Perlstein, with a few exceptions, gets it right. (The SDS chant was "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win" and not "Ho Chi Minh is gonna win."

It’s a very Perlsteinian response, wide-ranging, multifaceted, but it is given in a very different America from the one in which he started work in 1997, nearly a quarter of a century ago.He sums up three decades’ worth of Holly­wood political activism in one tone-deaf Warren Beatty remark from 1972: “A great deal of the leadership of this generation comes from music and film people, whether people like that fact or not.” He captures the essence of Richard Nixon’s career in a single aside to Leonard Garment: “You’ll never make it in politics, Len. You just don’t know how to lie.” The Pentagon claimed what civilian casualties there were [in Vietnam] came from the Communists’ deliberate emplacement of surface-to-air missiles in populated areas. P 196

As he prepared for his next big Vietnam speech, set for November, he made ready to turn the divide between ‘normal’ Americans and the immoral Establishment that pretended to speak for them into his next political advance. The liberal inhabitants of the best circles: they weren’t like you and me” (411). Perlstein is also the author of the books Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001) and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008). Before the Storm covers the rise of the conservative movement culminating in the nomination and campaign of Barry Goldwater and how the movement came to dominate the Republican Party despite Goldwater's loss. Nixonland covers American politics and society from 1964 to 1972, centering on Richard Nixon's attempt to rehabilitate himself politically and his eventual successful use of the resentment of settled society against the social unrest of the day to rebuild the Republican Party. The student insurgency over the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention You know, I would have six or seven or eight different strands to think about, kind of untangling that.That meant everybody which might stop a second term must be squashed. This is where the illegal stuff came in. Which as you know, if the President does it, that means it’s not illegal. Right? Right. So he won in 72, a gigantic landslide, 49 states. But Republicans still couldn’t get into Congress. The story of 72 was that Americans still liked Democrats EXCEPT McGovern. Between 1965 and 1972 America experienced a second civil war. Out of its ashes, the political world we know today was born. In a book in which picaresque narrative and forensic political analysis sit side by side, Perlstein constructs a typically vivid set piece. Another complex thread is the next Democratic president – and this is something I was thinking about long before it was Joe Biden, who has a history of seeking ententes cordiale with the Republican party – are they going to feel like this is a constituency that they’re going to have to service as part of their coalition? Which is dangerous.”