An Unexpected “Nixonland” Review

November 13, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, History, National Security, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixonland Nitpicks, Richard Nixon, Terrorism, U.S. History, Watergate | 6 Comments 

It has now been about a half-year since Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland was published, and some time back I noticed that no review had appeared in The American Spectator, a magazine avidly read by the 37th President and usually not a place where major books about him go unnoticed.

Well, Perlstein’s book is finally discussed in TAS’s November issue, which you’ll have to buy or browse at a store, for it’s not online. The author of the review is none other than Tom Charles Huston - one of the most important figures in Young Americans For Freedom in the mid-1960s, associate counsel at the Nixon White House during the administration’s first two years, and, of course, author of the 1970 “Huston Plan” which presented a comprehensive proposal for coordination of the FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and local law enforcement to combat the threat to the United States posed by violent antiwar and anti-government radicals, such as the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground.

This plan was never implemented primarily because of objections from the aging J. Edgar Hoover, who viewed it as a threat to the FBI’s autonomy, and Huston left government service in 1971 to become an attorney in his native Indianapolis, where he has practiced ever since. During the last 37 years he has been prominent in efforts to preserve the Hoosier State’s historical sites, but has not been heard from concerning the years in which he was an up-and-coming figure on the political stage. Possibly as a result of this silence, he has tended to be among the figures most demonized in the vast anti-Nixon literature, especially after 1973 when his “plan” came to public notice during the Senate Watergate hearings.

But it now appears that Huston is ready to come out of the cold, so to speak. Earlier this year I was surprised to find his name among the list of interviewees in James Rosen’s fine biography of John Mitchell, The Strong Man, and even more surprised when Rosen told me that Huston had spoken at considerable length about his White House years, though little from this talk appeared in the finished volume, which focused on the period after Huston left Washington. And, to judge from the TAS review of Nixonland, Huston has much more to say.

The review vigorously pans Perlstein’s book, to such a degree that it makes Conrad Black’s scathing New York Sun notice almost look like a Harriet Klausner five-star puff from Amazon. After listing such descriptions in the book as Strom Thurmond being called a “dirty-neck” and Robert Kennedy referred to as “Senator Love Beads,” Huston remarks: “This sort of language may be pitch-perfect for a duet with Keith Olbermann on Countdown but is hardly appropriate for an allegedly serious work of history.”

“There is a point at which the frequency of factual errors raises the legitimate question of whether the author is a scholar or transcriber,” the reviewer continues, and then cites a half-dozen examples, including several that even escaped Jack Pitney’s watchful eye. Huston also takes issue with Perlstein’s beloved Orthogonians-vs-Franklins dichotomy, noting that the historian uses the terms as “trap doors through which the author conveniently disposes of men and ideas he is unwilling to confront on their own terms.”

Toward the end of the review Huston takes strong exception to Perlstein’s argument that the Nixon years represented a battle between two equally sized, equally bloody-minded factions for the soul of the Republic:

The decade of the 1960s was the most turbulent in America since that which began with John Brown’s Kansas raids and ended at Appomattox Courthouse. There was a lot of anger, a lot of goofiness, and an indecent amount of violence. It commenced on Lyndon Johnson’s watch, during the high tide of liberalism. Richard Nixon didn’t cause it; he inherited it. The deranged landscape of the 1960s was the product of a liberalism untethered from common sense and good judgment, which elicited a reaction that was often ill considered and ill advised but was hardly homicidal. There were, of course, extremists who resorted to violence and haters who, while less lethal, were nonetheless menacing, but these were outriders, not mainstreamers. The very notion that the mass of Americans were prepared to kill each other over their political and cultural differences is more than nonsense; it is a calumny.

One wonders if Huston, when he speaks of an “ill-considered and ill-advised” reaction to rampant New Leftism, is thinking in retrospect about his “plan” which provided, on the assumption that extraconstitutional measures were needed to combat violent radicals, for the opening of mail, wiretaps, and an increased use of campus informants. (It is a little-remembered fact that some of the Libertarian Party’s founders-to-be were among Huston’s closest associates in the YAF, which would suggest that his 1970 proposals were intended to be a response to a wartime crisis and applicable only for the duration such a threat existed.) It may be that, as his professional career winds down, we’ll be hearing more from him in the future. Which is all for the best, since he was among the genuine intellectuals in the Nixon White House and, as his review makes clear, has read extensively and carefully in American history and can take the long view regarding the era in which he played a brief but significant part.

