Tom Charles Huston
Peristein, Rick
booKs IN revIeW Nixonland Revisited “Any fool can write history; and many do.” —Clyde Wilson, Professor of History University of South Carolina Rick perlstein’s nixonland has...
...Is this what Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, or Harry Truman would have done...
...He is occasionally clear-eyed about the arrogance, foolhardiness, and/or perniciousness of the contendNixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America By Rick Perlstein (Scribner, 881 pageS, $37.50) reviewedby Tom charles Huston ing forces...
...There are three reasons for this lapse of critical judgment: • Perlstein’s narrative style—fast-moving, bombastic, and heavily anecdotal—has dramatic flair...
...and refers to Bobby Kennedy as “Senator Love Beads...
...It is, as my mother would have said, “smart-alecky...
...The third of perlstein’s big ideas is that Richard Nixon won the 1968 election “by using [author’s emphasis] the angers, anxieties, and resentments produced by the cultural chaos of the 1960s...
...Occasional errors are inevitable in a work of history, often the result of haste or poor editing...
...The Vietnam War was ending, peace had been restored on the campuses, the streets were clear of demonstrators, all was quiet in America’s cities, and the economy gave the appearance of being on the mend...
...the land of smash and grab and anything to win...
...There was a lot of anger, a lot of goofiness, and an indecent amount of violence...
...the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving...
...He’s after scalps, one at a time...
...How large the “we” demographic Walters presumed to speak for was never quite established—her View co-hosts...
...He succeeded because he understood that elections “were won by focusing people’s resentments...
...this is so unusual among chroniclers of the period that he succeeds in establishing a degree of credibility which, unfortunately, is not justified by a close reading of the text by anyone who actually lived through the period...
...The political class has a vested interest in the 1960s, which spawned many of the most contentious ideas with which it is currently preoccupied, and ideologues across the political spectrum have dogs in the fights that Perlstein recounts with such gusto...
...encounter bookS, 130 pageS, $20) (Perhaps she has yet to concludewhetherplan reviewed by shawn macomber tationlifeunderMaster John was preferable to co-hosting The View with Missus Walters...
...or that the Texan Ralph booKs IN revIeW Yarborough was not a congressman, as he states on one page, but a senator, as he correctly notes on a much later page...
...By the time voters went to the polls in 1972, any fear of civilizational chaos had long since been overcome...
...Perlstein embellishes Galbraith to establish “a more inclusive definition of Nixonland: it is the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans.… Nixonland is what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together...
...Leftists have a disposition to believe that conservatives could not conceivably believe what they say they believe if they were not impaired by some mental disorder such as “status anxiety” or old-fashioned paranoia...
...Actually, this was one “historic first” that even Nixon didn’t claim, as previous Republican candidates had done as well (or nearly so) as he did in winning five Southern states in 1968: Herbert Hoover won five in 1928, Eisenhower carried four in 1952 and five in 1956, Nixon won three in 1960, and Goldwater took five in 1964...
...it is polemics...
...In a three-way contest, he received 52 percent of the delegate votes on the first ballot, besting his closest competitor (Governor Rockefeller) 2.5 to 1. Excluding votes for favorite sons (many of which would have been available if required), Nixon received60percentofthevotescast,withRockefeller garnering 24 percent and Reagan 16 percent...
...Why such a blatant error...
...booKs IN revIeW Nixonland Revisited “Any fool can write history...
...Unnoted is that Nixon (unlike Goldwater) was again Occasional errors are inevitable in a work of history, often the result of haste or poor editing...
...According to Perlstein, Nixon’s politics were “a class politics for the white middle class” that reflected “his gift for looking below social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath...
...According to the Perlstein model, to understand correctly the political history of the United States since 1946, all one has to do is distinguish the Orthogonians from the Franklins...
...and concocts an elaborate Nixonian plot to thwart the integration of Southern schools as a payoff to Strom Thurmond while ignoring entirely the story (best told by Ray Price) of how those schools were, in fact, integrated without violence during Nixon’s first term (testified George Wallace in 1971: “the administration [i.e., Nixon] has done more to destroy [i.e., integrate] the public school system in one year than the last administration [i.e., Lyndon Johnson] did in four...
...Clyde Wilson, Professor of History University of South Carolina Rick perlstein’s nixonland has been inexplicably well received by people who should know better...
...In one direction lies a land of slander and scare...
...74 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008...
...His populism was rooted in his experience, personal and political, and his politics were a strange mix of visceral reaction to events and calculated action to influence events...
...Perlstein is, as Dominic Sandbrook noted in the Telegraph, “a gifted and exciting storyteller...
...Perlstein plays the same game with the general election result, claiming that Nixon’s success “was barely a victory…only five or so points more than Barry Goldwater’s humiliating share in 1964...
