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

by Rick Perlstein

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...