Living Up To The Promise

November 9, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Nixonland Nitpicks, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

A timely warning from Rick Perlstein, who in Nixonland documented the consequences of LBJ’s overreach after his 1964 landslide:

Transformative change in our republic is difficult, for good or for ill—which was how the Founders devised it. Some things a president, no matter how great, has no control over at all. Among the many challenges President Obama will face, the biggest may be to live up to the transformative hopes he stoked during this campaign.

“The Greatest President In The History Of Our Century”

October 31, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Election 2008, Nixonland Nitpicks, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon | 2 Comments 

Following a period in which some liberals claimed that Dubya’s misdeeds made them wish Richard Nixon were still in the White House, this year has seen the resurgence of the customary derogation of our 37th president.  For example, horror novelist Stephen King, speaking recently to Salon.com, remarked that his recent reading of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland had brought to mind many parallels between RN’s 1968 campaign and Sen. John McCain’s current one.  I haven’t yet seen a post pointing out the ominous fact that Ohio, the home of Joe the Plumber, was also the place where RN saw the “Bring Us Together” sign that helped inspire the “Silent Majority” speech, but I feel reasonably sure some left-leaning blogger has drawn that connection.

The latest proof that RN can cause liberals to think and say the darndest things was manifested this week.  Rep. Don Young has been Alaska’s at-large congressman since 1973 when he was elected to fill the seat left vacant when Rep. Nick Begich disappeared in a plane over the state’s wilderness. (Begich’s son Mark is now challenging the embattled Sen. Ted Stevens.)  He is an unabashed apostle of the earmark, and strongly supported the ”Bridge To Nowhere.”  Although the Wall Street Journal reported last year that Young was under Federal investigation for bribery, he has been charged with no crime and, despite winning this year’s GOP primary by just 300 votes,appears fairly likely to achieve re-election.

This week, the Anchorage Daily News published an article on the reaction of various lawmakers to Stevens’ conviction for filing false financial disclosure forms.  Young unhestitatingly expressed his belief that the charges against his colleague were “trumped up” and continued:

I can remember Richard Nixon, you know, his years of service, what he’s done. And everybody was ridiculing him and he ended up being the greatest President in the history of our century.

This remark has gotten considerable response from bloggers, including Swing State Project’s flabbergasted amazement that Young could set RN “Above Kennedy? Above Eisenhower? Above Truman? Above (gasp)….Reagan?”  A number of other bloggers have cited other twentieth-century presidents in this context - Wilson, FDR, Johnson - and nearly all have mentioned the Gipper as well. Which goes to show that the surest way to get liberals to start speaking of Reagan’s virtues, instead of decrying Gov. Sarah Palin’s frequent references to him, is to say something nice about Nixon.

Bonnie and Nixon

September 30, 2008 by Jonathan C. Movroydis | Filed Under Nixonland Nitpicks | 2 Comments 

Ed Driscoll sent me his superbly produced and informative video that builds upon Rick Perlstein’s enthusiasm for the emergence of the new left and “rejection of the traditional culture for trash cinema.” Perlstein’s praise of the film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is no different:

“It made an argument about vitality and virtue vs. staidness and morality that was completely new, that resonated with young people in a way that made no sense to old people. Just the idea that the outlaws were the good guys and the bourgeois householders were the bad guys–you cannot underestimate how strange and fresh that was.”

Driscoll’s video also includes a rarely scene footage of Bobby Kennedy’s leftist radicalism that symbolizes the fusion between New Deal liberalism and new left politics.

Searching For The Original Sin Of Resentment

September 18, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Election 2008, News media, Nixonland Nitpicks | Leave a Comment 

Channeling Rick Perlstein, the “Economist” lays 2008’s culture war politics at Richard Nixon’s door:

Nixon understood in his marrow how middle-class Americans felt about the country’s self-satisfied elites.

And yet most of the political news over the last three weeks has been about how those self-satisfied elites feel about a middle-class American family from Alaska.

Nixonland Nitpick 9

September 7, 2008 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Nixonland Nitpicks | Leave a Comment 

This one is less about a factual error than an unwarranted inference. On page 602, Nixonland discusses RN’s speech to the nation on economic policy: “He then named the desperado they would slay together, with a hint of anti-Semitic code: ‘We must protect the dollar from the attacks of international money speculators.’”

