Despite being a long, thick tome, it was quite a page-turner. Especially since I came of age during these years (voting for the first time in 1972). But I never knew about the non-stop covert actions, and in such detail. It appears that Watergate was just the tip of the iceberg, so no surprise that Watergate was only mentioned in the last few chapters. That case would require another book. Honestly, though I did take a side and still do, it was painful and frustrating to read about the violent actions of both sides as my country was torn apart.

I will definitely look for Perlstein's other books, including: "The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan." ( )

I waited a long time for Rick Perlstein's second book in his series on conservatism in modern U.S. politics to become available through Libby. And let me tell you, this was a TOUGH book to read in November 2024, as it seems like everything that's happening today happened before and we learned nothing from it.

Whereas Richard Nixon was something of a punchline in Before the Storm, Perlstein's book about Barry Goldwater, here we see his comeback and rise to power after his humiliating back-to-back losses running for President in 1960 and Governor of California in 1962. Perlstein uses a framing device based on social clubs at Nixon's alma mater of Whittier College. The "Franklins" are the popular, good looking, and wealthy elite who have positions of influence handed to them (think of FDR and JFK), while Nixon identifies with the "Orthogonians," those who have to fight for power. While Orthogonians like Nixon have all the privileges of white, Christian men, they nevertheless have lots of grievances. Nixon's success come from mobilizing the grievances of what became known as "The Silent Majority."

This book is called Nixonland because it is not a straight biography of Nixon but a sprawling and detailed political history of the United States from the mid-60s to the early-70s. After Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide victory over Goldwater on a platform of civil rights and social welfare programs, the Democratic Party's consensus fell apart. On one side, urban uprisings and increasing militancy of Black activists terrified the white Orthogonians who used it as a pretext to declare the civil rights movement a failure. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party tore itself apart over Johnson's hawkish commitment to the war in Vietnam.

Perlstein's narrative traces the trends and crises that made it possible for a landslide victory for Nixon just 8 years after Johnson's. As an author, he has an engaging manner of bringing to life even familiar incidents in his writing. For example, the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago is described as how it might have been seen by an ordinary American watching it on TV, complete with the commercial breaks for Gulf Oil. While the book ends with Nixon at his greatest success, it also contains the seeds of his demise with the events of the Watergate burglary. ( )

It’s amazing the extent to which we are still living in the political world created by the paranoid, disaffected, self-righteous Nixon and his enthusiastic supporters. Perlstein does quite a job illuminating the levels of hypocrisy and moral licensing that fed the Nixon campaigns’ corruption and underhanded maneuvering. Not to mention the credulous simplicity that led the media to repeatedly ignore such blatant wrongdoing, and the superior indifference with which the Left fanned the flames.

More impressive still is how clearly this book shows the roots of Trumpism and modern Republican politics. The parallels can’t have been purposeful, as it was published in 2008. But even down to the fine details (e.g., the Nixon campaign drastically—and obviously—inflating their crowd sizes), it’s impressive to see how far back these things really go.

You have to know what you’re signing up for when you start a book like this, obviously. It‘s quite a long read, and certainly dry in parts, but I think it’s one of the best things I’ve read for an understanding of the longer historical trends in modern American conservatism. ( )

There are, at the end of 2022, somewhere between 250 and 300 full-length books in print concerning Richard M. Nixon and his times. Leaving aside his self-serving memoir, "RN," these books range from the very specialized (Joe McGinness' "The Selling of the President 1968") to the expansive and scholarly (Stephen A. Ambrose's classic trilogy, "Nixon"), and most are worth reading or at least skimming. (Obviously, with so many accounts, the details can become somewhat repetitive.) "Nixonland," by Rick Perlstein, is notable primarily for its lack of focus and its meandering style. In nearly a thousand pages, Perlstein essays to cover Nixon's life from his college days up to his re-election to the presidency in 1972. If the reader is looking for a fairly complete, easily digestible chronicle of America in the 1960s, the book may serve its purpose. If, on the other hand, one is interested in understanding how Richard Nixon affected American government and political history, one's time would be better spent elsewhere. Between the minutiae and the lacunae, Perlstein's account of what Nixon meant to America is very sparse indeed.

Perlstein has previously published volumes on Eisenhower, Goldwater, and Reagan. He will, in all probability, continue his uninspired, shallow chronicles of Republican politicians with a book on Donald Trump. Those of us who have read the preceding books will avoid it: there are far too many legitimate analyses and critiques of Trump, or Nixon, to waste time with fluff.

