Christopher Hitchens, in his 2001 book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, called it “an open secret that is too momentous and too awful to tell.” The year was 1968, and Richard M. Nixon, once cast off as a has-been by even his own Republican Party, was engaged in a heated race for the White House with Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. The societal fissures which were threatening to tear the country apart that year were numerous and multiplying, but the disastrous war in Vietnam, which even by that date had been dragging on for nine years, was perhaps the deepest among them.

Both Humphrey and Nixon promised a quick end to the war, but with the Democrats — who had controlled the White House for the past seven years — unable to end the bloodshed, Nixon, perceived now by a wide swath of the American public as a political outsider who would bring order to an age that had seemingly descended into chaos, held the advantage with voters on the Vietnam issue.

In such a close campaign, surrendering this political advantage would of course be folly, even if it meant placing ones Presidential ambitions before the lives of both American troops and countless innocent civilians. And Richard Nixon was too close to the throne to fall on his sword now. With peace talks ongoing in Paris, Nixon, characteristically paranoid, feared that his democratic rivals in the Johnson administration would soon produce an 11th hour deal to pull out of Vietnam, undermining one of the central planks of his campaign — namely, that he was the only man who could end the war. This development, he was certain, would cost him the election. And so, in what may be one of the most repulsive episodes ever to emerge in the history of American political expediency, Richard Nixon took the necessary steps to ensure that there would be no peace in Vietnam before the 1968 elections. Through a contact by the name of Anna Chennault, Nixon sent this message to the negotiating South Vietnamese: Don’t agree to anything. Richard Nixon will get you a better deal. They listened, and the peace talks collapsed.

It was, to put it bluntly, treason, and President Lyndon Johnson, himself well-versed in political subterfuge and always suspicious of Nixon, called it as much in a taped conversation with Senator Everett Dirksen (though he seemed to believe, or at least gave the appearance of believing, that Nixon had no direct involvement). Nixon, in another taped conversation with President Johnson, claimed that “any rumblings around about somebody trying to sabotage the Saigon government’s attitude . . . have absolutely no credibility.” It was Nixonian duplicity at its finest.

No one, of course, was ever persecuted for the crime, because the instigator, only months later, was elected leader of the free world.

As its title might suggest, Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland isn’t so much concerned with biography as it is with elucidating the fractured social environment of the late 1960′s, when political assassinations, race riots, and sometimes violent student demonstrations seemed an almost daily occurrence. It was an environment, Perlstein argues, that was tailor-made for a demagogue like Richard Nixon, who, always the perceptive opportunist, gave form and voice to the nebulous reactionism that then lie dormant in much of the country. In so doing, Perlstein levels the astronomic charge that it was Nixon who bricked the wall between left and right, liberal and conservative, between real Americans and the other — a division that, in the child-like invective that has replaced American political discourse in 2010, continues to this day.

After 748 pages of conniving, wiretapping, break-ins, outright lying, and assorted dirty tricks, it’s hard to argue that Perlstein isn’t on to something. But does Nixon, who remains a convenient and obvious villain to everyone but the far-right Republicans who wish to rehabilitate his image, really represent the fount from which all modern-day American political divisiveness has sprung? Would the nation be a different place had a candidate appeared in 1968 who appealed to our better angels?

The answer to the first question is a conditional “yes.” Perlstein recounts in exhaustive detail an America gripped in the late 1960′s by a fearful violence from which there seemed to be no reprieve. Such violence represented an inevitable outcome of long years of racial oppression and societal inequality, and the divisions that emerged from the aftermath of these turbulent years were almost certainly equally inevitable, if only because they had always existed just below the surface. But it took Richard Nixon to frame those divisions in political terms. In so doing he encased in amber the divisiveness of an age, and passed it on to his successors as the most efficient means of electoral success — appealing to people’s fears and hatreds was now simply the cost of doing business when running for public office in America.

The second question is impossible to answer, but one thing does seem clear: Nixon, more than any other candidate (with the notable exception of George Wallace, a cartoonish racist whose popularity as a third party Presidential candidate revealed much about the state of the nation in 1968) made social divisions political divisions, transforming the debate from one of ideas into an internecine struggle of opposites for whom the notion of compromise soon became anathema, a legacy which American governance labors under still.

Whether Nixon realized the damage he was doing to the country is of course now irrelevant, but then he never seemed to be a man capable of truly understanding the long term consequences of his actions, not with peace on the line in Vietnam in 1968, not during the campaign, not during the Watergate scandal. Time and time again, winning was all that mattered. Richard Nixon did win — and we allowed him to win — but 42 years later, Nixonland reveals the truth: we’re the ones who lost.