Nixonland

The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Rick Perlstein

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781416579885
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"Perlstein...aims here at nothing less than weaving a tapestry of social upheaval. His success is dazzling." — Los Angeles Times "Both brilliant and fun, a consuming journey back into the making of modern politics." —Jon Meacham " Nixonland is a grand historical epic. Rick Perlstein has turned a story we think we know—American politics between the opposing presidential landslides of 1964 and 1972—into an often-surprising and always-fascinating new narrative." —Jeffrey Toobin Rick Perlstein's bestselling account of how the Nixon era laid the groundwork for the political divide that marks our country today. Told with vivid 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 of the United States. 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. Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful narrative, Rick Perlstein's magisterial account of how it all happened confirms his place as one of our country's most celebrated historians.

NOTES

ABOUT THE NOTES

Notes like these serve a threefold purpose: transparency, accountability, and as a resource for readers’ own further explorations. All three functions have greatly been enhanced by the exponential expansion of material available on the Internet since my research began in 2001.

Historians have produced outstanding Web sites devoted to individual events; see, for example, “The Hard Hat Riots: An Online History Project,” from George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, which cross-references documents and news accounts for a minute-by-minute reconstruction of that 1970 event. You can find out what was on the TV news every night via the abstracts at the Vanderbilt University Television News Archive (openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu). Interested citizens have scanned crucial documents onto their own Web sites—such as the good soul who reproduced Rolling Stone’s coverage of the Berkeley People’s Park riots of 1969. And, of course, classic TV moments referenced herein such as the Checkers Speech of 1952 and the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 can be viewed, in whole or in part, on YouTube and other video sites. The American Museum of the Moving Image’s “Living Room Candidate” site makes available every presidential campaign commercial described in the text.

Time put its entire archive online so that any passage from the magazine quoted herein can be Googled, leading the reader to the original article. (Just as this book was going to press, Atlantic Monthly did the same.) Readers interested in the relationship between Ronald Reagan and the University of California can review the documents reporter Seth Rosenfeld requisitioned via the Freedom of Information Act for his extraordinary “Campus Files” series, available at the San Francisco Chronicle Web site. Every presidential utterance recorded in the Public Papers of the President series has been digitized, sometimes with audio and video, by John Woolley and Gerhard Peters of the University of California—Santa Barbara. In the notes, PPP followed by a document number and date makes it easy for the reader to find Johnson and Nixon speeches at presidency.ucsb.edu.

The State Department has put online the Vietnam volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States collection of documents, which includes full texts of every major high-level memo on Vietnam decision-making, and even transcripts of some telephone conversations. The Pentagon Papers have been digitized by the Mount Holyoke University International Relations Program. The Miller Center for Public Affairs at the University of Virginia adds digitized audio of Nixon White House tapes at regular intervals, and an important newly released tape—number 33, in which you can listen to the president reacting in real time to the returns on Election Day, 1972—is online at the National Archives’ Nixon Project. David Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections and Larry Kestenbaum’s Political Graveyard sites are exceptionally useful as well.

Readers with online access to university libraries, or physical access to larger public libraries, may be able to download PDF files of newspapers including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times articles cited below (these are the files subscribed to by the library I use, at the University of Chicago; others may vary) through ProQuest Historical Newspapers, with content fully searchable, and also download the full pages in which the articles appeared.

These are just some examples; there will be more with each passing month. A continually updated hypertext version of these notes will be available at my Web site, rickperlstein.org, so that readers, wherever possible, can explore Nixonland’s source materials on their own.

Here is how the notes below work: Phrases in italics are passages taken from the text. Paragraphing of the source citations follows the paragraphing in the text. Each page number preceding a paragraph in the notes corresponds to the page where the paragraph begins in the text.

ABBREVIATIONS

BPP: Berrigan Brothers Papers, Cornell University Special Collections, Ithaca, New York CDN: Chicago Daily News

CT: Chicago Tribune

LAT: Los Angeles Times

LBJCR: “Civil Rights During the Johnson Administration, 1963–1969: A collection from the holdings of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas” (microfilm)

MIP: Files on the events of 1970 collected by Maurice Isserman, in possession of author MTR: Museum of Television and Radio, New York City

NLT: Nixon Library Tapes transcribed by author, National Archives, College Park, Maryland NYDN: New York Daily News

NYT: New York Times

NYTM: New York Times Magazin...