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Leaving Nixonland

By David Weigel on 6.13.08 @ 12:07AM

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
By Rick Perlstein
(Scribner, 896 pages, $37.50)

Seven years ago, William Ayers, the Weather Underground bomber-turned-leftish education scholar, published a memoir of his criminal career and embarked upon one of the most damaging promotional tours in literary history. He sat for a profile in Chicago magazine, then stood up to dance on an American flag as a photographer clicked away. He told the New York Times that he didn't regret setting bombs, in an interview that landed on doorsteps the morning of September 11.

Ayers's book, a solipsistic yawner, became a bit of a sensation. The liberals who remembered what he and the Weather Underground did got understandably worked up. When Ayers arrived at a reading in Evanston, Illinois, one of those liberals confronted him about it.

"I personally spent all of 1972 working all day and all night to elect George McGovern," the former activist said, "and I will tell you that your tactics made it harder to vote the Richard Nixons out of office."

"I'm not going to disagree," Ayers said, disagreeing with him. "The American people did vote, three times, to end the war. We voted for Johnson because Goldwater had his finger on the trigger... and then we voted for Nixon as the anti-war candidate, and he also escalated it. It would be a big stretch to say that the left brought McGovern down."

WELL, NOT THAT BIG of a stretch. The Weathermen make several appearances in Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. They are the ultimate examples of left-wingers who crippled their cause with violence, overreaction, and a general need to frighten Middle Americans.

Take one example from early 1971. The U.S. Senate was responding to the Army's scandalous abuse of spying, against such hot targets as Arlo Guthrie and Adlai Stevenson III, and civil libertarians had the upper hand. But the Weathermen had just bombed the Capitol building, giving Nebraska Republican Roman Hruska a ladder onto the moral high ground when he defended the spying.

"The people," Hruska said, "must receive every protection possible against those elements who consider even the United States Capitol Building as a legitimate object of their violence."

Perlstein, a man of the left who has accused George W. Bush of "stealing our democratic birthright," is also America's best living historian of the conservative movement.

He has achieved this, in part, with exhaustive research. Nixonland, like its predecessor Before the Storm (the best history of conservatism in the years around Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign), is a trove of original documents, primary sources, long-forgotten magazine clips, interviews, and archived letters. Perlstein often pays tribute to the "iron-assed will" of Richard Nixon, who could sit for hours to win poker hands. He could be talking about his own ability to lock himself in a library.

He has also achieved his status by understanding the motivations of conservatives. He has pure contempt for conservative politicians, like the "ratf-----s" who, as he recounts, sabotaged every 1972 Democratic candidate's campaign to smooth a path for the unelectable George McGovern. But he understands why middle-class whites, ethnic voters only a generation or so removed from Europe, and George Wallace Democrats rejected the left and embraced Nixon and his brand of resentment politics.

Perlstein's subject is the voter who cast a ballot for LBJ in 1964 "because to do anything else...seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason."

This is what Nixonland adds to the cornucopia of Nixon books already on the shelves. Other studies focus on the man's psyche, his friendships, and his downfall, and make it hard to understand how he rose to the pinnacle of American politics.

Plenty of these analyses focus on Nixon's inability to pay for a Harvard education after the school accepted him. Perlstein considers that important, but he hones in one what Nixon did when he arrived at Whittier College.

Nixon was rejected from the Franklins, the elite clique that ran the campus, so he founded a club called the Orthogonians "for the strivers, those not to the manor born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one's unpolish was a nobility of its own."

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Education, Barack Obama, Books, Conservatism, Oil