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

by Rick Perlstein

The main character in Nixonland is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name—but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.

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.

Thus a more inclusive definition of Nixonland: it is the America where two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears coexist in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans.

The long, hot summer of 1966 was when the national Republican Party changed its mind.

A new national panic had burst to the surface: that the federal government would deliver the chaos of rioting urban slums to your own quiet, bucolic neighborhood via yellow bus, in the guise of combating “de facto” school segregation.

On March 8, four Palo Alto militants began a national campaign to collect pledges to turn in draft cards—the “Resistance,” just like the underground insurgency against the Nazis in World War II.

The Chicago Tribune, in an editorial the morning of the funeral, refused to acknowledge the existence of any racial impasse at all. “The murder of Dr. King was a crime and the sin of an individual,” it said. “The man who committed the act must come to terms with his maker.” The “rest of us” were “not contributory to this particular crime.” “Yes, this nation and people need a day of mourning,” the Trib allowed. America should mourn, but not for King. They should mourn because “moral values are at the lowest level since the decadence of Rome….” “Drug addiction among the youth is so widespread that we are treated to the spectacle at great universities of faculty-student committees solemnly decreeing that this is no longer a matter for correction…. “At countless universities the doors of dormitories are open to mixed company, with no supervision…. Dress is immodest. Pornography floods the news stands and book stores. ‘Free Speech’ movements on campuses address themselves to four-letter words…. We are knee-deep in hippies, marijuana, LSD, and other hallucinogens. We do not need any of these: we are self-doped to the point where our standards are lost…. “If you are black, so goes the contention, you are right, and you must be indulged in every wish. Why, sure, break the window and make off with the color TV set, the case of liquor, the beer, the dress, the coat, and the shoes. We won’t shoot you. That would be ‘police brutality.’… “If you are white, you are wrong. Feel guilty ab...

The next week, students overran Paris and set fire to the stock market, sparking a general strike that almost brought down the government. “Sous les pavés, la plage” was one of their slogans (“Underneath the paving stones, the beach”); “Marx Mao Marcuse” was another. Everyone knew who Marx and Mao were. But who was this Marcuse? Imagine the shock upon discovery that he was a teacher at the San Diego campus of the University of California.

That was Nixon’s first one hundred days. A remarkably successful public relations campaign selling the new presidency as a magnanimous respite from a cacophonous era of division. A popular set of moves to clamp down on dissent, greeted by a media Establishment newly eager to kowtow to a conservative “Middle America” as eminently responsible. Already, a secret escalation of the Vietnam War. Already, Nixon’s own grand dreams that he could make the world order anew, bring new peace and stability to the globe.

One faction, the Progressive Labor Party, a severe, crew-cutted Maoist cell that banned the use of drugs, had stealthily taken over the SDS bureaucracy. Another faction—for Byzantine reasons of factional history, they called themselves Revolutionary Youth Movement II—joined in tactical alliance with a group that called themselves Weathermen to try to win the organization back. They labeled Progressive Labor false Maoists and ersatz revolutionaries and had attempted to prove their revolutionary superiority by recruiting angry white working-class high school students, who were supposed to serve as foot soldiers under the vanguard leadership of the Black Panther Party. The Weathermen were, meanwhile, working to harden themselves as urban guerrilla warriors and had brought black and Latino street toughs into the meeting as ringers. When an entirely separate faction, the Women’s Liberation Caucus, offered a motion against male chauvinism, the street toughs roared back in mockery, chanting, “Pussy power! Pussy power!” The floor disintegrated into a cacophony of contending chants: “Fight male chauvinism! Fight male chauvinism!” “Read Mao! Read Mao! Read Mao!”

Two days after that, on October 8, the Weathermen tried to jump-start the revolution. Their analysis led them to the conclusion that thousands of young people would gather in Chicago in solidarity with the conspiracy defendants to tear down Pig City. One of their major organizing efforts had been among the toughs in working-class high schools, alienated proletarians who, their dialectic concluded, would flock to radicals who didn’t just talk. The revolution would finally have been made concrete. The war would be brought home. Youth would “feel the Vietnamese in ourselves”—and the third world, witnessing their sacrifice, would rise up in revolutionary solidarity.

The day before that—Veterans Day—they bombed the empty offices of Chase Manhattan Bank, Standard Oil, and General Motors. “Corporations have made us into insane consumers,” their manifesto pronounced. “Spiro Agnew may be a household word but it is the rarely seen men like David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, James Roche of General Motors, and Michael Haider of Standard Oil who run the system behind the scenes.”