Not recommended. ( )

Present day politics echo the past. Required. ( )

Given the present day situation in the US, many are starting to look back, with some fondness, to the 60's. One hears of critics speaking of the 1960's as one of the golden ages of film, music, etc. However, this is not true in the daily civic life. Rick Perlstein has managed to capture some of the rage and anger of the period. This is the age of the civil rights movement, the start of the feminist movement and the student protest over the war in Vietnam. Into this maelstrom comes Richard Nixon. Nixon is not only a problem, we also see the rise of young staffers and individuals who, for better or worse, effect the course of American History in the early 21st century. This is a well written book that gives understanding to what happened and how those events are still with us today. ( )

Very impressionistic history. You need to have some basic knowledge of the events, because Perlstein skips over many of them in favor of the little details. (For example, he won't generally say who won each election or primary.) He goes so far as to read through daily newspapers, page by page giving each story. You do get a certain sense for the time, although from a biased perspective. Perlstein has a strong thesis, but he often leaves it implicit, in the choice of topics he focuses on. I'd rather he always argued explicitly. ( )

Whew, what a tome! Nixonland is a factual, insightful book about the turbulent 1960's and the divisiveness that arose in the politics in the United States. I was fascinated by Nixon's political career, the way he was able to set an "us against them" tone to his rhetoric, how his lust for power led to the inevitable and infamous Watergate, and how he felt victimized throughout his presidency. A great read. ( )

Forty-four years ago this very month, as this review goes to press, Richard Nixon became the first American President to resign that office, on the heels of almost certain impeachment. Apologists then and now snort dismissively of a “second-rate burglary,” while more perspicacious observers might point out that Watergate was the least of what were certainly nothing less than high crimes and misdemeanors; that a brilliant yet amoral and often unstable Nixon brought the mechanics of a criminal syndicate to the Executive Branch, and—much worse than that—in an attempt to achieve some sort of personal glory selfishly extended a war he had long privately admitted was unwinnable, thereby needlessly sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers, as well as hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian civilians and combatants. Forty-four years on, and some might argue that not only have the deep scars Nixon inflicted on the national landscape never healed, but that both his methods and his madness are currently enjoying a kind of renaissance that either signals a reverse to the remission that was once a cancer upon his Presidency, or an underscore that there is a deep well of malevolence in our national character that can never really be expunged. Of course, neither of these notions satisfies or reassures, which is precisely why we must never let Nixon’s legacy be overlooked: like it or not, Nixon forever altered America and put a terrible mark upon all of us that may have faded but will not go away.
I am reading Rick Perlstein backwards, which is less ironic than perversely logical, since the nation is itself tumbling rapidly backwards into the kind of hate and racism and division by any other name that Nixon championed so expertly in the era that he once commanded. My first read was Perlstein’s latest, from 2014: The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, his splendid analysis of how it was that after Nixon went up in flames, Reagan managed to emerge from the ashes and with a shrug and an “aw, shucks” declare that there really wasn’t any fire at all. Though Reagan had unrelentingly defended everything noxious that Nixon was about, after the ignominious fall virtually all of Nixon’s political capital clung to Reagan but none of his toxicity. But by that time, the political landscape, indeed the entire nation, had been irrevocably altered by the Nixon phenomenon that had turned politics into a zero-sum game, and divided Americans into distinct groups of us vs. them, good guys vs. bad guys, patriots vs. traitors, solid citizens vs. arrogant elites. It was hardly coincidental that Nixon surveyed the universe through a similar lens that only detected black and white, that ever filtered out any and all gray areas. And by the time Nixon had finished with America—or America had finished with him—he had forever after transformed it into “Nixonland.” That is the remarkable thesis of Perlstein’s brilliant study of the 1960s, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, first published in 2008.
Nixon endured a forbidding childhood beset by poverty, the death of a sibling, and ever grim, unyielding parents who enforced such a rigid religious fundamentalism that it bordered on abuse. An enthusiastic but mediocre athlete, Nixon instead scored academically and distinguished himself in debate, but at his hometown Whittier College he was snubbed by the “Franklins,” a prestigious literary society comprised of members from prominent families. He responded by leading the effort to forge a rival society of “Orthogonians” for those like himself who might not otherwise get a seat at the table with the elite. This was to prove a defining moment in the life of Richard Nixon that Perlstein argues set him on an unrelenting path that would carve a cleft in America that ever clings to us like a poisonous film on the flesh of the nation that simply will not wash off.
Nixon seems to have never gotten over his rebuff by the Franklins, and the wrath that was born of that rejection fueled a resentment that he wielded like a hammer for the rest of his life. It was not simply the “us vs. them” mentality—but that was certainly part of it—but it ran much deeper and was far more vicious, because it was at root about whether or not you were “like us” or “like them,” and if you were “like them,” it meant that you were “the other,” and therefore not worthy of the same rights or the same respect we might require for ourselves. Nixon was neither the first nor the last to turn his opponents into “the other,” but he was indeed the first to successfully take that into the White House and weaponize it on a mass scale. The clarion call to the “silent majority” to stand up for the America they loved was a dog whistle to the Orthogonian hard hats that bloodied Franklin hippies on the streets of New York in 1970.
Perlstein’s book is as much a masterful history of America in the tumultuous 1960s as it is a chronicle of Nixon and how he put that indelible mark upon it, a reminder of how much those days seem like a study of an entirely different country from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, a time of great violence and radicalism that—it should not be forgotten—barely touched the vast majority of Americans who simply went about their lives anonymously in what was also a postwar economic boom in the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world. I was a youth in that era, and the truth is that more Americans listened to Pat Boone than Jimi Hendrix. Nixon knew his audience—the former, of course—and he knew how to transform them into vehement foes of the latter.
It was Nixon’s genius that he could identify these two emerging America’s and exploit the divisions there that he could actively shape, and compartments that he could adeptly construct, that would admit no shades of anything that was not an “either” or an “or.” There were the patriotic Americans who had defied economic depression and world war for a better life—only to see it put in jeopardy by unwashed longhaired cowardly druggies manipulated by communists from abroad seeking to undermine our democratic institutions; and, lazy unmotivated welfare recipients who demanded entitlements without a willingness to put in a good day’s hard work; and, most especially, violent, radical blacks who refused to be grateful for all that was being done to assist them with their seemingly endless and relentless demands. And there was now more opportunity with these same black people! There was the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln—which had long been the not-always-reliable-friend but a friend nonetheless to African Americans against the scourge of the Southern branch of segregationist unreconstructed Democrats—who now with Nixon’s Machiavellian sleight of hand could almost silently (with a swelling cohort added to his “Silent Majority”) exploit the national Democratic Party’s embrace of Civil Rights to actively turn Republican backs on blacks and instead entice the great white backlash of the South to join their ranks. (Reagan took this baton of this “southern strategy” and skillfully ran with it under the same barely disguised cover; Trump does not bother with even a token shellacking of the ulterior motives here. And Trump doesn't need batons: he has far more effective and not-so-subtle dog whistles. Neither Nixon nor Reagan would consort with Nazis; Trump finds good people among the crowd.)
Nixon was hardly the first politician to capitalize upon fear, upon hate, upon racism, upon xenophobia, upon a misguided fantastical nation that the very essence and identity of traditional values central to a national identity were under attack and needed to be actively defended before it was too late—but he was the first American figure of national prominence to successfully parlay this tactic into a kind of art form that drove a great and enduring and unrelenting wedge into the country that has never since been bridged, and perhaps never will be.
That Nixon wedge has long been exploited, by both Reagan and his descendants, but never so cruelly and with such baseness as it has been by Donald Trump, who not at all coincidentally was a student to all of the lessons Nixon taught, and who has associated with a lot of same villains that have been key to the rise of Nixon: Roy Cohn, Roger Ailes and Roger Stone among them. Much of the wreckage Nixon left behind was superficially paved over by Ronald Reagan, and there is no little irony to the fact that Reagan’s campaign slogan—"Let’s Make America Great Again”—has been disingenuously expropriated by Donald Trump. And Trump, it must not be forgotten, has like Nixon styled himself a great defender of “law and order,” even as it becomes increasingly clear that his administration may turn out to be the most criminally corrupt in American history.
The author wrote Nixonland nearly a decade before Trumpworld, but yet it seems to eerily presage it. Perlstein’s magisterial work may not only be the best book written about Nixon and the 1960s, but should also be required reading for anyone who wants to try to comprehend the madness that besets the nation today. Of course, Nixon was a far more clever fellow than Trump, and the Republican Party of his day was not the cult of personality of its current iteration, wagging a collective tail at the master of tax and tariff scams calculated to enrich a select plutocracy, and Nixon’s motives were more about leaving an enduring mark in the history books rather than the cheap Trumpist thrills of amassing trinkets and celebrity stardom, but nevertheless there is much of then that has come back to haunt us now. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does thyme,” Mark Twain was once alleged to quip. We can only hope that the last stanza of that rhyme ends for Trump much as it did for Nixon, forty-four years ago this month … ( )

