This is a journalist's cultural account of the Nixon years, not a historian's textbook, and not a biography of RMN. It's a great read, filled with fabulous details that historians tend to overlook. Here's Al Capp trying to pick a fight with John Lennon; there's Lorne Greene attacking McGovern for lack of support of Israel.

Three caveats. First, the nature of the book makes it hard to figure out where you are. As others have mentioned, dates aren't given, and he does go back and forth a few times. Second, it's hard to ignore the possibility that Perlstein may be reading the present into the past. His approach is so anecdotal -- not in the sense of being false, but in the sense of focusing on small things that are supposed to represent larger things -- that we are at his mercy. For example, he quotes letters written to Time magazine. This adds color, but also forces us to trust the author that these items really are representative.

Third: we don't get to see Nixon tossed out of office. The book ends before.

I had heard good things about Nixonland and it started out very well. Unfortunately, Perlstein perpetuates a lot of the mythology of that period and could not repress his own biases in his discussion of Richard Nixon and his times. As previous reviewers have noted, this book is loaded with inaccuracies and poor research but of greatest importance, he misses (or miscasts) the central tragedy of that period and Nixon. Richard Nixon pursued the presidency as an idealist, believing in the purity of the presidency and his unique capabilities to straighten out our country and its position in the world. He inherited all of JFK's and LBJ's social programs and turmoil with their huge costs, an all-consuming Cold War in progress with the Soviet Union and China, a full-up hot war in Vietnam with nearly half a million troops 10,000 miles away and its costs, and a huge space program costing yet more. It was a political and fiscal train wreck that was almost beyond any one president's powers to rectify. Perlstein also glosses over the "antiwar" movement, focusing on immaterial areas like the hippies and the Socialist Worker's Party's "New Mobe" while completely missing or avoiding the direct connections of the US Communist Party, its umbrella People's Coalition for Peace and Justice and their direction of the schedules, sustainment, and "thrust" of nation wide pro-enemy activities. In Perstein's account, there isn't any mention of the continuous flow of activists travelling to Hanoi to meet with the enemy or the return flow of propaganda and guidance that came from the North Vietnamese. Nixon was rigidly opposed by the nation's media who held a complete monopoly on the information given to the people in those days as "news" and the law enforcement agencies watched mutely as treasons were committed and American lives lost. It's a shame. Nixon was a rare individual and he had enormous talents but the deck was stacked against him. Too bad Perlstein couldn't get past his own leftist biases to come up with a more accurate picture.

The book gives a detailed and insightful history of US politics 1955-1975, roughly the "Era of Nixon." Anyone who lived through those times, or anyone who is interested in the principal trends of American politics, will benefit from this analysis. It's really a very good book.

I thought it was going to be a visitors' guide to a new theme park.

Well, it was still really great anyway.

A sprawling, compulsively readable tale of a divided America spinning out of control over an unpopular, divisive war and civil rights and social justice issues. Perlstein argues that Richard Nixon helped end the consensus on Great Society liberalism, and divided America along lines that still divide her. Perlstein paints a picture of Richard Nixon as a brooding, jealous loner, filled with resentments against more privileged opponents like the Kennedys, but also a master demagogue and mass manipulator who achieved election to the Presidency by playing on emergent generational and racial divisions. Perlstein does a good job of weaving the distinctive music and culture of the 60s into the tale. Apparently hastily written in places, loose with some facts, and a bit repetitive at times (e.g., Perlstein seems enamored of the phrase 'soiling humiliation' when discussing Nixon trolling for votes), this is nonetheless a first-rate history of a turbulent era, the effects of which are still being felt today.

This 800 page tome is hardly something I'd expect to be written by an "historian," as in its attempt to relate basically every interesting anecdote in American society from between 1965 and 1972, proper sourcing seems to have fallen by the wayside. The inaccurate (there are copious examples given by other reviewers below), unsourced, or dubiously sourced (internet web pages, tabloid journalism a la Anthony Summers) "facts" and stories in this book are at least midly annoying and could serve to make other readers not find this book worth reading at all.

The author compounds this problem by making sensationalistic claims such as the tired rumor that candidate Nixon secrectly sabotaged the Vietnam peace talks in 1968 to ensure the war would not end before the election that year (and end to the Vietnam war before the election would obviously benefit the Democrats). However, when I went to the endnotes section to see what sources the author used for that claim -- there were none at all. As a work of "history," therefore, this book is deficient.

As a work of "pop culture" re-telling, however, this book is marvellous. The author has a certain fondness for purple prose (which might explain the over 800 page length of this book) but fills his work with vivid detail of the trends, music, drug use, racists, politicians, hippies, yippies, actors, and protesters of the era. Those that enjoy this book most will most likely be the non-academic younger reader who didn't live through this period themselves or those who can overlook the author's sometimes torturous prose and factual inaccuracies.

Perlstein is a scion of the 60s. Through reading a lot of newspapers and mining a lot of television, he has constructed an imaginary world called Nixonland. Nixonland, like Hobbitland, exists in the mind of the fabulist. Perlstein has also reconstructed, in this same manner, many of the events of the 50s and 60s in fascinating and often compelling narrative detail. As a popular history of these times, Nixonland is an exciting and sometimes fresh read. As a paradigm for understanding America in the postwar era, the concept of `Nixonland' is extremely limited. The limitations of the concept are readily apparent, for example, in the race narrative that Perlstein grapples with throughout the book.

To conclude, as Perlstein does, that Nixonland `has not ended yet' is true but meaningless. Nixonland indeed exists, but not in the way Perlstein imagines. In fact it is the imaginary place where the 60s go to die. It is the remote magic mountain nursing home for those unable or unwilling to recover from the past, where the patients live in the twilight of a rapidly fading era. Most of the kids today don't visit the nursing home, except occasionally on grandpa's birthday, when he tells them stories of cities burning, John and Yoko in bed for peace, and `radical' philosophy be-ins, but leaves out the part where he took acid and ran half-naked in the streets before becoming a lawyer and moving to the suburbs. Nixonland is the same kind of invented place as John Ford's American West.

Had Nixon never become president, the arc of his career would have still held some interest for historians, but he hardly invented the Orthogonians versus Franklins (Perlstein's rhubric) conflict, a theme that has been salient throughout American history. Nixon was one player in the postwar drama, and a fascinating one, skilled at exploiting social rifts for political gain, but hardly the master metallurgist forging a new social alloy. The subtitle of the book includes the phrase, `the fracturing of America'. It's hard to know what that means, especially after reading the book. Fractures, fissures, social conflict (think FDR and his `moneyed interests'), and violence have marked American life for centuries, driving the social dynamic of the country. Nixon is one variant of the venal, cynical, manipulative, and corrupt American politician. In this he has keen competition, including among those who achieved the presidency.

The book repays reading and one should anticipate with enthusiasm a further installment where Perlstein will presumably draw out the picture of a fractured America.

Rick Perlstein's new book, "Nixonland", appeals to two groups, I would suggest; those of us who grew up with Richard Nixon and those who missed him in real life, only to be assuaged by his legacy. On those two levels, the author has scored well...he's attracted both audiences.

