There are reams of audio news reports from that era against which contemporary pronunciations of those names can be checked - it's not as if this book were about life in the 1850s, after all. But like several other reviewers, I found this *edition* wanting because of the narrator's careless pronunciation - I counted at least a dozen relatively well-known folks (including Dean Acheson, Nguyen Cao Ky, and Tom Huston, infamous today for the "Huston Plan" that presaged Watergate) whose names he botched, along many place-names of Vietnam (e.g., Ton Son Nhut Air Base). But this book tells the story of this talented yet deeply flawed man against the vast canvas of his era, showing how easily history could have taken a different path. Richard Nixon is the main character, of course, in all his bottomless pathology - smart conniving petty crafty conflicted envious. And that minute detail is what, ultimately, explains why many folks who supported Kennedy in 1960 and Johnson in 1964 had come, by 1968 and, especially 1972, to vote for Nixon in droves. Charles Percy) are a kind of Rorschach of the politics in the 1960s. Though one can quibble about some of Perlstein's choices (relatively little space devoted to the 1960 election compared to, e.g., Nixon's role in the 1966 Republican midterm-election resurgence), the details about seemingly minor politics and politicians, many now largely historical footnotes (Calif.
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