Historian Daniel S. Chard creates a compelling history of counterterrorism in America under President Richard Nixon. It is almost unbelievable how Nixon barely batted an eyelash at such a huge quantity of illegal activities, many of them surveillance tactics. Even notorious FBI Director J. Edge Hoover did not approve of Nixon’s tactics, so that tells the reader a lot about Nixon. Nixon was able to use the nebulous “national security” label to get away with all of this illegal activity, at least for a time. Ironically, the FBI played a key role in Nixon’s eventual demise through the Watergate scandal.
Chard doesn’t state it explicitly, but lays out a connection in electoral strategies between Nixon and Trump. Many contemporary sources love to talk about how Trump is such an original by tapping into the “forgotten Americans,” but as Chard so clearly points out, this strategy was part of Nixon’s plan in getting elected in 1968. To be abundantly clear, Nixon used subtler language, but his goal was to tap into the Southern voter base, as well as the working Whites in the North.

Nixon’s War at Home includes relatively recent declassified documents from both presidential and FBI sources, as well as documentary visual evidence—photos, newspaper clippings, etc.

There’s no question some of the information in here is troubling. To see documentary evidence that Johnson had worked out general parameters to potentially end the Vietnam War, only to have Nixon stick to his goal to escalate the war, along with Nixon’s pervasive spying on ordinary, law-abiding citizens is depressing.

However, Chard does a real service to trace this history, even drawing real parallels to the surveillance of that time period being direct antecedents to the PATRIOT Act and the Department of Homeland Security. For instance, some contemporary sources talk of NSA as if it is a recent development, but Chard demonstrates how the agency has been violating our civil liberties for many years and ramped up its activities during the Nixon years. This is an important historical work. I'd like to thank the University of North Carolina Press, the author and Netgalley for this ARC. I will return to Amazon and Goodreads with a five-star review upon publication.