From Nixon to Reagan; how the Right Wing found its voice and its leader.

Nobody particularly liked the 70’s when they were living through them, much of the time it felt like the long hangover from the big out of control party that was the 1960’s in America. But now, long after those days have faded from the rearview mirror of history, it can make for compelling reading. Rick Perlstein’s THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE: THE FALL OF NIXON AND THE RISE OF REAGAN is one thick piece of reading, and an exhaustive look back at those times, but if you like a deep dive into American history, then Perlstein’s book is a veritable Marianas Trench. This is the third book of a trilogy that covers roughly a decade in American politics, starting with BEFORE THE STORM, a history of Barry Goldwater’s consequential losing 1964 campaign against Lyndon Johnson; then followed by NIXONLAND, which covered the fracturing of the American political consensus in the late 60’s, the turmoil of Richard Nixon’s first term and his landslide re-election, even as the Watergate scandal begins to fester. In this third book, Perlstein covers the period from late 1972 through the nomination fights and political conventions in the summer of 1976, as a divided country attempts to move on from the deep wounds of the Vietnam War and the scandal of Watergate.

And those were deep wounds, as Perlstein takes time to give the reader a wider picture of the times and the culture. This was the era of Patty Hearst’s kidnapping; when a member of the Manson family attempted to assassinate the President and a mentally ill police informant followed her up with another assassination attempt two weeks later. An Arab oil embargo in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War jacked the price of gasoline at the pumps, and resulted in long lines at stations, making the term “energy crisis” a household word. Out of control inflation ate away at wages, as trips to the grocery store became an exercise in sticker shock. Jobs disappeared, and the sense of economic security a generation of Americans had taken for granted seemed to vanish overnight. “Peace with Honor” went down the drain in Southeast Asia, as South Vietnam collapsed and the Communists rolled into Saigon, leaving Americans to grapple with fact that over 50,000 brave young men had seemingly died for nothing. A hidden history of domestic spying and harassment by the FBI was exposed, while the CIA’s dirty laundry, including plots to assassinate foreign leaders, were dumped before the public at Senate hearings. A crime ridden New York City went broke and needed to be bailed out by the taxpayers. Marijuana, cocaine, and heroin became part of daily life for many. Feminism and Gay Rights movements challenged and upended the social order. Cults and “self help” gurus flourished, as some joined the Moonies, while others checked out EST and Primal Scream theory. The movie AMERICAN GRAFFITI, and the TV show HAPPY DAYS, cashed in on a wave of nostalgia for the supposedly simpler 1950’s. Other films, like JAWS, THE GODFATHER PART 2, CHINATOWN, THE PARALLAX VIEW, and NASHVILLE, expressed the fears, paranoia, suspicions, and divisions of the times. Parents in West Virginia revolted against “pornographic” textbooks, white working class citizens of Boston turned violent when their children were bussed across town to black schools, and a lot of American women took a look at the Equal Rights Amendment, and wanted no part of it, and wanted no part of it in the Constitution. These events are all things Perlstein recounts in his book, often with an ironic eye.

The main focus of the book is on the politicians who dominated the times: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and to a lesser extent, Jimmy Carter. None of whom come out of the book unscathed. I thought Perlstein did a good job recounting Nixon’s fall in the Watergate scandal, but what caught my interest more was his writing on the return of the POW’s from North Vietnam, which the Nixon Administration tried to spin into a great American victory narrative. We’d fought and fought, and bombed and bombed, for years, and years, and years, and at long last, our heroes could come home. Never mind anything else. That was the narrative Nixon and his men tried sell to a weary and, sadly, indifferent public. The truth, like it often is, was much more complicated. Gerald Ford is portrayed as a bumbler, in over his head, easily parodied by Chevy Chase on SNL. “Damned if he did, damned if he don’t” is how Perlstein dismisses him. I think history has been much kinder to Ford than Perlstein; a man whose basic decency served him and the country well in the long run. I won’t argue with anybody when it comes to the faults and failures of Jimmy Carter’s leadership, but Perlstein, like many of Carter’s critics, appears to have a personal dislike of the man, and the culture he came from. Carter has always been a hard man to like for many, and no doubt Scoop Jackson, Morris Udall, Frank Church, Lloyd Bentsen, or Birch Bayh, all competitors of his for the 1976 Democratic Presidential nomination, would have been more successful as President, but they either ran bad campaigns, or simply lacked a compelling message that resonated with voters. One thing Perlstein does give Carter the proper credit for is that he, and his supporters, outworked every one of his rivals in 1976. Sometimes it is just a matter of wanting it more.

Ronald Reagan, more than anyone else, gets the most attention from Perlstein. The portrait he paints is of a glib and genial fabulist, ever able to project optimism no matter what, no doubt a reaction to a meager and trouble filled childhood spent in the mid west. That Reagan could spin anecdotes and stories, and present then as true, has been well documented elsewhere, but Perlstein does a good job of pointing out just how well Reagan could bend, or break, the truth, and how well that talent served him. I think Perlstein runs into the same problem many of Reagan’s biographers run into: it’s simply impossible to really understand what made him tick. The man was not introspective, like many of his generation, never bothering to look deep, and certainly never bothering to explain himself to the wider world. He expected to be taken as he appeared: honest, sincere, and forthright, which is how his many supporters saw him: a man who had no use for Communists, liberals, protesters, and anyone who had a bad word to say about America. In him they saw a leader who told it like it was, or at least, how it should be. The truth was, of course, more complicated. Betty Ford would be savaged by conservatives for “permissive” views on abortion and sex, but there is little doubt that the First Lady and her husband were far better parents than the distant, and disinterested, Ronnie and Nancy Reagan.