Though Nixon mounted the airlift that helped save Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War — an episode that the book overlooks — it is true that he did make anti-Semitic comments in private. But should we automatically regard the word speculator as anti-Semitic code? If so, Senator Obama is in trouble:

• “But we must not allow government intervention to protect investors and speculators who relied on the government to reap massive profits.” (September 6, 2008)
• “We do need to bring down gas prices, and as President, I will. It’s time to crack down on speculators who manipulate the market.” (July 31, 2008).
• “For the past years, our energy policy in this country has been simply to let the special interests have their way—opening up loopholes for the oil companies and speculators so that they could reap record profits while the rest of us pay $4.00 a gallon.” (June 22, 2008).

The New Two Americas And The Edwards Zone

September 5, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Election 2008, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Nixonland Nitpicks, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Yesterday brought some news that was surely welcome in Democratic circles.  When last heard from, former senator and 2004 vice-presidential candidate John Edwards was ready to visit the campuses of America, starting next Monday at Hofstra University, and continuing to Salem State in Massachusetts and the University of Illinois, to lecture students and whoever else might be interested about his tried-and-true theme of “two Americas;” what he had learned on the campaign trail; and other odds and ends that might strike his fancy.  He was even to debate Karl Rove on September 26 in Buffalo.

But, following an announcement that the Salem State events (which was to be with his wife Elizabeth) had been cancelled, Edwards has now stated through his agent, to the disappointment of CSPAN junkies and bloggers everywhere, that he will not make the above appearances and, indeed, that his schedule will remain empty until after Election Day, explaining:

Nothing is more important than electing Barack Obama and Joe Biden. I don’t want my appearance at these events to be a distraction from the important issues of the election, or from the important purpose of these meetings.

The last phrase is a bit unclear, but Edwards seems to be suggesting that he expects that he can simply appear in front of any audience in the country, eight weeks from now, and deliver his populist message of old as if the Rielle Hunter scandal had never happened.  He may be disappointed, and not just because there have been some hints that one or another of the major general-interest magazines is contemplating an article on the scandal.

When Edwards last was appearing in public, the term “two Americas” was being treated by the mainstream media in the way he defined it - one rich and privileged (read: Republican Party), the other poor and downtrodden (read: Democrats and trial lawyers), in the most fire-breathing tradition of Tom Watson or Melvin Belli.  

But now Edwards’ rhetoric, and the variations upon it played by Sen. Hillary Clinton after he withdrew from the race, seem almost as dated as a copy of Coin’s Financial School.  The last seven days have seen the emergence of a new version of “two Americas.”

One America consists, more or less, of Boston, Martha’s Vineyard, the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the Hamptons, Georgetown, some larger college communities like Ann Arbor and Madison, and portions of Beverly Hills and Malibu.  In this America, Gov. Sarah Palin and her family are figures of ridicule and their very emergence on the national scene is a source of bewilderment. (See www.huffingtonpost.com, passim.)

The other America is bordered by the communities of Lubec, Maine to the east; Naalehu, Hawaii to the south; and, rather fittingly, Adak in the Aleutian Islands to the west and Barrow, Alaska to the north. (Can I be that sure about Naalehu, in one of Sen. Barack Obama’s several native states? I think so.  This week, not long after Gov. Palin’s speech, I talked with a counterculture type, of the sort found in abundance on the Big Island, who wasn’t hesitant about declaring herself a citizen of this America.)  It is a place where Gov. Palin and her family are admired, respected, and even loved.  Obama and, especially, Sen. Joe Biden, a man who has campaigned by the side of a lot of officeholders around the country over the years, are both well aware that it exists, though it may take some time for everyone in their organizations to catch on.

In the course of a week, as poll data is starting to show, Gov. Palin, simply by being herself, has come quite a way toward reassembling the “New American Majority” that Kevin Phillips wrote about so many years ago, long before his career settled down into churning out one anti-Bush book per year and making the rounds of left-wing internet talkshows.  Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson has started to realize which way the wind is blowing, and Paul Krugman at the New York Times, discussing the shift in the electoral temper, invokes Rick Perlstein’s Franklins/Orthogonians dichotomy from Nixonland.  (Perlstein, meanwhile, discusses this week’s events here.)

