Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

Stockman was certain his party was finally grasping the Truth—that it was “possible to cut taxes, raise defense, and balance the budget all at once.” He was particularly dismayed that Reagan was “aligning himself with Jerry Falwell, the anti–gun control nuts, the Bible-thumping creationists,” folks obsessed with “the threat of unisex toilets, the school prayer amendment and the rest of the New Right litany.” Irving

would provide Republicans was so historically imperative that they should be blasted through whatever the effect on the budget. “The neoconservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums. He wants

Fact-checkers disagreed. “The U.S. Geological Survey has told me that the proven potential for oil in Alaska alone is greater than the proven reserves in Saudi Arabia,” he had enthused to the traders. The Geological Survey said they had no idea what he was talking about.

Rupert Murdoch, for one thing. Murdoch had been awaiting a favorable decision from the Export-Import Bank on financing for an airliner deal he was involved in, and got it two days after a February 17 meeting with Carter. Both before that and afterward, his New York Post kept putting nasty Kennedy stuff on the cover like “TEDDY IS THE TOAST OF TEHRAN” and “TEDDY’S SECRET PARTIES.” Then Kennedy

Kennedy also had a living legend in his corner. Carroll O’Connor played Archie Bunker on All in the Family, a character intended by his creator, Norman Lear, to represent the quintessential

Ironically, however, white working-class men adopted Archie as a hero. In 1972, some sported “Archie for President” buttons. O’Connor’s commercials for Ted Kennedy deliberately played to this misreading, in an attempt to reach out to white ethnics in the outer boroughs. Sporting an Archie-like canvas jacket, sounding far more Queens-like than he usually did off-camera, O’Connor fixed the viewer’s gaze and said, “Friends, Herbert Hoi-ver hid out in the White House,

clamor inside the White House was worse. At one meeting, Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that the diplomatic track was a fool’s errand, that the Iranian coastal island housing the world’s largest offshore crude oil processing facility should be seized. He was joined by Secretary of

message was beginning to take—all too well, unfortunately. Credit controls helped slow consumer spending so much that the economy was grinding to a standstill. Housing starts were at their lowest in twenty years. Ford Motor Company announced that it was closing three more plants and laying off twelve thousand workers at seven others. GM announced eighteen thousand layoffs.

The prime rate hit 20 percent. Gold topped $900 an ounce. “There had never been anything like it in modern American history,” said Newsweek, “and even veteran moneymen stood in awe.” One Fed governor said, “We are in a South American inflationary environment now.”

removed most restrictions on banks operating across state lines, allowed instant electronic transfer of funds—and, most epochally, phased out “Regulation Q.” Regulation Q was the centerpiece of a suite of rules created by the Banking Act of 1933 to tamp down

Banks, basically, were no longer able to compete for customers by bidding for them—an expensive proposition that incentivized banks to seek out high-risk, high-return investment, and also something only big banks could afford. The banking business stayed modest and conservative; banks stayed small, competing instead to best serve their local communities. Americans enjoyed a decades-long run of stability unprecedented in the history of modern capitalism.

And now, in Jimmy Carter, they finally found one who would. He signed the bill in a public ceremony, handing out signing pens to a number of banking CEOs. Arthur Schlesinger declared him “not a Democrat—at least in anything more recent than the Grover Cleveland sense of the word.” Carter couldn’t have cast himself as a better foil for Ted Kennedy if he were writing a script.

these, carefully edited to just barely not cross the line into a direct attack over Chappaquiddick, proverbial men and women in the street pronounced their doubts about Kennedy’s character. These, however, were neutralized by the announcement of a surprise Kennedy endorser: the parents of Mary Jo Kopechne.