Perlstein wrote this in 2008 but its instructive to read it in 2018 as a reminder that Donald Trump is not a one off, black swan, but in many ways the logical conclusion, or at least the love child of the culture wars that Nixon may not have started, but magnified from their Goldwater roots. Its Nixon after all who coined the phrase the "Silent Majority", Nixon who understood that the majority of the population craved for a quiet status quo without being challenged by the loud minority, Nixon (or at least Spiro Agnew) who started to tear at the neutrality of the press, who started to create and disseminate fake news, overall Nixon who tore down the post war consensus by appealing to the lowest common dominator and invoking the fear of aliens and fear of change.

"Nixonland is still with us" warns Perlstein, in the hazy glow of the election of Obama. "Does anyone doubt that half the population, given the slightest provocation, wouldn't willingly pick up a gun and shoot the other half". Well, not anymore we don't. At this distance, he looks remarkably prescient.

As for the history itself, Perlstein's account is lively, invigorating, intense (it took me 3 months to read) and not uncommonly, inaccurate - at least in the details. But not in the overall tone. The story of how Nixon, beautifully described as a "serial collector of grudges" went from unfashionable rural California to the White House, through a combination of a knack for political insight and a mastery of the black arts rose to be the most powerful person in the world is remarkable. Even now, the whole thing seems somewhat unlikely. Thankfully the story ends at his election for a second term, and before the humiliations of Watergate (such a small thing in his general program of "ratfucking" the opposition) and his alcoholic decline took the world nearer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Program till, well, now (I write this as US and Russia sabre rattle over Syria).

