Nixonland

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/07/10/perlstein.nixonland/index.html

"Could it have been different? Countless commentators have tried to replay history from the hinge year of 1968, wondering if a surviving Robert Kennedy could have beaten Nixon and salved an angry culture.

Perlstein, whose next book will chronicle the '70s, will have none of it.

"I don't like that magic thinking. I'm very suspicious of it," he says. "Martyrs seem to get 100 extra bonus points in the annals of history, and that's a bias. By the same token, nostalgia systematically cheats the past.

"I think that it pulls around to one of the huge themes of my book and my work, which is that we really want to believe that somehow magically we can transcend our differences in American and as Americans without working hard at it.

"If only this person had lived; if only this event hadn't gone the way it did. But the fact of the matter is, we are a deeply divided nation, and transcending those differences isn't the work of an afternoon or a single person. It's something we all have to fight for."