Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
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About this ebook
“Both brilliant and fun, a consuming journey back into the making of modern politics.” —Jon Meacham
“Nixonland is a grand historical epic. Rick Perlstein has turned a story we think we know—American politics between the opposing presidential landslides of 1964 and 1972—into an often-surprising and always-fascinating new narrative.” —Jeffrey Toobin
Rick Perlstein’s bestselling account of how the Nixon era laid the groundwork for the political divide that marks our country today.
Told with vivid 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 of the United States. 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. Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful narrative, Rick Perlstein’s magisterial account of how it all happened confirms his place as one of our country’s most celebrated historians.
Editor's Note
Monumental history…
Rick Perlstein is a storyteller of the first class, weaving together huge historical set pieces with lesser known but equally revealing moments. And Nixon—an American Faust—is the thread that ties all these events together.
Rick Perlstein
Rick Perlstein is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan; Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by over a dozen publications; and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history and appeared on the best books of the year lists of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. His essays and book reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Village Voice, and Slate, among others. A contributing editor and board member of In These Times magazine, he lives in Chicago.
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Reviews for Nixonland
283 ratings26 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Before the Storm and Nixonland, now maybe more so than ever, should be taught in high schools. Few histories provide a context quite like this.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Very impressionistic history. You need to have some basic knowledge of the events, because Perlstein skips over many of them in favor of the little details. (For example, he won't generally say who won each election or primary.) He goes so far as to read through daily newspapers, page by page giving each story. You do get a certain sense for the time, although from a biased perspective. Perlstein has a strong thesis, but he often leaves it implicit, in the choice of topics he focuses on. I'd rather he always argued explicitly.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5There is a divide in America, often called "Red State/Blue State" or simply Republican/Democrat. How did it come about? Nixonland is a detailed re-telling of the political and social history of America between 1965 and 1972, when the divide, as we currently know it today, first emerged. As someone who didn't have the pleasure of living through "the sixties", but who is heir to the era and its events, this book has been an amazing revelation. The divide continues to this day and everything can be traced back to these stormy 7 years. Many of the stories I have head or before but did not understand their historical context or importance. Perstein's narrative technique and skill is enthralling and often humorous, he can go on for pages on a particular topic that would stand alone as a classic essay. The books is full of these, too many to recount, but some of my favorites include: Watts Riots (p.3-19); The Summer of Love (p.185+); Newark Riots (p.190-194); about the film Bonnie and Clyde (p.208); protest at the Pentagon (p.214+); Columbia University and the SDS (p.263); Democrat National Convention in Chicago (p.289-327); Cornell University protests (p.374+); Berkley protests (p.382+); Nixon and Patton (p.472); Kent State (p.479-495); Nixon and Billy Graham (p.500+); George Wallace assassination (p.660-665); Jane Fonda's Vietnam visit (p.703+); Republican National Convention 1972 (p.712-719).The common thread throughout is the cultural and political divide in America. In the last 3 pages of this wordy and information dense history, Perstein gives his personal opinion of why the divide exists: it is a difference in world views, both uniquely American, but both deadly serious about eliminating the other to ensure their own survival. The violence of the 60s has tamed somewhat but the war continues.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5There are, at the end of 2022, somewhere between 250 and 300 full-length books in print concerning Richard M. Nixon and his times. Leaving aside his self-serving memoir, "RN," these books range from the very specialized (Joe McGinness' "The Selling of the President 1968") to the expansive and scholarly (Stephen A. Ambrose's classic trilogy, "Nixon"), and most are worth reading or at least skimming. (Obviously, with so many accounts, the details can become somewhat repetitive.) "Nixonland," by Rick Perlstein, is notable simply for its lack of focus and its meandering style. In nearly a thousand pages, Perlstein purports to cover Nixon's life from his college days up to his re-election to the presidency in 1972. If the reader is looking for a fairly complete, easily digestible chronicle of America in the 1960s, the book may serve its purpose. If, on the other hand, one is interested in understanding how Richard Nixon affected American government and political history, one's time would be better spent elsewhere. Between the minutiae and the lacunae, Perlstein's account of what Nixon meant to America is very sparse indeed.Perlstein will, in all probability, continue his vapid, shallow chronicles of Republican politicians with a book on Donald Trump. Those of us who have read the preceding books will avoid it: there are far too many legitimate analyses and critiques of Trump, or Nixon, to waste time with fluff.Not recommended.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Perlstein wrote this in 2008 but its instructive to read it in 2018 as a reminder that Donald Trump is not a one off, black swan, but in many ways the logical conclusion, or at least the love child of the culture wars that Nixon may not have started, but magnified from their Goldwater roots. Its Nixon after all who coined the phrase the "Silent Majority", Nixon who understood that the majority of the population craved for a quiet status quo without being challenged by the loud minority, Nixon (or at least Spiro Agnew) who started to tear at the neutrality of the press, who started to create and disseminate fake news, overall Nixon who tore down the post war consensus by appealing to the lowest common dominator and invoking the fear of aliens and fear of change. "Nixonland is still with us" warns Perlstein, in the hazy glow of the election of Obama. "Does anyone doubt that half the population, given the slightest provocation, wouldn't willingly pick up a gun and shoot the other half". Well, not anymore we don't. At this distance, he looks remarkably prescient. As for the history itself, Perlstein's account is lively, invigorating, intense (it took me 3 months to read) and not uncommonly, inaccurate - at least in the details. But not in the overall tone. The story of how Nixon, beautifully described as a "serial collector of grudges" went from unfashionable rural California to the White House, through a combination of a knack for political insight and a mastery of the black arts rose to be the most powerful person in the world is remarkable. Even now, the whole thing seems somewhat unlikely. Thankfully the story ends at his election for a second term, and before the humiliations of Watergate (such a small thing in his general program of "ratfucking" the opposition) and his alcoholic decline took the world nearer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Program till, well, now (I write this as US and Russia sabre rattle over Syria). If there is a fault here, its that Perlstein doesn't give enough credit to Nixon's achievement, engagement with China in particular, but also the beginnings of detente with Russia. And compared to the Republican party of today, he comes across as socially centrist. He gives plenty of time - and rightly so - to Nixon's many failings and especially to the criminal policy of sabotaging the peace talks in Paris in 1968 and keeping the war going through the elections of 1972. Its not so much the blood on the hands of Nixon and Kissinger - extensive though that is - but the sheer cynicism. You can't expect Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian lives to mean much to them - but clearly, those of their own citizens didn't much either. If there are two main themes of the book its Vietnam and Nixonian dirty tricks. But for me there's a third; the accurate portrayal of the 1960s. It wasn't a time of free love and flowers in the hair; it was a time of social change that many in society opposed passively or actively. For every civil rights activist, there are 2 people who would have African Americans know their place. For every hippie, there are 3 hard working joes. The image of hard hats and stockbrokers joining forces to beat up hippies in Manhattan is one of Perlstein's strongest. The 60s weren't about counter culture - its just that many of the counter culture were smart enough to later get jobs in media. Recommended
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was a great book, but it took me for-eva to read. I think I'm getting stupid. I used to be able to read non-fiction books much more quickly.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Is Nixonland a time or a place? Back in 2008, Rick Perlstein stated that between 1965 and 1972 when Richard Nixon rose to not only the Presidency but achieving the third-largest percentage in election history that Nixonland was brought forth and has been our country ever since. Over the past 8 year, Perlstein has been proven correct.After the catastrophic defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, many assumed that the conservative wing of the Republican Party had been thoroughly reputed and would recede to the background of American political life. Then Watts occurred days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and liberalism started unravelling both domestically and in Vietnam. Watching these events was a man thought a political afterthought, Richard Nixon.Through four elections cycles over seven years, Nixon used the remnants of the conservative insurgence still controlling the state party conventions and his own narrative message to achieve not only a political comeback but a historical reelection victory. But what ultimately helped Nixon the most was the division of nation in two between a progressive driven liberal “popular” culture and those reacting about how fast and how far those progressive steps had gone. It was this latter group that Nixon convinced to join him while the Democratic Party descended into chaos on the national level not once but twice over the course of two Presidential elections.Over the course of 748 pages of text that covered mostly 7 years, showed how the political atmosphere of the time but of our time was born. The political rhetoric of 2008, 2012, and even 2016 is wholly seen in 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1972 born by the campaigns and speeches by one Richard Nixon and numerous Democrats. In fact the foolish of Democrats in response to this rhetoric that can sometimes still be seen today in 2016 is described in full detail within Perlstein's text. Of the remaining 131 pages, it is stock full of notes and citations of a well-researched book about the birth of modern American political culture.For those living the United States, we’re still in Nixonland and if you want to know how American politics entered this 24/7 heated political atmosphere then I recommend that you read this book.
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Highly detailed and thoroughly documented retelling of the history of the turbulent 1960's in the United States and the political trajectory of Richard M. Nixon. This history leaves off with Nixon's re-election in 1968. Perlstein subsequently continued the history with THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE (which I had previously read).Even though I lived through this period and have subsequently read other histories of this period, facts were revealed in NIXONLAND that managed to shock me.
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love this book.
