Tim Combes’s Reviews > Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America > Status Update

“The youth’s new slogan [RFK] wrote… was ‘escalation without participation’—or at any rate without *me*. This was something Richard Nixon, with his gift for looking below social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean truths that broiled underneath, understood. The future belonged to the politician who could tap the ambivalence, the nameless dread, the urge to make it all go away…”

I’m flying through this.

Crazy that a 900 page (or 37 hour, in my case) book on the 60s by way of Nixon should be “burn burner”… but alas it is

Ram Dass cameo

This comes out the gate so much stronger than Before the Storm, and I loved Before The Storm.

Nixon is just so much more compelling than Goldwater. And Before The Storm also had the tough job of tying together all the nascent threads that would one day elect Reagan. Which is interesting, but not always riveting.