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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.

Average Customer Rating:

About then, about now

Customer Rating:

This is a journalist's cultural account of the Nixon years, not a historian's textbook, and not a biography of RMN. It's a great read, filled with fabulous details that historians tend to overlook. Here's Al Capp trying to pick a fight with John Lennon; there's Lorne Greene attacking McGovern for lack of support of Israel. Three caveats. First, the nature of the book makes it hard to figure out where you are. As others have mentioned, dates aren't given, and he does go back and forth a few times. Second, it's hard to ignore the possibility that Perlstein may be reading the present into the past. His approach is so anecdotal -- not in the sense of being false, but in the sense of focusing on small things that are supposed to represent larger things -- that we are at his mercy. For example, he quotes letters written to Time magazine. This adds color, but also forces us to trust the author that these items really are representative. Third: we don't get to see Nixon tossed out of office. The book ends before.

Disappointing: expected more

Customer Rating:

I had heard good things about Nixonland and it started out very well. Unfortunately, Perlstein perpetuates a lot of the mythology of that period and could not repress his own biases in his discussion of Richard Nixon and his times. As previous reviewers have noted, this book is loaded with inaccuracies and poor research but of greatest importance, he misses (or miscasts) the central tragedy of that period and Nixon. Richard Nixon pursued the presidency as an idealist, believing in the purity of the presidency and his unique capabilities to straighten out our country and its position in the world. He inherited all of JFK's and LBJ's social programs and turmoil with their huge costs, an all-consuming Cold War in progress with the Soviet Union and China, a full-up hot war in Vietnam with nearly half a million troops 10,000 miles away and its costs, and a huge space program costing yet more. It was a political and fiscal train wreck that was almost beyond any one president's powers to rectify. Perlstein also glosses over the "antiwar" movement, focusing on immaterial areas like the hippies and the Socialist Worker's Party's "New Mobe" while completely missing or avoiding the direct connections of the US Communist Party, its umbrella People's Coalition for Peace and Justice and their direction of the schedules, sustainment, and "thrust" of nation wide pro-enemy activities. In Perstein's account, there isn't any mention of the continuous flow of activists travelling to Hanoi to meet with the enemy or the return flow of propaganda and guidance that came from the North Vietnamese. Nixon was rigidly opposed by the nation's media who held a complete monopoly on the information given to the people in those days as "news" and the law enforcement agencies watched mutely as treasons were committed and American lives lost. It's a shame. Nixon was a rare individual and he had enormous talents but the deck was stacked against him. Too bad Perlstein couldn't get past his own leftist biases to come up with a more accurate picture.

Insightful history of the US 1955-1975	Customer Rating:
The book gives a detailed and insightful history of US politics 1955-1975, roughly the "Era of Nixon." Anyone who lived through those times, or anyone who is interested in the principal trends of American politics, will benefit from this analysis. It's really a very good book.

Not what I expected	Customer Rating:
I thought it was going to be a visitors' guide to a new theme park. Well, it was still pretty good.

NIxonland: Still With Us Today?

Customer Rating:

A sprawling, compulsively readable tale of a divided America spinning out of control over an unpopular, divisive war and civil rights and social justice issues. Perlstein argues that Richard Nixon helped end the consensus on Great Society liberalism, and divided America along lines that still divide her. Perlstein paints a picture of Richard Nixon as a brooding, jealous loner, filled with resentments against more privileged opponents like the Kennedys, but also a master demagogue and mass manipulator who achieved election to the Presidency by playing on emergent generational and racial divisions. Perlstein does a good job of weaving the distinctive music and culture of the 60s into the tale. Apparently hastily written in places, loose with some facts, and a bit repetitive at times (e.g., Perlstein seems enamored of the phrase 'soiling humiliation' when discussing Nixon trolling for votes), this is nonetheless a first-rate history of a turbulent era, the effects of which are still being felt today.