Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

The malaise that concerned him most, the president told his guests, was Pat Caddell’s finding that for the first time ever, Americans thought their children’s lives would be worse than their own. He

article, “Carter Was Speechless,” was illustrated with a picture of a bewildered-looking Jimmy Carter, and suggested that the entire spectacle was a giant con—possibly cover for negotiations with Ted Kennedy concerning the 1980 nomination, maybe for preparations to resign. Hugh Sidey, whose weekly Time column

Carter had “reached the low point not only of his Administration but perhaps of the postwar presidency.” Carter seemed perversely to almost relish the abuse—heaping plenty of it on himself. “I worked hard all week, some of the

received a group of congressmen, his first contact with the legislative branch in a week. His diary claimed, dubiously, that the advice of legislators from both energy-producing and energy-consuming states was “remarkably compatible.” (The only “dissident,” he journaled, was Speaker Tip O’Neill, “who cannot accept the idea that the Great Society days are over, and that all the problems of the nation cannot be solved with massive spending programs, public works, etc.”) He met with a group of economists, which left him annoyed. The next day, he met with a group of religious leaders, which left him over the moon.

evident in Carter’s final speech than Christopher Lasch’s thinking—although, just as with Lasch and Daniel Bell, the president ignored the part of Bellah’s argument that said national revival was impossible until corporate power was checked.

Instilling an ethic of scarcity in a nation whose habits were formed in an age of abundance, all agreed, would be a challenge. The president’s task, they said, was

CARTER SIGNED A DECLARATION OF an official “national energy supply shortage,” ordering all places of public accommodation, effective Monday morning, to keep their air conditioners no lower than 80 degrees. He consulted with Speaker

thousands of “boat people” continued desperately setting out on the high seas in rickety vessels to escape war-torn Southeast Asia. (At the Tokyo summit, Carter

Miami, Ted Bundy was on trial for the bludgeoning murders of two sorority sisters—a trial that a new Florida law allowed to be recorded for newscasts. More than two hundred TV crews from around

possessed of a “quick, disarming smile.” He was allowed to wander the courtroom freely, winking and smiling, and to give unlimited interviews. (“Yes, I intend to complete my legal education and become a lawyer, and I’ll be a damned good lawyer.”) His jokes kept reporters in stitches. (One headline: “Jail Hasn’t Robbed Bundy of His Humor.”) They were particularly fascinated by all the women from as far away as Seattle—“attractive, young, and single” according to one feature—who lined up for hours to

Their record soon became the only country number that rock stations played. Many of those same stations fielded streams of abusive phone calls every time they played a song by a Black artist. “White males eighteen to thirty-four,” a Rolling Stone writer commented, “are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they’re the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.” And at Comiskey Park, as he exploded crates of disco

As for energy, “there will be other cartels and other shortages.” But the true problem was deeper. He raised his voice: “All! the legislation! in the world! can’t fix what’s wrong with America!” His eyes no longer twinkled. They locked solemnly with the viewers’. The camera had been pulled in close for intimacy. Now it drew back for drama. It was galvanizing. This was the man with whom, back in 1976, the American people had fallen in love. “I want

The threat is nearly”—he paused, appearing to be sincerely searching for just the right word—“invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis—of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” That paragraph felt both perfectly formed and achingly spontaneous, like all truly great political speeches. The next paragraph did, too: “We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”

Confidence in the future has supported everything else—public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always believed in something called—progress! We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children—would be better than our own.” He grew somber: “Our people are losing that faith.”

“Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things, and consuming things, does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve

which have no confidence, or purpose.… For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote! The productivity

and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world. As as you know, there is a growing disrespect for government. And for churches. An...

reviewed recent history: the assassinations that shattered the faith that “ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet”; the war that eviscerated the faith “that our armies were always

invincible and our causes were always just”; Watergate’s theft of Americans’ bedrock conviction that the presidency was “a place of honor”; the inflation that turned the venerable phrase “sound as a dollar” into a joke—and the way the 1973 energy crisis revealed the fallacy of Americans’ belief “that our nation’s resources were limitless.” (He almost

Congress seems “twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests,” and “every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath. “You don’t like it. And

We’re the heirs of generations who survived threats much more powerful, and awesome, than those that challenge us now. Our fathers and mothers were strong men and women, who shaped a new society during the Great Depression. Who fought world wars. And who carved out a new charter of

devoting “the most massive—peacetime—commitment—of funds and resources in our nation’s history to develop America’s own alternative sources of fuel.” (Announcing

creating “this nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000”—again, “just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II.” By mandating

Instead he took the harder path: what he called “honest answers, not easy answers.” Amazingly, it worked: he immediately reaped just about the greatest public opinion dividend in the history of presidential rhetoric, an eleven-point bump in approval ratings in one poll, and seventeen points in another. Then, as he began working to pass his new energy plan into law, he squandered his gains with a single colossal mistake.

Then, on Thursday—in Chicago the dispatch broke into a rerun of Laverne and Shirley—a black-backgrounded “SPECIAL REPORT” logo appeared as Charles Gibson

The backlash was overwhelming. The “midsummer massacre,” Newsweek said, “signaled to survivors that political loyalty has priority over professional competence,” and “sent a spasm of anxiety around the world about the stability of his reign.” In fact, the backlash was so overwhelming that, like an errant missile

Jerry Brown was growing more serious about a challenge: enough so that Garry Trudeau, who appeared to despise him, devoted a week of Doonesbury to flaying the governor for dodgy real-world donations he had received from the Chicago mob fixer Sidney Korshak. The strips were so nasty that lawsuit-shy newspapers refused to print them.

Neoconservatives held fortnightly strategy sessions at Washington’s Madison Hotel, packed with young Senate staffers with the highest security clearances and led by the formidable former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission William Casey, a World War II–era spy. Scoop Jackson, whose

Baker’s trademark”—that “we must awaken those Americans who have been lulled to sleep by foolish liberals and leftists here and abroad who believe peace can be procured by granting the Soviets strategic superiority.” He said this even though the treaty merely codified agreements that Gerald Ford reached with the Soviets, back when Baker was pro-détente. Then, the

Terry Dolan was a name to remember. Trim, handsome, and fashionably mustachioed, the twenty-eight-year-old son of the manager of a Sears outlet in a blue-collar part of Connecticut, his New Right colleagues knew, secretly enjoyed having sex with men. They considered Dolan indispensable nonetheless. The reason was that his brazenness

to announce a program unlike any in the history of Senate campaigning: NCPAC would spend $700,000 on attack ads against a “hit list” comprising Church and his fellow senators Birch Bayh of Indiana, John Culver of Iowa, George McGovern of South Dakota, and Alan Cranston of California—though

how purchasing ads during the Super Bowl on Houston TV cost between $4,000 and $10,000, whereas the same ad in Sioux Falls cost $220. “Yet, both Texas and South Dakota have EQUAL votes in the U.S Senate.” Billboards

Even though an estimated 80 percent of its benefits would go the biggest tenth of American corporations, Walker persuaded the National Federation of Independent Businesses to get behind it, and a majority of members of both houses to cosponsor it. He gloated, “At the rate we’re winning, I’m worried about working us out of business.”

Other senators introduced amendments to ban the FTC from touching entire industries, aggression unprecedented in the history of congressional authorizations—the mirror image, in fact, of the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Act requiring the FTC to regulate entire industries.

“A federal law covering the funeral industry will no doubt lessen competition.” (Pertschuk: “It is hard to comprehend how enhanced opportunities to compare prices could do anything but strengthen competition.”)

