Nixonland

The Rise of a President

and the Fracturing of America

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.

This epic account by Campaign for America's Future senior fellow Rick Perlstein 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 Nixon, a disgraced politician, was on his way to a shocking comeback.

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.

George Will in The New York Times Book Review calls "Nixonland" a "sprawling, rollicking book." He adds: "In 2001, [Perlstein] published the best book yet on the social ferments that produced Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy. ... Now comes the second installment of Perlstein’s meditation on that era’s and, he thinks, our current discontents. 'Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America' completes his inquest into the death of the 'cult of "American consensus"' and the birth of 'American cacophony.'"

About the Author

Rick Perlstein is senior fellow at the Campaign for America's Future [19], for whom he writes the blog The Big Con [20]. His first book, "Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus [21]," won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. It appeared on the best books lists that year of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune, and also achieved the status, in the wake of the Clinton wars and the 2000 Florida recount, as one of the very rare books to receive glowing reviews in both left-wing and right-wing publications.

From the summer of 2003 until 2005 he covered the presidential campaigns as chief national political correspondent for The Village Voice. He has also published "The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo: How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America's Dominant Political Party," an essay with responses from several eminent commentators, including Robert Reich, Elaine Kamarck and Ruy Teixeira. In 2006 and 2007 he wrote a biweekly column for The New Republic Online [22].