Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein
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Book Summary Information
Author: Rick PerlsteinEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2008-05-13
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 896
Publisher: Scribner
Book Reviews of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
Book Review: A Foreign Country Indeed
Summary: 4 Stars
In a seemingly rushed final few pages, Rick Perlstein invites us to agree with him that the fissures in American society of the 1960s that he describes so compellingly in this book are still the same today. This is odd; because throughout this fascinating and detailed study I kept think how strange, how different, how very remote that society seems today. (I should add that I am not an American, so this no doubt adds an extra layer of remoteness in my case.) A number of reviewers have also noted that this thesis is abundantly contradicted by Perlstein's own research and analysis.
Nevertheless, the book is a remarkably readable political and social history of those very troubled times, when leftist revolution or authoritarian backlash seemed equally likely to many observers. One is struck again and again in Perlstein's narrative by how rebarbative were political extremists on both sides. Each time segregationists or other right-wing brutes appear to shock and appal us, there are matched for ghastliness by the hippies, yippies and other monsters, mountebanks and posturing idiots of the left.
So Perlstein's sympathies may well be left-leaning (as some other reviewers aver); but I found the book impeccably balanced. For example, he quotes with understandable glee the fatuous approving statements about hippies, student radicals, drug use, young peoples' clothes etc made by ageing liberals desperate to seem 'with it'. By contrast, the predictable remarks by conservatives about the selfish ingratitude of scruffy, vulgar, drug-addled, spoilt radical students seem, in retrospect, not too far off the mark.
Of the politicians from both parties (and how marvellous it was to remember all these half-forgotten titans of 40 years ago), all but one emerge from the book as shoddy, duplicitious, cynics and opportunists. The exception is George McGovern, for whom Perstein has clear respect despite his dreary manner and pious, preachy persona. A babe in the woods predictably devoured by the ravening Nixon, McGovern at least seems to have been been pure of heart (for a politician anyway).
For an apparently leftist author, Perlstein skewers many heroes of American liberalism, such as Ted Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, with humour and relish. As for racist monsters like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond, it is hard to read about the power they wielded without a shudder.
Surprisingly, a figure for whom I found myself having a sneaking (and slight) admiration was Spiro Agnew. This was mostly because he delivered some very good lines against the hippies and left radicals (presumably written by the likes of William Safire) and because of his (originally) liberal civil rights stance in Maryland. The book concludes before Agnew was forced from office.
What of Richard 'My Mother was a Saint' Nixon himself? Ruthless, mendacious, vindictive beyond measure: of course; but there was a sort of tragic greatness about him too. As is sometimes said, such is the strength of Lucifer's portrayal in Paradise Lost that he comes to be virtually the hero of the poem and certainly its most interesting character. So with Nixon in Nixonland. If one can stop recoiling with moral outrage at his actions, there is an audacity in his realpolitik approach to winning that is almost seductive. More than once, I found myself laughing at the sheer naughtiness and imagination of the dirty tricks he and his gang cooked up against their enemies; for example when young Karl Rove infiltrated the Muskie campaign stealing letterhead and handing out hundreds of invitations to a Muskie event to drunks and other undesirables. Perhaps this is the fault not of Milton, but of popular culture: where, despite our moral disapproval, we cheer on resourceful villains such as Tony Soprano, Dexter Morgan and Vic Mackey.
The way to check the urge to admire Nixon even at a subterranean level, I found, was to remember i) that he was real not fictional (as improbable as it now seems) and ii) that it was not just self-righteous Democrats who were victims of his methods, but tens of thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians and American servicemen.
Nixon's tragedy (and thus America's) is that he was not just a superbly crafty operator but in some ways a visionary when it came to foreign policy. He saw in the mid 60's that communism in the Far East would be checked not by military might but by the growing prosperity of Japan, Malaysia, South Korea and so on. His famous insight that China could and should be brought into the world was too bold even for Kissinger to accept at first. These flashes of statesman-like genius seem to sit oddly with such a vindictive and unscrupulous operator as Nixon; but remember that Bismark was not just the brilliant creator of united Germany, he was the dirty trickster of the Ems Telegram affair and the anti-Catholic bigot who instigated the Kulturkampf. But for Watergate and his utterly cynical prolongation of a war he long knew was lost, Nixon may ultimately have been accorded a Bismark like status in American history.
Other readers have spotted some factual errors in the book. I noticed only two things that puzzled me: a spurious French etymology for the Nazi office of Gauleiter (which Perlstein misspells) and a misleading description of the relationship between British Prime Ministers Gladstone and Disraeli.
LBJ had a similar mixture of greatness (his civil rights record), trickiness (political chicanery) and wrongheadedness (the Vietnam disaster); but he has more chance of ultimate rehabilitation than Nixon. The fact that Futurama, a programme loved mostly but not exclusively by viewers born many years after Nixon's death, frequently features his head as a stage villain shows how enduring is his reputation for zesty wickedness. It is a reputation this excellent book will do nothing to dispel.
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