Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
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- ISBN13: 9780743243032
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Product Description
Told with urgency and sharp political insight, Nixonland recaptures America’s turbulent 1960s and early 1970s and reveals how Richard Nixon rose from the political grave to seize and hold the presidency.
Perlstein’s epic account starts in the blood and fire of the 1965 Watts riots, nine months after Lyndon Johnson’s historic earthquake victory over Barry Goldwater appeared to indication a stable liberal consensus in the United States. Yet the next year, scores of liberals were tossed out of Congress, America was more divided than ever, and a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard Nixon.
Between 1965 and 1972, America veteran no less than a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know now was born. It was the era not only of Nixon, Johnson, Spiro Agnew, Hubert H. Humphrey, George McGovern, Richard J. Daley, and George Wallace but Abbie Hoffman, Ronald Reagan, Angela Davis, Ted Kennedy, Charles Manson, John Lindsay, and Jane Fonda. There are tantalizing glimpses of Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Jesse Jackson, John Kerry, and even of two ambitious young men named Karl Rove and William Clinton — and a not so ambitious young man named George W. Bush.
Cataclysms tell the tale of Nixonland:
Mad blacks burning down their neighborhoods in cities across the land as white suburbanites defend home and hearth with shotguns The student mutiny over the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention The fissuring of the Democratic Party into warring factions manipulated by the “dirty tricks” of Nixon and his Committee to Re-Elect the President Richard Nixon pledging a new dawn of national unity, governing more divisively than any president before him, then directing a criminal conspiracy, the Watergate take in-up, from the Oval Office
Then, in November 1972, Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and resentment born of America’s turmoil, was reelected in a earthquake even larger than Johnson’s 1964 victory, not only setting the stage for his dramatic 1974 resignation but defining the terms of the ideological apportion that characterizes America today.
Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful narrative, Rick Perlstein’s magisterial account of how America divided confirms his place as one of our country’s most celebrated historians.Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: How did we go from Lyndon Johnson’s earthquake Democratic victory in 1964 to Richard Nixon’s equally lopsided Republican reelection only eight years later? The years in between were among the most chaotic in American history, with an endless and unpopular war, riots, assassinations, social disruption, Southern resistance, protests both peaceful and armed, and a “Silent Majority” that twice elected the central figure of the age, a brilliant politician who relished the battles of the day but finished them in disgrace. In Nixonland Rick Perlstein tells a more familiar tale than the one he unearthed in his influential previous book, Before the Storm, which argued that the stunning success of modern conservatism was founded in Goldwater’s massive 1964 defeat. But he makes it fresh and relentlessly compelling, with obsessive original research and a gleefully slashing style–equal parts Walter Winchell and Hunter S. Thompson–that’s right to the times. Perlstein is well known as a writer on the left, but his historian’s empathies are intense and unpredictable: he convincingly channels the resentment and rage on both sides of the battle lines and lets neither Nixon’s cynicism nor the naivete of liberals like New York mayor John Lindsay off the hook. And while election-year readers will be reminded of how much tamer our times are, they’ll also find that the echoes of the era, and its persistent national divisions, still ring loud and clear. –Tom Nissley
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If you reflect that unpleasantness in American politics started with a social misfit named Richard Nixon, then you are gonna like this book. Perlstein seems hardly to have noticed police-are-pigs, f’-the-USA, sex/drugs/rock and roll, burning cities and all the rest of the cultural revolution. In his version, Nixon simply had a vision of how he could draw out the latent bitterness of losers and form it into a political movement, as if the result of the “silent majority” had no cause and no legitimacy. Perlstein is a groovy guy but not much of a historian, IMO.
Addendum, 7/31/08: It is a long and tedious book. I was still mulling it over in my mind when I heard Mr. Perlstein in a forceful small interview on NPR. He helpfully summarized his view on the Nixon era, and his comments were highly consistent with my remarks above. I appreciated hearing him deliver a quick, synopsis judgment on Nixon and the Nixon era. It was happily lacking all the obfuscations and diversions that a publisher may indulge if he thinks you have the chops to sell a pricey tome like this to the broad audience of Nixon haters
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I had the misfortune to hear Pearlstein give the central take up to an literary symposium on Barry Goldwater at Arizona State University in the Fall of 2009. Dressed in what looked like his Bar Mitzvah suit, Pearstein gave a nonsensical, convoluted speech on how the failure of conservatism started with Goldwater’s 1964 defeat and was cemented by the victory of President Obama. His inability to string 2 sentences together completely ruined what could have been a thought provoking speech. His writings, especially Nixonland, are merely an extension of his shameless liberal slant.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
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 unrestricted 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 place this book in its proper place: the garbage.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
What a disappointment. It reminds me of William Manchester’s “Power and the Glory” (or whatever it was called) where he danced through the history of the entire post-WW2 era.
Random quotes from celebrities, columnists, this that and the additional, all add up to a bunch of nothing. Here’s Charles Manson. Here’s George Romney. Here’s Bob Haldeman.
I give it two stars not one because many readers will not remember the period. For them, it will be a fun read, kind of like going to Time. com and reading all the Time magazines from 1966-1973.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I thought it was going to be a visitors’ guide to a new theme park.
Well, it was still pretty excellent.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5