Is there really room for another book on Richard Nixon? In the past two years alone there has been a doorstop of a biography by Conrad Black, a blow-by-blow account of Nixon's visit to China by Margaret MacMillan and a joint portrait of Nixon and Henry Kissinger by Robert Dallek. And those are only the notable ones.
The answer is that, if Rick Perlstein is the author, there certainly is. Perlstein first came to attention in 2001 with his excellent study of Barry Goldwater, "Before the Storm." His new book on Goldwater's successor as the Republican candidate for the presidency is every bit as good -- a fluently written and carefully researched book that is bound to be the political hit of the season.
Nixon hardly has a reputation as Mr. Normal. But it is still astonishing to be reminded of quite how odd Nixon and his circle were. He wore a necktie when he was in his dressing gown. He once visited his mother, camera crew in tow, to wish her a happy birthday -- and shook her by the hand. He sent memos to his wife, Pat, about how "RN" would like his furniture arranged. Chuck Colson, Nixon's general counsel who famously said that he would run over his grandmother for his boss, once contemplated firebombing the Brookings Institution, a stately think-tank, and then sending in FBI officers dressed as firemen to steal a document that Nixon wanted.
What drove this extraordinary man? Boundless ambition was part of it. Nixon once told Leonard Garment, another adviser, that he was willing to do "anything" to get what he wanted -- anything except "see a shrink." But it was ambition turbocharged with resentment. Nixon hated the liberal snobs who ran America -- the holier-than-thou Ivy-League types who looked down on ordinary people while pretending to champion their cause -- and he was never happier than when confronting them. Nor was the loathing all one way. Hating Richard Nixon was almost the defining feature of American liberalism during his glory years.
But light struggled with dark in Nixon's soul. The dirty trickster also had a foreign-policy brain. Nixon had little interest in home affairs: He was content to subcontract what he called "building outhouses in Peoria" to bright liberals such as Patrick Moynihan. For Nixon the only thing that mattered was foreign policy. He and Henry Kissinger had a revolutionary view of foreign policy -- one defined not by the Cold-War categories of good vs. evil but by the European notion of the balance of power, where the greater good of global order and control was paramount -- even if that meant making a deal with China.
Perlstein's biggest contribution to his subject is to set Nixon's private resentments in the context of a broader culture of resentment. "Nixonland" is a study of how the consensus of the early 1960s turned into the cacophony of the late 1960s, when "regular" white Americans found everything they held dear thrown into question: threatened by black activists, looked down upon by pointy-headed intellectuals, vilified by student radicals, corroded by a rising tide of lawlessness and vulgarity and fatally challenged not just by the antiwar movement but also by the United States' failure to achieve its aims in Vietnam. Perlstein rightly points out that many people supported Nixon not in spite of his boiling rage but precisely because of it.
"Nixonland" also is a study of how those resentments split the once triumphant Democratic Party into two warring factions. In the disastrous 1968 convention in Chicago the delegates could not even agree on which songs to sing. At one point one group started up with "You're a Grand Old Flag" while its rival belted out "We Shall Overcome."
It is hard, in the current political season, to read this book without hearing the sound of history rhyming, to paraphrase Mark Twain. George McGovern's promise of "post-partisanship" galvanized America's youth. He trumpeted his opposition to the Vietnam War under the slogan "Right from the start." He went on to suffer one of the biggest defeats in the general election in U.S. history. "Dirty politics confused him," Hunter S. Thompson sighed. Nixon chose "experience counts" as his campaign slogan in 1960 and boasted that he had spent "a lifetime getting ready." He made up for his lack of personal charm by an almost deranged relentlessness. But recent results suggest that these are only half-rhymes at best: Barack Obama has already met his Richard Nixon and slain her.
