Rick Perlstein

Early life and education

Perlstein was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to a Reform Jewish family, the third child of Jerold and Sandra (née Friedman) Perlstein. His father ran Bonded Messenger Service, a delivery company founded by his grandfather in 1955. Perlstein grew up in the Bayside and Fox Point neighborhoods of suburban Milwaukee, taking cross country trips with his parents and siblings to national landmarks like Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone National Park. In high school, upon earning his driver's license, Perlstein would head to Renaissance Books in downtown Milwaukee, and spend hours in its basement among stacks of old magazines from the 1960s. He later recounted in an interview: "I ended up getting my own archive on the 1960s culture wars. That's where it started." He also wrote in Rolling Stone: "A sixties obsessive since childhood, I misspent my teenage years prowling a ramshackle five-story used-book warehouse that somehow managed . . . to stay one step ahead of Milwaukee, Wisconsin's building inspectors." Following graduation from Nicolet High School, Perlstein attended the University of Chicago, earning a B.A. in History in 1992. While at the University of Chicago – years Perlstein described as "delightfully noisy and dissident", and a stark contrast to the suburbia of his youth, which "felt like a jail" – he was able to engage with and catch neighborhood jam sessions.

Early career

After graduate study in American studies at the University of Michigan, Perlstein moved to New York in 1994, settling in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. While in New York, Perlstein interned at Lingua Franca, a magazine about academic and intellectual life, where he would become an associate editor. Perlstein also began writing book reviews, for publications like The Nation and Slate. It was Perlstein's 1996 Lingua Franca essay "Who Owns the Sixties?" that won him public notice, by exposing the emerging chasm between older and younger historians. The essay also aroused the attention of a literary agent and soon after earned him a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Chronicle of modern American conservatism

By 2015, Perlstein had published three notable books on the subject of modern American conservatism.

Before the Storm (2001)

In 1997, Perlstein began work on a history of the rise of Barry Goldwater, a transformative event for the conservative movement. Perlstein's book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, was released in 2001 to widespread acclaim, including a laudatory New York Times review by William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard. Kristol wrote of Before the Storm, "It's an amazing story, and Perlstein, a man of the left, does it justice." Perlstein won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. Soon after, Perlstein moved from New York to Chicago. From 2003 to 2005, Perlstein was the Village Voice's national political correspondent, and contributed articles to publications that included the New York Times, The New Republic and The American Prospect.

Beginning in spring 2007 through 2009 Perlstein was a Senior Fellow at the Campaign for America's Future where he wrote for its blog The Big Con about the failures of conservative governance. A co-director at the Campaign for America's Future once noted, "Rick was unique. … I don't know when he sleeps."

Nixonland (2008)

In May 2008, Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America was published to rave reviews. In his review, the conservative columnist George Will credited Perlstein having "a novelist's, or perhaps an anthropologist's, eye for illuminating details" and called Nixonland "compulsively readable." At the end of 2008, The New York Times included Nixonland among its notable books. In 2009, The A.V. Club included it among the best books of the decade.

The Invisible Bridge (2014)

In August 2014, Simon & Schuster published The Invisible Bridge: the Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. In his New York Times review, Frank Rich wrote that the tome was "a Rosetta stone for reading America and its politics today." The Invisible Bridge received favorable reviews from The New Yorker, Slate, and The Washington Post among others.

Controversy

Perlstein's 2014 book The Invisible Bridge received "sharp criticism from some scholars and commentators who accuse Mr. Perlstein of sloppy scholarship, improper attribution and plagiarism," The New York Times reported. Conservative author and historian Craig Shirley alleged that Perlstein stole distinctive words and phrasing from Reagan's Revolution. Perlstein's supporters regarded the criticism as a partisan attack. Responding to numerous complaints, Times public editor Margaret Sullivan dismissed the plagiarism allegations as a "smear" and criticized the reporting for "conferr[ing] a legitimacy on the accusation it would not otherwise have had."

Responding to letters from Shirley and his attorneys, Perlstein's publisher, Simon and Schuster, stated that the claims of plagiarism "ignored the most basic principle of copyright law." Those same letters from Shirley's attorneys demanded that Simon and Schuster pay Shirley $25 million in damages, pulp all copies of The Invisible Bridge and take out ads of apology in various publications. If these demands weren't met, the letters promised that a lawsuit would be filed on July 30, 2014, nearly a week before the book was to be released on August 5. However, as of August 8, 2014 there was no evidence a lawsuit had ever been filed. For his part, Perlstein said, "Mr. Shirley has sued me for $25 million and tried to keep people from reading my book; I've told everyone to read his book."

In The Atlantic Monthly, Sam Tanenhaus wrote that The Invisible Bridge demonstrated that "Perlstein’s gift for energetic caricature and his taste for bizarre incidents have overpowered his impulse to sift through the ideas and beliefs that animate his subjects, and to grapple seriously with a politics rooted in authentic if not always coherent dissent."

Publications