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Leaving Nixonland

By David Weigel on 6.13.08 @ 12:07AM

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PERLSTEIN'S INSIGHT IS that Nixon kept up the chairmanship of this club for the rest of his political life, drafting new members at every critical juncture. The "Checkers" speech is the first and best example, as, over the jeers of liberal intellectuals, nearly 2 million people saved Nixon's career by sending telegrams supporting his position in a campaign finance scandal. "They interpreted the puppy story just as Nixon intended it," writes Perlstein, "as a jab at a bunch of bastards who were piling on, kicking a man when he was down, a regular guy, just because they could do it and he couldn't fight back."

It was good practice for the turmoil of the 1960s, and Perlstein is clear-eyed enough to see why, as the decade closed, Nixon was so successful. He identifies the reasons all historians of the left identify -- a heated backlash against the civil rights movement, an even stronger backlash against integration. He locates nasty letters that angry white voters sent to Sen. Paul Douglas (D-Illinois): "While you sit on your butt in Washington Martin Luther King is violating everything I bought and paid for." He excavates oddball rumors that swirled in white communities, like the fear, in eastern Iowa, that black gangsters were traveling from Chicago on motorcycles to attack their communities.

Myth after myth about the 1960s is punctured. The saintly Robert F. Kennedy actually wheezed over the finish line in Indiana and California, stitching together a coalition of white liberals and blacks, not uniting all voters. Ronald Reagan wasn't a sunny optimist, but a political flirt who bashed college students and tried to steal the 1968 nomination from Nixon.

Perlstein, however, does not argue that the backlash of the 1960s and 1970s (the book ends with Nixon's defeat of McGovern) was all the fault of the backlashers. He excoriates the far left for egging all of this on.

The Chicago Seven trial -- the subject of a hagiographic animated movie just last year -- is recounted as a battle between self-aggrandizing, cartoonish leftists and an embittered establishment that didn't know better.

Perlstein digs up wacko event after wacko event, writing the proceedings in a deadpan voice as his subjects condemn themselves. At the 1968 New Politics Conference, convened to nominate a third party ticket of Martin Luther King and Benjamin Spock, "one delegate offered himself for endorsement for president of the United States and said the 1966 Italian art-house Blowup was his platform. He was serious."

At the 1972 Democratic convention, a delegate gloats about voting on acid.

THROUGHOUT HIS NARRATIVE, Perlstein produces examples of contemporary media that completely missed both stories -- the alienating effect of the left and the perfidy of Nixon's organization. Editorialist after editorialist is quoted praising the courage and freshness of the young generation, and contrasted with middle Americans who openly fantasize about beating their brains out -- when they're not actually doing so.

Perlstein mocks the lefty theorist Charles Reich and his book The Greening of America (endorsed by Justice William O. Douglas and Sen. George McGovern) as head-in-the-clouds pap: "His New Jerusalem would just sort of happen. Automatically. No more riots, no more cataclysm, no more protests, no left, no right -- no politics."

This is by no means a conservative book. It is bigger and better than ideology. It is also, to Perlstein's delight, becoming less pointed by the day. While he concludes that Nixonland "has not ended yet," he's told interviewers that the rise of Barack Obama and the collapse of fearmongering Republicans has given him confidence that the country is really moving away from the "national berserk."

Is he making Arthur Schlesinger's mistake after the 1964 Goldwater-Johnson race, reading one election for proof that the Republicans would never win again? Perhaps not. The Weathermen have been reduced to college professors. The new drug epidemics are happening in the Great Plains, not college campuses. The Republicans, not the Democrats, own the latest war. With nothing for the Silent Majority to backlash against, the Left might finally win.

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