Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

Stylistically, Bush seemed almost to relish opportunities to disassociate himself from the Republican rank and file’s anger.

He condescended to his party’s base of arriviste entrepreneurs. (He concluded a contrast of his foreign policy experience to Reagan’s by crying, “I’ve been there—not lecturing on the Republican free enterprise circuit”). He fetishized rule-following. (“Absolute international anarchy out there. Dealing with people like the Ayatollah, who has absolutely no concept of order.” Sentence

handsome little poker bluff, for he had already green-lighted a bold CIA operation to rescue eight American personnel living secretly in the Canadian embassy. (They were disguised as a film crew working on a science fiction picture called Argo.) With steely discipline, the president had never even hinted of their

At that, given that he was taking billions in business away from Iowa farmers, his political aides were in a sweat. Ted Kennedy seized the initiative: “The American farmer will pay the price for an ineffective foreign policy,” he said. Nonetheless, the president’s speech had received the highest television ratings of any of his addresses, scoring an approval rating approaching 100 percent. As he spoke, United Nations Secretary General

fly to

Which was better than nothing—and would have served as a useful rebuke to the arguments of the president’s opponents that the White House was incompetent, had anyone been allowed to know about it.

butt of a Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” gag from Jane Curtin: “Anyone who has seen Congressman John B. Anderson of Illinois, please call 800-555-1212.” Anderson gibed: “I must confess to this audience that I am not a younger Ronald Reagan with experience”—for the rest seemed

popular magazine behind TV Guide, published a cover article, “Chappaquiddick: The Still Unanswered Questions,” claiming that Kennedy could not possibly have swum across the channel as he claimed given the currents at that particular time. Joan Kennedy was drafted to stand by his side and claim, “I

“How long are you going to stay out campaigning?” a reporter asked—to which he replied, “Until I run out of underpants.” (Another reporter: “Did he just say… underpants?”)

little wheel with handles sticking out of the center like a baker rolling out dough, until his stomach was flat on the ground, waited a beat, then rolled himself back, over and over again for half an hour. Once, visiting Reagan’s hotel room during the Republican convention, Bush—fifteen years Reagan’s junior, star of two Yale College World Series teams—asked to give the little wheel a go. He collapsed unceremoniously on his belly on the first try.

Then, Reagan laid down the marker that he would repeat up to Election Day: “Mr. Carter is encouraging the belief that this nation will not risk war no matter what the provocation. In doing so he is increasing the challenge of a nuclear confrontation”—just like “when Mr. Chamberlain was tapping his cane on the cobblestones of Europe.” In L.A., Reagan held his first press conference

Then Reagan lamented how the USSR, “fueled with American capital, run by American computers, and fed with American grain,” kept playing America for the fool, and that Jimmy Carter bowed to “Kremlin propaganda” on arms control, until, after the Afghanistan invasion, he finally realized that “the Soviets can’t be trusted.” The strategy was working.

Her movement was more aflame than ever. Federal District Court Judge John Dooling, a practicing Catholic, had just handed down a 642-page ruling striking down the Hyde Amendment with an argument that stung: that by singling out a certain medical procedure to be denied federal funds, the Hyde Amendment imposed a religious view. The court thus deprived the Christians of their cherished martyrdom; they were the religious persecutors. Noted Time, “Although

At Trinity Christian Academy in Jacksonville, Florida, a teacher was so riled up after Falwell’s preachments about the dangers of homosexuality that he told his class, “In my day, we knew how to deal with faggots.… We knocked a guy’s head into the side of the fountain! He was bleeding like a squashed tomato.” When a student complained to another teacher about this un-Christlike utterance, the concern turned on him, not the teacher: “Are you thinking of turning gay, Dwayne? A gay person cannot be saved.” Paul Weyrich kept up a busy

to elect to the presidency instead. On January 30, Ronald Reagan appeared to a delirious reception in the auditorium of the Christian institution of higher learning in South Carolina wrapped up in federal litigation to preserve its right to exclude Black students: Bob Jones University—a “great institution,” Reagan proclaimed.