If there is a fault here, its that Perlstein doesn't give enough credit to Nixon's achievement, engagement with China in particular, but also the beginnings of detente with Russia. And compared to the Republican party of today, he comes across as socially centrist. He gives plenty of time - and rightly so - to Nixon's many failings and especially to the criminal policy of sabotaging the peace talks in Paris in 1968 and keeping the war going through the elections of 1972. Its not so much the blood on the hands of Nixon and Kissinger - extensive though that is - but the sheer cynicism. You can't expect Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives to mean much to them - but clearly, those of their own citizens didn't much either.

If there are two main themes of the book its Vietnam and Nixonian dirty tricks. But for me there's a third; the accurate portrayal of the 1960s. It wasn't a time of free love and flowers in the hair; it was a time of social change that many in society opposed passively or actively. For every civil rights activist, there are 2 people who would have African Americans know their place. For every hippie, there are 3 hard working joes. The image of hard hats and stockbrokers joining forces to beat up hippies in Manhattan is one of Perlstein's strongest. The 60s weren't about counter culture - its just that many of the counter culture were smart enough to later get jobs in media.

Recommended ( )

If you've read my review of Perlstein's first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, you know what a huge fan I am and how eagerly I was looking forward to this one. So my disappointment was all the greater when I quickly realized that the sense of detachment coupled with imaginative empathy, so essential to a history, is missing here. This is a book poisoned by snark. When Nixon does something bad, Perlstein makes a point of explaining how this is emblematic of Nixon's character. When Nixon does something good, Perlstein quickly argues that he does it solely for personal or political advantage. When Nixon does something morally neutral, such as submitting suggestions for an update to the White House bathroom, Perlstein mocks him for it. By page 400 of this long book, I was firmly in Nixon's corner—and very annoyed with Perlstein.

Of course Nixon was a bad guy. His willingness to screw the Constitution (as he might put it) and the people in pursuit of his own ends is acknowledged by everybody regardless of politics. It's also now known that Nixon, as a presidential candidate, deliberately sabotaged the Vietnam peace talks of 1968, deliberately prolonging the war in a successful plan to assure his own election. (Perlstein states this as an established fact, although the "smoking gun" proving this particular brand of treason wasn't uncovered until several years after the book's publication.) So what does Nixon deserve credit for? Well, depending on one's own political positions, one might approve of his creation of the Environmental Protection Agency; his work toward the completion of the ABM and SALT antinuclear treaties; his signing of Title IX; or his ending of the military draft. All of these accomplishments are dismissed by Perlstein as mere jockeying for personal power or electoral popularity.

This bald-faced bias made this book a difficult read. What kept me going was Perlstein's great strength as a historian—his assembly of thousands of facts large and small into a coherent, engaging narrative and a graspable timeline. Nevertheless, I can't recommend this book to those who prefer not to have their preconceptions reinforced (for who doesn't see Nixon as somewhat of a cartoon villain?). History should challenge as well as engage. And for all its mastery of detail, the only thing this book challenged was my patience. ( )

I’ve had Rick Perlstein’s book, NIXONLAND, on my shelf for a few years, and finally got around to reading it. It proved to be the perfect read as the contentious Presidential election of 2016 played out its final act, for NIXONLAND proves that we are really not seeing anything new and that America has been a bitterly divided nation far longer than we care to admit. Perlstein is the author of another great piece of non-fiction, BEFORE THE STORM, a history of Barry Goldwater’s ill fated 1964 campaign, when right wing conservatives seized control of the Republican Party from the men who’d nominated Thomas Dewey and Dwight Eisenhower, and then lost in an epic landslide to Lyndon Johnson. BEFORE THE STORM can serve a prequel to NIXONLAND because it ends right after the votes are counted in ’64, when the consensus among political pundits and social scientists was that America would continue in harmony on the path toward greater racial equality and economic growth. Activist liberalism was the governing philosophy and would likely remain so far into the future; ever upward and ever onward thus.

NIXONLAND is the story of how it all fell apart within a few short years, as Americans turned on one another with a sometimes murderous fury across racial and generational divides over the struggle for the full rights of citizenship by Black Americans, and the seemingly futile war in Vietnam, where an army of conscripted young men were fed into a meat grinder for the vaguest of reasons and the most dubious of causes. But the book is also the story of the man who rode the second American Civil War to power, exploited the divisions for his own gain, and ultimately reaped the whirlwind: Richard M. Nixon, who might have been a washed up politician in 1964, but who refused to quit, and possessing a steely determination, set his sights on the Presidency in 1968.

In the early chapters, Perlstein shows us how LBJ, anti-war protesters, and an increasingly radical civil rights movement did a lot of Nixon’s work for him. Johnson, with his whole-hearted support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights of 1965, fully tied the fortunes on the Democratic Party to the cause of racial justice, a position that became a serious political problem when, first Los Angeles, then Detroit and Newark, were torn apart by the worst violence seen on American soil since the first Civil War, as Black neighborhoods erupted in a series of long, hot summers. It didn’t help when Martin Luther King led marches in Chicago to demand an end to discrimination in housing and suddenly Northern suburbanites who had been okay with the outlawing Jim Crow below the Mason Dixon line were suddenly not so keen on having Black families move into the house next door. At the same time, college students began to grow their hair long, smoke marijuana, and worst of all, took to the streets to protest the Administration’s escalation of the war in Vietnam in the crudest and rudest terms possible. To the Greatest Generation, who had come of age in the Great Depression and then saved civilization from the Nazis and Imperial Japan, it was as if their country had gone to hell overnight, and somebody needed to do something.