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- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If you've read my review of Perlstein's first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, you know what a huge fan I am and how eagerly I was looking forward to this one. So my disappointment was all the greater when I quickly realized that the sense of detachment coupled with imaginative empathy, so essential to a history, is missing here. This is a book poisoned by snark. When Nixon does something bad, Perlstein makes a point of explaining how this is emblematic of Nixon's character. When Nixon does something good, Perlstein quickly argues that he does it solely for personal or political advantage. When Nixon does something morally neutral, such as submitting suggestions for an update to the White House bathroom, Perlstein mocks him for it. By page 400 of this long book, I was firmly in Nixon's corner—and very annoyed with Perlstein.Of course Nixon was a bad guy. His willingness to screw the Constitution (as he might put it) and the people in pursuit of his own ends is acknowledged by everybody regardless of politics. It's also now known that Nixon, as a presidential candidate, deliberately sabotaged the Vietnam peace talks of 1968, deliberately prolonging the war in a successful plan to assure his own election. (Perlstein states this as an established fact, although the "smoking gun" proving this particular brand of treason wasn't uncovered until several years after the book's publication.) So what does Nixon deserve credit for? Well, depending on one's own political positions, one might approve of his creation of the Environmental Protection Agency; his work toward the completion of the ABM and SALT antinuclear treaties; his signing of Title IX; or his ending of the military draft. All of these accomplishments are dismissed by Perlstein as mere jockeying for personal power or electoral popularity.This bald-faced bias made this book a difficult read. What kept me going was Perlstein's great strength as a historian—his assembly of thousands of facts large and small into a coherent, engaging narrative and a graspable timeline. Nevertheless, I can't recommend this book to those who prefer not to have their preconceptions reinforced (for who doesn't see Nixon as somewhat of a cartoon villain?). History should challenge as well as engage. And for all its mastery of detail, the only thing this book challenged was my patience.
3 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is about how Richard Nixon formulated the narrative that the Republican Party still uses today, that of innuendo, outright lies, and the cognitive dissonance of saying one thing today and the opposite tomorrow, depending on what is expedient for purely political purposes; we still live in Nixonland. Lest you think I am some huge fan of the Democratic Party, I would like to make it clear that I subscribe to Gore Vidal's analysis that there is really only one party in America now: the Property Party that protects us with a National Security State.But back to the book. It's truly shocking to read of how much public fear was generated on a nearly daily basis in the summer of 1966, and how it was put to use in bringing down LBJ. There were riots in a number of cities, and the account of the Newark police shooting African-Americans just standing on their front porch or just on the street doing nothing is heartbreaking. No police or Guardsmen were ever indicted. As I write this, a grand jury recently refused to indict the policeman who murdered Eric Garner with a chokehold on a New York street. And this is nearly 50 years after that long, hot summer of 1966.Then there's Vietnam. Nixon would alternate between criticizing LBJ for escalation or if he stopped the bombing. You see, it wasn't about ending the war; it was about Nixon positioning himself for the 1968 presidential election. If this sort of thing sounds familiar, well, I guess that's the point that Perlstein is trying to get across.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5More catnip for political junkies from Rick Perlstein; this volume picks up where Before the Storm left off, covering the period from the 1965 Watts riots to the 1972 general election. As with the previous volume, I loved how Perlstein juxtaposes political and cultural history: the narrative is greatly enhanced by the way he enables the reader to get a sense of what songs were popular, which movies were out, what the newspaper ads said at the same moment that a particular piece of political news was breaking. At nearly 750 pages of text, this book is a bit of a commitment, but it's worth every page, I thought. Highly recommended.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The adventures of Tricky Dick, from his first congressional race to the 1972 presidential election and the emergence of Watergate. Not only that, but the historical and political events of the day that provide the contextual backdrop. This is a very long book, but is chock full of information. Reading this took me back to the political science classes of my youth. Everyone is here: JFK, Dr. King, Malcolm X, LBJ, Eugene McCarthy, HHH, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Gerry Ford, John Kerry, Jane Fonda, George McGovern, E. Howard Hunt, Richard Daley, Abby Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, G. Gordon Liddy, Haldeman, Erlichman, Woodward & Bernstein, even Al Capp!
For all the info, this book is still just a teaser for delvers into sixties history. It's such a tumultuous and exciting period.
The book promised to connect the polarization of today's politics with Nixon. To lay it at his doorstep, if you will. But apart from a five page essay tacked at the end, Perlstein doesn't really do this. I'd have preferred that he took a little more space to make that case.1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Rick Perlstein is an amazing historian—capable of both marshaling a wealth of documentary evidence and arranging it into a coherent and gripping narrative. He's ostensibly telling a political narrative, but shines in being one of the few non-fiction writers I've ever read who really capture that ethereal feeling of cultural momentum (usually called the "zeitgeist"). His earlier book, Before the Storm, chronicled the rise of Goldwater before the 1964 election. It followed the activists determined to see him get the nomination, and led the reader through what was happening in the wider sphere of American culture (and why that made Goldwater seem angelic to some and deranged to others). While some were capable of shaping events—Clif White and LBJ among them—most others seemed carried along by them.
Nixonland, on the other hand, revolves around the psyche of its title character. Nixon, paranoid to the bone, was constantly striving for more power and haunted by the impression that others were plotting against him. As everyone knows, this eventually led to his undoing: commanding increasingly bold and decreasingly lawful activities that eventually came to a head in Watergate. But what people seem to have mostly forgotten is how Nixon got to be so powerful in the first place. It wasn't all by theft, but instead by rhetorically playing upon the internal divisions within America, amped up by the rise of civil rights movements and economic anxiety.
I'm not going to lie to you; this book is LONG, 750 pages before endnotes and a SOLID 750 pages at that. But it's such an excellent book, one that finally knits together all the subjects that have been covered piecemeal in books before or thoroughly defanged by sweeping & inoffensive pop-histories. This could easily become the definitive era's textbook, and the only thing standing in its way are the teeth. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great read, especially the sections on the out of control police forces of the50s and 60s, Nixon's incredible intelligence, and his twisted take on everything around him, which led him to destroy himself.
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Nixon era was ultimatly quite sad. Nixon was a deeply flawed president, although quite brilliant. He knew how to take advantage of a very turbulent era.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book explores the turbulence in America during the 1960's and 1970's, as Richard Nixon reinvented himself politically and became president of the United States. I had difficulty getting into the book, since one is bombarded by facts and events at a furious pace from page 1. The style reminded me a bit of the old Billy Joel song 'We Didn't Start the Fire.' Once I got into the rhythm of the writing though, I couldn't put the book down.Perlstein seems to have explored every nook and cranny of this era, and tells us everything that happens. This means that the book can only briefly mention many of the events, people, and places. However, the seminal events--the summer race riots in the cities, the Black Panthers, the 1968 Democratic convention riots, the trial of the Chicago Eight (then Seven), the Vietnam War, Spiro Agnew and the 'silent majority' rising against the 'nattering nabobs of negativism,' the 'dirty tricks' and Watergate break-in of the 1972 campaign are covered in depth. Perlstein writes in an engaging, easy to read, conversational style. I do fear, however, that unless you have at least some familiarity with the people and events of this era (i.e. perhaps by being old enough to have been politically aware during that time), parts of the book may be difficult to follow or meaningless without further background information.My one criticism of the book, and it is major one, is that it ended abruptly with Nixon's victory in the 1972 election. I cannot imagine why a book whose purpose is to definitively explore the Nixon era would omit the Watergate hearings and Nixon's resignation in disgrace. Maybe a sequel?
