Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

The next day a former member of both the Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan named Gerald Carlson won the Republican nomination for the congressional seat representing the depressed automotive city of Dearborn, Michigan. He had spent

few weeks later, ABC News followed him canvassing voters for the general election: “I’d like to get to Washington to see if we can’t get back some of the civil rights that the white majority of this country once had.” A woman: “I agree with

Reagan himself was so emotional on the subject of Taiwan that in 1971, when a bloc of nations, including African nations (but also European nations), voted for Beijing to occupy China’s United

The critic Peter Biskind saw in this “the very worst aspects of American culture, those that led to Vietnam in the first place. Its popularity and warm reception by the critics indicate a failure to consolidate whatever progress was made in the ’60s toward confronting the underside of our national life.” He concluded, “It is tempting to call Cimino our first home-grown fascist director.” An essayist in the New York Times labeled the picture “The Gook Hunter,” describing

Such opinions didn’t keep it from sweeping the 1979 Academy Awards, where the ailing John Wayne presented Cimino with the Best Picture statuette. And it was The Deer Hunter that inspired a veteran named Jan Scruggs to launch the personal crusade that led to Congress authorizing a Vietnam memorial on the National Mall. Whether Vietnam was a noble cause was in the

A television program debuted as a limited-run miniseries on CBS in the spring of 1978 and proved so popular it had a twelve-year run as the most popular by far of a new crop of evening soap operas about rich, feuding families. Dallas chronicled the intrigues of the brood sired by

1977, T. Cullen Davis, whose wildcatter father bequeathed him America’s eighth-largest privately held company, was acquitted, barely, of the execution-style murder of his estranged wife’s boyfriend and that man’s daughter, and two others, thanks to an audacious defense from the flamboyant Texas attorney

Reverend James Robison in his case before the FCC after his Fort Worth affiliate pulled him off the air for claiming that gay men recruited little boys. In June, Pastor Robison stood with Cullen Davis on the grounds of his 181-acre estate while a thousand of his employees and their families looked on as he stepped forward to accept Jesus Christ as his

the televangelist was proud to welcome the probable murderer as a regular on

Nelson Bunker Hunt, whose father, H. L., was said to have been the richest man in America, and in November of 1963 had welcomed John F. Kennedy to Dallas by announcing on the radio that the thirty-fifth president intended to form a “dictatorship” where “no firearms are permitted.” H. L.’s sons had just embroiled the nation in another genuine Texas soap opera: they lost their shirts,

He scowled: “They want everybody to vote! I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people: they never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now.” He grew agitated: “As a matter of fact our leverage in elections goes up as the voting populace goes down.” He complained about ministers who registered their congregants to vote without telling them who the “good guys” were, and he attacked

it was not yet Ronald Reagan’s turn to speak. D. James Kennedy explained why “1980 could be America’s last free election.” He was then supposed to introduce W. A. Criswell, who was to introduce his old friend Ronald Reagan… but then Jerry Falwell, who had already spoken once,

had determined “that tax exemption constitutes federal funding” (it always had), forcing “all tax-exempt schools, including church schools, to abide by affirmative action orders drawn up by—who else?—“IRS bureaucrats.” Then he said

Reagan traveled to Columbus to accept an endorsement from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the biggest union in the country. But out in the crowd, policy director Martin Anderson and economist Alan Greenspan,

reminded his audience that he was the only union leader to run for president. He quoted the late AFL-CIO president George Meany, speaking a year earlier, on the “climate of economic anxiety and uncertainty” midwifed by the Carter administration. He said: “I pledge to you in his memory that the voice of the American worker will once again be heeded in Washington”—promising regular consultation with union leaders—“and that the climate of fear that he spoke of will no longer threaten workers and their families.” He turned his

pledge to each other, with this great lady looking on, that we can, and so help us God, we will make America great again.” It was cut into one hell of a campaign commercial. Maybe he could put the whole slump

but were part of a plan that simultaneously promised to lower inflation. “In other words, a policy that promised to balance the budget in order to reduce inflation was going to attain budget balance by assuming the very inflation that balance was supposed to eliminate.” The governor was still in Wonderland. Only

