What is a grown-up to think of an author who characterizes Nixon’s father as a “dirty-necked, lusty spitfire” who affected a “peacock sense of superiority” dismisses Bill Safire as a “flack,” Strom Thurmond as a “dirty-neck,” and Ronald Reagan as a “hypocrite” and “demagogic moralizer” and refers to Bobby Kennedy as “Senator Love Beads”? This sort of language may be pitch-perfect for a duet with Keith Olbermann on Countdown but is hardly appropriate for an allegedly serious work of history. Tone is a good measure of seriousness…and of good faith.
It is, as my mother would have said, “smart-alecky.” George Will has characterized it as “snarky.” There is, for example, the matter of tone. Beating up on Richard Nixon is a widely lauded bipartisan enterprise, and Perlstein is an unrelenting and remorseless Nixon basher.Įven otherwise friendly reviewers have, however, noted certain problems with the book.He is occasionally clear-eyed about the arrogance, fool hardiness, and/or perniciousness of the contending forces this is so unusual among chroniclers of the period that he succeeds in establishing a degree of credibility which, unfortunately, is not justified by a close reading of the text by anyone who actually lived through the period. The political class has a vested interest in the 1960s, which spawned many of the most contentious ideas with which it is currently preoccupied, and ideologues across the political spectrum have dogs in the fights that Perlstein recounts with such gusto.Perlstein’s narrative style-fast-moving, bombastic, and heavily anecdotal-has dramatic flair Perlstein is, as Dominic Sandbrook noted in the Telegraph, “a gifted and exciting storyteller.”.
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