Auf ein Miniaturbild klicken, um zu Google Books zu gelangen.
Lädt ... Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics (Original 2017; 2017. Auflage)von Lawrence O'Donnell (Autor)
Werk-InformationenPlaying with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics von Lawrence O'Donnell (2017)
Keine Lädt ...
Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. Holy crap this was a slog. It started out really promising, full of interesting details that related, if not compared, the political situation in the US today to what it was 50 years ago. It ended up being a detailed account of all that goes on in a presidential campaign, from wrangling over delegates and running mates to organizing campaign events. 1968 was undeniably an interesting time in American history, with Vietnam and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. And the events surrounding the political figures are covered pretty well here. But the minutiae of the Democratic and Republican campaigns kind of muddied up the narrative a bit too much. As a Canadian I find the American electoral system befuddling, and this book didn’t do much to demystify it for me. Occasional commentary relating Nixon and the evolution of the Republican party to the current situation with Trump was quite interesting (frankly I thought—and hoped—there would be more of that) and I was energized at the end by the epilogue, which told what happened to the characters from the story who did not go down in infamy. This has definitely filled my nonfiction quota for a while. Long winded and unchallenging for the first half or more, this develops pace and interest only after 1968 erupts into violence. It feels like several half-written books have been mashed together to produce this, with the core content focussing almost obsessively on Eugene McCarthy and elevating his importance far above what most people would assume. The rambling epilogue ends with practically elevating McCarthy to sainthood. The relevance of the history to the 2016 campaign is touched on briefly and inconsistently throughout with throwaway lines about Trump repeating certain phrases word for word etc. but it never commits to using the 1968 campaign as a lens to better understand 2016, or vice versa. As such, those references feel forced and partisan rather than natural and insightful. The final chapters feel rushed and sprint through Nixon's secret interference in the peace process as well as quickly summarising Watergate in ways that are so superficial as to seem almost pointless. Two stars "it was okay" is fair. While very dated and naively fawning over Nixon, Theodore White's 1968 edition of The Making of the President is still better. Read that, then read a serious expose on Nixon and Watergate to get the full picture. keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
Bemerkenswerte Listen
Biography & Autobiography.
History.
Politics.
Nonfiction.
HTML:From the host of MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, an important and enthralling new account of the presidential election that changed everything, the race that created American politics as we know it today The 1968 U.S. Presidential election was the young Lawrence O'Donnell's political awakening, and in the decades since it has remained one of his abiding fascinations. For years he has deployed one of America's shrewdest political minds to understanding its dynamics, not just because it is fascinating in itself, but because in it is contained the essence of what makes America different, and how we got to where we are now. Playing With Fire represents O'Donnell's master class in American electioneering, embedded in the epic human drama of a system, and a country, coming apart at the seams in real time. Nothing went according to the script. LBJ was confident he'd dispatch with Nixon, the GOP frontrunner; Johnson's greatest fear and real nemesis was RFK. But Kennedy and his team, despite their loathing of the president, weren't prepared to challenge their own party's incumbent. Then, out of nowhere, Eugene McCarthy shocked everyone with his disloyalty and threw his hat in the ring to run against the president and the Vietnam War. A revolution seemed to be taking place, and LBJ, humiliated and bitter, began to look mortal. Then RFK leapt in, LBJ dropped out, and all hell broke loose. Two assassinations and a week of bloody riots in Chicago around the Democratic Convention later, and the old Democratic Party was a smoldering ruin, and, in the last triumph of old machine politics, Hubert Humphrey stood alone in the wreckage. Suddenly Nixon was the frontrunner, having masterfully maintained a smooth façade behind which he feverishly held his party's right and left wings in the fold, through a succession of ruthless maneuvers to see off George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and the great outside threat to his new Southern Strategy, the arch-segregationist George Wallace. But then, amazingly, Humphrey began to close, and so, in late October, Nixon pulled off one of the greatest dirty tricks in American political history, an act that may well meet the statutory definition of treason. The tone was set for Watergate and all else that was to follow, all the way through to toda Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
Aktuelle DiskussionenKeineBeliebte Umschlagbilder
Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)324.973Social sciences Political Science The political process Biography And History North America United StatesKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
Bist das du?Werde ein LibraryThing-Autor. |
The section about the Abbie Hoffman and the creative anarchy of the yippies and their "merry prankster tactics" was also elucidating; I've been meaning to read Abie Hoffman's "Steal This Book" and it's next on my list. I'm in agreement with O'Donnell's point of view re: the similarities between the 1968 and 2016 elections: the convergence of the far left [the yippies] the far right [George Wallace] the inability of the Democrat party to unify [the friction between Bobby / Ted Kennedy, McCarthy and Humphrey). And in terms of the "what ifs": If only Humphrey hadn't been outspent by Nixon, then maybe the course of history could have been changed. The communications between Johnson & Nixon, as presented by O'Donnell, seemed downright creepy in the way they avoided the "elephant in the room" [Nixon's treasonous actions re: the Vietnam Peace Talks/Chennault Affair]. Finally, in the context of "Playing With Fire" and in my view, the difference between 1968 and 2016 is that Nixon was implementing his corrupt actions behind the scenes (Nixon wanted to be seen as "good" / "A fine upstanding citizen"). Whereas Trump is blatantly corrupt, shameless and lacking in restraint. And he enjoys flaunting all of that in the public arena. ( )