Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Additional Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America Information

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.

What Customers Say About Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America:

End seems abrupt. Frequently interesting and overwhelmingly detailed. A pain to read at times, but an okay analysis of cultural resentments in the 1960s and early 1970s. Instead of continuing to describe Nixon's fall, the author inserts a sudden summary and concludes with the 1972 election outcome. That was disappointing.

This is a long, meandering, but ultimately gratifying exegesis of a major paradigm shift in the American political landscape. Over the last few decades I've been utterly perplexed by the willingness of conservatives and liberals alike to use the ideological political battles of the 60s (and early 90s) as synecdoches for seemingly unrelated events (i.e., Iraq as Vietnam, Bush as Nixon, Progressives as Hippies, etc). As someone who was born during the Nixon administration, I've always found the justifications for why people voted for Nixon (or even Reagan) to be wanting.

It is both biased and honest: an emerging hallmark of the latest style of journalistic political writing. Nixonland certainly helped disabuse me of some of that naïveté. It hop-scotches its way through the 1960s (mainly) to reveal how Richard Nixon and others lassoed pockets of aggrieved conservatives into a durable political coalition.

I understood conservatism, but I was still deeply naïve about the trends in American culture that metastasized into such overwhelming support for Nixon in 1972. It's also written with complex and confusing quirks of syntax that, while creative, tend to slow the pace of the narrative. Fundamentally, its an old story told in a fresh way.

Nixonland feels modern and relevant today largely because it positions the broader American body politic as its true protagonist. Rick Perlstein has written a noble and enlightening explanation for this unhappy phenomenon.

Easy to read retelling of the most difficult times in our recent past.I learned many things I did not know and was reminded of the things I wanted to forget.

There are factual errors left and right. As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal who has studied Nixon to death, I was really looking forward to reading this book. 50 pages in and I have to put it in the 'to be donated' pile.The prose is contorted, requiring that I go back to re-read many a sentence a second (or third) time to try to interpret what the author was trying to communicate. The author's slanted point of view leads to many statements that are more propaganda than fact.One of the books I looked forward to most and was most disappointed by. Don't waste your money.

This is a large book and it took me a while to figure out what it was about. The result was that I probably had a better sense of events than I would have had reading wikipedia articles, but I didn't get the same clarity. Youtube was especially great since I could watch events (e.g. Instead, it's about an unusually tumultuous time when civil rights and the vietnam war combined to create a stronger than usual divide between some parts of the country. So good subject matter and interesting though longish read. Perlstein's gift seems to be to provide a sort of 'you are there' presentation of the events. It's not really about Nixon, i think, though he was an important figure during the time of the events discussed in the book. As is becoming more-and-more common for me when reading history books, the real value of the book was introducing me to subjects that I could pursue by looking at wikipedia (for clarity and details) and youtube (for a real sense of what things were like).

He'll look at something and describe it, and then get distracted by something else and describe that. Descriptions can comprise several pages of coarse prose. old campaign commercials) after reading about them. But a little too unpolished for my liking.