Nixonland
You must read the attached, immediately!
Rick Perlstein: For the benefit of the lazy, the 881 pages of Nixonland are more or less compressed into a mere sixty-three page introduction [to]... a brand new book that ships starting this week from Princeton University Press, Richard Nixon: Speeches, Writings, Documents. For the benefit of scholars and history students (professors! perfect for course adoptions!), it collects or excerpts some thirty... well, Richard Nixon speeches, writings, and documents,
Perlstein's favorite Nixon quotes:
from (my favorite) his 1929 schoolboy elocution contest entry "Our Privileges Under the Constitution"—
How much ground do these privileges cover? There are some who use them as a cloak for covering libelous, indecent, and injurious statements against their fellowmen. Should the morals of this nation be offended and polluted in the name of freedom of speech or freedom of the press? In the words of Lincoln, the individual can have no rights against the best interests of society. Furthermore there are those who, under the pretense of freedom of speech and freedom of the press have incited riots, assailed our patriotism, and denounced the Constitution itself. They have used Constitutional privileges to protect the very act by which they wished to destroy the Constitution. Consequently laws have justly been provided for punishing those who abuse their Constitutional privileges—laws which do not limit these privileges, but which provide that they may not be instrumental in destroying the Constitution which insures them. We must obey these laws, for they have been passed for our own welfare....
—to his obscure but crucial Cincinnati speech of February 24, 1964 ("the irresponsible tactics of some of the extreme civil rights leaders..."), to the 1972 "Shanghai Communiqué," to his celebrated White House farewell address ("My mother was a saint...")...