As Franklin Roosevelt commanded the first half of the American twentieth century, Richard Nixon assumed the latter. Perlstein couches his book in "Franklin" and "Orthogonian" sides...the latter, from which, Nixon battled. It's a successful argument and one that reminds us that although the author grew up at a time after Nixon had faded from view, he has his temperature down to a tee.

"Nixonland" is brilliant and a book I highly recommend. This may be the year of Obama...or maybe the year of "anti-Bush". Yet Nixon set the stage for it all, and the parallels to the current administration bear witness to all that went before, as defined by President Nixon, himself.

I love this book. I hate this book. It is one of the best histories of post-'60s politics ever written. It is lousy with stupid factual errors that detract from its overall greatness. The writing at times soars; other times one must reread whole paragraphs to find the verb. Still, it was the book I grabbed every day to be entertained, amused, enlightened and only occasionally irked. It is a classic in search of a good editor and a corps of fact checkers.

The best thing about this book is Pearlstein's descriptions of key but forgotten moments of the mid sixties to early seventies American trainwreck. The grousing ex-Vice President Nixon gets a tongue-lashing from a fresh-faced Roger Ailes, McGovern only allow reporters to source his desire to jettison Thomas Eagleton as that of a senior McGovern aide and Jimmy Stewart sweats at the 1972 Republican convention podium because the air conditioning had been sabotaged. There are hundreds of brief but revealing portraits that convey a sense of real people caught up in a crazy time.

As history, his thesis seems a bit forced; these critical years formed our own times. While this maybe true, I wondered how much he left out in order to convey this belief. He doesn't build an argument idea by idea but image by image. In a sense, "Nixonland" plays out like a Michael Moore documentary, compelling, absorbing, immediate but a bit too clever and clear to be completely believable.

But it is a great read and for anyone who finds Nixon one of the most fascinating political characters of the 20th century, Pearlstein gives the man a grandeur, a desperation, an unhinged quality that feels right. He has the great insight that Nixon was truly popular, loved even. He wasn't just an actor conveying an appealing blandness that made him seem safe among the crazies like Lester Maddox or the charismatics like Bobby Kennedy or the overheated like Hubert Humphrey. Nixon got people to root for him as if he was their surrogate most tellingly by creating a club for all the outsiders not welcomed by the elites who called themselves the Franklins. He named the club the Orthogonians and used it as a platform to win his college's student body presidency. It was an approach he used again and again, marshalling the forces of mass resentments to ever more political power.

But there is one thing I found myself bothered by as I read the book. How can you explain the violence of that time? There was civil rights, the student protests, police brutality, the killings in Vietnam and none of it fit neatly together but gave the era a crazy, recklessness, sensibility but it was an energized society very different from the atomized culture of today that is refracted through flat screen TVs and computer monitors. Did that violence lead to exhaustion and a reaction that made subsequent generations dubious of angry expressions of radicalism? Dubious of all radicalism? Did that violence more than anything lead to the apathy of the present day where torture and denial of due process and wars waged without scrutiny are the legacy? I feel like this disturbing question which Pearlstein's vivid and detailed reporting raises, is more than he wants to tackle yet it seems to me to be central to understanding our times.

Perlstein intertwines an analytic history of Richard Nixon's political career with a description and analysis of the forces that tore asunder the broad-based consensus that seemed to have emerged with Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory in 1964. He presents a vast panorama of people and events, which are interesting in themselves and serve to elucidate both the upheavals that convulsed American society between 1965 and 1972 and the motives and character of one of the most complex political leaders of the twentieth century (a man who was repulsive, pathetic, and yet, in an odd way, appealing). Perlstein accomplishes all three functions that a historian should perform. He narrates what happened, provides plausible explanations, and enables the reader to relive it.
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.

Earlier this month the New York Times Book Review asked a wide range of American writers what books they would recommend to the then three remaining candidates for President of the United States. Suggested titles ranged from classical literature such as ANNA KARENINA to books on health care and economics. Conspicuous by its inclusion as one of the few contemporary books on American politics was NIXONLAND by Rick Perlstein. It is an epic recounting of the political era that spanned the final third of the 20th century and continues to leave its footprint on our nation's politics and the forthcoming presidential election.

Perlstein has become a respected historian of the post-World War II American political scene. In 2001 he authored BEFORE THE STORM: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. As the title reflects, the focus was on the 1964 election battle between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater. At the time, Johnson's landslide victory appeared to signal the beginning of a second New Deal era for American liberalism. But within one national election cycle, liberalism was on the wane and the movement nurtured by Goldwater seized control of American politics. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush would be the beneficiaries of the Goldwater movement. While Nixon's political career pre-dated the conservative movement, the political vacuum created by Goldwater's defeat also made possible Nixon's political rebirth.

The members of Nixon's political generation were the products of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Those experiences tempered their political philosophy and created a Republican Party that was forced to eschew economic policies identified with Herbert Hoover. Domestic politics was what elected Democrats, and Republicans were forced to become a party that built its foundation upon anti-communism. Nixon was a master at this game; using that platform he was elected first to the House of Representatives, then to the U.S. Senate and finally became Vice President. Narrowly defeated for President in 1960 by John F. Kennedy, he returned to California to seek the Governor's office in 1962. His defeat in that election resulted in his famous bitter concession when he lambasted the media and announced, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." Those words, however, were a lie, and he immediately began to plot his return to the national political stage.

But despite its title, NIXONLAND encompasses far more than the story of our 37th President. After the election of 1964, the cadre of voters who had previously been faithful supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal began to leave the party. Perlstein argues that white middle-class dissatisfaction with crime, civil rights and economic woes made Republicans out of a critical mass of Democrats. Nixon exploited that anger and political disenchantment with his "Southern Strategy" of 1968. Reagan and both President Bushes refined his work to cement a solid Republican political majority.

More than a book about politics, NIXONLAND is a brilliant narrative of the entire social, political and cultural history of an era that began with optimism after World War II and turned into post-war cynicism with Vietnam. The events of the '60s and '70s --- the politics, riots, wars and assassinations --- are detailed in an exquisite style.

Political upheavals such as the elections of 1912, 1932, 1964 and 1972 are often difficult to pinpoint with accuracy. Indeed, historians frequently must identify these cataclysmic events years after the fact. While Perlstein suggests that the political revolution detailed in NIXONLAND may remain with us for another generation, there are signs that he may be incorrect. It remains to be seen whether the election of 2008 between the hopeful politics of Barack Obama and the old politics of John McCain will emerge victorious. Perlstein will be ready to offer his analysis in a future political history, for which readers can be grateful.

--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman

Ok, Ok, we all know that Richard Nixon was a "boring" person & president- -- -he was a 1950s 1960s nerd of the first order, but why does Perlstein"s 800 + page book need to be as equally boring as the person he writes about? During the course of this book, we have a walk thru of every character, ever listed on the front page of the NY Times or WAJ during the 50's & 60's, taking up your reading time. That being said, there are some good sections in the book depending on what your political beliefs are - -- But, the book is so long and so tedious that one gets saturated with "era reports" rather than in depth data on Nixon! Perlstein also exacerbates the problem by not supplying dates for situations and events he discusses. The reader forgets where in Nixon's "Energizer Bunny" carrer they are as the story unfolds. I expected this book to be on the level of Eisenhower or John Adams, but alas, it fails all the tests --It should be prescribed by every MD nation wide for patients suffering from insomnia -- -it is a sure cure! What we have here is a 250 page story expanded to 800+ pages --

This book is just a terrific read. Almost every page has some shocking or outrageous detail: Nixon is bugging Kissinger, the Secretaries of State and Defense have to find out about administration policy by reading the newspapers, Mayor Daley is raiding McCarthy headquarters with police, hardhats are charging peaceniks during their lunch hours, the horrible killer Lt. Calley was getting 2000 letters of fan mail a day; it was probably the sickest, most dangerous era we've ever been through. Some pages had me laughing out loud about the endless insanity and corruption, some pages just shaking my head and thinking what a miracle it is that we came through that era with our democracy intact.