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A great book especially if you appreciate the wealth of minutia that Perlstein presents. He presents a very well argues thesis that Nixon's career and presidency was based on and reinforced the polarization of the USA into a liberal elite and Nixon's "orthagonians" a class of angry middle class voters whose newly comfortable life has been threatened by such liberal legislation as the Civil rights acts of the 60s. The war in Vietnam was cynically manipulated by Nixon and his administration to appeal to the jingoism of this group.The book has obvious applications to the Bush and Obama administrations, however I often wondered whether he was inferring much more than he should have from minor incidents. For example, when Bob Hope sees a much larger audience on his second trip to Da Nang to entertain the troops, he makes some jokes about the difficulty of the soldiers in the back even seeing the stage. Perlstein quoted this as an implied criticism of Nixon's policy of increasing American troop levels. It reads more like an innocuous quip about large crowds. Other sections read the same way. I have a hard job believing that Bonnie and Clyde was a significant influence on the politics of the day.Still - it is a book well worth reading.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a story about the topsy-turvy era known as the roughly 1960-72 years. Pearlstein offers much salacious detail and spectacle in reconstructing the milieu within which a Nixon presidency was seemingly inevitable. Everything was burning: cities, campuses, weed, and, of course, ‘Nam. I certainly recommend this to those too young or forgetful to remember this stuff when spouting off about how everything’s going to Hell “these days” based on whatever imbecilica the local news affiliate televises nightly. As an overall theme, this is a story about the battles between Nixon’s underdog Orthogonians and the elitist Franklins. If I can correctly recall many weeks/hundreds of pages back, these were two Whittier College groups or clubs – the former hosting the typical middle to lower middle classers while the latter represented the campus elite. The Franklins consisted of the rich, handsome, popular types that Nixon increasingly loathed. Later, as his problematic Vice Presidency concludes, the Franklins become the Kennedys and, as the decade unfurls, all the vociferous, rabble-rousing figures – the Rubins, the Carmichaels – capturing media attention begin to expand this category. The Orthogonians are eventually defined by the “silent majority,” a group increasingly united against all the boisterous crap that seemingly destabilizes the nation. This is the group who’s annoyed psyche Nixon cleverly taps for his improbable political reemergence. Pearlstein then traces the first four years: the exponential increase in paranoia and resulting deceptive tactics of Nixon and Co. Despite the WTF?!? value of a term marked by such duplicitousness, I feel the author’s coverage of the decade leading up to the 1968 elections is the most important aspect of the book (and certainly the most fun to read) as it lays the groundwork for how a Nixon type – a mostly unpopular misanthrope – could negotiate a sea of malaise and discontent and rise to the highest office by fundamentally avoiding, or positing ambiguous responses to, the pointed issues of the day. NIXONLAND: The rides suck, the cotton candy is probably laced with DDT, and you might get beaten down on Main Street. At the very least we can put today’s societal annoyances in perspective.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellent account of how Nixon and the right wing exploited white fear and resentment in the 1960s in response to 30 years of New Deal/Great Society policies. Also gives great insight to Nixon's insecurites and paranoia. Shows how tactics and strategies first honed by Nixon have contributed mightily to the polarization we have in today's political climate.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Whew, what a tome! Nixonland is a factual, insightful book about the turbulent 1960's and the divisiveness that arose in the politics in the United States. I was fascinated by Nixon's political career, the way he was able to set an "us against them" tone to his rhetoric, how his lust for power led to the inevitable and infamous Watergate, and how he felt victimized throughout his presidency. A great read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a long, meandering, but ultimately gratifying exegesis of a major paradigm shift in the American political landscape. 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. It is both biased and honest: an emerging hallmark of the latest style of journalistic political writing. 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. 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. 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. Nixonland certainly helped disabuse me of some of that naïveté.Nixonland feels modern and relevant today largely because it positions the broader American body politic as its true protagonist. 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.). Rick Perlstein has written a noble and enlightening explanation for this unhappy phenomenon.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Decade of DisillusionmentI wasn't quite sure what to expect from "Nixonland", I did not read Perlstein's highly acclaimed book on Goldwater but I certainly had high expectations going in and certainly was not disappointed. "Nixonland" is much more than a biography, it is a complete social and cultural history of one of the defining decades in American and indeed world history.On "Tricky Dicky" Nixon himself, Perlstein keeps his interpretations pretty close to the standard biographical history. In fact, most of his research comes from standard secondary sources and newspapers. What we read of Nixon is a man or anger, resentment, and constant paranoia of the inevitable. All stuff that has pretty much been validated before.Perlstein is rather light on many of Nixon's major political achievements such as the Shanghai Communique and of course Watergate, but that much is intentional, as plenty of other books have covered those subjects. Instead, where Perlstein focuses on and really excels at is in his treatment of the social and cultural undercurrents of the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. The liberal consensus, the New Left, the silent majority, the civil rights movement, the vietnam war, student movement, the violence of 1968, counter-culture, credibility gap. Perlstein pieces all these seemingly contradictory themes together through intricate portraits of the people that shaped them and attempts to make sense out of the madness of what has been referred to as America's "second civil war".Fundamentally, the term "Nixonland" is one that Perlstein uses to describe "what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together. By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States. It would define it, in fact, for the next fifty years" (p.47).At a mammoth 750 pages, "Nixonland" is a tough slough. I do believe it is a rather casual read as Perlstein avoids big words and chooses to write in a readable colloquial style. If you enjoy reading about 1960s culture and politics, you'll thoroughly enjoy Perlstein's latest book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Insightful analysis of the origins of the culture wars, but a bit redundant. The author does a masterful job explaining Nixon's ability to capitalize on the divisions in American society to rise to power.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Breathless, entertaining history of the United States at the breaking point. According to Perlstein, the United States was in a state of civil war and Richard Nixon was leading the counter-revolution. Reads like a novel and Perlstein uses his secondary sources masterfully. I can't wait for the sequel, which will cover the years 1974-1980.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5One of the central ideas of Rick Perlstein's "Nixonland" is that the Nixon era spawned much of the political discourse of subsequent U.S. history. Having finished the book, I have to admit that Perlstein is pretty accurate in his assessment. The book is a depressing chronicle of left and right wing excesses and ideological pigheadedness. Nixon himself comes across as a pathetic and self-loathing villain, but Perlstein also paints a rather unflattering series of portraits of Tricky Dick's opponents on the left. Bobby Kennedy comes off as a self-serving and cynical pol; George McGovern seems both naive and manipulative at once. Perlstein's narrative does an excellent job of capturing the raw emotions of the age. Ranging from Johnson's crushing of Goldwater in 1964 to the Watts riots to Woodstock to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the Zeitgeist is portrayed vividly. As someone born in 1968, most of this history is practically contemporary, but also rather remote. Perlstein makes this come to life and my family's stories of the age are much more vivid and much less mythical to me.The story is largely a narrative of Nixon's rise to power and the beginnings of his downfall. Perlstein's depiction of Nixon is particularly bleak and "Tricky Dick" does not come across as especially sympathetic. From the start, he is portrayed as a miserable soul. His Red Baiting in the late 40s and 50s is odious and really pathetic. By the time the book gets around to Watergate, nothing Nixon does seems improbably.The left isn't portrayed much better. As I said above, Bobby Kennedy is unpleasant, and McGovern seems like a hypocritical prig. An extended passage on Chappaquiddic casts Ted Kennedy in an unappealing light. The hippies come across as a crass, nasty, and rather self-serving bunch. As a contemporary reader, however, I think Perlstein's text is especially relevant to our current political situation. As I read the book, I could not help drawing parallels to the current spate of presidential politics. McCain isn't quite Nixonian in scope, but I saw some parallels. His ability to play a bit fast-and-lose with his ideology in order to appeal to the center right felt familiar. But Hillary Clinton's politics in the primaries really did seem the most Nixonian of all the candidates. Her appeal to ethnic tensions among blue-collar democrats and her sense that she alone had the political skills and "experience" to successfully handle the war stunned me. Her learned cynicism and bitterness during her husband's years as president reminded me of Nixon's time as VP under Eisenhower. Both Clinton and McCain seem stuck in the 1960s. Obama really does strike me as someone who has moved out of this paradigm. Admittedly, I'm an Obama supporter, but I'm not trying to cast him as a saintly figure counterpoised against corrupt baby boomers. More than anything, I think his very comportment leaves the politics of the 1960s behind. Yes, he's liberal and yes, he's a politician but he thinks differently. When I watch his opponents trying to define him as a sixties radical, it's just not a match. Trying to link him to radical preachers and 60s radicals like Ed Ayers; the claims of elitism; the talk of his communist sympathies; it all seems so stale and beside the point. People like Clinton, McCain, Limbaugh, and others, are playing out of a different playbook. None of this is to say that Obama is destined to win the election -- the 1960s style of politics is still very powerful. My only point is that he is not part of that mentality.Perlstein's book is long -- over 700 pages -- and it starts to get a bit long in the tooth in the middle. But by the end, the narrative picks up with gripping accounts of the 1972 election and the start of Watergate. Perlstein clearly sits on the left of the political spectrum, but he does a good job showing the complexity of each side. I sometimes read books looking for sympathetic characters, but I really didn't find any here. I finished Nixonland pretty confused about the era. Given what I know about the 1960s and early 70s, I can't think of higher praise for this book.
Book preview
Nixonland - Rick Perlstein
PREFACE
IN 1964, THE DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE LYNDON B. JOHNSON won practically the biggest landslide in American history, with 61.05 percent of the popular vote and 486 of 538 electoral college votes. In 1972, the Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon won a strikingly similar landslide—60.67 percent and 520 electoral college votes. In the eight years in between, the battle lines that define our culture and politics were forged in blood and fire. This is a book about how that happened, and why.
At the start of 1965, when those eight years began, blood and fire weren’t supposed to be a part of American culture and politics. According to the pundits, America was more united and at peace with itself than ever. Five years later, a pretty young Quaker girl from Philadelphia, a winner of a Decency Award from the Kiwanis Club, was cross-examined in the trial of seven Americans charged with conspiring to start a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
You practice shooting an M1 yourself, don’t you?
the prosecutor asked her.
Yes, I do,
she responded.
You also practice karate, don’t you?
Yes, I do.
That is for the revolution, isn’t it?
After Chicago I changed from being a pacifist to the realization that we had to defend ourselves. A nonviolent revolution was impossible. I desperately wish it was possible.
And, several months after that, an ordinary Chicago ad salesman would be telling Time magazine, I’m getting to feel like I’d actually enjoy going out and shooting some of these people. I’m just so goddamned mad. They’re trying to destroy everything I’ve worked for—for myself, my wife, and my children.
This American story is told in four sections, corresponding to four elections: in 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1972. Politicians, always reading the cultural winds, make their life’s work convincing 50 percent plus one of their constituency that they understand their fears and hopes, can honor and redeem them, can make them safe and lead them toward their dreams. Studying the process by which a notably successful politician achieves that task, again and again, across changing cultural conditions, is a deep way into an understanding of those fears and dreams—and especially, how those fears and dreams change.
