We spent April and May 2025 slowly working our way through Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008). It is 750 pages of dense political history covering roughly 1965 to 1972 - from the Watts riots through Nixon's re-election - and it is the second book in Perlstein's four-volume history of American conservatism.
Full notes on the wiki: Nixonland.
What The Book Actually Is
The title is misleading. Nixonland is not really a biography of Richard Nixon. Nixon is the frame - his loss in 1960, his loss in 1962, his political resurrection, his 1968 victory, his first term, his 1972 landslide - but the book is about the country around him. It is about how a nation that voted for Lyndon Johnson in a landslide in 1964 voted for Nixon in a landslide in 1972.
Perlstein's argument, compressed brutally: the disintegration of the New Deal Democratic coalition was driven less by policy failure than by cultural conflict, and Nixon's genius was recognizing early that the resentments of white middle-class voters at what they saw as the excesses of the counterculture, the civil rights movement, and liberal elites could be organized into a durable political majority. Everything Nixon did in office - the Southern Strategy, the silent majority speeches, the culture war framing, the paranoid style, the enemies list - was in service of that recognition.
Perlstein clearly sees the Nixon coalition as a tragedy for American politics. But his account of how Nixon built it is scrupulously detailed and painfully accurate.
Structure
The book has four Books (parts), each covering roughly two years:
- Book I (1965-1967): The Watts riots, the rise of Reagan in California, the long hot summers, and the collapse of the LBJ consensus
- Book II (1967-1968): The 1968 campaign - Tet, LBJ's withdrawal, RFK's assassination, MLK's assassination, the Chicago convention, and Nixon's narrow victory
- Book III (1969-1970): Nixon's first two years - Vietnam, Cambodia, Kent State, the polarization, the culture war getting organized
- Book IV (1971-1972): The lead-up to the 1972 landslide - George Wallace, the Democratic primary chaos, McGovern's nomination, the sabotage operations that would become Watergate
Every chapter is worth reading. The pacing gets faster as the book goes on - Book I is a long buildup, Book IV is a chaotic sprint.
Favorite Chapters
Chapter 5: Long, Hot Summer. The 1965 Watts riots, and Perlstein's argument that this was the moment the Democratic Party's Northern white base started to fracture. The riots were shocking - to Californians who thought the racial politics of the South did not apply to them, to Northern liberals who thought the Civil Rights Act had solved the problem, and to Black Americans who watched their neighborhood burn while the National Guard occupied it. Nothing was the same after Watts.
Chapter 15: Wednesday, August 28, 1968. The night of the Chicago police riot at the Democratic National Convention. Perlstein's account of that day is journalism at its best - hour-by-hour, with enough context that you understand not just what happened but what each side thought was happening. The image that the country took away - hippies in Grant Park, police clubbing them on live TV, the convention nominating Humphrey in the middle of the chaos - was the Democratic Party losing its future.
Chapter 30: The Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and George Wallace. The title juxtaposes the two founding icons of the Democratic Party with George Wallace, who was making a serious run at the 1972 Democratic nomination on a platform that was recognizably a throwback to the segregationist South. The chapter is about the identity crisis this produced. Wallace had a real constituency - white working-class voters, especially in the South and the outer suburbs of Northern cities, who felt abandoned by the national Democratic Party. The Democratic establishment eventually settled on the strategy of clearing the field for McGovern, on the theory that McGovern would be the easiest opponent for Nixon to beat. They were right about McGovern being easy to beat, and it did not help them.
Chapter 32: Celebrities. The chapter on the strange celebrity-politician overlap of the 1972 campaign - Warren Beatty raising money for McGovern, John Wayne stumping for Nixon, the music-industry mobilization for both sides. Perlstein uses it to make the point that mass media had transformed political campaigns into a hybrid of policy fight and cultural performance, and Nixon's team understood this better than McGovern's did.
The Wallace Chapter Is the Key
Chpater 30 gets our vote for the most illuminating chapter of the book. The reason is that Wallace exposes the whole logic of the political realignment Perlstein is describing.
Wallace was not a Republican. He was a lifelong Democrat, running in the 1972 Democratic primary. His base was traditional Democratic voters - white Southerners, white working-class voters in the industrial North, union members. His platform was populist: protectionist on trade, hawkish on Vietnam, savagely opposed to busing and to the cultural changes of the 1960s.
When Wallace won primaries in Michigan and Maryland in 1972, it was clear that a significant portion of the Democratic base wanted what he was selling. But the national Democratic Party had committed to a different vision - the McGovern coalition of professionals, young voters, minorities, and cultural liberals. Those two visions were incompatible. Wallace was shot in Maryland in May 1972 and dropped out. The Wallace voters did not just go home. Many of them voted for Nixon that November.
The core Nixon strategy, Perlstein argues, was to keep the Wallace voters in the Republican coalition permanently. He succeeded. The realignment took another decade or two to fully resolve, but the shape of it - the Republican Party becoming the party of culturally conservative white working-class voters, the Democratic Party becoming the party of cosmopolitan educated professionals - was visible by 1972.
Everything about American politics for the last 50 years has been downstream of this realignment. If you want to understand why American politics looks the way it does now, Nixonland is where that story starts.
What This Book Is Not
Nixonland is not:
- A biography of Nixon (there are better ones - John Farrell's Richard Nixon: The Life is the current standard)
- A history of Watergate (Perlstein covers it briefly at the end, but the whole scandal properly belongs to Perlstein's next volume, The Invisible Bridge)
- A neutral academic history (Perlstein has a clear point of view)
- Short (it is 750 pages, and it takes as long as it needs)
What it is: the definitive book on the political and cultural disintegration of the 1960s, and the definitive book on how the Nixon coalition was built. Both of those things are worth understanding.
Reading Order
Perlstein's four-volume history:
- Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001) - covers 1960-1964
- Nixonland (2008) - covers 1965-1972
- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (2014) - covers 1973-1976
- Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 (2020) - covers 1976-1980
Total page count for all four: over 3,000 pages. This is a commitment. But it is one of the best accounts of American politics (with a 10,000 foot view) from 1960 to 1980 that we have found. Perlstein's voice is sharp and opinionated but also highly enjoyable and hard to match.
Companion Reading
Other reading in a similar vein:
- Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson (5 vols.). Covers the same period from a very different angle - LBJ's biography. Volume 4, The Passage of Power, and the not-yet-published Volume 5 cover the years Perlstein covers.
References
Wiki:
- Our wiki notes on Nixonland: Nixonland
- Our wiki notes on the sequel, The Invisible Bridge: Nixonland
Blog posts:
- Companion post on political theory: Reading Hobbes's Leviathan
Books:
- Perlstein, Rick. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Scribner, 2008.