Nixonland

Richard Milhous Nixon has been called the Darth Vader of American politics, a disgraced figure who still casts an enormous shadow on our public life. Of course, much of the story of the Nixon presidency is familiar, but Rick Perlstein does much more than rehash stories of the Watergate break-in and enemy lists. Instead, Nixonland describes how the two-term Republican president used urban riots, antiwar protests, and counterculture rebellion to accent his own platform of old-fashioned American values, law and order, and demonstrative patriotism. Perlstein doesn't regard this as distant history: He notes that George H. W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld all burst onto the scene during the Nixon administration.