These cherry-picked bullet points are not intended as a substitute for actually reading Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein.
Nor is this a formal review of a book which has been widely reviewed and discussed.
Even though Nixonland is slightly longer than the average Dickens novel, I stole every moment I could for a solid week to read it. I could not, as they say, put it down.
Here's some of what I learned.
- Fun fact: Nixon said privately in 1966 that the war in Vietnam could not be won.
[A] withdrawal, however, must take place under the most strategically propitious circumstances -- whether they be one, five, or ten years in the future. Until that time, the public would just have to be told what the public had to be told. (p. 138)
- Nixon may not have invented the Republican hissy fit or the wedge issue, but he sure did perfect them:
...[L]et them pounce on your 'mistake,' then garner pity as you wriggle free by making the enemy look unduly aggressive. Then you inspire a strange sort of protective love among voters whose wounds of resentment grow alongside your performance of being wounded. Your enemies appear to die of their own hand, never of your own. Which makes you stronger. (p. 161)
- Fun fact: All the time Nixon swore he would never utter a word to undermine LBJ's handling of the Vietnam War, Nixon's mole at the 1968 Paris peace talks, Anna Chennault, sabotaged the negotiations.
She told the South Vietnamese not to agree to anything, because waiting to end the war would deliver her friend Richard Nixon the election, and he would give them a better deal....This head-spinning stuff would be for future generations to find out about. (p. 350-1)
- After it became clear that the public blamed the protestors, not Mayor Daley or his police, for the violence surrounding the 1968 Democratic convention, the so-called liberal media rushed to bend over.
Walter Cronkite had Mayor Daley on his program...[H]is manner with Daley was almost obsequious. He repeatedly addressed him as 'sir.' He introduced him with [an] ingratiating remark... (p. 336)
During coverage of the Nixon inauguration, [Huntley-Brinkley producer Richard Shad] Northshield ordered that no protesters be shown on the air. (p. 367)
- The Republican National Committee hired young Karl Rove to play dirty tricks, the pettier the better. Phoning in fake orders for limos or 50 pizzas in the name of a Democratic campaign was just the start of Karl's career.
Ratfuckers slipped [Edmund Muskie's] pilot a bogus schedule; he landed in the wrong city; Muskie's entire day was shot." (p. 631)
- "Americans hated the war. They hated the antiwarriors more." (p. 657)
- When the Watergate story broke, "political reporters yawned...
More responsible reports, such as the New York Times', focused on the burglars' ties to the Bay of Pigs: the same kind of crazy Cubans who had been bombing the offices of left-wingers in New York for years... (p. 679)
Nixon tried to plant hints that he was nobly trying to keep the lid on revelations that could damage the reputation of JFK. (p. 682-3)
- The "plague on both your houses" narrative was in play early.
"They [the public] think that political parties do this all the time," [chief dirty trickster Charles] Colson pointed out. (p. 684)
- Nixon saw a psychiatrist? Really? The possibility boggles the mind.
...[B]ack in the 1950s, after Walter Winchell raises suspicions about the number of visits Nixon was making to a certain Dr. Huntschnecker on Park Avenue, Nixon started seeing a military doctor in Washington instead. (p. 701)
- Towards the end of his life, Nixon tacitly admitted he had prolonged Vietnam for political gain. In 1992 he told reporters that George I had ended Iraq War I too soon.
...[He] should have kept it going at least until the election. "We had a lot of success with that in 1972"... (p. 709)
I was 13 when Nixon was elected president. Nixonland is full of things I remember, things I missed, and things nobody knew till years later. A while back I remarked to a friend that the Democrats didn't know what hit them in 1980. My friend shot back, "They didn't know what hit them in 1968."
Fully recovery depends on getting the diagnosis right to begin with. Nixonland goes a long way towards meeting that need.
P.S. Looks like you can still read the first chapter for free here.
George Will hated it. The Times book-blogger asked Will:
How, then, does Nixon fit into the larger story of modern conservatism? "He doesn’t. His tenure was an empty parenthesis."
In some ideologically pure Platonic-ideal world, maybe. But the world we live in is the one in which Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II were Nixon's revenge.