Winston’s Way with Words

On the day that changed everything, September 11, 2001, then New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani seized the moment and guided that most unmanageable of all municipalities through its unsurpassed dark day. When the mayor reached the point of exhaustion in the early...

Still Scapegoating After All These Years

Republicans are comparing Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter.  Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s domestic policy adviser, claims that Carter does not deserve blame for the malaise of the late 1970s.  He says: “What led to the economic problems was the built-in inflation,...

Who’s Mr. Conservative: Reagan or Nixon?

That is the query Barron YoungSmith, an intern at The New Republic, poses at the magazine’s website this week.  (YoungSmith is a 2006 Brown University graduate, incidentally.  And some people were amazed that 39-year-old Rick Perlstein was fascinated enough by...

Conrad Black on “Nixonland”

Countering Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, RN biographer Conrad Black argues that RN won in 1972 not because he was a good polarizer but because he was a good President: It is not mentioned that only Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in more...

RN and the African-American Vote

John Mitchell biographer James Rosen on a Nixon benchmark to which Sen. McCain may hope to attain: [I]t was…Nixon, that most complex psychological character, who earned more of the black vote — 32% in his 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy — than any GOP nominee of...

Southern Strategy: Myth and Reality

Now that the general election campaign has started, there is a great deal of talk about the GOP’s “Southern Strategy.” Many accounts say that the strategy was responsible for electing Nixon in 1968 and thus became the template for Republican...