Herein emergeth both “Nixon the Loser” and “The New Nixon” (same as the old Nixon, but with embedded viral marketing). What say y’all?
Have to admit, this is also where Perlstein starts to run crossgrain to my own prejudices:
Went one of the Stevenson/Galbraith jeremiads… “Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.”
__
Of course, saying a President Nixon would unleash the bomb was also slander and scare, and spared not the innuendo. Adlai Stevenson and his learned speechwriter had coined a useful word, Nixonland. They just did not grasp its full resonance. They described themselves outside its boundaries. Actually, they were citizens in good standing… [I]t only stood to reason that if you believed your opponent was neither sensible nor sober and would do anything to win, and that his victory would destroy civlization, a certain insobriety was permissible to beat him.
I have no opinion of Adlai Stevenson (which is the way my people say: I have a conviction that Stevenson is too minor a character to bother having an opinion about), but I would argue that Galbraith was indisbutably correct to assert that “Nixonland” was (is) a sociological construct in opposition to all that is best and decent behind the concept of “America”. Of course, this is because I’ve spent my entire life on the Galbraithian side of the divide… and I blame the Stench Artists Nixonians for its very existence…
Linda Featheringill
Hi, Guys.
Question: Exactly what was it about Goldwater’s conservatism that caused so many republicans to not support him and/or campaign for him? Pertinent in this context because this gave an opening for Nixon.
I don’t remember Goldwater being all that weird.
Anne Laurie
OMG I BROAK THE TUBEZ. Hit ‘refresh’ to pull up this post and immediately got the problemloadingpage icon. Do we blame Nixon, or the Minions of Xenu?
Nutella
“I felt so sorry for Nixon’s mother tonight” – Rose Kennedy on the first televised debate.
Ouch.
Linda Featheringill
Oh, let’s blame Nixon, by all means. :-)
Damned at Random
I was surprised to find out the Republican establishment didn’t get behind the Goldwater candidacy after the ’64 convention. I guess I knew that the conventions actually determined the candidate in those days, but it never occurred to me that they didn’t make peace and get behind the candidate as a matter of course.
Also, I thought the party platform was written and approved at the convention- so how could Rockefeller call Nixon to his office for a rewrite in ’60?
Little Boots
It’s mean, but I totally love that his mother was going door to door for Goldwater and Nixon had to yank her up to New York.
Villago Delenda Est
So, the question becomes, how do you go about winning elections in the face of the Nixonian juggernaut?
I think Barack Obama offers an alternative, but the thing is, you can’t win over the lost 30% under any circumstances. You can only appeal to the better nature of the mushy middle, which I think Obama did during the 2008 campaign. The problem is, moments after his victory rally, he started dismantling the organization that made that victory rally possible. The database of millions of email addresses of small donors that added up to billions in campaign funds got lost, and Obama and his new team refused to mobilize them to support his health care initiative, no matter how we might think it was flawed.
Omnes Omnibus
@Damned at Random: A lot more still happened in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms in 1960.
Phoebe
I dunno. By the end of The Stench, I still hate what Nixon did, but I can also see these people through his eyes, and I kinda hate them too.
Little Boots
Maybe Obama has the way, but I fear you also need a completely collapsed economy and two very unpopular wars to get anywhere, which I’m hoping is not necessary.
Mark S.
One thing Perlstein emphasizes in this chapter (as well as Before the Storm) is that Nixon worked his ass off in 1964 (“collecting chits”), creating the local infrastructure that led to his success in 1968. Doing favors for party operators at the state level.
We have arguments here a lot about whether Palin could win the nomination, and I think this is the reason she won’t. She acts like a diva and makes these local operatives pay through the roof to come endorse their candidates. I realize the nomination process has changed a lot since the 60’s, but I don’t think you can replace that kind of goodwill solely through Facebook and Fox appearances.
Alex S.
“The new Nixon”, is that the same mythical person that we now refer to as “The old John McCain”?
I also like the short deconstruction of the Kennedy myth in this chapter. JFK and RFK were just one generation away from organized crime.
And Eisenhower was the grandfather-like figure Ronald Reagan pretended to be.
Mary G
I think Rick is saying that the Kennedys played just as dirty as Nixon.
“And they called Dick Nixon the dirty one.” He repeats this quite a few times.
My parents and all their friends were rabid Republicans and I can remember them wailing about how Nixon’s makeup artist was bribed by the Democrats to make him look worse. One woman came over with a compact; she mixed cigarette ash into the powder to demonstrate how it was done.
It was interesting to me that Nixon refused to go after Kennedy’s health, marital affairs, etc. Just like McCain refused to go after the Muslim/terrorist pal/birther strains against Obama. He lost, too.
mclaren
This represents a bizarre and intriguing example of the kind of weird moral inversion that pops up whenever anyone points out the documented facts about sociopaths like Nixon.
The sociopaths immediately accuse anyone who points out their crimes of hurling slander and using innuendo and hitting below the belt and so on.
It’s a truly weird mindset. Remember when the Teahadists and hatriots accused people who pointed out that they were bringing automatic weapons to President Obama’s speeches and carrying signs implicitly threatening Obama, that the people who were pointing out these facts were the ones who were allegedly using violence because their rhetoric was “unhinged.”
We encounter this kind of weird moral inversion of reality in Ann Coulter’s rhetoric when she describes liberals as “sadists who tell savage lies for sport.” In fact, the only people who appear to be telling savage lies for sport are those on the far right who accuse Obama of being a Maoist, a Communist, a Leninist, an Islamic mole, and so on.
Liberals, by contast, merely state the documented fact that members of the far right are now threatening the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Yet the Teahadists who make those threats aren’t accused of being violent; the liberals who point out that Teahadists are making threats are the ones accused of violence.
This bizarre inversion of reality, where the violent radicals become portrayed as reasonable moderates and the moderates who point out that the violent radicals are using innuendo and slander and threats are protrayed as “unstable” and “dangerously unhinged” was discussed in detail in Billmon’s classic article Spock With A Beard: The Sequel.
What’s particularly intriguing about this whole trip down the rabbithole into an alternate reality is that it began with Richard Nixon. He and Pat Buchanan were the guys who invented this technique and first applied it in American politics. The took the raw ore of McCarthyism and added a new refinement, accusing their political opponents of the very crimes they themselves were committing.
Phyllis
@Phoebe: Yeah. Eisenhower, not so much Mr. Honorable.
Kathryn
In reply to AL’s post, I think that Perlstein is setting up the point that Stevenson is not that different from Nixon in his approach to “the other.” And that Democrats and Republicans at this time were not so different in how they thought and operated. So in time, Nixon would be able to appeal to registered democrats to cross the line to vote for him… where for Dems “my America” was not the DFH America that was emerging but just as mythologized, and nostaligic, and “Orthogonian” as for conservatives.
MikeJ
And we always will be. So keep your opinions on racial equality, women’s control of their own bodies, protections for workers, and stopping government overreach to yourself.
suzanne
I keep coming back to the underlying issue of social class, and how Nixon seems to have a love/hate relationship with “the Franklins”, but also wants populist appeal. I’m relatively young, but I’ve always thought of the GOP as the rich man’s party. But reading this chapter, it’s very clear that Kennedy was the wealthy, sophisticated one, but Nixon didn’t emphasize his working-class background in the wake of his defeat. I’d like to hear others’ opinions on how/when the GOP decided to go all-in for the rich.
Linda Featheringill
No hard data on this one, only foggy memory. But I remember that Goldwater’s supporters were not upper class by any means. I don’t think that he was terribly working class, but many of his followers were.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mark S.:
Yes, I think that’s a key point. Nixon went out and supported at the state and local level. He had a long term strategy.
Palin is very 21st century in that she’s all about short term gain. Three months from now doesn’t exist in her world, just like it doesn’t for the typical MBA.
freelancer
@Phoebe:
Ditto this, esp. WRT the Kennedy’s.
Damned at Random
@Phoebe:
Eisenhower certainly used him badly. I wonder if he would have sent a VP of his own choosing into Latin America knowing the depth of anti-American feeling there.
mclaren
@Linda Featheringill:
Goldwater wanted to use atom bombs in Vietnam. Goldwater wanted to repeal social security and medicare. Goldwater vehemently opposed the Civil Rights Act.
Any more questions?
Jager
@Linda Featheringill:
My today’s republican standards Goldwater was a moderate. Goldwater didn’t give a rat’s ass about cultural issues and he thought the preachers were nuts. Nixon realized that everything Goldwater distained could be used as “tools” to win an election.
Little Boots
the Kennedy’s played hard and dirty. I hope despising Nixon doesn’t depend on idolizing or, worse, sanitizing the Kennedy’s.
Omnes Omnibus
@Phoebe: Which people? Stevenson, Hiss, et al.? The Kennedys?
Linda Featheringill
@Alex S.:
I have long thought of Old Man Joe was “rich white trash.” He did obtain a good deal of money in his lifetime, but no class.
This was the thing about Jack marrying Jackie. He didn’t need her money. But she really was high class in several meanings of the phrase.
suzanne
The other random bit that I found interesting was that Fawn M. Brodie wrote a well-respected biography of Nixon. She also wrote one of the most important bios of Joseph Smith. The two were very similar, now that I think on it.
General Stuck
@Villago Delenda Est:
Don’t know for sure, but if i was guessing, I would say that Obama did make a sort of deal with the HC industry, that if they wouldn’t go all out to defeat HCR, and let congress work it’s will, then he wouldn’t go all out to get it passed, especially with a PO that they feared most of all.
It was a detente of sorts, I suspect, and in the end it worked for some real reform, though imperfect reform. This doesn’t bother me much, because of the fact it passed at all as compared to 100 plus years of failure.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, as for JFK and RFK being one generation away from “organized crime”, one of the best things about “The Godfather” is how it draws parallels between corporate America and La Cosa Nostra.
The two are not that dissimilar in so many ways.
Rick Perlstein
“And they called Dick Nixon the dirty one.”