The crucial figure in common to all these elections was Richard Nixon—the brilliant and tormented man struggling to forge a public language that promised mastery of the strange new angers, anxieties, and resentments wracking the nation in the 1960s. His story is the engine of this narrative. Nixon’s character—his own overwhelming angers, anxieties, and resentments in the face of the 1960s chaos—sparks the combustion. But there was nothing natural or inevitable about how he did it—nothing inevitable in the idea that a president could come to power by using the angers, anxieties, and resentments produced by the cultural chaos of the 1960s. Indeed, he was slow to the realization. He reached it, through the 1966 election, studying others: notably, Ronald Reagan, who won the governorship of California by providing a political outlet for the outrages that, until he came along to articulate them, hadn’t seemed like voting issues at all. If it hadn’t been for the shocking defeats of a passel of LBJ liberals blindsided in 1966 by a conservative politics of law and order,
things might have turned out differently: Nixon might have run on a platform not too different from that of the LBJ liberals instead of one that cast them as American villains.
Nixon’s win in 1968 was agonizingly close: he began his first term as a minority president. But the way he achieved that narrow victory seemed to point the way toward an entire new political alignment from the one that had been stable since FDR and the Depression. Next, Nixon bet his presidency, in the 1970 congressional elections, on the idea that an emerging Republican majority
—rooted in the conservative South and Southwest, seething with rage over the destabilizing movements challenging the Vietnam War, white political power, and virtually every traditional cultural norm—could give him a governing majority in Congress. But when Republican candidates suffered humiliating defeats in 1970, Nixon blamed the chicanery of his enemies: America’s enemies, he had learned to think of them. He grew yet more determined to destroy them, because of what he was convinced was their determination to destroy him.
Millions of Americans recognized the balance of forces in the exact same way—that America was engulfed in a pitched battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. The only thing was: Americans disagreed radically over which side was which. By 1972, defining that order of battle as one between people who identified with what Richard Nixon stood for
and people who despised what Richard Nixon stood for
was as good a description as any other.
Richard Nixon, now, is long dead. But these sides have hardly changed. We now call them red
or blue
America, and whether one or the other wins the temporary allegiances of 50 percent plus one of the electorate—or 40 percent of the electorate, or 60 percent of the electorate—has been the narrative of every election since. It promises to be thus for another generation. But the size of the constituencies that sort into one or the other of the coalitions will always be temporary.
The main character in Nixonland is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name—but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.
BOOK I
CHAPTER ONE
Hell in the City of Angels
YOU MIGHT SAY THE STORY STARTS WITH A TELEVISION BROADCAST. IT issued from the Los Angeles television station KTLA, for four straight August days in 1965, culminating Sunday night, August 15, with a one-hour wrap-up. Like any well-produced TV program, the wrap-up featured its own theme music—pounding, dissonant, like the scores composer Bernard Herrmann produced for Alfred Hitchcock—and a logo, likewise jagged and blaring. It opened with a dramatic device: a voice-over redolent of the old L.A. police procedural Dragnet—elements familiar enough, almost, to make it feel like just another cops-and-robbers show.
It was a hot and humid day in the city of Los Angeles, Wednesday, August eleventh, 1965,
the gravelly narration began…
"The City of Angels is the nation’s third-largest metropolis.
"Two and a half million people live here, in virtually an ideal climate, surrounded by natural beauty, and the benefits of economic prosperity.
"Within the vast metropolitan spread live 523,000 Negroes. A sixth of them reside in southeastern Los Angeles in an area that is not an abject slum in the New York or Detroit context, but nonetheless four times as congested as an average area in the rest of the city.
The community had prided itself on its relatively harmonious racial relations, few demonstrations, no massive civil disobedience, little trouble from militant factions.
The camera tracks an ordinary-looking residential block, tree-lined and neat, a row of modest ranch houses fronted by postage-stamp lawns, suburban, almost. The angle came from a helicopter—KTLA-TV’s telecopter
was the first of its kind. The utility of the Korean War–vintage Bell 47G-5 with the camera affixed to its belly had so far been mostly prurient: shots of the swimming pool where Marlon Brando’s maid had drowned; of the well that swallowed a darling little girl; of movie stars’ mansions being devoured by brush fires in the Hollywood hills. Now the chopper was returned to its wartime roots. Los Angeles’ black citizens were burning down their neighborhood.
When the Watts riots began, television stations sent in their mobile cars to cover it. They were stoned like a scene from Leviticus. The next day militants cautioned, or threatened, the TV crews not to come: they were all-white—the enemy. There was even fear that KTLA’s shiny red helicopter might be shot down, by the same snipers peppering the firefighters who were trying to douse the burning blocks.
The risk was taken. Which was why the worst urban violence in American history ended up being shown live on TV for four straight days, virtually nonstop.
Then, that Sunday-night wrap-up: The narrator paused, the telecopter slowed to a hover at the end of the tree-lined block, lingering on a single bungalow on the corner. Its roof was gone, the insides blackened like the remains of a weekend barbecue.
The voice-over intensified:
Then with the suddenness of a lightning bolt and all the fury of an infernal holocaust, there was HELL in the City of Angels!
Cue the music: shrieking trumpets, pealing from television speakers in Southern California recreation rooms and dens, apartments and bars, wherever people gathered, pealing as heralds, because American politics, for those white, middle-class folks who formed the bedrock of the American political conversation, could never be the same again.
Until that week the thought that American politics was on the verge of a transformation would have been judged an absurdity by almost every expert. Indeed, its course had never seemed more certain.
Lyndon Johnson had spent 1964, the first year of his accidental presidency, redeeming the martyr: passing, with breathtaking aplomb, a liberal legislative agenda that had only known existence as wish during John F. Kennedy’s lifetime. His Economic Opportunity Act of 1964—the war on poverty
—passed nearly two to one. The beloved old general Dwight D. Eisenhower came out of retirement to campaign against the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut. But Lyndon Johnson passed that, too. And then there was the issue of civil rights.
Let this session of Congress be known as the session which did more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined,
Johnson intoned in his first State of the Union address. It was just five weeks after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, seven months after Kennedy, alarmed by a wave of civil rights uprisings sparked in Birmingham, Alabama, had introduced the most sweeping civil rights bill since Reconstruction. It had been bogged down by Congress’s recalcitrant conservative coalition of Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats. Even Martin Luther King’s heroic hundreds of thousands of pilgrims marching on Washington couldn’t unstick it. But President Johnson unstuck it. By June of 1964, the first session of the Eighty-eighth Congress had indeed done more for civil rights than the last hundred sessions combined: segregation in the United States in public accommodations was now illegal. Our Constitution, the foundation of our republic, forbids it. The principles of our freedom forbid it. Morality forbids it. And the law I sign tonight forbids it,
Johnson said at a ceremony carried live on all three networks.
What the ceremony marked was not merely a law but a liberal apotheosis—an apparent liberal national consensus. Johnson’s approval rating even among Republicans was 74 percent. Pundits and public-opinion experts proclaimed him an exact match for the spirit of the age. So, even, did conservative businessmen: speaking before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the president was interrupted for applause some sixty times. They had reason to cheer. So dynamic had the American economic engine become that it was fashionable to presume that prosperity could fix any social problem. I’m sick of all the people who talk about the things we can’t do,
Lyndon Johnson told an aide in one of his patented exhortations. Hell, we’re the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all.
The Great Society was the name Johnson gave his ambition. It rests on abundance and liberty for all,
he said in a May 22 speech, a society of success without squalor, beauty without barrenness, works of genius without the wretchedness of poverty.
The rhetoric was incredible. Still more incredible: it seemed reasonable.
The Republican Party spent the year of the liberal apotheosis enacting the most unlikely political epic ever told: a right-wing fringe took over the party from the ground up, nominating Barry Goldwater, the radical-right senator from Arizona, while a helpless Eastern establishment-that-was-now-a-fringe looked on in bafflement. Experts, claiming the Republican tradition of progressivism was as much a part of its identity as the elephant, began talking about a party committing suicide. The Goldwaterites didn’t see suicide. They saw redemption. This was part and parcel of their ideology—that Lyndon Johnson’s consensus
was their enemy in a battle for the survival of civilization. For them, the idea that calamitous liberal nonsense—ready acceptance of federal interference in the economy; Negro civil disobedience
; the doctrine of containing
the mortal enemy Communism when conservatives insisted it must be beaten—could be described as a consensus
at all was symbol and substance of America’s moral rot. They also believed the vast majority of ordinary Americans already agreed with them, whatever spake the polls—crazy figures,
William F. Buckley harrumphed, doctored to say, ‘Yes, Mr. President.’
It was their article of faith. And faith, and the uncompromising passions attending it, was key to their political makeup.
That, the experts said, was exactly what made Goldwater so frightening. Unadulterated political passion was judged a dangerous thing by the dominant ideologists of American consensus. One of the deans among them, University of California president Clark Kerr, used to give his students a piece of advice that might as well have served as these experts’ motto: a man should seek to lend his energies to many organizations and give himself completely to none.
