Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

said that Kennedy and Kopechne were not heading toward the Edgartown Ferry.” The next segment continued the interview

So the Commodore became the first experiment in a new strategy: making redevelopment more attractive by promising the developers future tax relief. The beneficiaries would then be required to share future profits with the city; everyone would win. The hungry young killer who emerged to save the Commodore was profiled fawningly in the New York Times. He was “tall, lean, and blond, with dazzling white

teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford. He rides around town in a chauffeured silver Cadillac with his initials, DJT, on the plates. He dates slinky fashion models, belongs to the most elegant

Their reporter joined Donald Trump while he inspected all the construction sites he claimed to be developing around the city: “a typical workday,” he said. In fact, they all belonged to, or were financed by, his father; same with the limousine. That “more than $200 million”

in net worth? He was counting his dad’s money—telling the IRS that his taxable income that year was only $24,594. “So far,” he boasted, “I’ve never made

Thus did the people planning Ronald Reagan’s campaign discover that the nation shared his opinions hardly at all.

Backing money with gold—“hard” currency, “real” money—had been a shibboleth of conservative populists since the days when manly frontiersmen carried heavy ingots around to pay their debts and signal their disgust at the effete paper money issued by the Bank of the United States. It

minutes of the same old lower taxes, slash spending. Same with energy: less government, more drilling, “putting the market system to work.” Then, however, he said that if Puerto Ricans voted in favor of statehood in an upcoming referendum, he would expedite their wishes—that was new. And next he

summarized it was crystalline: a North American continent “in which the peoples and commerce of its three strong countries flow freely across their present borders.” Borders more porous not just for money and goods but people was anathema to many conservatives. Reagan thought the opposite way. He’d been pondering the idea since spring, when he dictated a rare letter about policy, tasking

speech patently put together by a political packager.” The Rocky Mountain News, in a piece headlined “Reagan Announces His Candidacy—Again,” found little of interest in the announcement of “a 68-year-old former movie star” other than that he was “the tenth man to declare his candidacy for the 1980 GOP nomination.” (Then it cut away to Teddy Kennedy.)

The oldest and wisest candidate took the podium, and again ignored the national moratorium on politicizing the hostage crisis, claiming that the Iranian revolution was Jimmy Carter’s fault for not having “encouraged the shah to separate some of the more incendiary leaders from their followers.” Then he ignored Richard Allen’s advice, averring that “the Soviet Union has never strayed one inch from its determination to one day have the Marxian dream of a one-world Communist state.” And he insulted the president for his collapse in the road race in September: “If I were a betting man, I’d bet that I won’t have to be helped off the track.”

Then it was off to a rally alongside Congressman Henry Hyde in Cicero, Illinois, a white ethnic working-class suburb of Chicago whose history of racist violence rivaled South Boston’s. The last time a Black person tried to live there was 1951; the ensuing riot warned anyone against trying again for decades. A little more than a dozen years before Reagan’s visit, a Black kid was beaten to death just for crossing into Cicero to look for a job, and Martin Luther King Jr. gave up on a plan for a housing march there after the Cook County sheriff called it “awfully close to a suicidal act.”

Next Reagan visited the most racially segregated city in America: Milwaukee, where the segregationist George Wallace had performed shockingly well in the 1964 Democratic presidential primary campaign, and the “hottest issue,” his briefing read, was resentment over the reopening of the 1955 case of a police officer who shot an unarmed Black man. Ronald Reagan doted upon his lack of racism, even as he opposed

Black mayor in 1973 as proof that racism was a thing of the past. In 1968, he said that the only reason race remained a political issue was because Democratic demagogues made it one, whipping up racial grievance in order to lure the Black

Reagan’s managers were targeting voters who felt victimized by government actions that cost them the privileges their whiteness once afforded them. In Cicero, they clamored six abreast in line waiting for the FBI to complete its bomb check to enter the Morton Community College gym to celebrate what city fathers had officially declared “Ronald Reagan Day.” Inside, they chanted, “Reagan’s right! Reagan’s right!” in eager anticipation. They cheered lustily when Reagan described Jimmy Carter’s new Department of Education as a plot to replace neighborhood schools with a system

argument for giving away the Panama Canal was that no one would like us if we didn’t.… Isn’t it about time that we stopped worrying whether anyone likes us and decide we’re going to be respected in the world—respected to the point that never again will any dictator dare to invade an American embassy and hold our people hostage?”

then, the percentage of all manufactured goods on the American market that were imported rose to 40 percent; in 1970, the figure had been 14 percent. Japanese cars captured a quarter of American sales—because American carmakers were the most conspicuously slipshod and second-rate domestic manufacturers

1978, U.S. automakers sold 9.3 million units. In 1979, they moved only 8.3 million. The economic consequences were colossal, for one out of twelve manufacturing jobs—in sectors like rubber, steel, and aluminum—were tied to the industry. Factory layoffs were one of the reasons voters in Southey, Cicero, and Milwaukee were so angry—and blamed racial scapegoats for their plight. The

automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—were so sclerotic, stupid, and arrogant that if they did not exist, a Soviet propagandist might wish to invent them, as glaring counterdemonstrations to the proposition that capitalism was the most efficient economic system.

