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Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America Paperback – Illustrated, April 14, 2009
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“Both brilliant and fun, a consuming journey back into the making of modern politics.” —Jon Meacham
“Nixonland is a grand historical epic. Rick Perlstein has turned a story we think we know—American politics between the opposing presidential landslides of 1964 and 1972—into an often-surprising and always-fascinating new narrative.” —Jeffrey Toobin
Rick Perlstein’s bestselling account of how the Nixon era laid the groundwork for the political divide that marks our country today.
Told with vivid 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 of the United States. Perlstein’s epic account begins in the blood and fire of the 1965 Watts riots, nine months after Lyndon Johnson’s historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater appeared to herald a permanent liberal consensus in the United States. Yet the next year, scores of liberals were tossed out of Congress, America was more divided than ever, and a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard Nixon. Between 1965 and 1972 America experienced no less than a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know now was born. Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful narrative, Rick Perlstein’s magisterial account of how it all happened confirms his place as one of our country’s most celebrated historians.
- Print length896 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateApril 14, 2009
- Dimensions6.13 x 1.7 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-10074324303X
- ISBN-13978-0743243032
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Nixonland is a grand historical epic. Rick Perlstein has turned a story we think we know -- American politics between the opposing presidential landslides of 1964 and 1972 -- into an often surprising and always fascinating new narrative. This riveting book, 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
"This is a terrific read. What a delight it is to discover the new generation of historians like Rick Perlstein not only getting history correct but giving us all fresh insights and understanding of it." -- John W. Dean Nixon's White House counsel
"Rick Perlstein has written a fascinating account of the rise of Richard Nixon and a persuasive argument that this angry, toxic man will always be part of the American landscape." -- Richard Reeves author of President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination
"Rick Perlstein's Nixonland digs deep into a decisive period of our history and brings back a past that is all the scarier for its intense humanity. With a firm grasp on the larger meaning of countless events and personalities, many of them long forgotten, Perlstein superbly shows how paranoia and innuendo flowed into the mainstream of American politics after 1968, creating divisive passions that have survived for decades." -- Sean Wilentz Princeton University, author of The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008
"The best book written about the 1960s." -- Newsweek
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Nixonland
The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of AmericaBy Rick PerlsteinScribner
Copyright © 2009 Rick PerlsteinAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780743243032
Preface
In 1964, the Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson won practically the biggest landslide in American history, with 61.05 percent of the popular vote and 486 of 538 electoral college votes. In 1972, the Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon won a strikingly similar landslide -- 60.67 percent and 520 electoral college votes. In the eight years in between, the battle lines that define our culture and politics were forged in blood and fire. This is a book about how that happened, and why.
At the start of 1965, when those eight years began, blood and fire weren't supposed to be a part of American culture and politics. According to the pundits, America was more united and at peace with itself than ever. Five years later, a pretty young Quaker girl from Philadelphia, a winner of a Decency Award from the Kiwanis Club, was cross-examined in the trial of seven Americans charged with conspiring to start a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
"You practice shooting an M1 yourself, don't you?" the prosecutor asked her.
"Yes, I do," she responded.
"You also practice karate, don't you?"
"Yes, I do."
"That is for the revolution, isn't it?"
"After Chicago I changed from being a pacifist to the realization that we had to defend ourselves. A nonviolent revolution was impossible. I desperately wish it was possible."
And, several months after that, an ordinary Chicago ad salesman would be telling Time magazine, "I'm getting to feel like I'd actually enjoy going out and shooting some of these people. I'm just so goddamned mad. They're trying to destroy everything I've worked for -- for myself, my wife, and my children."
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, and whether one or the other wins the temporary allegiances of 50 percent plus one of the electorate -- or 40 percent of the electorate, or 60 percent of the electorate -- has been the narrative of every election since. It promises to be thus for another generation. But the size of the constituencies that sort into one or the other of the coalitions will always be temporary.
The main character in Nixonland is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name -- but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.
Copyright © 2008 by Rick Perlstein
Continues...
Excerpted from Nixonland by Rick Perlstein Copyright © 2009 by Rick Perlstein. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Scribner; Reprint edition (April 14, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 896 pages
- ISBN-10 : 074324303X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0743243032
- Item Weight : 2.13 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.13 x 1.7 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #42,080 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #41 in Elections
- #84 in United States Executive Government
- #155 in Political Science (Books)
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However, I think that Perlstein only partially proves his basic thesis. Only four times in American history has a presidential candidate received over 60 percent of the popular vote: Harding in 1920, Roosevelt in 1936, Johnson in 1964, and Nixon in 1972. Harding's victory was followed by a decade of Republican dominance, which was ended by the Depression. Roosevelt's victory was followed by sixteen years of Democratic dominance. It was ended by the combination of an economic boom, which deprived Depression-era economic issues of their appeal, and by an immensely popular military hero. Just eight years elapsed between Johnson's and Nixon's victories. Nothing in that period altered the way most Americans lived to anywhere near the same degree as the Depression and post-World War II economic boom. So how did Nixon pull off this stunning reversal?
Perlstein answers this question in the subtitle of his book: by "the fracturing of America." Nixon succeeded in expressing the resentments of those Americans who felt that "liberals," "cosmopolitans," and "intellectuals" ignored their needs and concerns and scorned their ideals and loyalties. Nixon could achieve this both because he shared these resentments and because he had an uncanny ability to discern the shifts in American attitudes that were taking place below the surface of events. ("Subterranean" is one of Perlstein's favourite words when he describes this ability (e.g., pages 213, 232, 509).)
I think that Perlstein is partially correct. However, he himself points out a serious problem with his thesis. Beginning in late 1969, Vice President Agnew launched an onslaught against "an effete corpse of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals" and "nattering nabobs of negativism." What Agnew was supposed to be doing was giving a voice to what Nixon called "the silent majority." But, as Perlstein points out, in the Congressional election of 1970, nearly all the candidates whom Nixon favored lost. Similarly, Nixon's overwhelming victory in 1972 was accompanied by a decisive Congressional victory for Democrats, and especially liberal Democrats. Perlstein does not point out that, by contrast, the victories of the three other presidents who were elected with over 60 percent of the popular vote were accompanied by huge majorities for their parties in Congress and in state and municipal elections.
Perlstein ends his book with the election of 1972. The last two sentences are "How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet." It is true that the ideas, loyalties, and resentments that emerged between 1965 and 1972 are still basic to the way the Democrats and Republicans and the American people in general define themselves. However, when the Republicans gained control of Congress it was under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, who eschewed Agnew's and Nixon's vituperation and projected a non-confrontational, benevolent image. Then the Democrat Bill Clinton finally responded decisively to two of the complaints that alienated many Americans from liberalism: welfare and crime. He did not respond to them in the way liberals constantly urged, by solving their root causes. His administration simply stopped giving money to welfare recipients. With regard to criminals, federal, state, and municipal governments followed the precept of the proverbial barroom bigot: "Lock them up and throw away the key."
Inexplicably to me, Perlstein pays remarkably little attention to another basic factor that emerged between 1965 and 1972 and that turned many Americans against liberalism: institutionalized anti-White discrimination (i.e., affirmative action). Instead, he concentrates on Nixon's pandering to those who were hostile to Black demands. He never mentions the fascinating fact that it was Nixon who personally, and in opposition to Congressional Democrats, imposed affirmative action throughout American society (S. Farron, The Affirmative Action Hoax, pages 287-8, 374).
Perlstein chronicles in detail Nixon's shameless lying and horrific misuse of presidential power. However, on his telling, Nixon was no worse than any other national political figure of the 1960s and early 1970s. The Kennedy brothers (John, Robert, and Edward), Lyndon Johnson, Nelson Rockefeller, Hubert Humphrey, and John Lindsay were just as unscrupulous as Nixon. According to Perlstein, only George Romney and George McGovern were politically honest; and he depicts the former as a fool and the latter as an incompetent bungler. Indeed, with regard to Nixon's normalization of relations with China, Perlstein grants to him both courage and wisdom (page 572: "a pragmatic understanding few others were wise enough to reach"); and Perlstein grants those attributes to no other politician.
Other readers will come to other conclusions. But few will be able to read this book without engaging in a continuous dialogue with it.
But the book also tells us how we got to where we are today (and it was written well before Trump). And the key role that Richard Nixon played in shepherding us along the path to division. Nixon understood the rifts in society better than any of his brilliant contemporaries. He could have healed them (and maybe at time he thought he was) but instead he exacerbated them. And whenever the opportunity to exacerbate them for personal gain came up, he took advantage.
And while we are not as bitterly divided (despite what some people think) as we were in 1970, the fault lines that Trump exploited, less knowingly than Nixon, were in part so raw because of Nixon. They have always existed to be sure. But there was a chance we could have moved past them. Nixon throttled that chance (well, along with Vietnam to be sure) in its crib.
One more thing that the author makes clear, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not. The story of Nixon is the story of the United States. In a way, Nixon represents what is best about America. He rose from nothing to the presidency. He resented those with more thanhim and strove to beat them at their own game. But he also represents what is worst. The racism, the dark side of American exceptionalism, the demonization of your enemies, they are woven into Nixon's genome. I don't think there is any single person from the past century that is more essential to understanding the country than Nixon. It is indeed Nixonland.
Perlstein has provided wonkish biography, variegated character study, cultural critique, and political forensic analysis in this retrospective of Richard Nixon's ascension within the politically and socially fractured United States of the 1960s that devolved into a trajectory of self-destruction that culminated in Watergate. No anti-Nixon screed; *Nixonland* fairly notes the corruption, dishonesty, and stupidity of both left and right during this polarized era; self-righteous and blustering leftist radicals receive no less disdainful treatment than G. Gordon Liddy.
However, in documenting Nixon's toxic blend of harbored resentment, paranoia, sociopathy, and its disturbing mutual accommodation with a predominantly middle- and working-class white electorate primed for backlash against the racial and cultural progressivism of the 60s, Perlstein cannot help but show us Americans an ugly side of ourselves whose Nixonian roots are undeniable and still sending up tubers into the American political garden. (Just look at the electoral map of the last presidential election in which we elected our first black president.) Whether we want to admit it or not, there's probably a little Dick Nixon in all of us.
The closest thing to a hopeful implication I received from reading the book is that, at our worst (and Nixon was certainly one of its exemplars) we Americans, bitterly divided along an overlapping lattice of race, class, and ideology, determine political supremacy through a refined and hallowed tradition of cheap shots, back room plots, defamation, distortion, demagoguery, and unabashed lies, but at least we're not rotating juntas through political murder--yet.
Summary (relatively long and detailed; it was a huge book):
The story begins with the apparent "consensus" of modernity, tolerance, and technocratic confidence that appeared to emerge in the US in 1964 with the landslide victory of Lyndon Johnson and Democratic majorities in both houses in the mid 1960s. Republicans appeared fractured and weak as Goldwater "extremists" became dismissed by academics and the media as a fading fringe. Education reform, civil and voting rights legislation, and Great Society technocracy appeared to set a new, inevitable trajectory for American public policy. However, the Watts riots and a growing involvement in Vietnam were harbingers of the imminent collapse of these facile assumptions about the American prospect.
In the shadows of this brewing storm was former vice-president Richard Nixon, once the odds-on favorite to inherit Dwight Eisenhower's position in the oval office, but who had lost to Jack Kennedy in 1960 by a heartbreakingly narrow margin despite initially leading in the polls. Victory for someone whom Nixon viewed as a philandering, privileged, prep school pretty boy --engineered in large part by the political skullduggery of his father Joseph--was the ultimate microcosm of Nixon's personal narrative and sociology: Kennedy was the national political manifestation of the exclusive and snobby "Franklins" of his college days. He, Nixon, (who had started his own rival social club of the excluded also-rans called the "Octogonians"), was the champion of the outsiders, the Average Joes whose nascent resentment of intellectual and cultural elitism represented a massive cache of potential power if it could be tapped by the right man. Nixon was it.
Presumed to be politically retired after his failed bid for the California governorship in 1962, Nixon bided his time. Even though Goldwater's far-right 1964 presidential campaign foundered, a new generation of saavy Republicans such as unlikely future California governor Ronald Reagan (and to a more blatant extent, George Wallace types in the South) were demonstrating the power of subtle appeals to the visceral resentments and fears of the white middle class: E.g., the Civil Rights movement as a cover story for black urban crime and welfare dependency; a generation of liberal college students and anti-Vietnam war activists regarded at best as naïve dupes for Soviet style Bolshevism and at worst collaborators in its totalitarian machinations; a presumably unprecedented degree of sexual depravity, drug abuse, and godlessness among American youth; the perception of many middle class whites that school and neighborhood integration was being forced upon them by a leftist, possibly Communist influenced, liberal elite. These creative appeals to the inner "Octogonian" in "mainstream America" served as what modern political scholars call "wedges" to wrest an largely Democratic electorate into the Republican camp. They were most thoroughly articulated in Nixon's later memo (as president), ""The emerging republican majority", which outlined how the "silent majority" could be tapped as a political cash cow by appealing to law and order and "pro-America" issues.
Nixon also capitalized on the impossible dilemma LBJ faced during his term in office, as far left anti-war protestors and impatient black civil rights activists splintered the Democratic Party and set Johnson on the path to being the only sitting president not to win his party's nomination, forcing his resignation. Even though Nixon himself recognized the futility of Vietnam, he alternately abused Johnson as insufficiently tough on Communism or overreaching American involvement. (He got a boost from William Saphire of the New York Times, who published a scurrilous Nixon portrayal of LBJ's proposed peace deal with the Hanoi as a "withdrawal", which it wasn't.) In contrast, progressive Republican George Romney, who articulated the closest thing to an honest, coherent, and rational program of withdrawal, was annihilated in the Republican primaries. Harping on the issue of looming inflation, which was largely beyond Johnson's control, Nixon assailed the sitting president as part of his effort to rehabilitate his own public image and make a surprise comeback to win the 1968 presidential election. In contrast, Democratic rival Hubert Humphrey was gashed by Democrats' association with black rioters and extreme leftists going out of their way to instigate police brutality--and getting grotesque manifestations of it that often left innocent bystanders beaten or murdered, in spades--as per the 1968 Chicago convention debacle and numerous other outbreaks of unrest.
But it wasn't a cakewalk. Nixon coldly recognized that he likely benefitted from the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, whose "messy" politics and charisma, and familial legacy of heroism might have constituted a presumed mythical unifying force for the Democratic Party and possibly the nation. With Kennedy out of the picture, it looked clear to Nixon that the Republican nominee would be poised to win. (He despised the Kennedys; president reveled in the Chappaquiddick scandal involving Ted Kennedy and the dubious death of Mary Jo Kopechne.) Furthermore, despite outmaneuvering his rivals leading up to the Republican national convention in Florida, Nixon had to re-acquire the southern delegation away from Reagan, a last-minute entrant in the nomination race. He outmaneuvered Reagan to secure the delegates by promising deference to states rights on issues such as school integration (this lead to subsequent squabbles with congress over a couple of supreme court nominees--southern reactionaries hostile to integration and with histories of open racism) and a hawkish posture on Vietnam. Through subsequent skillful campaign management under Haldemen, Nixon is able to simply run out the clock against Humphrey and would have won easily in '68 were it not for third party candidate George Wallace siphoning 20 percent via the Dixiecrat vote, most of whom would have pinched their noses and voted for Nixon in a two-man race.
Once in power Nixon was fixated on projecting himself as not caring how he appeared even though he was obsessed with it. His staff and cabinet instantly became an Orwellian melodrama where everybody distrusted everybody else; Nixon obsessively wanted subordinates (especially Kennedy's leftovers from NSA) spied on. This mentality sowed the seeds of increasingly covert and cynical operations to undermine his political enemies, which would reach its apex--and Nixon's nadir--in Watergate.
As president he continued his own rendition of the radical notion of "heightening the contradictions" for political gain. With the backdrop of campus takeovers by radical blacks and antiwar protestors, the trial of the Chicago 7, and the shooting of student demonstrators by national guardsmen at Kent State, Nixon continued to publicly appeal to the inner Orthogonian in mainstream Americans, exemplified in the "silent majority" speech. The ugly American political divisions that made this a winning strategy were illustrated in events such as the unlikely alliance of New York businessmen clubbing hippie protestors with construction workers in Manhattan streets after the Kent State riots and other cases of reactionary violence against leftists.The irony was that despite this public rhetoric, Nixon actually showed some ability to effectively govern, as exemplified with the Family Welfare Act, which in essence tweaked AFDC payments to reward more work, and which was popular legislation as it appeased progressives, states' rights advocates, and incorporated the moderate ideas of DP Moynihan from his report on dysfunction in the black community.
Nixon was epically unprincipled, even sociopathic. Calculating no consideration but his own political interests he decides to flout basic economic principles and prepare for wage and price freezes right before the 72 election. Furthermore, although he had always privately argued that Vietnam was essentially unwinnable, he briefly dabbles with the idea that one massive concerted surge might finish the North and VC irregulars, granting him a Pattonesque triumph (Perlstein makes a brilliant analysis of why Nixon would identify with the character George Patton after he first viewed the movie starring George C. Scott) despite the sniveling protestations of the cringers and peace freaks. As a result, he got us involved in a wholesale military debacle in Cambodia and Laos. Less Nixon's fault was the timing of the release of "The Pentagon Papers" showing that US presidents going back to Truman had been lying habitually regarding our level of involvement and the real stakes in Vietnam; Nixon decides to personalize the attack instead of trying to portray himself as a victim of circumstance. Unable to conceive a motive any more noble than his own depraved ones, Nixon and his operators attempt to uncover whatever dark passion has motivated the leaker, war hero Daniel Ellsberg (was he a secret communist?), and discredit him through its discovery. It never dawned on them that Ellsberg's motive might have been patriotism and devotion to the truth.