That’s sort of my attempt to channel RN’s stream of consciousness.
Kathryn
Nixon wasn’t a sociopath. He cared what people thought, his feelings got hurt, whether it was because he had a martyrdom complex is beside the point. He had greater “ends” in mind, and his “means” were brutal, he had his enemies and hatreds, but that doesn’t make him a sociopath. In a lot of ways, he is really an everyman in his context.
Anne Laurie
@Phoebe:
Yeah, there’s plenty to loathe about the “Limousine Liberals”, as they used to be known. People point to the ‘disconnect’ between the Koch brothers and the rank’n’file Tea Party membership, but I can’t remember a point in my lifetime when the DNC wasn’t struggling to paper over the cracks between the wine-and-cheese capital-L Liberals and the New Deal lunch-bucket Dem voters.
4jkb4ia
@Villago Delenda Est:
Huh? I got emails from OFA to support health care reform and make phone calls to wavering people. OFA also had a video contest and formally supported the public option to the end.
No disagreement that OFA was a possible powerful tool that was badly used. The Tea Partiers out-community-organized them.
Chris
@Linda Featheringill:
Wasn’t alive in the sixties, but it was my understanding that the GOP post-Eisenhower’s election basically accepted the New Deal as legitimate. Thus the Republican establishment in 1964 was still moderate and pro-New Deal (the Rockefeller wing), Goldwater being an insurgency that was only beginning and, while it won that nomination, hadn’t taken over the party yet.
Besides that, people in 1964 still accepted the welfare state (which Goldwater didn’t) as legitimate, along with much of the post-1940s liberal consensus. And either oldwater didn’t know how to split the consensus open by using the politics of resentment like Nixon did, or the country still wasn’t ripe for that.
Nutella
I didn’t know that it was Pat Brown’s campaign that came up with the famous “Would you buy a used car from this man?”
Later when Reagan ran against Brown for governor he had a lovely slogan too: “If it’s brown, flush it.”
MikeJ
@Little Boots: I do think people want to call some of the hard playing they did dirty. Perlstein ‘s example of Kennedy back footing Nixon with his opening in the debate shifting the ground to where he expected to excel and his opponent would be unprepared, wasn’t playing dirty, it was playing hard.
Rick Perlstein
@Villago, when Vito says of his hopes for Michael that there would have been a “Senator Corleone–President Corleone,” I very much took that as a brilliant cynical seventies riff deconstructing Camelot–that Vito was ventriloquizing what Joe Kennedy actually achieved.
Anne Laurie
@Alex S.:
Less, if you believe the Marilyn Monroe rumors :>
Little Boots
@suzanne:
I think it was about 1870, but they learned how to pretend. They actually had a lot of progressive positions for awhile, when it came to race, and abortion, and other things. In fact, I think it was part of Nixon’s genius to turn the whole definition of elite, and with it the definition of Republican, on its head.
Villago Delenda Est
@Rick Perlstein:
Yeah, I definitely got that vibe, Rick, from that particular sentence. That Nixon, the oppressed one, was again channeling the entire Franklin thing.
Rick Perlstein
@Nutella “If it’s brown, flush it.” I’ve never heard that one!!
WoodyNYC
Regarding Johnson’s aide Jenkins and the Larry Craig-esque mini-scandal – when I read that paragraph I thought of David Foster Wallace’s short story Lyndon about a fictitious ( or was it? ) aide to LBJ, whose devotion to the president is cover for love. I wondered if that was the germ of Wallace’s story.
It’s a great story btw, LBJ’s dialog is really well rendered.
Mary G
His parents house is at his library in Whittier and it is a teeny little thing. The bedroom he was born in is not that much bigger than the double bed in it.
Little Boots
@MikeJ:
Not that I mind the outcome, really, but I think inventing the “missile gap” was playing dirty. I don’t dislike the Kennedy’s but I absolutely refuse to pretend they were in any way angels, ever.
JWL
Is this the Nixonland give & take thread? It’s 6PM PST in my house.
I read the book, but lent it to my sister months ago. So far as referring to, or commenting by chapters, I’m out of luck. What is quoted, or remarked upon, is all I’ll have to go on.
Let me throw this out: Eisenhower, a very good man and adroit politician, threw a bone to the Taft forces by bringing Nixon aboard his ticket, simply in order to smooth his way to election. He never respected Nixon’s brand of political beast.
Ike fucked up. Moreover, he knew it. He knew better, which is one reason he would have gladly jettisoned his VP, had it not been for the success of the Checkers speech.
That compromise was the genesis of today’s American Fascist Party, aka, the GOP.
Rick Perlstein
Ah–Time magazine:
“Some rabid Brown backers have retouched photographs to show Reagan with a Hitler-like forelock and moustache; some far-out Reagan supporters display bumper stickers proclaiming: IF IT’S BROWN, FLUSH IT.”
That’s Nixonland.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101661007-199339,00.html#ixzz1DKXQWWoP
Nutella
@Rick Perlstein:
I doubt if it was an official slogan but I remember hearing about it during the California election.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: There may be a boat load of snobbery in the limousine liberals of that era, but they were also the integral in passing and administering the New Deal. The difference between that group and the Kochs and Tea Party leaders today is the difference between enlightened self-interest and naked self-interest. I think that difference matters.
MikeJ
@Little Boots: Who said they were? Progressives today complain that Dems don’t throw enough elbows and then turn around and complain that the Kennedy family might have been mean to some people.
Rick Perlstein
@Mary, I got to go to the second story of the house and, yes, the boys’ room is so small you can’t stand up in it.
JWL
@Mark S.: Right you are. Palin is little… make that nothing more than a money grubbing dilettante.
Anne Laurie
@Damned at Random:
General Eisenhower had no moral qualms about sending subordinates off to die in service to A Higher Cause. I think that part of Reagan’s (or at least the Reagan administration’s) success came from studying “Ike the Happy Warrior” for clues on standing above the fray while making sure the most dedicated underlings (Elliot Abrams, Oliver North) were out there shiving the opposition and shipping arms to the enemies-of-your-enemies.
Little Boots
@Rick Perlstein:
Do you think he had a point, at all?
Moose in Seattle
Long-time lurker, first-time commenter.
Stevenson/Galbraith as citizens of Nixonland–smacks of “both sides do it,” doesn’t it? I’m a lifelong liberal and Democratic voter, so maybe the qualitative difference I see between Nixonian tactics and political hyperbole is my bias talking.
On the other hand, to skip ahead in time a little, I never gave Reagan a fair shake; I spent his entire first term hiding under my bed, sure he was going to get us all nuked. It was the cowboy talk that did it. He and Nixon both called forth some kind of latent fear in their political opponents that guys like Ike and Bush the 1st didn’t. It’s like they pulled us on the other side into Nixonland with them.
What do you say, Mr. Perlstein? Are you here today?
Rick Perlstein
@Omnes, as you read on in the book you’ll see that the “limousine liberals” were indeed pretty damn annoying, like Lindsay’s NYC parks commissioner who said of people complaining of people fornicating in Central Park etc. that they were “afraid of the variety of life.”
I think liberals are much better at this stuff now. Not that we get any credit for it.
Linda Featheringill
Okay. So Goldwater really wanted to dismantle a lot of what we would call progressive legislation. I can see that.
I remember that he recommended atomic weapons in Vietnam. But I also remember conversations about not participating in a war unless you used everything you had. He was not a fan of limited warfare.
On the other hand, I really don’t know the difference between the potential mortality figures doing it Goldwater’s way rather than the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson way.
Little Boots
@MikeJ:
Yeah, I think you’re right. I don’t complain about that, but I don’t want to overlook it either.
MikeJ
@Omnes Omnibus: I tried three times to write the reply you wrote, failed each time, and threw them away. Glad somebody got it out there.
Rick Perlstein
@Anne–brilliant! I never drew the comparison, but I think it’s right. They protected “the principle” at all costs.
freelancer
Made me laugh quite loud when I read this phrase because of its use here.
Funny that when the truth started to come out about Palin in the days and weeks following the convention, she was commonly compared to Lonesome Rhodes. And then after her backyard quitter speech.
Not the media that I was once told about, good to get an accurate summation of the media landscape. And how perceptive of Milhous to sense certain magazines’ lamestream attitude. See also this…
Am I nuts? Do I need to take the rest of February off? I keep seeing Palin between the lines.
4jkb4ia
@suzanne:
If you look at Sarah Palin and the people who support her, that’s hardly “going all in for the rich”. I am reminded of TNC’s post about populism basically saying, “There’s nothing wrong with you America”. If the Republicans can sell that, they can sell that there is nothing wrong with the rich either and the rich are performing their function in the best of all possible worlds. But in this book Nixon isn’t going to sell that. Nixon is going to sell that there is something terribly wrong but he is going to exalt the goodness and decency of the American people who understand that something is wrong.
(
Mike E
@MikeJ: Ouch–that’ll leave a mark.
Goldwater wasn’t the only one to be eager to let loose the nuclear Genie one more time… I’ll take JFK’s advisors over RMN’s when it comes to those 13 days in October. But, even with Kennedy, we really shouldn’t be here; Kruschev was right close to being the EOTW
Villago Delenda Est
@Rick Perlstein:
Given that the Irish were probably more despised than the Italians historically, that’s not a bad take on the whole thing.
“Alright, we’ll give some land to the ni*CLANGS* and the chinks, but we don’t want the Irish.”
mclaren
The claim that Nixon wasn’t a socipoath is bizarre. Nixon was a classic sociopath. No empathy, no interest in other people, no friends, nothing but a desire for power and a constant burning sense of hatred and a thirst for revenge against anyone whom he had perceived to have wronged him.
Nixon’s “enemies list” is the classic document of a sociopath. Read the transcripts of the Watergate tapes: “We have to do anything to save it…save the plan,” Nixon says about covering up the burglaries and buggings at the DNC. A man with an empty hole where a normal human being would have a conscience.
