![]() And just as Nixon’s paranoid mind was fed by the turbulence of the 1960s, so that paranoia has escaped history and now imprisons all of us a half a century later. Indeed, according to Boyle, the United States remains imprisoned inside that witch-like Nixonian brew of small-town hysteria, dog-whistling racism and conspiratorial obsession with imaginary crime and all-too-real punishment. The heart of Nixonland is an account of the dysfunctional triangular relationship between Middle America, the news media and that bitter but endlessly creative Californian who lost his bid for. While Germany might be free of the Stasi, America has yet to rid itself of Richard Nixon. And sometimes, as the Northwestern University historian Kevin Boyle argued this week about the politics of contemporary America, we are imprisoned inside the paranoid mind of a long-dead president whose tenure was defined by his own noxious web of secrets and lies.Ģ1st-century America, Boyle explained, is haunted by the singularly secretive and deceitful mind of Richard Nixon-an American president with a Stasi-like curiosity in the lives of others. Perlstein, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, provides a compelling account of Richard Nixon as a masterful harvester of negative energy. ![]() ![]() Sometimes, as the Cold War novelist Dan Fesperman explained on Keen On about life in East Germany, we are locked inside a Stasi-like web of secrets and lies. Nixonland The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. ![]()
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