Reviews for Right from the start

The average rating for Right from the start based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-09-22 00:00:00 Mindy Nancarrow Gary Hart's "Right From The Start," chronicling his time at the helm of the George McGovern campaign for the presidency in 1972 is not a read for everyone. Hart, previously a lawyer and major McGovern supporter started off organizing Colorado and other western states for the senator before being lured into taking on a larger, full time roll as head of the campaign. Though he had a family back home, Hart began commuting back and forth to Washington and keeping a very tight and copiously noted journal of each development in the campaign and wrote the book in this journalistic format. The action is organized by years and months, with individual entries detailing the action of particularly momentous days and weeks of the campaign. This format can lead to dry reading if you aren't interested in the play by play nature of the campaign. But if you are into the nuts and bolts, the gritty mechanics in this tome will very clearly illustrate what is needed to organize and manage a national campaign and the specific choices that McGovern, Hart, and the rest of the leadership team made in an effort to communicate their message to the voting populace.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-05-13 00:00:00 Elena Barron I discovered Gary Hart's "Right from the Start" on a dust covered shelf in a musty used bookstore. The ill fated 1972 general election campaign of U.S. Senator George McGovern has already interested me. In hindsight, the choices McGovern and his team made in the race against President Richard M. Nixon seem naïve at best, stupid at worse. Reading Hart's first person account of his experience as a young upstart managing McGovern's campaign, you gain a greater appreciation for the moment they lived in and the rationale behind the decisions they made. I cannot say I put the book down and said, "They were right!" However, I did put the book down with a greater appreciation for the energy and idealism of a time (not unlike our own) when an insurgent outsider took on the political establishment.