Tricky Rick.

Hudson, Walter M.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein, Scribner, 896 pages

WHEN RICHARD NIXON won the White House in 1968, he was what America did not need but may have deserved. His presidency resulted in massive distrust and cynicism toward government and authority in general, though this was by no means all bad. America had placed too much power and faith in the Cold War presidents. The job was overwhelming for one man--perhaps the only time in history where the fate of humanity was vested in one office--and the era's "crisis psychology," as David Halberstam termed it, created an atmosphere in which anything was permitted to defeat a political opponent. Your adversary had no rulebook, the thinking went, so you couldn't afford one either.

Does Nixon's impressive yet nefarious rise to power make him kind of a perverse epic hero of the late 1960s? As a man who drove himself to the top despite his opponents and--most of all--himself? As a man who helped create a nation of red and blue states, attack-dog politics, and cultural warfare? This is what Rick Perlstein, previously the author of a good biography of Barry Goldwater, asserts but fails to prove in Nixonland.

Of course, to begin to understand how Nixon could win the presidency, one needs to understand the era in which he reached the summit of power: the climactic high 1960s, from 1968 to 1972, the time of maximum social unrest. Though it is hard to believe now, America seemed to be falling apart. In 1969, the usually staid Wall Street Journal asserted that the U.S. was in the midst of a guerrilla war within its own borders.

Remember the comforting, black-and-white footage of the March on Washington in 1963. In retrospect, it's a startling picture of old, dignified America --decorum and respectability abound: men in coats and ties, women in modest dresses, noble speeches appealing to better angels and dreams of a brighter future. It's painful to flash forward half a decade and see in Technicolor what appears to be insanity: fools such as Jerry Rubin and Bernadine Dohrn prancing around, praising Charles Manson and telling kids to kill their parents.

What happened in the interim? Why did America suffer, as one wag called it, a "psychedelic breakdown?" As Perlstein points out, in 1964 the Democrats had crushed Goldwater. In an awesome display of the ambition and hubris of the modern West, LBJ and a Democratic Congress promised a Great Society, "abundance and liberty for all." And what instead did the people get? "America plunged into chaos," as Perlstein puts it. The crisis was mild compared to, say, France in 1789 or Russia in 1917, but to complacent Middle America, it was terrifying: riots in the cities, skyrocketing crime rates, open promiscuity and obscenity, widespread drug abuse, campus disruption, stalemate if not defeat in Vietnam, breakdown of family life. "All this moral anarchy," writes Perlstein, "all of it felt linked."

In Perlstein's account, Nixon provides the skeleton key to understanding the period. Indeed, the ascendancy of the Silent Majority--Red State America, in its more recent guise--is coded in terms of Nixon's life story. The horrified Middle Americans that elected and supported him were "Orthogonians"--the term Nixon himself gave to the fraternity he co-founded at Whittier College for kids who weren't the elite. Orthogonians were hardly downtrodden, though. According to Perlstein, they were "Martyrs who were really not martyrs, oppressors who were not really oppressors: a class politics for the white middle class." The entitled ones were Whittier's elite fraternity of "Franklins." And Nixon fought a personal battle against Franklins all his life--the Kennedys, most prominently. He rose to power because he perfectly reflected "Orthogonian" rage and anxiety. He was, after all, one to them to his core.

This all seems too clever by half, and Perlstein carries his thesis for more than 700 pages. Throughout the book, he refers to Franklins and Orthogonians in various political guises, his style combining a kind of New Journalist hip argot with metafictional irony--at times, one might say, Tom Wolfe, at others, Thomas Pynchon. So we read cool and clever chapter titles ("In Which a Cruise Ship Full of Governors Inspires Considerations on the Nature of Old and New Politics"); you-are-there descriptions of the Watts riots and the '68 Democratic convention; and smart-Alec, tongue-justenoughin-cheek commentary. ("Now that farmers were afraid that Martin Luther King would send Negro biker gangs to rape their children, the Republican restoration was inevitable.") At the center of the maelstrom, the trickster himself is always there--always prevailing, jiu-jitsuing his opponents by any means necessary.

Amusing, and even exciting at first, the book's sprawling narrative becomes wearying, condescending, and ultimately puerile. Its slapdash tone betrays a willingness to play fast and loose with the facts and to provide overly simple explanations. Perlstein writes, "In the State of the Union address the president said his first economic priority was 'controlling inflation.' He lied." That is a highly dubious assertion, at best. In fact, Nixon was more concerned about inflation than unemployment in his first year in office, even willing to see unemployment rise if it would help curb inflation. Perlstein calls Nixon's creation of the EPA "less noble the closer you looked: its 3560 employees all came from existing agencies; its 1.4 billion budget taken from existing programs, the only difference being that these previously scattered centers of authority were now directly controlled from the White House." But wait a minute--could it be that these "scattered centers of authority" were centralized in a sincere attempt to improve the management of environmental issues?

