My shorthand is history is process, not parallels. There really can’t be a historical parallel. You can’t step in the same river twice or even once because the thing that happened in 1968 happened and we were responding to what happened. Even if there are similarities. In these cases, and in others, Perlstein is unsparing in his critique of the political failures of mid-century liberalism; I only wish he had meditated more deeply on liberalism’s policy failures as well, and at least grappled with the possibility that voters rejected liberal governance for pragmatic reasons as well as atavistic ones. But to do so might have required him to give Nixon’s Republican Party—if not Nixon himself—more credit for restoring domestic tranquillity than I imagine he thinks the GOP deserves. Indeed, a minor theme of Perlstein’s book is the extent to which domestic tranquillity has never been restored; Americans, he argues, inhabit “Nixonland” even now.

The first part of the Yippie program is to kill your parents. And I mean that quite literally, because until you’re prepared to kill your parents you’re not ready to change this country. Our parents are our first oppressors. P475 He sums up three decades’ worth of Holly­wood political activism in one tone-deaf Warren Beatty remark from 1972: “A great deal of the leadership of this generation comes from music and film people, whether people like that fact or not.” He captures the essence of Richard Nixon’s career in a single aside to Leonard Garment: “You’ll never make it in politics, Len. You just don’t know how to lie.” Perlstein is also the author of the books Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001) and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008). Before the Storm covers the rise of the conservative movement culminating in the nomination and campaign of Barry Goldwater and how the movement came to dominate the Republican Party despite Goldwater's loss. Nixonland covers American politics and society from 1964 to 1972, centering on Richard Nixon's attempt to rehabilitate himself politically and his eventual successful use of the resentment of settled society against the social unrest of the day to rebuild the Republican Party.

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Perlstein...aims here at nothing less than weaving a tapestry of social upheaval. His success is dazzling.” — Los Angeles Times That meant everybody which might stop a second term must be squashed. This is where the illegal stuff came in. Which as you know, if the President does it, that means it’s not illegal. Right? Right. So he won in 72, a gigantic landslide, 49 states. But Republicans still couldn’t get into Congress. The story of 72 was that Americans still liked Democrats EXCEPT McGovern. Perlman's writing is good and flows well but sometimes the paragraphs are stuffed with too many facts. Perhaps because Perlman has a very solid grasp on the history of the 1960s through 1972, there isn't much to dispute here other than the sparse coverage of topics.

Edited 12/12/18: Cruz is a footnote in Presidential politics and Trump won and is possessed of very paranoid insecurities. But as the saying goes, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you... In Reaganland, one after another, major players take the stage. More than 40 years later, many are still there. After Nixonland came out,” Perlstein says, Stone “came out with one of his books about Nixon [and] basically proposed that we go on tour together: ‘We can sell a lot of books and make a lot of money.’ At the time he was very adamant he was no longer a Republican. He was running for the Senate, I believe, from Florida as a Libertarian. The depths of his attention-starved behavior. . This isn’t a presidential biography or political essay--it’s a painting--a mural--of the political culture of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s indispensable for a person like me that didn’t live through it. The storytelling and analysis cuts through all of the cliches, the iconography, the superficial and reductionist history books. And damn, is it entertaining! Perlstein never abandons the reader--he never strays too far, never becomes redundant, never bores with unessential details. The thing is, he makes all details feel essential!Within 24 hours the White House got 100,000 telegrams, calls and letters, 100 to 1 for Calley’s release. P556

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. Indeed, few politicians mastered the art of positive polarization so well as the man whose majority Richard Nixon set out to undo. Much of Nixon’s divisive rhetoric owes an obvious debt to FDR—the Roosevelt who pitted the “forgotten man” against the “economic royalists”; who pledged “to restore America to its own people”; who scapegoated businessmen and Wall Street as relentlessly as Richard Nixon scapegoated intellectuals and media mandarins (if we remember Nixon as a vastly more polarizing figure than FDR, it’s perhaps because his targets were more likely to end up writing history books); and who anticipated Spiro Agnew in his broadsides against an un-American elite: “They are unani­mous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.” Asking huge questions about American identity that are just as relevant now, is a powerful look at the lasting legacy of Nixon’s era.I found that this book, although a great read, as one would expect from a much honored journalist, contains a major flaw - at least from a historian’s perspective. Although Perlstein apparently felt he needed the devices of "national consensus" and its antagonist to enhance the drama in his narrative, he didn't establish at the outset that such a consensus existed for Nixon to assail and extinguish. And I doubt that such a consensus obtained at all. Goldwater and consensus in the same sentence? The one that’s the simplest is it’s a patriotic and humane act to say that the person who has in their possession the sole authority to launch a nuclear strike is not a responsible person. That’s the simplest thing and good for them. Perlstein’s own “engagement with Trump”, he says, “came at a time, in 2015, when I was incredibly burned out from writing about Republican conservatism because it seemed so darn predictable. Then something happened: history is a cunning thing to completely transform the story. I think we always have to be alive and open to that.” ‘Do you take the good with the bad? Perlstein's thesis is that Richard Nixon manipulated the political and social events between 1965 and 1972 in a way that shaped the political divisions of the present day. As quoted by a reviewer in The Nation, the titular "Nixonland" is where "two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans." [1] The author frames the divisions of the 1960s as between the "Franklins" and the "Orthogonians", names taken from two social clubs at Nixon's alma mater of Whittier College; the Franklins were the privileged elite, and the Orthogonians the social strivers. The author casts Nixon as the "King of the Orthogonians", who would play upon the growing resentments of "Orthogonians" nationwide (Nixon's " silent majority") to electoral success. Besides ensuring his re-election, however, Nixon's political and social maneuvering also created a deep rift in American society that persisted into the 1970s and on through the end of the century, polarizing the United States. In Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America, author Chris Matthews explores how an amicable friendship descended into a bitter feud that would last for far longer than the close of election night in 1960.