Quotes from Rick Perlstein

Perlstein says a movement gives you a chance, "to make anger boiling inside you ennobling, productive, powerful, instead of embittering.

People did what conservatives always did when the going got tough: they started a new group.

Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB (ad men) found nothing to lament and the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to KNOW about a product, which in this case happens to be a human being, in half a minute – the speed not of thought but of emotion.

The ideal politician is an ordinary representative of his class with extraordinary abilities.

They campaigned on contempt for the body they sought to join.

Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.

Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not. How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.

Now even reformers needed political machines.

Nixon was becoming a discombobulated president, politically on the run. His interior secretary, Walter Hickel, posted a letter to the president that leaked to the Washington Star: "Youth in its protest must be heard." Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were all young people in their day, Hickel argued; their "protests fell on deaf ears and finally led to war." (The president's response was to bulldoze the White House tennis court, beloved of Hickel.)

They reported how when he took over as president of Phoenix Country Club in 1949, he said if they didn't allow his friend Harry Rosenzweig to join he would blackball every name. Rosenzweig became the first Jew the club ever admitted. Left out of the tale was that another Jew wasn't allowed in for a decade.

Politics is motion." John Sears

Must, never, must avoid, must guard: the minatory commands came the eleven times (from the departing Eisenhower). In contrast, Kennedy's rhetoric on January 20 with a cascade of permissions: the word "let" rang out 14 times.

With the best of intentions, the reformers conflated what savage cops did in the streets with the backroom deal-making that wired the convention for Hubert Humphrey—just as Mayor Daley's police tarred peaceful McCarthy campaign bureaucrats with the rampages of the revolutionary left.

Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon

Congressmen had a use for their very own son of a bitch.

So Newark had the highest percentage of substandard housing of any American city: 7,097 units had no flush toilets; 28,795, no heaters. Twenty-eight babies died in a diarrhea epidemic in 1965, eighteen of them at City Hospital, which was also infested by bats.

insistent opening bark of the UPI's Helen Thomas:

In Texas, the lies wore cowboy boots.

This kid assumed an alias, volunteered for the campaign, stole the candidate's stationery, and distributed a thousand fake invitations—they promised "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing"—at communes, rock concerts, and street corners where Chicago's drunken hoboes congregated. The kid's name was Karl Rove. The RNC soon hired him at $9,200 a year to give seminars on his techniques.

How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.

all alone to endorse Goldwater without a fight. "Fanatics of the Birch variety have fastened their fangs on the Republican Party's flanks," Nelligan told reporters, "and are hanging on like grim death.

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

The main character in Nixonland is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name--but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.

The supposed American consensus had always been clouded. The experts had just become expert at ignoring the clouds.