Books
Ron Briley: Review of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner, 2008)
During the Presidential campaign of 2008, one John McCain television ad opens with a reference to the summer of love in 1967 followed by the solemn comment that McCain did not participate in these frivolous antics; he was a prisoner of war and serving his country. Although he was only in grade school at the time, some conservatives have attempted to link Barack Obama with the violence of the Weather Underground through his association with Bill Ayers. Questions regarding the “liberal” bias of the media are raised by the McCain camp in television pieces comparing Obama with superficial celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears. What do such issues, especially invoking the 1960s, have to do with the economic and foreign policy issues confronting America in 2008? According to Rick Perlstein, the answer is that we are all living in Nixonland crated between 1964 and 1972.
In Nixonland, Perlstein, the author of the award-winning Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), writes an old-fashioned political history, based primarily upon newspaper and periodical accounts supplemented by archival sources and interviews, focusing upon the Congressional and Presidential electoral campaigns from 1964 through 1972 and how the politics of that period and today were shaped by Richard Nixon. Once demonized by the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, Nixon’s reputation has risen somewhat in academic circles where George W. Bush is often described as the worst President in American history. But in Nixonland, Richard Nixon reassumes the center stage as a leader orchestrating a politics of divisiveness which Reagan and the younger Bush have only emulated and refined. Perlstein writes his fascinating account somewhat from the perspective of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once termed “the vital center.” While never dogmatic, Perlstein often assumes a liberal position under attack from both the political left and right. And he certainly makes a strong case that while much of the media focus in the 1960s was upon the emergence of a radical counterculture; the real story of the era was the formation of a conservative movement which continues to dominate American politics.
Perlstein begins his study with a description of the 1965 urban unrest in Watts which signaled that the Great Society consensus championed by Lyndon Johnson was based upon a rather flimsy foundation. Civil rights legislation and government social programs still left many black Americans out of the consensus, and that frustration erupted in the steamy streets of Los Angeles in August 1965. A white backlash fueled opposition to further civil rights legislation such as an open housing bill, and the Republican Party gained seats in the 1966 Congressional elections. The Vietnam War was also unraveling the Johnson majority, with growing opposition to the Democratic President within his own party.
Richard Nixon, argues Perlstein, was perfectly poised to take advantage of this political discontent. Many believed that Nixon was, indeed, done with politics following his defeats in the 1960 Presidential campaign and 1962 California Gubernatorial race. Yet, the former Vice-President was looking for an opportunity to re-enter the political arena, and this opening was offered by the growing social, class, ethnic, generational, gender, and regional divisions of the late 1960s. Nixon, Perlstein maintains, was able to exploit increasing animosity by white Southerners, ethnics, and suburbanites that a liberal and cultural elite were ignoring the needs of ordinary Americans, while catering to the demands of minorities and spoiled college students who were not willing to serve the nation in Vietnam as their elders had during the Second World War. Employing some of the psychological interpretations developed by Fawn Brodie in her biography of Nixon, Perlstein argues that Nixon identified with these disaffected Americans whom he would later label the silent majority.
Perlstein depicts Nixon as the perennial outsider who worked in his father’s struggling grocery store and attended small Whittier College in California rather than an elite institution such as Harvard. While at Whittier, Nixon organized a fraternity he termed the Orthogonians to challenge the Franklins, who “were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly.” Nixon’s club was “for the strivers, those not to manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one’s unpolish was a nobility of its own” (22).
The Franklin-Orthogonian dichotomy is used by Perlstein to characterize Nixon’s political life. Ever the outsider, Nixon attended Duke Law School rather than an Ivy League school, and after graduation he could not find employment with a prestigious Wall Street firm. Following military service in World War II and election to Congress in 1946, Nixon first made his mark nationally with his leading role in HUAC’s investigation of Alger Hiss, whom Nixon identified as one of the culturally elite Franklins. The Hiss case helped propel Nixon to the Senate and Vice-Presidency, but Eisenhower almost dumped the young man from California due to allegations of illegal campaign contributions. Nixon saved himself with the self-pity of his Checkers speech in which the candidate cast himself as an Orthogonian beset by elites who would deny his wife, Pat a new coat and his children a pet dog. Perlstein concludes that the Nixon of the Checkers speech resonated even better with discontented Americans during the late 1960s. Nixon was one of them—a victim of the liberals and cultural elitists just like the rest of middle America.
As the nation was torn asunder by violence in 1968, Nixon, thus, emerged as the law and order candidate who would bring peace with honor to Vietnam, while taking a tough stance against protesters breaking the law and assuring Southerners that desegregation would not be pursued through “forced busing”—positions undercutting the third party candidacy of George Wallace. Achieving a narrow victory in 1968, Nixon remained insecure. Perceiving the media as his enemy and out of step with the American people, Nixon unleashed Vice-President Spiro Agnew’s attacks upon the “nattering nabobs of negativism” within the nation’s leading television networks and newspapers. Perlstein is critical of what he perceives as the media’s retreat during a time when the Nixon administration merited a closer monitoring by the fourth estate in service of democracy and the people’s right to know.
Perlstein chronicles how the insecurity of the Nixon administration culminated in the Watergate crisis. The “dirty tricks” employed by Nixon operatives resulted in the Democrats nominating George McGovern, the candidate Nixon most wanted to face in the 1972 general election. Nixon was able to portray McGovern as the candidate of pot, protest, and abortion, obscuring discussion of economic policies and Vietnam. In the short run, Nixon was able to secure re-election, but the uncovering of his political tactics led to the President’s resignation. Nevertheless, Perlstein asserts that the divisive politics, focusing upon cultural symbols rather than economic interest, unleashed by Nixon still dominate political discourse. He dedicates his book to “the memory of the dozens of Americans who lost their lives at the hands of other Americans, for ideological reasons, between the year s of 1965 and 1972.” Perlstein concludes with the hope that political and cultural disagreements will never again lead to such violence, but he pessimistically notes that we still live in Nixonland.
Critics of Perlstein’s study will note that while the 1960s were turbulent, divisions over race, gender, and class are hardly unique to that decade of American history. One only needs to remember the American Revolution, slavery, Indian Wars, Civil War, social and industrial unrest of the 1890s, and the Great Depression to recognize that there is a legacy of conflict beyond the designs of Richard Nixon. Also, Perlstein is open to criticism for downplaying the role of the ostensibly affable Ronald Reagan in fostering the politics of division, but there is no denying that Perlstein’s massive volume makes for a fascinating read. It is not so much that Perlstein introduces new information and interpretations, but that he is a fine writer who is able to deftly utilize media accounts in the recreation of a fascinating period in American history whether or not one agrees with the label Nixonland.
- Liked it by Michael Davis (September 8, 2008 at 6:54 AM)
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