Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

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Perlstein is also the author of the books Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001) and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008). Before the Storm covers the rise of the conservative movement culminating in the nomination and campaign of Barry Goldwater and how the movement came to dominate the Republican Party despite Goldwater's loss. Nixonland covers American politics and society from 1964 to 1972, centering on Richard Nixon's attempt to rehabilitate himself politically and his eventual successful use of the resentment of settled society against the social unrest of the day to rebuild the Republican Party. These years were absolutely bonkers. One war raged in Vietnam; another flared in American streets. Watts erupted in flames. The National Guard was deployed in Newark. The Democratic Party went to Chicago to hold a convention, and decided instead to burn itself to the ground, live on national television. Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed. Martin Luther King was shot and killed. The odious George Wallace was shot and paralyzed. Weathermen planted bombs. Soldiers shot kids on college campuses. As president, Nixon stewed, plotted, dropped bombs on Cambodia and Laos, and surrounded himself with buffoons who were full of bizarre schemes and had ready access to slush funds. He cheated and broke laws and acted small and vindictively. He also had the far vision to look at Communist China and see the possibility of friendship rather than the inevitability of conflict. And just when you think – oww, my mind is obliterated, this is death by facts – along comes something you actually always wanted to know about, and how it fit in to the 60s, Attica, Soledad, Angela Davis, Jerry Rubin, all those half-heard names. Here they all are, bawling in your ear, dancing in your face. I put Perlstein’s Nixonland on my "to read" shelf, after I read a very effective and thorough review of the book in the September 1/8, 2010, edition of The Nation. Perstein's book is a must-read for any one interested in the Republican Party's calculated obliteration of whatever tatters and remnants of New World democracy still informed the American polity during the years that Perlstein examines. Two contending sets of rumors circulated: that cleanup crews found “nothing but bras and panties – you never saw so many”. And that two marchers had been dragged into the building and summarily executed. P 216

As for the book itself, Perlstein's writing style is personable, interesting, and engaging. He treats his narrative voice self-consciously, frequently presenting events speaking from Nixon's perspective (or that of his prejudices), giving us a certain insight into the man's psychology (while disavowing that this book is meant as a psychobiography, which it definitely is not). However, his narrative voice may be a bit too glib and winking for some readers. One habit I found particularly annoying was his insistence on referring to major political figures by diminutive versions of their first names, even when those are not the names by which they are famous, and in one or two cases where this introduces some ambiguity. Also, he's quite ready to throw in references to some famous figures as asides, with no explanation. This poses less difficulty for the reader who is already a political junkie with a good knowledge of the last forty years' history, but I can imagine, in fifty years' time, that it might make the book unreadable in parts. And I swear I'll scream if I see another politician described as "glad-handing," whatever that even means. a) Vietnam – its immorality became too painful, the American dead unignorable – 50,000 by 1970; and the draft meant that YOU or your son might be next up Perlstein’s overarching thesis, tying together two parallel narratives involving American society and Nixon himself, is that Richard Nixon masterfully recognized, exploited and magnified cultural divisions which then persisted long past his presidency. It is a contention not easily dismissed, but many readers will appreciate that there is nothing new about America’s polarized politics (or culture). The Pentagon claimed what civilian casualties there were [in Vietnam] came from the Communists’ deliberate emplacement of surface-to-air missiles in populated areas. P 196

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You know, I would have six or seven or eight different strands to think about, kind of untangling that.

A brilliant history that seeks to illuminate the time of Nixon's rise to presidency and the country that elected him, a 1960s America, so familiar to modern readers but also, astoundingly more volatile. Perlstein is a passionate and arduous researcher and faithful story teller. The amount of detail and recorded events collected and woven into a compelling story is truly impressive. It does make for a huge and almost impossible volume for average readers despite that it's actually quiet readable and entertaining, not a bit dry. He covers Nixon's early political career through his second election while mapping him in the larger political and cultural context. This isn't a biography but Perlstein does cover the appeal of Nixon to his base because of his character, pride, ego and tactics and not despite them. What a wild ride. Nixonland describes national politics in America from about 1965 to 1972. If you are looking for in-depth reporting of a particular event, this isn’t your book. But the breadth is very impressive. Perlstein seems to include just about anything you can think of that is related to the major political stories of the time, even pop culture events involving movies, television or celebrities. If you’ve ever been at the Disneyland attraction “Soarin’ Over California” where you are virtually flying across California, from the mountains to the orange groves to the beaches, it felt a little like that. Flying through the era at 5000 feet can be useful; you might see some patterns that get lost when you focus on individual incidents. Perlman's writing is good and flows well but sometimes the paragraphs are stuffed with too many facts. Perhaps because Perlman has a very solid grasp on the history of the 1960s through 1972, there isn't much to dispute here other than the sparse coverage of topics. The one that’s the simplest is it’s a patriotic and humane act to say that the person who has in their possession the sole authority to launch a nuclear strike is not a responsible person. That’s the simplest thing and good for them.Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. Certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans – mostly under 30 – are determined to destroy our society. P518 Like trying to keep up with American politics in any election year, reading Perlstein can be like trying to drink from a firehose. There’s something Melvillean about the sheer scale of the work, four leviathans to make up a whole. The first part of the Yippie program is to kill your parents. And I mean that quite literally, because until you’re prepared to kill your parents you’re not ready to change this country. Our parents are our first oppressors. P475

Perlstein, with a few exceptions, gets it right. (The SDS chant was "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win" and not "Ho Chi Minh is gonna win." The rise of twin cultures of left- and right-wing vigilantes, Americans literally bombing and cutting each other After Nixonland came out,” Perlstein says, Stone “came out with one of his books about Nixon [and] basically proposed that we go on tour together: ‘We can sell a lot of books and make a lot of money.’ At the time he was very adamant he was no longer a Republican. He was running for the Senate, I believe, from Florida as a Libertarian. The depths of his attention-starved behavior. .

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Is this Perlstein’s real view? If so, he would have been better advised to put quotation marks around the final word in the title of his book on Goldwater; but perhaps his publishers told him that pandering to an imaginary golden age of social harmony is the way to sell books. That allows him to wring his hands over the present. The closing sentences of Nixonland have an appropriately apocalyptic timbre: ‘Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not. How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.’ Call the America they shared – the America over whose direction [the Right and Left] struggled for the next fifty years, whose meaning they continue to contest even as this book goes to press, even as you hold it in your hands – by this name: Nixonland. Study well the man at Nixonland’s center, the man from Yorba Linda. Study well those he opposed. The history that follows is their political war…” I found that this book, although a great read, as one would expect from a much honored journalist, contains a major flaw - at least from a historian’s perspective. Although Perlstein apparently felt he needed the devices of "national consensus" and its antagonist to enhance the drama in his narrative, he didn't establish at the outset that such a consensus existed for Nixon to assail and extinguish. And I doubt that such a consensus obtained at all. Goldwater and consensus in the same sentence? In the Nixon presidential years a wide variety of illegal activities ranging from revenge upon the president's long list of enemies to the hiding of international war crimes conducted in southeast Asia occupied much of his time even before the Watergate break-in was conducted.