Review by Choice Review
It could be argued that the two figures who defined the emergence of New Right partisan politics in the past 40 years were Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. Perlstein builds on his previous work, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (CH, Nov'01, 39-1793), which explained the success of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush through the prism of the 1964 election. This new work is epic by comparison. The book spans the tumultuous years of 1965, on the eve of the Watts Riot, through Nixon's landslide victory in 1972. Perlstein has twin objectives. First, he develops a convincing narrative about how Richard Nixon, the status-deprived law student and underappreciated vice president and presidential candidate in 1960, came to epitomize and personify the values of the "silent majority." Second, Nixon's ability to exploit voters' anxieties about race, poverty, law and order, and patriotism has produced bitter partisan divisions that still inform the current US political landscape. Perlstein's gripping narrative makes this a must read for a wide-ranging audience, including undergraduates, graduates, and specialists. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. B. Miller University of Cincinnati
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Rick Perlstein's sprawling, rollicking book arrives hard on the heels of a contest of empathy-exhibitionism in which the two Democratic presidential candidates competed to see who could more ardently adore churchgoing, gunowning, not-at-all-bitter working-class Pennsylvanians. Perlstein's readers will learn why this happened. He shrewdly quotes a commentator's assessment of Richard Nixon's 1952 Checkers speech with its maudlin reference to his wife's "Republican cloth coat": "Dick Nixon has suddenly placed the burden of old-style Republican aloofness on the Democrats." In Perlstein's mental universe, Nixon is a bit like God - not, Lord knows, because of Nixon's perfect goodness and infinite mercy, but because Nixpn is the explanation for everything. Or at least for the rise of the right and the decline of almost everything else. This is a subject Perlstein, a talented man of the left, has addressed before. In 2001, he published the best book yet on the social ferments that produced Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential candidacy. Subtle and conscientious, "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus" demonstrated Perlstein's omnivorous appetite for telling tidbits from the news media, like this one: When Goldwater was campaigning in the 1964 New Hampshire primary, The New York Times ran a photograph with the snide caption "Barry Goldwater, aspirant for the Republican presidential nomination, with the widow of Senator Styles Bridges in East Concord. She holds dog." Oh, the other person must be the conservative presidential candidate. In November 1964, surveying the debris of Goldwater's loss of 44 states, the Times columnist James Reston said Goldwater "has wrecked his party for a long time to come." The archetypal public intellectual of the day, the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who thought the conservative movement was the manifestation of a psychological disorder, said Goldwater's candidacy provided conservatives "a kind of vocational therapy, without which they might have to be committed." Surely "the end of ideology" - as Daniel Bell's 1960 book was titled - was at hand. As the winner of the 1960 presidential election had assured the country, the liberal consensus was so broad and deep that America's remaining problems were "technical" and "administrative." "These," said President Lyndon Johnson when lighting the national Christmas tree in December 1964, "are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem." In his State of the Union address a few weeks later, he said, "We have achieved a unity of interest among our people that is unmatched in the history of freedom." The nation was, however, stepping high, wide and plentiful along the lip of a volcano. The first eruption occurred seven months later in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. And in 1968, Republicans began winning seven of the next 10 presidential elections. Perlstein thinks he knows why. Whereas in 1960 22,000 people donated to John Kennedy's campaign and 44,000 to Richard Nixon's, in 1964 Goldwater had more than a million contributors. A mass movement was gestating, undetected by complacent celebrators of liberalism's hegemony. Now comes the second installment of Perlstein's meditation on that era's and, he thinks, our current discontents. "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America" completes his inquest into the death of the "cult of 'American consensus'" and the birth of "American cacophony." Perlstein's chronicle, which begins with the Watts riot of August 1965, is itself riotous: even at its calmest, his pell-mell narrative calls to mind a Pieter Bruegel painting of tumultuous peasants; at its most fervid, it resembles one of Hieronymus Bosch's nightmares. Do we need another waist-deep wallow in the 1960s, ensconcing us cheek by jowl with Frank Rizzo and Eldridge Cleaver, Sam Yorty and Mark Rudd, Lester Maddox and Herbert Marcuse and other long-forgotten bit players in a period drama? Do we need to be reminded of that era's gaseous juvenophilia, like Time magazine's celebration of Americans 25 or younger