Historian and journalist Rick Perlstein has just published Nixonland, a history of the mid and late sixties, roughly from the Johnson landslide of 1964 to the Nixon landslide of 1972. The book is a tremendous read that doesfull justice to that turbulent period. It’s not a feel-good book; one keeps encountering calamitous decisions and catastrophic ends. And yet, for all that, the book is lively and incisive. Perlstein was kind enough to answer some questions from me for playboy.com:
Seen as a figure who governed in a time in between sunny Franklin Roosevelt and sunny Ronald Reagan, it’s amazing that the dark, complex Richard Nixon ever made it to the presidency. How did that happen?
Welllll—to use a favorite Ronald Reagan opener—first let’s make one thing perfectly clear. Reagan wasn’t so sunny! He rose to power, first as governor of California in 1966, then as president in 1980, very much by playing to people’s fears and resentments in a time of social transformation. I very intentionally used a picture in my book of Reagan scowling—as he used to do when he said a hippie was someone “who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah,” or, when someone admired the protesting Baby Boomers’ “youthful energy,” that “I’d like to harness their youthful energy with a strap.” Richard Nixon went to school on Ronald Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign—harnessing the majority’s rage at those insolent protesters, and riding it all the way to the White House.
The reason he was so uniquely qualified to do so was because he’d been harnessing the rage and resentments of those around him ever since he won his first election, for student body president at Whittier College. As a youth, he always felt looked-down-upon, despised for being too unpolished, too uncool. So he made people who felt like him his political constituency, which was a smart move, because, after all, those who feel themselves unpolished and uncool are everywhere in the majority.
You argue that Nixon won election and governed by skillfully manipulating what we now call wedge issues–the war, racial tensions, domestic violence. Was he the pioneer of that? Is this his enduring legacy?
Once, during the 1970 elections, Democrat Hubert Humphrey complained of the Nixon team, who were campaigning hard on all these wedge issues to capture a conservative congressional majority, “I personally doubt that our country has seen in 20 years”—i.e., since Joseph McCarthy’s time—”such a calculated appeal to our nastier interests.” John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top lieutenants, was a bit baffled by the charge. After all, he said, “politics is the art of polarization.” That was the Nixonian way—but there was a twist. Just like George W. Bush promised to govern as a “uniter, not a divider,” Nixon, in his inaugural address, promised to “bring us together.” He then proceeded to argue that, even as he was basically accusing anti-war protesters of being anti-American, he was bringing us together. It was the protesters who were dividing us, by being so anti-American. He mastered that sort of two-step very early on: attacking his enemies by claiming, in wounded, innocent tones, that he—and you, and me, and hard-working, decent Americans everywhere—were the ones being attacked.
Nixon’s enduring legacy is, of course, complex. You see that every time you buy a cheap consumer product manufactured in China—before Nixon’s presidency, China was utterly cut off from the capitalist world—and every time you take a breath of fresh air, because Nixon was reasonably progressive on environmental issues (even if he said privately that environemtnalists want to “go back and live like a bunch of damned animals”—did I mention he was a rather nasty man?). But surely the most prominent stamp he left on our public life was a new language by which one half America could disparage the other half of America as not quite American at all.
It’s hardly a revelation that Nixon was dishonest, but after reading your book, the sheer amount of his dishonesty just sucks the spirit out of you. He didn’t just spin situations, he just lied–telling the FBI, for example, that the Watergate break-in was a CIA operation. Most of us believe all politicians lie sometimes–where do you rank him in the pantheon of lying presidents?
Nixon’s lies were often entirely unnecessary—suggesting they were entirely compulsive. My favorite example was his claim that he never took naps (he was always plumping himself up as tougher, more macho, than the average man). In fact, he took naps nearly every day. They were marked “staff time” on his schedule. He lied about big things as well, of course: in order to secretly bomb the nation of Cambodia, he had the Air Force prepare two sets of ledgers to record the operation, a false, public one; and an accurate, one that was kept from his own top military officials. We see lies like this even today, of course—did you know America doesn’t torture? But when it comes to that petty, uncontrollable, day to day mendacity, I don’t believe we’ve ever seen Dick Nixon’s like before, or are likely to ever see it again.
Let’s stipulate that Nixon’s cynical governance made things worse in the sixties. But it was an awfully turbulent era, and given the passions of the era, given that profound changes were taking place, what leader could have done more to contain the chaos?
What a tough question. One of the things that most fascinates me about America is that we have a real aversion to admitting, facing up to, and working through, our deep-seated conflicts. In fact, just prior to the cacophonous sixties, pundits were saying that America was more united and at peace with itself than at any other time in its history. It wasn’t, of course—our divisions were positively seething, just slightly below the surface. My theory is that the turbulence was made worse by the fact of this previous repression—Americans hadn’t learned to healthily disagree with each other, just like in a good marriage the two parties must learn to healthily disagree with each other. After JFK was shot, there was a lot of fantasizing that he would have been the one who could have brought us together, but I don’t think that’s true—because he was wedded to this repressive myth of consensus as anybody. Then came the rather perverse fantasy that some other Kennedy could magically smother the fires—which requires you to ignore that Robert F. Kennedy, for all his gifts, was more deeply despised in some parts of the country than any other Americans. Buddha, Jesus, Allah: maybe one of those guys could have pulled it off. No mere mortal man that I can think of, that’s for sure.
Who won the sixties? Looking back, some see the progress in race relations, equal rights for women, and more liberal attitudes about sex, and say the left won. Others say issues aside, the chaos of the period permanently discredited the idea of liberal change, and that we are a more conservative society. What say you?
In the end, I have to give it to the left on points. It’s hard for us to imagine now how repressive things were for women before the feminist movement—they weren’t allowed to take out credit cards or rent cars in their own names (in her memoir Kathleen Turner writes about how even after her father died, her mother couldn’t get credit); pregnant girls were sent off to cruel institutions, and then were never seen in their communities again; the few women in law school were only allowed to ask questions only a couple of days out of the year—”Ladies Day”—and were often only offered jobs as secretaries when they graduated. Life has become so much freer and richer on an everyday level for so many Americans, and in ways that are unquestioningly accepted by even the most conservative citizens (who, of course, give no credit to the brave left-wing pioneers who made such “discredited liberal change” possible) that you can almost forget that it’s mostly been conservatives who’ve been devising our public policies.
What were you doing during the Nixon years?
My favorite part was the first nine months, which I spent taking in a warm, comforting bath. Immediately following, as my mother will surely attest, I regularly made an even bigger mess of things than Richard Milhous Nixon.
How foolish of me. I didn’t realize you were such a whippersnapper. Okay–what Nixon-era pastime do you most enjoy today?
I could watch early 1970s episodes of the Dick Cavett Show all day. Dick, if you’re reading this, shoot me an emai