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

by Rick Perlstein

The jury was told the government needn’t prove these “conspirators” were ever in the same room, or even in on the same phone conversations—only that “a meeting of the minds” had taken place. Hundreds had signed the same document. Why had the government chosen these five? Mitchell Goodman was the forty-four-year-old novelist who had shouted, “We are burning children in Vietnam!” during Hubert Humphrey’s appearance at the National Book Awards. Marcus Raskin was a thirty-three-year-old former Kennedy administration defense official. The Reverend William Sloane Coffin was the forty-four-year-old chaplain of Yale University, a former CIA officer. Only one, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate student of no particular public reputation named Michael Ferber, resembled a typical antiwar activist. The state was on the lookout for gurus: “teachers, preachers, and politicians,” as Nixon had put it in Reader’s Digest, who led children astray. Our children were the symbol and substance of American innocence. The thought that they’d come to insurrectionist conclusions on their own was too painful for some to bear. Their Svengalis had to be punished. Svengalis were in patriots’ sights everywhere.