Perlstein sees some patterns and has his own story on what the major takeaways should be. There is something I should be taking away about how Nixon is a flashpoint or symbol for how everything changed. I didn’t always follow the author’s logic for how we should connect the dots into his central narrative. However, it never failed to be interesting, so I did enjoy the ride. An exciting e-format containing 27 video clips taken directly from the CBS news archive of a brilliant, best-selling account of the Nixon era by one of America’s most talented young historians. Two contending sets of rumors circulated: that cleanup crews found “nothing but bras and panties – you never saw so many”. And that two marchers had been dragged into the building and summarily executed. P 216 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. Richard Nixon acceding to the presidency pledging a new dawn of national unity--and governing more divisively than any before him.

Overall, “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” provides a unique and frequently fascinating window into the social and political fabric of Nixon’s era. It is vibrant and engaging, with dramatic characters and powerful themes. But readers hoping to observe Nixon’s presidency, his political philosophy, his ascent or downfall in detail will need to look elsewhere. How does Perlstein feel about the Never Trumpers, Republicans working to eject a Republican from the White House itself? As we all know, the sixties was in part the story of the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the New Left, the anti-war movement, the counterculture, and the hippies. These public and disruptive protests antagonized the social conservatives of society. Nixon capitalized on this resentment by convincing people that this resentment, though not visible, not heard, was in fact, the real majority, the real America. The angry masses of demonstrators didn’t really represent you, the average, law-abiding, patriotic, hardworking middle-class American. With great success, Nixon positioned himself in such a way to draw the line, intensify, and capitalize on the culture wars:

In Before the Storm, Perlstein positioned Goldwater’s doomed White House bid as a starting point of a crusade. Though he lost badly, his grassroots support – in terms of small-dollar donations – had been strong.

These years were absolutely bonkers. One war raged in Vietnam; another flared in American streets. Watts erupted in flames. The National Guard was deployed in Newark. The Democratic Party went to Chicago to hold a convention, and decided instead to burn itself to the ground, live on national television. Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed. Martin Luther King was shot and killed. The odious George Wallace was shot and paralyzed. Weathermen planted bombs. Soldiers shot kids on college campuses. As president, Nixon stewed, plotted, dropped bombs on Cambodia and Laos, and surrounded himself with buffoons who were full of bizarre schemes and had ready access to slush funds. He cheated and broke laws and acted small and vindictively. He also had the far vision to look at Communist China and see the possibility of friendship rather than the inevitability of conflict.

Nixonland

Perlstein...aims here at nothing less than weaving a tapestry of social upheaval. His success is dazzling.” — Los Angeles Times The rise of twin cultures of left- and right-wing vigilantes, Americans literally bombing and cutting each other Perlstein is also the author of the books Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001) and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008). Before the Storm covers the rise of the conservative movement culminating in the nomination and campaign of Barry Goldwater and how the movement came to dominate the Republican Party despite Goldwater's loss. Nixonland covers American politics and society from 1964 to 1972, centering on Richard Nixon's attempt to rehabilitate himself politically and his eventual successful use of the resentment of settled society against the social unrest of the day to rebuild the Republican Party. They have to be worn to be understood… They give the ankles a freedom as if to invite dancing right on the street… p542 What I believe RP wishes me to extract from this howling tumult was three big ones. RP characterises the 50s and early 60s as a time of optimism, culminating in LBJ’s civil rights legislation 64-66. But then it all splintered . What happened NEXT was

If you think you fully understand the modern culture wars, and everything that went on in the 1960s, you don't... until you've read Nixonland. Is this Perlstein’s real view? If so, he would have been better advised to put quotation marks around the final word in the title of his book on Goldwater; but perhaps his publishers told him that pandering to an imaginary golden age of social harmony is the way to sell books. That allows him to wring his hands over the present. The closing sentences of Nixonland have an appropriately apocalyptic timbre: ‘Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not. How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.’

In a book in which picaresque narrative and forensic political analysis sit side by side, Perlstein constructs a typically vivid set piece. Perlstein was born in 1969, the first year of the Nixon presidency. He writes, however, like he was in the middle of it. His narrative is lively, ironic, and ultimately, depressing. The country, in the years since, has not progressed but regressed. Nixon, in retrospect, looks like a wise man. Despite his "enemies list" he seems a civil libertarian compared to what we have now. Surely he is responsible for the beginnings of what American politics have descended into, but other, more skilled practitioners have dug the hole far deeper than Milhouse could ever have dreamed.

a) Vietnam – its immorality became too painful, the American dead unignorable – 50,000 by 1970; and the draft meant that YOU or your son might be next up

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He sums up three decades’ worth of Holly­wood political activism in one tone-deaf Warren Beatty remark from 1972: “A great deal of the leadership of this generation comes from music and film people, whether people like that fact or not.” He captures the essence of Richard Nixon’s career in a single aside to Leonard Garment: “You’ll never make it in politics, Len. You just don’t know how to lie.”