Nixonland

For my bathroom reading, I have Rick Perlstein's Nixonland. For the most part the book is awful: its idea of history is essentially to summarize what was in the newspapers at the time. And it also imagines news sources like Time and Newsweek to be objective, non-ideological venues, while it pretends that pundits of the time somehow offered mostly legitimate analyses of contemporary events. As many of the participants in the events it covers are still alive, it is incomprehensible why the author was unwilling or unable to interview them. Ultimately, like a bad student essay, it takes a self-evident thesis (the country was divided into irreconcilable right and left wings in the late 1960s and early 1970) and pretends that it is original. Its one redeeming virtue is to remind me of the psychopathic nature of Richard Nixon and his minions. For a while there, George Bush the 2nd had me pining for the good old days of Nixon, as his utter stupidity made Nixon look almost competant, even sane. Yet the moment that Nixon was ensconced in the White House, he already manifested his deep paranoia. I recall that people like Nixon--and before him Robert McNamara--were my enemies: anyone who wants to kill you is your enemy. It doesn't matter if they have a gun out pointing at you or they want to draft you and send you thousands of miles away to be killed--they're still your enemy.