I lived through it but there is so much I have forgotten. I was at Washington University in the late 1960's but I forgot that they burned the ROTC down, twice, and I was in Chicago in 1968 but not in the battle zone. I do remember the horrible phone calls that filled the radio shows after the Kent State killings; the hatred people had for those who protested was unimaginable to me then and still is. One detail that the author doesn't mention is that one of those four innocent students killed at Kent State was an ROTC member and another was just a student going to class. But that didn't stop people from filling up the air waves with hatred or giving Lt. Calley, who murdered hundreds of innocent people in cold blood, a huge approval rating.

Can you imagine the president sponsoring and funding a burglary ring operating out the White House today? The burglaries actually achieved nothing, but the endless acts of sabotage of the campaigns of the Democrats in 1972, which made it almost impossible for them to present their message, were a hideous assault on our democracy. The ironic thing was that Nixon wanted to do so many other more drastic things to destroy his political opponents, like big time IRS audits, that even his criminal subordinates got cold feet.

In 1968 Nixon posed as a candidate with a plan for peace (like Eisenhower in 1952) while actually he was sabotaging the peace talks in Paris, telling the South Vietnamese to hold out and he'd get them a better deal. What I just can't understand is how the people could see their sons sent off to a senseless war for so many more years after it became clear that Nixon had no plan to end the war, and why people as a whole just stood by while literally hundreds of thousands of totally innocent civilians in Laos, Cambodia, North and South Vietnam were killed in senseless bombing.

The real theme of this book, as I see it, is what was wrong with us. How did we ever let a guy like this in the Presidency, let alone re-elect him? And why were we so intolerant and so filled with malice toward those who disagreed with us? Maybe it's no exaggeration to say that we owe our democracy today to a burglar on the White House payroll named McCord who was so inept that he taped the locks on the doors within the Watergate horizontally instead of vertically so that the security guard noticed the tape and called the police (who finally responded the second time).

The subject matter here is compelling, and Perlstein's initial thesis--Nixon's rise reflected a deep set of resentments running through the American policy--is interesting. Ultimately, however, the case is poorly made, and the book disappointing. The more you dig through Perlstein's resentments the more you end up with old-fashioned racism triggered by the civil rights movement. The book seems mostly a set of reviews of newspapers linked by purple prose. The work seriously needs a professional editor (What do "the danker corners of Nixon's mind" look like?). I fear this is an exemplar of future historical studies where the research is clipped from online resources: shallow theses knit together by sensationalistic text.

Rick Perlstein has written a groundbreaking book that fully assesses the significance of the Nixon years, and shows how those years shape the current times. Perlstein ressurects long forgotten anecdotes, and recounts them with urgency and excitement, creating a rollicking, fast moving, never boring chronicle of the times. More importantly, Perlstein shows how the Nixon years sparked the great "cultural divides" that still live with us today. If you want to read a fun, exciting history book, and if you want a greater understanding of our recent past and the times we live in now, click the Amazon link and get yourself a copy of Nixonland.

I understand the "Great Man' theory of politics...and how one can tag a particular person as shaping the events of his time. But for serious authors of history, trying to write the history of any one period around one 'Great Man' is not terribly effective.

This is a good solid history of the period. But Perlstien falls short when trying to attribute the tenor of the times and the massive political realignment to Nixon. Nixon didn't create the wave, he just rode it. He didn't break off working class and Southern whites from the Democratic Party, the New Deal coalition had already disintegrated. Almost any Republican candidate from that point forward could have harvested those votes. Nixon didn't create the divisions in America, the fracture was already wide and deep by the time he took office in January of '69.

So this is where the book falls flat. Trying to build a narrative around one man gives this book a mass-market feel rather than one of serious scholarly ambitions. Still well worth picking up as light reading, but does not capture the true nature of the forces at work during that time.

'Nixonland' is a good companion to The Ungovernable City

I found that too many times events were mentioned and the aftermath was surmised, but the actual event was never described. There were many assumptions made by the author that the person reading this book already knows the era.

Very interesting and important book for us over 50 that seek an explanation why the Western World became so quickly alient from year 2000 and onwards.

As a faithful reader of Digby's political bloc Hullabaloo, I was primed for "Nixonland" well before its release, and was not disappointed. If you like to wade more than knee-deep into the cultural history of a particular place and time, this is a great book to latch onto.

As a slightly narcissistic Baby Boomer, I am now obliged to insert myself into this review. I was a 12-year old paperboy when I had to get up at the crack of a rainy dawn to deliver our local newspaper's "Extra" announcing the foregone conclusion of Nixon's re-election. (My gloominess was somewhat offset by the fact that Republican Luther Hackett, who had been prominently depicted on TV and in the newspaper ads as being in the same room and chatting it up with Nixon, was roundly defeated for the Vermont governorship by the Democrat, Tom Salmon.) So, this book brought back some memories. (As fate would have it, our family was on vacation the first part of August 1974, so I didn't get to deliver the "Nixon Resigns" issue.)

Having never read much about the student revolts of the late Sixties, I was a bit surprised to learn just how violent and stupid they could sometimes be, which brings me to a better understanding of how easily Nixon, Agnew et al could exploit people's annoyance with (and fear of) them. Although Fox News has given "balance" a bad name, it's good to get a view of the 60s and 70s liberal vs. conservative divide that doesn't totally demonize one side or the other (and also has a convincing argument as to how it all came about). It doesn't hurt to have a historian who didn't actually live through all of these years, who can perhaps more easily take a sensible view of events.

Even though I think this book deserves five stars, I nonetheless can't resist a little carping. With the sheer volume of sources Rick Perlstein must have consulted, he may have understandably grown weary of the many words of uncritical praise for the martyred Robert Kennedy. This may explain why I don't recall reading a kind word about RFK in "Nixonland," nor anything particularly critical about his rival Eugene McCarthy, who has elsewhere been not so tenderly handled (perhaps by the same aforementioned praisers of RFK). And George McGovern is described twice as "pious as ever," which doesn't seem particularly fair to me. (Not surprising, though, considering McGovern was the only major party nominee in my lifetime so far whom I would ever have voted for enthusiastically.) And, although his name is spelled correctly elsewhere in the book, future printings would do well to eliminate the reference to "Jimmy" Hendrix.

Perlstein's first book, "Before the Storm," is inexplicably out of print and commanding high prices wherever copies of it are sold. I would recommend that book as well. If you can't afford the going price (approximately $98.00), there's probably a wonderful program at your local library called Inter-Library Loan.

