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It speaks to what is most profound to me, which is basically contributing to a civic conversation about this nation and its prospects. I write it as an American for Americans.” There were a couple things that stood out to me. Things that, maybe in retrospect aren’t that surprising, or maybe I actually already knew, but stood out with a little more clarity with the 5000 foot tour. This was a hard book for me to get through. I had to take breaks and read two other books while getting through this one. It was a bit slow going, and also depressing.
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.’ That meant everybody which might stop a second term must be squashed. This is where the illegal stuff came in. Which as you know, if the President does it, that means it’s not illegal. Right? Right. So he won in 72, a gigantic landslide, 49 states. But Republicans still couldn’t get into Congress. The story of 72 was that Americans still liked Democrats EXCEPT McGovern.A supplemental review! - this is just some of my favourite outrageous quotes from Mr Perlstein and his mostly less than merry pranksters - starting with a jarring fact I found quite jaw-dropping: Richard Nixon acceding to the presidency pledging a new dawn of national unity--and governing more divisively than any before him. The rise of twin cultures of left- and right-wing vigilantes, Americans literally bombing and cutting each other
Nixon’s journey from derided two time loser (1960 for president, 1962 for governor of California) to presidential candidate in 1968 is fascinating stuff. (The other half of that story is how Johnson went from clouds of civil rights glory in 1964/5 to hated buffoon in 1967 – we only glance at that story from the outside here, so I will be grabbing a Johnson bio very soon.) Nixon knew two things – the public are fundamentally conservative, and the press are fundamentally liberal. That meant he would win, but it would be a struggle. By 68 it was clear he couldn’t lose, that’s how much Johnson had unravelled. But then it turned out winning, being the actual President, wasn’t enough. He still didn’t have the control he wanted because of a hostile Congress. He needed a second term. He began to believe that he was the only person who could set things right in America. Obviously the vile Democrats couldn’t, but nor yet could the other fools in the Republican party. As far as RN was concerned, RN was America’s only hope. It’s a very Perlsteinian response, wide-ranging, multifaceted, but it is given in a very different America from the one in which he started work in 1997, nearly a quarter of a century ago. A richly detailed descent into the inferno—that is, the years when Richard Milhouse Nixon, “a serial collector of resentments,” ruled the land. Perlstein sees some patterns and has his own story on what the major takeaways should be. There is something I should be taking away about how Nixon is a flashpoint or symbol for how everything changed. I didn’t always follow the author’s logic for how we should connect the dots into his central narrative. However, it never failed to be interesting, so I did enjoy the ride. Nixon was both a conspirator and obsessed that others were conspiring against him. His dark psyche and self pity hobbled his political career that peaked with his unsuccessful run against JFK and was followed by a humiliating loss running for governor in California in 1962. It was then, however, that his projected persona was altered. In public he remained awkward but he began to use self-deprecating humor that contributed to the impression that he was a regular guy out to upset the rule of the liberal elite. He took on young media advisors including Roger Ailes. The division of the citizenry was exploited and has only intensified with time, leaving us all living in "Nixonland."Is Perlstein’s vision true? Is it fully reliable? That’s for the readers to judge. I admit I was a bit dismayed that the author has not even tried to remain objective. Oh, I know objectivity is an impossible goal, particularly in social sciences and humanities, but it is one I feel we should all strive for. From history books I expect at least that – some effort, some endeavor for objective assessment, at least an attempt at balanced depiction of events and people. In this regard, Perlstein unfortunately fails, big time – and it looks as if he wasn’t ever considering trying not to fail. He approaches his subject with an emotionally charged opinion, and he portrays different aspects of the times with that opinion foremost in his mind. And because he hates Nixon’s guts, his book is quite amusing. It’s more a case of a laughter through tears, to be fair, but nevertheless makes for an entertaining (like horror can be entertaining) read. In these cases, and in others, Perlstein is unsparing in his critique of the political failures of mid-century liberalism; I only wish he had meditated more deeply on liberalism’s policy failures as well, and at least grappled with the possibility that voters rejected liberal governance for pragmatic reasons as well as atavistic ones. But to do so might have required him to give Nixon’s Republican Party—if not Nixon himself—more credit for restoring domestic tranquillity than I imagine he thinks the GOP deserves. Indeed, a minor theme of Perlstein’s book is the extent to which domestic tranquillity has never been restored; Americans, he argues, inhabit “Nixonland” even now. Perlstein takes us through the years 1964-1972 as if they had happened yesterday. That was when America fractured into what Perlstein terms the Franklins and the Orthogonians, representing very roughly the in crowd and the out group and Nixon's Whittier College. We are now red and blue staters. A man of the left, Perlstein agrees his books are as much about the failures of liberalism and the media as the success of the right.
What I believe RP wishes me to extract from this howling tumult was three big ones. RP characterises the 50s and early 60s as a time of optimism, culminating in LBJ’s civil rights legislation 64-66. But then it all splintered . What happened NEXT was 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
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How does Perlstein feel about the Never Trumpers, Republicans working to eject a Republican from the White House itself? Lennon appears to be radically oriented however he does not give the impression he is a true revolutionist since he is constantly under the influence of narcotics. P714 This isn’t a presidential biography or political essay--it’s a painting--a mural--of the political culture of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s indispensable for a person like me that didn’t live through it. The storytelling and analysis cuts through all of the cliches, the iconography, the superficial and reductionist history books. And damn, is it entertaining! Perlstein never abandons the reader--he never strays too far, never becomes redundant, never bores with unessential details. The thing is, he makes all details feel essential! If you think you fully understand the modern culture wars, and everything that went on in the 1960s, you don't... until you've read Nixonland.
Nixon was the first Republican president who was obsessed with power. Power was much much more important to him then doing the job of the president, which is to care for the welfare of the citizens of the United states. Up until Nixon, the presidents of the time new their job was to serve. To make this nation a great place to live. But since Nixon the Republicans have just been spiraling down hill, into an ever growing cesspool of power hungry, selfish, down right criminal pile of morons. Perlstein’s own “engagement with Trump”, he says, “came at a time, in 2015, when I was incredibly burned out from writing about Republican conservatism because it seemed so darn predictable. Then something happened: history is a cunning thing to completely transform the story. I think we always have to be alive and open to that.” ‘Do you take the good with the bad?In Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America, author Chris Matthews explores how an amicable friendship descended into a bitter feud that would last for far longer than the close of election night in 1960. 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.
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