Before reading A Glorious Disaster my knowledge of the 1964 presidential election was shallow. I knew Lyndon Johnson defeated Goldwater in a landslide, but I never really knew anything about the nuts and bolts of the campaign. The 1964 election is an odd one. Johnson had just become president after the Kennedy assassination (killed by a Marxist, go figure). As senator Johnson served as a conservative southern Democrat. He voted against every Civil Rights bill while he was in Congress. Johnson only shifted his opinion later because of the popularity of the measure. Johnson's ambitions were much stronger than any...