"Nixonland": Author says Nixon architect of country's left-right

"Postwar, the country was rich, prosperous, confident; it created an attitude of 'we can solve any social problem,' " he says. Policymakers and pundits believed in "unlimited possibility and potential," constructing wildly optimistic scenarios of victory in Vietnam and the end of poverty, and shrugging off moral codes that had held fast for generations.

"The '60s became a period of such dramatic excess. People on the left were quite casual about ignoring the intellectual and psychological cost of rapid social change," Perlstein says. "It was a very condescending, arrogant mind-set. When the backlash came, liberals were blind-sided. That made the counterpassions even more intense."

The backlash enraged and bewildered Johnson, who regarded the federal War on Poverty and the passing of the Voting Rights Act the crowning achievements of his political career.


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