as 1967's "Man of the Year": "This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation. ... In the omphalocentric process of self-construction and discovery," today's youth "stalks love like a wary hunter, but has no time or target - not even the mellowing Communists - for hate." Well, this retrospective wallow does increase the public stock of harmless pleasure, as when Perlstein revisits the 1972 Democratic convention that nominated George McGovern and heard 80 nominations for vice president, including Mao Zedong and Archie Bunker. But Perlstein's high-energy - sometimes too energetic - romp of a book also serves, inadvertently, a serious need: it corrects the cultural hypochondria to which many Americans, including Perlstein, are prone. Because the baby boomers' self-absorption is so ample, there already has been no shortage of brooding about those years. We do, however, benefit from the brooding by Perlstein, who is not a boomer, for two reasons. First, he has a novelist's, or perhaps an anthropologist's, eye for illuminating details, as in his jaw-dropping reconstruction of the Newark riots of July 1967. Second, his thorough excavation of the cultural detritus of that decade refutes his thesis, which is that now, as then, Americans are at daggers drawn. NIXON, who became vice president at age 40, was well described as "an old man's idea of a young man." He was, Perlstein says, one of only two boys in his elementary school photograph wearing a necktie. Politics is mostly talk, much of it small talk with strangers, and Nixon was painfully - to himself and others - awkward at it. His temperament always invited, and has received, abundant analysis. Perlstein's Rosetta stone for deciphering Nixon's dark personality is a distinction he acknowledges borrowing from Chris Matthews's 1996 book "Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America." Arriving at Whittier College, Nixon, "a serial collector of resentments," found that the clique of cool students was called Franklins, so he helped organize the Orthogonians for people such as himself - strivers who would try to ascend by grit rather than grace. Perlstein repeatedly explains Nixon's or other people's behavior as arising from an Orthogonian resentment of Franklins, including establishment figures as different as Alger Hiss and Nelson Rockefeller. Nixon "co-opted the liberals' populism, channeling it into a white middle-class rage at the sophisticates, the well-born, the 'best circles.'" By stressing the importance of Nixon's character in shaping events, and the centrality of resentments in shaping Nixon's character, Perlstein treads a dead-end path blazed by Hofstadter, who seemed not to understand that condescension is not an argument. Postulating a link between "status anxiety" and a "paranoid style" in American politics - especially conservative politics - Hofstadter dismissed the conservative movement's positions as mere attitudes that did not merit refutation. Perlstein, too, gives these ideas short shrift. As the pollster Samuel Lubell had already noted before the 1952 election, "the inner dynamics of the Roosevelt coalition have shifted from those of getting to those of keeping." Perlstein keenly sees that some liberals "developed a distaste" for the social elements they had championed, now that those elements were "less reliably downtrodden" and less content to be passively led by liberal elites. The masses bought television sets and enjoyed what they watched. But Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (and formerly Adlai Stevenson's administrative assistant) declared television a "vast wasteland," thereby implicitly scolding viewers who enjoyed it. When New York was becoming a lawless dystopia, with crime, drugs and homelessness spoiling public spaces, August Heckscher, the patrician commissioner of parks under Mayor John Lindsay, sniffily declared that people clamoring for law and order were "scared by the abundance of life." A Newsweek cover story on Louise Day Hicks, who led opposition to forced busing of school children in Boston, described her supporters as "a comic-strip gallery of tipplers and brawlers and their tinseled overdressed dolls ... the men queued up to give Louise their best, unscrewing cigar butts from their chins to buss her noisily on the cheek, or pumping her arm as if it were a jack handle under a truck." Perlstein deftly deploys such judgments to illustrate what the resentful resented. Unfortunately, he seems to catch the '60s disease of rhetorical excess. He says George Romney was a "glamour boy," Secretary of State Dean Rusk was "maniacal," Lyndon Johnson's 1955 heart attack was a "psychosomatic illness," Mayor Richard Daley's supporters were "cigar-chompers." Senator Paul Douglas, the Illinois Democrat, was a giant of postwar liberalism, but when he said residential segregation resulted in part from "consciousness of kind," he was, Perlstein writes, "aping Daley." PERLSTEIN says "it was hard to keep count" of how many times Nixon ran for president. Not really. When Perlstein writes that during a 1966 civil rights debate "congressmen North and South behaved as if Washington, D.C., were about to cart schoolchildren off in tumbrels," he becomes a cartoonist. Perhaps his deep immersion in the desensitizing coarseness of the 1960s is to blame for his occasionally snarky tone, as when, referring to the death of three astronauts in a fire on the Cape Canaveral launching pad, he says they "roasted to death." Senator Abe Ribicoff's speech nominating George McGovern in 1968 was "windbaggery." A Black Panther shot by police "was turned into a block of Swiss cheese." When "the old Wall Street crew" could not get into Nixon's suite at the 1968 convention, were they really "reduced to spittle-flecked rage"? Calling South Vietnam's army "a joke" is not historical analysis, it is an unworthy dismissal of men who fought and died for more than a decade. Reaching for easy irony by jumbling together events large and small, Perlstein piles up jejune incongruities, like: "The month of March came in like a lamb with Frank Sinatra sweeping the Grammy awards and went out like a lion with Jimi Hendrix in the hospital after burning himself while immolating his guitar." As Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac's fiction, that is not writing, that is typing. Having cast the Nixon story as a psychodrama, Perlstein has no need to engage the ideas that were crucial to conservatism's remarkably idea-driven ascendancy, ideas like the perils of identity politics and the justice of market allocations of wealth and opportunity. Instead, Perlstein dwells on motives, which he usually presents as crass or worse. As a result, the book often reads as though turbulent waters from the wilder shores of cable television have sloshed onto the printed page. For example, Perlstein writes about some military policemen in 1969 wondering why they were on 24-hour alert at an airbase in New Jersey: "A team of soldiers stood guard around two B-52s. Their pilots sat in the ready room carrying guns. An M.P. madly scanned the newspaper in vain for some international crisis. He knew what it meant when B-52 co-pilots started carrying sidearms. It was for one co-pilot to shoot the other if he was too chicken to follow orders and drop the big one." Well. Leaving aside the adolescent language ("chicken," "the big one"), perhaps there really was a madly scanning M.P., but an Air Force historian laughed when asked about the idea that crews carried guns aimed, so to speak, at one another. Perlstein says that before the Kent State violence, "citizens were thrilled to see the tanks and jeeps rumbling through town." There were no tanks there. What he calls "the heavily Dixified eastern corner" of Tennessee was actually the least Southern, most pro-Union portion of the state. He says that at the Rolling Stones' 1969 rock concert at Altamont, Calif., "Hells Angels beat hippies to death with pool cues." The bikers did fatally stab one person and hit others with pool cues but killed no one with cues. In his victory speech following the 1968 election, President-elect Nixon mentioned seeing, at a whistle-stop in Deshler, Ohio, a girl carrying a sign reading "Bring Us Together." Perlstein says: "A reporter tracked the girl down and learned her placard actually bore the rather more divisive words 'L.B.J. Taught Us Vote Republican.'" So Nixon lied? No. The New York Times later reported that as the girl drew near the event she lost her sign that said "L.B.J. convinced us - vote Republican," but by the time she reached Nixon's train she had picked off the ground another that read: "Bring Us Together Again." Perlstein considers it significant that before the 1972 election, in which Nixon carried 49 states, James Reston wrote that "barely over one in four adult Americans will have voted for the winner in 1972. ... The consequences of that kind of a minority presidency are hard to foretell." Actually, such "minority" presidents are not unusual. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan carried 44 states and defeated President Jimmy Carter 489-49 in electoral votes, Reagan won the votes of 26.9 percent of American adults. The winners of the 1996, 2000 and 2004 elections received 24 percent, 24.1 percent and 28.2 percent, respectively. The cumulative effect of carelessness, solecisms and rhetorical fireworks is to make Perlstein seem eager to portray the years and people about whom he is writing as even wilder and nastier than they were. Which is especially unfortunate because he has a gift for penetrating judgments, for example, that Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California because he provided "a political outlet for the outrages that, until he came along to articulate them, hadn't seemed like voting issues at all." Perlstein's thesis is that America became Nixonland because of "the rise of two American identities" in the 1960s - actually between 1964, when Johnson won 61.1 percent of the vote, and 1968, when the combined votes for Nixon and George Wallace were 56.9 percent Perlstein says Nixon's legacy is the "notion that there are two kinds of Americans." On one side of the barricades are "values voters" and other conservatives who are infuriated by the disdain of amoral elites conservatives consider (in the brilliantly ironic phrase that Perlstein appropriated from Kevin Phillips) a "toryhood of change" determined to supervise their lives. On the other side are Hofstadterian liberals who feel threatened by these nincompoops who have been made paranoid by their status anxieties. "How did Nixonland end?" Perlstein asks in the book's last line. "It has not ended yet." But almost every page of Peristein's book illustrates the sharp contrast rather than a continuity with America today. It almost seems as though Perlstein, who was born in 1969, is reluctant to let go of the excitement he has