In recent years some historians of late twentieth-century America, influenced by political science, have developed a form of political history which emphasizes the degree to which public policy is formed by non-elected bodies, such as courts, the bureaucracy and pressure groups, thereby downplaying the parts played by Presidents and political parties. Mr. Bonastia is a sociologist, but his study contributes to this new institutional history. It centres on the Nixon presidency, when there was the possibility that housing segregation might be attacked in much the same way as school segregation and discrimination in employment.

While the major civil rights milestones, such as the Supreme Court's Brown decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, had been achieved earlier, it was during the Nixon years that school desegregation proceeded most rapidly, and Richard Nixon is also credited with pioneering affirmative action through the adoption of the Philadelphia Plan requiring the integration of the construction trades. Mr. Bonastia argues that there was also a window of opportunity for residential desegregation, following the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and Nixon's appointment to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) of the liberal Republican George Romney, a determined supporter of the integration of the suburbs. But it did not happen. Mr. Bonastia explains the failure of housing integration through a comparative analysis of the federal agencies spearheading the various civil rights policies. This leads him into a theory of “institutional homes,” which posits that a great deal depends on the structure and mission of the particular agency responsible for a given policy. Thus, for various reasons, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare were able to evolve into effective and well-focussed civil rights agencies, but HUD, a ragbag of older federal organizations, did not provide a supportive site for serious integration initiatives. For one thing, it had multiple missions, and those well-established parts of it that were responsible for housing construction at a time of acute housing shortage did not want to be troubled with fair housing considerations. The corruption scandals in HUD further weakened it, making it easier for Nixon to freeze all federal housing funds in 1973, ending any hope that it might integrate the suburbs. If Nixon found himself unable to rein in the antidiscrimination energies of the EEOC and OCR, at least as much as he would apparently have liked, the weaknesses of HUD allowed him to save the suburbs for the silent majority.