement from the Senate in 1987 by speaking out against many of the actions of the party he did so much to change.

Goldberg biography offers a balanced examination of the senator's life and career that is welcome. He avoids the hagiography of earlier works, which distorted or excluded some of the details of Goldwater's life so as to better fit their image of a conservative paradigm. Though such information as Goldwater's financial donations to Planned Parenthood and his personal efforts to support civil rights (which he disguised so as not to alienate voters in the South) may call his reputation for honesty and bluntness into question, the result is a better understanding of the man and his role in the rise of American conservatism after the Second World War. ( )