Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Rick Perlstein

Jul 2010 · Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

An exciting e-format containing 27 video clips taken directly from the CBS news archive of a brilliant, best-selling account of the Nixon era by one of America’s most talented young historians.

Between 1965 and 1972 America experienced a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know today was born.

Nixonland begins in the blood and fire of the Watts riots-one week after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, and nine months after his historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater seemed to have heralded a permanent liberal consensus. The next year scores of liberals were thrown out of Congress, America was more divided than ever-and a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard Nixon. Six years later, President Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and resentment borne of that blood and fire, was reelected in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's, and the outlines of today's politics of red-and-blue division became already distinct.

Cataclysms tell the story of Nixonland:

• Angry blacks burning down their neighborhoods, while suburbanites defend home and hearth with shotguns.

• The civil war over Vietnam, the assassinations, the riot at the Democratic National Convention.

• Richard Nixon acceding to the presidency pledging a new dawn of national unity--and governing more divisively than any before him.

• The rise of twin cultures of left- and right-wing vigilantes, Americans literally bombing and cutting each other
down in the streets over political differences.

•And, finally, Watergate, the fruit of a president who rose by matching his own anxieties and dreads with those of an increasingly frightened electorate--but whose anxieties and dreads produced a criminal conspiracy in the Oval Office.

Ratings and reviews

Very detailed account of the man and president Richard Nixon. So much detail of the time period of the late 1960s and early 70s that shaped the decision making and politics of the time. Very good read.

About the author

Rick Perlstein is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan; Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by over a dozen publications; and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history and appeared on the best books of the year lists of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. His essays and book reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Village Voice, and Slate, among others. A contributing editor and board member of In These Times magazine, he lives in Chicago.