CARTER ADMINISTRATION’S INABILITY TO help blue-collar workers made Ronald Reagan’s economic message—tax cuts for everyone—sound better all the time. A longtime Democrat in West Allis, Wisconsin, who had crossed over in that state’s open primary to vote for Reagan, explained to Time, “Inflation is eating us up, welfare is a mess, we don’t have any power in this country—why shouldn’t we switch?” Besides, Reagan “would return us to

describe Reagan’s economic policies. His boss tried it out on the stump in Pittsburgh on April 10: Reagan’s plan to cut between $70 billion and $90 billion in taxes and balance the budget—with “no mention of where and how he would make budget cuts”—was “voodoo economics.” He then ventured an unsupportable

Every channel depicted a desert graveyard of twisted, molten metal. Hertzberg immediately knew what this was about: some sort of rescue mission in Iran had failed. He darted to the White House to begin working on one of the saddest speeches he would ever write. As best the first

received surprisingly little attention—until a New Republic reporter named Morton Kondracke reached Walter Cronkite to ask him about rumors that Anderson was considering him as a running mate. Cronkite, who had announced plans to retire at the end of the year, answered, “I’d be so honored to be asked. I wouldn’t turn it down. It would be the right party. I’ve been an independent all my life.” Requests for confirmation bombarded

Nancy Reagan snapped to him, “Why can’t you get him out of the race? He’s doing nothing but costing us time and money and energy.” Connally doubted that his opinion cut much ice with the human being who despised him most in the world, but he agreed to call James Baker to try. He also addressed Nancy’s husband: “I hope when it’s over that you won’t reward him with the vice-presidency.” Reagan shook his head: “Don’t worry. I’ll never do that.” ON APRIL 28, THOUSANDS OF pilgrims began

Bob Dylan was interrupting concerts with rants about “specific things, in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, which just might apply to these times here.” (“Just look at the presence of the Soviet

where Jim Bakker set forth the usual litany of evidence that the nation was turning its face from God—“and you wonder why we haven’t been winning any wars lately?” The next

new sort of weekly variety show began its second season, a lighthearted look at the charms of ordinary Americans, like the guy who played a fiddle using a toothpick for a bow, and the detective for missing pets who called himself “Sherlock Bones.” It was called Real People—and one of its themes was that real people held government bureaucrats in contempt. (“It’s nice that at

turned earnest: he didn’t “want to see a bunch of six- and eight-year-old kids, being made, you know, totally uneducated, and made to feel they were living outside the law! Let’s address ourselves to the fundamentals. These are good people.

than talking about putting up a fence, why don’t we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, and make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here?” He said he wanted to “open the border both ways,” and was for “understanding their problems”: the Mexican economy was in trouble, and immigration

Reagan took his turn, claiming that every time a big across-the-board tax cut had been instituted, “there was such an increase in prosperity that the government, even in the first year, got increased revenues, not less!” He followed that falsehood with a parable about a spendthrift

Smith challenged Reagan about all the dubious figures he had been using, like the one about the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut being the same size as his 30 percent tax cut “when it was only 18 percent”—and Reagan interrupted with another sheer invention: “That was only the first year! It was a two-year tax cut, and it was a 27 percent tax cut, and I think that’s close enough to round up to thirty.”

Bush yelped helplessly that Cuba hadn’t invaded Afghanistan, maundered about “hemispheric problems,” pointed out that within the international community an “embargo” was considered an act of war, which was why Kennedy had insisted on the word quarantine during

Reagan kept saying embargo, and getting still more applause. Bush gave a forgettable closing statement. Reagan said

In the nineteenth century, we built the greatest industrial power that the world has ever seen. And we spent most of the twentieth century—apologizing. And I don’t know what we’re apologizing for!” And who could forget hearing something like that? Bush

days later, UPI reported that two hundred Cubans, “some of them reportedly hardcore criminals, have in fact been transferred to a federal prison in Alabama.” That number represented but 0.56 percent of the arrivals thus far. But many residents from the areas around the military bases—all in conservative regions—were not interested in doing the math. A plane soared

nearby demonstrator, however, admitted he had: “The president and the governor said when the Vietnamese came out here that they were only going to stay a little while. Now they live here, they’ve got our jobs. They’ve got our tax dollars.” Another worried observer

Richard Lamm. He said he hoped no refugees

seems to me the evidence is clear and overwhelming that Castro is emptying out his prisons and mental institutions. I think this country is sadly mistaken if we feel we can be the reser...

