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

by Rick Perlstein

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.