Finally, I don't know if it's polite to do this, but I'd also recommend Bruce Miroff's recent book "The Liberals' Moment: The McGovern Insurgency and the Identity Crisis of the Democratic Party" for further insight on the '72 campaign.

This is perhaps the best history book I've ever read about the 60's. Rick Perlstein follows Nixon's career but most of the book is from 1964-1972. I was in college and during this time and Perlstein just nails the mood of the country during this time period. It always amazes me to remember how many historic events happened during these years. Perlstein helps to put it into a political perspective. Though he tends to lean toward the anti-Nixon side of that argument, I think, in general, he presents a fair case. Though Nixon did many great and good things in his life, he almost destroyed our country during his presidential reign. I think Perlstein somewhat misses how imperialistic Nixon was about the government he wanted. As bad as things may be during this Bush's administration (concerning our freedoms and rights), things were much worse during Nixon's terms. Anyone who wants to read a great history of this time period needs to read this book. The Vietnam war was raging, and so were the people. It was amazing how many of the same arguments for that war are being used today for the Iraq war. Apparently, the USA has troubles learning from its past.

When my father was alive, he used to love reading books by people like David Halberstam and Robert Caro because they wrote long, well-written, detailed works that were driven almost entirely by compelling narrative. Rick Perlstein has done this kind of book one-better. Nixonland is just as good as anything David Halberstam ever wrote, but it's also driven by an argument that's highly relevant to today's politics. Perlstein argues that Richard Nixon is the founder of modern attack politics, positive polarization is the way they described it back in the day. [That's positive in terms of the electoral fortunes of the Republican Party.] Perlstein doesn't make that argument explicitly until the very end, but you can see it coming a mile away and by the end of the book it's a very hard point to contest.

In order to make this argument, Perlstein has to do what some historians might deem impossible, examine Nixon without considering Watergate. "Impossible!," you say? Not if you cut off the story with the 1972 election. Of course, some of the stuff that eventually brought down the administration (like the Watergate break-in itself) makes it into the narrative, but Perlstein's focus is more on the political culture of 1964-72 than it is on Nixon himself. When you look at that culture closely as he does it's hard not to conclude that it's just as toxic (if not more so) than our own.

I've read some reviews of Nixonland here that complain about it being bogged down in trivia - That it all adds up to nothing. To make that argument is to miss the entire point of the book. Richard Nixon's political strategy, indeed the entire political strategy of the Republican Party since Nixon, has been to make mountains out of cultural mole hills in order to obscure the fact that Republican positions do not match the positions of the majority of American voters.

It also helped that Democrats often haplessly played their Republican-cast part of aloof elitists so well. Perlstein does not spare them the criticism they deserve. He even criticizes people who are often treated like sacred cows in democratic circles such as Robert Kennedy. Republicans who criticize Nixonland for partisanship haven't a leg to stand on.

By taking Watergate out of the Nixon administration, Perlstein has allowed us to see history as it unfolded rather than to read Watergate backwards. Unfortunately for Nixon lovers everywhere, this course of action makes it abundantly clear what an unpleasant, amoral, and divisive figure Richard Nixon was even before he betrayed the sacred trust of his high office.

Not a biography of Nixon so much as a history of the period, around 1965 to 1974. The book covers Vietnam, the civil rights movement, student demonstrations, etc, and the backlash to them, in particular, how Nixon used the backlash to win votes.

One of the primary tropes in this book is the division between Franklins and Orthogonians. When Nixon was in college he was denied admission to the Franklins - the main frat on campus. In response, he created a frat for the rest of the people called the Orthogonians. According to the book, Nixon used this division between the elite, ivy league, old money types, and the less fashionable, less educated, as a way to divide up the country. The silent majority vs. Columbia student protestors for example.

All in all this is a good, readable, occasionally glib, popular history of the period. The author seems reasonably objective though I suspect he would have been voting for McGovern.

As he did with his first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), popular historian Rick Perlstein has created a memorable portrait of a legendary political figure by exploring the culture of his subject's times. The author has chosen to focus on the years 1965 through 1972, capturing Nixon's phoenix-like rise from has-been to twice-elected President. It is a refreshing period for Perlstein to write about because the world was not exactly crying out for another book on Nixon's second term demise.

Nixonland is a great book for the political junkie who thinks he or she knows everything there is to know about the 37th President of the United States and the times in which he campaigned and governed. The wild ride of a description of the 1972 GOP Convention in Miami Beach, Florida is representative of some of the disparate facts Perlstein corrals into his entertaining and highly readable narrative. Who knew or who remembers that Stanley Livingston (who played the incredibly bland teen "Chip" on the long-running TV series "My Three Sons") pitched in for the Nixon cause? Or that police had sprayed so much Mace around the convention center that the air conditioning had to be turned off (which in turn caused Jimmy Stewart to sweat profusely when introducing a film on First Lady Pat Nixon)? Or that John Wayne introduced the campaign infomercial about the President?

The 1972 Convention chapter also contains an example of how Perlstein is able to reference earlier, pivotal events in his subject's career and convey the repetitive (and often cynical) nature of politics. The passage involves Nixon's rhetorical use of a war-orphaned 12-year-old Russian diarist named "Tanya" (she recounts in her diary her familial loss during WWII) in a Checkers-like speech that called fro a thaw in the Cold War.

Perlstein's ambitious and lengthy book (nearly 900 pages) has hundreds of characters and anecdotes that may well whet the reader's appetite to do more reading on some of the points that are only briefly touched upon. For example, it is intriguing to read about a young Karl Rove's induction into big time campaign work (With a mentor like Donald Segretti, is it any surprise that Mr. Rove wound up going so far in Republican politics?). And Perlstein's description of the curative powers of Up with People! (the peppy, patriotic and youthful singing battalion) as sourced from a 1967 Reader's Digest article is strange enough to make one want to go to the public library and read the original article (in it a Watts rioter who saw an Up with People! show was so moved by their inspiring message that he tried to make amends for his looting crimes). And are just a couple of examples from many. The point is that while much of Perlstein's book may be derived from secondary sources, he has an undeniable knack for choosing details that truly enliven the history that he is writing about. His writing style is engaging and often so observationally humorous that it elicited chuckles from this reviewer. However, there are other times where a too-cute-by-half reference prompts groans (one Buffalo Springfield song title invocation is especially painful). But on the whole, Nixonland is a welcome and unique addition to the Nixon bibliography and one well worth reading for pleasure or for serious study.

By the way, the headline blurb for this review ("Happiness is Nixon") comes from one of the campaign buttons found at the 1972 Republican Convention that Perlstein describes in the book. Other souvenir buttons from '72 included "Nixon is Love" and "Nixon Cares." There was also a McGovern boxing figure accessorized with a white flag of surrender on sale at the convention hall. Was this Rove's idea?

With another presidential election upon us, it is useful to look at past elections and learn both the mistakes and successes of prior elections. Rick Perlstein's Nixonland does just that, offering a glimpse at the United States between 1965 and 1972 that to many readers will be simultaneously alien and familiar.

The hero of this book, as the title indicates, is Richard Nixon, but he is only a hero the way Shakespeare's Richard III is a hero: both Richards are diabolical schemers who stop at nothing to achieve power. The analogy is imperfect, though; while the English king would reign only a couple of years and would bring about a new dynasty of his rivals, Nixon would merely represent the beginning of a Republican regime that continues to this day.