SUNDAY, MAY 18, AN earthquake triggered the eruption of Mount Saint Helens, a volcano in Washington State, shooting a plume of ash sixteen miles in the sky, killing fifty-seven. In the Liberty City neighborhood

called a New York Times reporter to his home for an exclusive interview, and pointed to a periodical on the coffee table—the Yale alumni magazine: “That’s the first time we’ve been able to put that out for months.” He indicated another on an end table. “I guess we can put this away now.” It was National Review.

senator accelerated his schedule for the run-up to the August convention—where, though all told he had received only 38 percent of primary and caucus votes to Carter’s slight majority, his strategists were devising a plan to seize the nomination nonetheless.

National Conservative Political Action Committee’s airwave assault on its “hit list” of five, then six, liberal senators. Ever since their cookie-cutter ads began

George McGovern’s

they just poured poison through South Dakotans’ TVs because they recognized a “golden opportunity” in a “remote, rural state.” From NCPAC’s sprawling headquarters, which took up an entire floor of an Arlington office building, Terry Dolan responded to such complaints insouciantly as ever: “We’re interested in ideology. We’re not interested in respectability.”

officially running against Frank Church.

Birch Bayh, called NCPAC’s ads “disgusting,”

MOST DRAMATIC LEGAL TEST of the “coordination” issue was South Dakota, where George McGovern was running scared. A state electorate suspicious that the

many people lived in South Dakota. That’s what made it so useful for NCPAC’s purposes.) Terry Dolan couldn’t care less about the SRCC’s exquisite electoral algebra; he considered the Republican Party a “social club” where bloodless

Which was one way NCPAC’s targets responded to the smears—trusting their neighbors to recognize tricksters when they saw them. This was the approach of Senator John Culver in Iowa, running against Congressman Chuck Grassley. The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew had recently published a little book about Culver called

Marshner was unapologetic: “In a political battle,” she told Washingtonian, “first you have to polarize people in order to get their attention.… What do you do with people who have spent 12,000 hours sitting in front of TV before they’ve

government had canceled a 1950s program of temporary visas for Mexican farmworkers while letting in these “boatloads of people… who in some cases will never work.” Carter made a calm, patient defense of his policy of welcoming refugees. Then, he stopped himself and grinned: “There are loafers in my own family. I hate to admit it. Maybe even

legislative package introduced by Senator Roger Jepsen and Reagan’s campaign chairman, Senator Paul Laxalt, that would explicitly declare spanking children protected by the Constitution and ban federal legal aid for abortion, school desegregation, divorce, and homosexual rights litigation. Phyllis Schlafly’s deputy Rosemary Thomson attended a luncheon at which, she complained, the feminist minister’s invocation was “interspersed with Women’s Lib

National Review publisher William Rusher said that for insisting that the party “lift its skirts and show its ankle to Detroit inner city blacks,” thus slighting “right-to-life people, pro-gun people, pro-energy people,” Brock ought to be fired. The headquarters

Michigan’s Governor William Milliken had his car stolen this morning at the Detroit airport.” Prostitutes weren’t concerned. One told the Detroit News she expected to earn at least $1,000 from the week’s twenty thousand visitors. Nor were businesses that dealt

But both also campaigned, if quietly. Bush, for example, reworked his speech scheduled for the third night of the convention from a generalized attack on Carter to a panegyric to Reagan, and denied to a reporter that he had ever uttered the phrase “voodoo economics”—even after the reporter played him the videotape. Following these wisps

blamed “60 percent of the world oil price increase since 1973” not on OPEC, but on the depreciation of the American dollar. It called energy taxes “punitive,” dismissed the federal fifty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit as “counterproductive.” There had been a spirited