Political history writer Rick Perlstein has just published his latest book, Nixonland: The Rise Of A President And The Fracturing Of America, which tries to put the years of the Nixon Administration into the context of the cultural revolution taking place in the United States of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Central to his thesis is the notion that the divisions of the time are attributable to the failure of the “powers that be” of the day to grasp the profundity of the changes underway. The successes of liberal government in the 1960s were undercut and undermined by these clueless conservatives, all with the sometimes-tacit, sometimes-explicit approval of Nixon himself. Nixon’s primary role, Perlstein claims, was to divide and conquer the elements of modern society he did not understand — minorities, feminists, the anti-war movement. These divisions, he says, are the starting point for the divisions we feel in our own society today.
Trying to understand Nixon in his own context is a worthwhile venture for our times, because the Bush Administration has very decidedly chosen to compare itself to the Nixon Administration. Some of the closest members of Bush’s staff were also Nixon men, and George W. Bush himself is an open admirer of Richard Nixon. Certainly, the efforts of both administrations to subvert the Constitution and enhance the autocratic power of the Presidency are part and parcel of the same ideology that we now think of as “neoconservatism”.
The American Prospect featured this excerpt from Perlstein’s book which details the confrontation between “hardhats” and “hippies” in New York City and which became a template for similar confrontations around the country. Nixon was encouraged by the original spontaneous confrontation, and, sensing its political possibilities, directed his political operatives to actively encourage more of the same:
New York construction workers now took every lunch hour for boisterous patriotic demonstrations. So did hard hats in San Diego, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Some of the rallies were not entirely spontaneous: “Obviously more of these will be occurring throughout the nation,” White House staffer Stephen Bull wrote in a memo to Chuck Colson, “perhaps partially as a result of your clandestine activity.” Peter Brennan, the combative head of the Building Trades Council of Greater New York, accused of organizing the “hard hat riot,” defiantly denied it — then showed what he could do as an organizer: one hundred thousand marchers on May 20, complete with a cement mixer draped with a LINDSAY FOR MAYOR OF HANOI banner. Signs read GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT and WE SUPPORT NIXON AND AGNEW. Time called it “a kind of workers’ Woodstock.”
“Thank God for the hard hats!” Nixon cried.
Atlantic Monthly writer Ross Douthat reviews the book in the May issue of the magazine. A couple of pull quotes from the review that I especially liked:
And yet one doesn’t have to excuse Nixon’s many sins to wonder whether his mix of ruthlessness, self-interest, and low cunning might have been preferable to some of the alternatives on offer. Perlstein depicts a country on the edge of a civil war—a nation in which columnists openly speculated that America might embrace a de Gaulle–style man on horseback, or find a “President Verwoerd” (the architect of South African apartheid) to install in the Oval Office. It was a political moment when the old order could no longer govern, and the new order wasn’t ready. The kids who screamed for Goldwater and McGovern would grow up to be responsible Reaganites and Clintonians, but back then they had only idealism, not experience, and Nixonland is an 800-page testament to the dangers of idealism run amok.
Perlstein sometimes seems to suggest that Nixon was the abyss, and that by choosing him we vanished into it. But this misunderstands contemporary America, and it misunderstands Dick Nixon. A cynic in an age of zeal, a politician without principles at a moment that valued ideological purity above all, he was too small a man to threaten the republic. His corruptions were too petty; his schemes too penny-ante; and his spirit too cowardly, too self-interested, too venal to make him truly dangerous. And he was a bridge, thank God, to better times. Could America have done better? Perhaps. But on the evidence of Nixonland, we could have done far worse as well.
Though Douthat argues that Nixon was perhaps the only choice Americans had at the time, I don’t know that I agree that it negates Perlstein’s line of reasoning that in Nixon’s machinations the stage is set for our own petty, lawless, ruthless and self-interested dictator-wannabe. Though the circumstances are indeed different now than in 1968-1970, it’s the same playbook and the same dirty tricks being run by many of the same people in the White House, save that now the fight between the groups is entrenched in the halls of government itself rather than in the streets, and we are still left with no good choice for leadership to replace the status quo.
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