Richard Nixon’s counterrevolution

THE RISE OF A PRESIDENT AND THE FRACTURING OF AMERICA

By Rick Perlstein

Scribner, $37.50, 881 pages

REVIEWED BY JOHN R. COYNE JR.

In 1962, after a humiliating loss in the California gubernatorial election, Richard Nixon, at an impromptu press conference, uttered one of his least prescient political pronouncements: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

It wasn’t. Nor have they stopped kicking. In fact, during the 34 years since he left office, the kicking has intensified, so that in Rick Perlstein’s massive Internet-fueled dramatization of nearly everything newsworthy between Watts and the 1972 landslide, Nixon assumes the character of an uber-politician whose malign spirit still hovers over us, responsible either directly or indirectly for nearly every national ill.

Mr. Perlstein gives his sprawling, episodic narrative a theme and unity by imposing on it a pop-psych, bubble-gum analysis of Richard Nixon, an analysis first developed by Chris Matthews in his book on Nixon and Kennedy.

At Whittier College, Mr. Perlstein writes, Nixon founded a group called the Orthogonians, hard-studying student grinds set up in opposition to a group called the Franklins. “Franklins were well-rounded, graceful, and moved smoothly, talked slickly. Nixon’s new club, the Orthogonians, was for strivers, those not to the manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one’s unpolish was a nobility of its own.”

This, in effect, says Mr. Perlstein, provides the template for Nixon’s political career. “Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president … acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid … dour and brooding, who couldn’t even win a girlfriend, who attracted enemies… . They hadn’t learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to success … . Ever-expanding circles of Orthogonians, encompassing all those who ever felt their pride wounded by the Franklins of the world, were already his constituency… . The keynote of the new, Nixonian politics.”

It’s this analysis (Franklins - Kennedy, Alger Hiss; Orthogonians - Agnew, Whittaker Chambers) that gives Mr. Perlstein shape, structure and a unifying image, albeit sometimes cartoonish and Herblockian. The Orthogonian Nixon, in 1968, takes on his chief rival and Franklin George Romney (to whom Mr. Perlstein, refers, oddly, as a “glamour boy”) whose “forthright honesty … was a dull blade to take into a knife fight with Richard Nixon … who was simply willing to lie.”

It’s also an analysis that requires Mr. Perlstein to force his thesis, often breaking the rhythms of the narration. In many cases, Nixon gets in the way of many of the book’s best dramatizations, or has no place in them at all - Watts, the centerpiece Chicago convention (brilliantly re-created as it would have been seen on home television), Berkeley, San Francisco State, Columbia, the Boston school busing controversy, the Newark riots, Selma and anything involving Dr. Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy - or, for that matter, anything involving the origins and escalations of the Vietnam war, gifts from the two preceding Democrat presidents and their liberal think-tank advisers.

In fact, given the revolutionary turmoil that characterized the decade and that Mr. Perlstein so effectively dramatizes, it was Richard Nixon’s job - the job for which he was hired - to restore order. His mandate was essentially counterrevolutionary, handed down in what to many seemed a country running out of control. He was, in short, elected to do the job that Mr. Perlstein shows us needed to be done.

Many of Nixon’s accomplishments were historic, permanently altering alliances and the balance of power in the world - the opening to China; a strong and principled defense of Israel, which set the pattern for succeeding administrations; detente, which constituted the first step in the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.

There was also the host of domestic programs and policies - the first clearly articulated and comprehensive national energy policy; the creation of the EPA and the great wash of proposals that form the basis of all our environmental legislation today, and like it or not, made Nixon the first - and so far the only - green president.

But it wasn’t for this that he was hired. He was elected in 1968 to end the war in Vietnam and to put down the insurrection at home. He did both successfully, thereby carrying out his mandate. And then, through Watergate, in the final explosion of the decade that he himself was responsible for igniting - an explosion that destroyed his career and his presidency - he cleared the air of a decade of violence and hatred.

Mr. Perlstein sees it differently, however, ending on a somber and uncharacteristically depressing note - his summing up, one suspects, informed by the need to push his thesis, using the Franklin-Orthogonian opposition to define the basic thrust of American history since the 1960s, explaining why there are red states and blue states (although we’ve always had them) why some groups of people don’t like other groups of people (they never have), why Richard Nixon is to blame for using those dislikes for political gain (like, say, Andrew Jackson or FDR), and why by so doing he permanently poisoned the political process..

Nixon, Mr. Perlstein says, “rose by stoking and exploiting anger and resentment, rooted in the anger and resentments at the center of his character.” As a result, the hatred between two populations - Franklins and Orthogonians - hardened and intensified into what Mr. Perlstein calls war. “Both populations … have learned to consider the other not quite American at all. The argument over Richard Nixon, pro and con, gave us the language for this war.”

He concludes: “Do Americans not hate each other enough to fanatsize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not.”

On the contrary. It’s not at all difficult to argue they do not - and in fact, they haven’t since 1974, when Richard Nixon pushed the self-destruct button, and by so doing completed his mission and ended our decade-long national nightmare.

John Coyne Jr., a former White House speechwriter, is co-author with Linda Bridges of “Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement,” published by Wiley.