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.
Did Kennedy intend to bring an end to the Vietnam War after his re-election?
What was the effect of Kennedy’s death on the success Johnson had passing his agenda?
In the first in a series for the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s death, this historian answers your questions.
We talk about conservatism’s “business” and "traditionalist" wings. But when it gets right down to it, they’re as interconnected as the two sides of a mobius strip.
Big business used to buy into the center-left consensus. Then, suddenly, it didn’t.
Despite some stutter steps backward, the relationship between business and the modern right has always advanced in the exact same basic direction: toward romance.
Have you ever noticed how many conservatives cannot believe a sane, sincere, intelligent person could disagree with them? That's a central component of the right-wing mind.