I was something of a “Nixon scholar” during my brief stint as an academic, but I never managed to finish Gary Wills’s Nixon Agonistes until now. I met Wills once when I was a kid, after a lecture he gave at a small liberal arts college in Iowa. The lecture had something to do with the Founding Fathers, and I asked a stupid question during the Q&A, to which he gave a condescending answer (which I deserved, because the question was genuinely stupid). Then he autographed my copy of Lincoln at Gettysburg.

Wills stands out as the most thoughtful and urbane of the so-called "New Journalists" of the 1960s and '70s. The depth and breadth of his knowledge—not just his knowledge but his perspective (a perspective that, like the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church to which he belongs, extends across centuries)—make Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norman Mailer seem amateurish by comparison. These writers’ insights are frequently sharp and witty; their prose styles are iconic. But for sheer perspective, they’ve got nothing on Wills.

That being said: the opening chapters of Nixon Agonistes, which began as an article for Esquire, are my least favorite. Wills is too scholarly and not nearly cool enough to deserve the New Journalist label. And when he apes the New Journalist style, he doesn’t do a good job of it. Sure, his coverage of the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions is better than Mailer’s (and Mailer’s is damn good!). Like Didion, Wills captures dozens of little moments that wholly embody the American Sixties as if in a microcosm. But these impressionistic, first-person, man-on-the-scene chapters are also a little cringe. I get the impression that, in these chapters, Wills wants to be hipper than he is (this is the man who wrote Lincoln at Gettysburg, Bomb Power, Verdi’s Shakespeare, and more books on Catholic theology than I can count…impressive, but not “cool”). His chapters on Nixon’s roots in Whittier are full of rich insights about the book’s theme, middle-class liberalism. But he also visits a Whittier strip club, just to get the full Whittier experience, and frankly…I just can’t imagine Wills in a strip club. And I don’t want to.

Maybe that’s the reason I never made it to the end of Nixon Agonistes until now. If you’re not into “New Journalism,” try reading the final two parts (eleven chapters) of this massive volume: “The Political Market” and “The Future of Liberalism.” Wills stays grounded in the 1960s, but he also widens his aperture to analyze the ‘60s within the wider context of Anglo-American ideology. These final chapters feel the most prescient when read today, with the perspective of five decades between us and Nixon’s presidency. Wills concludes that American liberalism is doomed, but he’s not an irritable post-liberal and he isn’t especially pessimistic about the future. His deep knowledge of history helps. For Wills, the past is a discovered country, one he knows intimately and that provides examples of what a bright American future might realistically entail. After all, as I said above, Wills seems to think in centuries, not decades.