Divide and Conquer
We all know Nixon was nasty. A stunning new book argues that he was also the grandfather of today's politics of hate.
Evan Thomas
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: May 9, 2008
On Aug. 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing African-Americans the right to participate in the political process. Five nights later, Watts, the mostly black neighborhood of Los Angeles, erupted into rioting. For four days angry, young men ran wild, looting and torching buildings, shouting, "Burn, baby, burn!" LBJ was stunned by the hatred of the rioters. "How is it possible after all we accomplished?" the president cried in anguish. "How could it be? Is the world topsy-turvy?" The 1960s were supposed to be a new Age of Reason—"These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem," Johnson declared as he lit the White House Christmas tree after winning in a landslide election in 1964.
But Watts was just the beginning: in dozens of cities, race riots (so severe in Detroit in 1967 that the president had to send in the 82nd Airborne); LSD-dropping college students calling cops "pigs" and taking over college-administration buildings; Yippie leader Jerry Rubin telling kids they needed to be prepared to "kill your parents." By the end of the decade Johnson was in exile, and America, it seemed, had become a strange dystopia, decadent and almost prerevolutionary in its feverish discontent.
The establishment press had been flummoxed by it all. In 1966, the pundits were sure that the Republican Party would pick a reasonable, moderate candidate, someone with a little Kennedyesque charisma like Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, or maybe New York City's attractive young mayor, John Lindsay. None of the pundits imagined that Richard Nixon, the sweaty, shifty-eyed loser to JFK in 1960, could take the GOP nomination. "It simply couldn't be Nixon," writes Rick Perlstein, whose sprawling, vivid "Nixonland" is the best book written about the 1960s since George Plimpton and Jean Stein published "Edie," their oral-history collection about Andy Warhol's "it" girl, in 1982. The Walter Lippmanns and Joe Alsops and all the Harvards of the Georgetown set were stuck in their own "echo chamber," writes Perlstein. "They were men who hardly noticed the ideological ground shifting under their feet."
(Continued here.)
Evan Thomas
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: May 9, 2008
On Aug. 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing African-Americans the right to participate in the political process. Five nights later, Watts, the mostly black neighborhood of Los Angeles, erupted into rioting. For four days angry, young men ran wild, looting and torching buildings, shouting, "Burn, baby, burn!" LBJ was stunned by the hatred of the rioters. "How is it possible after all we accomplished?" the president cried in anguish. "How could it be? Is the world topsy-turvy?" The 1960s were supposed to be a new Age of Reason—"These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem," Johnson declared as he lit the White House Christmas tree after winning in a landslide election in 1964.
But Watts was just the beginning: in dozens of cities, race riots (so severe in Detroit in 1967 that the president had to send in the 82nd Airborne); LSD-dropping college students calling cops "pigs" and taking over college-administration buildings; Yippie leader Jerry Rubin telling kids they needed to be prepared to "kill your parents." By the end of the decade Johnson was in exile, and America, it seemed, had become a strange dystopia, decadent and almost prerevolutionary in its feverish discontent.
The establishment press had been flummoxed by it all. In 1966, the pundits were sure that the Republican Party would pick a reasonable, moderate candidate, someone with a little Kennedyesque charisma like Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York, or maybe New York City's attractive young mayor, John Lindsay. None of the pundits imagined that Richard Nixon, the sweaty, shifty-eyed loser to JFK in 1960, could take the GOP nomination. "It simply couldn't be Nixon," writes Rick Perlstein, whose sprawling, vivid "Nixonland" is the best book written about the 1960s since George Plimpton and Jean Stein published "Edie," their oral-history collection about Andy Warhol's "it" girl, in 1982. The Walter Lippmanns and Joe Alsops and all the Harvards of the Georgetown set were stuck in their own "echo chamber," writes Perlstein. "They were men who hardly noticed the ideological ground shifting under their feet."
(Continued here.)
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