Rick Pearlstein's Nixonland

...At their best, White, Halberstram, and Lukas provide an impressive standard to aim for, and in places Perlstein does them justice...

...Tom Hayden, H. Rap Brown, Jane Fonda, George Wallace, Abbie Hoffman, John Mitchell, Howard Hunt, and BOOKS Richard Nixon ultimately are all the same (in spite of the disparities in the power they wielded and the causes they advocated), yoked together in dragging the country toward Armageddon...

...ASTRONG CASE can be made that the years after Nixon's presidency constituted the real turning point in the postSecond World War history of the United States...

...Nixonland is a throwback to a type of book that headed the bestseller lists in Nixon's own era, the big book of journalism about big national events...

...This is writing about the recent American past in the tradition of David Halberstram and J. Anthony Lukas (to whom Perlstein dedicates his tome), but without the shoe leather...

...Even so, they easily maintained their control of Congress and four years later recaptured the White House...

...Steel America...

...Obama beckons us to leave the divisiveness of Nixonland behind...

...Introducing a new argument that he never develops, he suggests that the conflict of the era "would not have been so ragefulwould not have been so literally murderous" if not for the false belief of the previous era that a consensus existed in the country...

...Boy, was that wrong...

...JOSHUA FREEMAN teaches history at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York...

...We now call them `red' or 'blue'America...

...True, he won a huge victory in 1972, but in many ways that was an aberration...

...Newspaper headlines, campaign speeches, urban riots, political scoundrels, trigger-happy National Guardsmen, clever admen, student radicals, shady operatives, and angry citizens of every stripe inhabit this massive effort at immediacy, at making the reader feel like he or she was there, a book that strives to achieve weightiness through, well, weight-748 pages of text and well over a hundred more of notes and index...

...Perlstein does a service in not trying to make the past easy to digest...

...Nixon did it, sort of, says Rick Perlstein, in his epic Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America...

...If the years from 1964 to 1972 marked a period of enormous cultural change and the triumph of the civil rights movement, the eight years that followed saw profound economic changes, as the great, post-Second World War international capitalist boom ground to a halt...

...What histories, what economic and cultural structures, and what blocs of local, national, and international power underlay these opposing camps remain questions largely unaddressed...

...During the eight years Nixon was elected to serve as president (including the period when Gerald Ford finished out his second term), federal social spending, adjusted for inflation, rose at an annual rate of nearly 10 percent, compared to just under 8 percent during the KennedyJohnson years...

...There is not much room in this version of the 1960s and 1970s for the contented, the unactivated, the typical, leadBOOKS ing to a portrait of America even more overheated than it was...

...He currently is writing a volume on the United States since World War II for The Penguin History of the United States...

...A stagnating economy, rampant inflation (especially in energy prices), and declining corporate profits brought a shift in federal policy toward deregulation, cutbacks in social spending, a huge downsizing of basic manufacturing that left once thriving industrial cities gutted, an anti-labor business offensive, and corporate efforts to reduce fixed costs and introduce greater flexibility...

...Journalists and scholars like Thomas and Mary Edsall, Jonathan Reider, and Dan Carter made this case long ago...

...Nixon—and others, too, including Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, and more local figures like Frank Rizzo and Sam Yorty—pointed the way toward the right, but it took changed circumstances and the Great Communicator to seal the deal...

...Perlstein offers up a sprawl96 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 ing political narrative, a detailed rendering of the 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1972 national elections and the events that surrounded them...

...Rather than a period of rightwing change, the Nixon administration DISSENT / Summer 2008 n 97 BOOKS represented the last great moment of liberal rule, even down to its fanatic, immoral pursuit of that horrifying project of postwar liberalism, the war in Vietnam...

...He rightly points out that Nixon himself found foreign affairs and politics far more interesting...

...In 1960, Nixon barely lost the presidential election, getting just under half the popular vote, while eight years later he won a three-way race that put him in the White House, this time getting an even smaller percentage of the votes...

...Freedomland might be just ahead...

...In a suggestive idea that, unfortunately, he throws in only at the last moment, Perlstein contends "that some of the 1960s anger and violence was a return of what America had repressed...

...Perlstein has written the historical justification for Obamaism, for the belief that it is time to leave that sixties stuff behind for a postpartisan politics...

...The problem begins with the very premise of the book, that the years from Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory in 1964 to Nixon's landslide eight years later represented a watershed period in American history...

...For them, opponents did not have to be defeated but destroyed...

...It is Teddy White come back from the grave, with a zippier style and pumped up sensibility appropriate to our age of enveloping hyperbole...

...Two tribes of such Americans, defined by their view of Nixon from as early as his 1952 Checkers speech, Perlstein argues, have kept us divided, in a state of simmering and exploding rage, for decades...

...Maybe, but perhaps not such a decisive moment as Perlstein assumes...

...In this, he follows Gary Wills, whose Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man, published not long after Nixon moved into the White House, remains the best book yet as to how that very odd man embodied so many of the aspirations and beliefs of postwar Americans, a book of true genius that everyone since has failed to approach in insight and intellectual breadth...

...Nixon rode to reelection on a series of diplomatic triumphs, the not-quite-true announcement that the Vietnam War was over, and an economy that had not yet fallen off the cliff, while the Democrats suffered from a weak if admirable candidate, a splintered party, and illegal disruptions by Nixon's minions...