The key thing with Nixon, according to Perlstein, is his political cunning and his mastery of dirty tricks. Of course Nixon was hardly alone at doing this (plenty of examples could be made for both parties), but Nixon had a no-holds-barred nastiness that would become a centerpiece of Republican campaigning.

From 1932 to 1964, the Democrats dominated presidential politics, a power base that resulted from the failings of Herbert Hoover during the Depression. For the Republicans, the only triumph - Eisenhower - was an exceptional case, a relatively apolitical candidate whose popularity stemmed from his war record. Otherwise, the Republicans would fail over and over, occasionally snatching defeat from the jaws of victory (most notably with Dewey's loss to Truman in 1948). In the mid-1960s, as Perlstein's book begins, Lyndon Johnson is another Herbert Hoover, unable to contend with the crises related to Vietnam.

Nixon would take advantage of the failings of the left and would start a string of strong Republican campaigns that only Bill Clinton could beat (I don't count Carter who barely squeaked by even with the advantages of Watergate and a non-elected incumbent opponent). The book chronicles how this transformation took place by showing the political and social landscape in which it evolved. It was a time when blatantly racist politicians could rise to national prominence and "law-and-order" was often just code for allowing segregation and stopping protestors. Nixon - power-hungry and paranoid - would even use the instruments of government to spy on, harass and even arrest his opponents. Unfortunately, these opponents may have been on the side of the angels, but they were politically inept, as most disastrously seen in George McGovern's presidential campaign.

Although critical of both sides, it is also apparent that Perlstein leans a bit to the left. Most Republicans and other conservatives in Nixonland are true villains, including Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace and Spiro Agnew. Democrats and other liberals are portrayed as incompetents, unable to deal with the various dirty tricks (innuendos, sabotage, etc.) that the Republicans would throw at them or counteract them with dirty tricks of their own.

It's a legacy that continues to this day, which is one reason the world of Nixonland is so familiar. So are some of the lies of that past era, such as being against the war (or even questioning it) is being somehow anti-American. On the plus side, while racism does still exist today, at least it has been toned down compared to this volatile era. And if you do have progressive views, you can take heart that George W. Bush (based on polling numbers and his own lackluster performance in crises) may well be the next Hoover or Johnson, able to swing the pendulum back to the Democrats.

Perlstein's book is a long read (750 pages of text plus copious notes) and not always a quick one, and he has a tendency to get a little too relaxed in his style at times, but overall, this is a good book. Even if you don't agree with his slant, this is still a informative book that brings to life an era that was not very long ago, but still is quite different from our own.

This is a fascinating book. However, I quickly noticed that when I would check the notes for the source of some especially outrageous comment, it was absent. This applied mostly to snipes about Nixon, but was also true about other people (across the political spectrum) and many events. There is plenty to dislike about Nixon that can be supported by facts, but Perlstein slathers on snide remarks throughout the book that are personal and unsubstantiated. A fascinating book, yes, but not a "history book" that should be relied upon for a true examination of Nixon and the events surrounding him.

A lot has been written over the past week about Barack Obama's historic run for the presidency, and Hillary Clinton's historic near-run, and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy 40 years ago, and the general consensus seems to be that we are living in historic times, and that this coming election year is shaping up as one of those watershed-type moments in our history---like 1968, or 1932, or 1876---when the nation finds itself at a kind of directional crossroads and confronted by two radically divergent visions of the nation's future, where the choices we make at the polls this time around could affect the political landscape, in many profound ways, for decades to come.

It's a little ironic, then, that I've been ploughing through this way cool book the past few days as it revolves around the pivotal '68 election and the rise of the modern conservative dialectic that has dominated our national politics from the end of the 1960s to the present day. It is a sobering yet fascinating invocation of an inchoate and messy time of mass discontent in the midst of mass prosperity, with lessons to ponder for the present day, and with sparkling insights and novel interpretations for the reader to digest in every chapter.

Not a lot of people come out of Nixonland looking very good. Gene McCarthy emerges as cold, aloof, a single-issue candidate more interested in poetry than politics. Robert Kennedy appears as a polarizing opportunist who, Perlstein strongly implies (using statistical polling data), would likely have lost the '68 election in a landslide had he lived to secure the Democratic nomination. Hubert Humphrey is an insincere groveler, Nelson Rockefeller a Kissingerian double-dealer, Ronald Reagan a narcissistic martinet, and Richard Daley an American Brezhnev. (Perlstein reminds us that Soviet tanks were rolling through Prague at the same time the Chicago police were committing mass muggings in Grant Park at the '68 convention.) And the sins of the usual peripheral wingnuts---the Lester Maddoxes, the George Wallaces, the Max Raffertys---are all revisited in detail, and they are as horrifying as ever to recall.

But a great many folks on the antiwar left, too, are depicted in less-then-flattering terms: Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, and the SDS and Black Panthers in general all come in for some pretty harsh criticism---in Perlstein's estimation, much of their rhetoric and actions in the run-up to the '68 convention were at best examples of immature delinquency, at worst cases of outright thuggery, and needlessly provocative as a rule---and given the wisdom of 40 years' hindsight, it is hard to argue that a great deal of this criticism isn't richly deserved.

And this calls into focus the uniqueness of Nixonland---it's the first detailed history of American politics in the 1960s that I am aware of to be written by someone who was born after its most formative events took place. To the new generation of historians like Rick Perlstein (b. 1969), it's probably a lot easier to wax less subjectively about this mercurial era in our history than folks like myself who actually lived through all this trauamatizing insanity---to create a work of genuinely objective history, in other words, rather than a narrative that's been artificially flavored by the faulty filter of living memory.

Who comes out looking good in Nixonland? George Romney, for one, though his penchant for speaking his mind to the voters renders him quickly radioactive to the national GOP. George McGovern is depicted as a thoughtful and compassionate man whose '72 campaign team is overpopulated by idealistic numbskulls. And Martin Luther King, preaching nonviolence to the end, is seen in Nixonland as a lonely man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, his voice drowned out by the growing number of militants in his own movement.

Above it all is Nixon himself---at turns ruthless, cruel, cynical, depressed and self-abnegating---but always possessed of a chess player's mind, thinking several moves ahead of his opponents and even his would-be supporters. Given the overall scoundelry of the majority of Nixonland's varied cast of characters, one almost---repeat, almost---becomes sympathetic to the man over the course of the book, for no other reason than this: as Perlstein tells it, he was the flat-out smartest guy in the room, who outguessed, outwitted and simply out-hustled everyone else to the presidency in '68. The fact that he was willing to exploit racist sentiment to rip the nation asunder in the process---well, hey, that's politics, right?

Which brings up my last point: the startling theme that's crucial to Nixonland's narrative is that the defining political issue in America during the 1960s was not Vietnam, as commonly assumed, but race relations---specifically, the white backlash against equal-access and open-housing laws that laid the blueprint for the political realignment that Dick Nixon and his gunsels, such as Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips, helped to construct. The war did play a contributing role to the ascent of Movement Conservatism, as Perlstein sees it, but more though the antiwar movement it engendered and the excesses of the countercultural left---and the right's Kulturkampf against it, which continues to this day---that followed. It's no accident that the book starts with the Watts riots---which, Perlstein reminds us, occurred only a few days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Whether you agree with his thesis or not, you will want to read this magisterial work---it's one of the most engaging and thought-provoking of its kind I've ever come across.

