My shorthand is history is process, not parallels. There really can’t be a historical parallel. You can’t step in the same river twice or even once because the thing that happened in 1968 happened and we were responding to what happened. Even if there are similarities. I have long maintained that the most influential president of the 20th century was not FDR or Reagan but Richard Nixon. While Roosevelt may have created more programs and Reagan changed the economic tone of the nation, Nixon changed how we voted and how our politicians campaigned. And that may have the most longstanding effect on 21st century America. A man of the left, Perlstein agrees his books are as much about the failures of liberalism and the media as the success of the right. And just when you think – oww, my mind is obliterated, this is death by facts – along comes something you actually always wanted to know about, and how it fit in to the 60s, Attica, Soledad, Angela Davis, Jerry Rubin, all those half-heard names. Here they all are, bawling in your ear, dancing in your face.

The 1960 Presidential Election was one of the most closely-fought and significant elections in American history. Both Richard Nixon and John F Kennedy were regarded as the trailblazing futures of their parties, and both entered the race for the White House knowing that their presidency would profoundly shape the country. The one that’s the simplest is it’s a patriotic and humane act to say that the person who has in their possession the sole authority to launch a nuclear strike is not a responsible person. That’s the simplest thing and good for them. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. In the Nixon presidential years a wide variety of illegal activities ranging from revenge upon the president's long list of enemies to the hiding of international war crimes conducted in southeast Asia occupied much of his time even before the Watergate break-in was conducted. In Reaganland, one after another, major players take the stage. More than 40 years later, many are still there.

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Filmmaker Sierra Pettengill was inspired by the book for her research on the 2022 documentary film Riotsville, U.S.A. [13] See also [ edit ] Perlstein’s overarching thesis, tying together two parallel narratives involving American society and Nixon himself, is that Richard Nixon masterfully recognized, exploited and magnified cultural divisions which then persisted long past his presidency. It is a contention not easily dismissed, but many readers will appreciate that there is nothing new about America’s polarized politics (or culture). Nixon was the first Republican president who was obsessed with power. Power was much much more important to him then doing the job of the president, which is to care for the welfare of the citizens of the United states. Up until Nixon, the presidents of the time new their job was to serve. To make this nation a great place to live. But since Nixon the Republicans have just been spiraling down hill, into an ever growing cesspool of power hungry, selfish, down right criminal pile of morons. In these cases, and in others, Perlstein is unsparing in his critique of the political failures of mid-century liberalism; I only wish he had meditated more deeply on liberalism’s policy failures as well, and at least grappled with the possibility that voters rejected liberal governance for pragmatic reasons as well as atavistic ones. But to do so might have required him to give Nixon’s Republican Party—if not Nixon himself—more credit for restoring domestic tranquillity than I imagine he thinks the GOP deserves. Indeed, a minor theme of Perlstein’s book is the extent to which domestic tranquillity has never been restored; Americans, he argues, inhabit “Nixonland” even now.

You know, I would have six or seven or eight different strands to think about, kind of untangling that. It’s a very Perlsteinian response, wide-ranging, multifaceted, but it is given in a very different America from the one in which he started work in 1997, nearly a quarter of a century ago. Like trying to keep up with American politics in any election year, reading Perlstein can be like trying to drink from a firehose. There’s something Melvillean about the sheer scale of the work, four leviathans to make up a whole.Capturing a figure that was so nuanced as Richard Nixon is no easy feat, however, author Evan Thomas does a stellar job in his biography, Being Nixon: A Man Divided. was the very terms of our national self-image: a notion that there are two kinds of Americans. On the one side, the “Silent Majority” … the middle-class, middle American, suburban, exurban and rural coalition … On the other side are the “liberals,” the “cosmopolitans,” the “intellectuals,” the “professionals” … Both populations—to speak in ideal types—are equally, essentially, tragically American. And both have learned to consider the other not quite American at all.

Perlstein also presents a broader overview of the cultural and political turmoil in 1960s America, including the 1968 Democratic Convention, but, as the book ends with Nixon's reelection in 1972, only peripherally covers Watergate.I mean, do you take the good with the bad? Do you throw out the baby with the bathwater? Ronald Reagan always said a half-loaf is better than no loaf. I put Perlstein’s Nixonland on my "to read" shelf, after I read a very effective and thorough review of the book in the September 1/8, 2010, edition of The Nation. Perstein's book is a must-read for any one interested in the Republican Party's calculated obliteration of whatever tatters and remnants of New World democracy still informed the American polity during the years that Perlstein examines. Short of destroying the entire country and its people, we cannot eliminate the enemy force in Vietnam by military means. Reported in the New York Times, October 1968. P423 So what was Nixonland? It was the beginning of the Culture Wars. It was left-wing rebellion and right-wing working class resentment, with each side “heightening the contradictions:” “The cops got the confrontation they wanted. The revolutionaries got the confrontation they wanted. Lo, a new crop of revolutionaries; lo, a new crop of vigilantes: Nixonland.” 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