Mary G
Rush Limbaugh is this generation’s John Birch Society – Nixon got in trouble denouncing them as nuts and kooks backfired. When he lost the governor’s race and blew up at the press, you can hear echoes of Sarah Palin’s word salad too.
Rick Perlstein
@Linda, in a nuclear age, “limited warfare” is the only option. Unless you prefer armagedon.
JWL
@Anne Laurie: Anne, I believe you to be uninformed about Eisenhower’s “moral qualms” concerning warfare. To be sure, he was a West Pointer. However, to claim that training extinguished his moral compass is, at best, laughable. At worst– and I tend to think the worst of your remark– it is slanderous.
Jay C
@Linda Featheringill:
In 1964, the Republicans – who would have had an uphill climb in any case, given President Johnson’s general popularity – had a lot of problems with the Barry Goldwater candidacy:
1. His nomination fractured the GOP – “moderate” Republicans were less-than inspired to turn out for him.
2. Goldwater was against Federal civil-rights legislation: on states-rights grounds, mainly; but all too easy (even in 1964) to paint as retrograde racism.
3. Goldwater’s seeming casual attitude about the use of nuclear weapons – and his perceived willingness to escalate US involvement in South Vietnam (yes, I know, irony) – was easy fodder for ridicule.
4. Goldwater was seen as a stalking-horse for even more extreme elements.
The general feeling towards Sen. Goldwater in 1964 was pretty summed up by the riposte someone came up with as a response to Barry’s main campaign slogan: “In your heart, you know he’s right”
Which was: “In your guts, you know he’s nuts“
suzanne
@Little Boots: Thanks for the insight. I think Obama has been so successful in large part because he’s been able to appeal across class even more than across race, though because he’s the first AA president, the class issue hasn’t been discussed as often. Now that I think on it, all the presidential elections for which I’ve been conscious have been won by the candidate that has greater populist appeal, even when it’s been wholly manufactured.
Sorry if this isn’t that sophisticated a point. I just watched “The Social Network” and class has been on my mind.
Little Boots
Rick, was it a big scandal that Governors would not campaign for their party’s nominee? It seems like it would be these days. Was Goldwater considered such an obvious loser that nobody paid a price for dissing him?
Linda Featheringill
@Rick Perlstein:
It’s understandable to protect the principle. If King Harold or his brothers had survived the Battle of Hastings, that battle probably would not have been decisive. The English could have regrouped and fought again. And again. And William would have likely run out of food at some point.
Phoebe
@Omnes Omnibus: The snobs, and they weren’t just Democrats. The Franklins, I guess. And I’m saying this coming from a family of Franklins-turned-DFH [but still Franklins], and it all makes me wince.
And the thing is, I’m going to disagree with someone in last week’s thread [possibly it was Rick!]: I think he would have hated Palin. Nixon worked his ass off and he graduated at the top of his class in law school. Sarah Palin barely graduated from a college. Her ilk is not just against the snobbery that would exclude them unreasonably, but against ANYTHING that would exclude them. Nixon was “willing to do what’s necessary” to quote Richard Crenna in Body Heat, but Sarah Palin isn’t willing to do shit, and yet here she is, surfing on a wave of charisma. Am I wrong to want to think he’d hate her?
Anne Laurie
@Omnes Omnibus:
Oh, absolutely. If you’ve read Galbraith, probably his single most oft-repeated trope was that “the struggling classes” wanted to be prosperous enough to be able to oppress other people; therefore, it was very much to the advantage of today’s well-to-do to ensure that the Poor Strugglers could rise without having to turn on each other — or their economic “betters”.
Tom M
Each of these chapters has a theme that is repeated throughout. You can hear it in every scene as Nixon goes about lying in every conceivable context. For someone who claims that “words have meaning” and you have to be “careful what you say” Nixon survived saying everything and nothing at the same time.
He had that streak of genius, though, in recognizing the undercurrent in the newly arrived middle class who bought the whole story with the Horatio Alger elements. They got there with hard work and sacrifice and they were god-damned if they were going to give it away to layabouts.
That theme has played and played well for 50 years. Still number one!
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
This.
I’ve been to college, I’m aware of the limousine liberal and DFH phenomena. But they’re not actively trying to tear down New Deal or civil rights legislation, or mobilizing to stop badly needed legislation (HCR), at massive cost for millions of Americans. They’re snobs, but relatively harmless ones. Sure as hell not true of the GOP.
Omnes Omnibus
@Rick Perlstein: I’ll grant that, but I also see those, especially, of Stevenson’s age as people who really had done some amazing things through the New Deal and WWII. They were, I think, largely correct in the direction they were trying to aim the country and, based on past successes, had a reasonable expectation that they could continue to improve the world.
Rick Perlstein
“Funny that when the truth started to come out about Palin in the days and weeks following the convention, she was commonly compared to Lonesome Rhodes. And then after her backyard quitter speech.”
OK, here’s a really really really important point that I’d like to drum into all my liberal comrades’ heads with a hammer. How does “Face in the Crowd” end? People hear Lonesome Rhodes on an open mike laughing about how his fans are rubes, and that destroys them. That’s the liberals’ fantasy: once the people learn the “true” facts about their heroes the scales will fall from their eyes and liberal rationalism will triumph. The same thing happens in “Twelve Angry Men,” when the holdout juror cowers in the corner in shame after having been revealed as a racist.
It doesn’t work that way. People hold on to their illusions in a powerful way that us rationalist liberals have a hard time understanding. I mean, in a profile in Forbes, Glenn Beck ADMITTED he looks upon his audience as rubes–that he’s just trying to make money off them, as a “rodeo clown.”
It had no effect on his followers whatsoever. The brain is a rationalizing machine. People who’ve been suckered will always seek to save face by denying to themselves they’ve been suckered. Con men even have a phrase for it: “cooling out the mark.”
Rationalism is never enough in politics.
Villago Delenda Est
@Little Boots:
As Rick points out in chapter three, Nixon campaigned for Goldwater, even though he knew Goldwater was a lost cause, because he was looking down the road, and knew that the effort would support his own candidacy in ’68. Nixon couldn’t get out of politics if he tired…I recall Rick quoting him as telling Pat Buchanan that he’d be dead in a few years if he had to stick to being a lawyer, and not being a politician.
Mary G
@Phoebe: I think he would hate her, too, but love the passion she could inspire in her little slice of Real Americans. I could even see her being his VP choice if he was around now, but he would have locked in a room and not let her out until she had learned more facts and figures before interviewing with Katie Couric, etc.
Then he’d probably hire a food taster if he won!
Phoebe
@Mary G: Road trip!
Rick Perlstein
@LIttle Boots, you have to read (and buy!) “Before the Storm.” That tells the whole story. Basically the establishment of the Republican Party felt like the forces that nominated Goldwater had cheated, exploiting the rules, taking over precinct and county and state conventions by subterfuge, and that Goldwater was not really a legitimate nominee. It wasn’t a terrible argument for them to make, given polling that showed most self-identified Republicans didn’t agree with Goldwater’s policy positions. It’s a fascinating story–that nomination truly was an insurgency. The establishment never knew what hit them (They wouldn’t make that mistake again).
ColleenSTL
I guess my understanding of the “Nixonland” coinage is different than what Annie took away. I thought that the author was arguing that the polarization between two sides and the concept that each held that the other wasn’t just wrong, but would be the “destruction of America” was the essence of “Nixonland” and, if that’s the case, then Galbraith and Stevenson were a part. Although I would love to blame Nixon for this, I’m not sure I buy it. From what I understand, politics in earlier days involved some pretty strong invective; it’s just that the Nixon era is more salient for us living now.
It seems to me that, polarization aside, Nixon did introduce two toxic strains into our political culture that plague us to this day: the ridicule of people who are highly educated (Repubs so celebrate the stupid now!) and the casual acceptance of a “the ends justifies the means” attitude. When I talk to (reasonable?) Republicans about the rank intellectual dishonesty of their talkers what I get in response is that they KNOW their people are dishonest and manipulative but they don’t care. If it keeps Democrats out of power it’s all okay. THAT is the legacy of The Stench.
Little Boots
@Rick Perlstein:
totally, totally, totally agree. I despise that fantasy. we have to get over that fantasy. it is really crippling us, as a movement.
Mike E
@Phoebe: I’m guessing that deep down, Nixon believed himself a man’s man and wouldn’t have trucked with an icky woman like Sarah P. His all-male ‘advisors’ would have shielded him from such associations with, uhh, somebody not his wife. Makes Ronald Reagan (almost) look like a feminist by relying on Nancy as much as he did, from CA to the WH
Villago Delenda Est
@Anne Laurie:
If you go back to the Puritans, the desire of the oppressed to be the oppressors is pretty obvious. It’s a long running American theme, it seems.
Nutella
@Rick Perlstein:
“Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion which by reasoning he never acquired.” – Jonathan Swift
Damned at Random
Another impression I came away with was that Kennedy was better managed as a candidate than Nixon. I may be making a lot of assumptions here, but the tanning and make-up before the debate, the opening ploy to steer the discussion away from domestic policy- all sounds like modern campaign packaging as opposed to Nixn doing it his way – I’ll wear the oversized shirt I packed, thank you very much, and I’ll campaign in all 50 states if it kills me. Kennedy’s people decided on their marketing strategy and the candidate allowed them to build his brand. Nixon refused to be “handled” that way
Rick Perlstein
@Phoebe, I agree with you that RN would have hated Palin. As I say somewhere, the true Orthogonian longs for the Franklins’ approval. RN revered the idea that he himself was an intellectual. He often told reporters that he would have rather been a professor.
Complicated stuff.