Though it is well covered ground, Perlstein gives us an account of Nixon’s rise to power, and how he shrewdly exploited the backlash of the middle class who elected not only Ronald Reagan Governor of California by a million votes in 1966, but a slew of other reactionary politicians as well. Nixon became an early critic of Johnson’s Vietnam policy, letting hawkish Republicans believe he would prosecute the war more vigorously, while in private, stating that South Vietnam was already a lost cause. Nixon’s path to the Republican nomination in ’68 turned out to be a cake walk, in part because he promised segregationists like Strom Thurmond, that in return for the support of Southern delegations at the convention, he would not enforce Civil Rights laws if elected. Meanwhile the Democratic Party collapsed in a struggle over the Vietnam War, forcing Johnson to retire after being challenged by Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. By the time the Democrats met pick a nominee at the end of August in Chicago, RFK was dead by an assassin’s bullet and the delegates chose battered Vice President Hubert Humphrey after an acrimonious convention and open warfare in the streets as Mayor Richard Daley’s cops broke bad on the thousands of anti-war demonstrators who had flocked to Chicago. Everyone expected Nixon to win easily in November, but in the last weeks of the campaign, the momentum swung to Humphrey as news of a possible settlement to the war before Election Day leaked out. In the end, the cease fire was scuttled in no small part because of Nixon’s own secret meddling when he told the South Vietnamese to hold out because he would give them a better deal when he became President; a illegal act under Federal law.

Once in the White House, Nixon was determined not to share LBJ’s fate; where his predecessor had been confounded and defeated by the long haired Hippie college students and their peacenik professors, he would fight back. And in this, Richard Nixon was quite successful, as his political underlings, among them Vice President Spiro Agnew, organized and carried out a well planned campaign to draw a line in the dirt between the dirty, lazy, Commie loving, America hating, drug using, sexually promiscuous, cop bashing, flag burning, Afro wearing, foul mouthed scum who were tearing the country down, and themselves, the defenders of all that was right and traditional in the greatest land on earth. And if they could tar the rest of the Democratic Party through guilt by association, then all the better. For Nixon and the counter culture, it was hate at first sight.

NIXONLAND gives us a vivid picture of Nixon and his like minded cohorts – John Mitchell and Charles Colson being the first among many – who preached “law and order” and claimed to seek “peace with honor” in public, while in private plotted to break and enter the homes and offices of their enemies to learn secrets which could be used against them, along with conspiring to use IRS harassment, illegal wiretaps, and host of other “dirty tricks” against their political foes. At the same time, Nixon reduced the number of troops on the ground in South Vietnam while expanding a devastating bombing campaign from the air in an attempt to keep the war going lest the South collapse while he was in office. It is a striking picture of abject hypocrisy. By 1972, the aptly named Committee to Re-Elect the President was actively sabotaging the campaigns of Democratic Presidential aspirants, Muskie, Humphrey, Wallace and Scoop Jackson on a regular basis, sparing only extreme anti-war candidate George McGovern, a strategy that paid big dividends, at least until those burglars were caught breaking into DNC Chairman, Larry O’Brien’s office in the Watergate Complex. For Richard Nixon, this would prove to be a political Waterloo from which there would be no coming back.

But NIXONLAND is not just story of the 37th President; though Perlstein is clearly a liberal, he does not spare the Left blame for the sorry state of the country during those years, and shows us how the Vietnam anti-war movement became a bitter anti-American crusade as Nixon’s first term progressed and it became apparent a quick end to the war was not happening. In the process, the war protestors alienated the good patriots in Middle America, the kind of people they would need on their side if they were to prevail. Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman would prove to be the perfect foils for the President; somehow a few Hippie hecklers always managed to find their way into appearances by Nixon and Agnew. This was accident, as it allowed the Administration to create a visual that assured the millions out there in the so-called Silent Majority that there was someone in the White House standing between them and those who did not share their values, a group which included sniveling limousine liberal Democratic Congressmen who wanted to cut and run in Vietnam and leave all those POW’s behind in Hanoi; it was a clique that also included their amen chorus at the big three networks and major city newspapers. All was fair game to the Nixon crew.

Perlstein charts how the Democratic Party begins turn away from its base of blue collar and union voters, whose main concerns were paycheck issues, starting with the debate over the morality of the Vietnam War and the cause for equal rights. Being morally right would leave little room for the messy compromises so necessary to real world democracy. Well meaning and zealous reformers set out to take the party away from the “Bosses” who had given them Presidents who started “immoral” wars, and give the Democratic Party back to the “people.” These progressives had an unbreakable belief that “progress” came from the top down despite plenty of evidence to the contrary – the Civil Rights and anti-movements began at the grass roots. In George McGovern, they found the perfect candidate, a Senator with the unshakable conviction that Vietnam was a crime, one every American was complicit in to some degree. But Perlstein gives us a critical portrait of a campaign that had tremendous passion for a cause, but was fatally deficient in simple competence, allowing the ’72 Democratic Convention to spin out of control so bad that McGovern gave his acceptance speech – considered the best of his career – at 2:00 a.m.in the morning. That, along with a bungled Vice Presidential choice, fatally compromised the McGovern campaign to the point that voters considered the Democratic candidate more untrustworthy than Nixon despite a continued stream of revelations about Watergate that tied the White House directly to the break in. In the end, Nixon won a 49 state landslide re-election, but because of Watergate, his administration was already a political Titanic, taking on water as the slow, but inevitable, pace of investigations and revelations continued.

