Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

Henry “Scoop” Jackson was the plodding, brilliant, and indefatigable fifth-term Democratic senator from Washington State. Jackson was quite liberal on some issues: running for president in 1972 he called for a federal jobs program; running in 1976 he called for

breaking up big oil companies. But he was very conservative on defense. After Jimmy Carter named Warnke as chief negotiator for a new strategic arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union, Jackson became determined to block his confirmation. Jackson was the Capitol Hill patron of the neoconservative defense intellectuals—bereft that, of the fifty-three names they had put forward for jobs

Senate had ever rejected a cabinet-level appointment so early in a new presidency, let alone a Senate controlled by the president’s party. Scoop’s minions were determined to make history. Nitze testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Warnke’s ideas were “demonstrably unsound,” “asinine,” “a screwball, arbitrary, fictitious kind of viewpoint that is not going to help the security of the country.”

Warnke’s job would be negotiating treaties that required two-thirds of the Senate to pass. Fifty-eight was nine votes shy of that. The Soviets surely received that message about President Carter’s weak negotiating position loud and clear.

CAPITOL HILL WAS EVEN ANGRIER with the president about their dams. In the middle of February word spread that the Engineer in Chief had gotten ahold of the Army Corps of Engineers’ General Plan, studied it from cover to cover, then devised a “hit list” of dozens of federal water projects to eliminate. And if your interest was sensible

Wrote a historian of America’s failed water policies, “One of the projects would return five cents in economic benefits for every taxpayer dollar invested; one offered irrigation farmers subsidies worth one million dollars each; another, a huge dam on a middling California river, would cost more than Hoover, Shasta, Glen Canyon, Bonneville, and Grand

in good fun. Except, this year, the contempt was real. The biggest project on the hit list was a $900 million artificial waterway in the Red River basin in Louisiana, home of Russell Long—who promptly announced his willingness to take Carter’s legislative priorities hostage. House majority leader Jim Wright of Texas

They loved his visit to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he lectured employees “who live in sin” to get married and “those of you who don’t know your children’s names, get to know them”; and Amy’s White House tree house; and the sleepover party she hosted with her best pal from school, the daughter of a cook at the Chilean embassy; and her baptism by total immersion

Mrs. Phyllis Rogers of Albuquerque asked if it might “be possible to eliminate the word ‘drug’ from drug store advertising” to discourage drug abuse, which the president said he thought was a splendid idea. (Saturday Night Live did an affectionate lampoon. One frightened caller was suffering a bad LSD trip. The president calmly talked him down: “You did some Orange Sunshine, Peter.… Do you have any Allman Brothers?…”) He held his first town meeting, in Clinton, Massachusetts. And

jokers coined the mocking acronym “MEOW” for Carter’s “moral equivalent of war” formulation: as if tinkering with natural gas subsidies, researching synthetic fuels, and lowering thermostats somehow compared to the global crusade that defeated Tojo and Hitler. Again, the public disagreed. His approval ratings ranged from 69 percent to 80 percent; Gallup had Congress at 36 percent. As for how many of the American people agreed with the president that the energy crisis was serious, that stood at 86 percent. “A rash of books about new presidents has become a well-established

included a vitriolic letter signed by Meldrim Thomson bearing the New Hampshire governor’s official seal of office, a photograph of a child being burned to death, and a “handwritten” explanation composed to make it sound like this “wanton act of violence by black power terrorists,” with whom “Andrew Young has long sided,” had not taken place in Africa, but—well, just maybe in a town near you.

THE WEEK OF JIMMY CARTER’S inauguration, ABC aired an eight-part television miniseries version of Alex Haley’s best-selling slavery epic, Roots. Executives had worried that sixteen hours of slavery would turn off viewers, so rather than waste a weekly prime-time spot for two months, they ran it on consecutive nights. It turned out their worries were misplaced. When the next week’s Nielsen ratings were published, the top eight slots were occupied by Roots.

