In his June 2008 review of NIXONLAND in The American Spectator, David Weigel wrote, “It is also, to Perlstein’s delight, becoming less pointed by the day. While he concludes that Nixonland ‘has not ended yet,’ he’s told interviewers that the rise of Barack Obama and the collapse of fearmongering Republicans has given him confidence that the country is really moving away from the ‘national berserk.’”

Have you expounded recently on your perceptions of that move? If so, could you provide me a link?

This is an area which interests me a great deal. I’m an Independent. I once took a position in relation to my former governmental employer which seemingly led some observers to assume that I was a liberal or not a Republican. Indeed, my entire cohort was blasted for holding views that we actually never held. (It’s complicated, I won’t go into the details.) At the time I was criticized, I was just starting to edge away from party affiliation with any party. (I was a Republican from 1968, when I campaigned for Nixon as a high school student, through 1989). The stereotyping my cohort faced stunned me. I was caught unawares when I was attacked for holding certain positions in a regulatory environment. The assumption that I had to be a Democrat and that a Republican or Independent could not possibly take the regulatory position I chose was a shock to me. The experience made me very wary of the demonizing and potentially destructive aspects of partisanship.

At any rate, I’m very interested in NIXONLAND and how people form the perceptions they hold and how they interact with political opponents. I was a member of the Young Americans for Freedom during 1969-1973 but am not one of those people who blames liberals and McGovernites for everything that happened during that time period. Many people on the right, left and middle made choices during the Nixon years which had long lasting consequences for the nation.

As to the present, in the 2008 Presidential election, in terms of party affiliation, exit polls show that 39% of those voting identified themselves as Democrats, 32% as Republicans, and 29% as Independents. In terms of ideology, 22% identified themselves as Liberal, 34% as Conservative, and 44% as Moderate. Given the results of the election, President-elect Obama clearly won the votes of more than self-identified Democrats.

Today’s New York Times reports “Barack Obama won only 53% of the vote on Election Day, but he is getting a landslide greeting from the American public.” The NYT reports in an article posted on its website (“High Hopes”) that voters gave “Mr. Obama better grades for his conduct during the campaign than any presidential candidate since 1988. Seventy-five percent of the sample gave Mr. Obama a grade of A or B.”

The poll shows significant changes in how Republicans and Independents view Obama in November as compared to their reactions in March of 2008. Where 37% of Republicans listed “angry” when asked how Obama made them feel in March, that number has slipped to 17% now. Where 21% of Republicans listed their reaction as “proud” when asked in March how Obama made them feel, that number has risen to 37% in November. The number for Independents was 39% proud when asked in March how Obama made them feel, in November the answer for proud is up to 68%. For Democrats, the proud numbers were 60% in March and 92% in November.

The NYT also reports that 80% of respondents in a Gallup poll thought Obama will “make a sincere effort to work with Republicans to find solutions.”

The comment attributed to you in the Spectator’s review of NIXONLAND dates back to this summer. If you haven’t done so, are you planning to write about any of the November polling in the context of NIXONLAND? I’d be interested in your take on the public pulse, just as I’m following with interest the reactions of the Republican bloggers on TNN now that the election is over.

My first thought when I read Mr. Nedelkoff’s posting was why would a magazine ask someone who participated in the administration to review the book. His perspective might be worth reading — sounds as if it is — but he would not be a disinterested party. My second thought was, maybe it isn’t actually a review as such. Maybe it is something different, an essay by Mr. Huston about your book. I’ll have to let Mr. Nedelkoff explain as he, unlike I, actually has read Mr. Huston’s pierce.

I’m looking forward to reading the book, natch.

http://spectator.org/archives/2008/06/13/leaving-nixonland/

This is the second time a right-wing organ has run a rave of my book by a disinterested party, and then turned around and run a second review, a pan, by an interested party–first the New York Sun, now the Spectator.

Thoughts?

