Nixonland... the book

Nixonland: the rise of a president and the fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein A political history of endless war, riots, assassinations, social upheaval, civil rights, Southern resistance, drug culture, anti-war protests and the Southern Strategy that led twice to the election of Richard Nixon by the so called "Silent Majority" in 1968 and 1972. The story is basically how we went from Lyndon Johnson's landslide Democratic victory in 1964 to Richard Nixon's equally landslide Republican reelection only eight years later. I liked how the author used the different perspectives on events that have become available to historians. We get the story as it appeared to people at the time through official announcements and current news reporting and of course I remember that time vividly. We get various views of the events from written memoirs of participants and we get the benefit of many official documents released in recent years. Best of all and most telling we now have Nixon's own words; his crazy ranting. You really get to see that the differences in politics today have been with us for a long time and actually are not as divisive today as there were then. You also see the results today of that Southern Strategy from Nixon's time that has shifted the Republican Party to the South.