The age of Nixon: Rick Perlstein on the left, the right, the '60s, and the illusion of consensus

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In May 1970 the United States saw a wave of political demonstrations--demonstrations in favor of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War. The most famous was the hard hat riot of May 8, when Manhattan construction workers beat up hippies and demanded that City Hall raise the American flag. In subsequent days more marches, some spontaneous and some quietly encouraged by the White House, broke out in such cities as Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and San Diego. On May 20 approximately 100, 000 union men in Manhattan held what Time called "a kind of workers' Woodstock," carrying signs with slogans such as "God Bless the Establishment. "A cement mixer hauled a banner mocking New York's liberal mayor: "Lindsay for Mayor of Hanoi."

The first histories of the 1960s and early '70s weren't always sure how to treat such events, when they deigned to notice them at all. But over the last decade, there has been a surge of interest in the right-wing movements that produced or cheered on such rallies. In studies ranging from Rebecca Klatch's A Generation Divided to Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors to John Andrew's The Other Side oft he Sixties, a new wave of scholarship has pored over the defining institutions, personalities, and moments of the '60s right, deepening our understanding of the decade and illuminating the subsequent rise of Reaganism.

The most acclaimed of those books was probably the independent historian Rick Perlstein's mammoth Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001), an intelligent and absorbing account of the conservative insurgency that seized the Republican Party in 1964 only to be crushed in the November election. Now Perlstein has published an engrossing, almost novelistic sequel that extends the story through the Republican landslide of 1972. The protagonist of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner) is not Richard Nixon himself, Perlstein writes, but "the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else ... seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the level for the Republican for exactly the same reason."

Nixonland takes its name from a speech that John Kenneth Galbraith wrote for Adlai Stevenson during the 1956 presidential campaign: "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." One lesson of the book is that men like Stevenson and Galbraith weren't above slander, scare, and innuendo themselves, even if they preferred to pretend these faults existed only in the opposition. Nixonland was much larger than Nixon.

Perlstein, 38, is strongly left-liberal in his own policy preferences, but his Goldwater book was widely praised by conservatives delighted that someone had taken the time to understand their history and ideas. Nixonland is similarly fair-minded in its account of the backlash against liberalism. That is not to say that it goes easy on its subjects. Many conservatives will be unhappy to be reminded of, say, the intense racial paranoia that helped to kick-start their political successes in the '60s. At the same time, Perlstein refuses to tell the left a comforting story in which the backlash was only about race. The arrogance of the era's liberals and leftists, and the ways that manifested itself in both public policy and personal style, is a theme throughout his account.

Perlstein is already planning a third book in the series, tentatively titled From Patty Hearst to Ronald Reagan. I spoke with him at Georgetown University in April.

reason: When you put these books together, what story are you telling?

Rick Perlstein: My overriding subject is how America deals with conflict and consensus. America was founded on the fissure between slave states and free states, so these huge fault lines are just built into the American project. How we repress them, express them, deal with them, talk around them, think through them, don't think through them, is fascinating to me.

Congress literally passed a gag rule making it illegal to talk about slavery. In structurally similar ways, in Nixonland, Chicago decided that there was no segregation in Chicago and had a Human Relations Commission whose job it was to keep the frequent housing riots of the '40s and '50s out of the papers. There's a certain kind of cultural energy pursued by the gatekeepers of elite discourse, who want to argue that Americans fundamentally agree with each other and that's the health of the nation.

When Walter Lippman in 1963 says, "America is more united and at peace with itself than anytime before"; when people describe the Kennedy assassination as an eruption of violence with no precedent in American culture; when people say Barry Goldwater lost because he "dared question the American consensus"; when you have liberal pundits basically not seeing the coming backlash against liberalism when the evidence is right in front of their faces--what's in operation, I think, is an understudied, underexamined American discomfort with conflict.