Big Dick Nixon Energy

Reading Nixonland stirs up some family memories, like the time I was a PA on Richard Nixon's funeral

Nixon White House Photographs, 1/20/1969 - 8/9/1974

I spent last weekend devouring Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein. I also made a pot of chili, but that’s neither here nor there.

If you don’t know, Nixonland is a big-ass book. It checks in at 896 pages, but I prefer audiobooks, so I spent thirty-six hours and forty-six minutes with Dick Nixon. The audiobook was narrated by Stephen R. Thorn, who also narrates the John Dies at the End books, which are billed as novels of “cosmic horror.” I can’t tell if the narrator casting was a happy accident, odd coincidence, or a subliminal effort to communicate just how unsettling it is to live your whole life in a Dick-shaped world.

Perlstein’s book is a sweeping political and cultural history of the modern conservative movement, from Nixon’s early days in Congress, where he out-McCarthy’d Senator Joe “Blacklist” McCarthy, to Nixon’s overwhelming victory in the 1972 election, when he carried 49 state…