"Nixonland" is the second part of a large project by Perlstein to describe the rise of modern conservatism. This project is extremely important, especially for those on the left, in that it presents a counter narrative to the accepted history of the era. For many liberals, the 1960's were a time of ascendancy. The Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the rise of feminism, etc. have tended be portrayed in a triumphal light by many commentators. It was, for many, an era of progress. What Perlstein reminds us, however, is that this "progress" was not universally accepted or agreed upon. This was also an era of resentment and reaction. It is this backlash, and the politics it created, that is the focus of this work.

To get a sense of the political trajectory that is traveled, Perlstein bookends his study with two of the most lopsided elections in American history--1964 and 1972--and asks a simple question: How could a country that had first given Lyndon Johnson such a massive victory turn around and give Richard Nixon an even larger win eight years later? How could the country have swung so dramatically in such a short period of time?

The answer to this question, it seems, is that both of these victories were largely delivered by the same group of people. It is this group of people that are at the heart of Perlstein's work. In short, this turbulent period is defined not by who we would normally think of--the protesters, the rioters, the hippies, the baby boomer youth, the New Left--but rather by what Nixon identified as the "Silent Majority." These were the millions of Americans who were, for the most part, most of the time, apolitical. They were working and middle class, and as such had an interest in stability, predictability, and order. They were the great center of the American electorate. As the 1960's unfolds we see this group move perceptibly rightward in much of their voting.

For this to happen, however, something had to change in the American political system. While the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, and other events certainly propelled this shift, I think that all of these were in many ways the product of a much larger systemic change beginning during this period. As I was finishing "Nixonland" and trying to put it into perspective, I came to conclude that the book is not just a story of the rise of conservatism, but perhaps more so it is the story of the collapse of New Deal Liberalism. One book that I came across several times in graduate school is Stephen Skowronek's The Politics Presidents Make" In it, Skowronek argues that American history is characterized by periods of "political time." By this, he means that politics at any given time is defined by a particular "regime"--namely a dominant coalition of interests, ideas, actors, and ideology. Over time, these regimes rise or decline in acceptance as they are more or less successful in solving problems and managing the emerging conflicts in society. Presidents are situated differently to these regimes and are sometimes, though rarely, able to replace one regime with another, or re-order the nature of politics. FDR is the classic example here. With the Depression, the old regime was in disarray and FDR was able to assume power and institute a new governing philosophy with the support of a newly organized coalition of supporters and ideas. It is this regime--New Deal Liberalism--that LBJ inherits some thirty years later. However, by the 1960's, the ability of this Liberalism to manage the issues of the day is in doubt. As Skowronek explains, presidents like LBJ who seek to expand upon a regime and put their own stamp upon it are oftentimes unsuccessful. They try to do too much, they overreach, and the regime is subject to collapse. This is what we see in "Nixonland." What the Great Society, the war in Vietnam, and the other policies pushed by Johnson do, in short, is create an unrealistic set of expectations among the public. When these expectations are inevitably not met, backlash is not far away. When this backlash is ripe, members of the dominant regime begin to turn on one another, setting the stage for the realignment of political and voting coalitions.

So, whereas the 1964 landslide is brought about through the votes of the older parts of the New Deal coalition (unions, farmers, urban whites) and newer groups (African Americans, the youth), by the late `60's and early `70's these groups are splintering and turning on one another. While the newer members of the coalition are in the process of becoming more radicalized--the rise of Black Power, the balkanization of the anti-war movement, the emerging gay rights movement--those older members of the coalition feel abandoned and thus begin to gravitate rightward. This backlash is fueled by the inability of the old regime to solve the problems of the day. As crime and urban disorder become the top issue of concern to American voters, Liberalism provided no answer or solution. Another great discussion of this, parenthetically, focusing on New York, is provided by Vincent Cannato in "The Ungovernable City" a biography of John Lindsay.

As this process unfolds, Richard Nixon rises to pick up the pieces. Throughout the book, Perlstein uses Nixon as a lens through which to view the period. Nixon, he argues, is just like those groups who feel abandoned or left behind. Throughout his life, he felt constantly slighted, underestimated, and condescended to. Thus, his political genius was his ability to read the mood of that great mass of Americans who simply wanted to return to a politics and a way of life they felt was under siege: "This was something Richard Nixon, with his gift for looking below social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath, understood: the future belonged to the politician who could tap the ambivalence--the nameless dread, the urge to make it all go away; to make the world placid again, not a cacophonous mess" He uses the New Left as a foil, mocking their "pseudo-intellectualism" as opposed to his, and the Silent Majority's solid values and patriotism.

While the story of "Nixonland," as I argued above, seems to be more about the collapse of Liberalism, it is not necessarily the story of the final triumph of Conservatism. Rather, this is a period where things fall apart without necessarily being rebuilt. It would take Reagan (and this would seem to be where Perlstein will go next) to accomplish this. The Nixon we get in this history is one that is not terribly ideological and without a fixed governing philosophy. In fact, in domestic affairs he accepts many of the liberal assumptions and policies. Furthermore, if we look at other elections during the period, we see a Liberalism that still has some life in it. While Nixon is elected in 1968 and re-elected in 1972, he has no noticeable coattails in congressional elections. The Democrats maintain large majorities in both chambers of Congress and gain seats in the 1970 midterm. So while the Silent Majority was beginning a process of moving rightward, they hadn't moved wholesale yet. What John and I have spent a lot of time looking at on this site is where these voters ended up.

There seem to be several lessons that can be drawn from Perlstein's work, especially for those on the left. The first of these is the danger of overreach. What we saw under Johnson, it seems, was an overestimation of the country's appetite for massive change. Here, I'm reminded of my great professor at UW-Madison, Charles O. Jones. In his writings on policy making and the presidency, he always warned against what many call "the myth of the mandate." Essentially, big electoral victories tend to be interpreted as a sign that voters are in agreement upon a wholesale policy agenda. The reality, Jones always taught, was that voters vote for candidates for a variety of reasons, many not connected to policy at all. When presidents act as if they have a clear mandate, they set themselves up for failure. Thus, we might look at this turbulent period and ask whether, in the future, a more "humble" or "incremental" approach to governing is warranted, lest we risk the fracturing and backlash that Perlstein describes.

A second lesson I would draw from this story is the need to avoid the temptation of ideological self-righteousness and self-absorption. The great value of Perlstein's project is that he, as a progressive, is willing to look critically at the left. This period gives him plenty of fertile ground to explore. The fact of the matter is that many of the people he describes (and who have been lionized in many histories of the 60's) would seem to have been pretty insufferable to deal with. The ultimate failure of people like Jerry Rubin, Mark Rudd, Bobby Seale,and others was not so much that their positions were wrong, but that their tactics made them easy targets for the forces mobilizing on the right. What was lacking among those on the left--and this may have been a function of a Liberalism in decline--was anyone of stature who could put the brakes on the process that was unfolding. The irony of this is that as the war dragged on, and as Perlstein describes, more and more members of the "Silent Majority" were being drawn to the anti-war movement. Had the leadership of this movement been less dogmatic and less confrontational early on, they perhaps might have had more success.

