Rick Perlstein On The Town Hall Demonstrators

August 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Congress, Double Standard Paranoia Quotient, George W. Bush, Healthcare, New Media, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixonland Nitpicks, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin, TV News Personalities, U.S. History | 9 Comments 

A little over a year ago, when Rick Perlstein published his mammoth study of “the American berserk” – the original subtitle of Nixonland – in the years between 1965 and 1972, he concluded his 748-page saga of heated hardhats and howling hippies (or was it the other way around?) by arguing that the culture and political wars of the late Sixties and early Seventies had not only not died, but had never really gone away.

Perlstein maintained that the 37th President’s legacy to the nation was “a notion that there are two kinds of Americans: one kind viewing themselves as “people of faith,” patriots, “nonshouters,” and viewing the other kind – “liberals,” “cosmopolitans,” “intellectuals” – as “un-Americans, anti-Christians, amoralists, aliens [Perlstein's emphasis].”

The book’s final paragraphs read:

Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not.

How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.

When Nixonland appeared, several reviewers criticized that penultimate statement, and said that Perlstein clearly was mistaken to think that the passions of that time still ran as strong.

But that was last year, and now that many of this month’s “town halls” about the proposed health-care legislation across the country have featured very heated rhetoric, not only at the meetings themselves, but among the crowds assembled outside the venues, Perlstein has written an op-ed for the Washington Post that makes it clear that he considers himself vindicated in his argument.

Now, anyone following the town hall meetings closely knows that many speakers at them have been as fervent about single-payer care and the proposed legislation’s failure to incorporate it, though not as visible in TV sound bites as the ones who have been waving pocket copies of the Constitution and arguing against the bill’s big-government tendencies.

But the leftist voices at the meetings count for nothing where Perlstein is concerned. What he sees is nothing less than the return of the right-wing fervor that swept through parts of America during the Kennedy years. And the op-ed’s title, though probably the work of a dependably liberal Post staffer, sums up its attitude toward the liberatarian and conservative voices at these gatherings: “In America, Crazy Is A Pre-Existing Condition.”

Yes, all the objections raised to the mammoth scope of the bill, and to the possibility that it marks the start of a path which will see Americans turn over as large a percentage of their income to the state as was the case in Sweden at the height of its cradle-to-grave system – or perhaps more – yes, all the worries raised by hard-working citizens, in Perlstein’s opinion, are on a par with the fears of almost 50 years ago that fluoride in drinking water would brainwash children into being Communists, or whatever members of the John Birch Society were supposed to have believed in those days.

(I have to admit that sometimes fluoride does worry me a bit. The other night I was gargling with that new Listerine “Whitening Formula,” or whatever it’s called, in which the active ingredient is sodium fluoride. On the back of the bottle I noticed an instruction not to drink or eat anything for 30 minutes after using it. If the idea is to keep fluoride out of my system, then why would it be in my drinking water? But then again, my dentist tells me there’s been an upsurge in cavities because kids don’t drink as much tap water as they once did. End of digression.)

In the op-ed, Perlstein states:

Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror — powerful elites — find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.

Why, of course, “crazy-making panic” is endemic only to conservative Americans, otherwise defined, in the world of the Post, as those people who still insist on regarding Sarah Palin as a political force even after her daughter’s former fiance has started dating Kathy Griffin. Those thousands upon thousands (or maybe millions upon millions) of words, many of them still online, which fretted about Guantanamo in the Bush years presaging internment camps for the young and disaffected in the United States? That was legitimate political discourse, nothing irrational about it.

(As is, presumably, the post at a left-leaning site I read the other day that compared the present political situation in America to that of Germany in about 1930. Anyone for Obama as the new Heinrich Bruening?)

Although, as I write, it will be several more hours before Perlstein’s piece appears in the antiquated ink-on-paper format, it has already stirred up several dozen responses from across the political spectrum. Matt Yglesias has one of the most thoughtful posts about it on the Left. He focuses on these remarks of Perlstein’s:

You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to “debunk” claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president’s program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn’t adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as “extremist” — out of bounds.

As opposed to the “in-bounds” rhetoric of the SDS and Black Panthers, which got substantial on-air attention. But let’s look at today’s situation. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when President Obama held his town hall meeting about health care this week, William Kostric, a self-described “free stater,” was spotted in the crowd by an MSNBC crew with a sign reading “Time To Water The Tree” (it referred to a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, which concludes “with the blood of patriots and tyrants”) – and a gun strapped to his leg, which he had a permit to carry.

