Herein emergeth both “Nixon the Loser” and “The New Nixon” (same as the old Nixon, but with embedded viral marketing). What say y’all?
Have to admit, this is also where Perlstein starts to run crossgrain to my own prejudices:
Went one of the Stevenson/Galbraith jeremiads… “Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.”
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Of course, saying a President Nixon would unleash the bomb was also slander and scare, and spared not the innuendo. Adlai Stevenson and his learned speechwriter had coined a useful word, Nixonland. They just did not grasp its full resonance. They described themselves outside its boundaries. Actually, they were citizens in good standing… [I]t only stood to reason that if you believed your opponent was neither sensible nor sober and would do anything to win, and that his victory would destroy civlization, a certain insobriety was permissible to beat him.
I have no opinion of Adlai Stevenson (which is the way my people say: I have a conviction that Stevenson is too minor a character to bother having an opinion about), but I would argue that Galbraith was indisbutably correct to assert that “Nixonland” was (is) a sociological construct in opposition to all that is best and decent behind the concept of “America”. Of course, this is because I’ve spent my entire life on the Galbraithian side of the divide… and I blame the Stench Artists Nixonians for its very existence…