George Romney, who retired as president of American Motors in 1962 to go into politics—called “gas-guzzling dinosaurs.” At the time he said that, the Big Three’s fleets averaged twelve miles per gallon, and ingenious engineers at NASA were busy putting men on the Moon. By the time the first energy

after the fuel tank on their Pinto, located behind the rear axle, burst into flames when their car was hit from behind. Ford was acquitted of all charges—three years after an exposé in Mother Jones magazine proved its executives were aware of the deadly flaw but decided not to fix it because a “cost-benefit” analysis suggested that it made more financial sense to chance lawsuits rather than expend the eleven dollars per automobile that would require. Of all the big American

In 1976, Chrysler released two smaller models, the Aspen and the Volare, which the Center for Auto Safety named the “lemons of the year”; then two more, the Omni and the Horizon, which were rated “too risky to drive” by Consumers Union—though since they had contracted with Volkswagen to build them rather than recommit factories to

a boss, there was just something about him that made you want to please him and to do your best.” It was almost mystical how precisely he grew to know his boss’s habits. He could enhance Reagan’s performance—without threatening his ego—so effectively, it was like magic. How to improve upon a rare

knew to be especially careful with what Reagan was given to read; “it would be entered into his mental computer and could be spit out at any time in the future.”

Nor the high school students in the nearby college town of Oxford, who burned an Iranian flag as a class project, while parents and teachers proudly looked on. A Birmingham, Alabama, gospel quartet released a song called “Message to Khomeini”

The prime rate neared 13 percent—which meant that in the twenty-two states that banned mortgage rates above 12 percent, the only way to buy a house was in cash. Bills were coming due, too, from the Great Tax Revolt: in Cincinnati, the public schools closed for three weeks for lack of funds. Cincinnati’s students returned to class on December

“During the first weeks after the hostages were taken, major presidential contenders refrained from making any substantive comments on the crisis. All that has changed.” That wasn’t so: both Connally and Reagan had regularly used the crisis to flay the president. Connally nonetheless now weighed in with relish about this supposedly shattered taboo: “I am sure the Ayatollah Khomeini is pleased to hear Senator Kennedy’s remarks.” Henry

The RNC chairman pointed to the joint statement he had just issued with the DNC chairman pledging bipartisan unity on the subject—which “the senator’s comments would seem to erode.”

He had also just received splendid news: Gallup had his approval rating at 54 percent. Their last pre-hostage sounding had him at 29 percent, his lowest ever. The pollsters at NBC found that 67 percent of the public approved of his handling of the Iran crisis, with 71 percent maintaining that he was doing the most he possibly could. Call it patriotism, call it leadership chic. But three days after Kennedy’s remarks, 100 percent in a much smaller survey—the fifty state Democratic chairmen—said Carter’s handling of Iran was helping his political standing.

Kennedy traveled to Iowa. Enormous crowds, electric with expectation, encountered a “fortuitously named cipher,” Joe Klein wrote, who seemed “clumsy and uncertain even in his best moment.” And yet the senator had a crutch: that old reliable Kennedy aura, the strange, cultic fantasy of a mythic deliverance

Sound arguments didn’t help. Voters told reporters they would have come to cheer Kennedy on were it not for his “unpatriotic” comments. Many who did show up bore signs like “SENATOR, KHOMEINI HAS YOUR SPEECH READY. PLEASE CALL IRAN.” In the twelve days after his shah remarks, Kennedy lost a dozen points in the polls.

A special on the events of 1953, when the CIA overthrew the Iranian president for nationalizing the nation’s oil fields, would have been helpful in explaining to the public why Iranians despised America so. The agent in charge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s nephew Kermit, had first tried paying off corrupt

Safire would be disappointed. A force perhaps more powerful than even the White House amplified the sentimentality: the lust for readers and ratings. WHAT WAS WRONG WITH THIS? Let a hostage wife explain.

