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

by Rick Perlstein

Kuchel himself knew enough to be worried. After the Goldwater crusade, his enemies now controlled the California Republican Party. In 1966 he called in Richard Nixon to broker a series of peace meetings with conservatives. It wasn’t enough. Someone more formidable than John Wayne arose to challenge him: the man who led the campaign against Land of the Free. For saving their children from what he called the “sick sixties,” California conservatives loved Max Rafferty more than Watts Negroes loved RFK. The Louisiana native and son of an autoworker had been an obscure school administrator in 1961 when he was invited to address a school board meeting in his new district outside Pasadena. He chose not to dilate upon the topic of his dissertation, “Personnel-Pupil Ratios in Certain California Elementary School Districts”; instead he excoriated activists who “seem to spend every waking moment agitating against ROTC, booing authorized congressional committees, and parading in support of Fidel Castro…. This sizable minority of spineless, luxury-loving, spiritless characters came right out of our classrooms. They played in our kindergartens, went on field trips to the bakery and studied things called ‘social living’ and ‘language arts’ in our junior high schools. They were ‘adjusted to their peer groups.’ They were taught that competition was bad. They were told little about modern democratic capitalism. They were persuaded that the world was very shortly to become one big, happy fam...