Nixonland

[Dave Monroe]

Perlstein, Rick.  Nixonland:
   The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
   New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Told with urgency and sharp political insight, Nixonland recaptures
America's turbulent 1960s and early 1970s and reveals how Richard
Nixon rose from the political grave to seize and hold the presidency.

Perlstein's epic account begins in the blood and fire of the 1965
Watts riots, nine months after Lyndon Johnson's historic landslide
victory over Barry Goldwater appeared to herald a permanent liberal
consensus in the United States. Yet the next year, scores of liberals
were tossed out of Congress, America was more divided than ever, and a
disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard
Nixon.

Between 1965 and 1972, America experienced no less than a second civil
war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know now was born. It
was the era not only of Nixon, Johnson, Spiro Agnew, Hubert H.
Humphrey, George McGovern, Richard J. Daley, and George Wallace but
Abbie Hoffman, Ronald Reagan, Angela Davis, Ted Kennedy, Charles
Manson, John Lindsay, and Jane Fonda. There are tantalizing glimpses
of Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Jesse Jackson, John Kerry, and
even of two ambitious young men named Karl Rove and William Clinton --
and a not so ambitious young man named George W. Bush.

Cataclysms tell the story of Nixonland:

Angry blacks burning down their neighborhoods in cities across the
land as white suburbanites defend home and hearth with shotguns

The student insurgency over the Vietnam War, the assassinations of
Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the riots at the 1968
Democratic National Convention

The fissuring of the Democratic Party into warring factions
manipulated by the "dirty tricks" of Nixon and his Committee to
Re-Elect the President

Richard Nixon pledging a new dawn of national unity, governing more
divisively than any president before him, then directing a criminal
conspiracy, the Watergate cover-up, from the Oval Office

Then, in November 1972, Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and
resentment born of America's turmoil, was reelected in a landslide
even bigger than Johnson's 1964 victory, not only setting the stage
for his dramatic 1974 resignation but defining the terms of the
ideological divide that characterizes America today.

Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful narrative,
Rick Perlstein's magisterial account of how America divided confirms
his place as one of our country's most celebrated historians.

http://books.simonandschuster.com/Nixonland/Rick-Perlstein/9780743243032
http://books.simonandschuster.com/Nixonland/Rick-Perlstein/9780743243025