Tallahassee, he blamed the hostage seizure on the “ease with which the administration abandoned its support of the shah,” and said Carter’s “continual failure to give the Soviet Union clear and unmistakable signals concerning our vital interests is driving the country closer to a nuclear confrontation.” (So much for last week’s claim that they weren’t ready

The Washington Post noted with distaste that he had even been “dusting off his references to the woman in Chicago who received welfare checks under 127 different names.” He

all worked seamlessly, Friedman said, because the people on that barren rock understood what Americans had back during the nineteenth century—which schoolchildren mistakenly learned was the age of robber barons, but whose unregulated economy actually had made it America’s golden age. “We’ve been squandering that inheritance,” the genial little gentleman softly rued. The narrative was exceptionally seductive: economic utopia was within America’s grasp, if only government would get out of the way. It was also a thoroughgoing fantasy—starting with that harbor ferry, without which the barren

“Spendthrift and snooping government,” Friedman harrumphed, “deciding what they think is good for us. They are taking away our freedom to choose.” The message was that not capitalists but public officials were the real greedy malefactors. It was an auspicious time to be selling

February 15, a handsome, corn-fed twenty-one-year-old from Wisconsin named Eric Heiden won the first of five gold medals in speed skating, a record; his sister Beth won a bronze. Two twin brothers from Yakima, Phil and Steve Mahre, competed against each other in skiing. Phil

the Romanians, 7–2. On February 20—the deadline Carter had imposed for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, when America’s summer Olympic boycott became official—they clinched a medal with a 4–2 defeat of West Germany. Surpassing expectations was fun. But it was time for reality to intrude, against the team that had just beaten them 10–3 without

With one second left in the first period, the Americans put the puck in the goal to tie the Soviets at two, and Herb Brooks, in his

kid skittered onto the ice with a big flag. Jim Craig draped it around himself with, the Boston Globe wrote, “only his head and the tail ends of his fat goalie’s stick poking through, and as he skated, glided, shook the row of hands, he was a symbol, a hope, a promise.… He looked like the Statue of Liberty on skates.” Vice President

This was the one about how you could tell the Polish guy at a cockfight. (He brought a duck.) And how you could tell the Italian. (He bet on the duck.) And whether the mafia was there. (The duck won.) A reporter who hadn’t heard the joke asked him to repeat it, which Reagan obligingly

His backfilling was sabotaged inadvertently that same day by his wife, who was campaigning in the Chicago suburb of Rosemont. The loudspeakers picked her up telling her husband on the phone that she wished he could be there to see “all these beautiful white people.” She later claimed that she was referring to the snow—although when she realized people could hear her, she had turned pale and added, “beautiful Black and white people.” There were no Black people present. Not in a white suburb like Rosemont. In Nashua,

For instance, in 1945, when Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild and the studio heads convinced him that persuading his members to cross a picket line in a nasty jurisdictional strike was the heroic thing to do, because the strike was part of a Communist plot to take over the motion picture industry. (It wasn’t.) Was this situation a little

appeared at a victory party in front of a red, white, and blue banner inscribed with the slogan devised by the jettisoned Madison Avenue ad agency, which the campaign had decided to stick with: “LET’S MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

Six days later, interest rates on long-term treasury bonds reached 11 percent, higher even than during the Civil War, and the Federal Reserve again raised the discount rate a once-unprecedented full percentage point. Nervous traders began dumping thirty-year bonds, which by February 19 had lost 20 percent of their value since the beginning

The inflation rate hit 18 percent, the highest since World War II. The unemployment

said, recommending “as much progress as we can… in balancing the budget.” He also said he agreed with one of John Anderson’s central campaign proposals: a fifty-cent-per-gallon increase in the federal gas tax.

Elliott Curson’s ads kept showing through the primaries, including the Good Shepherd one saying that the way to arrest inflation was to “cut tax rates deeply and permanently,” with nothing about budgets, except implicitly in its accusation that Carter believed “that for one American to gain, another American has to suffer.”

Ronald Reagan was playing Santa Claus to Jimmy Carter’s Scrooge. Which made for a marvelous

An ABC/Harris Poll said that Ford would beat Carter 54 percent to 44 percent, while Carter would beat Reagan 58–40, and that Republicans favored Ford for the nomination over Reagan 33–27.

