| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action: The Pursuit of Racial Equity in an Era of Limits. By Kevin L. Yuill. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. viii, 265 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-0-7425-4997-5. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-7425-4998-2.)
Ever tire of straw men? I do, and in this book one of many is me: "Anderson apparently finds untroubling the fact that no affirmative action policies were implemented between World War II and 1969," when examining those state and federal policies during that era (p. 9). Whatever, I am just an American, who this British author defines on his last page as "cramped, risk-fearing individuals who fear the future, rue the past, and have no aspiration other than to survive the present" (p. 240).	1
Sandwiched between all that is Kevin L. Yuill's goal: to stress President Richard M. "Nixon's actions in establishing the trajectory of affirmative action . . . within the historical transformation of the normative structure of American liberalism" (p. 2). The author examines the history of that public policy "in light of the theories" of the German social theorist Jürgen Habermas and American political philosopher John Rawls (ibid.). He divides his book into three sections: origins of the affirmative action idea after World War II, the implementation of Nixon's policies, and the results—Nixon, as stated in a chapter title, was "The Father of Identity Politics."	. . .

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