Nixonland Quotes

“In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words: from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“He (Nixon) needed someone with him so he could be alone.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble - whether instituting open housing, civilian compliant review boards, or sex education programs - when they presume that a reform is an inevitable comcomitant of progress. It is then they are most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another—until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“The Republican Party spent the year of the liberal apotheosis enacting the most unlikely political epic ever told: a right-wing fringe took over the party from the ground up, nominating Barry Goldwater, the radical-right senator from Arizona, while a helpless Eastern establishment-that-was-now-a-fringe looked on in bafflement. Experts, claiming the Republican tradition of progressivism was as much a part of its identity as the elephant, began talking about a party committing suicide. The Goldwaterites didn’t see suicide. They saw redemption. This was part and parcel of their ideology—that Lyndon Johnson’s “consensus” was their enemy in a battle for the survival of civilization. For them, the idea that calamitous liberal nonsense—ready acceptance of federal interference in the economy; Negro “civil disobedience”; the doctrine of “containing” the mortal enemy Communism when conservatives insisted it must be beaten—could be described as a “consensus” at all was symbol and substance of America’s moral rot. They also believed the vast majority of ordinary Americans already agreed with them, whatever spake the polls—“crazy figures,” William F. Buckley harrumphed, doctored “to say, ‘Yes, Mr. President.’” It was their article of faith. And faith, and the uncompromising passions attending it, was key to their political makeup.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate." Martin Luther King, Jr. after the violent reception he received in Chicago in 1966.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“Being hated by the right people was no impediment to success. The unpolished were everywhere the majority.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“Richard Nixon was a serial collector of resentments.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not. How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less;”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“Thirty-six House incumbents with ratings from the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education of seventy-five or higher were defeated—especially traumatic since Republicans had filibustered labor’s fondest legislative wish: a repeal of the right-to-work provision of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. Union members voted for politicians who weakened their unions because the Democrats supported civil rights.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“This trip was not about running for president. This trip was preparing to BE president.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble - whether instituting open housing, civilian compliant review boards, or sex education programs - when they presume that a reform is an inevitable comcomitant of progress. It is then they are most likely to establish their reforms by to-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“But honesty was a dull blade to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon -- who was simply willing to lie.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“The third day revealed the smokingest gun of all—a memo from Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs John McNaughton breaking down, in Robert McNamara’s preferred statistical terms, why we were persisting in Vietnam: 70%—To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat…. 20%—To keep SVN (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands. 10%—To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life. ALSO—To emerge from the crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used. NOT—To “help a friend.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“The lies went back to Harry Truman, the article explained. Military aid to France had “directly involved” the United States in preserving a European colony; the Eisenhower administration played “a direct role in the ultimate breakdown in the Geneva settlement” and the cancellation of free elections scheduled for 1956. (President Nixon always said honoring Geneva was the reason we had to continue the war.) Kennedy—this in the Pentagon study’s words—transformed the “limited-risk gamble” he inherited into a “broad commitment.” Lyndon Johnson laid plans for full-fledged war as early as the spring of 1964—campaigning against Barry Goldwater with the line “We seek no wider war.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“King had marched six weeks earlier through the Mississippi town where the civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were murdered. He had called it the most savage place he had ever seen. Now he revised his opinion: 'I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“In the middle of May an L.A. cop stopped a black man named Leonard Deadwyler for speeding through Watts. He stuck his gun in the driver's-side window — 'to attrack the driver's attention,' he later testified. He also claimed the car suddenly lurched forward, causing his gun to discharge. Leonard Deadwyler slumped into the lap of his wife and muttered his last words — 'But she's having a baby' — as his two-year-old son looked on from the backseat. He had been speeding her to the nearest hospital, miles away; there was no hospital in Watts — an area twice the size of Manhattan.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“Nixon has been the subject of more psychobiographies than any other politician. His career vindicates one of that maligned genre's most trustworthy findings: the recipe for a successfully driven politician should include a doting mother to convince the son he can accomplish anything, and an emotionally distant father to convince the son that no accomplishment can ever be enough.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“But honesty was a dull blade to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon — who was simply willing to lie.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“Jeb Magruder’s team’s chief operative, Herbert Porter, was the White House scheduling director. One of Porter’s masterpieces was hiring a young aide, Roger Stone, to contribute $200 to Pete McCloskey in the name of the militant homosexual group the Gay Liberation Front and forward the receipt to William Loeb (though Stone, ashamed of any imprecations against his masculinity, chickened out and made the contribution from the Young Socialist Alliance instead). Muskie ducked in on Oregon and California, scene of early June primaries.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“This kid assumed an alias, volunteered for the campaign, stole the candidate’s stationery, and distributed a thousand fake invitations—they promised “free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing”—at communes, rock concerts, and street corners where Chicago’s drunken hoboes congregated. The kid’s name was Karl Rove. The RNC soon hired him at $9,200 a year to give seminars on his techniques.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“the rights of free speech and free press do not carry with them the right to advocate the destruction of the very government which protects the freedom of an individual to express his views.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“So Newark had the highest percentage of substandard housing of any American city: 7,097 units had no flush toilets; 28,795, no heaters. Twenty-eight babies died in a diarrhea epidemic in 1965, eighteen of them at City Hospital, which was also infested by bats.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“With the best of intentions, the reformers conflated what savage cops did in the streets with the backroom deal-making that wired the convention for Hubert Humphrey—just as Mayor Daley’s police tarred peaceful McCarthy campaign bureaucrats with the rampages of the revolutionary left.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“He concluded, “While there may have been extremist groups who grasped the opportunity to exploit the violence…to state that the riots were Communist or otherwise inspired appears to me to be a lame excuse to salve the consciences of those who do not want to, or refuse to, face the conditions that precipitated this disaster and similar ones in other great cities of our nation: rat-infested slums, unemployment, poverty, hopelessness, frustration, and despair.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“The DNC was right: an amazingly large segment of the population disliked and mistrusted Richard Nixon instinctively. What they did not acknowledge was that an amazingly large segment of the population also trusted him as their savior. “Nixonland” is what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together. By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

“Nixonland is what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together. By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States. It would, in fact, for the next fifty years.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“The supposed American consensus had always been clouded. The experts had just become expert at ignoring the clouds.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America