It turned out that Kostric had not simply brought the weapon to provide a headache to Secret Service personnel who had to worry about any individuals who might not be carrying weapons simply to “make a statement.” He meant for the gun to attract media attention and stir curiosity about what he wanted – which turned out to be, presumably like all the “crazies” Perlstein describes, to get on TV.

And which program finally extended an invitation to appear? Was it Glenn Beck’s show, or Sean Hannity’s, or The O’Reilly Factor, or any of the other shows which, as every schoolperson in Santa Monica or Marin County knows, are diabolically constructed by “elites” to inflame the heartland? No, it was Hardball with Chris Matthews, a show which is not usually viewed as a hotbed for “crazies.”. I assume that Kostric chose Hardball because MSNBC was the channel that gave him visibility. (He also appeared on Alex Jones’s radio talk show, a venue more along the lines of his personal views, but certainly not the creation of any media “elite.” Indeed, Michael Savage, singled out as a rabble-rouser by Perlstein, has not had Kostric appear on his program.)

Perlstein doesn’t seem to realize that most of those who are concerned about the drawbacks of the health-care bill are voicing heartfelt and rational objections. They know that every citizen of the country already is shouldering a share of the national debt equivalent to nearly a fifth of a million dollars and they hope that there’s some way to keep it from going to a quarter of a million. They were not happy with the idea of a President doing his best Lyndon Johnson imitation and insisting that Congress pass over a thousand pages of slapped-together taxes and regulations before the end of last month, before it became clear that would not happen. (And compared to the versions of the health-care bill now in the works, even the most hastily drafted bills of LBJ’s Great Society look like they were penned by James Madison or George Mason.)

But that doesn’t matter to Perlstein; for him, “the tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America’s flora.” However, he’s not going unchallenged about this. One of the more impressive retorts so far has come from Stephen Bainbridge, a professor at UCLA’s law school. The professor sums up the op-ed as follows: “we lefties are rational, nice, kind people who are puzzled by conservative crazies. We’ve got no crazies on our side, of course. Just nice rational people like me.” Then Bainbridge lists some “rational” responses to perceived threats from the Right by left-wing organizations, starting with the Weathermen.

Bainbridge’s post got this prompt response from Perlstein, who says: “I hate the Weathermen. Read my book. So does everyone I know on the left.”

Well, it may be that everyone Rick knows on the Left deplores what the Weathermen, as a whole, became, or some of its actions. But individual former members of the Weathermen, whether or not they still think they were justified in what they did, certainly are not hated by many of his colleagues – indeed, quite the opposite, as Bill Ayers’s recent well-attended book tour demonstrates.

And, before I forget: does Perlstein mention Richard Nixon in his article? Yes, he does, classing RN as one of the “vultures” who exploited the fears sprouting from the “tree of crazy” – and, somehow, managed, by doing so, to secure a 49-state victory in 1972.

With a little help from 47,168,710 “crazies.” Count ‘em.

“The New Nixon” Improves “Nixonland”

June 30, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Nixon in the News, Nixonland Nitpicks | 5 Comments 

In an interview with the editor of the History News Network, Nixonland author Rick Perlstein tips his hat to TNN:

I actually quite appreciated most of what was said at the New Nixon blog. New Nixon blogger Jack Pitney made several useful corrections in particular I was able to incorporate into six subsequent printings.

Rude Awakening, or The Edwards Zone Redux

May 5, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Ethics, News media, Nixonland Nitpicks, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Senate | 1 Comment 

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” — Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Louis Napoleon (1851)

Most of what Marx said has been proven wrong by history, but that quote still holds up with a vengeance. The opening pages of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland describe vividly the days in which Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, having seemingly vanquished the forces of the Right for all eternity, was on the verge of ushering in a second Era Of Good Feelings (as defined by Democrats and seconded by Rockefeller Republicans) when the Watts riots gave the nation a brutal slap on the face and ushered in a series of violent and chaotic events that brought about the resurgence of conservatism.

In much the same way, as President Obama’s first 100 days closed last Wednesday with Arlen Specter’s defection to the Democrats and David Souter’s notifying the White House of his planned retirement, the stage seemed set for the final triumph of liberalism for this century, if not millennium. All that was needed was for Al Franken’s smirk to materialize in one chair in the Senate, and all would be well.