...Such a claim not only insults George Nash and Greg Schneider, but it Perlstein claims that Nixon “exploited” the angers, anxieties, and resentments that arose out of the Johnsonian chaos...
...Nixon is easy pickings...
...His election set the stage for “a pitchedbattlebetweentheforcesofdarknessandthe forces of light,” which resulted in a nation in which “two loosely defined congeries of Americans,” each of whichwas“convincedthatshouldtheothertriumph, everything decent and true and worth preserving would end,” and this battle continues today with Americans hating each other “enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements...
...It may not be important that when Paul Douglas received the racially insensitive letters that Perlstein uses to such dramatic effect he was the senior senator from Illinois, not, as Perlstein twice insists, the junior senator...
...No Perlstein “fact” can be relied upon as true, no event he relates can be assumed to be fairly discussed, and no grand idea advanced by him can be taken seriously...
...And when he couldn’t find a previously published damning story to lift, he made it up, as in his phony reconstruction of Nixon’s meeting with the Southern Republican state chairmen in June of 1968...
...Even otherwise friendly reviewers have, however, noted certain problems with the book...
...At the convention, Nixon faced two formidable opponents: Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller...
...Early on he recognized (and took personally) the escalating arrogance of the liberal establishment and its disassociation from the values of working people...
...McCain has as much chance of weaseling Goldberg’s vote out of her as Obama has of getting Cindy McCain to wittingly punch his hole on the proverbial butterfly ballot...
...There is, for example, the matter of tone...
...An artfully selected trope may be conducive to understanding, but in the heavy hands of an author in a hurry it is more likely to become, as here, a cudgel with which to bludgeon the reader...
...In 1964 Barry Goldwater was the gamble...
...In such event, the relevant point might fairly be expressed thusly: Nixon exceeded the popular vote of Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton in their respective three-way contests...
...So why go through the rhetorical motions...
...By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States...
...There were, of course, extremists who resorted to violence and haters who, while less lethal, were nonetheless menacing, but these were outriders, not mainstreamers...
...or even hearing Barbara Walters promising Whoopi, “Us white folk will take care of you,” but rather that Goldberg felt comfortable implausibly posing as an undecided voter to the New York Times scant days later...
...Nor can Perlstein muster even the semblance of even-handedness in his description of the players in his drama: Sam Ervin, Nixon’s nemesis, is described by Perlstein as “a segregationist of the old school,” while Strom Thurmond, Nixon’s supporter, is described as a “thoroughgoing racist gargoyle...
...second, Barry Goldwater, with the help of the Democratic attack machine, had been caricatured as a radical, a threat to stability and good order...
...Perlstein, however, doesn’t see in Nixonian politics anything sophisticated, complex, or tragic...
...Specifically, comedienne-cumSerious Journalist™ Whoopi Goldberg inquired whether, considering his support for placing “strict constitutionalists” on the Supreme Court, she shouldn’t “worry about being returned to slavery” were he to ascend to the Oval Office...
...Building on earlier work in the area of classbased resentments by such eminent scholars as Anthony Summers and Chris Matthews, Perlstein divides the American electorate into two classes: the resentfulandtheresented.Theresentful(Nixonwas, Perlstein asserts, a “serial collector of resentments”) he tags as “Orthogonians,” the name of the fraternity of strivers Nixon headed at Whittier College, while the resented (of whom Adlai Stevenson is the classic exemplar) are the “Franklins”—Whittier’s fraternity 72 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008 booKs IN revIeW of choice for the swells...
...but there is a point at which the frequency of factual errors raises the legitimate question of whether the author is a scholar or a transcriber...
...He won 43.42 percent of the popular vote, which an honest man might choose to compare not against Goldwater’s tally in his man-toman contest with Lyndon Johnson, but against the winningpercentageinotherthree-wayraces:Wilson in 1912 (41.84 percent) and Clinton in 1992 (43.01 percent...
...apes Todd Gitlin’s revisionist line on the history of the New Left (“any two given New Leftists were more likely to break into fisticuffs than join in any effective conspiracy,” Bill Ayers’s night on the town was nothing more than “the bombing of the Capitol By the time voters went to the polls in 1972, any fear of civilizational chaos had long since been overcome...
...Perhaps after that raid, conservatives (if not libertarians) will begin to figure out that this guy is up to no good...
...November 2008 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor 73 booKs IN revIeW Perlstein claims that Nixon “exploited” the angers, anxieties, and resentments that arose out of the Johnsonian chaos...
...Perlstein’s nixon is a cartoon figure, not in the mode of Herblock, whose caricatures, while vicious, were nonetheless original and uncomfortably recognizable to Nixon’s friends, but plastic, one-dimensional, and unrecognizable except to the most fervid of Nixon’s enemies...
