I lived through this period, while Perlstein knows it only second hand. Yet my reading of this book left me more appalled by Nixon's enemies than by Nixon. "How did Nixonland end?" he concludes his book. My impression is that Perlstein's attempts to understand Nixon left him loathing him all the more, and regretting the nation-"Nixonland"-he left behind. But of course Goldwater, who never really wanted to be president, was gifted with an appealing personality while Nixon, who longed to be president, was not.
There he showed the capacity for a sympathetic understanding of a man whose ideas he does not share here he struggles to do the same for a man whose ideas often were much closer to his own.
Perlstein is a young man of the Left who won many admirers on all sides with his previous book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001). Rick Perlstein, the gifted author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, seems to disagree. But if we grant, as I think most Americans would, that the nation was better off in April 1945 than it had been in March 1933, I also think a strong case can be made that the nation was better off in August 1974 than it had been in January 1969. Against the picture of Roosevelt departing suddenly from the scene as the nation neared the moment of absolute victory, we have the picture of Nixon, physically awkward as ever, making the "V" sign as he boarded the helicopter that would take him away from the White House as the first president so disgraced that he was forced to resign. That might seem counterintuitive or nonsensical. Nixon is perennially rated as one of our worst presidents, and here I disagree, for I have come to think that Nixon, for all his sins, left the country better off than it was when he came to the White House. Roosevelt is perennially rated as one of our best presidents, and I think justifiably so, whatever you may think of his domestic policies, because of his brilliant success as commander-in-chief in World War II. Each of them polarized the nation, with most voters coming out most of the time on his side, but with an uncomfortably large number-including many prominent voices in the press-never reconciled to the legitimacy of the man or his works. Personally and by the long shadow they cast, both shaped American politics and government for a generation or more.
Only two men have been nominated five times for national office by one of our two great political parties. A review of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, by Rick Perlstein
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