Rick Perlstein

Jamie Malanowski, managing editor of Playboy and author of The Coup, interviewed Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

Their opening exchange:

PLAYBOY: Seen as a figure who governed in a time in between sunny Franklin Roosevelt and sunny Ronald Reagan, it’s amazing that the dark, complex Richard Nixon ever made it to the presidency. How did that happen?

PERLSTEIN: Welllll—to use a favorite Ronald Reagan opener—first let’s make one thing perfectly clear. Reagan wasn’t so sunny! He rose to power, first as governor of California in 1966, then as president in 1980, very much by playing to people’s fears and resentments in a time of social transformation. I very intentionally used a picture in my book of Reagan scowling—as he used to do when he said a hippie was someone “who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah,” or, when someone admired the protesting Baby Boomers’ “youthful energy,” that “I’d like to harness their youthful energy with a strap.” Richard Nixon went to school on Ronald Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign—harnessing the majority’s rage at those insolent protesters, and riding it all the way to the White House.

The reason he was so uniquely qualified to do so was because he’d been harnessing the rage and resentments of those around him ever since he won his first election, for student body president at Whittier College. As a youth, he always felt looked-down-upon, despised for being too unpolished, too uncool. So he made people who felt like him his political constituency, which was a smart move, because, after all, those who feel themselves unpolished and uncool are everywhere in the majority.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue