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Rick Perlstein

Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. He is a senior fellow and blogger at the Campaign for America's Future.

Recent Articles

Solidarity Squandered

The attacks brought us together until we let them turn us against each other--and damn near everyone else.

Rick PerlsteinAug 30, 2011

The day began in a dull civic deadness. It was an election day, the second Tuesday in September, in one of the world's most political cities. The weather was perfect: a cloudless Indian-summer day. The polls opened at six in the morning. But no one was showing up. Did it even matter who governed? Seven and a half months earlier, a Republican had become president and the sky had not fallen. The federal budget was in surplus. New York was about to enjoy a fiscal windfall from a new 99-year lease on the World Trade Center. The hot issue in the mayoral primary, supposedly, was how the city would spend all the money. But nobody cared. When September 11, 2001, dawned, collective rituals of civic engagement felt like anachronism.

Solidarity Squandered

The attacks brought us together until we let them turn us against each other -- and damn near everyone else.

Rick PerlsteinAug 29, 2011

The day began in a dull civic deadness. It was an election day, the second Tuesday in September, in one of the world's most political cities. The weather was perfect: a cloudless Indian-summer day. The polls opened at six in the morning. But no one was showing up. Did it even matter who governed? Seven and a half months earlier, a Republican had become president and the sky had not fallen. The federal budget was in surplus. New York was about to enjoy a fiscal windfall from a new 99-year lease on the World Trade Center. The hot issue in the mayoral primary, supposedly, was how the city would spend all the money. But nobody cared. When September 11, 2001, dawned, collective rituals of civic engagement felt like anachronism.

Solidarity Squandered

The attacks brought us together until we let them turn us against each other -- and damn near everyone else.

Rick PerlsteinAug 23, 2011

The 1960s, Refracted

While published decades ago, the works of writers like Stanley Crouch and Lisa Jones are still ferociously in the present.

Rick PerlsteinNov 20, 2009

One summer over 15 years ago, three books crossed my horizon at exactly the same time. One was Greg Tate's Flyboy in the Buttermilk.

The Truths That Television Can Tell

Ron Howard's new film, Frost/Nixon serves as a daring argument about the way TV can be most virtuous precisely when it acts most like TV.

Rick PerlsteinDec 11, 2008

I noticed it only months later. It certainly wasn't intentional. I chose several dozen photographs to illustrate my book Nixonland, pretty much a random selection of galvanizing images illustrating the general theme of social conflict in the American 1960s and 1970s. And in almost half of them, just as if I had planned it, the accoutrements of media -- microphones, cameras, tape recorders, TV lights, cue cards -- crowd their way into the frame.

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