Among the things I found interesting in NIXONLAND is how it documents just how violent the times were, where police and state troopers opened fire indiscriminately on Black citizens in Detroit and Newark during the summer riots there; it also gives a sense of the mistreatment minorities routinely received at the hands of local police in many cities, especially in the North, and gives a historical context for the recent troubles between law enforcement and the residents of many urban areas. There are excellent examples of just how wrong so many political pundits can be, such as before the 1966 mid-term election when endless columns were written touting George Romney, Charles Percy and NYC Mayor John Lindsay as the future of the Republican Party, all but ignoring the former Vice President out there hustling across the country making speeches for candidates and collecting valuable IOU’s. They also gave little chance to a certain B movie actor running for Governor in California.

NIXONLAND ends with the President’s re-election to a second term, the debacle of Watergate is not covered, but we already know how the story ends because Perlstein has given us the why. His Nixon is not the flawed Shakespearean character of other books, but a mean paranoid with a gigantic chip on his shoulder, a man for whom no margin of victory would ever be enough. Perlstein makes it plain that while Nixon the man is gone, his legacy endures and this seemingly permanently divided nation is the norm, that there is no precious “consensus” to be found. Either way, the story continues in Perlstein’s next book, THE INVISABLE BRIDGE, subtitled The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. Hope it is good as this book and look forward to reading it. ( )

This history of Nixon's rise to the presidency is the perfect reading for this year's election. Brilliantly written, it tells the history of America in the 1950s and 1960s describing how Richard Nixon played off the social divisions and helped fan the flames of today's political polarization.

The discussion of Nixon's political campaigns provides a new perspective on our current presidential campaign with its attempts to capitalize on the divisions in society. Its description of the political conventions is also a good prelude to the conventions for the 2016 campaigns. ( )

Is Nixonland a time or a place? Back in 2008, Rick Perlstein stated that between 1965 and 1972 when Richard Nixon rose to not only the Presidency but achieving the third-largest percentage in election history that Nixonland was brought forth and has been our country ever since. Over the past 8 year, Perlstein has been proven correct.

After the catastrophic defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, many assumed that the conservative wing of the Republican Party had been thoroughly reputed and would recede to the background of American political life. Then Watts occurred days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and liberalism started unravelling both domestically and in Vietnam. Watching these events was a man thought a political afterthought, Richard Nixon.

Through four elections cycles over seven years, Nixon used the remnants of the conservative insurgence still controlling the state party conventions and his own narrative message to achieve not only a political comeback but a historical reelection victory. But what ultimately helped Nixon the most was the division of nation in two between a progressive driven liberal “popular” culture and those reacting about how fast and how far those progressive steps had gone. It was this latter group that Nixon convinced to join him while the Democratic Party descended into chaos on the national level not once but twice over the course of two Presidential elections.

Over the course of 748 pages of text that covered mostly 7 years, showed how the political atmosphere of the time but of our time was born. The political rhetoric of 2008, 2012, and even 2016 is wholly seen in 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1972 born by the campaigns and speeches by one Richard Nixon and numerous Democrats. In fact the foolish of Democrats in response to this rhetoric that can sometimes still be seen today in 2016 is described in full detail within Perlstein's text. Of the remaining 131 pages, it is stock full of notes and citations of a well-researched book about the birth of modern American political culture.

For those living the United States, we’re still in Nixonland and if you want to know how American politics entered this 24/7 heated political atmosphere then I recommend that you read this book. ( )

Highly detailed and thoroughly documented retelling of the history of the turbulent 1960's in the United States and the political trajectory of Richard M. Nixon. This history leaves off with Nixon's re-election in 1968. Perlstein subsequently continued the history with THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE (which I had previously read).
Even though I lived through this period and have subsequently read other histories of this period, facts were revealed in NIXONLAND that managed to shock me. ( )

Rick Perlstein is an amazing historian—capable of both marshaling a wealth of documentary evidence and arranging it into a coherent and gripping narrative. He's ostensibly telling a political narrative, but shines in being one of the few non-fiction writers I've ever read who really capture that ethereal feeling of cultural momentum (usually called the "zeitgeist"). His earlier book, Before the Storm, chronicled the rise of Goldwater before the 1964 election. It followed the activists determined to see him get the nomination, and led the reader through what was happening in the wider sphere of American culture (and why that made Goldwater seem angelic to some and deranged to others). While some were capable of shaping events—Clif White and LBJ among them—most others seemed carried along by them.

