Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

Connally strategy: fixing it so ordinary voters had as little role in picking the Republican nominee as possible. Results were mixed. In June, Connally’s people

A week before Connally was to speak, he finally showed the text to his staff. Press secretary Jim Brady said it would be a political disaster. Others pointed out that donations from Jews would dry up. His campaign manager, Eddie Mahe, was on a cruise with his wife, a fundamentalist Christian. She read the speech, and announced that she could no longer support her husband’s boss. After the governor

and now hilarious editorial judgments like “Behind the swagger is one of the fastest, most experienced minds in national politics.” It concluded that if, as was likely, Ronald Reagan suffered George Romney and Edmund Muskie’s fate, “Connally would emerge as the Republican to beat—an irresistible choice for those frustrated by a well-meaning but paralyzed presidency, those who want a country that swaggers again the way this candidate does.”

individual. I found out otherwise.” Billy Graham was said to have announced, “I believe God has shown me that unless we have a change in America, we have a thousand days as a free nation”; and Bill Bright to have responded, “I know. I do not believe we’ll survive more than three years as a free nation. It’s that serious”; and Pat Robertson to have chimed in: “I believe the same thing.” Then—“and I can just remember so well,” Robertson related—“Charles Stanley slapped his hand on a table and said, ‘I’ll give my life to solve this. I’ll give everything I’ve got to turn this country.’ ” Robertson said, “Me too. I’ll die to turn this country. Whatever it takes. We can’t lose the country.” Almost every

They were overwhelming. Not only would parishioners accept their ministers’ political activity, they were clamoring for it. They wanted to reach into their own wallets to help—“without cutting back on their usual tithing,” Tarrance reported. “By the end of the meeting,” he remembered,

Reagan interrupted. “Do you ever feel that if we don’t do it now, if we let this become another Sodom and Gomorrah, that we might be the generation that sees Armageddon?” He was practically whispering—aching with sincerity. Bakker agreed. “This is the most important election ever to face the United States. I really believe that. And with the controls on religion—I don’t think anyone knows what has happened in our leadership. In the crushing of religion in this country…” And Ronald Reagan nodded some more.

described inflation as the “cruelest tax,” because, as Ronald Reagan put it in 1975, it hits “those hardest who can least afford it.” But this is not so. Inflation taxes investors: if a bond matures

But. If that same schlub belonged to a union that negotiated a cost of living adjustment in his employment contract, as was the case for most factory workers, inflation hardly hurt him at all. (It didn’t necessarily hurt nonunion workers much, either: employers tended to raise wages in concert with the best union contracts, to keep workers from fleeing, or seeking to unionize their workplace, too.) And if that same schlub was paying down a fixed-rate mortgage, he was better off if inflation increased: he had borrowed dollars that were dear, but would pay back the loan with dollars

problem caused by inflation—“bracket creep”—was easily fixed by indexing tax rates to inflation, which required no intervention in the broader economy. For Americans

inflation was like “a progressive tax, leading to greater equality in the distribution of wealth.” That was why Federal Reserve policy was political. It effected distribution by stealth.

“During every great inflation,” he said in 1978, “there is a striking decline in both public and private morality.” What allowed this disastrous state of affairs to continue, a former Federal Reserve economist said in the Wall Street Journal in June 1979, was “the almost universal commitment to the objective of ‘full employment’ ” and the “welfare-state idea which holds that government ought to have a continuing active concern with the poor, the sick, the aged, and the chronically unemployed.” Conservatives

Raising interest rates was not working. The inflation rate was now 13 percent and climbing, but economic activity was not slowing. That was because everyone kept making bets that buying now and paying later would pay off. They rationally expected that the dollar would keep getting weaker—a self-fulfilling prophesy, for the more these bets compounded, the weaker the dollar became.

Federal Reserve governor compared it to a traffic signal turning yellow: it just caused people to speed up before it turned red. Paul Volcker called this the

sign of psychological success was whether long-term rates would stabilize and start coming down.” What these two political appointees understood was that there was no way this would happen before the

Jimmy Carter had been promising all year that “we will not try to wring inflation out of our economic system by pursuing policies designed to bring about a recession.” But this was precisely what Volcker intended his plan to do. Schultze and Miller had tried to persuade President Carter to jawbone Volcker into reconsidering his announcement, or at least criticize it to distance himself from the political

strictly adhered to,” might “end inflation in the next five years.” It actually took only four—by which time the economy had lost 2.4 million manufacturing jobs, with a far greater proportion of the national income flowing to investors than to Americans who worked for wages. By which time President Jimmy Carter was no longer president. THE IMMEDIATE EFFECTS OF

resist the political pressure—the demands for ‘accommodation,’ as the bankers call it—for long.” In von Hoffman’s description, Chairman Burns had been a veritable ninety-eight-pound weakling, Volcker a “stubborn mule, the intellectual activist, the rock of integrity,” whose “mettle needed to end the costly price climb” was matched only by his selflessness: he had, after all, taken a $53,000-a-year pay cut from his previous job. The cult of the swaggering John Connally had passed. The cult of Volcker replaced it practically without missing a beat.