This year, the most exuberant were all with Reagan. There was Roger Stone, the Watergate bit player who had been elected as Young Republican president in 1977 by depicting his opponent, a 1976 Reagan delegate, as a captive of “Rockefeller liberals.” Stone was Reagan’s organizer in the Northeast, in charge of crucial primaries in Pennsylvania (April 22) and New York (April 25).

The manager for Stone’s cutthroat YR campaign, Paul Manafort, ran the South. Before spring

Stone, Manafort, and John Sears’s fired aide-de-camp Charlie Black had formed their own PR firm, hoping to capitalize on their closeness to R...

then there was an insouciant young fellow named Harvey LeRoy Atwater in South Carolin...

Sowing such acrimony between one’s opponents, known as “ratfucking,” was a specialty of the young Republican milieu that incubated all the healthiest right-wing exuberants.

The next day, Reagan came out against federal disaster-area declarations as so much socialism: “When Chicago burned down, they didn’t declare it a disaster area. They just rebuilt it, the people of Chicago, and this is the kind of America we can have again.” (In fact, the Secretary of War in 1871 did something functionally identical, with Washington

He said that he could balance the budget by cutting forty-one “totally unnecessary” items cited by a document the General Accounting Office had transmitted to the Congressional Budget Office, “adding up to $11 billion in spending.” (GAO and CBO spokesmen said that they had never heard of any such document, and $11 billion wasn’t close to the full budget deficit.)

Now that Reagan was on the cusp of nomination, on March 13, Ford signed a document declaring his intent to run in those states that did require his assent—telling the aides who witnessed his signature, “You have to make sure if we don’t do this, these documents don’t ever see the light of day.” Two days later, however, he gathered his people in his Palm Springs living room and called it all off. Immediately after saying that, he launched into a tirade against Jimmy Carter, stalked out of the room in frustration,

press belatedly started examining some of the claims from the campaign that had gotten him there. On Issues and Answers on March 16, host John Laurence noted his commercial claiming that John F. Kennedy “helped almost everybody in the country” with a 30 percent tax cut. Laurence pointed out that the 1960s cut had only averaged 19 percent, was not uniform across the board but progressive, and had not closed the budget deficit as claimed. Reagan replied, “I don’t remember saying that, because I honestly don’t know what the rate of tax cut was.” Laurence asked if he read his scripts before reciting them.

Journal decided it was his louche affection for “those who view the burning issues of the day as opposing gun control, making abortion unconstitutional, and outlawing homosexuality”—that “Mr. Reagan has indulged these supporters rather than educating them.” More conventional Republicans thought the problem was his louche affection for the loopy economic theories of the Journal.

BILL CASEY WAS SOMETHING OF a right-wing exuberant himself. Born in 1913 to a modest family in Queens, as a hotshot young lawyer during the Depression he helped invent the idea of “sheltering” income from New Deal tax levies on the rich—then grew rich himself writing guidebooks teaching others the tricks of the trade.

Nancy Reagan thought him grotesque: a sartorial unmade bed, with crooked ties and crooked teeth, a mumbler even from a podium, with table manners like a hobo. Campaign chairman Paul Laxalt, however, called him a “godsend.” He was a morale-building manager, who governed like a chairman of the board,

But Casey’s most important preconvention project was persuading Wall Street to learn to live with Reagan. His chief of staff, Ed Meese, recruited establishment

But Meese was rather a right-wing exuberant, too. He had first caught Governor Reagan’s attention as a fearsome prosecutor

In 1969, he helped turn a protest over Berkeley’s “People’s Park” into a military

occupation. One hundred and twenty-eight people were sent to the hospital with gunshot wounds. One lost his life. Robert Scheer had recently pointed out to him that no evidence ever emerged that the man who was shot to death was more than a bystander. Meese responded, “James Rector deserved to die.” So which side was Meese on—the internationalist quislings

and meat-ax cuts to programs like job training ($900 million), food stamps ($1.1 billion), and school lunches ($300