Nixonland, on the other hand, revolves around the psyche of its title character. Nixon, paranoid to the bone, was constantly striving for more power and haunted by the impression that others were plotting against him. As everyone knows, this eventually led to his undoing: commanding increasingly bold and decreasingly lawful activities that eventually came to a head in Watergate. But what people seem to have mostly forgotten is how Nixon got to be so powerful in the first place. It wasn't all by theft, but instead by rhetorically playing upon the internal divisions within America, amped up by the rise of civil rights movements and economic anxiety.

I'm not going to lie to you; this book is LONG, 750 pages before endnotes and a SOLID 750 pages at that. But it's such an excellent book, one that finally knits together all the subjects that have been covered piecemeal in books before or thoroughly defanged by sweeping & inoffensive pop-histories. This could easily become the definitive era's textbook, and the only thing standing in its way are the teeth. ( )

Great read, especially the sections on the out of control police forces of the
50s and 60s, Nixon's incredible intelligence, and his twisted take on everything around him, which led him to destroy himself. ( )

This is about how Richard Nixon formulated the narrative that the Republican Party still uses today, that of innuendo, outright lies, and the cognitive dissonance of saying one thing today and the opposite tomorrow, depending on what is expedient for purely political purposes; we still live in Nixonland. But Nixonland isn't just that, and not just the domain of Republicans anymore; his term applies to the complete vilification of the other party, and trying to get the public to believe that if their party isn't in control, then the country will be destroyed from within.

It's truly shocking to read of how much public fear was generated on a nearly daily basis in the summer of 1966, and how it was put to use in bringing down LBJ. There were riots in a number of cities, and the account of the Newark police shooting African-Americans just standing on their front porch or just on the street doing nothing is heartbreaking. No police or Guardsmen were ever indicted. As I write this, a grand jury recently refused to indict the policeman who murdered Eric Garner with a chokehold on a New York street. And this is nearly 50 years after that long, hot summer of 1966.

Then there's Vietnam. Nixon would alternate between criticizing LBJ for escalation or if he stopped the bombing. You see, it wasn't about ending the war; it was about Nixon positioning himself for the 1968 presidential election. If this sort of thing sounds familiar, well, I guess that's the point that Perlstein is trying to get across.

The fun really starts around page number 550, when Perlstein gets to quote Nixon, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and other various henchmen such as G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, thanks to the Oval Office audio taping system and the Freedom of Information Act. It's sort of astonishing to think that they wouldn't turn off the tapes, when they were clearly engaging in extreme acts of obstruction of justice and talking openly about it. Am I the only one to be alarmed at Ehrlichman's suggestion that they assassinate the columnist Jack Anderson? Is that sound legal advice? ( )

This was a great book, but it took me for-eva to read. I think I'm getting stupid. I used to be able to read non-fiction books much more quickly. ( )

More catnip for political junkies from Rick Perlstein; this volume picks up where Before the Storm left off, covering the period from the 1965 Watts riots to the 1972 general election. As with the previous volume, I loved how Perlstein juxtaposes political and cultural history: the narrative is greatly enhanced by the way he enables the reader to get a sense of what songs were popular, which movies were out, what the newspaper ads said at the same moment that a particular piece of political news was breaking.

At nearly 750 pages of text, this book is a bit of a commitment, but it's worth every page, I thought. Highly recommended. ( )

The adventures of Tricky Dick, from his first congressional race to the 1972 presidential election and the emergence of Watergate. Not only that, but the historical and political events of the day that provide the contextual backdrop. This is a very long book, but is chock full of information. Reading this took me back to the political science classes of my youth. Everyone is here: JFK, Dr. King, Malcolm X, LBJ, Eugene McCarthy, HHH, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Gerry Ford, John Kerry, Jane Fonda, George McGovern, E. Howard Hunt, Richard Daley, Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, G. Gordon Liddy, Haldeman, Erlichman, Woodward & Bernstein, even Al Capp!

For all the info, this book is still just a teaser for delvers into sixties history. It's such a tumultuous and exciting period.

The book promised to connect the polarization of today's politics with Nixon. To lay it at his doorstep, if you will. But apart from a five page essay tacked at the end, Perlstein doesn't really do this. I'd have preferred that he took a little more space to make that case. ( )

This book explores the turbulence in America during the 1960's and 1970's, as Richard Nixon reinvented himself politically and became president of the United States. I had difficulty getting into the book, since one is bombarded by facts and events at a furious pace from page 1. The style reminded me a bit of the old Billy Joel song 'We Didn't Start the Fire.' Once I got into the rhythm of the writing though, I couldn't put the book down.

Perlstein seems to have explored every nook and cranny of this era, and tells us everything that happens. This means that the book can only briefly mention many of the events, people, and places. However, the seminal events--the summer race riots in the cities, the Black Panthers, the 1968 Democratic convention riots, the trial of the Chicago Eight (then Seven), the Vietnam War, Spiro Agnew and the 'silent majority' rising against the 'nattering nabobs of negativism,' the 'dirty tricks' and Watergate break-in of the 1972 campaign are covered in depth.

Perlstein writes in an engaging, easy to read, conversational style. I do fear, however, that unless you have at least some familiarity with the people and events of this era (i.e. perhaps by being old enough to have been politically aware during that time), parts of the book may be difficult to follow or meaningless without further background information.