General Stuck
though I haven’t read Nixonland, and am just wanking it from being alive during that time, I think it was a different political world than what we have now. Existential fear permeated everything in those days, and it was largely a legit fear with two superpowers living on the precipice of nuclear war, and one of those countries cut off from the rest of the world. Add to that the pent up frustration of an America bulging at the seams to throw off all sorts of Victorian era social strictures to expand the freedom thingy, and what you had was a kind of mix of healthy chaos of social change through street level catharsis, all played out under the persistent menace of global thermonuclear warfare. Nixon was made for flim flamming his self to power under such conditions. With young folk running nekkid through the street burning draft cards and mostly too young to vote, with the voting oldsters huddled at home, peeking out their curtains and wondering what would come next. The Silent Majority was real and Nixon scammed it to power, a paranoid soul with launch codes and a giant chip on his shoulder. It was fortunate his pathology mostly concerned partisan politics that he was in complete control of, but couldn’t realize nor accept it. So we got Watergate and stealing psychiatric records and a run amuck FBI.
The times we lived in and we as a people, I blame for Vietnam, as with same Iraq. Dick Cheney was a lot worse than Nixon on that score, imo. More in the Genghis Khan mold.
freelancer
@Mike E:
Almost all of Kennedy’s advisors were pushing for airstrikes to eliminate the missiles on Cuba. That they eventually went with the blockade saved the entire world.
PS, fuck Curtis LeMay.
JWL
Perlstein: I posted Hunter Thompson’s Nixon eulogy herein a week or so ago, a eulogy I fully endorse.
I was came to age in a home where his name was synonymous with SOB. You have no memory of his time. How was it you came to draw such an accurate bead on the man?
Phoebe
@Mary G: That checks out. He would be impressed by her results, and would have tried to use her. I guess that’s what whatshisface — Bill Safire? I’m drawing a blank. That dude with the creepy smile who masterminded her vp pick after the Alaska cruise — has/had in mind. I say “had” because to me they seem to be scuttling off her sinking ship around now.
suzanne
@4jkb4ia:
On social issues, perhaps. But the economic policy of the GOP has, for my entire lifetime, been crafted specifically to benefit the rich. However, it appears in this chapter that it wasn’t always this way, and Nixon himself had conflicting feelings about the issue of economic class, so I was wondering when that changed for the party.
Rick Perlstein
@Chris “They’re snobs, but relatively harmless ones” is an important point; but look at it this way: during the sixties, in places like New York, the violent crime rate doubled. And one of the qualities many liberal Franklins hold in common was that they truly did dismiss working class folks’ fear of crime as politically illegitimate. I deal with this in the chapter where I write about the fight over the NYC police review board (of the course the wingnuts also just made shit up and fear-mongered in a completely irresponsible way…)
Also, you’ll read about Abbie Hoffman treating policemen with such unbelievable soulless antihuman contempt you’ll want to shoot him in the face.
Read on! Read on!
But like I said, we liberals are better at this stuff now. Not that we get any credit…
Alex S.
@Mary G:
Yes, I agree. Palin reminds me of Agnew.
Little Boots
@Rick Perlstein:
More homework???!!!
Just kidding. I will do that.
MikeJ
@suzanne:
Reagan hated the poor and talked about doing good for the middle class. That was because they defined poor as “black” and middle class as “white”.
When Clinton actually made the middle class better off, the Republicans decided it was a bad thing.
Villago Delenda Est
@suzanne:
The party (by that I mean the wealthy who bankrolled it) realized that Nixon had his own ideas on this, was his own man.
So they grabbed the vessel that was Ronald Reagan and used him as their front man for their campaign to dismantle the New Deal, and get this country off the path to egalitarianism and safely on a road to neo-feudalism.
Mary G
@Rick Perlstein: Just wanted to let you know how much I am enjoying the book and your comments here.
Rick Perlstein
@Mike E, somewhere in there I have a quote from RN, “I’m not going to talk to those shit-ass ladies!” before he had to go out and speak to a Republican women’s meeting.
Mike E
@freelancer: PPS …yes, eff him with a 2-ton incendiary bomb
Little Boots
@Mike E:
Or even George W. Not sure if it’s changing times or different personality, but did Nixon have any woman he respected? I mean, he loved the whole sainted muther thing, but anyone he’d actually listen to? Rosemary Woods?
Chris
@Rick Perlstein:
I agree completely with this statement. Here’s another take on it, though:
If read “To Kill A Mockingbird,” one of the key points of the novel is that none of the townspeople are actually taken in my Ewell’s charade. They all know he’s full of shit, their opinion of him’s even lower than it was, and they make sure he knows it: in the end, he’s an outcast even worse than before. But as a jury, they still vote with Ewell, because he’s their people and they just can’t support a black man over him.
I sometimes wonder if the same principle isn’t at work when it comes to phony GOP populists. That on some level, a lot of the voters know they’re being lied to, but still vote Republican because they have to support the tribe, and for better or for worse, the GOP has made itself the party of the tribe.
Rick Perlstein
Man, I have to read more Swift, vis. “Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion which by reasoning he never acquired.”
The epigram to “Before the Storm,” and to my facebook page, is from Swift: “It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee house for the voice of the kingdom.”
Rick Perlstein
@Damned at Random Wait until ’68! He’d learn from his mistakes–and how! Roger Ailes played a role here…
Rick Perlstein
In fact Haldeman said he’d only work for him again if he stopped drinking on the campaign trail and listened to his advisors.
Mike E
@Little Boots: Hell, even Chuck Coulson said he’d run over his own granny to get ahead politically–I believe it’s in his version of the bible…
Rick Perlstein
@JWL Hunter S. Thompson portrayed Hubert Humphrey as unmitigatedly evil. That’s about the most stupid political judgment I could imagine. No American leader cared about the working class, and better understood how to ameliorate their exploitation by the greedy, than Humphrey.
Alex S.
@Little Boots:
Did he listen to anyone at all?
Mary G
@Little Boots: I don’t think he did like or respect women – I read the book of the tapes when it came out and I remember being much more offended by all the anti-female remarks than the cussing or sneakiness or even racism.
Anne Laurie
@Villago Delenda Est:
Maybe in your neighborhood! But on the East Coast, when I was growing up, the Italians were the upcoming ethnic group behind the Irish — barely a step above The Coloreds, if that. (My Midwestern Spousal Unit couldn’t understand why Robert Mitchum was so insistent that his people were from northern Italy, “Blue eyes! Blue eyes!” but even during the 1950s/60s it was ‘generally accepted’ that Italians had curly hair because ‘they all had ancestors from the wrong side of the Mediterranean’.) And looking at the Eugenics Movement anti-immigrant propaganda from the 1920s-40s, “Mediterranean types” were definitely lower on the scale of
beingIQ than the Irish. When Puzo’s book came out, I remember it being read that the Sicilians (lowest of the lowly Italians) were naturally jealous / hoping to emulate their Irish=American rivals rise from “dumb thugs in the tenements” to “serious Presidential candidates”. (Heck, remember the crap Mario Cuomo and Gerry Ferraro took, even in the 1990s?)Villago Delenda Est
BTW, I’ve read through chapters four and five, and it’s just astonishing. I was only a kid when all this was happening, so I wasn’t fully aware of the torrent of violence in the mid 60’s. Bombings, shootings, harsh confrontations. The riots I do remember generally, but not the detail.
One thing I do vividly recall is that my family bought our first color TV in August of ’68, and all those baby-blue helmets in Chicago…
Linda Featheringill
@freelancer:
Dr. Strangelove. Seriously.
freelancer
@Linda Featheringill:
Yeah, but I can’t figure out if he’s Gen. Turgidson or Gen. Ripper.
Nutella
One incident that turned out better in those days: The Ward Churchill of the 60s, a Rutgers prof named Genovese, said he would welcome a Vietcong victory.
In spite of pressure, the board of trustees refused to fire a tenured professor for remarks made outside the classroom.
freelancer
@Rick Perlstein:
Tom Friedman needs that quote as a tattoo.
Nutella
@Mike E:
That remark about granny was before Coulson went to prison and found Jesus!
mclaren
People keep comparing the Kennedys with Nixon. The comparison doesn’t work.
Joe Kennedy started off as a bootlegger and went legit. By the 1930s he was out of bootlegging and into bankrolling movies. Bootlegging was certainly a criminal enterprise, but it wasn’t the kind of intense criminality we associate today with trafficking hard drugs: during the 1920s, huge numbers of people were involved with bootlegging, and essentially the entire American population patronized speakeasies.
Kennedy’s “below the belt” campaigning involved bribery and harsh language. Rumor has it that Joe Kennedy paid to have some ballot boxes stuffed during the presidential election in 1960. JFK turned on Hubert Humphrey during the primaries and cut him to pieces, rhetorically speaking.
Now compare with what Nixon did during the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections.
Nixon sent ex-CIA agents into burglarize and wiretap his political opponents. Nixon sent ex-CIA agents into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to burgle his psychiatric notes for damaging personal info about Ellsberg after the Pentagon Papers broke in the news.
Nixon systematically subverted the American electoral process. He used smears, push polling, slander, burglaries, blackmail, and he set up an enemies list and had people whose political opinions he disagreed with audited by the IRS. Nixon had FBI agents illegally surveilling and wiretapping his political opponents looking for personal dirt with which to blackmail them.
Nixon authorized Plan Sedan Chair and Plan Gemstone which involved setting up Democratic convention delegates with hookers and then filming them and blackmailing them into changing their votes.
Source: Review of the Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy.
Show me the Egil Kroghs and G. Gordon Liddys in JFK’s campaign. You can’t. They aren’t there. Show me JFK’s “enemies list” — there isn’t one. Show me all the burglaries JFK authorized against his political opponents: there are none. Show me how many of JFK’s political opponents he ordered the IRS to audit. You can’t, that never happened.
There is simply no comparison whatever between the depth of criminality of Richard Nixon’s campaigning and the “hard tactics” JFK used. It is completely invalid to even try to compare the level of pathology and criminality and sociopathy of Nixon’s political campaigns to the tough talk JFK used against political rivals.
MikeJ
@freelancer: I’ll offer a bounty to every cab driver in Bangalore, $10 to the first one to repeat it to him.
