Nixonland Redux
I have finally come to the last few pages of “Nixonland”. It has been quite a chore at times: Blow-by-blow accounts of the ‘68 and ‘72 political party conventions are fascinating in their way. I can’t knock it, but my interest flagged regularly. I guess I thought the book would end much later than it does, and I was fooled into thinking it would therefore move a little faster to cover all that ground.
Still, I didn’t know that much about Nixon’s early career - and his involvement in the McCarthyite communist witch hunt. And all the bad things about Nixon I did know were largely second hand. Or worse - just vague memories of other people’s opinions.
The book isn’t really about Nixon, though… It’s about a brand of cynical politics that polarized a nation. In many ways it reminds me of the tales of the early days of computer security: People could legitimately wonder why anybody would deliberately attack a computer network. In retrospect it seems naive to forgo paranoid levels of protection. When you can’t even identify the cause of a problem, or you’re too embarrassed to disclose that anything even happened, it’s hard to concentrate on normal business.
Posted by Evan Bittner Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:06:00 GMT
