His nickname was "Tricky Dick." Herblock, The Washington Post cartoonist, drew him crawling out of a sewer. For a time his dog, Checkers, was as well known as he was.

When asked about his contributions to his administration as vice president, President Eisenhower said, "Give me a week and I'll think of one." The remark didn't help his run for president, which he lost to John Kennedy in 1960.

ABC-TV produced his political "obituary" after he lost the California governor's race in 1962. He told the press, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore."

Ten years later, Richard Nixon was re-elected president with the third-largest margin in history. From triumph to defeat, comeback to disgrace, his political life transcends any other in American history.

Rick Perlstein uses that life to frame his remarkable history of post-war America, a country he calls "Nixonland."

		"NIXONLAND: THE RISE OF A PRESIDENT AND THE FRACTURING OF AMERICA" By Rick Perlstein Scribner ($37.50)

He didn't come up with the name, but filched it from a 1956 Democratic broadside: "Our nation's future stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different."

That was an attack from Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate. He didn't dare criticize Ike, the ailing war hero, in the 1956 election, so he pounded on his VP.

It made little difference; the general won re-election easily, even though Nixonland was a world still taking shape in the Northern white-collar suburbs and the rural white-only communities of the South.

By the mid-1960s, the neighborhood was firmly established. It became the source of Nixon's strength as he campaigned back from exile on the heels of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, the new saints of right-wing Republicanism.

The "other" America -- city dwellers, African Americans, college students and their "egghead" professors, social do-gooders, liberal clergy and even Dr. Benjamin Spock -- became Nixon's whipping boys. In their 21st-century form called "the elite," most of them still are targets of the right.

Nixon in word and action defined the division, Perlstein claims. Before him, Democrats were working class; Republicans, upper class. With his televised "Checkers speech" in 1952, the jowly Californian with a 5 o'clock shadow blurred the divisions.

Tales of a slush fund threatened to cost him the second spot on the Eisenhower ticket. His performance saved his job.

His wife didn't have a mink, but "a good Republican cloth coat." He didn't drive a Cadillac, but an Oldsmobile. He had mortgages, not family property. He owed $8,000, not owned millions.

Oh yes, somebody gave his kids a black-and-white cocker spaniel and "we're going to keep it."

It was Nixon's mawkish -- and exaggerated -- appeal to the "common man" that captured the nation's support.

"What delivered the telegrams [of support] were the stories," notes Perlstein. "These too left plenty of room for dispute. 'I worked my way through college,' he said -- he hadn't; 'I guess I'm entitled to a couple of battle stars' from the war -- he wasn't."

The experience taught Nixon the effectiveness of sincerity, humility and the common touch. Perlstein believes that speech crystallized for Republicans the importance of cultural rather than economic messages. And the message:

"It's you and me" against the snobs.

A Republican who straddled the Old Guard era of Eisenhower and the new dogmatic conservatism of Goldwater-Reagan, Nixon answered to neither camp. His political philosophy -- what there was of it -- was purely pragmatic.

Pragmatists are also opportunists. At the high-water mark of liberalism -- Lyndon Johnson's landslide 1964 election -- Nixon made his comeback plans, then went to work when the "consensus" society went up in the smoke of a wave of inner-city riots, starting with Watts in 1965.

Perlstein's account of this frightening episode of violence and hate spares no sides, but more problems were on their way. By 1967, opposition to President Johnson's war in Vietnam grew white-hot, spawning myriad campus-based radical splinter groups burning flags, setting bombs and issuing dire threats.

"Middle America" was frightened, angry and confused. Anarchy seemed just around the corner, hastened by another worry -- the new "hippie" culture of sex, drugs and communes.

These chapters are the centerpiece of "Nixonland," full of details, personalities and anecdotes that bring that Armageddon-like era into vivid focus. It peaks with the surreal horrors of the Democratic convention in Chicago that made Nixon's election a near certainty.

He capitalized on this chaotic time effectively and cynically, appearing on TV from "spontaneous town hall sessions," staged by Roger Ailes, now Fox News producer, and casting himself as the candidate of peace and law and order and preaching to those he called the "silent majority."

All the while, he was plotting to delay the negotiations between the United States and North Vietnam because a breakthrough in the war could hurt him at the polls.

After he was narrowly elected to the job he coveted, Nixon continued to exploit the country's divisions at home while hunting glory abroad. He found it, with breakthrough trips to China and the Soviet Union.

The Democrats cooperated, handing him his historic '72 victory, while behind the scenes, his paranoia and resentment set the stage for his and the nation's humiliation.

The whole grab-bag of dirty campaigning from harmless pranks to egregious violations of the Constitution now called Watergate grew from Nixon's deep-seated hatreds and paranoia, the same emotions he was able to tap from the voters. Perlstein's account of the '72 campaign includes skulduggery by a 19-year-old political junkie named Karl Rove, who stole a Democratic candidate's stationery and wrote fake invitations to booze-and-sex parties.

The Republican Party "soon hired Rove at $9,200 a year to give seminars on his techniques."

"We Americans are not killing or trying to kill one another anymore for reasons of ideology, or at least for now," Perlstein concludes. "Remember this: this war has ratcheted down considerably. But it still simmers on."

(A mistake: Arthur Krause, father of Alison Krause, one of four Kent State University students killed in 1970, worked for Westinghouse and lived in Churchill. He was not a "Pittsburgh steel worker.")