Mike E
@freelancer: LeMay = Ripper, he’s the model.
General Stuck
@Chris:
You know, it seems trite, and too simplistic to be true, especially in these supposed enlightened times, but I still think our meta politics is mostly about race in this country. Underneath it all.
It is the power of the same in a primal zone, that in the end, trumps all the ideology and righteous declarations of moral advancement past such things. A black leader of the free world erases common sense even more than usual from the usual suspects. It’s not as bad as 1864, or 1964, but bad enough still.
Rick Perlstein
@Anne Laurie Check out the great HBO doc on Vince Lombardi. He couldn’t get a NFL head coaching job because he was Italian. And this was when Notre Dame was synonymous with football glory!
@Nutella Genovese is still alive and is now a wingnut, defending the Southern planter class. Once a Stalnist, always a Stalinist–in reverse.
Little Boots
@Mary G: I suspect he had that icky, seen but not heard, stand there and look innocent and pure thing, when it came to women. I think I read, in fact I think in Nixonland, that he had a rather humiliating courtship of Pat, but that may have been all part of that icky thing, where women must be wooed and then ignored forever once they’re won.
Rick Perlstein
By the way, folks, not sure if Anne Laurie mentioned this, but I spent all day in the library in Dixon, Illinois, reading the newspapers Ronald Reagan would have read as a child, for my next book…
Martin
Jesus, we sound smart when discussing a book. I’m going to have to wait until the next thread to get the evil retards back.
Little Boots
@Alex S.:
heh, yeah, but I think sometimes he did actually take advice. was it ever from a woman?
Rick Perlstein
@freelancer What do you mean? He gets all his opinions from cab drivers! ;-)
hamletta
I remember Dan [spit] Quayle intoning, “Maario…Maarrrio,” rolling his R’s in an attempt at some quasi-Italian accent.
It was disgusting.
MikeJ
@mclaren:
If you took out all the ballot boxes stuffed for Kennedy in Cook County *and* all the ballot boxes stuffed for Nixon downstate everything would have come out exactly the same.
Moose in Seattle
I’m going to try this one again because the first time I hyphenated it into moderationland.
Stevenson/Galbraith as citizens of Nixonland—smacks of “both sides do it,” doesn’t it? I’m a lifelong liberal and Democratic voter, so maybe the qualitative difference I see between Nixonian tactics and political hyperbole is my bias talking.
On the other hand, to skip ahead in time a little, I never gave Reagan a fair shake; I spent his entire first term hiding under my bed, sure he was going to get us all nuked. It was the cowboy talk that did it. He and Nixon both called forth some kind of latent fear in their political opponents that guys like Ike and Bush the 1st didn’t. It’s like they pulled us liberals into Nixonland with them.
Not that liberals are incapable of such demagogery, but it seems that over my lifetime there has been a strain of Republicans that made it their primary strategy.
freelancer
@Rick Perlstein:
Even the greats have their blind spots, like reading Mencken when he was losing his shit over FDR and the New Deal. That man did not like any form of Socia|ism, and he didn’t like it very loudly.
Anne Laurie
@Rick Perlstein:
Excellent point. Or, as the apocryphal Stevenson quote goes, “It’s not enough that ‘every thinking American’ vote for me, Madam — I need a majority.”
Rick Perlstein
@McLaren gets it just right on the relative perfidy of Kennedys and RN.
Phoebe
@Rick Perlstein: I believe it’s true of the 27 percenters, the tea people, but I also believe that Katie Couric was Patricia Neal for a moment there. After that interview, a sliver of reasonable Republicans [represented in my family by 1] could not vote for that ticket.
General Stuck
@Rick Perlstein:
Well, if yer gonna write a book about Saint Ronnie from a liberal perspective, you are one brave soul. Maybe you will be able to afford a chateau in France, or at least Marin county.
Rick Perlstein
You guys are great. Best commenters I’ve encountered.
Little Boots
@mclaren:
“RUMOR HAS IT?” Just please, could we stop treating people as cartoons? Could we not with the eternally noble Kennedy’s thing?
Mike E
@General Stuck: Race is just a ‘face’ put on the precept of class warfare, err, I mean, American Capitalism. Where’s my iced tea emeffer?!
JWL
“Also, you’ll read about Abbie Hoffman treating policemen with such unbelievable soulless antihuman contempt you’ll want to shoot him in the face”.
Whoa. Your book’s insight into the obnoxious rhetoric of the anti-war/civil rights self-styled “spokesmen” is clean. But remarks (such as the above) betray a fundamental ignorance about the posturing of shit disturbers such as Hoffman, vs. B-52’s, napalm, and the terrible position police were thrown into. He was mosquito stabbing at the skin of Godzilla.
“You’ll want to shoot him in the face”. You should be ashamed of that remark. At least Hoffman was on the right side of humanity; he wanted to end the war.
Villago Delenda Est
@Anne Laurie:
Anne, I was referring to the long term trend…how the Irish were utterly despised for generations, and of course the Italians went through the same process after the Irish. Nowadays, of course, you’ve got Tom Tancredo, a guy with a last name that ends in a vowel complaining about immigrants.
My ethnic background is terribly Anglo-Scot, with some Dutch tossed in for flavor. Heck, I know of at least one ancestor who served in the Continental Congress on my mother’s side, and on my dad’s side, people who fought on both sides of the Civil War. Protestants all.
Nutella
@Rick Perlstein:
That’s not at all surprising. He’s still going with emo extremism.
freelancer
@Mike E:
See, and Wiki says it’s Bucky T.
That’s why I’m split. Because I think the roles are split.
South of I-10
Well hell, I finally get the little one in bed, and y’all have already discussed any points I had. Carry on, I’m really enjoying the comments.
gnomedad
@General Stuck:
Thanks, Stuck, this is important to remember. Every now and then I am stunned to recall that I lived through this.
JWL
Boy. It’s hard keeping up.
Fuck Hubert Humphrey. He supported LBJ’s war all the way… all the way, that is, until the final week of the ’68 campaign.
Rick Perlstein
@JWL, read the story about Hoffman smashing the display case in the police precinct headquarters.
Also, people like Hoffman made it impossible for the left to become a majoritarian movement by showing utter contempt for people’s reasonable desire for order and security.
General Stuck
@Martin:
Wouldn’t say “evil”, at least not tonight, but I am holding up the retard flag quite well in this thread about a book I haven’t read.
Chris
@General Stuck:
I agree.
And that’s what brought “To Kill A Mockingbird” to mind. I know it’s not the conventional thing to take away from the book, but to me the message was twofold. One: don’t assume the “rubes” are as stupid and oblivious as they’re sometimes portrayed. Two: don’t assume that just because they’re not stupid means you can convert them. That’s just not how tribalism works.
Rick Perlstein
@freelancer And Dr. Strangelove himself is a mix of Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, and Werner von Braun. Poetic license!
Mike E
@freelancer: You’re prolly right about the split. Ripper=id, Bucky=ego, ??=super ego.
MikeJ
@Little Boots: Can’t you get over your desire to tear down anybody who might have done anything? Nobody here is calling any Kennedy a saint, but none of them were as evil as Nixon and your insistence that nobody admire anyone ever is tiresome.
Rick Perlstein
@JWL, well, he lost, so we’ll never find out what he would have done.
suzanne
@Mike E:
Concur.
Nutella
@suzanne:
True. And also a clever way to split the lower economic class into two mutually suspicious parts so they won’t combine to fight back.
Little Boots
@General Stuck:
the details might be different, but I think we are every bit as susceptible to this crap as any other generation. We really are more secure than any other generation, not economically, but in terms of fear of invasion or any real warfare, and yet we respond like rabbits whenever anything threatens us, anything at all. I wish we had learned something in the past 50 years, but no, we haven’t, at all.
Anne Laurie
@JWL:
I am not expert on the WWII European Theatre, but I remember reading that Eisenhower was regarded as a brilliant strategist in the War Room as well as on the field. I think Reagan, as a Hollywood-studio-trained actor, studied Ike’s performance as a general and used his ‘methods’ for their own low dishonest purposes. Remember, long before he was officially diagnosed with Alzheimers, Ronnie insisted he’d actually served in Europe during WWII, seen a newly-opened concentration camp, etc. He wasn’t there, but I’m sure he studied the footage in preparation for “his greatest role”.
Alex S.
@Little Boots:
Yes, probably not. Maybe Kissinger (although they probably hated each other), a few economists in his “we are all Keynesians now” phase, and his media team.
Little Boots
@MikeJ:
I am not trying to tear anyone down. In fact I tried to withdraw that, because I thought it would lead to this kind of silly argument, but no, I am not trying to make anyone hate or tear down anyone.
JWL
“Smashing a display case”?
Perstein, you’re a smart guy. Is that your best rejoinder? Condemning a silly, superfluous act by those who opposed the Vietnam war?
Villago Delenda Est
Rick, I get the impression that you did a LOT of newspaper/magazine reading as research on Nixonland. The recounting of events in a timeline fashion helps to do two things: ground the reader in a narrative, and provide context for the political reactions to events. I also like the sort of low hum in the background of Nixon’s activities, which leads us into the “twist” of the ’68 election that so few seem to have seen coming.
I’m jumping ahead a bit, but the entire KTLA helicopter thing during the Watts riots was a preview of coming attractions, probably the best example was the entire OJ slow-speed chase thing on the freeways of greater LA back in the early 90’s.
Ties into the entire “white perception” of what was going on as fed by the TV news. Suddenly, this stuff was in your living room. The Pentagon learned from Vietnam…and the result was military friendly coverage of the two gulf wars.
freelancer
@Rick Perlstein:
I also see a lot of Edward Teller in Strangelove’s character as well, probably moreso than I do anything about Kissinger. But my knowledge of what Kissinger was up to previous to the Nixon administration is practically nil. If only there was a book that could fill me in on the context…
Gus
@Anne Laurie: Is that apocryphal? How disappointing! @Mike E: Mandrake maybe?