By coincidence, I was just reading the last chapters of John Lewis’s autobiography last month when he made his comments about campaign rhetoric. So it was very interesting for me to see how that played out. I don’t know if it and McCain’s April speech at Selma were discussed on TNN. I stopped reading the site for about two months after September 1.

I was 14 when Lewis led the courageous march in Selma and although I read the newspapers and watched the news, I only came to understand fully the environment in Alabama when I started studying the civil rights movement on my own as an adult. Of course, in my day, those were current events, not something taught in school. Nowadays, I’ve heard that some instructors assign Lewis’s autobiography to students to read. I think that is a good idea.

A professor who blogs at the History News Network noted in a blog entry on May 1, 2006 that “After 34 years of college teaching, I thought I had heard just about every imaginable student complaint. Last week, however, a freshman in my 300-seat US History Since 1865 course came in to discuss her exam with one of the graders and proceeded to work herself into a semi-hissy over the fact that we had spent four class periods(one of them consisting of a visit from Taylor Branch) discussing the civil rights movement.

‘I don’t know where he’s getting all of this,’ she complained, ‘we never discussed any of this in high school.’ One might have let the matter rest here as simply an example of a high school history teacher’s sins of omission being visited on the hapless old history prof. had the student not informed the TA in an indignant postcript, ‘I’m not a Democrat! I don’t think I should have to listen to this stuff!’”‘

Aaargh. I hope that type of scene doesn’t happen often, regardless of the subject (if legitimate for study as part of our history) and the political leanings (right or left) of the person making the complaint.

I’m a federal historian not an academic historian. I only get glimpses into academe on professors’ blogs. I sighed a few years ago when another blogger, Thomas Reeves, told the story of a student who once told him “I hate old stuff.” (Reeves, a conservative scholar, no longer blogs at HNN but sometimes contributes to Jensen’s List.) Teaching history certainly seems like a real challenge at times.

As to the Huston Plan, in the minds of many members of the public (at least those who know what it is), it tends to get lumped in with the Nixonian “governmental abuses of power.” I think a lot about the campaign ethos, the rhetoric used while trying to attain office, and what is needed once you take office. There are things the government has to do as part of its essential functions. You have to have sustainability. You want the governed — the people in your care, of all political persuasions — to believe that if they are not guilty of wrongdoing, they will not be deliberately harmed by the exercise of governmental powers.

Getting things right is challenging as the environment can be fragile. It depends on people in individual positions and whether they understand, as one official put it well a few years ago in discussing stewardship, they believe that “the law is the *floor* of acceptable behavior” and that actually you have to aim higher. Everyone who works for the government has stewardship obligations.

You can’t just talk the talk, you have to walk the walk. It takes much more than saying, as a number of Presidents have said on taking office, “ours will be the most ethical government in history.” If too many members of the public form the impression that agencies and departments will be used politically to punish and harass political enemies, those agencies become weakened in their ability to perform some of their legitimate functions. Over-reaching always backfires but insularity sometimes keeps officials from assessing the risks properly.

Thanks again for the nice welcome back!

I would hope that anyone wanting to understand what happened in the U.S. during the Johnson and Nixon years would read Taylor Branch’s outstanding trilogy about Martin Luther King — at least the last volume, At Canaan’s Edge. At Canaan’s Edge provides useful insights into the nexus between the civil rights and the anti-war movements and how some members of the former shifted away from nonviolence. It’s one of many books I chose to read during the last year (others included John Lewis’s Walking With the Wind, Gene Roberts’s The Race Beat, and Charles Marsh’s God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights). I’m currently reading Raymond Arsenault’s Freedom Riders. Some of the horrific things witnessed by Northern students who came down South to work in the movement during the Freedom Summer left them shell shocked.

Foreign policy considerations led me to become a Republican as I matured (I was in college during the Nixon years.) I even was a member of Young Americans for Freedom then. At the end of 1989, I left the Republican party and have been an Independent ever since. I often ponder the consequences of choices made during the Nixon years. The Huston Plan, and how it came to be perceived, haunted some of Nixon’s successors.