...Yes, well…what’s truly amazing about this isn’t McCain’s remarkably fey retort (“That’s an excellent point, Whoopi, and I thank you...
...Playing “gotcha” over a few insignificant mistakes is hardly fair play...
...He shapes it to suit his purpose and wields it to achieve a political objective...
...During the 1956 campaign Adlai Stevenson turned to a fellow egghead, John Kenneth Galbraith, to write the candidate’s speeches against Nixon because the Harvard economist had, in Stevenson’s estimation, “no tendency to be fair...
...Tone is a good measure of seriousness…and of good faith...
...privy...
...I’m going to wait until the Media Madness: The Corruption debates to figure out of Our Political Culture who really has what By James Bowman it takes,” she insisted...
...Perlstein regurgitates the standard New Left line on the war in Vietnam (the U.S...
...There was in 1964 no fear of anything as grandiose as civilizational chaos...
...Perlstein can’t control his contempt for Nixon’s middle-class constituency: The Republican functionaries in Nixon’s congressional district are “pennyante plutocrats,” his 1950 senatorial campaign was waged in “every god-forsaken little berg in that state with so many scores of god-forsaken little bergs,” and his personal vehicle—an Oldsmobile—to which he referred in his Checkers speech was “not a stylish car...
...The second big wrong idea is that Nixon’s politics were “rooted in the anger and resentments at the center of his character...
...What is a grown-up to think of an author who characterizes Nixon’s father as a “dirty-necked, Tom charles Huston is an attorney in Indianapolis and was associate counsel to the president of the United States from 1969 to 1971...
...Perlstein is an ideological warrior who, having donned his war paint and put on his war bonnet, is leading (with Tom Frank) a war party of hard-core leftists against the political and cultural settlements occupied by the right...
...No way...
...For him it was all starkly simple: Nixon “saw that Alger Hiss was a pitch-perfect Franklin [and] everything followed from that...
...Perlstein trots down the path pioneered by Richard Hofstadter and dismisses Nixon and his supporters as just one Prozac pill short of lunacy...
...Army was “populated with imbeciles [and] led by imbeciles,” Ho Chi Minh November 2008 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor 71 booKs IN revIeW “had no special beef with the United States...
...For some, a vote for Nixon was a vote of thanks for a job well done...
...The Vietnam War was ending, peace had been restored on the campuses, the streets were clear of demonstrators, all was quiet in America’s cities, and the economy gave the appearance of being on the mend...
...Nixon succeeded in establishing the necessary preconditions for an electoral realignment as a consequence of his sensitivity to the cultural concerns of the middle and working classes, but he failed to maximize the political opportunities thus afforded by aligning his domestic policies with the political imperatives of those concerns...
...dismisses Bill Safire as a “flack,” Strom Thurmond as a “dirty-neck,” and Ronald Reagan as a “hypocrite” and “demagogic moralizer...
...Perlstein seems to think it was the obligation of the Republican presidential candidate in 1968 to embrace ambivalence and cacophony, to minimize polarization, and, of course, to lose the election...
...All womankind...
...After all, when his opponent, Barack Obama, last appeared on the show Barbara Walters (Serious Journalist™) opened the substantive grilling by confiding, “We find you very sexy-looking...
...Each of them was every bit as “polarizing” as Richard Nixon is said to have been...
...hardly homicidal...
...or that Sam Ervin was not, as the author claims, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee...
...for many, it was a vote against the perceived radicalism of George McGovern and the threat he represented to stability in our international relations...
...For example, Perlstein “credits” Nixon with accomplishing something in 1968 that “no other Republican presidential candidate, with minor exceptions,” had ever done before: win electoral votes in the South...
...Relying largely on the psycho-babble of Fawn Brodie, the partisan fury of Leonard Lurie, and the genteel animus of Richard Reeves, Perlstein left no Nixonphobic screed untapped in the process of liming his portrait of Nixon as psychotic...
...No one who has carefully studied their campaigns could conceivably think so...
...Nixon’s political success was in large measure a result of his ability to identify with and position himself as spokesman for the middle class...
...In both elections, the electorate chose to play it safe...
...Richard Nixon didn’t cause it...
...Galbraith confirmed Stevenson’s judgment when he penned the scurrilous attack that is the text for Perlstein’s flawed history of the Nixon era: “Our nation stands at a fork in the political road...
...This is Nixonland...
...Though not in an Aaron Copland, ‘Fanfare of the Common Man,’ sort of way...
...A Richard Nixon kind of car...
...It commenced on Lyndon Johnson’s watch, during the high tide of liberalism...
...With this level of understanding of Richard Nixon and politics in America, it is no wonder that the heirs of Adlai Stevenson have been wandering in the wilderness for half a century...
...Suffice to say, whomever “we” may signify, McCain received a much less cuddly reception from the girls on their behalf...
