Rick Perlstein is the author of, most recently, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976–1980, as well as Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history, and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), a New York Times best seller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications. A former online columnist for The New Republic and Rolling Stone and former chief national correspondent for The Village Voice, his journalism and essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Nation, The New York Times, and many other publications. Perlstein has been called the “chronicler extraordinaire of American conservatism” by Politico and the “hypercaffeinated Herodotus of the American century” by The Nation. He lives in Chicago, where he is at work on a book on the 1970s and the rise of Ronald Reagan. He plays jazz piano on the side.
The mainstream and liberal press’s quixotic search for a ‘good’ conservative merely reinforces the soft bigotry of low expectations.
The main difference between the Church Committee’s investigations of 1975–76 and the discussion of NSA spying now is that back then, the spooks stopped the abuses themselves.