Reagan and Bush landed in Washington for an unusual joint campaign event with more than two hundred Republican members of Congress on the Capitol steps. Before two thousand spectators, they collectively committed to five promises: slashing Congress’s budget and bureaucracy, passing the first year’s Kemp-Roth tax reduction, weeding out $34 billion in government waste, instituting enterprise zones, and strengthening defense. The architect of the gathering was first-term firebrand Newt Gingrich, who called it a “historic moment.” Gingrich’s

Roger Stone was both an unscrupulous and boastful man, and what he boasted to a journalist many years later was that, in 1980, he approached the city’s famously reptilian Republican fixer Roy Cohn, a Reagan fan, for advice on persuading Harding to slate Anderson. “You need

I don’t understand you.” “How much cash, you dumb fuck.” His number was $125,000. The problem, Stone responded, was that the campaign didn’t have that kind of cash lying around. Barked back Cohn, “That’s not the problem. How does he want it?” Cohn gave Stone a suitcase (“I don’t look in the suitcase.… I

But Carter longed to speak his mind. He was irritated—beyond irritated. He couldn’t believe how seriously Reagan’s economic mumbo jumbo was being taken.

They also reported his work as a registered agent of the Portuguese government to help them defend their colonialism in Mozambique. Two hundred copies of that exposé had been hand-delivered to top journalists in Washington before the Republican

“We assumed,” Hendrik Hertzberg later said plaintively, “that they would cover him like they might cover us.” The Times never did, for instance, call out Reagan’s continued insistence that he had never suggested that Social Security be made voluntary. To the president and his men, it felt like the media’s obsession with “balancing” the news between left and right had killed simple journalistic good sense. Their

the far-right outfit Accuracy in Media bought shares in the New York Times Company in order to harass its executives at shareholder meetings. To make peace, publisher Arthur O. “Punch” Sulzberger invited its president, Reed Irvine, to regular conclaves at the

newspaper’s corporate suite—a courtesy extended to no other shareholder. The relationship soon ad...

“And the rebirth of code words like ‘states’ rights.’ In a speech in Mississippi! And a campaign reference to the Ku Klux Klan relating to the South. That—is a message—that

It took only until four o’clock for Hamilton Jordan to issue a nervous clarification that Carter was not calling Ronald Reagan racist. It didn’t work. Jimmy Carter had crossed a line. At his next White House press conference, running live on all three networks, the media set upon him like sharks. A journalist sanctimoniously demanded: “Do you think that Governor Reagan is running a campaign of hatred and racism? And how do you answer allegations that you are running a mean campaign?”

“President Carter must know that, despite his recent rise in the popularity polls, many of his supporters—even many members of his own administration—are deeply disappointed by the mean and cunning antics of his campaign.…

“The wrath that escaped Carter’s lips about racism and hatred when he prays and poses as the epitome of Christian charity leads even his supporters to protest his meanness.” Carter’s meanness was now a certified campaign issue. The conventional wisdom was now that he was taking, in the words of a headline on a front-page City Section column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “The Low Road

Reagan pinned every problem but the weather on the president. So why shouldn’t Carter take off the gloves, too?

will help to decide whether we have war or peace. It’s an awesome choice.” And Reagan yelped like a struck dog. “I think it’s inconceivable that anyone and particularly a president of the United States would imply, as this is another incidence that he is implying and has several times, that anyone, any person in this country would want war, and that’s what he’s charging. And I think it’s unforgivable.”

