One of Us

"And he knows how to conjure the characters you’ve never heard of as well as the ones you expect. Not only Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden and the rest of the Chicago Seven defendants, but Thomas Aquinas Foran, one of the prose­cutors in the case, a pal of (the by-now-murdered) Bobby Kennedy and a living embodiment of backlash. Not only John Lindsay, the media darling whose disastrous mayoralty helped run New York City into a ditch—Perlstein quotes a New York Times op-ed describing Central Park under Lindsay as 'a combination of decadence and barbarism; a cut-rate FelliniSatyricon'—but Barry Gray, the father of talk radio, who had crusaded against McCarthyism in the ’50s but attacked Lindsay from the right over law and order when the mayor, amid riots, tried to impose a Civilian Complaint Review Board on the NYPD. Not just George McGovern, who chaired the commission that took the Democratic Party away from the union leaders and urban bosses, but Fred Dutton, the commission intellectual who envisioned a new Democratic coalition shorn of blue-collar reactionaries and anchored by the votes of minorities and newly enfranchised 20-somethings."

In The Atlantic, Ross Douthat has an early review of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

Thomas J. Sugrue reviews the book in The Nation.