turned over the White House “to the real thing—the Mafia Mafia.” America’s energy concerns immediately abated once “the Ayatollah Khomeini and Muammar Qaddafi each woke up with a sacred ram’s head at the foot of their beds.” The new president’s first

Supreme Court, Congress, the Brookings Institution, Harvard University, Common Cause, the IRS, “and the entire cast and crew of Sixty Minutes” all disappeared—and impressed pundits gave their seal of approval, Joseph Kraft having taken the temperature of the electorate and discovering that “the current resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has the support of the American people in whatever enterprise he chooses to undertake.” The president’s two sons, asked how they would help their father’s reelection, replied, “Lean on a few people and keep our noses clean.”

One of the bizarre things about this new conventional wisdom concerning American softness was how closely it resembled what Jimmy Carter had been saying—even though Carter himself was being held up as the exemplar of how American leadership had failed.

Khomeini had installed as chief jurist Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Givi Khalkhali, who had spent time as a youth in a mental hospital for strangling cats, a hobby in which it was said he still indulged. Among his jurisprudential innovations was the concept of “obvious guilt”—which

did away with testimony and defense lawyers, skipping straight to gigglingly pronouncing sentences of execution in five minutes or less. When he ran out of former government officials, Fallaci wrote, “the firing squads turned on adulterers and alleged adulterers, on homosexuals or alleged homosexuals, on young

Through the personal intervention of the prime minister of the provisional government, Mehdi Bazargan, Fallaci miraculously received permission to interview the imam. Bazargan was universally respected even though he was a defender of secularism. He dreamed of establishing Iran as a Western-style representative democracy. He even had the courage to shake Fallaci’s

One of the most important was Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a veteran anti-shah activist educated at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, placed in charge of state television and radio, where he undertook

Khomeini responded by establishing an Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolutionary Council—his very own SAVAK. The last independent newspaper suspended publication. Anti-Khomeini forces announced a breakaway National Democratic Front. Unemployment

Farms were left unattended, the transportation infrastructure to get crops to markets having collapsed. Fallaci estimated that 80 percent of the stores in big cities were closed. Government agencies were paralyzed. Tehran’s once-gleaming airport fell to greasy, graffiti-covered ruin. Given these manifest practical failings, the Islamists’ most effective weapon of control became the stoking of hysteria. Almost daily

And scapegoats, many, many scapegoats—like the United States, which Khomeini labeled the “Great Satan.” And the Kurds seeking autonomy in the northern territories, against whom Khomeini declared a holy war. The Ayatollah Khalkhali set up itinerant kangaroo courts in the Kurdish regions, which inaugurated nearly random executions, sometimes more than sixty in a day. Since Iran’s

Carter was tragically unlucky in his choice of emissaries. “Don’t worry about another embassy attack,” a Washington CIA official had recently reassured one of his colleagues in Iran. “The only thing that could trigger an attack would be if the Shah was let into the United States—and no one in this town is stupid enough to do that.” That would make Henry Kissinger, and Kissinger’s dear friend David Rockefeller, very stupid people indeed—for instead of fulfilling Carter’s request to tell the shah not to come, they set up a veritable lobbying office in a tony Manhattan town house to pressure Carter to change his mind. Their

They prevailed upon Howard Baker, whom Carter still hoped would come around on SALT II, to help. They won over Gerald Ford (“I told him why this was a problem, with

column that denying the shah sanctuary was “inconsistent with a great nation’s self-respect.” Richard Nixon joined Operation Eagle, visiting the shah in Acapulco. John J. McCloy, the eighty-four-year-old dean of foreign policy mandarins, wrote the State Department’s second-highest official, Warren Christopher, that to bar him “could seriously impair our ability to obtain the support of those of whom we might well stand in need.” The president

ALWAYS, ADVICE TO THE president from his foreign policy officials was divided. The hawks were at Zbigniew Brzezinski’s National Security Council, who reported, “Khomeini is his own worst enemy. Left to his own devices, he will destroy himself,” that while Minister Bazargan’s rational secularists “lose more often than they win, they are buying time and giving Khomeini a chance to discredit himself

Vance warned of “possible dangers to American people” if he took that course; his Iran expert warned that confidence the U.S. could muster any control over Iranian events was hubris—“We simply do not have the bios, inventory of political groups or current picture of daily life as it evolves at various levels in Iran. Ignorance here of Iran’s events is massive.”