Lest all the competing passions crosscutting a modern, complex society such as America’s become irreconcilable, beyond compromise—a state of affairs Kerr could only imagine degenerating into all-out war.
Here was no idle metaphor. I know that very often each of us did not just disagree, we poured forth our vituperation,
the Episcopal bishop of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, wrote in a typical expression in late 1963. The accumulation of this hatred expressed itself in the bullet that killed John Kennedy.
Opinion-molders warned, with the numbness of habit, against extremists of the left and right
—that veering too far from the center spurred the savage beast that lurked inside every soul. Goldwater, in accepting his party’s nomination, had proudly declared that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.
Lyndon Johnson successfully framed his reformist agenda as something that was not ideological at all—conservative, even, simply a pragmatic response to pressing national problems, swept forward on ineluctable tides of material progress. The Democrats, in nominating Lyndon Johnson, made a rather careful decision to adhere to the rules of American politics,
political scientist Clinton Rossiter wrote. The Republicans, in nominating Barry Goldwater, deliberately chose to ignore, to downgrade, perhaps to change these rules.
And so in November 1964 Lyndon Johnson won the grandest presidential victory since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s in 1936. There was an old saying in Iowa, overwhelmingly Republican from time immemorial: Iowa would go Democrat when hell went Methodist.
Hell went Methodist in 1964; or at least Iowa’s seven-man delegation to the House of Representatives went five-sevenths Democratic. In Congress, Democrats now outnumbered Republicans more than two to one. A bright new class of pro-Johnson liberals was swept in on his coattails, forty-seven in the House of Representatives alone. The right had been rendered a joke, an embarrassment, a political footnote—probably for good.
I doubt that there has ever been so many people seeing so many things alike on decision day,
Lyndon Johnson declared in acknowledging his victory on November 5.
These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem,
he said while lighting the White House Christmas tree.
And in his January 4, 1965, State of the Union address, he said, We have achieved a unity of interest among our people that is unmatched in the history of freedom.
He continued:
"I propose that we begin a massive attack on crippling and killing diseases.
"I propose that we launch a national effort to make the American city a better and more stimulating place to live.
"I propose that we increase the beauty of America and end the poisoning of our rivers and the air that we breathe….
"I propose that we eliminate every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote.
I propose that we honor and support the achievements of thought and the creations of art.
And he insisted that America would honor its pledge to the people of Vietnam, where, according to the public record, not a single American bomb had been dropped save in immediate retaliation for the Gulf of Tonkin incident, nor a single infantryman sent. Our goal is peace in Southeast Asia,
the president intoned. That will come only when aggressors leave their neighbors in peace. What is at stake is the cause of freedom and in that cause America will never be found wanting…. To ignore aggression now would only increase the danger of a much larger war.
And that, to a vast majority of Americans, sounded perfectly reasonable. It all sounded reasonable. Johnson is almost universally liked,
the left-wing Nation reported that week—hinting, even, that they rather liked him, too. Even the man who wrote Barry Goldwater’s 1964 convention platform, Representative Melvin Laird of Wisconsin, said it would be suicidal
for the Republicans to ignore the election results and try to resist any change in the party.
A poll that month found that 65 percent of rank-and-file Republicans still called themselves conservatives. Should that two-thirds dominate their party’s direction, warned two of the nation’s most respected political scientists, we can expect an end to the competitive two-party system.
The system wasn’t all that competitive in any event. The Republican National Committee had been purged of Goldwater holdovers. One staffer, Frank Kovak, had been allowed to remain for his financial expertise. Throughout the spring Kovak surreptitiously passed the RNC’s private donor lists to right-wing groups that raised funds in competition with the Republicans. Party chairman Ray Bliss found out and ordered him to stop. Kovak continued. So on June 18, two weeks after Bliss presided over a ceremonial RNC meeting meant to herald an era of Republican healing, his assistant broke into Kovak’s desk. The break-in was bungled. Kovak alerted the press.
That was the Republican Party in 1965.
Lyndon Johnson took advantage of the weakened opposition. His hero was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Now he became Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Actually, he outpaced him. The liberals’ struggle to pass federal funding for education had been a political dry hole since the New Deal. Johnson passed it in the House in March by a margin of 263–153. He then insisted the Senate pass the same bill without a single word changed. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed the Senate two weeks later with only eighteen votes in opposition. He then turned the nation to dreams of immortality, proclaiming, Heart disease, cancer, and stroke can be conquered—not in a millennium, not in a century, but in the next few onrushing decades.
The down payment on the revolution was medical insurance for the elderly funded out of Social Security contributions—another stalled New Deal–era initiative, steered by Johnson past its permanent obstacle, the American Medical Association (the only major professional organization to back Barry Goldwater), by a 110-vote House margin.
And then there was civil rights.
The genesis of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 echoed the genesis of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: televised images of Southern sadism. In 1963 it had been Birmingham children set upon by fire hoses and police dogs. Now Martin Luther King, the freshly minted Nobel Peace Prize laureate, came to Selma, Alabama, a town of twenty-nine thousand, of which fifteen thousand were blacks of voting age. Only about three hundred were registered to vote.
Soon came mass arrests—including, on February 1, the detention of five hundred schoolchildren, who had been transported to a state prison farm after the warning Sing one more freedom song and you are under arrest.
When King himself was arrested, he published an open letter in the New York Times: This Is Selma, Alabama. There Are More Negroes in Jail with Me Than There Are on the Voting Rolls.
Soon after, troopers shot protester Jimmy Lee Jackson to death.
The stage was set. A march was planned for March 7 down U.S. Highway 80—thereabouts known as the Jefferson Davis Highway—to the state capital, Montgomery, fifty miles to the east. At the far side of the point of embarkation, the Edmund Pettus Bridge, stood rank upon rank of Sheriff Jim Clark’s officers, and, outfitted in gas masks, cordons of Governor George Wallace’s fearsome Alabama state troopers. The six hundred marchers, clutching sleeping bags for the five-day journey ahead, were ordered to disperse. They did not. The troopers rushed, clubs flailing, tear-gas canisters exploding, white spectators wildly cheering them on; then Jim Clark’s forces, on horseback, swinging rubber tubes wrapped in barbed wire, and bullwhips, and electric cattle prods, littered the bridge with writhing black bodies splattering blood. The film ran on national TV. Over and over. On NBC, the broadcast cut into a showing of the film Judgment at Nuremberg—a story about what happens when ordinary citizens turn a blind eye to evil.
Federal mediators negotiated safe passage for a peaceful march a week later. The next night, local thugs beat the Reverend James Reeb, a white minister from Boston, to death (he had been watching Judgment at Nuremberg when his conscience directed him to travel to Selma). Lyndon Johnson was a man given to towering rages. Now he was angrier than any of his intimates had ever seen him. He prepared to give the greatest speech of his career. Outside the White House, left-wing picketers marched by bearing signs reading LBJ, JUST YOU WAIT…SEE WHAT HAPPENS IN ’68. The threat—redeem the martyrs or be punished at the polls—seemed viable. Answering that yearning now appeared not just a moral imperative, but a political one.
Yet no one was prepared for the moral force of the speech Lyndon Johnson gave to Congress and the nation on March 15. He wrote it himself, and delivered it over the objections of temporizing aides:
It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country…. There is no issue of states’ rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights…. Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
Then, stunningly, he raised his arms in the air and invoked the slogan of a movement that was not too long ago perceived as the preeminent irritant to America’s national unity: And…we…shall…overcome!
There followed the silence of a reaction too stunned for mere applause. Martin Luther King cried. Senators cried. Southern legislators cornered LBJ’s befuddled mentor, Georgia senator Richard Russell, and demanded an explanation for his protégé’s betrayal of his native South. They looked like heartless old jackasses.
The next Selma procession, on March 21, was celebratory—thousands of singing marchers, ranks of glamorous celebrities in the fore, marching all the way through to Montgomery.
That night one of the white marchers, a Detroit mother of five named Viola Liuzzo, while humming We Shall Overcome
in her car, was shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan because she was sitting next to a black man.
The martyr only seemed to intensify the nation’s moral resolve. Should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue,
Lyndon Johnson had proclaimed, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.
He signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6 under the Capitol dome. He intoned about the slaves, who came in darkness and they came in chains…. Today, we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds.
People cried. The Negro’s cause was America’s cause. Who could argue with that? Johnson, the Times’ agenda-setting pundit James Scotty
Reston avowed, was getting everything through the Congress but the abolition of the Republican party, and he hasn’t tried that yet.
The rioting in Los Angeles began five nights later. The spark came at the corner of 116th and Avalon. Two black men, brothers, were stopped by a California highway patrolman at 7:19 p.m., the driver under suspicion of drunkenness. The three scuffled; a crowd gathered. Their mother came out from her house to quarrel with the cops, then another woman joined the fight. The crowd thought the second woman was pregnant (she was wearing a barber’s smock). When the cops struck the second woman—kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach?—the mob surged as one. By ten fifteen several hundred Watts residents were on the street, throwing things at white car passengers, staving in store windows, looting. Police tried to seal off the immediate area. But things had already spiraled out of control.