Speaking of Nixonland, Sam Tanenhaus, author of the acclaimed biography Whittaker Chambers and editor of both the New York Times’ “Week In Review” and book-review sections, reviews it (and Thomas Frank’s The Wrecking Crew) at The New Republic this week.  His discussion of Frank’s book is a little on the perfunctory side - understandably so, since The Wrecking Crew is, for all its fury and fire-breathing, a pretty one-sided and slightly cartoonish treatment of the lobbying culture, predicated on the idea that every K Streeter is 100% committed to eternal GOP rule. 

However, Tanenhaus not only provides a very acute and insightful assessment of Nixonland  but uses the book as a jumping-off point for a long, carefully considered examination of President Nixon’s relationship with the conservative movement of his time; how his policies related to the New Deal/Great Society tradition, the development of neoconservative and neoliberal thought in the Nixon years (with special attention to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s role in urban policy); and what the events of those years can tell us now, where the future of the Republican party and conservatism is concerned.  It’s one of the rare book reviews that repay repeated readings.

RN’s Tuxedo

August 29, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Nixonland Nitpicks, Richard Nixon, The New Nixon | 1 Comment 

Reviewing Lord Black’s Nixon bio and a Rick Perlstein-edited collection of Nixon speeches and writings, TNN’s Frank Gannon, who served as RN’s principal editorial adviser on his memoirs in the late 1970s, takes on the Perlstein-Chris Matthews theory of Nixonian original resentment:

Mr. Perlstein’s thesis is that Nixon’s life was driven by serial resentments of the elites who scorned him. An early manifestation of this pathology is supposed to have occurred when Nixon, a freshman at Whittier College, founded the Orthogonians (”Square Shooters”). In Mr. Perlstein’s view, the new club was intended to be a refuge for those who had been snubbed by the fancy Franklin Society. He makes much of the fact that Franklins donned tuxedos for their yearbook photos while Orthogonians sported open-necked shirts. “Franklins were well-rounded, graceful; they moved smoothly, talked slickly,” he writes. “Nixon’s new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers, the commuter students, those not to the manor born.”

But Whittier College in 1930 was a culturally homogeneous Quaker-based community that reflected the middle-class towns from which the majority of its students were drawn. Whittier was a commuter campus. In any case, Nixon was from one of Whittier’s “better” families; he owned a tuxedo. The Orthogonians were in fact jocks or would-be jocks (like Nixon), hardly bitter outcasts with their noses pressed resentfully against the glass. Nixon was elected president of every freshman and senior class from eighth grade through law school. If he later resented political and academic “elites,” it was because they kept screwing him over, not because he wanted to be one of them.

Nixonland Nitpick 8

August 16, 2008 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Nixonland Nitpicks, Vietnam | Leave a Comment 

Nixonland  (p. 521) notes that men on a movie crew were hostile to Jane Fonda “not merely for her anti-war stand but for her defiance of feminine convention:  she had stopped wearing makeup.  Wrote William F. Buckley: “She must never even look into the mirror anymore.’”

Nixonland misquotes the Buckley line and misplaces it in 1970.  Here is what Buckley actually wrote in 1972:

But of course, ignorance is an instrument of oppression deployed by  the bourgeois classes, and Miss Fonda, who last week termed Richard Nixon “a very serious traitor” will not surrender her vast investment in it . She is Miss Grim, walking about the world hectoring American institutions with what one writer has characterized as her “solemn, Red Guard face,” never smiling, never laughing, never, obviously looking into the mirror.

Buckley was not talking about cosmetics, but about her self-important sermonizing.

Nixonland Nitpick 7

August 10, 2008 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Nixonland Nitpicks | Leave a Comment 

In 1969, says Nixonland, the new president “was sworn in by Justice Black” (p. 357).  No, it was Chief Justice Earl Warren.  The book thus misses a delicious irony.  Nixon and Warren had been at odds since their days in California politics.  In 1968, Warren had sought to retire early so that Johnson, not Nixon, would name his successor.  (Abe Fortas’s ethical problems blocked that move).  And Nixon had campaigned against the Warren Court’s decisions on criminal law.

