Barry Goldwater was a Republican senator from Arizona for five terms between 1953–1965 and 1969–1987. In 1964, Goldwater, a fervent anticommunist, won the Republican nomination for president but was defeated by Lyndon Johnson in a general election landslide, thanks largely to negative advertising in which Goldwater was painted as dangerous and extreme. Deemed a disaster in 1964, Goldwater's White House bid was later seen as a watershed event in the rise of modern American conservatism.

During the 1950s, Goldwater emerged as one of the nation's leading conservatives. In 1960, he published his book, Conscience of a Conservative, in which he outlined many of the central tenets that later defined modern conservatism. In 1964, Goldwater won a bitterly contested presidential nomination fight that exposed the growing factionalism ...