Nixonland

Rick Perlstein, in his book Nixonland, asks a seemingly simple question: In 1964, the Democratic Party, behind Lyndon Johnson, trounced the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, with a sixty-percent majority. Just eight years later, Richard Nixon, the Republican, won a similar landslide against the Democratic candidate, George McGovern. In between, what happened?

The book, subtitled The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, has a couple of answers. One of them is of course the remarkable comeback of Nixon, who after losing the '62 California governor's race famously said to the press that they wouldn't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore. How wrong he was. He spent a few years in the wilderness and overcame the image of a loser to come back to win the 1968 nomination and then a close election. Perlstein, who is a liberal, can't help but respect the man, and carefully documents his political genius.

The other reasons for the shift in the political culture had to do with perhaps too much success by the Democrats. Passage of the Civil Rights bill led to ramped up demands by African-Americans, many of whom responded with violence. As the civil rights struggle moved to the Northern cities, riots became a way of life during the long hot summers. Watts, Cleveland, Detroit, and Newark nearly burned to the ground, and the police were often criminal in killing the innocent as well as the guilty. Black leaders like Stokely Carmichael called for an armed black resistance. White America got scared.

Perlstein begins the book with a brief biography of Nixon, the most psychoanalyzed president in U.S. history. He was an unlikely leader, as he was essentially unlikeable. Perlstein uses a theme that started for Nixon at Whittier College. A club called the Franklins consisted of the well-moneyed swells who had their whole lives laid before them, while Nixon started an alternative society called the Orthogonians, which were the kids from modest backgrounds who had to work for what they got. No one personified the Franklins like the Kennedy family, who were Nixon's bete noirs his entire career.

Then the book takes a chronological path through the U.S. from 1965 to 1972. We start with the Watts riots, and Martin Luther King's attempts to integrate Northern cities like Chicago, where white children sang racist jingles while jump-roping. "Chicago could teach Mississippi how to hate," said King. Meanwhile the Vietnam War continued to rage, and eventually the public would begin to sour on it, with LBJ taking the blame.

By the time 1968 rolled around, LBJ would abdicate, Nixon would vanquish Rockefeller and Reagan, and the stage was set for the most tumultuous election in U.S. history. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey got the Democratic nomination despite not winning one single primary, enraging the liberal factions of the country, leading to the riot in Chicago. I've read about the Chicago convention for years, and while Perlstein's depiction is by necessity brief, it's vivid. Every time I read about Abraham Ribicoff, from the podium of the convention, condemning the "Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago," I get chills. Perlstein, citing lip-readers, gives us Mayor Daley's response: "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home." When the dust settled in November, Nixon was president. As Perlstein writes, "The boy who'd spent his childhood cloistered in a tower reading, who hated to ride the school bus because he thought the other children smelled bad, the feral junior debater, this founder of fraternal societies for the decidedly unfraternal, would, come January 20, be the leader of the free world."

Nixon's first term would have peaks and valleys, but he stabilized things in 1971 with a speech in which he gave a name to his supporters--the Silent Majority, the hard-working white Americans who didn't take to the streets and protest. This was the contrast with the counter-culture, which were outraging normal folks. To be sure, a lot of hippie and yippie behavior was immature and naive, and ended up setting back the cause a lot farther than they realized.

If the '68 election, with assassinations and riots, was a Greek tragedy, the '72 election was absurdist like a play by Ionesco. A lot of this had to do with Nixon's dirty tricksters of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, Gordon Liddy, Donald Segretti, and others, who sabotaged the front-runners of the Democrats like Edmund Muskie so that George McGovern, a calm prairie liberal, would win (and would most easily lose to Nixon). Perlstein quotes New York Times columnist Scotty Reston: "The only logical explanation of the Democratic Presidential campaign so far is that is must have been planned by the Republicans." Perlstein comments, "Little did he know his joke was literally true." Of course, one of the dirty tricks, the break-in of the DNC at the Watergate hotel, would bring the presidency down within two years.

This is a big book, and Perlstein paints a huge canvas. He includes all the politics, but also touches on many other cultural markers along the way: Woodstock, Attica, Chappaquidick, the Manson murders, Nixon's trip to China, Jane Fonda's trip to Hanoi, the Chicago 8 trial, the resignation of Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas, John Kerry's emergence in the Vietnam Vets Against the War, the attempted deportation of John Lennon, the shifting of the movie business with films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the attempt against George Wallace.

The book is written in a very breezy fashion, this no academic tome, though it is extensively footnoted. At times it seemed a little too breezy, as if the entire thing were being told as an anecdote by a Borscht-Belt comedian. Perlstein uses some incongruous terms, such as "jujitsu" to describe Nixon's political acumen. A little of this goes a long way, but then Perlstein is a writer who is clearly having fun with his subject, while being somber when it's called for. For instance, though I lived through the sixties (as a small child) it's still jarring to be confronted with how openly racist our society was just forty years ago. Reading this book after the inauguration of Barack Obama is dizzying, and makes one wonder whether all of this really happened or was just a very bad nightmare.