Book Review of Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
A Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
Nov 18, 2008
The 1964 election saw President Lyndon Johnson crush conservative extremist Barry Goldwater, an undoubted sign of a liberal consensus in America. But as Johnson's Great Society legislation was too slow to work for blacks and too fast for whites, urban violence broke out. Meanwhile, Johnson escalated the fighting in Vietnam, further dividing America. Richard Nixon, according to Perlstein, took advantage of the cultural and political fractures and exasperated them. This was Nixonland.
Watts
Perlstein does a tremendous job of describing the violent events of the era, like a play-by-play television broadcast. You can feel the escalation as the Watts riots of 1965 gain momentum and the authorities and local media try to cover the chaos. Then a few years later, while lawmakers fought over an open housing provision attached to civil rights legislation, there was a white backlash. Whites rioted to protect their own enclaves. In Newark, NJ, police and National Guardsmen gunned down innocent blacks.
Then there was the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Perlstein creatively describes the scene through the eyes of an ordinary man plopping down on a chair after work drinking a beer watching the incredible events on television. Police clubbing angry protesters in the streets, while inside the convention hall, Mayor Daley's goons roughing up and challenging the credentials of anti-Humphrey delegates. This ordinary man must have thought the country was falling apart.
Silent Majority
Most people watching from home were wondering the same thing. Students of the New Left or the New Politics were blowing up or taking over college campuses. President Nixon in a major speech labeled the law abiding Americans passively observing the unrest as the "Silent Majority." Perlstein frequently spots Nixon's efforts to divide and conquer.
For instance, Nixon, while in college, was rejected by the elite fraternity, the Franklins, because of his poor background. So Nixon organized his own fraternity, the Orthogonians, for those without elitist credentials. Perlstein cleverly applies this Franklin versus Orthogonian divide to American society. The Silent Majority were the Orthogonians and the protesters and the liberal elite who unleashed the mayhem with their Great Society reforms were the Franklins.
Tricky Dick
In 1972, a paranoid and determined Nixon sought to protect the nation and the Silent Majority from the nasty Franklins by resorting to dirty tricks in his reelection campaign. Besides the bungled Watergate break-in at Democratic headquarters, Nixon operatives employed prank-like tactics called "ratf**ks" on Democratic rivals during the primaries.
The pilot for Edmund Muskie received the wrong flight schedule and arrived in the wrong place. Eugene McCarthy supporters received a letter with a fake McCarthy signature telling them to back Hubert Humphrey. George McGovern was not touched by the "ratf**kers," Nixon believing that he was the easiest to defeat in the general election. The Democrats were frustrated and suspicious of each other. Divide and conquer. Perlstein's illumination of these base manuevers brings to life the fractious nature of Nixon and the political culture of the times.
The one negative of this book is that the tone is too informal at times. In general, the informality is entertaining and you get a great feel for the era. However, this reader was a little distracted by the stylistic choppy sentences and language, forcing a rereading of some lines to understand the ideas and events. But only a Franklin would harp too much on this.
The societal divisions presented in Nixonland still has relevance today. Cosmopolitan liberals and values voting conservatives, blue states and red states, currently frame our political thinking. Therefore Perlstein's book deserves our attention.
Published by Scribner, 2008, ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-4302-5, ISBN-10: 0-7432-4302-1
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