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.”
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.