Perlstein does a good job of detailing what at the time was one of the least noticed, certainly by the mainstream media, stories of the mid 70’s: the rise of the right wing political activist. For decades, but especially in the 1960’s, it had been the political Left that had organized, taken to the streets, marched when necessary, stood in the way if that’s what took, on behalf of their causes, be it for better wages and working conditions, equal rights for minorities, or against a war they considered a crime. But those protests against bad textbooks in West Virginia brought together house wives, social conservatives, and evangelical Christians to fight for a common cause. Same for the parents in South Boston, who stood against a Federal judiciary who had taken their neighborhood schools away from them. Then there were the women who were horrified at the prospect of unisex bathrooms, women being drafted into the armed forces, or being compelled to pay alimony if the ERA became the law of the land. Others feared what they saw as a resurgent Soviet Union, and the prospect of America losing the Cold War, while others bristled at the idea of America “giving back” the Panama Canal to a tinhorn dictator. America was changing, and they didn’t like it, and they were going to change it back, if only they could find the right leader. They got organized fast, and often with far more discipline than their compatriots on the Left, quickly building a fundraising apparatus like none before. They took a big chunk of the old Democratic working class and middle class constituency away from the party of FDR and JFK, which now seemed have been taken over by anti war pacifists, affirmative action advocates, and politicians who never met a tax hike they didn’t love. This New Right would be scorned by liberals and progressives as racists, reactionaries and Bible thumpers, and not taken seriously. They heard the laughter and derision on the Left, and it just made them work harder.

Without a doubt, the high point of the decade was the Bicentennial celebration on July 4th of 1976, a day of simple pride and gratitude, where a divided country put their disputes on hold for a short while. But something else of note happened that Bicentennial year, a battle for the Presidential nomination in both parties that were among the all time great political throw downs. In the last section of his book, Perlstein does this epic struggle justice. The Democrats had a huge field of candidates, but it would be Carter, with his anti-Washington message, and promise to restore integrity to government in the wake of Watergate, who quickly jumped to the head of the pack and became the front runner. But it was not a done deal until the last primary in June, as Carter’s fortunes rose and fell from one week to the other, as he won and lost primaries against spirited opponents like the never say die Mo Udall, the late entry candidacies of Senator Church and Governor Jerry Brown of California, not to mention a nearly successful movement to get Hubert Humphrey into the race.

But it would be the Republican battle that would be the most hard fought, and consequential. Try as he might, the beleaguered Gerald Ford could not please a restive right wing in the Republican Party, who didn’t like his wife, Betty, not to mention détente, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Reagan was their man, and initially, it looked like the former movie star and ex California Governor would unseat a sitting President seeking the nomination of his own party. But Ford had some real talent working for him, namely a young Dick Cheney, and they managed to defeat the insurgent in a string of early primaries, starting with New Hampshire. Within a matter of weeks, Reagan’s campaign was on the ropes and out of money. The situation was so bad, even Nancy was urging him to drop out. But Reagan rolled the dice, and made a last stand in North Carolina in late March. Hitting Ford hard on the issue of détente (appeasement to conservatives), and the Panama Canal, while getting a lot of help from Senator Jesse Helms’s New Right organization, Reagan won in what turned out to one of the most decisive Presidential primaries ever, going on the win in Texas, and a string of other states. With this new momentum, Reagan was able to pull even with Ford in the delegate count, and take the fight all the way to the Republican Convention in Kansas City in August. Some reviewers have complained that Perlstein’s book is slow and dull in the final hundred pages, as it winds through ancient arcane political history: the ill-fated Richard Schweiker Vice Presidential choice by Reagan, the hardball politics of the fight for Rule 16-C, the battle to squeeze delegates out of the uncommitted Mississippi delegation, the near chaos on the convention floor as Reagan and Ford delegates tried to outdo each other in demonstrations whenever the First Lady or Nancy Reagan entered the hall, to the writing of the platform, where the Republican Party came out squarely against the ERA, gun control, and legalized abortion for the first time. If any of this had gone differently, American history as we experienced it in the ensuing decades would not have happened.

Like I said, Perlstein’s book is thick and deep, it’s not a casual read, and many would think by just covering the years of 1973 to 1976, only half the story is being told, but he makes the case well the events of these years made not only the 1980’s possible, but likely inevitable. This book is the story of how the conservatives who got bloodied in the disastrous Goldwater campaign, endured the calamities of the Nixon years, began to build a national political machine that would take control of the Republican Party, and make it a political juggernaut in the decade ahead. It’s one if the best short histories of Reagan the man, the sportscaster from the Mid West, who became a likable Hollywood leading man before discovering his true calling as a politician. The GE spokesman, and later California Governor, who gave speeches extolling free enterprise, denouncing the evils of big government and Communism, and most of all, expressing his undying faith in the goodness of America no matter what, and to millions in this country who felt it had lost its way, he was the man who would lead it back to the greatness of bygone times. Even for someone like me, who does not consider themselves a conservative, this is a good story, and an essential one in understanding the times we live in.

THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE ends on the last day of the 1976 Republican convention, with Ford nominated, Reagan vanquished, and at the ancient age of 65, seemingly too old to mount another campaign in the future. Around that time, an episode of ALL IN THE FAMILY had a defiant Archie Bunker shout, “You’re getting Reagan in 1980.” We know who laughed last, and it makes me wonder if Rick Perlstein doesn’t have another book in him.

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