Reagan departed from his text: “I think to accuse that anyone would deliberately want a war is beneath decency.” Carter, engineer-like, began adding example after example to his speeches of times Reagan had advocated

said something daffy—like, in Buffalo, that “approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources”—Carter could not hit back without it confirming his “meanness” to the press. Reagan’s handlers, just to make sure, worked even harder to protect him from himself. After the LSU speech, a scrum of reporters

Reagan had said in Harlingen, Texas, in the wilting heat, following a performance by a mariachi band to entertain the largely Mexican American crowd: that he would grant visas to undocumented Mexican immigrants “for whatever length of time they want to stay.… You don’t build a nine-foot fence along the border between two friendly nations.” The fence had been a Carter administration proposal back in December 1978—the “Tortilla Curtain,” the notional twenty-seven-mile barrier had been dubbed by horrified human rights activists,

He began answering a pool reporter’s question about the hostages—and Nofziger nearly knocked them over hustling the great man away. On the bus, another press officer,

project was named in Wirthlin’s Black Book. He had discovered that, if Carter managed to spring the hostages, it would be worth ten points in the polls. So he enshrined as one of his nineteen Conditions of Victory, “We can neutralize Carter’s ‘October Surprise.’ ”

thorough was their penetration, so many-tentacled their connections to shady arms dealers abroad that might broker an exchange, that it eventually inspired detailed (but unsubstantiated) conspiracy theories that the former spook Bill Casey had directly negotiated with Iran to hold the hostages until after the election. Mostly, however, this intelligence

As if the OSHA head could not come up with this inference on his own. Reagan had called the agency part of an effort “to minimize the ownership of private property in this country.” And said: “I bet everyone in this room has, at one time or another, climbed a ladder.… How we did it without their 144 rules and regulations about ladder climbing I’ll never know.” OSHA had two regulations about

Its economic teachings came from Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose; its argument that “it is time for our welfare

program to be examined and much of it done away with” was illustrated via an un-Christ-like parable about adopting two dogs whose former owner instructed him to feed them fresh meat. Instead, Falwell bought “a big bag of brown nuggets.… They did not eat luxuriously, but they did eat.” Falwell toured the upper Midwest.

A pastor said that “our country is no longer Christian and it’s time we took it back.” The latest edition of the Moral Majority

just each one of you will reach ten churches with the truth on Chuck Grassley and John Culver—” “It means that we will win the election hands down in this state.” Culver and Grassley were tied. But maybe not for long. The Sunday after that was the “Christians Are Citizens Too Day” voter registration drive—an idea hatched within the Reagan campaign. Liberals poured

Norman Lear chartered a membership organization called People for the American Way to fight “this alarming new movement” who were “teaching people to hate, but in a ‘Christian’ way.” Iowa congressman Tom Harkin said that if churches wanted to measure a politician’s morality “on the basis of his vote on the B-1 bomber or the creation of the Department of Education, they ought to be taxed.” The University of Chicago

“logically they are going to impose their particular brand of theology and lifestyle on the rest of us.” Which further inflamed evangelicals’ martyrdom, making them work all the harder.

is blasphemy. It may be politically expedient, but no one can pray unless he prays through the name of Jesus Christ.” The AJC official distributed the transcript to Jewish leaders around the country. It caused a stir. And, now that Ronald Reagan was fellowshipping with the Moral Majority’s leader, after enthusiastically endorsing the gathering where

Given all this, the ads Carter was running were about as accurate as political commercials could

data points most crucial to this conclusion rhymed with Elliott Curson’s intuition from back in February: 90 percent of voters had heard of Ronald Reagan. But only 40 percent—and lower east of the Mississippi—knew what he had done.

BUT IT WAS CARTER’S MESSAGE that appeared to be getting through. More and more, men and women in the street were telling interviewers that they were afraid of Reagan. The election polls still had them just about

said that Reagan’s tax proposal was “a monstrous, ill-conceived giveaway to the very rich.” He reminded voters, “My

Commentators pressed forward on the attack, too—against Carter. Mary McGrory asked, “Is our president really the man who preached morality in 1976?” A political cartoonist drew Jimmy