“[NBC producer Lew Koch] was inordinately proud of what they’d produced – 1968′s version of Bull Connor’s fire hoses: glorious moral theater, naked evil being visited upon innocents. He repaired to NBC headquarters at the Merchandise Mart after that first broadcast filled with self-satisfaction. A sympathizer with the antiwar movement, he thought he had advanced their cause considerably. The assignment editor asked him to help with the phones; the switchboard was overwhelmed.

The first call: ‘I saw those cops beating the kids – right on for the cops!’

Another: ‘You fucking commies!’ He was referring to NBC – as if they had instigated the riots.

The calls kept coming, dozens. They came to all the networks, for days upon days. Some people saw noble cops innocently defending themselves. Others accused the networks of hiring cops to beat up kids to spice up the show. Lew Koch was so shaken by the experience, he left for a soul-searching six-month leave of absence.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“Godfrey Hodgson wrote of the media about-face: ‘They had been united, as rarely before, by their anger at Mayor Daley. Now they learned that the great majority of Americans sided with Daley, and against them. It was not only the humiliation of discovering that they had been wrong; there was also alarm at the discovery of their new unpopularity. Bosses and cops, everyone knew, were hated; it seemed that newspapers and television were hated even more.’”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“Chicago cops had been angry for years. In 1960, after a corruption scandal, they had inherited a new police superintendent, Orlando W. Wilson, who was a college professor, one of the founders of the academic discipline of criminal justice. They saw him as an ivory-tower puritan, obsessed with showing arrests for the kind of ‘victimless’ crimes – drinking, whoring, gambling – by which cops from time immemorial had padded their weekly pay envelopes by looking the other way. [..] They hated him for his policy of replacing retiring white commanders with Negroes (40 percent of new sergeants were black his first year); in one survey, two-thirds of Chicago cops called themselves racists. These cops hated him most especially for holding them back from busting ‘civil rights’ troublemakers. During the riots in 1966, ten thousand officers working twelve-hour patrols felt as if they were hardly allowed to arrest anyone. Sixty-four quit that June alone, thirty-seven before they were eligible for pensions.

Wilson quit in 1967. His successor continued his policies. One of his first acts had been to shut down a Ku Klux Klan cell operating within the force, with its own arsenal of firearms and hand grenades.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“The pundits said [Robert] Kennedy was a uniter. The facts showed he was a divider. But to an Establishment hungry beyond measure for signs of consensus, the myth answered a psychic need. Moderates can be seized by ideological fever dreams as much as extremists; it has always been thus.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“On Januar 31, 1967, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, flanked by eight security guards, briefed some one hundred student-government presidents and campus-newspaper editors who had signed a letter questioning the war: football players, fraternity presidents, mainstream kids, stunned into silence by the obvious lies their secretary of state expected them to believe.

A kid from Michigan State: ‘Mr. Secretary, what happens if we continue the policy you’ve outlined … this continued gradual escalation until the other side capitulates … up to and including nuclear war, and the other side doesn’t capitulate?’

Rusk leaned back, hissed forth a stream of tobacco smoke, and solemnly replied, ‘Well, somebody’s going to get hurt.’

Here, before their eyes, was the maniacal air force general Buck Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove. The room drew silent, their thoughts as one: My God, the secretary of state is crazy.

The madness was not hard to spot, if you chose to spot it. The problem was facing the wrath of all those decent Americans who didn’t want to face that their government was mad.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland

“Hangers-on urged [George] Romney to run in the open to build his national following and prove his grasp of the issues. His statehouse aides cringed: they knew the last thing that would help their boss was to rehearse in public. He was too damned forthright, too earnest – especially about Vietnam. He grappled with it honestly. Which would make what he said sound absurd, since everyone else was in denial or lying.”

- Rick Perlstein, Nixonland