Explaining that “Nixon didn’t like senators or congressmen,” the book says of 1969:  “A new president’s first-year State of the Union address was where he traditionally unveiled his legislative program; Nixon did not even give a State of the Union” (p. 388).  It is true that Nixon did not give the 1969 State of the Union address.  Lyndon Johnson did.   Nixon had no obligation to deliver one of his own.  He could have done so, but on February 14, the New York Times reported White House concern that Nixon was not yet prepared to offer a detailed agenda.  

A few weeks earlier, Nixon had visited the floor of the House of Representatives for informal handshaking and conversation.  No president had done that in the previous 20 years.  Nixon may have privately harbored ill will toward the lawmakers, and he would surely have titanic fights with them in the years ahead.  But in early 1969, he was making nice with Congress.

 

Nixonland Nitpick 6

August 9, 2008 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Nixonland Nitpicks | Leave a Comment 

Nixonland credits Nixon’s 1968 TV campaign to Gene Jones, who had made a fine war documentary without narration.  “Nixon’s commercials would run without narration as well” (p. 333).  No, an important ad did have narration.  “Decisions” asked:  “Think about it - when the decisions of one man can affect the future of your family for generations to come, what kind of a man do you want making those decisions?”  The theme and visuals anticipated Senator Clinton’s “3 AM” ad this year.

The book says Nixon’s 1960 loss was “the closest any made had come to the presidency without winning” (p. 352).   No, in 1880, Democrat Winfield Hancock lost the popular tally to James Garfield by less than ten thousand votes.  In 1916, Republican Charles Evans Hughes lost the popular vote to Woodrow Wilson by about 3 percent, but if just 2,000 California votes had shifted from Wilson to Hughes, the latter would have won the electoral vote and the presidency.

The book says that Nixon won in 1968 with ”something that no other Republican presidential candidate, with minor exceptions, had ever had before:  electoral votes from the South.  Wallace took Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana.  But Nixon got Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina — and Strom Thurmond’s South Carolina” (353-354).  That’s wrong in a couple of ways.  First, Arkansas went to Wallace, not Nixon.  Second, this election was most certainly not the first in which a Republican got a substantial electoral vote in the South.  Consider:

• In 1928, Hoover carried Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
• In 1952, Eisenhower carried Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
• In 1956, Eisenhower carried Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
• In 1960, Nixon carried Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia.
• In 1964, Goldwater carried Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.

 

Nixonland Nitpick 5

July 26, 2008 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Nixonland Nitpicks | Leave a Comment 

In 1964, according to Nixonland, “Nixon was the only Republican of national stature not to abandon the Goldwater ticket” (p. 64).  That’s almost true, but not quite.  Dwight Eisenhower endorsed the ticket and made a TV spot with Goldwater.  Ike’s support fell short of full-throated enthusiasm, but it was not an abandonment, either.

President Johnson “begged Senate Appropriations chair Robert Byrd not to let his meager $20 million rent-subsidy program die” (p. 113).  Byrd would not become chair of Appropriations until 1989.

Eugene McCarthy “refused to mention he was a Catholic, even though New Hampshire was two-thirds Catholic” (p. 229).  New Hampshire was less than 40 percent Catholic.

In the 1968 campaign, “All the top Goldwater plotters from 1964 were in the Nixon camp, even William F. Buckley, even Goldwater himself — all, that is, except F. Clifton White” (p. 282).  William Rusher, National Review publisher and leader of the Draft Goldwater movement, backed Reagan for the 1968 GOP nomination.

It refers to Ralph Yarborough, “the liberal Texas congressman” (p. 310).  He was a senator.

 

Some Concluding Reflections On Nixonland

July 26, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, History, Nixon in the News, Nixonland Nitpicks, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 2 Comments 

This week I finished Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland. My conclusions are not very much changed from what I previously posted, and as I mentioned previously Oxford historian Dominic Sandbrook’s review in the London Telegraph expresses an opinion of the book close to mine.  But there are some aspects about the book’s account of the 1972 campaign worth mentioning.

Perlstein, as a progressive intellectual, is preoccupied with the problem of how the Democratic Party - once perceived as the champion of the common man, the defender of working-class and middle-class Americans of non-WASP origin and of unionized workers - came to be alienated from these groups in the 1960s and early 1970s, and how that party came to be seen as captive to an intellectual elite that looked down on ordinary citizens.  This is, after all, still a concern with Democratic activists as they face November and start to wonder what might happen if Sen. John McCain starts to avoid accidents like the one that happened with the applesauce this week, and continues to build on his seemingly unlikely base of blue-collar support in Rust Belt states, as shown in recent Quinnipiac Poll results.