Aside from the main themes just described, there were some sections and topics that I found particularly interesting. First was his discussion of how Nixon was able to implement the "southern strategy." Here, the role of Strom Thurmond was instrumental. While I had originally read about this before, I think in "The Making of the President 1968," Perlstein describes the relationship between Thurmond and Nixon in much greater detail. We see how these two were able to court each other and ensure that each's interests were being served. With the Wallace vote threatening to keep the White House in the Democrats' hands, Nixon was able to convince Thurmond (on issues like busing, school desegregation, etc.) that he would embrace state's rights and strict constructionism. With Thurmond's blessing (and signals to other southern leaders and voters), Nixon was able to win enough of the south, including Thurmond's South Carolina, to capture the presidency.

A second section I particularly enjoyed was his narrative on how Watergate came about. When thinking about this scandal, the conclusion that many draw is that Nixon's dirty tricks campaign was unnecessary. The fault of this analysis, it seems, is that we tend to view Watergate with the hindsight of knowing how the 1972 election turned out. In other words, why would a president who won 49 states need to break into the Democratic headquarters as part of a systematic process of infiltrating his opposition? What Perlstein gives us is, I think, is more of the answer than we've gotten before. What we see is that going into the 1972 election, Nixon's victory was anything but assured. His level of popularity fluctuated. Opposition to the war was growing. So after the 1970 midterms, Nixon's fear of holding the White House intensified and reached a level of paranoia. It was out of this context that Watergate was spawned.

Finally, I've long felt that the period of the civil rights movement that has been understudied is the time when the movement came north. As Martin Luther King concluded that issues of race and poverty couldn't be disentangled, not only did answers and solutions become much more elusive, but the collision of the movement with the entrenched segregation of blacks in northern cities became inevitable and tragic. Thus, we have large scale riots in dozens of northern cities (Newark, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland) and we are able to see how the reaction and backlash among many whites played out. So, in places like Cicero, Illinois, we see the large story that runs throughout "Nixonland" played out on a small scale. It was here that I found myself less certain about the culpability of those on the left for the backlash that emerged on the right. While its easier to question the tactics of those opposing the war, I find myself unable to say that confronting the poverty, segregation, and discrimination that existed in these cities head on was ill adivsed. It is perhaps because of the intractability of these issues that race continues to be the one cleavage described in "Nixonland" that endures stronger than the others to this day.

Nixonland is Rick Perlstein's follow-up to "Before the Storm", which focused largely on Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign. Though I preferred Perlstein's earlier book this one is pretty damn good. I was born in the 1980s and thus have no first-hand knowledge of what was going on in the 60s and early 70s. Perlstein does a very good job at drawing a vivid portrait of the state of the union at that period. After reading this book, I felt like I had learned a thing or two about why things happened the way they did--why the backlash against civil rights came about, why conservatism reemerged as it did after Goldwater's disastrous campaign, why Nixon managed to become so popular and how he helped define the political landscape.

The book doesn't quite manage the cohesion of its predecessor, though Nixonland manages to paint an accurate and messy picture of America during the Nixon era. It's quite readable, and the detail on display here is impressive.

After almost a month, I finally finished reading Nixonland last Thursday. It's truly a remarkable book.

For starters, I never learned about this stuff in school -- not in American history or civics during high school, or during any of the political science courses I took during college (granted, the WNMU courses weren't geared that way, but still). Yeah, the major stuff was covered: it's kind of hard to skip the Kennedy and King assasinations, Vietnam, McCarthyism, and Watergate. However, while I've picked up a lot of the themes over the years, never before have I had such an excellent resource on the era. Rick Perlstein lays it all out in meticulous detail, but in a narrative so lively you don't want to stop reading.

The book is 748 pages long, and aside from some time on the beach I read it exclusively during my 45-minute commute: first on the bus, then on the blue-line train. Often, I just kept it out for the 7-block walk to the office, reading while avoiding pedestrians and traffic. It was that good.

Nixon is the plot device Perlstein uses to explore the radicalization of the left and the backlash of the right; the lies used to sell an unpopular war; and the racial tensions that led to riots and the rise of the Southern Strategy. The story is about so much more than Nixon, but he's inexorably the focus: he played such a role in shaping the debates of that time (and today) that you can't tell the story but through the Nixon lens.

The parallels between that generation and my own are stark yet unsurprising: the political forces have remained unchanged, while the players may have changed. Still, familiar names (especially on the GOP side) like Pat Buchanan, Karl Rove, and George Bush are spread throughout the tome.

Though I kept reading about the origins of todays political debates, I finished the book thinking the next generation will have moved past them. So many of my personal and professional relationships are completely online: I've never met these friends and colleagues, and yet my "collected life" is but a foreshadowing of those being built by teenagers across the country. Perhaps I'm being naive, but I think things like race will play less of a role in the future as more people interact over new media.

I might have more on this later, but for now, take my word on it: read Nixonland. You'll come away from it with a better understanding of our history, and why today's political conversations are framed the way they are.

Perlstein uses the rise of Richard Nixon as a way of illustrating the rise of modern Republicanism, with its populist themes, often faux populist policies, and its relentless negativity. None of these things were invented by Nixon, his circle, or the GOP, but he certainly provided a vehicle for making them central to Republican power since the 1960s. Although Nixon is the central figure of the book, Perlstein also provides a narrative that describes what happened to the Democrats and how they came to fall out of power, even as a majority of voters tended to endorse the majority of their positions.

The book is not a full scale biography of Nixon and some sections show obvious signs of editing which probably excised details that would be important to people not familiar with Nixon's life or major events of the 1960s. The book also relies a lot on secondary sourcing and could have used more aggressive fact checking on key details (e.g., Hugh Scott did not represent Ohio, Wayne Hays was not from Cleveland and, most embarrassingly for a resident of Chicago's South Side like Perlstein, the Dan Ryan Expressway goes no where near the West Side. Perlstein also goes with less credible accounts of Eisenhower's decision to place Nixon on the ticket (Eisenhower wanted Earl Warren) and the sweep of Eisenhower's disdainful treatment of his vice president (e.g., waiting until the last minute to endorse him in 1960) is not fully developed. The phoniness of Nixon's striving also gets a bit lost. Nixon was a poor relation (his mother's family were the local gentry), but never knew real poverty--unlike Lyndon Johnson, who shared many of Nixon's grievances about the world, or George McGovern whose view of life was more optimistic than that of Nixon or Johnson.

The book's these is built around drawing distinctions between the Franklins (the privileged people of ease, people not unlike Nixon's mother's family) and the Orthogonians (strivers, people w/o privilege). These two groups were names of social clubs at Whittier College in Nixon's day. Nixon is credited with organizing the Orthogonians, although some historical accounts suggest the group was already in existence when Nixon came to college. Perlstein notes how Nixon tended to view people in terms of whether they fit one or the other of theses clusters throughout his life and how he built his political appeal around identifying with the Orthogonians (and carefully concealing his admiration for and financing by the Franklins).