...he inherited it...
...Kind of tacky even if was expensive—maybe even tackier because it was expensive...
...The first of these big ideas Perlstein introduces in his Preface: “the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else…seemed to court civilizational chaos… eight years later pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason...
...Long-time New Criterion media critic, TAS movie reviewer, and culture maven James Bowman shawn macomber is a contributing editor to The American Spectator...
...While most errors are likely the result of the author’s shallow understanding of American political history, some appear to be dictated by the ideological imperatives of his narrative...
...What might be called “comparative error” is a tool in Perlstein’s work kit that he uses to further another narrative objective: denigrating Nixon as a person and as a political figure...
...America is something different...
...This sort of language may be pitch-perfect for a duet with Keith Olbermann on Countdown but is hardly appropriate for an allegedly serious work of history...
...Indeed, his understanding of American politics since World War II is suspect when he describes eastern Tennessee, Republican since the Civil War, as “heavily Dixified,” or Indiana in 1968 as a “toss-up state...
...Then there is the matter of facts...
...Humankind...
...Nixon did what politicians do in contested elections: he sought to put together a majority coalition, and he did so by staking out the ground in the center yielded by the Democrats under pressure from the intellectuals...
...The conceit was plainly absurd...
...Kind of common...
...Beating up on Richard Nixon is a widely lauded bipartisan enterprise, and Perlstein is an unrelenting and remorseless Nixon basher...
...70 THe amerIcaN sPecTaTor November 2008 lusty spitfire” who affected a “peacock sense of superiority...
...in a three-way contest...
...Perlstein has three big ideas that constitute the framework for his narrative, all of which are wrong...
...Relentlessly deployed, “Franklin” and “Orthogonian” are trap doors through which the author conveniently disposes of men and ideas he is unwilling to confront on their own terms...
...No Republican left Miami in 1968 believing that Nixon lacked the full backing of his party...
...What Perlstein means is that Nixon sided with those who were fed up with a failed liberalism...
...Perlstein notes that at the 1968 Republican national convention Nixon received on the first ballot “only 26 more [votes] than 50%” and, thus, the candidate “was being sent into the general election with barely the endorsement of his party...
...Welcome to the Madhouse As john mccain trundled off to appear on ABC’s invariably insipid gals-led gabfest The View one morning last September, the Republican presidential nominee could have been forgiven for believing he wasn’t in for a girl-power reinterpretation of the Spanish Inquisition...
...Nixonland is not history...
...It would define it, in fact, for the next fifty years...
...Reason’s David Weigel in reviewing Nixonland heralded Perlstein as “America’s best living historian of the conservative movement...
...Early on he recognized (and took personally) the escalating arrogance of the liberal establishment and its disassociation from the values of working people...
...The very notion that the mass of Americans were prepared to kill each other over their political and cultural differences is more than nonsense: it is a calumny...
...Deep character flaws ultimately overwhelmed his shrewd political judgment, but not before he prepared the ground for the subsequent Reagan Revolution...
...but there is a point at which the frequency of factual errors raises the legitimate question of whether the author is a scholar or a transcriber...
...there was fear of defoliating the daisies...
...in 1972 it was George McGovern...
...The studio audience...
...or that the GOP picked up four, not two, Senate seats in the 1970 midterm elections, but such errors do suggest a lack of grounding in the politics of the Nixon era...
...The deranged landscape of the 1960s was the product of a liberalism untethered from common sense and good judgment, which elicited a reaction that was often ill considered and ill advised but was Nixon’s political success was in large measure a result of his ability to identify with and position himself as spokesman for the middle class...
...Voters pulled the Democratic lever in 1964 for two reasons: first, President Johnson had come to office under traumatic circumstances, had performed satisfactorily, and had given voters no compelling reason to throw him out...
...Reagan will be tougher, but he is next...
...A reader expecting to learn something new (or true) about the issues that roiled the public discourse in the 1960s is bound to be disappointed...
...or that Senator Kuchel had only 15 (not 18) years of seniority when he was defeated for renomination (he was appointed by Earl Warren in 1953 to fill Nixon’s unexpired term...
...What Perlstein means is that Nixon sided with those who were fed up with a failed liberalism...
...Well, Perlstein is out to convince the reader that Nixon in 1968 pandered to racists in Dixie, and giving Nixon “credit” for his electoral success in the South helps make (as in “make up”) the case...
...From the “historian” Perlstein...
...Perlstein is out to poke Republicans (and conservatives) in the eye and “history” is his stick...
...libels the craft of history...
...The decade of the 1960s was the most turbulent inAmericasincethatwhichbeganwithJohnBrown’s Kansas raids and ended at Appomattox Courthouse...
...George Will has characterized it as “snarky...
Vol. 41 • November 2008 • No. 9