Perlstein's dislike of Nixon--admittedly he is not hard to dislike--gets the better of him. He overstates the case that Nixon sabotaged the '68 negotiations with the North Vietnamese. The implication is that, in so doing, he ensured that Hubert Humphrey would lose the election. This reductionism is too easy: Saigon probably would have rejected negotiations without the Republican-woman-in-Asia Anna Chennault's proddings--and, of course, LBJ was the one illegally wiretapping Chennault anyway. Even when posing as a balanced historian, Perlstein casts Nixon in the worst possible light. "In the middle of March [1969], Nixon ordered the bombing of the sections of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that meandered through Cambodia," he writes. He does not mention that Nixon actually debated whether to bomb and ultimately acquiesced to Kissinger, who more than once goaded his commander in chief into foolish positions. On the other hand, Nixon did not bomb North Korea after a U.S. spy plane was shot down off that country's coast, largely acceding to the advice of Secretary of State William Rogers and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. Perlstein's narrative conceals that, even in the heart of Nixonland, presidential decisions weren't purely Nixonian.

But Perlstein's problem is not just with Nixon. He does not, to put it mildly, like Orthogonians. He indicts them all, repeatedly. They practice "jury nullification" when some Chicago jurors acquit a cop accused of beating Chicago protestors. They don't deserve their economic success. ("Through no agency of their own, Chicago's white ethnics were the beneficiaries of an urban planning miracle.") Their meetings and rallies are just smarmy patriotism: the 1971 Youth Day at the University of Tennessee with Rev. Billy Graham is recorded as a "political contrivance." And then he comes up with this gem of a slander by association:

 James Buckley had been one of the
 Catholic conservatives outraged by
 New York's abortion bill in April
 (Not as outraged, however as the
 Buckley friend Brent Bozell. When
 his group Los Hijos de Tormenta--Sons
 of Thunder, after the Spanish
 fascist group--learned that George
 Washington University hospital
 was performing abortions ...

Ipso facto presto. With legerdemain and insinuation, antiabortion Catholics are equated with members of the Caudillo's storm-trooping Falange. Such criticism may seem like cherry-picking, but this is the price Perlstein pays for his freewheeling narrative. He wants to be the historian equivalent of Oliver Stone, relying on existentialist truths, yet he does not employ the historical facts and hard evidence that are the most existential things the past can provide. The rest is whimsy.

This leads to deeper, more essential problems with Nixonland. Perlstein cannot corral the impossible 1960s. He rightly rejects patterns that didn't exist. No, antiwar protestors were not mere puppets of communist masters. No, there was not any conspiratorial connection between black radicals, student radicals, the New Left, and the counterculture. These groups were more often at odds than allied. Yet Perlstein himself falls prey to pattern-making compulsions. One implied narrative of Nixonland is easy to follow: in the late 1960s, as the civil-rights movement moved north, gloating "Dixie gargoyles" full of race-hate and evil took over the soul of the Republican Party, with Nixon orchestrating the whole thing. The working-class "Pucinskis and Rostekowskis" of Chicago and Milwaukee were manipulated to react in terror as they saw their cities fall into the hands of minorities. They turned to Nixon to save them.

The trouble is that not everyone, perhaps not even that many, of those who voted for Tricky Dick were closet racists--no more than every early 20thcentury union member was a communist or every midcentury communist a Stalinist. Not all of them were Orthogonians; some had marched in 1963. They tended to take seriously--too seriously, it seems--the stated ambitions of radicals to destroy the American society in which they worked hard and raised their families. Many probably thought life was bigger than politics, but they were dragged into the fight by many of the politicalis-personal New Left. All this complexity de-links the narrative. This is why, for instance, Gerard DeGroot's recent, shambolic The Sixties Unplugged is better history than Nixonland. In that book, Nixon doesn't divide America; all is fracture and fissure. Nobody dominates, nobody masters the moment, and in the end nobody really wins.

To deal with the complexity that was Richard Nixon, one needs more than Perlstein's sneering and heavy-handed innuendoes. In this book, the president is little more than a political confidence man. A better book, and one Perlstein relies on heavily, is Richard Reeves's Nixon: Alone in the White House. Reeves gets closer to the bone and provides a truer psychological portrait of a man who was solitude incarnate, even among his inner circle. Robert Lowell once wrote, "Pity the monsters." Perhaps we don't have to pity, but good history at least requires human empathy and close attention--Nixonland has neither. The past in question is too big and unruly to be lain at the feet of one man, even the chief Orthogonian himself, Richard Milhous Nixon.

Walter M. Hudson resides in the Washington, D.C. area and has written reviews and articles for Modern Age, Military Review, and The Latin Mass magazine.