and concocts an elaborate Nixonian plot to thwart the integration of Southern schools as a payoff to Strom Thurmond while ignoring entirely the story (best told by Ray Price) of how those schools were, in fact, integrated without violence during Nixon’s first term. apes Todd Gitlin’s revisionist line on the history of the New Left.

Perlstein regurgitates the standard New Left line on the war in Vietnam. And when he couldn’t find a previously published damning story to lift, he made it up, as in his phony reconstruction of Nixon’s meeting with the Southern Republican state chairmen in June of 1968.Ī reader expecting to learn something new (or true) about the issues that roiled the public discourse in the 1960s is bound to be disappointed. Relying largely on the psycho-babble of Fawn Brodie, the partisan fury of Leonard Lurie, and the genteel animus of Richard Reeves, Perlstein left no Nixonphobic screed untapped in the process of liming his portrait of Nixon as psychotic. Perlstein's Nixon is a cartoon figure, not in the mode of Herblock, whose caricatures, while vicious, were nonetheless original and uncomfortably recognizable to Nixon’s friends, but plastic, one-dimensional, and unrecognizable except to the most fervid of Nixon’s enemies. Those of us who have read the preceding books will avoid it: there are far too many legitimate analyses and critiques of Trump, or Nixon, to waste time with fluff. He will, in all probability, continue his uninspired, shallow chronicles of Republican politicians with a book on Donald Trump. Perlstein has previously published volumes on Eisenhower, Goldwater, and Reagan. Between the minutiae and the lacunae, Perlstein's account of what Nixon meant to America is very sparse indeed. If, on the other hand, one is interested in understanding how Richard Nixon affected American government and political history, one's time would be better spent elsewhere. If the reader is looking for a fairly complete, easily digestible chronicle of America in the 1960s, the book may serve its purpose. In nearly a thousand pages, Perlstein essays to cover Nixon's life from his college days up to his re-election to the presidency in 1972. (Obviously, with so many accounts, the details can become somewhat repetitive.) 'Nixonland,' by Rick Perlstein, is notable primarily for its lack of focus and its meandering style. Ambrose's classic trilogy, 'Nixon'), and most are worth reading or at least skimming.

Leaving aside his self-serving memoir, 'RN,' these books range from the very specialized (Joe McGinness' 'The Selling of the President 1968') to the expansive and scholarly (Stephen A.

There are, at the end of 2022, somewhere between 250 and 300 full-length books in print concerning Richard M.