Mike Pertschuk was not stunned: “No congressman needs to be told that a funeral director whose customers begin to select $350 funerals in place of $3,500 packages will remember nothing else as the next

Brown & Williamson had claimed to the Secretary of Health and Human Services that it had “a strict policy against promoting cigarettes to persons under twenty-one years of age”—then produced documents outlining a detailed marketing plan aimed at “the young smoker,” for whom tobacco “is not yet an integral part of life,” recommending cigarettes be depicted “as one of the few initiations into the adult world, as part of the illicit pleasure category” including “ ‘pot,’ wine, beer, sex, etc.,” and crafting language that would offer “a means of repressing their

Connecticut woman who chose cremation for her late husband because she couldn’t afford a funeral, but paid $600 for a casket that the funeral director lied was the least expensive available; and an old lady in Grand Rapids whom a hearing aid salesman had taken for $485 even though she was deaf.

The measure that Heflin, a Democrat from Alabama, was so eager to introduce would strip the commission of authority to break up monopolies. FTC commissioners said that was akin to banning the IRS from auditing tax returns. The measure failed only

Dallas, at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, conservatives replaced a leadership they insisted was “liberal” in a coup like the one at the National Rifle Association in 1977. Its two plotters had been working for this moment for more than a decade—first traveling from

Veteran delegates complained that they could not recognize their beloved church gathering: it felt instead like a party convention. James Robison bellowed that “if we are a denomination that tolerates liberalism in any form, and continues to support it, we will be guilty of the suicidal death of countless millions of people through the world,” and called the existing SBC leadership “snakes,” “termites,” and “devils.” (And, worse, “like government bureaucrats.”)

He loved reciting a line from his favorite book, Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, in which the former Communist described watching his daughter sleep and deciding he could no longer be an atheist. Reagan spoke constantly of his hope America would undergo a “spiritual revival.” His evangelical fans doted upon a story from

said one describing antinuclear demonstrators as “modern Luddites” who “behind the scenes… are being manipulated by forces sympathetic to the Soviet Union.” He kept

Germond was skeptical. He had recently dined at the Reagans’ home at Sears’s invitation. The would-be statesman kept going off on bizarre tangents—wondering, for instance, whether Gerald Ford had staged fake assassination attempts to win sympathy for his renomination in 1976, and expressing incredulity that anyone could believe General Eisenhower had had an affair during World War II. Each time, Germond assumed Reagan was joking—until he “looked

REAGAN MADE MORE NEWS FOR how he was going broke. One article, “The Big Money’s for Connally,” reported that the Reagan for President Committee was $500,000 in debt, quoting an embittered Lyn Nofziger:

what about John Connally? He was either dominating the field or going nowhere fast; it was hard to tell which. He rented a house in New Hampshire, intending to stay a spell. But already on the first leg of his “Leadership for America” tour

We’re the most vulnerable nation on earth. This country is a hostage!”—respectable Republicans would stand up and scream like he was Ringo Starr and this was 1964. Their greatest delirium followed his signature line demanding that Japan lower its trade barriers or “be prepared to sit on the dock in Yokohama in your Hondas and your Toyotas.” (In Florida he added the line “eating your own orange.”) They went particularly nuts, one day in Florida, when he stared down a Japanese TV crew while delivering the line. At a cattle show in Chicago, an awed observer

seemed to have something to do with never apologizing—like when he baited all the goody-two-shoes about Richard Nixon’s Oval Office tapes, “They ought to have been burned,” or tut-tutted all the “small and bigoted minds” who refused to accept his acquittal on his 1974

“There’s no question in my mind that the man is qualified to be president,” said one dazzled state party official. “I think he’s shifting the mood of the country,” said another. The other candidates were dumbstruck in the face of it. “I remind you that they’re one of the best customers Illinois has,” Bob Dole said in Chicago about Connally’s Japan-baiting, and “very important to rural America.” Tepid applause. Yawn. There was only one problem with track one: ordinary voters didn’t see the appeal.

gulf between elite and mass opinion was strikingly revealed when Newsweek said one reason Carter had scooted to Camp David in July was because polls showed him losing to “Reagan or Connally.” An annoyed public opinion expert wrote a letter to the editor: he wasn’t aware of a single poll that gave Connally a chance against Carter.