If Richard Nixon were
writing this review, he would probably open with "Some have asked me whether I
am important or relevant at all to 21st-century America." It was a rhetorical
technique he often used in his speeches, whether or not anyone had ever posed
the question he was answering; after 1968 primary opponent George Romney
appeared to go soft on the Vietnam War, Nixon opened a press conference with
the words, "People ask me, 'What will you give North Vietnam?'" This
faux-populism appears over and over in Nixonland:
The Rise Of A President And The Fracturing Of America, Rick Perlstein's
exhaustively detailed tome on how the 37th president shaped American politics.
Perlstein frames Nixon's
rise and his personal approach to politics through the dueling forces of the
Franklins and the Orthogonians—the fraternity that refused to accept him
in college, and the one he co-founded in reaction. This division expressed
Nixon's long-building resentment toward privileged politicians from Alger Hiss
to John F. Kennedy, and his conviction that disadvantaged men like him deserved
to be in charge. He developed this narrative through his two unsuccessful
campaigns, eventually calling the Orthogonian forces the "silent majority" who
believed the vocal anti-war movement and the reforms of the Great Society had
gone a little too far. Once he'd created and exploited that social gap, nothing
he did in office or toward his exit could bridge it. When he famously told the
press corps in 1962, "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more," Perlstein
argues, Nixon planned to return (and did), surrounded by a phalanx of foot
soldiers to his mythology.
Nixonland doesn't particularly emphasize
the parallels between the elections it covers and more recent contests, because
it isn't necessary: If the back-room regional politicking doesn't seem eerily
predictive of today's color-coded electoral maps, the bloody fights for
primaries and the spin machine which allowed Nixon to overcome his image as a
loser will. But Perlstein
takes great care to contextualize Nixon, from the
debate over public-school sex education to the inner leadership of the Yippies
and the rise of Ronald Reagan, who defeated the gubernatorial incumbent who
beat Nixon in 1966. Rich in description and occasionally terrifying, Nixonland revisits the '60s not only from the side of the
counterculture, but from the counter-counterculture which carried Tricky Dick
to the White House by invoking the cues that built a majority, no matter how
fractured it really was.