experienced secondhand through the archives he has ransacked to such riveting effect. "We Americans," he says, "are not killing or trying to kill one another anymore for reasons of ideology, or at least for now. Remember this: This war has ratcheted down considerably. But it still simmers on." NOT really. America has long since gone off the boil. The nation portrayed in Perlstein's compulsively readable chronicle, the America of Spiro Agnew inciting "positive polarization" and the New Left laboring to "heighten the contradictions," is long gone. So exquisitely sensitive are Americans today, they worked themselves into a lather of disapproval when Hillary Clinton said that Lyndon Johnson as well as Martin Luther King was important in enacting civil rights legislation. There has not been a white male secretary of state for 11 years. Today a woman and an African-American are competing relatively civilly for the right to run for president against the center-right - more center than right - senator who occupies the seat once held by Goldwater. Whoever wins will not be president of Nixonland. In Perlstein's universe, Nixon is a bit like God - because he is the explanation for everything. George F. Will is a syndicated columnist.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
We are constantly bombarded with talk of red states, blue states and culture wars. Perlstein, a journalist and historian, claims to have figured out the genesis of this toxic divide. He asserts that Nixon's relentless campaign for the presidency, which began after his defeat in the 1962 California gubernatorial race, consciously crystallized and intensified emerging divisions over Vietnam, civil rights, and the violent upheavals that began with the Watts riots in August 1965. This is not an uplifting book, and there are few heroes. Perlstein takes shots at targets as diverse as the Kennedys, Ronald Reagan, George McGovern, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But hovering over the narrative like a malignant cloud is the character of Nixon, and Perlstein clearly despises him. In tracking the evolutions from the apparently solid liberal consensus of the early 1960s to our present state, Perlstein provides a valuable service. Unfortunately, his animus toward Nixon detracts from what is, generally, a sharp historical and political analysis.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Perlstein, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, provides a compelling account of Richard Nixon as a masterful harvester of negative energy, turning the turmoil of the 1960s into a ladder to political notoriety. Perlstein's key narrative begins at about the time of the Watts riots, in the shadow of Lyndon Johnson's overwhelming 1964 victory at the polls against Goldwater, which left America's conservative movement broken. Through shrewdly selected anecdotes, Perlstein demonstrates the many ways Nixon used riots, anti-Vietnam War protests, the drug culture and other displays of unrest as an easy relief against which to frame his pitch for his narrow win of 1968 and landslide victory of 1972. Nixon spoke of solid, old-fashioned American values, law and order and respect for the traditional hierarchy. In this way, says Perlstein, Nixon created a new dividing line in the rhetoric of American political life that remains with us today. At the same time, Perlstein illuminates the many demons that haunted Nixon, especially how he came to view his political adversaries as "enemies" of both himself and the nation and brought about his own downfall. 16 pages of b&w photos. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
From a Los Angeles Book Prize winner: an account of Nixon's phoenix-like rise from the ashes of the Sixties. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In its hardcover format, Nixonland succeeded in telling the complicated story of the 1960s partly through a deft use of narration based on the medium most Americans relied on in that turbulent decade: network TV news reports. This enhanced e-book version replaces the photos illustrating the book with more than 30 contemporary video clips scattered throughout, all made available by CBS News.The videos, few longer than two minutes and most considerably shorter, cover race riots, anti-war demonstrations, assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the chaos of the 1968 Democratic convention, presidential speeches to the nation and so on. Some of these replace and augment the coverage in Perlstein's book based on NBC or ABC reports. Others, which Perlstein described in the text, are illuminating: for example, a segment on Stokely Carmichael's introduction of the establishment-quaking phrase "black power" to the national discussion during an angry demonstration in Mississippi, and Walter Cronkite's meticulous detailing of what was then known of the Watergate scandal, before Watergate had even become a household word. Despite Perlstein's claim to CBS News' Bob Schieffer, in a video introduction to these media enhancements, that these clips "complete" the book, a hard-copy reader of Nixonland probably would not lose much, if anything, from skipping this enhanced version.Still, anyone who has not already read this essential history of the Nixonization of America, and especially anyone who did not live through the era, would do well to dig into this meaty book in this multimedia format.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