MikeJ
@JWL:
If 100,000 march in Washington against a war, you may look at it and see people making themselves heard.
People in Washington see that traffic is fucked up and want to blame somebody.
General Stuck
@Mike E:
Largely true, at he plutocrat level. At the nativist bubba level, race is thrown into the mix so that poor white republican idiots can also too screw themselves for their right wing plutocrat masters, that laugh all the way to the bank.
ColleenSTL
@Nutella: @Nutella: I think this is spot on. As long as the plutocrats can keep working people at each others’ throats via race, sex, abortion, homosexuality, etc. they can keep laughing all the way to the bank.
Also, I have often thought that the “welfare state” that Repubs decry is actually their best friend. It’s the only thing that keeps people hovering just above destitution and, thus, prevents any real revolt against this rigged system.
Rick Perlstein
@JWL Read the scene. Tell me what you think.
He was a fascinating, complicated guy, a hero in many ways. But no one I’d want to follow into battle.
Gus
@JWL: I kind of agree. I tend to have more sympathy for the yippies than Rick does. And actually more than they probably deserved. America was a deeply conservative country, and many believed that extreme methods were needed to wake the country up from its torpor to actually end the war. The tactics backfired, but I can understand the impulse that led to them.
Rick Perlstein
@freelancer Yes, replace him with Werner von Braun, I think.
Mike E
@<a href="#@Gus: Mandrake was his conscience if LeMay ever had any. @freelancer: Teller, definitely. The accent makes people think Kissinger
Phoebe
@Rick Perlstein: If anybody needs to remember why people hated hippies [Rick clearly does not], read Patty Hearst’s autobiography, and see how insane the SLA was, and how they were treated as folk heroes in San Francisco. And they were Johnny-Come-Latelies, as it was the 70s, but that stuff lasted for a good while. And then if you want the SLA point of view, watch the documentary about it, “Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst” [but definitely read the book first]. To me it is all just fascinating.
As is Nixon’s brain. Those were extremely interesting times, and yet that is my favorite part of the book. I very much look forward to the Reagan one.
Rick Perlstein
Kubrick read a ton of academic books on game theory and nuclear strategy when he was planning the movie.
Little Boots
@freelancer:
wasn’t he a Rockefeller guy? Doesn’t that make the whole thing even more insidious? Kissinger comes to Nixon and becomes a crazy warmonger?
pikhoved
JWL
“..I remember reading that Eisenhower was regarded as a brilliant strategist in the War Room as well as on the field”.
I dare say your response is discombobulated. You are surely familiar with Eisenhower’s farewell admonition concerning the military-industrial complex. Permit me suggest that you read his Guildhall Speech, delivered a year and a week after the Normandy invasion.
Linda Featheringill
@MikeJ:
Yeah. A lot of us inconvenienced a lot of different people in a lot of different places in the Vietnam era.
hamletta
He had his own copy. Showed it to young Ron when he was 12.
Little Boots
@ColleenSTL:
You’d think we’d catch on after 5000 years, but no, apparently not.
Alex S.
@Phoebe:
I like to say that San Francisco was not just the town of the hippies, but also the town of Dirty Harry and the Zodiac killer.
Rick Perlstein
@Little Boots Ah, you’re deceived! Rocky was a crazy war-monger too. See Before the Storm. His people came up with the idea of “usable” nuclear weapons that got Goldwater into so much trouble. He also wanted to require every New York State resident to buy a bomb shelter–a kind of “individual mandate” to make it easier to be belligerent in bullying the Soviets in the Cold War. No angel, that Rocky.
Ellen
Just a quick note from NZ (I messed up the time zone thing again. It is late Tues afternoon here.) Wanted to thank Rick Perlstein for being here. I’m trying to integrate this with my own memories of those times. Everything there was still scarred by racial division (Wichita, Kansas is the operative hometown.)
JWL
@Phoebe: I’m a 55 year old native San Franciscan. The SLA were never considered “folk heroes” hereabouts. Take my word for it.
MikeJ
@Linda Featheringill: And didn’t really accomplish anything.
Rick Perlstein
Very few heroes, very few villains in the Perlstein universe.
‘Cept MLK. The ovaries on that guy!
Little Boots
@Rick Perlstein:
I gotta read that damn book.
Martin
@General Stuck: I haven’t read it either. I was going to join in, but then my kids decided to spend 2011 being sick, so I figure 2011 will be the year I learned barf archeology and the classification of snot burritos.
Omnes Omnibus
@Phoebe: I would not say we are a deeply conservative country, rather we are a deeply conventional country.
Maude
@Martin:
I’m here, just quiet.
@Little Boots:
Nixon loved Pat and had the utmost respect for her. She in turn loved him and stood by him.
Pat had a very hard early life. He wanted to make sure that she never went through anything like that again.
Richard Nixon delivered newpapers in Whittier when he was a kid. That is mentioned by Adela Rogers St. John, who remembered him doing so.
Little Boots
And Rocky totally went nuts on the drug war, now that I remember. A Party of Assholes, right to moderate!
Little Boots
@Maude:
Maude, do you think he ever turned to Pat, when he was in office, and said, “what should I do here?” If not, why not?
ColleenSTL
@Phoebe: Sorry, but I think it’s completely ridiculous to conflate “hippies” with the SLA. I lived through this and it’s completely unfair. The violent radicals were a small sliver of the progressive movement at that time but they got a lot of media play because… that’s what the media do.
Having said that, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that part of the problem with liberalism today is that we don’t have a radical left in any real sense anymore. This is a key reason that Republicans have been able to move the goalposts and shift the frame rightward. A reasonable progressive can now be called a socialist BECAUSE there are no longer unreasonanble leftists around.
Rick Perlstein
@Maud Hmmm. He promised Pat he wouldn’t ever run for anything again in 1962. I’m not sure how much “respect” he had for her in the end.
Anne Laurie
@JWL:
The Hoffman I remember hearing, at the time, only wanted “the war” not to suck him or his personal friends into it. IIRC, he was quoted as saying it didn’t matter what happened to ‘the American pigs, the armed lackeys of the police state’, as long as his people (the ‘beautiful young people’) weren’t inconvenienced by the draft. Of course, this may have been a deliberate attempt by the MSM to soil the good name of an American patriot — but I haven’t heard anything of Mr. Hoffman’s career since the mid-1970s that leads me to doubt Perlstein’s generally negative assessment of the man.
Feel free to surprise me, if you have other sources.
Rick Perlstein
@Anne He was a troubled, complicated dude. As an egomaniac, he made Frank Sinatra seem a nun. He ended up committing suicide.
WoodyNYC
@Gus: I tend to agree as well. It’s easy to blame the yippies, as if they actually somehow created our statist, rightist situation by some manichean magic, instead of just responding in kind to a system that they perceived as insane.
It’s like blaming the communards of 1871 for the artillery bombardment of Paris.
Omnes Omnibus
One of the things that strikes me about the Nixon and his heirs today is that his heirs have the low cunning that he could demonstrate but tend to lack his intellect and his work ethic.
Rick Perlstein
One mark against Hoffman (and others, including Tom Hayden) in the moral ledger was that they were willing to lead others into physical risk under false pretenses. See my account of the Days of Rage.
Little Boots
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think he made it easy. And then Reagan made it easier. They all have the script now, preprinted and laminated.
Anne Laurie
@Mike E:
The President, I think. Mr. Milquetoast.
JWL
@Anne Laurie: Anne, come on. Hoffman was a self-publicizing cipher. You seem to mistake for a viable, bona fide, legitimate political force way-back-when.
Rick Perlstein
But hell, if I were in that situation, who knows how I would fare? The evil of the Vietnam War was just bottomless. Bottomless. As a historian, ultimately, I have to try to understand, not judge.
Gus
@Omnes Omnibus: Much better word. And conventional wasn’t going to end that war, at least not quickly enough.
Jager
@Rick Perlstein:
I hope you do an entire chapter the Reagan Library…more military uniforms than the Eisenhower Museum. Mrs. J worked on a breast cancer awareness event there, she had Cheryl Crowe lined up to be the featured speaker. The “private” Reagan Library said they’d rather not have Ms Crowe at the event
Little Boots
Rick, do you see another Nixon out there, anywhere?
Phoebe
@JWL: I guess I mean in that one patch of it festooned with pro-“Tanya” posters [Tanya being Patty’s SLA name. Or Tania?]. The one patch of it that people not from there [me] think of when they think of San Francisco during the 60’s-70’s.
Rick Perlstein
@Little Boots: Everywhere.
Maude
@Little Boots:
Yes.
Little Boots
(Can I just say, a Hoffman thread would be really, really interesting, after this one.)
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus:
Nixon was what we’d call a “policy wonk” nowadays, too. Of course, when the Village uses that, it’s disparaging, because it means the airheads might have to actually STUDY to get the story. Which is why they love McCain and Palin. No mental effort required, at all.
Little Boots
@Maude:
On what? that was a throwaway line, but now I’m really curious? did she advise him on anything he care about?
mclaren
@Rick Perlstein:
LOL. These people typically describe me as “ranting” and “raving” and “foaming at the mouth.”
As far as a bio on Ronald Reagan from a liberal — e.g., reality-based — point of view, methinks the times are changing. More and more of the general American population is realizing today that all of the most bizarre and dysfunctional GOP policies actually stemmed from Ronald Reagan. Systematic denial of reality? Check (“Facts are stupid things” — Ronald Reagan, 1980). Eager embrace of religious fundamentalist beliefs contrary to observed reality? Check (Reagan’s secretary of the interior, James Watt, publicly proclaimed that it was unnecessary to worry about conserving natural resources, because if they ever ran out, it would be a sign of the End Times at which Jesus would return and whisk us all to heaven). Hatred of science? Check (Nancy Reagan used an astrologer to time Ronnie’s announcements of major White House appointments.) Bogus faux economics straight out of the Twilight Zone? Check (Ronnie first popularized Laffer’s nonsensical supply side economics, accurately described by George H. W. Bush during the 1980 campaign as “voodoo economics.”)