Barbara Rosen, who was married to embassy press attaché Barry Rosen, later wrote eloquently about the damage that issued from turning her and her fellow sufferers into characters in a “public affairs soap opera.” A sharp strategic thinker herself, Rosen realized immediately

that’s the way it was…” sign-off: “… on the seventy-fourth day of captivity for the American hostages in Iran.”) “Self-absorption

newscast closed with five straight minutes of the opera singer’s rendition of “Ave Maria.” They might better have devoted that airtime to analyzing developments on the border between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, which was where the last awful news event of an awful year was about to explode.

Other recruits, including the son of a wealthy Saudi family whose name was Osama bin Laden, poured in from abroad. In fact, the makeshift army’s greatest success came in Herat, where the most valiant soldiers were laborers who had worked

approximately the moment he said it, Islamic political solidarity inspired by the Iranian revolution helped Herat insurgents fight so effectively that the Afghan military lost contact with Kabul for a week. Taraki desperately cabled the Kremlin, begging for men and materiel. This set off anguished days of emergency debate in the Soviet Politburo. The debate strikingly paralleled that between Zbigniew Brzezinski

also the debates among American policymakers in the mid-1960s about Vietnam. KGB chief Yuri Andropov led the hawks: “We cannot afford to lose Afghanistan under any circumstances.” Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko was the diplomat: “The Afghan army is unreliable, and our army could become the aggressor. With whom will it fight? With the Afghan people! Our army would have to shoot them! The negative factors would be enormous. Most countries

Brezhnev’s aide Alexei Kosygin said “it would be a fatal mistake to commit ground troops”—just like the 1950s American general who warned Eisenhower not to get bogged down in a land war in Asia.

did President Carter. In July, he authorized the CIA to supply covert assistance to the mujahideen, acting on the advice of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who hoped it would escalate the violence to the point that the Soviet Union directly intervened. Khalq

One of the arguments deployed by the hawks was that the United States Senate’s reluctance to ratify the SALT II treaty proved the U.S. had never been interested in peace—an argument similar to the one American hawks pressed against the Soviet

and not what it actually was: a chaotic, ambivalent, and desperate attempt by a Soviet leadership cadre gasping for life to stanch the bleeding from a series of political accidents.

“Every scrap of evidence from opinion polls that have been taken in recent weeks—and the pollsters have had a field day—attests to the fact that Americans are in a much more assertive, even jingoistic mood, stiffer than at any time since the early days of Vietnam.” NBC found that 81 percent of Americans were “personally angered” by the hostage crisis.

GEORGE BUSH WON THE IOWA caucuses. Few saw it coming except George Bush. “How can anyone with such impressive credentials, who has served his country for so long, achieve such widespread anonymity?” Dan Rather asked him on 60 Minutes eight days before the contest—then accused him of actually being a stalking horse for Gerald Ford.

Bush said something even more improbable: “I will win.” He gave three reasons. The first was, “We are the most well-organized campaign in the field.” The second and third were… well, those didn’t much matter. In Iowa, organizing was the name of the game. And if you won it in Iowa, as Jimmy Carter had proven, miracles were possible.

oldest son, George W., the failed congressional candidate, was a bit of a wastrel. He didn’t do much of anything at all.) Bush also benefitted from his right-wing political director’s taste for the jugular. “I don’t question Reagan’s health or stamina or his intellectual

Howard Baker had pegged his entire strategy on winning that vote. In his speech he had pledged “a revival of the honorable profession of politics”—to limp applause, and an even limper vote. The rejection in Maine knocked him out of serious contention.

Reagan and Crane, he snapped, were “the only two men here who truly care about this country,” while Bush was a Trilateralist: “The Trilateral controls and orchestrates what is going to happen in the world. George Bush represents nothing but the elitists.… The Bolshevik Revolution was literally underwritten by the Chase Manhattan Bank. It’s provable. Go look it up… I’m not a stupid person. I went to a fine school and I got a master’s from Harvard.… At the rate we’re going, my kids are going to live in some form of dictatorship. When a couple making forty or fifty grand can do nothing but pay their bills, that isn’t freedom.” William F. Buckley had

Bush tried to protect himself by quitting the Trilateral Commission, and also the Council on Foreign Relations. Theodore “Teddy” White, the Making of the President chronicler, was impressed that he went no further than that. “As a civilized person,” Bush “could not, or would not, court the Moral Majority, the right-to-life movement, the National Rifle Association.” This, however, was a mistaken impression. As Dick Wirthlin observed in a Reagan strategy memo, “Bush’s