A Visit To Nixonland,Jason Maoz, <i>Senior Editor</i>

Rick Perlstein, an unabashed man of the left, first attracted wide notice seven years ago with the release of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, his engagingly written and fair-minded study of the rise of the American conservative movement in the 1950's and 1960's.

Last month brought the much-awaited publication of the second volume of Perlstein's projected trilogy on American conservatism. Nixonland (Scribner), as should be obvious from the title, focuses on American politics from the mid-1960's to the early 1970's, a time and an era dominated by Richard Nixon.

The Monitor asked Perlstein about the book and his perception of Nixon.

Monitor: Were you more sympathetic to Nixon or less so after writing the book?

Perlstein: Here I have to exercise the intellectual's classic cop-out and say: both. We all know about Nixon's reputation for iniquity. I kept finding myself yet more astonished at how bottomless this quality in him truly was. The example I keep coming back to is the revelation by Leonard Garment, in his 1997 memoir Crazy Rhythm, that as early as 1966 Nixon didn't believe the Vietnam War could be won militarily - even as, for the next seven years, he ruthlessly savaged any political opponent who dared say the same thing, even as 50,000 more American soldiers went to their deaths for this war he thought couldn't be won.

But on the other hand, there was rarely a week that went by when I didn't discover some hidden store of nobility in the man - in his courage, coolness under pressure, and especially, his refusal to back down under adversity.

My favorite example is his famous visit [as vice president] to Peru in 1958. He was set upon by a mob chanting calls for his death. What did he do? He waded into the mob, and managed to talk them down! Later on the same trip, the mob wielded stones, and attacked his limousine. Secret Service agents were ready to fire, but Nixon ordered them to holster their weapons, realizing that shots would only make the chaos worse.

As I point out in the book, that's "the kind of presence of mind for which battlefield commanders win medals." Not a bad quality for a commander-in-chief - until, that is, that same quality was turned to iniquity, as it so often was.

A few reviewers, while praising the book, were surprised that you neglected to look at the growth of conservatism as an intellectual force in the 1960's.

It wasn't intentional. The conservative movement, both intellectually and politically, formed the core of my first book. It drops out of the story in Nixonland. That's because Nixon was such a commanding presence in the Republican Party - much more a classic "great man" than Goldwater ever was - that he sucked the oxygen out of any other contender for its institutional control, whether conservative, liberal, or whatever.

I treat conservative Republicans, in the book, as Nixon did - just another constituency to be managed, neutralized, and bent to his will. They'll be back, though, in volume III, which will focus on the rise of Ronald Reagan.

How do you respond to reviewers who take issue with your thesis that the divisions of the late 1960's are still a salient fact of life in America some 40 years later?

It's a misunderstanding. Which is to say, it's my own fault: it's the author's responsibility to make himself understood, and I didn't do a good job making myself understood in the very short conclusion in which I make the claim that Nixonland "has not ended yet." I certainly don't mean the violence of the chaos dividing society now is as great as was the case in the 1960's; the opposite holds true, in fact. I mean that the violence and chaos then were so great -- and so skillfully manipulated by Richard Nixon in devising his core electoral appeal -- that they forged the language we still use to understand our own moment, even as those words no longer describe the reality on the ground. It has given Republican politics an ethereal, ghostly quality, as if Woodstock and Vietnam were the day before yesterday, and indeed, John McCain even ran a commercial contrasting Hillary Clinton's support of a Woodstock museum with his own wartime service in Vietnam!

Given what you know of Nixon and his times, had he won the presidency in 1960, would he have governed differently? Would he have been a better match for a relatively more placid and less jaded country, or, because character is destiny, would his demons eventually have emerged and destroyed his presidency?

Nixon ran a radically different campaign in 1960 than he did in 1968: it was middle-of-the-road and accommodationalist, with none of the law-and-order hullabaloo of 1968. If anything, he was derivative of Senator Kennedy, who outflanked Nixon to the right on foreign policy. The notion that he would have better been able to master his demons in, if you will, a less demonic time is certainly a notion I'd entertain. But as a historian, I try to stay alive to the radical complexity and contingency, so I hate counterfactuals.

As a historian who's been praised across the spectrum for giving a fair hearing to those whose politics differ from your own, would you care to speak to the double standard at play in the way Nixon and John Kennedy have been portrayed by most historians? Most Americans can recite Nixon's lies, quirks and malfeasances backward and forward, but Kennedy's derelictions and failures are usually glossed over, rationalized, placed "in context," etc.

I think forty-five years after the gauzy sentimentalities of "Camelot," have no problem reciting Kennedy's derelictions, be they sexual, tactical, or geostrategic. But I'd have to say his malfeasances, to estimate it quantitatively, are perhaps a tenth as serious as Nixon's, all told. It would be succumbing to a dangerous moral relativism to equate them.

As a man of the left, has your close study of the conservative movement - - more directly with the Goldwater book and now as sort of cultural backdrop to the Nixon book - changed your view of conservative ideas and politics? If so, how?

I see today's Republican Party, even though led by conservatives definitely ideologically to the right of Nixon, as much more the heir of Watergate than of Goldwater. It's fascinating to see how many of Nixon's unsavory henchmen-Fred Malek, who gladly counted up the number of Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics; Kenneth Rietz, who was in charge of passing on stolen documents from Edmund Muskie's 1972 campaign to the White House; Roger Stone, one of the Nixon campaign's notorious [operatives], went on to thrive in Republican politics up to the present. Malek is John McCain's finance co-chair; Rietz was fired from the RNC after his name came up in the Watergate hearings, then was hired by Ronald Regan in 1976 to run his presidential campaign in California, and went on to become a key advisor to Fred Thompson's presidential run last year; Stone, of course, remains a valued Republican jack-of-all-trades consultant.

Even more fascinating to me was the way Nixon, when he needed someone to lie and cheat for him, would often go first to a veteran of the conservative movement, because they were more likely to sympathize with his ends-justies-the-means morality. It's a puzzlement conservatives need to confront, and haven't. Once, when I outlined these connections, a leading conservative activist and author going back to the early 1960s, M. Stanton Evans, proudly proclaimed, "I didn't like Nixon until Watergate!"

What do you make of Nixon's strong support of Israel - James Rosen in his new biography of Nixon's attorney general John Mitchell notes that "Nixon may have been the first presidential candidate [in 1968] to call for the U.S. to guarantee Israeli military superiority" - and his appointment of several key Jewish advisers, given what we know of his anti-Semitic feelings?

Nixon's presidency was driven, of course, by an abiding obsession with foreign policy - by the dream of re-ordering the world into a more stable system of alliances that transcended the simple Cold War categories of good and evil. He was very unsentimental about this; to take one particularly disturbing example, he decided to look the other way in 1971 as Pakistan's dictator General Yahya Khan perpetrated a genocide in Bangladesh, because Kahn was Nixon's crucial go-between with China. I'm certain he saw Israel as just another chess piece in this grand geo-strategic game.

Jason Maoz can be reached at jmaoz@jewishpress.com

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A Visit To Nixonland , Jason Maoz, <i>Senior Editor</i>