The images came soon afterward, raw and ubiquitous—and, because of a quirk of technology (the telecopter did not record its images on film, as most news cameras did, but via a microwave signal), live. KTLA fed it raw into people’s homes for the next four days. As a public service, they shared the feeds with the other L.A. channels and the networks.
You would see the telecopter hovering over a hapless lone individual turning a garden hose on a fire at an army surplus store, whose exploding ammunition had already kindled adjacent drug and liquor stores, as upward of a thousand lingered to watch them burn and to harass the Good Samaritan as fire trucks approached and were turned away by a hail of bricks.
You saw fire trucks escorted by sixteen police cruisers to secure their passage, flames high enough to down power lines, the transformer in front of a furniture store about to blow, black smoke spreading second by second over a massive expanse of roof, then over the lion’s share of the block, the helicopter tacking through banks of black smoke, looking for ribbons of light through which to capture the scurrying firemen below.
The reporter narrates the action in surges and lulls, like a demonic sports play-by-play:
"There is little that they can do. These buildings will be a total loss before they can get the first drop of water on the building—AND ANOTHER FIRE JUST ERUPTED ABOUT A BLOCK AWAY!…
"And the spectators do not seem to be concerned by what’s going on….
"Here are two kids running away from the fire right now!…If the command center can see our picture, I would check the parking lot next to the National Dollar Store for three individuals…. AND NOW THERE’S ANOTHER BUILDING ON FIRE ON THE NORTH SIDE OF THE STREET!…
"And there’s another group of spectators! All they’re doing is standing around and looking. They couldn’t be less concerned….
And now we have orders to climb higher into the air as potshots are being taken from the ground. Rifle fire and small-arms fire. So we’re pulling up and out.
Then you saw the helicopter swof-swof across two more miles of blazing streets, to Fifty-first and Avalon, for shots of a burning car turned on its back like a helpless scarab, the crowd guarding their treasure with a street barricade of picnic tables, park benches, and trash cans, the flames ascending heavenward.
War, breaking out in the streets of the United States of America, as if out of nowhere.
The supposed American consensus had always been clouded. The experts had just become expert at ignoring the clouds. The violent, feudal South had long been classed as a vestige, its caste-ridden folkways soon to be inundated by the flood tide of progress, hastened by the salving balm of federal intervention, just as in Selma. Social critics on the left thought the kind of violence you saw in the South might just represent the nation’s future, not its past. But they, too, were ignored—seen as vestiges of the thirties, back when there wasn’t a consensus.
There had been race riots in the summer of 1964 in New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Rochester. And then, when Goldwater lost overwhelmingly, pundits systematically breathed a sigh of relief. White Backlash Doesn’t Develop,
the New York Times headlined. But backlash was developing, whatever the Times’s triumphant conclusion. In a statewide referendum in California, with Proposition 14, voters struck down the state’s open housing
law, which prevented property owners from discriminating against purchasers or renters on the basis of race, by a proportion of two to one—an anti-civil-rights vote of almost the same size as the day’s vote for President Johnson.
A prominent liberal Southern newspaper editor, Samuel Talmadge Ragan, asserted that after the aberration of five Southern states going for Goldwater, leaders of both parties are confident
that elections will be decided on issues other than civil rights.
It was a perverse interpretation: in Mississippi, the presidential candidate who had voted against Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act won 87 percent of the vote, compared to the 24.7 percent Nixon had won in 1960. Yet Ragan’s conclusions ran in the most respectable outlet imaginable, the sober quarterly American Scholar. American scholars, like liberals everywhere in early 1965, chose to bask in the sun.
There had been violence on both sides in the presidential campaign—vandalism against campaign offices, civil rights activists and conservative partisans assaulting one another, death threats against the candidates. None of it was seen as a pattern. Watts was absorbed, six days after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, as a visitation from another planet. How is it possible after all we’ve accomplished?
Lyndon Johnson cried in anguish. How could it be? Is the world topsy-turvy?
Los Angeles radio station KNX fired its most popular call-in host. He insisted on talking about Watts. His bosses wanted him talking about anything but. In this way consensus was institutionalized.
Vietnam made the myth harder to sustain. Johnson had spent the first thirteen months of his presidency in fits of sleeplessness. Holding the line against further Communist insurgency into South Vietnam, holding it against an escalating American commitment that might bring China and Russia actively into the fray, perhaps even forcing the threat of nuclear war: these were the Scylla and Charybdis through which Lyndon Johnson attempted to steer his Vietnam thinking. Some days it threatened to crack open his skull. Then, in January 1965, the latest in a series of South Vietnamese governmental coups led National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy to urge that America’s present course, massive aid to Saigon coupled with secret low-grade sabotage and airborne harassment, could only lead to disastrous defeat.
The election was over, Bundy reminded his boss—the election in which Johnson had run as a peace candidate even while authorizing elaborate plans not just to retaliate against Communist insurgency but to provoke a pretext to retaliate
against.
The pretext presented itself on February 7: a deadly mortar attack on the American barracks of among the twenty-three thousand U.S. advisers
at Pleiku, the Vietnamese Central Highlands outpost Americans had been introduced to a few months back during Bob Hope’s televised USO Christmas special. (They had a ring of security around us bigger than anything since I hit the Orpheum circuit,
he quipped from the makeshift stage, brandishing his golf club.) What followed was code-named Rolling Thunder—continuous air war against North Vietnam. What followed hard upon that was the landing of two marine battalions to secure the bases from which the air raids were launched. By spring there were thirty-six hundred Rolling Thunder sorties a month and ninety thousand troops to secure them. By mid-June the pretense of defense was dropped altogether, as squads were sent out on the first major missions to search and destroy
the enemy. They said that if you supported Goldwater, Bob Hope had quipped, America would end up in Vietnam. I forgot to take the Goldwater sticker off my car, and here I am.
Not so funny now.
Johnson lied about all of it. Just as he lied about an April incursion of twenty thousand marines into the Dominican Republic—making up a story that the ambassador phoned him from underneath his desk as Communist bullets ricocheted around the room. (A young administration defense intellectual named Daniel Ellsberg said actually the Dominican Republic was one of the few Communist-free environments in the whole world.
) By summer, plans were in place to put nearly one hundred thousand more American troops into Vietnam, though Johnson told the public the number was half that and denied any policy had changed. Few Americans will quarrel with President Johnson’s determined conclusion to hold on in Vietnam,
the Newspaper of Record editorialized the day after that announcement.
Vietnam critics gathered exponentially: fourteen were arrested for blocking the entrance of the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in February; the first of one hundred campus teach-ins
by the end of the school year came days after the first marines landed at Da Nang (at first the administration sent spokesmen to these events, but they were so rhetorically manhandled for the gaps and contradictions in their presentations, they stopped showing up). The biggest peace rally in the history of the republic, organized by Students for a Democratic Society, the regnant New Left
organization, brought twenty thousand to D.C. on April 27. SDS discussed a Kamikaze Plan
to urge young men not to register for the draft in explicit violation of the 1917 Espionage Act.
But the Senate passed the president’s $700 million Vietnam appropriation that spring 88–3. The Times subheaded its report on the SDS protest Holiday from Exams.
According to one poll, more Americans thought such protesters were tools of the Communists
than disagreed with Johnson on Vietnam.
Johnson kept on rolling out his Great Society: preschool for poor children, college prep for poor teenagers, legal services for indigent defendants, economic redevelopment funds for lagging regions, landmark immigration reform, a Department of Housing and Urban Development, national endowments for the humanities and arts—even a whole new category for the liberal agenda, environmentalism: a Highway Beautification Act, a Water Quality Act, a Clean Air Act, bulldozed through as if the opposition from the Big Three automakers, the advertising industry, and the chemical industry weren’t even there. The Republican National Committee could hardly raise the $200,000 each month necessary to keep its office open. The conservative organizations thriving the most—such as the John Birch Society, which had leveraged a successful membership drive out of the Goldwater defeat—were so far out that Republican leaders wanted little to do with them. The Washington Post editorialized of a party fighting off an attempted gigantic political kidnapping
by fanatics
: a party in smoldering ruins, ghouls the only sign of life.
Only in hindsight did the report from thirty-three-year-old Morley Safer on August 5 from the village of Cam Ne look like a foreshadowing of Watts: marines torching a peasant village by touching off the straw roofs with cigarette lighters, what soldiers called a Zippo raid.
This is what the war in Vietnam is all about,
Safer narrated. To a Vietnamese peasant whose house meant a lifetime of backbreaking labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.
What wasn’t on film was even worse: a South Vietnamese cameraman persuading marines not to aim a flamethrower into the warren in which women and children were hiding.
In America, the first antiwar mass arrests soon followed: three hundred collared on the Capitol steps at an Assembly of Unrepresented Peoples
commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Brigades from Berkeley’s Vietnam Day Committee made the most militant antiwar intervention yet, explicitly drawing parallels with the Germans who defied Hitler, standing in front of barreling troop trains shipping soldiers out for Vietnam, giving way like matadors only at the last possible moment. I felt I might die,
one participant said, and that would be okay.
Others burned their draft cards even though a recently passed law made the act a federal crime. J. Edgar Hoover called them halfway citizens who are neither morally, mentally, nor emotionally mature.
We have achieved a unity of interest among our people that is unmatched in the history of freedom.
