Reviewed by Elizabeth Drew

There is so much literature about various aspects of Richard Nixon -- his foreign policy, his domestic policy, his rise to power, his time in power, his fall from power, his comeback, his relationship with Vice President Spiro Agnew, his trip to China -- that it would seem difficult to find an original approach to the man. But, in Nixonland, Rick Perlstein has come up with the novel and important idea of exploring the relationship between Nixon and the 1960s counterculture, a rebellion of mostly young people against society's conventions and authority in general. Perlstein is quite right in identifying this rebellion -- and the reaction against it -- as critical to Nixon's rise and his strange hold on the American people. One might even consider Perlstein's book to be primarily about the counterculture and only secondarily about Nixon, since he devotes nearly half of it to a brilliant evocation of the '60s.

The decade had begun quiescently, with a general acceptance of the conventional mores of the '50s and the Cold War. But midway through came upheaval: hippies, yippies, be-ins, the drug culture, the Weather Underground, the "summer of love." Then the traumas of 1968: the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, campus unrest, urban riots. And, of course, Vietnam. A nation unhinged.

Perlstein astutely follows the reaction against all of this by a large part of the American people, whose deep resentments and fear Nixon shrewdly observed and exploited. In the 1968 election campaign, he offered America peace and quiet, law and order. But once in office, he delivered mass arrests of peaceful protesters against the war; his allies in the construction unions beat up demonstrators on Wall Street. Perlstein's Nixonland is a land of rebellion and reaction, each faction stirring up the other.

Perlstein previously wrote Before the Storm, a well-received book about Barry Goldwater. Now, once again, he has done a prodigious amount of research to give us a fat volume on a key figure who shifted our political ground. Perlstein is a fine writer with a well-developed capacity for seeing irony and absurdity; his storytelling skills make this an absorbing book, full of surprising details. His recounting of the 1968 Republican convention includes a marvelous description of Nixon making a deal with Strom Thurmond to get Southern support in exchange for promising to halt government desegregation efforts and to appoint Supreme Court justices and a vice president acceptable to the South Carolina senator. (Thurmond suggested Agnew, who had not even been on Nixon's list.) Perlstein's account of the Democratic convention in Chicago is so vivid as to make one feel right there on the chaotic convention floor and amid the bloody demonstrations outside the convention hall. In keeping with his theme, he makes it clear that most of the American public sided with mayor Richard J. Daley, who denounced the demonstrators in earthy terms and whose cops beat them up. Richard Nixon understood this very well.

But Perlstein's book is weaker on Nixon's presidency than on what led up to it. He certainly catches the anger that Nixon carried into office and fatefully acted upon; he writes, acutely, that "Nixon was a serial collector of resentments." He also captures the assorted gumshoes and clowns who were brought into the White House to snoop on and harass Nixon's perceived "enemies." But while Perlstein is perceptive about Nixon, he isn't reflective about him. He does not examine the phenomenon of a president drunk and out of control, barking orders to aides in the early hours of the morning -- orders they had to decide whether to carry out. Nor does he stop to reflect on the true menace of a president using the power of the state against political opponents and trying to interfere with the inner workings of the opposition party.

Perlstein makes too much of Nixon's college experience: Rejected by Whittier College's elite fraternity, the Franklins, Nixon started a new fraternity of outsiders, the Orthogonians. (Nixon told fellow members that the word meant "upright" or "straight shooter.") From then on, by Perlstein's account, Nixon saw the world in terms of Franklins and Orthogonians.

But the metaphor becomes tiresome and is simplistic. From his childhood on, Nixon felt looked down upon by those who were better off. As president, he resented the elites in the State Department and CIA, and others from privileged backgrounds. But his antipathies extended far beyond that, to include blacks, Jews, intellectuals, political opponents and much of the press (with the exception of those he could manipulate).

In his source notes, Perlstein attributes his ability to gather so much material to the wonders of the Internet, but he sometimes seems indiscriminate, if not self-indulgent, in his use of the available information: Do we really need to know the details of the trial of the Chicago Seven? Why are we suddenly being told about the murder of actress Sharon Tate? All the jump-cutting is disorienting, and he makes some small, avoidable errors: The townhouse Nixon bought in New York after his forced retirement was on East 65th Street, not Fifth Avenue; the Washington Post reporter who asked Lyndon Johnson an uncomfortable question was Chalmers Roberts, not Chalmers Johnson.

Perlstein's thesis about the clash between the counter-culture and much of the rest of the country, and his explanation of Nixon's place in it, is on target. But at the end of Nixonland, he becomes carried away and pushes his theme too far. In a peculiar passage, he writes, convolutedly: "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."

