Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, reviewed brilliantly by tristero, provides an incredibly dense and rich narrative that is as page-turning as a techno-thriller
I'll be talking to Rick tonight at my Virtually Speaking programin Second Life, which will be simulcast at BlogTalkRadio.
The program starts tonight at 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern. There'll be a 60s music stream for early arrivals inworld.
This clip illustrates a theme inNixonland. While there is much talk of Nixon's Southern Strategy, he adopted his wedge tactics much earlier in his political career. Early in his life, while at Whittier, he recognized that the people who ran things by birthright or by personal poise were deeply resented by many of the people who could not attain those positions of privilege. The swells called themselves the "Franklins." Nixon, recognizing the resentment that the majority of his fellow students held toward the inner circle founded his own group, the "Orthogonians," a named that explicitly defined the group as at right angles with the Franklins.
This early recognition of the existence a resentful, silent majority is reflected in the Checkers speech, youtubed above. At that moment, as the candidate for Vice President, he was being thrown under the bus by the media elite, and the ultimate American Franklin of the moment, Dwight Eisenhower didn't really mind. Nixon had, as you'd expect, a slush fund. But when that was exposed in the newspapers, he was in danger of being forced off the ticket. (Adlai Stevenson had the same kind of fund, but Nixon, much to his own resentment, was the one who got nailed for it.)
This speech contains all the elements of Nixon's identification politics. He puts himself on the side of the ordinary Joe, with a mortgage to meet, a mid-priced, not new car and a wife with a good Republican cloth coat.
And he loved his dog. It was a brilliant piece of political theatre, and kept him in the VP slot. Perlstein:
[T]his wasn't just an act. And it wasn't just sincere. It was a hustle; and it was from the heart. It was all of those things, all at the same time.
And it worked.
The telegrams poured in: over 2 million of them, and according to one careful sample, only 0.4 percent of them negative. The 99.6 percent were the ones who had let themselves be drafted as Orthogonians.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 created a large number of new recruits for Nixon. But, long before, he had been looking for the disaffected, those who felt cheated by the system and patronized by the elites.