Before the Storm is out of print

I finished Nixonland last night, and now I don’t have anything to read. People have been recommending things lately, and I’ve seen a couple of interesting book reviews, but I’m still on the fence. What I’d really like to read is Before the Storm, the book Rick Perlstein wrote before Nixonland, but it’s out of print… and it’s selling for $150 on Amazon and abebooks.com.

<gulp>

Who knew that a book published in 2001 could fetch so much?! According to my local bookstore, the publisher is bringing it back in softcover next year, but I wanna read it nooooow.

Anyhoo, Nixonland was fantastic, 740 pages of page-turning delight. It bogged down a bit towards the end as it turned away from the riveting figure of RN to the upright, largely decent but boring George McGovern. Nixon is so compellingly sick and twisted, it makes me want to hunt down a good psychobiography of the guy… evidently there are quite a few out there.

What’s absolutely incredible after reading this book is to hear Pat Buchanan say to the author during an interview: “How did [Nixon] cheat during the ‘72 election?”, as though it was a ridiculous assertion. Why is Pat Buchanan on television? How can he ask that question with a straight face?

Books I’m thinking about reading next:

• Kluge, about the evolution of the brain
• On Being Certain, epistemology is fun
• New Kings of Non-fiction, compiled by Ira Glass
• Nixon psychobiography… hm…
• Eleanor Roosevelt biography, but they all seem kinda long

It’s weird not having a book in my bag! Really I should probably just go back and re-read the Moral Animal… it was way too complex to absorb in one pass.

Update: Holy smokes, Rick just commented on my blog! The world seems very small sometimes. OK, off to find a copy of Fawn Brodie’s book…

Another delectable Nixonland morsel

This book just keeps getting better. Here the author’s discussing Daniel Ellsberg, who decided to leak the Pentagon Papers:

Ellsberg had lectured Henry Kissinger in that hotel room, lectured him about the narcotic effect of secrets: “It will become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have clearances. Because you’re thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know?’… you’ll become something like a moron… incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have.” Lyndon Johnson, after all, did it: “I’m just not in a position to know how much information each critic of my policy in Vietnam happens to have,” he’d say. “It makes me wish that all this information was available to everybody who is assuming responsibilities in this matter.” American Legion counterprotesters would say, “All of the sudden, you guys on the streets, you know more than the secretary of state.”

Well, Daniel Ellsberg did know more than the secretary of state. And by the time the Pentagon Papers were done at the beginning of 1969, it was driving him nearly insane. William Rogers and Melvin Laird had access to the Papers. But it hadn’t seemed to affect any of their recommendations.

…

Now every Vietnam lie was public.

I wonder when and if the Iraq War will have its Pentagon Papers Moment?  Would today’s media take that kind of risk? I guess you could argue that the NYT decision to print the story on Bush’s wiretaps was pretty brave, but it’s not quite in the same league…

A snippet of Nixonland

Hello ducklings.  The list of book reports I’d like to be writing now is long: The two Everest books, plus the US & genocide book and Matt Yglesias’ book… but lately I’ve been feeling more like reading than writing about reading. I’m enjoying the hell out of Nixonland, and can’t wait to get out of work so I can go home and read it.

But right now I’m stuck at work, so I’ll share a little snippet with you:

Amid it all, George Wallace preached defiance to the same symptoms as Nixon, with precisely the opposite remedy. Nixon appealed for quiet. Wallace said, “We need some meanness...”

…

Even some Wallace aides were frightened. “Now let’s get serious a minute,” the president of a Polish-American club told Wallace’s right-hand man, Tom Turnipseed, arranging a rally outside Webster, Massachusetts. “When George Wallace is elected president, he’s going to round up all the niggers and shoot them, isn’t he?” When the aide replied, laughing, “We’re just worried about some agitators. We’re not going to shoot anybody,” his host responded, with dead seriousness, “Well, I don’t know whether I’m for him or not.”

Seems like there’s a lot of nervous laughter in this book, as politicians and their associates ponder the forces they’re trying to harness and ride to power…

More news later. I hope to get through a lot of pages this weekend!