Well, I, for one, don't find it so hard. Nevertheless, Nixonland is a highly readable book and an important contribution to the literature about our arguably most interesting president.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

In 1964, the Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson won practically the biggest landslide in American history, with 61.05 percent of the popular vote and 486 of 538 electoral college votes. In 1972, the Republican presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon won a strikingly similar landslide -- 60.67 percent and 520 electoral college votes. In the eight years in between, the battle lines that define our culture and politics were forged in blood and fire. This is a book about how that happened, and why.

At the start of 1965, when those eight years began, blood and fire weren't supposed to be a part of American culture and politics. According to the pundits, America was more united and at peace with itself than ever. Five years later, a pretty young Quaker girl from Philadelphia, a winner of a Decency Award from the Kiwanis Club, was cross-examined in the trial of seven Americans charged with conspiring to start a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

"You practice shooting an M1 yourself, don't you?" the prosecutor asked her.

"Yes, I do," she responded.

"You also practice karate, don't you?"

"Yes, I do."

"That is for the revolution, isn't it?"

"After Chicago I changed from being a pacifist to the realization that we had to defend ourselves. A nonviolent revolution was impossible. I desperately wish it was possible."

And, several months after that, an ordinary Chicago ad salesman would be telling Time magazine, "I'm getting to feel like I'd actually enjoy going out and shooting some of these people. I'm just so goddamned mad. They're trying to destroy everything I've worked for -- for myself, my wife, and my children."

This American story is told in four sections, corresponding to four elections: in 1966, 1968, 1970, and 1972. Politicians, always reading the cultural winds, make their life's work convincing 50 percent plus one of their constituency that they understand their fears and hopes, can honor and redeem them, can make them safe and lead them toward their dreams. Studying the process by which a notably successful politician achieves that task, again and again, across changing cultural conditions, is a deep way into an understanding of those fears and dreams -- and especially, how those fears and dreams change.

The crucial figure in common to all these elections was Richard Nixon -- the brilliant and tormented man struggling to forge a public language that promised mastery of the strange new angers, anxieties, and resentments wracking the nation in the 1960s. His story is the engine of this narrative. Nixon's character -- his own overwhelming angers, anxieties, and resentments in the face of the 1960s chaos -- sparks the combustion. But there was nothing natural or inevitable about how he did it -- nothing inevitable in the idea that a president could come to power by using the angers, anxieties, and resentments produced by the cultural chaos of the 1960s. Indeed, he was slow to the realization. He reached it, through the 1966 election, studying others: notably, Ronald Reagan, who won the governorship of California by providing a political outlet for the outrages that, until he came along to articulate them, hadn't seemed like voting issues at all. If it hadn't been for the shocking defeats of a passel of LBJ liberals blindsided in 1966 by a conservative politics of "law and order," things might have turned out differently: Nixon might have run on a platform not too different from that of the LBJ liberals instead of one that cast them as American villains.

Nixon's win in 1968 was agonizingly close: he began his first term as a minority president. But the way he achieved that narrow victory seemed to point the way toward an entire new political alignment from the one that had been stable since FDR and the Depression. Next, Nixon bet his presidency, in the 1970 congressional elections, on the idea that an "emerging Republican majority" -- rooted in the conservative South and Southwest, seething with rage over the destabilizing movements challenging the Vietnam War, white political power, and virtually every traditional cultural norm -- could give him a governing majority in Congress. But when Republican candidates suffered humiliating defeats in 1970, Nixon blamed the chicanery of his enemies: America's enemies, he had learned to think of them. He grew yet more determined to destroy them, because of what he was convinced was their determination to destroy him.

Millions of Americans recognized the balance of forces in the exact same way -- that America was engulfed in a pitched battle between the forces of darkness and the forces of light. The only thing was: Americans disagreed radically over which side was which. By 1972, defining that order of battle as one between "people who identified with what Richard Nixon stood for" and "people who despised what Richard Nixon stood for" was as good a description as any other.

Richard Nixon, now, is long dead. But these sides have hardly changed. We now call them "red" or "blue" America, and whether one or the other wins the temporary allegiances of 50 percent plus one of the electorate -- or 40 percent of the electorate, or 60 percent of the electorate -- has been the narrative of every election since. It promises to be thus for another generation. But the size of the constituencies that sort into one or the other of the coalitions will always be temporary.

The main character in Nixonland is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name -- but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.

Copyright © 2008 by Rick Perlstein