That meant everybody which might stop a second term must be squashed. This is where the illegal stuff came in. Which as you know, if the President does it, that means it’s not illegal. Right? Right. So he won in 72, a gigantic landslide, 49 states. But Republicans still couldn’t get into Congress. The story of 72 was that Americans still liked Democrats EXCEPT McGovern.

His point is that when Trump “keeps doing things proven unpopular to all but the fascistically inclined, maybe he sees his audience as the fascistically inclined – those more useful to him for keeping permanent power than mere voters”. a) Vietnam – its immorality became too painful, the American dead unignorable – 50,000 by 1970; and the draft meant that YOU or your son might be next up He sums up three decades’ worth of Holly­wood political activism in one tone-deaf Warren Beatty remark from 1972: “A great deal of the leadership of this generation comes from music and film people, whether people like that fact or not.” He captures the essence of Richard Nixon’s career in a single aside to Leonard Garment: “You’ll never make it in politics, Len. You just don’t know how to lie.” Within 24 hours the White House got 100,000 telegrams, calls and letters, 100 to 1 for Calley’s release. P556

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Between 1965 and 1972 America experienced a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know today was born.

After Nixonland came out,” Perlstein says, Stone “came out with one of his books about Nixon [and] basically proposed that we go on tour together: ‘We can sell a lot of books and make a lot of money.’ At the time he was very adamant he was no longer a Republican. He was running for the Senate, I believe, from Florida as a Libertarian. The depths of his attention-starved behavior. . I put Perlstein’s Nixonland on my "to read" shelf, after I read a very effective and thorough review of the book in the September 1/8, 2010, edition of The Nation. Perstein's book is a must-read for any one interested in the Republican Party's calculated obliteration of whatever tatters and remnants of New World democracy still informed the American polity during the years that Perlstein examines. The one that’s the simplest is it’s a patriotic and humane act to say that the person who has in their possession the sole authority to launch a nuclear strike is not a responsible person. That’s the simplest thing and good for them. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.Short of destroying the entire country and its people, we cannot eliminate the enemy force in Vietnam by military means. Reported in the New York Times, October 1968. P423

A supplemental review! - this is just some of my favourite outrageous quotes from Mr Perlstein and his mostly less than merry pranksters - starting with a jarring fact I found quite jaw-dropping: Asking huge questions about American identity that are just as relevant now, is a powerful look at the lasting legacy of Nixon’s era. It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top. You find you can’t stop playing the game the way you’ve always played it or because it is part of you and you need it as much as an arm or a leg… You continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance. P460 As we all know, the sixties was in part the story of the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the New Left, the anti-war movement, the counterculture, and the hippies. These public and disruptive protests antagonized the social conservatives of society. Nixon capitalized on this resentment by convincing people that this resentment, though not visible, not heard, was in fact, the real majority, the real America. The angry masses of demonstrators didn’t really represent you, the average, law-abiding, patriotic, hardworking middle-class American. With great success, Nixon positioned himself in such a way to draw the line, intensify, and capitalize on the culture wars:

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And just when you think – oww, my mind is obliterated, this is death by facts – along comes something you actually always wanted to know about, and how it fit in to the 60s, Attica, Soledad, Angela Davis, Jerry Rubin, all those half-heard names. Here they all are, bawling in your ear, dancing in your face. Perlstein is frequently cited these days by middlebrow political commentators in the us as someone with his finger supposedly on the pulse of history.A self-identified left-liberal Democrat—useless though such terms are as political locators in a talk-radio grading system that slots Teddy Kennedy in as a Spartacist—Perlstein contributed a long and rather laboured essay for the Summer 2004 issue of the Boston Review on what the Democrats should do. It added up to a vague call for return to some sort of fdr programme. Nixonland, then, offers historical grounding for these sympathies; appropriately enough, its title comes from words spoken by Adlai Stevenson on the campaign trail in 1956: A must read for anyone who wants to understand late 20th century history. My only quibble is that Perlstein stopped with the election of 1972, and did not bring it forward to the more fun and amazing Watergate scandal times of 1973 and 1974, when we all watched the hearings and marveled at Sam Ervin ("I'm just an old country lawyer") digging up things we could not believe. The Pentagon claimed what civilian casualties there were [in Vietnam] came from the Communists’ deliberate emplacement of surface-to-air missiles in populated areas. P 196 Is Perlstein’s vision true? Is it fully reliable? That’s for the readers to judge. I admit I was a bit dismayed that the author has not even tried to remain objective. Oh, I know objectivity is an impossible goal, particularly in social sciences and humanities, but it is one I feel we should all strive for. From history books I expect at least that – some effort, some endeavor for objective assessment, at least an attempt at balanced depiction of events and people. In this regard, Perlstein unfortunately fails, big time – and it looks as if he wasn’t ever considering trying not to fail. He approaches his subject with an emotionally charged opinion, and he portrays different aspects of the times with that opinion foremost in his mind. And because he hates Nixon’s guts, his book is quite amusing. It’s more a case of a laughter through tears, to be fair, but nevertheless makes for an entertaining (like horror can be entertaining) read.

In President Nixon: Alone In The White House, Richard Reeves illuminates a presidency that was doomed from the start. Utilising new interviews and recently declassified source material, he explores how Nixon’s office was one of the most corrupt and suspicion-driven offices in US history. It speaks to what is most profound to me, which is basically contributing to a civic conversation about this nation and its prospects. I write it as an American for Americans.” I mean, do you take the good with the bad? Do you throw out the baby with the bathwater? Ronald Reagan always said a half-loaf is better than no loaf. Perlstein also presents a broader overview of the cultural and political turmoil in 1960s America, including the 1968 Democratic Convention, but, as the book ends with Nixon's reelection in 1972, only peripherally covers Watergate. Perlstein was born in 1969, the first year of the Nixon presidency. He writes, however, like he was in the middle of it. His narrative is lively, ironic, and ultimately, depressing. The country, in the years since, has not progressed but regressed. Nixon, in retrospect, looks like a wise man. Despite his "enemies list" he seems a civil libertarian compared to what we have now. Surely he is responsible for the beginnings of what American politics have descended into, but other, more skilled practitioners have dug the hole far deeper than Milhouse could ever have dreamed.

Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving . . . This is Nixonland. America is something different. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. You know, I would have six or seven or eight different strands to think about, kind of untangling that. This isn’t a presidential biography or political essay--it’s a painting--a mural--of the political culture of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s indispensable for a person like me that didn’t live through it. The storytelling and analysis cuts through all of the cliches, the iconography, the superficial and reductionist history books. And damn, is it entertaining! Perlstein never abandons the reader--he never strays too far, never becomes redundant, never bores with unessential details. The thing is, he makes all details feel essential! In Before the Storm, Perlstein positioned Goldwater’s doomed White House bid as a starting point of a crusade. Though he lost badly, his grassroots support – in terms of small-dollar donations – had been strong.