05:30 pm
Book Report: Nixonland
I used to read a lot more than I do now — on average, a book every day or two. Of course, that was back before I had a life — no wife, no child — or a blog. So these days, it takes me a bit longer to get through even the most compelling of reads.
It’s my intent to share the best of what I read with you. Not a comprehensive review, mind you, but I hope I can point you to some worthwhile books you otherwise might have missed.
As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been plowing through Nixonland by Rick Perlstein for quite some time now — despite the fact that I found myself staying up way too late on way too many nights, absolutely gripped by the story he has to tell.
It’s a a terrific read. Perlstein has a gift for historical narrative, and there are parts of the story — particularly his takes on the impact of the 1968 Democratic convention and the implosion of the 1972 McGovern campaign — that are as compelling as anything I’ve ever read, fiction or non-fiction. He brings a fresh perspective to something that I (and many others) thought too stale to benefit from a new approach.
He does this by tracing the evolution of the civil war over values that has wracked this country since the 1965 Watts riots. At the center of this narrative is the story of the decline of the Democratic party into chaotic conflict, and of how Richard Nixon ruthlessly took advantage of the resultant divisions to build his “silent majority.” Perlstein is right to place Nixon at the center of our cultural divide (and his narrative), and to identify it as his main legacy.
In addition, he successfully traces how each side in this conflict frames the other as evil, and how, as a result, they are unable or unwilling to see the logic or utility of the other side’s point of view. And as he notes at the book’s end, we are still living in — suffering the consequences of — Nixonland today.
That said, I did have three reservations.
The first is Perlstein’s decision to turn an otherwise brilliant analysis of the impact on Nixon of an event early on in his life — his exclusion at Whittier College from a group called the Franklins and his subsequent establishment of a counter-group called the Orthogonians — into a frequently strained metaphor for the broader cultural conflict. After the first few chapters, I found the analogy distracting rather than useful. In addition, I have to say that while Perlstein’s examination of what drove Nixon is brilliantly perceptive, he sometimes descends into glib psychohistory that only distracts from an otherwise compelling analysis.
The second is the book’s ending. Perlstein’s ends his account in November 1972, immediately after Nixon’s landslide victory over McGovern. That certainly is his perogative, but the timing seems startlingly abrupt. Why not to continue the story through Watergate and Nixon’s subsequent resignation? Even though I wasn’t a fan of the Franklin-Orthogonian frame, I would have liked to have read his description of both sides’ reaction to events like Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War.
Third, given that he devotes significant time and space to Nixon’s rise, why no attempt to document what happened to him after his fall from grace? It is almost as if Perlstein fell victim to that classic novelist’s mistake: he confuses his story’s climax with its conclusion. The abrupt ending also means that he devotes only a few cursory pages to a conclusion — which seems rather meager given the time and resources he has devoted to the story.
Despite these concerns, I urge you to go out and buy it today — it truly is the nerd beach read of the summer. And I plan to pick up his book on the Goldwater revolution as soon as the vampires on Amazon and B&N stop asking $70.00 for a used copy.
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