Nixonland

[Mark Kohut]

I just got this book and want to thank whoever on the plist recommended it.

--- On Sat, 10/3/09, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> Subject: Nixonland
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Saturday, October 3, 2009, 12:56 PM
> 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
>