Told with 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.

Perlstein's epic account begins in the blood and fire of the 1965 Watts riots, nine months after Lyndon Johnson's historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater appeared to herald a permanent liberal consensus in the United States. Yet the next year, scores of liberals were tossed out of Congress, America was more divided than ever and a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard Nixon.

Between 1965 and 1972, America experienced no less than a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know now was born. It was the era not only of Nixon, Johnson, Spiro Agnew, Hubert H. Humphrey, George McGovern, Richard J. Daley and George Wallace, but of Abbie Hoffman, Ronald Reagan, Angela Davis, Ted Kennedy, Charles Manson, John Lindsay and Jane Fonda. There are tantalizing glimpses of Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Jesse Jackson, John Kerry and even of two ambitious young men named Karl Rove and William Clinton — and a not-so-ambitious young man named George W. Bush.

Cataclysms tell the story of Nixonland:

— Angry blacks burning down their neighborhoods in cities across the land as white suburbanites defend home and hearth with shotguns.

— The student insurgency over the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

— The fissuring of the Democratic Party into warring factions manipulated by the "dirty tricks" of Nixon and his Committee to Re-elect the President.

— Richard Nixon pledging a new dawn of national unity, governing more divisively than any president before him, then directing a criminal conspiracy, the Watergate cover-up, from the Oval Office.

Then, in November 1972, Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and resentment born of America's turmoil, was reelected in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's 1964 victory, not only setting the stage for his dramatic 1974 resignation, but defining the terms of the ideological divide that characterizes America today.

Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful narrative, Rick Perlstein's magisterial account of how America was divided confirms his place as one of our country's most celebrated historians.

Review: Nixonland (Ross Douthat, Atlantic Monthly) ...Nixonland reads marvelously. Perlstein has the rare gift of being able to weave social, political, and cultural history into a single seamless narrative, linking backroom political negotiations to suburban protests over sex education in schools to the premiere of Bonnie and Clyde. And he has the eye of a great documentarian, fastening not only on the obvious historical set pieces (Kent State, Watts, Attica), but on the not-so-obvious ones as well. A National Association of Governors cruise, late in 1967, featuring George Romney “dressed like Xavier Cugat” on the dance floor, Ronald and Nancy Reagan sipping crème de menthes nearby, and Nelson Rockefeller chewing on seasickness pills and denying, yet again, that he has any designs on the presidency. A White House concert in ’72 in which one of the backup singers suddenly plucked a Stop the Killing banner from her décolletage and told Richard Nixon, “If Jesus Christ were in this room tonight, you would not dare to drop another bomb.” A McGovern fund-raiser at which Simon and Garfunkel goaded the crowd to boo the patrons in the most-expensive seats, and Peter, Paul, and Mary invited everyone present to “take your place on the great mandala.” ... (Read the full review.)

Review: Nixonland (Politico) ...Perlstein’s passion is seeing and understanding this development clearly, and “Nixonland,” which is part two of a trilogy, is another achievement in understanding and empathy, say those who know the movement. “He has a warrior’s respect for the enemy,” said Ross Douthat, a conservative senior editor at The Atlantic who recently praised “Nixonland” in a review. Like its predecessor “Before the Storm,” “Nixonland” is part of an important revisioning of the 1960s, said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. The history of the 1960s has always been told through the narrative lens of liberalism and civil rights, but now historians are seeing that the hidden power of the ’60s, for all the countercultural overtones, lies on the right. ... (Read the full review.)

Review: Nixonland (Publishers Weekly) Perlstein, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, provides a compelling account of Richard Nixon as a masterful harvester of negative energy, turning the turmoil of the 1960s into a ladder to political notoriety. Perlstein’s key narrative begins at about the time of the Watts riots, in the shadow of Lyndon Johnson’s overwhelming 1964 victory at the polls against Goldwater, which left America’s conservative movement broken. Through shrewdly selected anecdotes, Perlstein demonstrates the many ways Nixon used riots, anti–Vietnam War protests, the drug culture and other displays of unrest as an easy relief against which to frame his pitch for his narrow win of 1968 and landslide victory of 1972. Nixon spoke of solid, old-fashioned American values, law and order and respect for the traditional hierarchy. In this way, says Perlstein, Nixon created a new dividing line in the rhetoric of American political life that remains with us today. At the same time, Perlstein illuminates the many demons that haunted Nixon, especially how he came to view his political adversaries as “enemies” of both himself and the nation and brought about his own downfall.

