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Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America | 
 enlarge | Author: Rick Perlstein
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $37.50
Buy New: $16.98
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Avg. Customer Rating:  50 reviews
Sales Rank: 1226
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st Scribner Hardcover Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 896
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.4 x 2
ISBN: 0743243021
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.924
EAN: 9780743243025
ASIN: 0743243021
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, May 2008: How did we go from Lyndon Johnson's landslide Democratic victory in 1964 to Richard Nixon's equally lopsided Republican reelection only eight years later? The years in between were among the most chaotic in American history, with an endless and unpopular war, riots, assassinations, social upheaval, Southern resistance, protests both peaceful and armed, and a "Silent Majority" that twice elected the central figure of the age, a brilliant politician who relished the battles of the day but ended them in disgrace. In Nixonland Rick Perlstein tells a more familiar story than the one he unearthed in his influential previous book, Before the Storm, which argued that the stunning success of modern conservatism was founded in Goldwater's massive 1964 defeat. But he makes it fresh and relentlessly compelling, with obsessive original research and a gleefully slashing style--equal parts Walter Winchell and Hunter S. Thompson--that's true to the times. Perlstein is well known as a writer on the left, but his historian's empathies are intense and unpredictable: he convincingly channels the resentment and rage on both sides of the battle lines and lets neither Nixon's cynicism nor the naivete of liberals like New York mayor John Lindsay off the hook. And while election-year readers will be reminded of how much tamer our times are, they'll also find that the echoes of the era, and its persistent national divisions, still ring loud and clear. --Tom Nissley
Product Description
Told with urgency and sharp political insight, Nixonland recaptures America's turbulent 1960s and early 1970s and reveals how Richard Nixon rose from the political grave to seize and hold the presidency.Perlstein's epic account begins in the blood and fire of the 1965 Watts riots, nine months after Lyndon Johnson's historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater appeared to herald a permanent liberal consensus in the United States. Yet the next year, scores of liberals were tossed out of Congress, America was more divided than ever, and a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard Nixon. Between 1965 and 1972, America experienced no less than a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know now was born. It was the era not only of Nixon, Johnson, Spiro Agnew, Hubert H. Humphrey, George McGovern, Richard J. Daley, and George Wallace but Abbie Hoffman, Ronald Reagan, Angela Davis, Ted Kennedy, Charles Manson, John Lindsay, and Jane Fonda. There are tantalizing glimpses of Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Jesse Jackson, John Kerry, and even of two ambitious young men named Karl Rove and William Clinton -- and a not so ambitious young man named George W. Bush. Cataclysms tell the story of Nixonland: - Angry blacks burning down their neighborhoods in cities across the land as white suburbanites defend home and hearth with shotguns - The student insurgency over the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention - The fissuring of the Democratic Party into warring factions manipulated by the "dirty tricks" of Nixon and his Committee to Re-Elect the President - Richard Nixon pledging a new dawn of national unity, governing more divisively than any president before him, then directing a criminal conspiracy, the Watergate cover-up, from the Oval Office Then, in November 1972, Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and resentment born of America's turmoil, was reelected in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's 1964 victory, not only setting the stage for his dramatic 1974 resignation but defining the terms of the ideological divide that characterizes America today. Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful narrative, Rick Perlstein's magisterial account of how America divided confirms his place as one of our country's most celebrated historians.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 45 more reviews...
 Revelations 2.0 January 3, 2009
Graceful, witty and fascinating, dense with a compelling choice of facts and narratives. It's a timely, probably classic history book. Meanwhile its parade of well-chosen anecdotes would make for quite the hilarious movie.
It's astonishing how many operatives mentioned in this book returned to headlines during Bush II's reign to continue their lives of privilege, lawlessness, fear-mongering and incompetence.
The Amazon reviewers here condemning Perlstein's book inadvertently support its thesis: well-oiled, well-financed Nixononian/GOP propaganda schemes have convinced a good portion of the country to vote their fears, resentments and superstitions -- and if anything goes wrong it's always the fault of unnamed "elitists."
ONE OF THE BEST OF 2008 December 30, 2008
NIXONLAND is one of the most entertaining historical tomes of the last decade. The author's subversive sense of humor and sarcasm permeate every page, and speak to the cynical in a way that entertains and educates. I am particularly obsessed with the history of this period, have read most everything there is to read about the Trickster, and feel this work stands alongside ARROGANCE OF POWER as the work that best captures this insecure, maddening, and fascinating human being who managed, in spite of himself, to ascend to the most powerful position in the world.
Nixonland is a long history of the 1960s when American exploded in division, destruction and disillusionment December 22, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Richard Milhous Nixon was one of the most complex, crafty and corrupt presidents of the United States! Nixon was born poor to a farmer/grocer in Yorba Linda California in 1913. He and his brothers were raised in a strict Quaker household by his pious mother. His father was morose, unloving and demanding. Nixon was born with a chip on his shoulder against wealthy elitest on the eastern seaboard. While at Whittier College he became a member of the Orthogonian fraternity. This fraternity made up of men from the middle class who were not rich were opposed by the Franklin fraternity of wealthy young men. Perlstein sees Nixon's whole career as being that of an Orthogonian at war with the elites of the Franklin class of American society.
Nixon was smart. He was unable to accept a scholarship to Harvard due to his penurious pocketbock in Depression America. He served on an island as a World War II officer after completing a law degree at Duke; wedding Pat Ryan and practicing small town law. Nixon would pull any dirty rabbit out of the hat in the political ring to win an election. He was amoral. Frankly, Nixon was not a nice man but a hard as nails politician who wanted power.