Meanwhile there were the broadcast networks to flay—four of them, now that PBS, which unlike the others was relatively free of the need to placate corporate sponsors, had matured into a fearless news powerhouse. The White House’s Office of Telecommunications Policy was crafting a public-broadcasting funding bill. OTP general counsel Antonin Scalia had drafted a series of memos on how the Corporation for Public Broadcasting might be made a more pliant vassal of the White House. “The best possibility for White House influence is through the Presidential appointees to the Board of Directors,” he wrote; the best way to shed the influence of “the liberal Establishment of the Northeast” would be to strengthen local stations at the expense of the national organization.

Back in February, Nixon had said antiwar Democrats “might give the enemy an incentive to prolong the war until after the election.” Actually, that was what he was doing, just as he had in 1968. Twenty years later, a superannuated Richard Nixon met with a group of young reporters just before the 1992 New Hampshire primary and copped to it. He explained that the incumbent Republican president would have been able to guarantee his reelection, but that it was too late: he ended the Iraq war when he should have kept it going at least until the election. “We had a lot of success with that in 1972,” he told the assembled scribes. But it was George S. McGovern’s campaign that was “Mafia-like.” Time magazine had said so.

An astonishing watershed in American political history had passed: a major journalistic institution was willfully and cynically discredited by a president as if it were a rival political candidate—the Washington Post as Jerry Voorhis, or Helen Gahagan Douglas. And the president had no trouble getting away with it.

The notion was that McGovern was the perfect Democratic candidate to run against Nixon because his shimmering idealism, his incorruptibility, his utter straightfowardness—not to mention his early and morally uncompromising antiwar stance—could draw brand-new strands into the Democratic coalition, perhaps for good: newly enfranchised under-twenty-ones; the activists of the new social movements; the conscience-stricken idealists of a nation suffering under an epidemic of alienation. The process was supposed to be additive. That, after all, was how the Democratic coalition had always worked: new groups braided into the whole, which bodies forth ever stronger in the future. But the Democratic regulars proved unwelcoming, the old magic from the days when McGovern successfully reached out to blue-collar voters in Milwaukee bowling alleys hard to recapture.

How did it end? After Lyndon Johnson’s landslide 1964 victory and the declaration by the pundits of permanent liberal victory; after the Watts riot and the first long, hot summer, and then the second; after the consuming fires of Vietnam and the war at home to try to stop it, and the war against those who tried to stop it; the wars against school-integrating bureaucrats and the war on school buses and sex ed; the conspiracy trials; civil rights, civil rats; radicals bombing buildings, vigilantes shooting and beating radicals; Bonnie and Clyde and The Green Berets; the assassinations, the New Politics, the drugs, the dropouts, the Soaring Sixties—how did it all end? After this strange, stiff man from Whittier who scaled pool-house walls rather than be photographed in a time and place not precisely of his choosing, who practiced McCarthyism before McCarthy had thought of the idea, who bravely faced down the snobs who wanted to kick him off General Eisenhower’s ticket in a speech that forever divided Americans; who braved the rocks of mobs in South America and the televised onslaught of a bronzed Adonis named Kennedy; who inspired the protective love of millions of white middle-class Americans in their daily battles with existential humiliation at the hands of the media, the liberals, the know-it-alls, the slovenly, the loud, the them—who proved that he could take it, like Lincoln, like Churchill, and come back; the cross-bearing embodiment of a Silent Majority’s humiliations...

Richard Nixon died in 1994. At his funeral, Senator Bob Dole prophesied that “the second half of the twentieth century will be known as the age of Nixon.” In a sense he surely did not intend, I think Bob Dole was correct. What Richard Nixon left behind was the very terms of our national self-image: a notion that there are two kinds of Americans. On the one side, that “Silent Majority.” The “nonshouters.” The middle-class, middle American, suburban, exurban, and rural coalition who call themselves, now, “Values voters,” “people of faith,” “patriots,” or even, simply, “Republicans”—and who feel themselves condescended to by snobby opinion-making elites, and who rage about un-Americans, anti-Christians, amoralists, aliens. On the other side are the “liberals,” the “cosmopolitans,” the “intellectuals,” the “professionals”—“Democrats.” Who say they see shouting in opposition to injustice as a higher form of patriotism. Or say “live and let live.” Who believe that to have “values” has more to do with a willingness to extend aid to the downtrodden than where, or if, you happen to worship—but who look down on the first category as unwitting dupes of feckless elites who exploit sentimental pieties to aggrandize their wealth, start wars, ruin lives. Both populations—to speak in ideal types—are equally, essentially, tragically American. And both have learned to consider the other not quite American at all. The argument over Richard Nixon, pro and con, gave us the language for this wa...