So the concluding chapters of his book explore how it was that Sen. George McGovern, who in the 1972 primaries more than held his own among blue-collar voters when challenged by Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson, was unable to gain any traction in that area after his party’s convention in Miami Beach.  On page 698 of Nixonland, he has a particularly telling quote in this context.  In the Oral History Collection of the New York Public Library, Perlstein found a study put together by the American Jewish Committee, “The Politics Of American Jews: The Election of 1972.” (This, incidentally, represents the kind of resource that would have improved Nixonland enormously, and Perlstein would have been well advised to look for more in this area, rather than mine old newspapers via Proquest and Lexis/Nexis as he was often content to do.)

The study quotes Gus Tyler, who was in 1972 a top leader of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Tyler (still alive and writing occasionally for the Jewish newspaper, the Forward, at age 96) was, in the 1930s, chairman of the youth organization of Norman Thomas’ Socialist Party, and at age 60 was a prime example of the liberal union leader, a proud Democrat, but well aware of the rank and file’s disillusionment.  As he watched Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman whoop it up for the cameras, and saw the radicals of 1968, now raised to the status of delegates, get into shouting matches with the representatives of the old-school Democratic machines from the cities, and listened to hour upon hour of heated rhetoric from militant leftists now convinced they had captured the Democratic Party once and for all -

“…he wondered [Perlstein says] what this all must look like to the farmer in Iowa, a housewife in Bensonhurst, ’somebody out there,’ he later reflected to an interviewer, ‘in Peoria.’  All of these people had given the Democrats a landslide in 1964. They had trusted the Democratic Party. In the interim they had seen America plunged into chaos.  And then they looked at this convention and thought, ‘Here are the people who are responsible for this chaos.’”

This illustrates, in a nutshell, why the organization of Sen. Barack Obama is so diligent about presenting a cheerful, upbeat, orderly face to the world.  The memory of the McGovern campaign’s manifestations of chaos still rankles among its older figures.

But it should be emphasized that not all of Perlstein’s account of 1972 focuses on the self-destruction of the Democrats.   He manages to work in dozens of references to Republican skulduggery and discusses the policies of the Nixon Administration in what is usually an extremely jaundiced fashion - claiming, for example, that President Nixon and Dr. Henry Kissinger’s efforts to secure peace in 1972 were no more than plans “to stab America’s soldiers and South Vietnamese allies in the back.”  To demonstrate that thesis, he does no more than refer to the President’s August 3, 1972 conversation with Dr. Kissinger. Did Perlstein actually listen to the recording, available to anyone who chose to listen for years? If his footnotes are any indication, no - he cites an Associated Press account from 2004, and refers to a conference presentation made by Jeffrey Kimball at the JFK Library in 2006.   He comments that one account has it that Dr. Kissinger wondered, speaking of a peace agreement, if it was possible to “sell it in such a way” as to gain South Vietnamese President Thieu’s acceptance, then notes that others have transcribed the words as “sell out in such a way.”  Why couldn’t Perlstein have just gone ahead, put on headphones, and decided for himself? And, while he was at it, listened to at least some of the dozens of other conversations available from this period that put that segment into context?

I’ll have a few more things to say about Nixonland in coming days but for now, I’ll repeat that though the book is one extremely well-written and vivid narrative, it is not, in any way, a really full, objective, or exhaustively researched account of Richard Nixon, the events in the years immediately before his presdency, and that presidency’s history until the end of 1972, and that any reader should keep that in mind.

A Brit Looks At Nixonland

July 19, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Book Review, History, Nixonland Nitpicks, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 3 Comments 

Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland hit British bookstores earlier this month, and at the London Telegraph Dominic Sandbrook, of Oxford’s history faculty and the author of well-received books on Eugene McCarthy and England in the Swinging Sixties, reviews it. His assessment more or less matches mine:

“One of the book’s biggest flaws, oddly, is its handling of Nixon himself. Moody, introverted, driven by resentment and envy, the man from California should be a gift to the narrative historian. But here we never get close to him, largely because he is no more than a caricature. Perlstein’s Nixon does not say anything; he ’snarls’ or ’slurs’ it. Behind the scenes, he ‘rants’ and ‘rages’; on camera, he is a manufactured liar. His positive achievements - diplomatic breakthroughs in Moscow and Beijing, his surprisingly liberal record on health, education, civil rights and the environment - are dismissed as window-dressing. We are never invited to feel sympathy for him, to understand what made him tick, to see his point of view. Even Bond villains usually get a better press.