All these weird pathological belief systems first got pushed into the political mainstream courtesy of Reagan. He actually believed that Medicare was “the anthill of totalitarianism”…and Reagan said so in a 1964 speech.
People today forget that Ronald Reagan was the original culture warrior. Long before Pat Buchanan demonized hippies and longhairs, Ronald Reagan rode to political fame and glory with lines like “A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” Four months before the Kent State massacre, Ronald Reagan publicly proclaimed in a speech about the Vietnam antiwar demonstrators, “If it takes a blood bath, let’s get it over with.”
Yes, Ronald Reagan publicly urged the murder of Americans’ own children. And then when the National Guard at Kent State shot down those antiwar demonstrators like dogs, Reagan tried to pretend he was only joking.
If Rick Perlstein does the same thorough detailed job on a Reagan biography that he did with Nixonland, it’s going to be quite something, and I look forward to reading it. If you turn over the rocks of St. Ronnie’s cenotaph, an astounding number of ugly critters come crawling out.
The American public is increasingly coming to understand that Ronald Reagan is the original source of the self-destructive policies and beliefs that have crippled America and rotted away our civil rights, the rule of law, basic respect for rationality and evidence, and the elementary principle of civility in public discourse. Articles like this recent headline (“Ronald Reagan Myth Doesn’t Square With Reality”) on CBS News suggest that the public is now beginning to see through the Reagan myth into the darker reality. Essentially all America’s current problems are due to policies started by Reagan: massive deficits, tax cuts for the rich, offshoring, treating the news as “spin” to be “controlled” and “managed” while utterly disregarding reality, the total politicization of White House policy, hiring lobbyists to write legislation to the point where the Reagan White House actually had to be sued to get it to enforce the Clean Water Act, rampant cronyism and corruption and outright criminality inside the White House (Attorney General Ed Meese was convicted of multiple felonies and went to prison),the massive paramilitary intensification of the War on Drugs, illegal foreign wars, extrajudicial “black ops” run from inside the White House which systematically ignore the rule of law…it all began with Reagan.
America today, bankrupt, devoid of the rule of law, with religious fundamentalists rewriting scientific papers and an out-of-control Pentagon losing multiple illegal foreign wars whose purpose no one can explain — it’s Reaganland.
Little Boots
@Rick Perlstein:
but who has that evil, intelligent combination?
Chris
@mclaren:
Oh gee, doesn’t that sound familiar…
Little Boots
I don’t know about raving. but longwinded, sure, there’s that.
Phoebe
@Rick Perlstein:
That is exactly what I got from the Patty Hearst documentary. The interviews with the relatively sane [and fringe, and therefore alive] members of the SLA as to what their mindset was during this period was a huge eye-opener for me. The whole thing is gigantically tragic.
JWL
@Rick Perlstein: Physical risk? It’s referred to as Freedom of Assembly. Not “Freedom of Assembly* (*except in cases of the agitation of discontented agitating malcontents”).
For Christ’s sake, do you believe that Hoffman and Hayden were that powerful as speakers? That they were responsible for the domestic insurrection of those years? If so, you’re little different than G.Edgar Hoover.
Maude
@Rick Perlstein:
I saw them together in 1968 for a nice space of time.
That promise was due to the defeat of 1960. A lot changed after that. If she had told him she didn’t want him to run for president, he wouldn’t have done it.
Nixon was compicated and not all one thing or another. He was not cardboard. He was very intelligent.
He was certainly a stinker as well.
Reagan was the first president who didn’t seem to be American, but some stranger from some place never heard of.
I also think that Bush I, Clinton and Bush II were strange.
We lost a common way of talking about ourselves with Reagan. The vicious class divisions started then and are still with us.
ColleenSTL
@mclaren: But isn’t Rick’s point in “The Stench” that Nixon, not Reagan, was the originator of the culture wars? What Reagan seems to have learned from Nixon is that – if you put a happy face on it – you can get away with this vile manipulation.
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: This is one of the reasons Palin will never make it as far as Dick did.
Little Boots
@Phoebe:
Honest, no agenda question: If there weren’t a draft, would the sixties have happened, in your opinion?
Maude
@Little Boots:
How the hell would I know? I wasn’t in ther bedroom and neither were you.
Villago Delenda Est
@mclaren:
Meese was not convicted for the various crimes he was accused of. However, since Meese did once say that an indictment is tantamount to a conviction, Meese’s indictment in the Wedtech Scandal is pretty much the same thing, by Meese’s own standards.
Little Boots
@Maude:
You seemed so sure, naturally I assumed you had been.
JWL
The evil of the Vietnam war was bottomless. It was a Great Patriotic War, waged by the Vietnamese against foreign oppression. American troops would still be fighting and dying in Vietnam today, if the military-industrial establishment (for lack of a better term) had had their way.
Chris
@mclaren:
Either that, or it’s just that the media’s daring to challenge the mythology for the first time in a long while. I hope you’re right and the people follow suit… it’s just that myths die pretty hard.
From what I understand of the last fifty years, Goldwater had the ideology, but not the electoral strategies or popular base. Nixon had those, but not the ideology (can’t remember which Republican said “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.”) Only Reagan had both of them together, putting Nixon’s crazed resentment-based politics in the service of Goldwater’s crazed economic royalist ideology. And we’ve been following in his footsteps ever since.
Little Boots
Maude seems bitter. Are you bitter, Maude?
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren: Look, I disagreed with you about something and you suggested that I masturbate to holocaust porn. Responses like that tend to cause people to think you a bit foaming.
mclaren
@Little Boots:
Roger Ailes. Karl Rove. Grover Norquist. The Koch brothers. To name but a few.
Little Boots
@Omnes Omnibus:
Tell it to MikeJ.
Alex S.
@Little Boots:
Noone is on the same level. But Gingrich might be closest, he’s using Nixon’s playbook. He also had some years in political exile and regarded himself as not just vice-president, but “parallel” president after 1994.
Villago Delenda Est
@JWL:
Towards the end, even the Army was getting tired of Vietnam. Oh, it was great for “ticket punching” for officers, but the thoughtful ones knew it was destroying the Army, just as some are pointing to Iraq and Afghanistan as doing the same thing.
Little Boots
Did Rick leave?
mclaren
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think that people who publicly applaud the president of the United States ordering the illegal extrajudicial murder of a U.S. citizen without even having accused him of committing a crime probably do jack off to Holocaust porn.
That’s the sort of thing extreme authoritarians tend to do.
BrendanL
Can we maybe start referencing comment number as well as username when replying to folks? There are a lot of good threads here but it’s getting difficult to follow.
Anne Laurie
@mclaren:
I’d argue we’ve lived through the Unholy Trinity: Nixon begat Reagan, who begat Dubya. Nixon was a smart policy wonk who didn’t mind “going dirty”. Reagan was a professional figurehead who used Nixon’s tactics — and many of his minions — to institutionalize the worst of the CREEPster mindset. Dubya was the culmination of the Republican Golden Triangle, giving the various authoritarians/fundamentalists/financiers free rein to steal anything they could carry away and break everything they couldn’t steal…
Of course, now there’s a strand of MSM revisionism (?) that posits Obama as the anti-Reagan (using his charisma and 11-dimensional-chess skills to redefine the Presidency, and possibly America) just as Dubya was the anti-Nixon (all the mean & stupid, none of the hardworking & deliberate & future-oriented). We want there to be a narrative, it’s just a question of whose narrative “wins”. And even that tends to change over time.
Gus
@Phoebe: I saw a documentary about the Weather Underground, and one of the members wasn’t particularly proud of his role. He basically called it temporary insanity brought on by the war. That’s why I’m willing to give Hoffman et. al. the benefit of the doubt, despite some reservations about them.
Little Boots
@Alex S.:
except he’d kinda stupid.
mclaren
@Anne Laurie:
Quite an insightful point. Your description proves eerily reminiscent of the descent in ancient Rome from Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, the first Roman general who actually crossed the Rubicon with his troops and threw out centuries of Roman law) to Caeser to Tiberius.
This suggests that we await the coming of the next stage in our political devolution, the American Caligula…a dreadful portent indeed.
ColleenSTL
@Little Boots: I know your question was directed elsewhere but I have to answer: No. And boy did the warmongers learn their lesson! No more upper-middle-class kids dying as cannon-fodder unless they volunteer which, of course, most of them don’t! Today’s US wars recruit most of their cannon-fodder from poor communities, rural areas, etc. where the risk looks like an economic opportunity. Sickening. If we re-instituted the draft there would be far fewer keyboard commanders.
suzanne
@mclaren: …and mclaren doubles down on the foaming. (The Randian length of your comments also furthers that assessment, BTW.)
Jager
@Rick Perlstein:
I was a college senior in Boston in 1968, not a DFH but close. I remember legitimate conversations about the upcoming election. Many of my friends were buying the “Nixon will end the war”, many kids were really, really sour on the Johnson and the Democrats. ’68 was the first election I could cast a vote for President. I had gotten my draft notice in June and had enlisted for 3 years. When I voted that fall, I voted for Humphrey. I know many of my friends fell for the end the war ploy.
Omnes Omnibus
@mclaren:I am not going to jack this thread to rehash that issue, but it is exactly that kind of asshole extremism and taking comments out of context that get you the reputation of being foaming at the mouth. And with this, I am back to ignoring you. Cheers.
Little Boots
@ColleenSTL:
thanks, my question was sort of directed all over the place, to anyone who was there. thanks, again.
KG
@Rick Perlstein: just out of curiosity, how much of an effect do you think losing in 1960 (and then the gubernatorial race in 1962) had on Nixon? Those two loses always seemed to be the major turning point with Nixon to me. Relatedly, if Nixon won in ’60, how differently do you think history plays out?
