Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein
Summary
Told with urgency and sharp political insight, Nixonland recaptures America’s turbulent 1960s and early 1970s and reveals how Richard Nixon rose from the political grave to seize and hold the presidency.
Cataclysms tell the story of Nixonland:
¥ Angry blacks burning down their neighborhoods, beginning with the 1965 Watts riots
¥ The student insurgency over the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention
¥ The fissuring of the Democratic Party into warring factions manipulated by Nixon’s “dirty tricks”
¥ Richard Nixon pledging a new dawn of national unity, governing more divisively than any president before him, then directing a criminal conspiracy, the Watergate cover-up, from the Oval Office
Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful narrative, Rick Perlstein’s magisterial account of how America divided confirms his place as one of our country’s most celebrated historians.
Excerpt
This American story is told in four sections, corresponding to four elections: in 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1972. Politicians, always reading the cultural winds, make their life’s work convincing 50 percent plus one of their constituency that they understand their fears and hopes, can honor and redeem them, can make them safe and lead them toward their dreams. Studying the process by which a notably successful politician achieves that task, again and again, across changing cultural conditions, is a deep way into an understanding of those fears and dreams—and especially, how those fears and dreams change.
The crucial figure in common to all these elections was Richard Nixon—the brilliant and tormented man struggling to forge a public language that promised mastery of the strange new angers, anxieties, and resentments wracking the nation in the 1960s. His story is the engine of this narrative. Nixon’s character—his own overwhelming angers, anxieties, and resentments in the face of the 1960s chaos—sparks the combustion. But there was nothing natural or inevitable about how he did it—nothing inevitable in the idea that a president could come to power by using the angers, anxieties, and resentments produced by the cultural chaos of the 1960s. Indeed, he was slow to the realization. He reached it, through the 1966 election, studying others: notably, Ronald Reagan, who won the governorship of California by providing a political outlet for the outrages that, until he came along to articulate them, hadn’t seemed like voting issues at all. If it hadn’t been for the shocking defeats of a passel of LBJ liberals blindsided in 1966 by a conservative politics of “law and order,” things might have turned out differently: Nixon might have run on a platform not too different from that of the LBJ liberals instead of one that cast them as American villains.
Nixon’s win in 1968 was agonizingly close: he began his first term as a minority president. But the way he achieved that narrow victory seemed to point the way toward an entire new political alignment from the one that had been stable since FDR and the Depression. Next, Nixon bet his presidency, in the 1970 congressional elections, on the idea that an “emerging Republican majority”—rooted in the conservative South and Southwest, seething with rage over the destabilizing movements challenging the Vietnam War, white political power, and virtually every traditional cultural norm—could give him a governing majority in Congress. But when Republican candidates suffered humiliating defeats in 1970, Nixon blamed the chicanery of his enemies: America’s enemies, he had learned to think of them. He grew yet more determined to destroy them, because of what he was convinced was their determination to destroy him.
Millions of Americans recognized the balance of forces in the exact same way—that America was engulfed in a pitched battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. The only thing was: Americans disagreed radically over which side was which. By 1972, defining that order of battle as one between “people who identified with what Richard Nixon stood for” and “people who despised what Richard Nixon stood for” was as good a description as any other.
Richard Nixon, now, is long dead. But these sides have hardly changed. We now call them “red” or “blue” America....
Copyright © 2008 by Rick Perlstein. Reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group.
Reviews
”[R]iveting…full of colorful detail and great characters, brings back to life an astonishing era—and shines a new light on our own” –Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
”A richly detailed descent into the inferno—the years when Richard Milhous Nixon, ‘a serial collector of resentments,’ ruled the land"—Kirkus Reviews
"This is a terrific read…giving us all fresh insights and understanding”—John W. Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel
Author's Biography
Rick Perlstein received a B.A.in history from the University of Chicago. He is a former political reporter for the Village Voice, and has written for Slate, Newsday, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The New Yorker, among other publications. His book “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” received the 2001 Los Angeles Times book award for History.