If, in a coffin that was already so full of nails, a final nail could be identified, it would be the one driven in by Goldwater himself. For his vice presidential candidate he picked William Miller, an invisible congressman best known for accusing the Kennedy White House of immorality because guests had danced the twist in the ballroom. For his campaign, Goldwater rejected guidance from men who were experts at organizing, propagandizing and raising money. Remember Frederick Clifton White, the genius who had put together the Draft Goldwater drive and stacked the convention so brilliantly? Goldwater didn't trust him, and gave him only a rinky-dink role in the campaign.

Instead, he surrounded himself with what was known as the Arizona Mafia, old friends, most of whom were political ignoramuses. "None had a day's experience in national elections," says Perlstein. Most ignorant of all was Denison Kitchel, Goldwater's best friend. Kitchel had married the daughter of an Arizona copper baron and became a lawyer for Phelps Dodge, one of the most brutally antiunion mining companies in the world. Goldwater made him his campaign chairman. He was hopeless.

"Who's Arthur Summerfield?" Kitchel asked when advised to consult the former Republican National Committee chair; "What line of work are you in?" he queried an uncommitted Republican senator.

[He was] hard of hearing--in a field where the most important work was done in whispers!

Old friend Richard Kleindienst, on being named director of field operations, asked, "And what am I supposed to do?"

Kitchel and Goldwater "didn't bother to attend the Sunday strategy meetings. They made strategy at 33,000 feet. The campaign plane was their playhouse," where they and other members of the Arizona Mafia "swapped ribald jokes, told hunting stories, yapped on the airborne ham radio."

Goldwater sometimes seemed to have taken leave of his senses. He went tooling around to "places so irrelevant to the outcome of the election that it was as if the plane were flying itself." And when he landed at places critically important to the outcome, he was sometimes almost comically offensive. In Knoxville, he advocated selling the Tennessee Valley Authority. In Memphis and Raleigh he derided cotton subsidies. In Fort Worth, he criticized a military aircraft project being built in--Fort Worth. In West Virginia, "the land of the tar-paper shack, the gap-toothed smile, and the open sewer," he called the War on Poverty "a war on your pocketbooks." As he left that rally, he was jeered by lines of workmen.

Did that sort of reception bother Goldwater and his courtiers? Not at all. "That Goldwater alienated audiences was taken by his inner circle as evidence he was doing something right--telling them things they needed, but didn't want, to hear."

When a campaign worker outside the Mafia tried to inject more rationality into the drive, Goldwater told him, "I want you to stop it. It's too late. You go back and tell your crowd that I'm going to lose this election. I'm probably going to lose it real big. But I'm going to lose it my way."

And so he did. He won only six states--one of them, his home state, by half a percentage point.

But other things were happening in 1964 that the press failed to put into the equation that would determine future events. Nixon gave 156 speeches in thirty-six states for the GOP ticket that year, gathering chits for "his new master plan." Reagan brought life to many a dying rally, where he would give a masterful introduction to Goldwater, stealing the show so completely that some in the audience went away uncertain as to which one was the candidate. In the final days of the campaign, Reagan was on television constantly with replays of what came to be known as The Speech ("You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.... We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness"). It was a stunning, melodramatic debut.

But Dick and Ronnie did not appear in the pundits' crystal ball. Instead, most insisted on seeing the outcome of the 1964 election as the right wing's burial. The New York Times's Scotty Reston wrote that Goldwater's conservatism "has wrecked his party for a long time to come." Also at the Times, Tom Wicker wrote that conservatives "cannot win in this era of American history." The Los Angeles Times interpreted the election outcome to mean that if Republicans continued to hew to the conservative line, "they will remain a minority party indefinitely." The Washington Post saw the conservative victory in Dixie as just a "one-shot affair."

With understandable relish, Perlstein allows the pundit chorus to end on this note:

The nation's leading students of American political behavior, Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky, speculated that if the Republicans nominated a conservative again he would lose so badly "we can expect an end to a competitive two-party system." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it most succinctly of all.... "The election results of 1964," he reflected, "seemed to demonstrate Thomas Dewey's prediction about what would happen if the parties were realigned on an ideological basis: 'The Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election.'"

To which Perlstein adds, "At that there seemed nothing more to say. It was time to close the book."

And so he does.

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