Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

You didn’t have to attack to attack. Better, much better, to give something to the mark: make him feel that he has one up on you. Let him pounce on your “mistake.” That makes him look unduly aggressive. Then you sprang the trap, garnering the pity by making the enemy look like a self-righteous and hyperintellectual enemy of common sense. You attacked jujitsu-style, positioning yourself as the attacked, inspiring a strange sort of protective love among voters whose wounded resentments grow alongside your performance of being wounded.

No one who knew of this bright young Richard Nixon’s capabilities and ambitions (he had formed a group to unify the freshmen Republicans, the Chowder and Marching Club) expected that upon entering Congress the previous year he would have welcomed a place on the House Un-American Activities Committee. Actually, he lobbied for it. He had ascertained a change in the cultural winds. Once the faith of boobs, Red-hunting was now the state religion. In the Hiss case, Nixon spotted the chance to engineer his investiture as its pope.

Liberal intellectuals were betraying themselves in a moment of crisis for liberal ideology. They saw themselves as tribunes of the people, Republicans as the people’s traducers. Liberals had written the New Deal social and labor legislation that let ordinary Americans win back a measure of economic security. Then liberals helped lead a war against fascism, a war conservatives opposed, and then worked to create, in the postwar reconversion, the consumer economy that built the middle class, a prosperity for ordinary laborers unprecedented in the history of the world. Liberalism had done that. Now history had caught them in a bind: with the boom they had helped build, ordinary laborers were becoming ever less reliably downtrodden, vulnerable to appeal from the Republicans. The pollster Samuel Lubell was the first to recognize it: “The inner dynamics of the Roosevelt coalition have shifted from those of getting to those of keeping.”

After Checkers, to the cosmopolitan liberals, hating Richard Nixon, congratulating yourself for seeing through Richard Nixon and the elaborate political poker bluffs with which he hooked the sentimental rubes, was becoming part and parcel of a political identity. And to a new suburban mass middle class that was tempting itself into Republicanism, admiring Richard Nixon was becoming part and parcel of a political identity based on seeing through the pretensions of the cosmopolitan liberals who claimed to know so much better than you (and Richard Nixon) what was best for your country. This side saw everything that was most genuine in Nixon, everything that was most brave—who saw the Checkers Speech for what it also actually was, not just a hustle but also an act of existential heroism: a brave refusal to let haughty “betters” have their way with him. They were no less self-congratulatory than the liberals. Call the America they shared—the America over whose direction they struggled for the next fifty years, whose meaning they continue to contest even as this book goes to press, even as you hold it in your hands—by this name: Nixonland. Study well the man at Nixonland’s center, the man from Yorba Linda. Study well those he opposed. The history that follows is their political war.

The DNC was right: an amazingly large segment of the population disliked and mistrusted Richard Nixon instinctively. What they did not acknowledge was that an amazingly large segment of the population also trusted him as their savior. “Nixonland” is 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.