He said, ironically in retrospect, that “no one is above the law and nobody is below the law and Americans are going to need to remember that if we’re going to have law and order.” As we saw in Chapter 16, rather than healing the divisive fractures of the 1960s, Nixon cleverly manipulated divisiveness to his advantage, further refining the age-old “politics of grievance.” In the words of historian/journalist Rick Perlstein, Nixon “co-opted the liberals’ populism, channeling it into rage at the sophisticates, the well-born, the best circles.’”

Co-opting George Wallace’s appeals to white middle America, the Californian promised the “ silent majority” watching the chaos of the 1960s unfold on TV that he’d clean up the country. Their candidate, Hubert Humphrey, pledged to stay the course in Vietnam and lost to Republican Richard Nixon, who rebounded from his loss to John Kennedy in 1960. George Mason, Objections to the Constitution, ĭemocrats struggled to present a coherent platform after their disorganized 1968 Chicago Convention. To that ability, of course, Nixon added a sociopathic disregard for truthfulness and legality that would make Ariel Sharon look like an honest man.“The President of the United States has the unrestrained power of granting pardon for treason which may be sometimes exercised to screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt.” That was the emotional basis for Nixon’s ability to unite everyone who felt excluded by the exuberance and anger and hope of the ’60s, who felt assaulted and threatened by the changes. Perlstein describes Nixon in similar terms: Someone who from boyhood onward felt that the elite looked down on him, that he was out of fashion through no fault of his own, and who managed to fuse the anger of all the others who felt left out into a political movement. His politics deepened all the divisions in Israel, and we suffer for it till today. His resentment was pitch perfect for those Israelis who felt the country’s elite had denied them respect. Menachem Begin saw himself as unjustly ostracized and excluded from power.

It was the crippled Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, who could tell a crippled America there was nothing to fear.” Sometimes a leader can uplift for this reason sometimes he or she can release a bitter flood.

Perlstein's portrayal of the relation between Nixon's inner furies and the political furies of the 1960s and early '70s bear out a thesis I've argued in the past : Some leaders succeed because their “…personal struggles resonated powerfully and subliminally with a wide public. I've just finished reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, an impressive depressing portrait of my native country in the years just before I decided to move to South Jerusalem.