Nixon, of course, is not the only Orthogonian president we've had---Truman and Johnson come to mind (and only get eliptical recognition, as such, in the book). The current George Bush would like to see himself in that mold and many would put Jimmy Carter in that category, as well. While this is helpful in seeing Nixon's world view and the construction of various populist appeals within the GOP, Perlstein misses some of the important subtleties of the Orthogonians. For one thing, there are earnest Orthogonians (McGovern, Carter) and people like Nixon (or Johnson). Some people strive, while others embellish and cut corners along the way and both kinds of Orthogoninas thrive with sponsorship. Nixon and, especially, Johnson made much of slim war records, neither could be considered "clean campaigners", and both had less than honest retainers and sponsors. Nixon also tended to embellish his Orthogonian credentials, as in the exaggeration of his childhood "poverty". Another is that while people may identify with the struggles of an Orthogonian leader, their appeal is easily lost, and the public seems to abandon them pretty readily. Perlstein's repeated looks at Nixon's popularity suggest that much of Nixon's peak support was soft and a glimpse at history would suggest that the most Orthogonian figures in the presidency seem to be the ones whose support evaporated the most readily (Truman, John, Nixon, Carter, and Bush II), perhaps because their pettiness showed through easily or because strivers have more difficulty in providing inspiration, especially when they have the many character flaws embodied by Nixon (social awkwardness, paranoia, etc.). People may have liked Nixon, in a pitying way, but he never inspired the kind of admiration or inspiration of Franklin's like John Kennedy or Franklin Roosevelt. Nixon's genius was attracting likeminded people who have continued to stage manage GOP campaigns into the present and helping to construct the narratives that proved so successful for them. OTOH, he lacks a legacy in terms of a mass movement of admirers or even hagiographers. The more earnest Orthogonian seems more capable of redemption, as in the case of Jimmy Carter, but it has required decades of painstaking work to accomplish this (or the earnest efforts of historians, as in the case of Truman's redemption), as opposed to the ease with which a Kennedy could inspire.

The book will dishearten liberals with rose colored eyes toward the 60s (or a lack of first hand experience of that era). The sheer political ineptitude of George McGovern is on full display, along with the shortsighted worldviews of the people who came to cluster around him. The pathetic, if zany, state of the New Left in 1972 is another problem for liberals, along with the lack along with the lack a real vision of how the disorder of the era affected the general public. Even so, Perlstein has difficulty pulling the strands of his book together and, instead, it ends in a rather clumsy, blunt way. Part of the problem is George McGovern. He was, if anything, as Orthoganian as Nixon and a far more decent, modest man. Also, it's apparent that if the Democratic "Orthogonians" such as Richard Daley or George Meaney had had their way, the candidate would have been someone like Hubert Humphrey (presented in all his hammy desperation), who easily could have lost to Nixon by a decisive margin. Moreover, despite their disarray at the national level, the Democrats were far from dead closer to the grassroots and the GOP had its own problems--Nixon had virtually no coattails in 1972. Another problem is that Perlstein fails to identify how the great mass movements of the early 70s--the environmental movement and the women's movement cut themselves off from their own receptive mass constituencies and became increasingly Franklin-like, a perspective that would have helped his overall thesis and provided a better prelude to the Reagan years. The women's movement quickly turned to intramural politics and abortion rather than economic issues, while the environmental movement became a captive of earnest college types who had little appreciation of how to confront the obvious environmental hazards experienced by less well off Americans. Perlstein also tends to exaggerate the appeal of Nixon to union members (as part of an obvious build up to a future book on Reagan which I'm sure will talk about "Reagan Democrats") and fails to put George Meany's role in the '72 election in context. Meany was able to exercise more power than in the past (or future) because of the then-recent death of progressive United Auto Workers' president, Walter Reuther, who had been close to many liberal politicians. Meany had long been viewed as a cretin by many trade unionists, but he had achieved significant power at the AFL-CIO despite never having spent much time on the shopfloor; like Nixon he was a corner cutting, nasty Orthogonian. In contrast, rank and file unionists have proven to be less likely to vote Republican than other parts of the stereotyped "Reagan Democrat" demographic.

Like Perlstein's Goldwater book, this one makes clear that the current Conservative movement is very much the product of people now entering their twilight years. Implicitly, this also makes clear that no figures of comparable intellectual or organizational imagination is in positions to take their place. Nixon saw himself as basically a center-right politician and despite occasional use of the term conservative to describe his outlook, he was far too pragmatic and utilitarian to be a movement conservative, although his authoritarianism would fit well with contemporary conservative postures. Nixon actually feared the Right (something which Perlstein misses) and viewed movement conservatives with the same withering eye as he did liberals, although he lacked the obsessions about the Right that haunted him with respect to liberals.

Nixonland is a flawed by factual innacuracies and poor editing. For example, I was on the UC Berkeley campus during the People"s Park protests when a helicopter gassed the campus. There were not several helicopters, just one. And it didn't swoop down on the protestors. It flew in front of Barrows Hall where I was alone on the ninth floor balcony. It released tear gas right in front of me; I was the closest person to it. I also have studied the shooting of the Black Panther Bobby Hutton and I find the details in the book at variance with the most objective accounts. The book also has spelling and grammatical errors that should have been caught by a competent editor. I intend to put this book in its proper place: the garbage.

Rick Perlstein has exhaustively researched and written a magnificent book, and his extremely thorough look back at the zeitgeist of the era of Richard Nixon should be read by any American of my age group (AARP eligible), or, for that matter, by Americans younger than I am.

Mr. Perlstein may get an ulcer when he reads this, but I was completely engrossed in Nixonland because I admire and worship Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Ronald Reagan to this day.

I was in junior high school and high school during the events of Nixonland.

Richard Nixon saved America for us today, and Spiro Agnew articulated the concerns of people like me (I had an Agnew wristwatch in 1970, only to lose it along the way of life) and I couldn't have cared less about the filthy Communist-ispired hippies who were killed at Kent State, antagonizing the National Guard, after they had burned the ROTC building, when I was in the 11th grade in California. The destabilizing efforts of those flakes was alien to me.

I worked in Ronald Reagan's 1970 gubernatorial campaign, when he thrashed the vile hypocrite Democrat, Jesse Unruh, who had destroyed my mother, a teacher at USC.

Nixon, Reagan, and Agnew spoke for me, a 16-year old with no economic or family certainty. (I lived in foster homes, then a home for boys, after Unruh had ruined my mom.) Once President Nixon signed the 26th Amendment, I petitioned Superior Court for my emancipation. It was granted, and have been on my own ever since.

The so-called "liberal" Democrats of the Sixties were unexemplary. They held out nothing for me, a simple Caucasian on his own.

But Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Spiro Agnew: they held our country stable against the violent threats of many angry, spoiled, entitled middle-class elitist pukes.

Friends: go out and buy Nixonland. It is a terrific book, If you are like me, you will be impervious to any suggested opinion. Mr. Perlstein is a pro, and he is not a polemicist. He is a scholar.

Rick Perlstein has exhaustively researched and written a magnificent book, and his extremely thorough look back at the zeitgeist of the era of Richard Nixon should be read by any American of my age group (AARP eligible), or, for that matter, by Americans younger than I am.

Mr. Perlstein may get an ulcer when he reads this, but I was completely engrossed in Nixonland because I admire and worship Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and Ronald Reagan to this day. <