But alas, in the preceding weeks, a distant rumble of things to come could be heard. Early last month Knopf published How It Ended, the collected stories of Jay McInerney. best known for Bright Lights, Big City. This volume garnered its author the best reviews of his career. And, in some of these, it was mentioned that one of the tales in the book, “Penelope On The Pond,” imagined Alison Poole, the heroine of McInerney’s 1988 novel Story Of My Life, as a discarded mistress of a presidential candidate, biding her time in a quiet cabin somewhere in the Rockies. The reviews further noted that McInerney has often acknowledged that Alison Poole was based on Rielle Hunter.

Rielle Hunter? Wasn’t she involved with that guy who had the most famous hairdo in politics before Rod Blagojevich came along? Didn’t he once run for Vice President or something? What was his name, um…Edwards, John Edwards, right?

Yes, John Edwards, who, in the eight months since I last posted about him, heeded the bidding of the Democratic establishment and faded into the woodwork, appearing in public only at University of North Carolina basketball games, while Rielle Hunter, the mother of an infant girl whose precocious head of hair somehow brought him to mind, was banished from her mansion in Santa Barbara (after the death of her benefactor and Edwards’s finance chairman for his 2008 presidential run, Fred Baron, in October) and exiled to a modest house in South Orange, New Jersey. It seemed a sure thing that neither would be heard from again.

But that was before it was reported that Elizabeth Edwards, the terminally ill wife of the ex-Senator, was about to publish a new book, Resilience, in which she discusses her husband’s affair. And before the Raleigh News and Observer, which has quietly followed the ins and outs of the Edwards scandal ever since the onetime Veep-presumptive bamboozled the paper’s executive editor into killing an article about his affair in late 2007 (by denying it and claiming that such a story would cause needless suffering to his wife), informed America last Sunday that a Federal investigation into the financing of his 2008 campaign was now underway.

Yes, like the most evil genie imaginable, the Edwards Zone, with all its many mysteries involving campaign operatives with a taste for high-stakes gambling (and a propensity to claim parentage of babies whom they then completely ignore), trial lawyers who send their private planes on round trips from Texas to make hour-long stopovers in Caribbean islands noted for offshore banking, and nonprofit foundations that manage to channel millions to LLCs that abruptly vanish, has come back.

In a column to appear in tomorrow’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd articulates the frustration that many liberals in the media must feel. It’s been long understood that John Edwards’s narcissism was close to uncontrollable; it took all the weight of the Democratic establishment to prevent him from touring college campuses last fall and to quietly go back to the Tar Heel State.

But what drives Elizabeth Edwards to go on Oprah Winfrey’s show, as she did today (for a taping that will be broadcast on Thursday), to speculate on how much or how little young Frances Quinn Hunter resembles the man who might have been a heartbeat away from the Oval Office if a few thousand votes had gone the other way in Ohio four and a half years ago? What is going to happen when Andrew Young (not the venerated lieutenant of Martin Luther King and former UN Ambassador, but the aforementioned operative) goes before a grand jury and is asked to explain why his own mother told a reporter she does not believe his claim, made through a lawyer, that he fathered Rielle Hunter’s daughter? Or when such a body ponders the question of why the chartered plane carrying Ms. Hunter and her daughter from California to the US Virgin Islands would make a quick stop in Mobile, Alabama, to acquire a passport for the infant – a passport not needed for travel to those islands, but necessary for, say, a visit to the Grand Turks and Caicos, to which the aforementioned private jet traveled for an hour during Ms. Hunter’s sojourn?

Last year, I wrote a dozen posts on this subject, and posed the questions that I think need to be raised by diligent Federal prosecutors to a grand jury. Some more have arisen, notably regarding the three million or so dollars donated to a nonprofit affiliated with Edwards by Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, the 98-year-old heiress who, until now, has been best known for providing her nation with the beautiful landscaping design that the South Lawn of the White House has had since the Kennedy Administration. (The nonprofit then paid an equivalent sum to an LLC – with the same address as the nonprofit, and which vanished from the records at the same time the nonprofit closed up shop in 2008 – for “consulting” work.)

If the Democrats have any luck, sullying Ms. Mellon’s legacy of Camelot will be the worst that John Edwards will do to the liberal tradition. But I have the feeling that there’s a considerable chance that the true dimensions of the events involving Edwards and his associates between 2006 and 2008 will  emerge, little by little. The question is how many journalists will follow the lead of the News and Observer (and some other North Carolina media) in looking into the scarifying revelations in the heart of….the Edwards Zone.

