Bradford Plumer: The Divided States of America
After the first-ever televised presidential debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and Sen. John F. Kennedy in 1960, a survey in Philadelphia famously found that TV viewers deemed Kennedy the winner, while radio listeners favored Nixon. In reality, the poll in question was shoddy and unreliable (even if Nixon’s sweaty, unshaven mug had looked gruesome on the small screen). But that didn’t matter to Nixon. The lesson he gleaned from defeat that year was that optics were everything, that he had to be far more ruthless about controlling his image from there on out.
And so he was. While staging his big political comeback in the 1968 Republican primary, Nixon scripted every campaign event, handpicking his audiences with the help of 28-year-old media strategist (and future Fox News head) Roger Ailes — and trounced his chief rival, Gov. George Romney, who naively believed that voters might like a little off-the-cuff candor. Later, Nixon would become the first president to hire a full-time communications director and told his economic advisers to work closely with public relations guru William Safire. Message first, policy second.
Still, Nixon’s mastery of the shiny surface of politics would’ve taken him only so far if he hadn’t also possessed another, less-noticed skill — a gift for reading the darker, subterranean moods of American voters. And it’s that aspect of Nixon that sits at the center of journalist Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland (Scribner), a rich new history of the 1960s that tries to pinpoint the origins of America’s rightward drift over the last four decades.
Once upon a time — say, late 1965 — it was possible to believe that American conservatism was two sweeps of the broom away from the dustbin of history. President Lyndon Johnson had just vaporized Rep. Barry Goldwater en route to re-election, and scores of new liberal Democrats had swept into Congress to enforce racial equality, expand healthcare and declare war on poverty.
Few pundits at the time realized, however, that beneath the surface, all the social upheavals of the ’60s were making vast swaths of Middle America susceptible to a new brand of right-wing cultural populism. It was Nixon, master of symbolism, reader of undercurrents, who knew exactly how to exploit this lurking resentment — and, in the process, redraw the nation’s electoral map.
Histories of the ’60s are hardly in short supply — the Watts riots, the Summer of Love, Attica, Kent State … familiar events, all. Even so, Nixonland manages to distinguish itself brilliantly. Perlstein’s talent for scene-setting, his cinematic style, serves to illustrate how the turmoil of the era would have actually looked and felt to the average American — showing, rather than just explaining, why so many in the “silent majority” became alienated from the reigning liberal consensus....
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And so he was. While staging his big political comeback in the 1968 Republican primary, Nixon scripted every campaign event, handpicking his audiences with the help of 28-year-old media strategist (and future Fox News head) Roger Ailes — and trounced his chief rival, Gov. George Romney, who naively believed that voters might like a little off-the-cuff candor. Later, Nixon would become the first president to hire a full-time communications director and told his economic advisers to work closely with public relations guru William Safire. Message first, policy second.
Still, Nixon’s mastery of the shiny surface of politics would’ve taken him only so far if he hadn’t also possessed another, less-noticed skill — a gift for reading the darker, subterranean moods of American voters. And it’s that aspect of Nixon that sits at the center of journalist Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland (Scribner), a rich new history of the 1960s that tries to pinpoint the origins of America’s rightward drift over the last four decades.
Once upon a time — say, late 1965 — it was possible to believe that American conservatism was two sweeps of the broom away from the dustbin of history. President Lyndon Johnson had just vaporized Rep. Barry Goldwater en route to re-election, and scores of new liberal Democrats had swept into Congress to enforce racial equality, expand healthcare and declare war on poverty.
Few pundits at the time realized, however, that beneath the surface, all the social upheavals of the ’60s were making vast swaths of Middle America susceptible to a new brand of right-wing cultural populism. It was Nixon, master of symbolism, reader of undercurrents, who knew exactly how to exploit this lurking resentment — and, in the process, redraw the nation’s electoral map.
Histories of the ’60s are hardly in short supply — the Watts riots, the Summer of Love, Attica, Kent State … familiar events, all. Even so, Nixonland manages to distinguish itself brilliantly. Perlstein’s talent for scene-setting, his cinematic style, serves to illustrate how the turmoil of the era would have actually looked and felt to the average American — showing, rather than just explaining, why so many in the “silent majority” became alienated from the reigning liberal consensus....