It only gets worse. A rogues gallery including G. Gordon Liddy (a maverick FBI agent dismissed for being a "loose cannon" and who as an assistant prosecutor once shot a gun during court room closing testimony) become "The Plumbers"--out to sabotage liberals through various means of skullduggery, such as trying to cajole the media into "uncovering" that Kennedy was responsible for the CIA-endorsed assassination of Diem when really the architect was Ambassador (and Republican) Henry Cabodt Lodge all along.
What Democrats couldn't understand (and this regard the story is consistent with the observations of Drew Weston in *The Political Brain*), was that a large part of America identified with Nixon's paranoia about change, anxieties about race and crime, and apparent cultural degeneration -"a tangle of fear and piety"--and the sometimes brutal methods of reasserting cultural norms--such as the deadly suppression of the Attica prison riot, were not regarded as inhuman but as necessary for societal stability ("law and order".) Cultural backlash such as the Rat Pack going mainstream and conservative stars like Merle Haggard ("I'm Proud to be an Oaky from Muskogee) symbolized the appeal of Nixon's message to many.
Nixon, despite all his rhetoric about belief in the free market, follows through with the plan to blatantly violate his own avowed principles because he thinks the 90 day wage and price freeze will help reelection. The irony is that he's willing to do something that is bad for America in the long run, to help himself in the short run, because he thinks he's the only thing that can save America in the long run.
The "rat f**ing" by the Committee to Reelect the President begins in earnest with the `72 primary season. It starts with the Florida primary and the use of numerous methods of skullduggery to set the Democrats against each other in the hope of getting Wallace nominated (to splinter the Dixiecrats from the liberal wing of the party), but of course not elected president. Even with the emergence of Eugene McCarthy as an antiwar candidate harnessing the passion of young people while simultaneously tapping working class angst, the Wallace/McGovern/Humphrey democratic nomination drama takes a huge twist after the assassination attempt on Wallace. (Instantly Nixon thinks in terms of spin and exploitation, coaxing Colson out to Milwaukee to plant pro-McGovern/ leftist-radical literature in the gunman's apartment while the FBI awaits their warrant, although by then it was too late as the crime scene was secured.)
The Watergate burglary (part of the CRPs ongoing program of infiltrating and compromising Nixon's Democratic rivals) is discovered before the '72 presidential election, and even as the story begins to slowly materialize, Nixon hatchet men like RNC Chairman Bob Dole are already attempting to spin the narrative of Nixon as the victim of an activist Washington Post defaming an honest president for sinister political motives. The whole ugly story is still nascent and never has any impact in '72. With Wallace gone and the president taking the angry Dixiecrat vote for himself, he wins by 20 points and McGovern only wins Massachusetts. Even as he gloats over this last victory over the "Franklins", Nixon still finds time to grouse: Why weren't his coattails enough to win more seats in the Senate and House, where he would face Democratic majorities in the first part of his second term? He also demeans the very voters whose Orthogonian ordinariness he always tapped for political gain: They are sheep, needing a strong figure like himself to make the difficult choices to save the future of a nation--a mission he never doubted was his and whose pursuit justified any means perceived necessary.
Perstein rightly stops at this point; Watergate has been bludgeoned into triviality by numerous other treatments, and the purpose of *Nixonland* has been served. In his afterward he summarizes the successful Nixon strategy of wedging middle and working class white Orthogonians and points out its ongoing relevance not just to understanding the deep seated cultural currents of the 1960s, but how they resonate in the politics of the moment. We're still living in Nixonland.
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Nixon was doing something deeply disturbing. He was playing to the racist instincts of a section of society, fuelling their resentments (subtly) and using them for his own political purposes. His criminality in office is not the only thing that makes him an unattractive president.
Perlstein takes you right into the mood of a country riven by divisions over race, patriotism, and the Vietnam War. As you read you get a real sense of the moods of anger and resentment. It is sometimes grim reading. And at times it is deeply shocking to think people, in great numbers, could endorse self-evidently racist views expressed in horrific terms. Not always for the faint-hearted. But it is a valuable read.
I cannot recommend this book enough.