Review: Nixonland (George Will, New York Times Book Review) Rick Perlstein’s sprawling, rollicking book arrives hard on the heels of a contest of empathy-exhibitionism in which the two Democratic presidential candidates competed to see who could more ardently adore churchgoing, gun-owning, not-at-all-bitter working-class Pennsylvanians. Perlstein’s readers will learn why this happened. He shrewdly quotes a commentator’s assessment of Richard Nixon’s 1952 Checkers speech with its maudlin reference to his wife’s “Republican cloth coat”: “Dick Nixon has suddenly placed the burden of old-style Republican aloofness on the Democrats.” In Perlstein’s mental universe, Nixon is a bit like God — not, Lord knows, because of Nixon’s perfect goodness and infinite mercy, but because Nixon is the explanation for everything. Or at least for the rise of the right and the decline of almost everything else. This is a subject Perlstein, a talented man of the left, has addressed before. ... (Read the full review.)

Interview with Rick Perlstein (Jon Wiener, Truthdig) Q. Do we still live in Nixonland? A. Yes, we do. I don’t mean that the political anxieties and passions today are as great as they were in the late ’60s. But the way Richard Nixon used the ’60s to define the ideological contours of American politics is still with us. On right-wing radio today, they keep talking about how snobby and elitist the liberals are—just like Richard Nixon did. Q. You are suggesting there was a time when the Republican Party did not win power by mobilizing resentment and anger. A. In 1960, there was a strange creature called the liberal Republican.  When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1960, his platform wasn’t all that different from Kennedy’s. Q. A key turning point in the history of Nixonland is the invention of the “hardhat” as a political figure, which coincided with the rise of the flag as a partisan political symbol. We can identify that moment precisely: the riots on Wall Street following the Kent State killings in 1970. A. On May 8, 1970, anti-war students rallied at the statue of George Washington in Lower Manhattan to protest the war and the Kent State killings. Then 200 construction workers from the area marched in on their lunch break, wearing hard hats and carrying the American flags that topped off building sites. They complained to the cops that flags were not flying at Federal Hall. The reason, in fact, was that it was a drizzly day, and the flag is not allowed to be flown in the rain. But they decided that the kids had taken down the flag, and started beating the protesters. Crowds of people from Wall Street cheered them on. ... (Read the full interview.)

coho	Posted on Oct 15, 2008 4:45 PM
Nixonland Unable to put this book down. I grew up in the 60's and learned much from this finely researched and wonderfully detailed book.
Hampster90	Posted on Sep 24, 2008 1:55 PM
Nixonland The finest analysis I've ever encountered of the 1960s and early '70s, and how we got o here. Impeccably researched, brilliantly written, sometimes witty, often sad, this book should be required reading for every voter. While Perlstein occasionally maligns leftist radicals by lumping them with dangerous militants and even misses some of the landmark moments of the era (the Stonewall riots, Daley's "The police are there to preserve disorder" speech) he debunks many right-wing tropes and rectifies the under-reported causes of upheaval. This is a great book, one to set on the shelf with Woodward and Bernstein at their best.
MariaATL	Posted on Jun 15, 2008 10:50 AM
an eye-opening read As a child of the 70s, I obviously didn?t have a full appreciation of the politics of the era swirling around me at the time and in reading Nixonland, it is apparent to me that I never learned the real scoop in school either until now. The parallels between that time and the present are fascinating
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Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. His first book, Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. It appeared on the best books lists that year of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, and also achieved the rare distinction of receiving glowing reviews in both left-wing and right-wing publications. From March 2007 to March 2009 he was senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, for whom he wrote the blog The Big Con.

Interview with Rick Perlstein (Playboy) Q. Seen as a figure who governed in a time in between sunny Franklin Roosevelt and sunny Ronald Reagan, it’s amazing that the dark, complex Richard Nixon ever made it to the presidency. How did that happen? A. Welllll—to use a favorite Ronald Reagan opener—first let’s make one thing perfectly clear. Reagan wasn’t so sunny! He rose to power, first as governor of California in 1966, then as president in 1980, very much by playing to people’s fears and resentments in a time of social transformation. I very intentionally used a picture in my book of Reagan scowling—as he used to do when he said a hippie was someone “who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah,” or, when someone admired the protesting Baby Boomers’ “youthful energy,” that “I’d like to harness their youthful energy with a strap.” Richard Nixon went to school on Ronald Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign—harnessing the majority’s rage at those insolent protesters, and riding it all the way to the White House. The reason he was so uniquely qualified to do so was because he’d been harnessing the rage and resentments of those around him ever since he won his first election, for student body president at Whittier College. As a youth, he always felt looked-down-upon, despised for being too unpolished, too uncool. So he made people who felt like him his political constituency, which was a smart move, because, after all, those who feel themselves unpolished and uncool are everywhere in the majority. ... (Read the full interview.)

	Rick Perstein discusses Nixonland on WHYY's Fresh Air with Terry Gross
	Rick Perlstein talks about Nixon and his influence (Center for America's Future)