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Why is this May 2008 book relevant today?

Because it provides a colorful, insightful, provocative, enjoyable journey through a period when we saw the emergence of angry culture wars in America, not to mention the Southern Strategy. The latter was really the targeting of white males who felt threatened and disenfranchised by the emergence of minorities and women with rights to a piece of the American pie, formerly sliced up exclusively by -- well -- white males.

Perlstein is a liberal -- and a BuzzFlash reader -- but he doesn't spare liberals their mistakes or foolish moments in this book.

The Nixon era set the tone for the exploitation of the class divisions through emotional appeals to a mythological America that Ronald Reagan came to build upon. It is the "America on a lapel pin" that seizes the brains of even million-dollar salaried ABC News anchors.

Of course, this is accompanied by the knowledge that media savvy Republican consultants assisted, and continue to do so, Republican politicians -- and more than a few Democrats -- in openly deceiving the middle class through emotional hot button "wedge issues" and code words.

Don't forget that Nixon lost the presidential election in 1960 and then lost an election for governor of California. He held an infamous news conference after the latter defeat in which he declared that "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore."

But Tricky Dick emerged a few year laters -- repackaged with the help of Madison Avenue advertising specialists and the likes of Roger Ailes -- as the new Nixon, running on a platform of lies and divisive emotional appeals.

"Nixonland" is a good place to begin to understand, as the turmoil of the early and late sixties set up divisions in the American cultural and psychological mindset that continue through to this election, even within the Democratic primaries.

We almost never mention Amazon.com recommendations, but this book is one of their 7 picks for best book choices in May.

Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: How did we go from Lyndon Johnson's landslide Democratic victory in 1964 to Richard Nixon's equally lopsided Republican reelection only eight years later? The years in between were among the most chaotic in American history, with an endless and unpopular war, riots, assassinations, social upheaval, Southern resistance, protests both peaceful and armed, and a "Silent Majority" that twice elected the central figure of the age, a brilliant politician who relished the battles of the day but ended them in disgrace. In Nixonland Rick Perlstein tells a more familiar story than the one he unearthed in his influential previous book, Before the Storm, which argued that the stunning success of modern conservatism was founded in Goldwater's massive 1964 defeat. But he makes it fresh and relentlessly compelling, with obsessive original research and a gleefully slashing style--equal parts Walter Winchell and Hunter S. Thompson--that's true to the times. Perlstein is well known as a writer on the left, but his historian's empathies are intense and unpredictable: he convincingly channels the resentment and rage on both sides of the battle lines and lets neither Nixon's cynicism nor the naivete of liberals like New York mayor John Lindsay off the hook. And while election-year readers will be reminded of how much tamer our times are, they'll also find that the echoes of the era, and its persistent national divisions, still ring loud and clear.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America Rick Perlstein. Scribner,(896p) ISBN 978-0-7432-4302-5

Perlstein, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, provides a compelling account of Richard Nixon as a masterful harvester of negative energy, turning the turmoil of the 1960s into a ladder to political notoriety. Perlstein’s key narrative begins at about the time of the Watts riots, in the shadow of Lyndon Johnson’s overwhelming 1964 victory at the polls against Goldwater, which left America’s conservative movement broken. Through shrewdly selected anecdotes, Perlstein demonstrates the many ways Nixon used riots, anti–Vietnam War protests, the drug culture and other displays of unrest as an easy relief against which to frame his pitch for his narrow win of 1968 and landslide victory of 1972. Nixon spoke of solid, old-fashioned American values, law and order and respect for the traditional hierarchy. In this way, says Perlstein, Nixon created a new dividing line in the rhetoric of American political life that remains with us today. At the same time, Perlstein illuminates the many demons that haunted Nixon, especially how he came to view his political adversaries as “enemies” of both himself and the nation and brought about his own downfall.


A richly detailed descent into the inferno -- that is, the years when Richard Milhous Nixon, 'a serial collector of resentments,' ruled the land."
-- KIRKUS REVIEWS

Nixonland is a grand historical epic. Rick Perlstein has turned a story we think we know -- American politics between the opposing presidential landslides of 1964 and 1972 -- into an often surprising and always fascinating new narrative. This riveting book, full of colorful detail and great characters, brings back to life an astonishing era -- and shines a new light on our own."
-- Jeffrey Toobin author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

"This is a terrific read. What a delight it is to discover the new generation of historians like Rick Perlstein not only getting history correct but giving us all fresh insights and understanding of it."
-- John W. Dean Nixon's White House counsel

"Rick Perlstein has written a fascinating account of the rise of Richard Nixon and a persuasive argument that this angry, toxic man will always be part of the American landscape."
-- Richard Reeves author of President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination

Rick Perlstein's Nixonland digs deep into a decisive period of our history and brings back a past that is all the scarier for its intense humanity. With a firm grasp on the larger meaning of countless events and personalities, many of them long forgotten, Perlstein superbly shows how paranoia and innuendo flowed into the mainstream of American politics after 1968, creating divisive passions that have survived for decades."
-- Sean Wilentz Princeton University, author of The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008

From the Publisher, Scribner:

Cataclysms tell the story of Nixonland:

¥ Angry blacks burning down their neighborhoods in cities across the land as white suburbanites defend home and hearth with shotguns

¥ The student insurgency over the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention

¥ The fissuring of the Democratic Party into warring factions manipulated by the "dirty tricks" of Nixon and his Committee to Re-Elect the President

¥ Richard Nixon pledging a new dawn of national unity, governing more divisively than any president before him, then directing a criminal conspiracy, the Watergate cover-up, from the Oval Office

Then, in November 1972, Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and resentment born of America's turmoil, was reelected in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's 1964 victory, not only setting the stage for his dramatic 1974 resignation but defining the terms of the ideological divide that characterizes America today.

Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful narrative, Rick Perlstein's magisterial account of how America divided confirms his place as one of our country's most celebrated historians.

Excerpt from the book, "Nixonland":

Richard Nixon, now, is long dead. But these sides have hardly changed. We now call them "red" or "blue" America, and whether one or the other wins the temporary allegiances of 50 percent plus one of the electorate -- or 40 percent of the electorate, or 60 percent of the electorate -- has been the narrative of every election since. It promises to be thus for another generation. But the size of the constituencies that sort into one or the other of the coalitions will always be temporary.

The main character in Nixonland is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name -- but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.

About the author:

Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, which will be published by Scribner on May 13, 2008. His first book, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. It appeared on the best books lists that year of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, and also achieved the status, in the wake of the Clinton Wars and the 2000 Florida recount, as one of the very rare books to receive glowing reviews in both left-wing and right-wing publications. From the summer of 2003 until 2005 he covered the presidential campaigns as chief national political correspondent for the Village Voice. He has also published The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party, an essay with responses from commentators including Robert Reich, Elaine Kamarck, and Ruy Teixeira. In 2006 and 2007 he wrote a biweekly column for The New Republic Online. Perlstein is now senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, for whom he writes the blog The Big Con.

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