Turn on the TV: burning huts in Vietnam. Turn on the TV: burning buildings in Watts. Turn on the TV: one set of young people were comparing another set of young people to Nazis, and Da Nang was equated with Nagasaki.
Lyndon Johnson was being mocked. He was losing his consensus.
The most frightening Watts footage did not require a telecopter. The morning after the first day, a series of calm intervals led officials to the false hope that the worst of the riot was over. The Los Angeles Human Relations Commission called a community meeting at Athens Park, eleven blocks from ground zero. A respected black minister with a polite little mustache made an appeal to stay off the streets: I think that the civil rights drive in America has demonstrated that violence will never be the just end to the grievances we have.
He soon lost control of the meeting. A parade of locals stepped to the microphone with angrier and angrier grievances: at the police (who were known to buck themselves up before ghetto tours of duty by crying LSMFT
—Let’s shoot a motherfucker tonight
); at their rotting homes (nine in ten Watts houses were built before 1939); at the 30 percent black unemployment rate.
Then a kid stepped up to the microphone. He was sixteen, but he looked younger.
I’m going to tell it the way it is,
he began. "I’m gonna tell you somethin’. Tonight there’s gonna be another one, whether you like it or not."
Murmurs.
He raised his hand for attention, his face intensifying. Wait! Wait! Listen. We, the Negro people down here, have got completely fed up. And you know what they gonna do tonight. They not gonna fight down here no more. You know where they goin’. They after the white people. They gonna congregate, they gonna caravan out to Englewood, to Marina Del Rey
—someone tried to push him away from the microphone—"and everywhere else the white man’s gonna stay. They gonna do the white man in tonight!"
There was applause.
The human relations commissioner begged local stations not to air the clip that night. They showed it anyway. Angry whites had begun mobbing sporting-goods stores. More TV images, these ones to scare Negroes: Caucasians siting down the barrels of rifles, stockpiling bows and arrows, slingshots, any weapon they could lay their hands on. Race war seemed imminent. In the integrating community of Pasadena, a little girl lay awake at night wondering whether the new family moving in down the block was going to burn down her house while she slept, she remembered forty years later.
The terror was compounded by administrative chaos within Governor Edmund Pat
Brown’s Democratic administration. Brown was on vacation in the Mediterranean. Executive authority rested with his lieutenant governor, Glenn Anderson. By 7 a.m. Friday the police announced that the situation was rather well in hand.
Lieutenant Governor Anderson, by then more worried about a situation brewing at Berkeley—student protesters were rumored to be planning a lie-in before a troop train—jetted north for a meeting of the University of California regents.
Within two hours the violence in Watts started up worse than before, now in broad daylight. L.A.’s police chief, William Parker, called Pat Brown’s executive secretary to ask for the National Guard—a pro forma request, he thought. A maelstrom of misunderstanding and recrimination unfolded instead. Anderson, who mistrusted Parker as a blustering racist, held off. By the time Anderson made it back to Los Angeles, Parker refused to meet with him.
At four fifteen Parker called a press conference to fulminate against a municipal stab in the back. Watts by then was six thousand rampaging bodies, the most violent civil disturbance since the New York City draft riots of 1863. The first National Guard units hit the streets at 7 p.m.—around the time the first rioter was shot by police. Pat Brown learned his city was out of control from the Athens Daily Post. He embarked on the twenty-four-hour journey home, arriving back in time for a report from a French airline pilot upon his final approach to Los Angeles International that the view looked in no way different from the war zones he had overflown during World War II.
Situation reports, minute by minute, to the president:
Saturday, August 14, 1700 hours: Riots are picking up tempo. No information on specific incidents such as siege of the police station and Napalm factory.
18:25: Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recommended LBJ dispatch C-13 transport planes to the California National Guard and send someone from the Department of Justice to stay close to Brown and give advice.
19:45: Looting reported but not verified at the Bank of America at Washington and Vermont. Also report by police that they are unable to guarantee anyone’s safety in area of 45 sq. mi. surround Watts area.
At 1:56 a.m., the draft of an executive order was cleared by McNamara for possible use:
Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, including Chapter 15 of Title 10 of the United States code, particularly section 331 and 334 thereof, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. The Secretary of Defense is authorized and directed to take all appropriate steps to suppress the insurrection, and domestic violence now in progress in the state of California.
Section 2. In furtherance of the authority and direction contained in section 1 hereof, the Secretary of Defense is authorized to use such of the armed forces of the United States as he may deem necessary.
Section 3. I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of Defense to call into the active military service of the United States, as he may deem appropriate to carry out the purposes of this order, any or all the units of the Army National Guard and of the Air National Guard of the State of California to serve in active military service of the United States.
It didn’t quite come to that, though there would be occasion to consult this document again in the years to come.
Watts was subdued once and for all Sunday morning by 12,242 National Guardsmen, twenty-year-olds patrolling American streets in troop carriers with .30-caliber machine guns, looking like scared doughboys from General Pershing’s expeditionary force, guarding the Harbor Freeway, a main Southern California artery that passed directly above the rioting, the imagined vector for some imminent black incursion on Greater Los Angeles. When KTLA aired its roundup documentary Hell in the City of Angels
Sunday evening, they had to label the violent scenes videotape
lest viewers think the uprising was still ongoing—though that reassurance was subverted when they had to cut in with live footage of new rioting in nearby Long Beach.
Cops in white helmets and the mien of Selma sheriff Jim Clark were shown kicking backsides, poking gun barrels into suspects, shouting things like First one drops their hands is a dead man,
stepping over prostrate bodies stripped down to their underpants. The news got out: four thousand arrests, thirty deaths, all but five of them black—some of them mere bystanders. (The only peace officer to die had accidentally shot himself, the only fireman from standing next to a wall as it collapsed.)
Some whites noticed a pattern: in 1964, rioting had broken out a few weeks after the signing of the last civil-rights-law-to-end-all-civil-rights-laws. Watts wasn’t even the only riot that week; in Chicago, a black neighborhood went up after an errant fire truck killed a woman. Some whites noticed some liberal politicians seemed to be excusing it all. Time quoted Senator Robert F. Kennedy: There is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law. To many Negroes the law is the enemy.
But what were we left with without respect for the law? Time answered that question by quoting a husky youth
: If we don’t get things changed here, we’re gonna do it again. We know the cops are scared, and now all of us have guns. Last time we weren’t out to kill whites. Next time is going to be different.
Lyndon Johnson, petrified, instructed federal agencies to pump $29 million into the neighborhood—in secret, for fear of charges he was pandering to rioters, for fear that rising expectations would lead but to more chaos (Negroes will end up pissing in the aisles of the Senate
). The Republican Policy Committee, meeting at the end of August, took a side on Watts—Chief Parker’s, who argued that the civil rights movement was responsible for the violence. Congressmen’s mail changed overnight: People are saying that the Irish had their problems and the Italians had their problems, but that they didn’t turn to civil disobedience,
a West Pennsylvania Democrat told the president. Los Angeles’ Democratic mayor, Sam Yorty, a Nixon supporter in 1960, began boasting of never having visited Watts and received a standing ovation from a businessmen’s luncheon when he said of the white Sacramento guardsmen sent down to his city, What a difference between these fine young men and the people they were sent to control!
The president pulled in his legislative reins, signing the law authorizing the establishment of a Department of Housing and Urban Development only after arranging to stall the appointment of its designated secretary, Robert C. Weaver, who had served the federal government since his days as the New Deal’s unofficial Negro ambassador, until January. Conventional wisdom converged on the president’s credibility gap
on Vietnam. Americans’ doubts about their president were made flesh when he went under the knife in October for gallbladder and kidney-stone surgery. Johnson had a habit of taking on maladies when stress on him was greatest; in 1948 he passed a kidney stone right before the agonizingly close Senate race that earned him the mocking nickname Landslide Lyndon; in 1955 he had a heart attack. This time so many people presumed he was lying—that he had really suffered another heart attack—that he shocked reporters by lifting his shirt to show them where the scar was. In the New York Review of Books, house organ for the left-wing intelligentsia, cartoonist David Levine drew the wound in the shape of Vietnam.
Such were the political facts of life as 1966 approached.
Though one more political fact of life—one more political force of nature—should also be noted: Richard Nixon was on the road, doing what he had been doing since he had moved to New York in 1963—since moments after he was crowned the Job of American politics, the patron saint of losers, after his defeat against Pat Brown for California governor. Bookies gave him a thousand-to-one shot that he would ever succeed in politics again. Nixon didn’t take the tip. He was plugging away to become leader of the free world, the tasks to check off yawning numberless and interminable.
One evening, the task was breaking into the manor grounds of a millionaire.
The politically retired
Nixon had been traveling through 1965 giving rousing political speeches before Republican audiences in carefully selected locations. He also gave speeches to business clients in his capacity as a partner in the Wall Street firm Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander. Occasionally the two tasks overlapped on the same trip. But not this time. He was in Miami to give a speech to the board of directors of a Minnesota-based company called Investors Diversified Services and to visit with one of the rich industrialists who was backing his presidential play, Elmer Bobst of Warner-Lambert pharmaceuticals. He had brought along a retainer for the trip, a fellow law partner, Leonard Garment; he liked to have along a cordon sanitaire to keep the celebrity-naggers at bay, the better to withdraw bubble-like within himself to prepare, which he always did obsessively for whatever task he set out to do. He had to have someone with him so he could be alone.
