another review of Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge

"Then, of course, there were the white people. Branch very deftly documents the ways in which the careers of an entire generation of conservative politicians depended upon managing the rhetoric of racial backlash. Here, for example, is Ronald Reagan's voice playing over an ominous film of riots in a commercial for his 1966 gubernatorial campaign: “Every day the jungle draws a little closer.... Our city streets are jungle paths after dark.” And Branch notes that the man who would become Reagan's presidential successor, then-Houston congressman George H.W. Bush, gave a 1968 speech criticizing “miscellaneous purchases under the federal anti-poverty program” in which he charged that seven new microscopes the government had bought for schools in his Houston district were in fact “rifle scopes secretly retooled for insurrection.” But if there's a failure in Branch's book, it's that he dwells too briefly upon this theme. For all his great characters, Branch decides not to create even one iconic figure of what would become the great white backlash—the defining feature of politics for the next quarter-century."