Nixonland Rick Perlstein Book Review

Rick Perlstein’s sprawling, rollicking book arrives hard on the heels of a contest of empathy-exhibitionism in which the two Democratic presidential candidates competed to see who could more ardently adore churchgoing, gun-owning, not-at-all-bitter working-class Pennsylvanians. Perlstein’s readers will learn why this happened. He shrewdly quotes a commentator’s assessment of Richard Nixon’s 1952 Checkers speech with its maudlin reference to his wife’s “Republican cloth coat”: “Dick Nixon has suddenly placed the burden of old-style Republican aloofness on the Democrats.”

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NIXONLAND

The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

By Rick Perlstein.

Illustrated. 881 pp. Scribner. .50.

Related First Chapter: ‘Nixonland' (May 11, 2008) Up Front (May 11, 2008) Times Topics: Richard Milhous Nixon Enlarge This Image Associated Press (1968)

In Perlstein’s mental universe, Nixon is a bit like God — not, Lord knows, because of Nixon’s perfect goodness and infinite mercy, but because Nixon is the explanation for everything. Or at least for the rise of the right and the decline of almost everything else. This is a subject Perlstein, a talented man of the left, has addressed before.

In 2001, he published the best book yet on the social ferments that produced Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy. Subtle and conscientious, “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” demonstrated Perlstein’s omnivorous appetite for telling tidbits from the news media, like this one: When Goldwater was campaigning in the 1964 New Hampshire primary, The New York Times ran a photograph with the snide caption “Barry Goldwater, aspirant for the Republican presidential nomination, with the widow of Senator Styles Bridges in East Concord. She holds dog.” Oh, the other person must be the conservative presidential candidate.

In November 1964, surveying the debris of Goldwater’s loss of 44 states, the Times columnist James Reston said Goldwater “has wrecked his party for a long time to come.” The archetypal public intellectual of the day, the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who thought the conservative movement was the manifestation of a psychological disorder, said Goldwater’s candidacy provided conservatives “a kind of vocational therapy, without which they might have to be committed.” Surely “the end of ideology” — as Daniel Bell’s 1960 book was titled — was at hand. As the winner of the 1960 presidential election had assured the country, the liberal consensus was so broad and deep that America’s remaining problems were “technical” and “administrative.”

“These,” said President Lyndon Johnson when lighting the national Christmas tree in December 1964, “are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem.” In his State of the Union address a few weeks later, he said, “We have achieved a unity of interest among our people that is unmatched in the history of freedom.” The nation was, however, stepping high, wide and plentiful along the lip of a volcano. The first eruption occurred seven months later in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. And in 1968, Republicans began winning seven of the next 10 presidential elections. Perlstein thinks he knows why. Whereas in 1960 22,000 people donated to John Kennedy’s campaign and 44,000 to Richard Nixon’s, in 1964 Goldwater had more than a million contributors. A mass movement was gestating, undetected by complacent celebrators of liberalism’s hegemony.

Now comes the second installment of Perlstein’s meditation on that era’s and, he thinks, our current discontents. “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” completes his inquest into the death of the “cult of ‘American consensus’” and the birth of “American cacophony.” Perlstein’s chronicle, which begins with the Watts riot of August 1965, is itself riotous: even at its calmest, his pell-mell narrative calls to mind a Pieter Bruegel painting of tumultuous peasants; at its most fervid, it resembles one of Hieronymus Bosch’s nightmares.

Do we need another waist-deep wallow in the 1960s, ensconcing us cheek by jowl with Frank Rizzo and Eldridge Cleaver, Sam Yorty and Mark Rudd, Lester Maddox and Herbert Marcuse and other long-forgotten bit players in a period drama? Do we need to be reminded of that era’s gaseous juvenophilia, like Time magazine’s celebration of Americans 25 or younger as 1967’s “Man of the Year”: “This is not just a new generation, but a new kind of generation. ... In the omphalocentric process of self-construction and discovery,” today’s youth “stalks love like a wary hunter, but has no time or target — not even the mellowing Communists — for hate.”

Well, this retrospective wallow does increase the public stock of harmless pleasure, as when Perlstein revisits the 1972 Democratic convention that nominated George McGovern and heard 80 nominations for vice president, including Mao Zedong and Archie Bunker. But Perlstein’s high-energy — sometimes too energetic — romp of a book also serves, inadvertently, a serious need: it corrects the cultural hypochondria to which many Americans, including Perlstein, are prone.

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George F. Will is a syndicated columnist.

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