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THERE began a lifetime of positioning, of nurturing and exploiting the nation's deepest resentments, of rallying the silent and the glum to their champion. This cleavage defines "Nixonland," and the resulting tensions make the riots the right place to start, for it was in those bloody days that the American consensus, such as it was, melted in the streets of Watts, just months after President Johnson crowed about American civilization at its apex, about a nation prepared to deliver "abundance and liberty for all."
As Perlstein tracks the rise and fall and rise and fall of Nixon, he hews to the knife's edge of conflict, opting for the cultural over the narrowly political. Student activist Tom Hayden makes more appearances in "Nixonland" than Justice William O. Douglas, and that's appropriate. This broad scope opens up the narrative, and through it flutter the personalities, large and small, who populated the late 1960s and early 1970s so colorfully. We find Abbie Hoffman and H. Rap Brown, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Herbert Marcuse, Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, Jane Fonda and John Wayne, H.R. Haldeman and Spiro Agnew. These figures come back to us in Perlstein's able hands, a reunion of old friends and enemies drawn together and mutually repelled by Nixon's influence. They make a dashing backdrop to this exegesis on love and war, politics and art.
Perlstein sends home some scintillating snapshots from his '60s tour. His account of the Chicago Seven trial is superb, as is his portrayal of the nation's response to the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. His writing is occasionally overwrought, but more often modulated, breezy in the decade's lighter moments, deliberate when appropriate. Thus, he observes, candidate "Richard Nixon's summer of love was spent abroad." And, "Some people wanted peace because they didn't want America to be humiliated. Some people wanted peace because they preferred America's humiliation. Now the president invited Orthogonians to join him in defining themselves by the split -- in a wager that the majority on his side would grow for it."