Nixon entered politcs by defeating Helen Gahagan Douglas is a brutal Senate campaign. He defeated Mrs. Douglas by accusing her of being soft on Communism. Nixon was a young man in a hurry. He won fame in the Alger Hiss Cass sending the wealthy spy to prison. This fame came to him while he was a young congressman in the class of 1946. This was the same class in which the young JFK his arch rival had also been elected. Nixon was chosen as Eisenhower's Vice-President from 1952 to 1960. Nixon's famous Checkers speech kept him on the ticket after it was alleged he was receiving money from undesirable contributors who wanted to call in special favors. Eisenhower and Nixon were not close. Nixon was the bulldog persona of the conservative rabidly anti-Red wing of the Republican Party.
Perlstein deals with Nixon's personal ascent to power. However, the author also uses Nixon as a mirror to the turbulence manifest in the hard years of the 1960s. The Civil Rights, ERA Amendment struggle and the war in Vietnam were all major rents in the fabric of American unity. Johnson destroyed Goldwater in the 1964 race. It was thought LBJ had brought the Great Society together with proressive Civil Rights issues. And then it all went wrong. The Vietnam War claimed 50,000 American lives; Civil Rights was fought tooth and nail as Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis. It was in this unhealthy brew of pottage that Nixon was resurrected as a national figure. His campaign appealed to law and order conservatives who hated campus radicalism, anti-war protestors and southerners. Nixon even managed to win support away from George Corley Wallace the choice of radical right wing Democrats.
It was the genesis of the current Red-Blue State quarrel in American politics. The age of the hardhat vs. the pot smoking hippie appeared in our cultural life. The hardball, take no prisoners, destroy and spy on your enemy political world we see on the news was in full force duringthe time Nixon was president.
Perlstein covers in great depth the following campaigns:
1960-Nixon loses a close race for the presidency against JFK.
1962-Nixon loses a tough race for California governor against incumbent Democrat Pat Brown. He tells reporters "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more." He practices law for a New York Law Firm.
1964. Nixzon campaigns for Goldwater building support among conservative Republicans who never trusted "Tricky Dick."
1968. Nixon beats Hubert H. Humphrey in a close election. 1968 was a horrible year in American history seeing the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Johnson's announcement of non-candidacy in the '68 race. Death is Vietnam continued to mount. Protesters and Chicago police fought and died in the streets outside of the Democratic National Convention. Nixon was elected but faced a divided and angry electorate.
Nixon is to be credited with opening the door to China. He visited the Communist Asiatic behemoth in 1971. Nixon brought troops home from Vietnam but also launched massive bombing raids against the Vietcong in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. He saw two of his conservative judge nominees for the US Supreme Court fail to win confirmation by the Senate. Nixon was never assured as he governed. Tricky Dick used wire-taps, spying, IRS intimidation and convert operations to destroy his political opponents.
In 1972. Nixon defeated McGovern in a landslide re-election to president. Within 20 months he would resign as the criminal case against him for consipiracy in the Watergate Scandal brought him down.
Rick Perlstein's book is long and slow. It is hard reading, It is also sad to read how our country was so divided and angry in this time of inhoate Civil Rights activism and the bloody tragedy of Vietnam.
Any reader wanting a well researched book on Nixon and his times will be rewarded by the many hours necessary to complete this fine work of history. Nixonland is still with us.
 Boring December 14, 2008
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
I'm 29 years old and have always wanted to learn more about Nixon and the 60's. I'm liberal, but do not like liberal bias. Since I have no first hand knowledge of the subject, I was looking for something objective that would present the facts and allow me to make my own conclusions.
When I read the first 10 pages of 'Nixonland' in the bookstore I was instantly hooked, and bought it on the spot. However, after about 80 pages I became confused and lost in the tedious minutea of senators, governors, obscure civil rights leaders, republican and democratic party members, congressmen, advisors, news stories, riots, and social activists. The timeline jumped around, and the subject of a chapter would change by the paragraph in some cases with no clear explanation why. Many times I would have to reread a paragraph because I wasn't sure who the author was talking about, or how the subject related to the previous paragraph or the chapter in general. Many times it simply didn't, and no reason for the detour was given. It began to remind me of a college research paper where the writer doesn't have any point or main thesis, so instead strings together quotes about the subject in a narrative form just to meet the minimum page requirement.
The author assumes you already have in-depth knowledge of the subject, but if you don't, many elements come across as esoteric. The author's bias clearly comes across in many pages. I started to question the author's research of the subject when I read the erroneous location of the Dan Ryan Expressway..
So I guess now I know more about Nixon, Goldwater, LBJ, Reagan, and the 60's in general, but really don't have much faith in that what I know is accurate.
 A Fractured Nation November 28, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
The country was already fractured by the time Nixon took office. Why do you think LBJ voluntarily gave up his second term? Protestors had already begun marching in the hundreds of thousands, chanting "Hey, Hey, LBJ, how many babies did you kill today?" Draft cards had long since started being burned by the thousands, race riots had already spread across the nation. So the title of the book is inaccurate. Nixon's presidency may have exacerbated things, but the greatest leaders imaginable couldn't have stopped the radical juggernaut that began in LBJ's term from rolling inexorably forward and completely altering the American landscape forever. And our commitment in Vietnam actually began under Eisenhower and was intensified under Kennedy, but it was on LBJ's watch that it all blew up in our faces. LBJ's failed presidency is what gave Nixon his 1968 election win to begin with. And actually, the seeds for the sixties' explosion were planted in the cultural changes of the 1950's (see David Halberstam's book, "The 1950's"). Living through the sixties' upheaval left indelible memories that no latter-day revisionist's take on things can possibly erase.
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