Michael Barone Reviews Nixonland

April 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Democratic Party, International Affairs, Nixon Administration, Nixonland Nitpicks, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam | 2 Comments 

Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland came out in paperback last week, a month after his study of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign, Before The Storm, was reissued by Nation Books. And, as it happens, the Claremont Institute’s website has just put up the review of Nixonland by columnist Michael Barone that appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Barone has often written perceptively about RN – one thinks in particular of his long article about the Nixon years which US News and World Report published some years ago – and this review continues that tradition, with a very insightful comparison of FDR and RN’s political styles. Its concluding sentences raise an important point about the Nixon presidency that escaped many of the book’s reviewers:

[I]n policy terms Nixon had his successes. His China policy, denounced by every successful presidential candidate but one since his day, remains in place, a more important part of American policy than ever. Some of his leftward domestic policies do, too. But the major difference, perhaps, between Roosevelt and Nixon was that the people Roosevelt professed to hate were still willing to serve with him because they wanted America to win a war. The people Nixon sincerely hated wanted America to lose a war. And, as we have seen in the past few years, the descendants of the people Nixon sincerely despised still want America to lose a war. Rick Perlstein’s indictment of Nixon is an even harsher indictment of the people who cheered when he was brought down.

Perlstein: Conservatives Are Annoying

February 20, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Nixonland Nitpicks, Republican Party | 1 Comment 

Refreshingly, no insincere lip service about bipartisanship from Nixonland author Rick Perlstein:

[C]onservatives will always be with us. I admit it. They’ll always be annoying, and always will be standing in the way of genuine reforms that can make the world a more stable, predictable, prudent, and moral place… The point is just to keep them as far from the levers of power as possible.

Nixon Was Introverted, Not Insincere

December 8, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Nixonland Nitpicks, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

Rick Perlstein doesn’t get it.

Perlstein Nitpicks (Newsweek Edition)

December 6, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Nixonland Nitpicks, Vietnam | 9 Comments 

Nixonland author Rick Perlstein is doubly wrong in a Newsweek column:

For 364 days a year archivists toil anonymously, transcribing hundreds of hours of often banal, taped conversations. Then they pick out a few titillating excerpts to nab a headline in the next day’s newspapers.

How much time has the recently so widely celebrated scholar of the Nixon Presidency actually spent with Nixon White House records? There’s nary a National Archives transcript to be found. As archivist Maarja Krusten recently wrote in comments at “The New Nixon” and as most Nixon scholars know well, NARA decided a generation ago not to make transcripts, since it took 100 person hours to transcribe an hour of tape (300 hours before PCs were available). Instead, archivists supply finding aids in the form of outlines.

And is Perlstein so unfamiliar with NARA practice that he thinks government archivists actually “pick out…titillating excerpts” and feed them to the papers? Perlstein meets Nixonstein: That’s what 37 and his cronies were supposed to think. Hundreds of dedicated professionals are cringing at the accusation. Perlstein and “Newsweek” owe them an apology.

Elsewhere in his column, writing about Vietnam, Perlstein misuses the tapes as he did a secondary source in Nixonland when he tried (but failed) to show that President Nixon had foreknowledge of plans for a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. As the Miller Center’s careful transcripts have shown, while Henry Kissinger was consistently pessimistic about whether South Vietnam would survive the withdrawal of U.S. forces, President Nixon was all over the map, sometimes saying that South Vietnam couldn’t survive, other times saying it must for the sake of U.S. credibility.

In his article, Perlstein tries to have it both ways:

In moments of candor both men admitted that Saigon would inevitably fall to the communists within a couple of years. Yet they were determined to stave off the collapse for a “decent interval”—the real purpose, as Nixon well knew, of the Christmas bombings. The two men told another story to the American people, our allies in the Saigon government and perhaps even themselves. In the new tapes, Nixon justifies his decision to use the most fearsome bomber in the fleet by saying that one final, swift, savage blow might force communist negotiators to give up their claim to non-communist South Vietnam. The only person he’s trying to convince is himself.

So if on one tape, Nixon says he doesn’t think Saigon will survive, he means it. If on another, the President says he thinks the bombing will blunt Hanoi’s ambitions, he doesn’t mean it.

How does Perlstein know? He doesn’t. He’s just pushing the “decent interval” theory, which is an ideological construct, the rearguard action of the antiwar movement.

The real history of the Vietnam war, and therefore the Nixon Administration and Watergate, has yet to be written. That work will take open-minded writers who among other things will take into account evidence, undercovered by scholars such as Stephen J. Morris, that the December bombings had precisely the chilling effect on the communists that the President had hoped. It was the distraction of Watergate that may well have doomed Saigon, not the Nixon policy.

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 Movroydis | Filed Under Nixonland Nitpicks | 3 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.

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