The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority. By Patrick Buchanan. Crown Forum; 400 pages; $28. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IF A lightning bolt had felled Richard Nixon on the night of his re-election as president in November 1972—before scandal and cover-up overtook his second term—he would be remembered as one of modern America’s most influential politicians. Not only was he re-elected by a staggering margin, winning 49 states, he had also presided over a realignment of politics. His Republican Party had grabbed millions of voters from the Democrats to build what aides called his “New Majority”: a coalition that included big-city Irish, Italian and Polish Catholics, and white Protestants from the South, Midwest and rural America. Far-sighted Democrats saw the danger, warning that their party needed a populist message to keep “the unblack, the unyoung and unpoor” on side.

Nixon’s triumph was all the sweeter for being so improbable. He was a two-time loser: beaten to the White House in 1960 by John Kennedy and defeated in an election for governor of California two years later. Nor was he trusted by the Tea Party of his day. Hard-right purists thought him squishy on everything from foreign policy to welfare programmes. Nixon reciprocated, telling aides that the trouble with the far right was that they “don’t give a damn about people”, yet they wielded sway in the primary contests that chose presidential candidates. A sound rule was to “give the nuts 20% of what they want”.

Four decades on, the Republicans face a new age of jarring social and economic change. After bitter defeats by Barack Obama, party leaders must again balance demands for purity from the right with the need to construct a new national majority. Could Nixon be a role model? In “The Greatest Comeback”, Patrick Buchanan, a close adviser to Nixon, works hard to make that case.

The standard criticism of Nixon’s victories is that they involved, in essence, an opportunistic annexation of racist white southern Democrats who had been orphaned when the national Democratic Party embraced civil rights. In that telling, Nixon’s so-called “Southern Strategy” amounted to an historical one-off that neither should nor could be repeated.

Not so, Mr Buchanan insists. Drawing on personal archives, including 1,000 memoranda to and from Nixon, he describes his boss’s “emotional empathy with black Americans”—in one instance citing Nixon’s “rage” on hearing that a town in Alabama was refusing to bury a black Vietnam casualty in its whites-only cemetery. He quotes Nixon’s challenges to the hypocrisy of his opponents, who in northern states condemned racism while relying on the votes of openly bigoted southern Democrats to preserve their congressional majorities. Mr Buchanan calls Nixon a centrist, who as president desegregated public schools in the South and expanded the reach of federal paternalism. Along the way he oversaw the creation of such bodies as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Many American readers will consider Mr Buchanan a problematic character-witness. After all, in his post-Nixon career as a three-time contender for the presidency, he embraced harshly nationalistic positions. Such readers need not worry, however. In its candidness and detail the book undermines its own argument.

Mr Buchanan records much clever plotting about how best to handle the rivals on his boss’s right, such as the segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace. He advised Nixon to make clear his disagreements with Wallace (who would run against him for the White House in 1968), while taking no part in efforts to purge segregationists from Republican ranks.

Aides urged Nixon to oppose laws obliging landlords to treat blacks and whites equally, but in “sophisticated terminology”, dwelling on individual freedoms. Nixon could also “make immense political mileage” by opposing the forced integration of schools “and still be on the side of the angels”, Mr Buchanan told his boss in another memo, adding a postscript about the reactions to urban race riots of ordinary, apolitical voters, who after a few drinks showed a “violent anti-Negro, let’s buy guns attitude”. The memo came back with a note from Nixon: “Let’s develop the theme.”

This history matters. Populism is much in fashion in modern politics. Mr Buchanan’s book performs the useful service of describing a populist triumph from the inside, showing how the wooing of what he first called the “silent majority” rested on coded appeals to resentment and division. By 1968, Mr Buchanan writes, middle America’s sympathy for civil rights had been undermined by race riots and the rise of militants such as the Black Panthers. Voters especially loathed protesters on Ivy League campuses, he says, seeing them as the spoiled sons and daughters of their bosses. The establishment’s apologetic response, in his telling, “contributed mightily to the discrediting of liberalism and the election of Richard Nixon”.

Time and again it was more fruitful to attack opponents than to set out what a conservative president might do in any detail. After all voters liked the idea of cutting government, but feared losing services for themselves. Thus, aides told Nixon, he needed to give fewer “think” speeches and focus more on the “gut vote”. This worked—and might work again—but Mr Buchanan’s account of the process does not make for an uplifting read.