Now Khomeini had no credible opposition. On September 12, the body drafting a new constitution approved a clause granting supreme power to mullahs. On the 14th, Khomeini declared that candidates for parliament had to be clergymen. The secular interim government was supposed to be running the country. Khomeini was supposed to be a figurehead. Instead, it was the other way around. Foreign

The health situation, however, weighed on him. Carter, after all, doted upon his image as a humanitarian. On October 19, he asked his national security team point-blank: “Does somebody here have the answer as to what we do if the diplomats in our embassy are taken hostage?” There followed an interval of silence. “I gather not. On that day we will all sit here with long, drawn faces, and realize that we’ve been had.”

and was so delighted to find the leaders of Iran’s government intelligent and competent that he advised Washington that normalization with a stabilizing Iran was reasonably on track.

Their idea to sit in at an embassy was arrived at by the core group in the third week of October. The main dispute was which embassy to seize: Two preferred the Soviet Union’s. Two wanted the United States’. America’s decision to take in the shah ended that argument. On Friday, November 2,

our problems come from America.… It is, therefore, up to the dear pupils, students and theological students, to expand with all their might the attacks against the United States and Israel so they may force the United States to return the deposed and criminal shah.” They were elated: they believed this was a message to them. In fact, it was a coincidence. Khomeini had never received word of their plans. The drama that followed would be compounded by many such ironies.

Khomeini just as the imam was beginning his customary evening audiences. He was apparently hearing the news for the first time. He asked Yazdi who was responsible and what they wanted. Then, he gave a blunt and unambiguous order: “Go and kick them out.”

exhausted from the trip to Algiers from which he had only that morning returned, didn’t act with any particular haste—best, he reasoned, to wait a few hours to let the crowds disperse and tempers cool. He was therefore rather shocked

There, Ahmed was deliriously borne aloft and hoisted bodily over the gates. He was led on a tour of “the great nest of U.S. espionage,” paraded before the subdued, blindfolded Americans, and shown seized documents and electronics equipment. He returned with a glowing report. Which was apparently what persuaded the Ayatollah to go on the radio to endorse the captors and announce that Iran should build “a Great Wall of China between itself and the United States,” and all citizens should do “whatever is necessary” to force the shah’s return.

expect the government of Iran to secure the release of the Americans and to return the embassy compound to our control.” But that government’s nominal leaders, Prime Minister Bazargan and Foreign Minister Yazdi, wondered whether they would survive in their jobs another day.

insistence that the U.S. had been warned something like this might happen if Americans admitted the shah. And also, the briefest of observations that to “hundreds of thousands of families” in Iran, the shah was a symbol of misery and death.

Among the stories that were crowded out by this saturation coverage was the development of the worst famine in modern world history, in Cambodia. Time’s massive cover

Never did a single story monopolize so much mass-media oxygen for so long. There was nothing like this, for instance, after North Korea seized the merchant ship the USS Pueblo in 1968, killing one crew member, starving the rest and torturing them with mock firing squads, holding them for eleven months. American diplomats were held for more than a year in China in 1949 with hardly any publicity at all. But those ordeals had not starred street frenzies that

had been casting about for a network show to fill the slot after the local news that affiliates gave over to reruns of cop shows and situation comedies, but which NBC dominated with The Tonight Show Starring Johnny

“Police Story will be seen forty-five minutes from now so that we may bring you the following special program from ABC News.…” It was 11:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on November 8. Anchorman Frank Reynolds began: “Look at this!” (The screen froze on an image of embassy press attaché Barry Rosen, a blindfold covering nearly his entire face like a shroud.) “One American. Blindfolded.

THE DAY THE HOSTAGES were seized, two special broadcasts competed for viewers’ attention. One was the TV debut of Jaws. It received the highest ratings of any movie on network TV ever. Which was a good thing for Senator Kennedy, because the other special was an hour-long profile of him on CBS that proved so unflattering it made political history. Kennedy was scheduled to declare his presidential challenge three days hence, on November 7. But he had made the decision in his heart

Newt Gingrich predicted that it would be “a mean, cruel, brutal campaign.” In fact, it already was. At a dinner with Wall Street heavies a presidential assistant said that Kennedy’s “not going to survive the primaries”—a very rude joke indeed. Carter began spraying favors on key constituencies: $3.1 million in public housing grants to Dade County just before the Florida state Democratic convention; a promise to Chicago mayor Jane Byrne to relocate an Air Force station from O’Hare to pave the way for the airport’s expansion. (She endorsed Kennedy anyway.) On October 20,

Carter backhandedly taunted his would-be opponent as a pathetic Rip Van Winkle, pining for the day when his brother was alive: “The world of 1980 is as different from that of 1960 as the world of 1960 was from that of 1940,” he sniped. “Fiscal restraint has become a matter of simple public duty.” It was the latest

addition, the judge who presided at the inquest thought Kennedy was not telling the truth—that he had meant to turn toward this bridge. Because he chose to drive himself and did not use his chauffeur, because Mary Jo Kopechne told no one she was leaving, and because she brought with her neither her hotel key nor her purse, Judge James Boyle