Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Nixonland begins in the blood and fire of the Watts riots-one week after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, and nine months after his historic landslide victory over Barry Goldwater seemed to have heralded a permanent liberal consensus. The next year scores of liberals were thrown out of Congress, America was more divided than ever-and a disgraced politician was on his way to a shocking comeback: Richard Nixon. Six years later, President Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and resentment borne of that blood and fire, was reelected in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's, and the outlines of today's politics of red-and-blue division became already distinct. 

Cataclysms tell the story of Nixonland: 

• Angry blacks burning down their neighborhoods, while suburbanites defend home and hearth with shotguns. 

• The civil war over Vietnam, the assassinations, the riot at the Democratic National Convention. 

• Richard Nixon acceding to the presidency pledging a new dawn of national unity--and governing more divisively than any before him. 

• The rise of twin cultures of left- and right-wing vigilantes, Americans literally bombing and cutting each other 
 down in the streets over political differences.

•And, finally, Watergate, the fruit of a president who rose by matching his own anxieties and dreads with those of an increasingly frightened electorate--but whose anxieties and dreads produced a criminal conspiracy in the Oval Office.