Nixon and Garment repaired to the mansion of Nixon’s patron for drinks. Then they had dinner at Bobst’s club. Then Nixon and his second were limousined off to the place they had been provided, through some favor or another, to spend the night. It was a house in a new suburban tract that was just starting to sell lots. Garment recorded what happened next in his memoirs:
Nixon took one look at the place, and his always-operational political instincts and suspicions told him that in the morning the developers would expect to get pictures of him in the house in order to use his name and photograph for publicity purposes.
It was the tiniest possible thing. But not, for Richard Nixon, a small thing at all. To be photographed thus, under circumstances not of his own control, in a city where he hadn’t advertised his presence, would dilute his political capital by some appreciable amount, though probably only Richard Nixon was sensitive enough to measure it. Nixon ordered the driver back the hour or so to the magnate’s house from whence they had come. When we arrived, after midnight, the gates were locked,
Garment wrote. A high wall surrounded the estate.
Nixon’s next words were hard to forget: Come on, Garment. It’s over the wall we go.
And so over the wall they clawed, briefcases in hand. Nixon had spied a pool house with twin beds inside. It turned out to be unlocked. They would sleep there. They stayed up half the night talking. Nixon told Garment he would do anything, make any sacrifice, to get where he wanted to go. Anything,
he said, except see a shrink.
Scaling a pool-house wall was even, in its way, routine. Another time, in 1966, Garment found himself pulled into a locked stairwell by Nixon to avoid an inconveniently milling crowd before his introduction to a Midwestern county GOP fund-raiser. The boss had a general’s sensitivity to commanding time and space. He was especially meticulous about making dramatic entrances. He wouldn’t sacrifice this one by appearing before the appointed hour, no matter that Garment nearly had a panic attack pounding on the fireproof doors to get out. Nixon was cool. There was political advantage to be had. If this was what it took, this was what it took. At this point in this man’s life, clawing for political advantage—anywhere, anytime, by any means necessary—was Richard Nixon’s way. Which was why there would come a moment, sometime in the future, when the complex set of forces unleashed by Watts, and the final rise, before the final fall, of Richard Milhous Nixon, would come to seem synonymous.
CHAPTER TWO
The Orthogonian
BY 1966 RICHARD NIXON HAD BEEN CLAWING ALL HIS LIFE. WHENEVER a dirty job had to get done, he had been there to do it.
From the time he was a boy in the Southern California citrus groves, staying up half the night to man the creepy little potbellied orchard heaters that kept the frost from the trees but not the black smudge from the boy tending them, to stain his clothes for school the next day; from the time his father built a combination grocery and gas station and made it his second son’s duty to begin each day in the dark, at 4 a.m., driving to the Los Angeles market to select the day’s produce; from the time he was denied a chance to go to Harvard because he could only afford to live at home; from the time he was blacklisted from his little local college’s single social club because he was too unpolished; from the time he was reduced to sharing a one-room shack without heat or indoor plumbing while working his way through Duke Law School; from the time, finishing third in his class, he trudged frantically from white-shoe Wall Street law firm to white-shoe Wall Street law firm and was shown the door at each one (he ended up practicing law back home, where, forced to handle divorce cases, he would stare at his shoes, crimson-red in embarrassment, as women related to him the problems they suffered at the marital bed). To the time, back from the war, he begged Southern California’s penny-ante plutocrats, navy cap in hand, for their sufferance of his first congressional bid; to the time he trundled across California in his wood-paneled station wagon, bringing his Senate campaign into every godforsaken little burg in that state with so many scores of godforsaken little burgs.
The town he was born in, Yorba Linda, was just that sort of godforsaken burg. Frank Nixon had built a little plaster-frame house there in 1910 across from a cruddy, oversize ditch that must have shaped one of the boy’s earliest indelible impressions of the world. It was, by Yorba Linda standards, a historic ditch: it brought in the freshwater that promised to make good for the first time on the Chamber of Commerce boast that this desert outpost was a fine place to grow citrus. For the children of this cactus-covered town, the Anaheim Ditch made for a bit of fun: they could swim in it, or at least wade in it. All except the Nixon boys, whose overstrict father forbade them. When Frank Nixon saw his boys in the canal, he would grab them by the scruff of the neck, haul them out, push them in, taunt them, then throw them in a few more times. One of Richard Nixon’s biographers, reflecting upon the image, speculated the kid might well have felt that his father was trying to drown him like an unwanted puppy.
For most farmers, that ditch helped bring a decent crop. Not Frank Nixon, who was filled with the kind of self-destructive abstemiousness that is sometimes labeled pride. I won’t buy fertilizer until I raise enough lemons to pay for it,
he said, though in Yorba Linda’s loaf-sugar
soil—it tended to clump—you couldn’t grow lemons without fertilizer. Frank and his family went bust.
California wasn’t supposed to be like this. Frank had come from Indiana after a life spent collecting humiliating jobs: farmhand (upon dropping out of school in the sixth grade); streetcar motorman (his feet got frostbitten in the unheated cab); glassworker; potter; housepainter; sheep rancher; telephone-pole climber; oxcart driver; oil-field roustabout. When Dick was ten, the family moved to the Quaker outpost of Whittier, home to his mother Hannah’s people. They never really approved of Frank. That didn’t keep the patriarch from affecting a peacocklike sense of superiority. To the point of tedium, he would remind people that he had once met William McKinley—as if that, and not the family he was raising, was his life’s great accomplishment.
Eventually Richard Nixon’s loquacious father didn’t do too poorly with his store. He built it in a former church, which was appropriate enough, for in this family, to toil was a sacrament. Frank, who did the store’s butchering, took pride in changing his bloodstained shirts no more than once a week. Richard Nixon would ever transit between feelings of pride and feelings of shame toward his dirty-necked, lusty spitfire of a father, between apologizing for him and boasting about him, between desperately reaching for success to honor him and desperately reaching for success to repudiate him.
Dirty jobs, either way.
Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments. He raged for what he could not have or control. At the age of seven he so wanted a jar of pollywogs a younger boy had collected from the forbidden canal that he beaned the kid in the head with a toy hatchet (his victim bore the scar for life). He ever felt unfairly put upon: at age ten he wrote a letter to the mother he revered, rendered distant by the raising of four other often-sickly boys, for a school assignment in the voice of a pet. Addressed My Dear Master,
it spun out fantastic images of unearned persecutions: "The two dogs that you left with me are very bad to me…. While going through the woods one of the boys triped [sic] and fell on me…. He kiked [sic] me in the side…. I wish you would come home right now. A few months later he betrayed another foreshadowing trait: groveling to elevate his station in life.
Please consider me for the position of office boy mentioned in the Times paper," he wrote to the big-city daily his family took and which he devoured, the reactionary Los Angeles Times. I am eleven years of age…. I am willing to come to your office at any time and I will accept any pay offered.
He contained his raging ambition in the discipline of debate. That was his father’s influence; the surest way to Frank’s heart (though there was never really any sure way) was through skill at argumentation. Frank loved to argue, sometimes to the point of driving customers from the store. The son received his first opportunity to argue competitively in the fifth grade, and his father, the sixth-grade dropout, did the research, obsessed with seeing his son whip others with words. When Dick joined the high school debate team, Frank attended every meet. Dick won often. The coach bemoaned his ability to kind of slide around an argument instead of meeting it head on.
Sometimes he broke the rules outright.
As a schoolboy he hadn’t a single close friend, preferring to cloister himself up in the former church’s bell tower, reading, hating to ride the school bus because he thought the other children smelled bad. At Whittier, a fine Quaker college of regional reputation unknown anywhere else, he embarked upon what might have been his most humiliating job of all: learning to be a backslapping hail-fellow-well-met. (I had the impression he would even practice his inflection when he said ‘hello,’
a reporter later observed.) The seventeen-year-old blossomed when he realized himself no longer alone in his outsiderdom: the student body was run, socially, by a circle of swells who called themselves the Franklins, and the remainder of the student body, a historian noted, seemed resigned to its exclusion.
So this most unfraternal of youth organized the remnant into a fraternity of his own. Franklins were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly. Nixon’s new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers, those not to the manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one’s unpolish was a nobility of its own. Franklins were never photographed save in black tie. Orthogonians wore shirtsleeves. Beans, brains, and brawn
was their motto. He told them orthogonian—basically, at right angles
—meant upright,
straight shooter.
Also, their enemies might have added, all elbows.
The Orthogonians’ base was among Whittier’s athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular—silent—majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback’s shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. Nixon himself was exemplarily nonspectacular: the 150-pounder was the team’s tackle dummy, kept on squad by a loving, tough, and fatherly coach who appreciated Nixon’s unceasing grit and team spirit—nursing hurt players, cheering on the listless, even organizing his own team dinners, entertaining the guests on the piano, perhaps favoring them with the Orthogonian theme song. It was his own composition.
Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president. Looking back later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called a rather quiet chap about campus,
dour and brooding, who couldn’t even win a girlfriend, who attracted enemies, who seemed, a schoolmate recalled, "the man least likely to