My one criticism of the book, and it is major one, is that it ended abruptly with Nixon's victory in the 1972 election. I cannot imagine why a book whose purpose is to definitively explore the Nixon era would omit the Watergate hearings and Nixon's resignation in disgrace. Maybe a sequel? ( )

A great book especially if you appreciate the wealth of minutia that Perlstein presents. He presents a very well argues thesis that Nixon's career and presidency was based on and reinforced the polarization of the USA into a liberal elite and Nixon's "orthagonians" a class of angry middle class voters whose newly comfortable life has been threatened by such liberal legislation as the Civil rights acts of the 60s. The war in Vietnam was cynically manipulated by Nixon and his administration to appeal to the jingoism of this group.

The book has obvious applications to the Bush and Obama administrations, however I often wondered whether he was inferring much more than he should have from minor incidents. For example, when Bob Hope sees a much larger audience on his second trip to Da Nang to entertain the troops, he makes some jokes about the difficulty of the soldiers in the back even seeing the stage. Perlstein quoted this as an implied criticism of Nixon's policy of increasing American troop levels. It reads more like an innocuous quip about large crowds. Other sections read the same way. I have a hard job believing that Bonnie and Clyde was a significant influence on the politics of the day.

Still - it is a book well worth reading. ( )

This is a story about the topsy-turvy era known as the roughly 1960-72 years. Pearlstein offers much salacious detail and spectacle in reconstructing the milieu within which a Nixon presidency was seemingly inevitable. Everything was burning: cities, campuses, weed, and, of course, ‘Nam. I certainly recommend this to those too young or forgetful to remember this stuff when spouting off about how everything’s going to Hell “these days” based on whatever imbecilica the local news affiliate televises nightly.

As an overall theme, this is a story about the battles between Nixon’s underdog Orthogonians and the elitist Franklins. If I can correctly recall many weeks/hundreds of pages back, these were two Whittier College groups or clubs – the former hosting the typical middle to lower middle classers while the latter represented the campus elite. The Franklins consisted of the rich, handsome, popular types that Nixon increasingly loathed. Later, as his problematic Vice Presidency concludes, the Franklins become the Kennedys and, as the decade unfurls, all the vociferous, rabble-rousing figures – the Rubins, the Carmichaels – capturing media attention begin to expand this category. The Orthogonians are eventually defined by the “silent majority,” a group increasingly united against all the boisterous crap that seemingly destabilizes the nation. This is the group who’s annoyed psyche Nixon cleverly taps for his improbable political reemergence.
Pearlstein then traces the first four years: the exponential increase in paranoia and resulting deceptive tactics of Nixon and Co. Despite the WTF?!? value of a term marked by such duplicitousness, I feel the author’s coverage of the decade leading up to the 1968 elections is the most important aspect of the book (and certainly the most fun to read) as it lays the groundwork for how a Nixon type – a mostly unpopular misanthrope – could negotiate a sea of malaise and discontent and rise to the highest office by fundamentally avoiding, or positing ambiguous responses to, the pointed issues of the day.
NIXONLAND: The rides suck, the cotton candy is probably laced with DDT, and you might get beaten down on Main Street. At the very least we can put today’s societal annoyances in perspective. ( )

There is a divide in America, often called "Red State/Blue State" or simply Republican/Democrat. What is it, and how did it come about? Nixonland is a detailed re-telling of the political and social history of America between 1965 and 1972, when the divide, as we currently know it today, first emerged. As someone who didn't have the pleasure of living through the sixties, but who is heir to the era and its events, this book has been an amazing revelation. The divide continues to this day and everything can be traced back to these stormy 7 years.

Perstein's narrative technique and skill is enthralling and often humorous, he can go on for pages on a particular topic that would stand alone as a classic essay on the topic under discussion. The books is full of these, too many to recount, but some of my favorites include: Watts Riots (p.3-19); The Summer of Love (p.185+); Newark Riots (p.190-194); about the film Bonnie and Clyde (p.208); protest at the Pentagon (p.214+); Columbia University and the SDS (p.263); Democrat National Convention in Chicago (p.289-327); Cornell University protests (p.374+); Berkley protests (p.382+); Nixon and Patton (p.472); Kent State (p.479-495); Nixon and Billy Graham (p.500+); George Wallace assassination (p.660-665); Jane Fonda's Vietnam visit (p.703+); Republican National Convention 1972 (p.712-719).

Perlstein's main thesis is that after WWII and the material success of the 1950's, the Liberal left believed it had won 40+ years of fighting for the rights of the downtrodden - the middle class had emerged triumphant and most people in America had substantially better standards of living. This moment of "liberal consensus" (an illusionary one Perlstein believes) saw the creation of a new divide, one characterized by, although not created by, the personality of Nixon. This new divide was about who would control the country - the "elite" cosmopolitan liberal educated professional class - or the "silent majority", suburban/rural patriotic religious middle classes. Nixon's genius was to recognize this divide at the core and continually drive a wedge through it, to be the hero of the Silent Majority while demonizing the Loud Minorities. The arguments over Nixon, pro and con, gave us the language for this war, and it has not ended yet. Welcome to Nixonland.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2010 cc-by-nd ( )