“But the real problem with the book is found in the subtitle: ‘the fracturing of America’. Nixonland wallows in the exaggeration of extremism, the pornography of violence; Perlstein even dedicates it to the ‘dozens of Americans who lost their lives at the hands of other Americans’ for political reasons between 1965 and 1972. While his vast array of anecdotes make for a rich and compelling read, they add up to a very distorted view of the period.”

The rest of the review is very much worth reading as well. And, in related news, at the end of the month Princeton University Press will publish the anthology Richard Nixon: Speeches, Writings, Documents, which Perlstein edited.  The book’s introduction, which is somewhat like a condensed Nixonland minus the drama and anecdotes, and which also looks at some aspects of the President’s career given little attention in that book, can be read here.

Nixonland Nitpick 4

July 12, 2008 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Nixonland Nitpicks, Republican Party, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

A few quick takes:

On page 155, Nixonland refers to the “Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.” For over a century, the name of the organization has been the National Republican Congressional Committee.

On page 185, it mentions “Paul A. Fino, the antibusing congressman from Queens.” He was from the Bronx, as it acknowledges on p. 277.

On page 199, it refers to Connecticut Senator Thomas A. Dodd (father of Chris Dodd) as a “conservative,” so as to make his sponsorship of gun-control legislation sound all the more remarkable. This one is a judgment call, as there is no universal definition of “conservative.” But through 1967, the Americans for Democratic Action had given him an average rating of 67 percent. And his score from AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education had averaged 85 percent. Few would describe these scores as the mark of a conservative.

Nixonland Nitpick 3

July 9, 2008 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under American Politics, Nixonland Nitpicks, Richard Nixon | 6 Comments 

Rick Perlstein writes (p. 137):

Richard Nixon broke with his reluctance to dwell upon law and order only once, in 1966, in that U.S. News essay — and had seemed to be apologetic to be raising the matter at all, concluding, “The polls still place the war in Vietnam and the rising cost of living as the major political issues of 1966.” He was lying. As far as domestic issues went, Gallup showed race far outstripped inflation as a concern.

The essay in question appeared in the magazine’s edition of August 15, 1966. But Perlstein cites a poll that came out several weeks later, on September 11 (see Nixonland endnotes at p. 766). At the time that Nixon wrote the essay, the latest Gallup survey on “the most important problem” had come out on May 27. The top three answers were:

• Vietnam crisis 45%
• High cost of living 16%
• Civil rights 9%

On this point, Nixon was telling the truth. Nixonland is wrong.

Source: George Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935-1971 (New York: Random House, 1972), 2009, 2026.

Nixonland Nitpick 2

July 8, 2008 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Book Review, Nixonland Nitpicks, Richard Nixon | 2 Comments 

Describing the 1962 California GOP gubernatorial primary between Richard Nixon and Joe Shell, Rick Perlstein writes (p. 60):

Nixon’s primary victory over Shell was humiliatingly close.

Shell did hurt Nixon by undermining his conservative support and forcing him to divert resources to the primary contest. But Nixon won 1,285,151 votes (66.19 percent of the major-candidate vote) to Shell’s 656,542 (33.81 percent). This 2-1 margin was not “humiliatingly close.”

Nixonland Nitpick 1

July 7, 2008 by Jack Pitney | Filed Under Nixonland Nitpicks, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

Whatever its virtues, Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland contains a number of factual errors. In the weeks ahead, I shall note some of them. The first deals with the 1950 Democratic senatorial primary in Florida (p. 34):

George Smathers beat Florida senator Claude Pepper by accusing him of being a “sexagenarian,” committing “nepotism” with his sister-in-law, openly proud of a sister who Smathers said was a “thespian.”

No, the story is an urban legend. Apparently it started as a joke that Time magazine mistakenly reported as fact. An annoyed Smathers offered $10,000 to anyone who could prove that he ever said any such thing. When he died in 2007, no one had ever claimed the money.