The “law and order” issue may have been introduced by Ronald Reagan, during his successful run for California governor in 1966, but Nixon was able to use it to his advantage in the ’68 Presidential race. After the topsy-turvy years of the urban riots, civil rights marches, and college anti-war protests, many northern whites had also thought things had gone too far. Southern leaders, led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, were resisting integration of schools and housing. The South, as well as white, blue-collar labor nation-wide, were key Democratic blocs that began to desert them for the Republicans during this period. Perlstein’s implicit thesis is that white backlash against the Kennedy/Johnson Great Society initiatives brought America the return of Nixon. The book certainly serves to show, perhaps as well as a book can do, what the political/cultural environment of its period was like. Nixonland tries to answer the question of how things changed so much in such a short period. Perlstein’s narrative is sweeping, colorful and dense as it covers the American political and cultural terrain from LBJ’s liberal landslide in 1964, through Nixon’s comeback in ’68, and landslide re-election in ’72. Nixonland reads like a tragi-hilarious movie reel of the Sixties.
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