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The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
Scribner
May 2008
On Sale: May 13, 2008
896 pages
ISBN: 0743243021
EAN: 9780743243025
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
Told with urgency and sharp political insight, Nixonland
recaptures America's turbulent 1960s and early 1970s and
reveals how Richard Nixon rose from the political grave to
seize and hold the presidency. Perlstein's epic account begins in the blood and fire of the
1965 Watts riots, nine months after Lyndon Johnson's historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater
appeared to herald a permanent liberal consensus in the United States. Yet the next year, scores of liberals
were tossed out of Congress, America was more divided than
ever, and a disgraced politician was on his way to a
shocking comeback: Richard Nixon. Between 1965 and 1972, America experienced no less than a
second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we
know now was born. It was the era not only of Nixon,
Johnson, Spiro Agnew, Hubert H. Humphrey, George McGovern,
Richard J. Daley, and George Wallace but Abbie Hoffman,
Ronald Reagan, Angela Davis, Ted Kennedy, Charles Manson,
John Lindsay, and Jane Fonda. There are tantalizing glimpses
of Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Jesse Jackson, John
Kerry, and even of two ambitious young men named Karl Rove
and William Clinton -- and a not so ambitious young man
named George W. Bush. Cataclysms tell the story of Nixonland: ¥ Angry blacks burning down their neighborhoods in cities
across the land as white suburbanites defend home and hearth
with shotguns ¥ The student insurgency over the Vietnam War, the
assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King,
and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention ¥ The fissuring of the Democratic Party into warring
factions manipulated by the "dirty tricks" of Nixon and his
Committee to Re-Elect the President ¥ Richard Nixon pledging a new dawn of national unity,
governing more divisively than any president before him,
then directing a criminal conspiracy, the Watergate
cover-up, from the Oval Office Then, in November 1972, Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and
resentment born of America's turmoil, was reelected in a
landslide even bigger than Johnson's 1964 victory, not only
setting the stage for his dramatic 1974 resignation but
defining the terms of the ideological divide that
characterizes America today. Filled with prodigious research and driven by a powerful
narrative, Rick Perlstein's magisterial account of how
America divided confirms his place as one of our country's
most celebrated historians.
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