...But in the years since the Edsalls and others popularized the idea, a generation of scholars, including Tom Sugrue, Arnold Hirsch, Kevin Kruse, and James Wolfinger, have shown that middle- and working-class urban whites, who on economic issues firmly fell in the liberal camp, had mobilized around opposition to racial integration long before the 1960s, bringing the backlash notion into ques9 8 n DISSENT / Summer 2008 tion, or at least robbing it of its chronological specificity...

...Between 1964 and 1972, Southern black voter registration soared, to the benefit of the Democrats...

...Except for this last-minute shift of blame, for Perlstein the villains of Nixonland (the phrase comes from a 1956 speech by Adlai Stevenson, written with the help of John Kenneth Galbraith) were the extremists, the uncivil Americans who saw their opponents not as fellow citizens with whom they disagreed but as existential threats to the nation itself and what they viewed as best about it...

...By contrast, the Nixon presidency saw nothing on that scale of change in the physical, economic, or ideological infrastructure of the country...

...Wal-Mart America had replaced U.S...

...Perlstein's Nixon could succeed because race, specifically a widespread white backlash to the civil rights movement, civil rights laws, and urban disorder of the mid-1960s, laid the basis for a political realignment...

...Perlstein does not provide much analysis to accompany his exhaustive and exhausting narrative, giving little scrutiny to his commonplace assumptions...

...He writes adeptly about Nixon, whom he despises, granting him respect for his political insight, discipline, and doggedness, and arguing that he won support as much for his obsessions, hatreds, and awkwardness as in spite of them...

...Nixon supported the Equal Rights Amendment, proposed a guaranteed national income to replace the degrading and dysfunctional welfare system, accepted indexing of Social Security benefits to the cost of living, signed into law one environmental bill after another, supported using the previously sacrosanct Highway Trust Fund for mass transportation projects, made affirmative action a major weapon in the federal antidiscrimination arsenal, and even went so far as to use wage-andprice controls—a horrifying notion to free market ideologues—to check inflation...

...But that was more than outweighed by the movement of Southern whites and some Northern Catholics and working-class voters into the Republican Party, at least in presidential contests, which made Nixon's 1972 triumph possible...

...After all, from the fall of Joe McCarthy through the end of the 1960s, a national consensus in support of liberalism seemed to have become entrenched...

...Like much else that Perlstein writes about, the trial of those accused of planning riots at the 1968 Democratic convention was so bizarre that memory cannot help but round off its edges...

...Rich in description and storytelling but lacking analytic rigor, Nixonland leaves it to the reader to draw out its implications, either for understanding the past or thinking about the future...

...As various observers have noted, sometimes Obama seems like a throwback to a still earlier era, to the moderation of Stevenson liberalism...

...One could highlight continuity in the years he chronicles as much as change, evident in Nixon's own fortunes...

...By the time Reagan left office, the United States was a very different place than when Nixon resigned...

...The left and right get treated as moral equivalents, equally responsible for the long years of national trauma...

...Of course, some things did change in the period from Johnson's landslide to Nixon's, as Perlstein chronicles, including the rhetoric of politics, the intensity and violence of political and civil conflict, and the electoral coalitions commanded by the two national parties...

...Nixon, Perlstein argues, helped rip the country apart by campaigning and ruling with strategies and lies designed to cleave the electorate in such a way that a dominant Republican or conservative bloc would be created, which would empower him and shape the country's future...

...Or is that Fantasyland around the corner...

...How did we end up with a deeply polarized society, in which conservative leaders, ideas, and policies have defined national politics...

...Rather than the large number of interviews that were the stock in trade for earlier generations of journalists turned book authors, Perlstein relies mostly on published accounts, some archival material, and the vast array of sources now available on the Internet, from newspapers to presidential recordings to campaign commercials...

...NIXONLAND: THE RISE OF A PRESIDENT AND THE FRACTURING OF AMERICA by Rick Perlstein Scribner, 2008 748 pp $37.50 OR DECADES, liberal scholars and journalists have been trying to figure out how it came to this...

...Piles of detail, however, do not always add up to a convincing argument...

...Rather, he dwells on the strangeness and unpleasantness of the years he chronicles...

...In portraying Nixon as central to these changes, as both an actor and a symbol, Perlstein travels down a well-worn road...

...Perlstein can avoid grappling with how much did not change under Nixon because he devotes very little attention to domestic policy during that administration, to what the federal government actually did...

...His fine account of the conspiracy trial of the Chicago 8 will drop jaws and evoke laughter even among those who lived through it...

...But what Nixon did on the domestic front suggests that his administration had more in common with the postwar liberal consensus than the neoliberal conservatism that followed...

...Conservatism appeared atavistic, on the wrong side of the tide of history...

...Barack Obama keeps implying that those boomers and their elders, liberal and conservative, screwed it up...

...It was Ronald Reagan and the 1980 election, not Nixon in 1972, who brought about a tectonic political shift...

...For Perlstein, Nixon was the central figure in a national agony of violence, recrimination, and division that occurred between 1964 and 1972, whose "sides have hardly changed" since...

...At the very end of his book, Perlstein himself suggests that the national schism of the late 1960s and early 1970s actually did not represent a great novelty: "America has always been divided and will always be...

...Nixon had no problem with expansive government, supporting or at least acquiescing to a domestic agenda far to the left of not only the current Republican Party but arguably today's Democratic Party as well...

...Not bothering to explore these clusters in any detail, in their geography, their class positions, their religious and cultural beliefs, Perlstein portrays them as unchanging congeries of stereotypes, the Silent Majority versus the cosmopolitans, battling across the decades...

...S0 IN THE END we are presented, after hundreds of thousands of words, with a simple moral tale of the danger of extremism, of the need for civility, moderation, and respect for others...