I should note, I’m not reading along with everyone else, but having grown up in Yorba Linda, Nixon has been a source of interest to me for a long time.
mclaren
@suzanne:
Absolutely. Anyone who responds with more than a sentence or two can’t possibly be taken seriously. As the Duke of Gloucester contemptuously spat at the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr Gibbon?”
Thanks, Suzanne, for representing the no-neck anti-intellectual contingent in this discussion.
Gus
@Phoebe: And if you want to read how young people of the day believed conventional liberalism was failing them (plus more Nixon), Nixon Agonistes is an excellent read as well.
Martin
Oh, look, the evil retards showed up after all.
Rick Perlstein
One last thought:
I’m Rick Perlstein. And you know NOTHING of my work!
;-)
Little Boots
@mclaren:
In fairness, Gibbon did go on and on.
mclaren
@KG:
Unbeknownst to the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the CIA, the Russians actually had usable nuclear weapons already deployed in Cuba by the time the Joint Chiefs proposed an invasion plan to Kennedy — who wisely nixed it.
If Nixon had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis, civilization on earth as we know it would have ended. Full thermonuclear exchange. Nuclear winter.
End of the world.
Little Boots
@Rick Perlstein:
If you are still Rick …
You are beyond hilarious!
Phoebe
@Little Boots: It would have kinda happened, because of the civil rights movement. And by “it” and the sixties, I’m assuming you mean that which led to the cultural divide, and produced the exquisite flower of Abbie Hoffman, or whatever. That whole thing. Altamont! I think it just would have been a very different sixties, but still pretty rad. What do you think?
mclaren
@Martin:
Yes, but you can remedy that by leaving, Martin. As usual you contribute nothing but name-calling and vacuous insults.
Phoebe
@Gus: Thanks! Right now I’m in a “More
CowbellNixon!” frame of mind.Anne Laurie
Many thanks to everyone who’s participated this evening… Two questions for our next virtual meeting:
Do we go back to Sunday afternoon, or is Monday evening better?
Secondly, are the next two chapeters — “Ronald Reagan” and “Long Hot Summer” — enough / too much for one week’s reading?
Little Boots
@Phoebe:
I don’t know, I was too young. I think it was this combination of selfishness and idealism, and maybe that’s all any liberation can ever be. I think the American and French Revolutions were idealistic and selfish at the same time, so maybe that’s all we get. but part of me wants to think the sixties were just selfless. Is that hopelessly false?
Little Boots
@Anne Laurie:
I say Sunday, and two chapters per week doesn’t seem impossible.
suzanne
@mclaren:
As an architect, I learned a long time ago that I can’t do better than Mies van der Rohe.
“Less is more.”
Damned at Random
@Rick Perlstein</a@mclaren:
@ColleenSTL:
I figure the way to tell a real war (with the country’s existence at stake) from a vanity war is that rich kids go to real wars.
JWL
@Rick Perlstein: Your last thought? But I’ve yet to straighten out your egregious misconceptions.
Well, your loss, not mine…
mclaren
@suzanne:
If less is more, than you should be silent. That, by your definition, would be best of all.
Suzanne…petard…hoist.
Martin
@mclaren:
I’m sure the rest of the class noticed that I never said who was the evil retard. I didn’t ask, you didn’t need to tell.
mclaren
I dunno — the “Long Hot Summer” was especially detail-intense, if memory serves. That was the summer when race riots erupted all over America. Scary stuff. That chapter is more than enough for a whole evening by itself.
NY Expat
@JWL:
“Smashing a display case”?
Perstein, you’re a smart guy. Is that your best rejoinder? Condemning a silly, superfluous act by those who opposed the Vietnam war?
Remember, kids: IOKIYAAH
Little Boots
watergate was intense. this is just some bullshit here.
Nutella
@Anne Laurie:
48 pages in a week? I think we can handle it (both chapters, that is)
Mike in NC
@mclaren:
In addition to “Nixonland”, one of the more memorable books I read last year was “Watchmen”, the graphic novel set in an alternate universe where Nixon was basically allowed to become dictator-for-life. Very interesting social commentary.
ColleenSTL
With football over (sigh) I suggest we go back to Sundays since, like John, I’m a Chuck fan. And two chapters a week would be good!
This was fun. Thanks to all. How come one of my comments seemed to await moderation forever when a couple of you others got really nasty?!
NY Expat
Speaking of the coming violence of the late ’60s, until Nixonland is made into the award-winning 8 hour HBO mini series it deserves to be, I highly recommend The Baader-Meinhoff Complex as a great glimpse into the insanity of this era.
Damned at Random
I like Sunday afternoon- if only because the east coast people will be up against midnight if we try 2 chapters on Monday evening. So Sunday for 2 chapters, or monday only if we do 1 chapter
JWL
@Anne Laurie: Let me think… weekend drinking vs. Monday’s roll call.
I vote Sunday.
Phoebe
@Little Boots: It’s a trite and annoying thing to say but I’ll say it anyway: a lot of the idealism [and idiocy] came from the fact that these people were all so YOUNG. See the Patty Hearst doc! See it!@Anne Laurie:SUNDAY!
I missed dance class for this. I don’t want to do it again. But thank you, again. Good night.
WoodyNYC
@Little Boots: I’m for Sunday as well, and while two chapters certainly aren’t onerous, the discussion is so good I’m inclined to drag it out with one chapter a week. Maybe that would be too much though.
MikeJ
@Anne Laurie: Two chapters is cool, and I like Monday nights, but I’m on the west coast. I understand some easters may not like the 9pm start.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I also vote for Sunday, especially now that we’re football-less.
mclaren
@Mike in NC:
Alan Moore’s Watchmen is certainly bizarre. A lot of people regard it as the greatest comic/graphic novel ever written. Certainly the competition for “best ever” seems to be between Warren Ellis’ Planetary and Transmetropolitan and Moore’s Watchmen.
It’s a provocative question whether Adrian Veidt in Watchmen is a hero or a villain. Doctor Manhattan is an extremely disturbing character with an outlook alienated from humanity nearly to the point of clinical autism.
JWL
@NY Expat: “IOKIYAAH”? I’m fairly certain I’m prepared to resent that acronym, New York.
suzanne
Two chapters a week! I have been greatly enjoying this, and have been forcing myself not to read ahead of the discussion.
I prefer Monday evenings, or any other weeknight besides Friday, personally.
JWL
Finally, Anne Laurie: Google Ike’s Guildhall speech. It was spoken in response to his having been named a “Citizen of London”. It’s as prestigious as it gets, awards wise. His remarks rose to the occasion, and offered a glimpse into the man.
NY Expat
@JWL: It is left as an exercise for the reader, but I suspect that you agree with the statement.
freelancer
@NY Expat:
I believe that’s on Netflix Instant. [checks] It is!
Omnes Omnibus
I think Sundays are fine. I also think I can manage the next two chapters by then.
Anne Laurie, thank you for setting this up. It is interesting, informative, and fun.
Mike in NC
@mclaren:
Not unlike Dick Cheney.
Turgidson
@mclaren:
Wasn’t that Sulla, a few generations before Pompey and Caesar? He marched on Rome, won, and immediately retired.
Platonicspoof
To those interested in reading along with Nixonland who might be assuming they won’t be able to keep up because they are short on time (as I assumed), I think the style, pace, personality details, etc., of this book will have you turning the pages very quickly.
Anne Laurie
Okay — next “meeting” is Sunday, Feb. 13, 4pm EST, and we’ll cover two chapters.
Apart from everything else, discussing Nixonland on Valentines Day just seems… deeply wrong.
rickstersherpa
@Linda Featheringill: Sorry I missed last night’s gab, but I wanted to just drop this note about Vietnam, and why Vietnam was such an evil war. It was a war of political cowardice and calculation. Mr. Perlstein touches on this in various points in Nixonland, and it really comes out in “The Best and the Brightest” by David Halberstam. Kennedy and Johnson became desperately afraid that Republicans would make “Who Lost Vietnam” a campaign issue, as they conceived “Who Lost China” had been campaign issues in 1950 and 1952 (in real life, I don’t know how much that issue as opposed to the fact the U.S. was fighting a rather desperate and not very popular foreign war under the banner of Anti-communism in Korea). When ever they came to a decision point between more war or disengagement, they chose war not because they thought we would win or that Vietnam was worth the candle, but because they had the 1964 election in the back of their minds. Likewise Nixon wrote in 1966 that the war was unwinnable. But the war served a useful purposes for him. It kept the Democrats very divided and helped him polarize the country between the patriots who stood by the troops and their President and the dirty rotten hippies who wanted their own country defeated. Once the 1972 election was over with he wrapped up negotiations after one more furious bombing campaign against North Vietnam by basically selling South Vietnam down the river with a deal he could have obtained in the Spring of 1969. If treachery is putting one’s personal interests, foibles, and goals ahead of the state, then these men were traitors, certainly traitors to those sent to Vietnam who were killed, wounded, or merely ruined. I guest we would find them in the 9th circle. (Dante reference.)
kay
I missed book club (again) but I’m still reading the book and the comments are wonderful. I love the whole limousine liberal conundrum.
I think we should have it at 7 AM next week:)
Scott P.
Sulla was one generation before the Triumvirate (a young Caesar served under Sulla). He did take over Rome in a civil war, but didn’t retire right away. He had himself elected dictator for a year, executed many of his enemies, reworked the Roman constitution, and then set aside his dictatorship. But he then ran for, and won, the consulship. He then retired a year later.
Barbara O'Brien
Adlai Stevenson was a good guy who deserves to be well remembered.
Paul in KY
@Rick Perlstein: Good point there, Rick. I aaways thought VP Humphrey was a pretty good dude (as far as politicians go).
Paul in KY
@Turgidson: I think it was Sulla. A generation or two before him it was Marius who upset the accepted way things went by being elected Consul more times in succession than one was allowed.
Some historians go back to Scipio Africanus as the start of charismatic generals who the troops were more loyal to than the state.