The book quickly skips along Nixon’s early life. Deeper down, for a soldier steeled for grim conflict, just doing his duty, it was the most unmanning thing imaginable: you are slaves, and we are free. Others placed flowers in the barrels of their guns. TV cameras doted on the not-inconsiderable number of young women, yielding the weapon of sex. Here’s one from the confrontation between the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and military police in the Pentagon parking lot in 1967:įrom the same window where he’d seen Norman Morrison immolate himself, Robert McNamara gazed down upon the scene.
Perlstein has a gift for emoting the intimate thoughts on all sides of iconic moments of crisis. “Nixonland” is what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together. What they did not acknowledge was that an amazingly large segment of the population also trusted him as their savior. It’s about how they found their voices, how their personal identities adapted to the times, and how all that energy was deliberately harnessed by Nixon to serve his drive to power, creating the fractured political world we live in today.Īn amazingly large segment of the population disliked and mistrusted Richard Nixon instinctively. The bulk of Nixonland is about the land: the people in turmoil, from radicalized college student to marching black to shocked & resentful blue-collar worker. If he were, the book could be 1/3 as long and titled something like The Count of Yorba Linda.
Then there is the “new” Nixon’s calculated reappearance after everyone thought him dead and gone, freely spending treasure of dubious origins, cavorting with highly weird & talented outsiders, making intricate moves within moves, shoving aside lightweights like Reagan, stepping over the bodies of Kennedys, and taking out his enemies with delicious patience, one by one by one.īut Richard Nixon isn’t the star of Nixonland. There are early triumphs, humiliating defeats, and years of secret plotting in the wilderness.
Nixon’s career is a vast & billowing revenge play that could have been written by Dumas. We don’t have tanks patrolling Pennsylvania Avenue or whole neighborhoods on fire, but each day seems to make it less unthinkable. Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008) is something of a biography, something of a history, and something of a quest to answer the question people have been asking about the 1960s since, well, the 1960s: what the hell just happened? This book is especially relevant to the world of 2016, which has so many tragic echoes coming hard and fast.
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