Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

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.

CONTENTS

Preface

BOOK I

1 Hell in the City of Angels

2 The Orthogonian

3 The Stench

4 Ronald Reagan

5 Long, Hot Summer

6 School Was in Session...

7 Batting Average

BOOK II

8 The Bombing

9 Summer of Love

10 In Which a Cruise Ship Full of Governors Inspires Considerations on the Nature of Old and New Politics

11 Fed-up-niks

12 The Sky's the Limit

13 Violence

14 From Miami to the Siege of Chicago

15 Wednesday, August 28, 1968

16 Winning

BOOK III

17 The First One Hundred Days

18 Trust

19 If Gold Rust

20 The Presidential Offensive

21 The Polarization

22 Tourniquet

23 Mayday

24 Purity

25 Agnew's Election

BOOK IV

26 How to Survive the Debacle

27 Cruelest Month

28 Ping-Pong

29 The Coven

30 The Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and George Wallace

31 The Spring Offensive

32 Celebrities

33 In Which Playboy Bunnies, and Barbarella, and Tanya, Inspire Theoretical Considerations upon the Nature of Democracy

34 Not Half Enough

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index