Far From Brooklyn

Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein

When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn in the summer of 1967, I remember thinking that Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, and the Temptations might save my life – literally.  I was eight years old and I thought maybe if the rioting in Bed-Stuy spread to my tony but nearby neighborhood I could display my Motown 45s in the front window to show that I was one of the good guys.  I wondered also if some dispensation might be made because it so happened that several of my very good friends were black.

“Nixonland” helped me remember and understand why I felt that way. As a portrait of racially divided America in the early 1960s – and the ferocious rage on either side of the divide – the book is a nice corrective to the more sanctified/sanctimonious recollections of peace marches, nonviolent resistance, and the summer of love.

It’s easy to forget that America, and especially urban America, was a crazy-ass place in the ‘60s.

While this book is mainly the story of America in the 1960s and 1970s, reflected through the rise and fall and rise and fall of Richard Nixon, it’s also a compelling catalog of the atrocious conditions of America’s cities in the 1960s. Consider: more than 7,000 tenement apartments in Newark had no flush toilets in 1965; nearly 30,000 units had no heat. Dozens of babies died in a diarrhea epidemics, many of them while in the care of the main city hospital. Much (or at least a good part) of the police force was little better than a sanctioned gang of criminals.

Rick Perlstein so meticulously catalogs the swinish racism that governed so much of America at the time that you can’t help but feel the radical stirring in your soul, waiting to bust out a black power symbol.  But he doesn’t gloss over the violence of radicalized blacks of the age.  He recounts a scene at a community meeting run by a respected black minister who appeals for people to stay off the streets after a wave of rioting in Watts.  Then a “kid” steps up to the microphone and says, “We, the Negro people down here, have got completely fed up… You know where [the rioters] goin’? They after the white people.  They gonna congragate, they gonna caravan out to Inglewood, to Marina Del Rey and everywhere else the white man’s gonna stay.  They gonna do the white man in tonight.”

Kumbaya, baby.

And just re-reading that little speech recalls the local Italian butcher around the corner from my childhood home.  He informed my mother that he and his neighbors took turns standing armed guard atop their homes in the all-Italian neighborhood that was not a mile away from there.

This is not of course what “Nixonland” is all about – really it’s about Richard Nixon’s weird political jujitsu skills, his ability to take advantage of the era’s rage and somehow channel it to his advantage, and it’s about the fracturing moderate center of political America and violent yo-yo-ing we have experienced ever since….

… but you take from books what they give, however they are given, and in this case, for me, the takeaway was a reminder of a small part of what it was like to grow in Brooklyn in the late 1960s, to be a generally happy kid playing stoop ball and singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at my Quaker school’s assembly, and to remember that not so long ago, not long at all, it was basically acceptable to say that you planned to to stand watch on your roof to shoot at black people who might come into your neighborhood; it was basically acceptable for the Los Angeles police to adopt the Lucky Strike LSMFT acronym “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco” and turn it into a rallying cry that was code for “Let’s shoot a motherfucker tonight.”