John Lewis, who had his skull fractured on the Pettus bridge at Selma by state troopers as his nonviolent group of marchers was about to kneel in prayer, comes across to me as one of the bravest figures in our recent history. He is one of the best known advocates of nonviolence and the blessed community. John McCain said as much last April, in a speech in Alabama in which he recounted the events of 1965

“On the other side of the bridge, row upon row of state troopers in blue uniforms and white helmets, many on horseback, prepared to charge and stop with violence the peaceful army, intent only on conquering injustice. John Lewis took the first blow, a baton thrust to the stomach that shoved him back on the marchers behind him. He took the second blow, too, a hard swung club to his head, leaving a permanent scar where it struck. Blood poured from the wound, darkening his raincoat. He tried to struggle to his feet, and then collapsed unconscious, his skull fractured.

That evening, millions of Americans watched in stunned silence as ABC News broadcast the clash of might against right. They watched brave John Lewis fall. They watched the marchers — peaceful, purposeful, loving, kneeling in humble resistance — scattered and overrun by the troopers, who struck them with clubs and whips, chased them as they fled, trampled them beneath their horses’ hooves. They watched old men and women fall. They saw dignified people claiming only their constitutional rights; affirming the promise of the Declaration of Independence without anger, malice or the least threat of violence, whipped and clubbed for their patriotism. They watched, and were ashamed of their country. And they knew that the people who had tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge weren’t a mob; they weren’t a threat; they weren’t revolutionaries. They were people who believed in America; in the promise of America. And they believed in a better America. They were patriots; the best kind of patriots.

The beaten and dispersed army on Edmund Pettus Bridge had conquered something after all — the indifference of too many Americans to their courageous struggle for the basic rights of American citizenship.”

I don’t know of any surrogates who mentioned that speech or McCain’s admiration for Lewis (he once took family members to meet Lewis in Washington) in October, when news reports surfaced of people at rallies calling out “sit down, boy” to a network soundman—and worse. Would that have affected some moderate voters (the 44% who describe themselves as in the middle, not on the right or the left)? (An article I read in 2005 after Katrina suggested that 2008 might shape up as a “bring us together” year.)

As to the Huston Plan, its impact lingers. The thinking behind the plan came up indirectly in an online q&a with John Yoo at the Washington Post’s site in 2006. Online Question: “Modern-day Presidents come into office with their public images colored by bitter electoral contests that often reflect an ethos of win at any cost. Can they easily shed that coloration once in office? Or does it become a drag on their ability to govern and convince the public of their trustworthiness?

The campaign ethos often reflects expediency and even a disregard for truth. If becoming President depends on one’s supporters handing out leaflets that imply that not voting for George Bush will lead the Bible to be banned in Arkansas, so be it. Or calling all critics unpatriotic. Or implying that John McCain has an illegitimate child, as happened during the primaries in 2000. Or, to use an example that may have harmed George W. Bush in the contest with Al Gore, leaking news of a candidate’s drunken driving arrest at the end of the campaign in 2000.

Do a President’s appointees understand the degree to which their efforts in governance are hurt by the earlier use of these tactics during a campaign? And by the continued reliance by many Presidents on political advisors for tactical advice while in office? How can you separate political expediency from governmental expediency, doing anything to win, but then turning around and saying, we will govern ethically and honorably? In other words, as a former government official, how insulated were you? [Did] you understand the extent to which your ability to stand up and argue “trust us, there is a legal and Constitutional basis for what we’re doing and we would never do anything to hurt Americans” [was] harmed by the baggage an administration [dragged] behind it politically?

John Yoo: That is a very good question. It may be the case that the political environment created by campaigns makes it more difficult to govern, particularly in the foreign affairs area. This may be true especially when foreign affairs and national security issues are prominent in the campaigns themselves, as they were in 2004.”