There was, however, one public figure who disagreed. He would soon be the subject of a front-page Los Angeles Times feature reporting that he had a “significant head start over anyone else in the drive for the Republican nomination.” “Very frankly,” Ronald Reagan said of Roots, “I thought the bias of all the good people being one color and all the bad people being another was rather destructive.” He also couldn’t imagine staying home eight nights in a row to watch it.

Reagan’s words, the secret to reaching voters “usually associated with the blue-collar, ethnic, and religious groups, who are traditionally associated with the Democratic Party” was via “the so-called social issues—law and order, abortion, busing, quota systems.” A Republicanism that could comfortably wear a blue collar, such thinking went, could put paid to the Democrats for good. Though for it to work, Reagan insisted,

ALSO HELPED THAT REAGAN was a leading advocate for one of the most potent social issues of all: restoring the death penalty. Lethal injection was best, he said in 1973: “Being a former farmer and horse raiser, I know what it’s like to try to eliminate an injured horse by shooting him. Now you call the veterinarian and the vet gives it a shot and the horse goes to sleep—that’s it.” Violent crime was skyrocketing: 4.6 murders

America had not executed a criminal for almost a decade. A de facto national moratorium on executions had been formalized in 1972 when the Supreme Court, in Furman v. Georgia, decided 5–4 that the way death was administered violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That same year, in California, the state Supreme Court overturned a death penalty statute signed by then Governor Reagan. The death penalty sentences of the likes of Charles Manson were commuted to life imprisonment—and 70 percent of California voters voted to reinstate it in a referendum. In the summer of 1976,

Civic bloodlust was a tributary in a roaring right-wing social-issue surge. A coalition of Miami conservatives called Save Our Children filed six times the required signatures to schedule a referendum to repeal Dade County’s gay rights ordinance; and, on the same day, in a special election for an open congressional seat in Minnesota, a farmer named Arlan Stangeland won a shocking upset

That day he also taped his next batch of radio commentaries. They included the story of the railroad ticket-taker in London who refused to help foil a purse snatching because “there was nothing about helping a policewoman in his union rulebook,” a paean to Campus Crusade for Christ’s “Athletes in Action” program, a warning of dangers to Americans’ liberty posed by the federally subsidized passenger rail company Amtrak, which reminded listeners that “Benito Mussolini began his career by making the trains run on time”—and Reagan’s first introduction to his followers of a policy idea that would come to define him. High taxes

pattern from his plan comes from the early 1960s and the late president John F. Kennedy. It calls for an across the board tax cut to provide incentives for long-term economic growth.” Kennedy, Reagan claimed—not quite accurately—“cut the 91 percent bracket to 70 percent and the 20 percent bottom bracket down to 14. His Keynesian advisors swore that government would suffer a great loss of revenues.… Instead the stimulus to the economy was so immediate that actual tax revenues equaled a $54 billion increase in six years.” Jack Kemp was proposing a loaves-and-fishes policy miracle. Ronald Reagan was one of his first major converts. It was a development that would be central to his political story.

1974, thirty of the thirty-eight states needed to sear the amendment into the Constitution for good had signed on. First lady Pat Nixon wore a pro-ERA bracelet; and back then even Governor Reagan supported it. President Ford was an outright enthusiast, as was his successor. In 1974, George Gallup reported that public support for passage was 79 percent. In 1976, Time replaced its customary “Man of the Year” selection with a dozen pioneering “Women of the Year,” declaring that “the women’s drive penetrated every layer of society, matured beyond ideology to a new

Women could be redeemed from Eve’s sin of defiance, she told a Texas Monthly interviewer, by submitting to their husbands as Christ submitted to the cross—“since there is no authority that is not ordained of God.” The reporter sought clarification: “But you don’t mean something like Hitler?” Yes, she replied, even Hitler.

Her father found steady work in New Deal agencies. He despised that; he considered the New Deal to be a “war on the free-enterprise system.” So did his hyper-political daughter. In 1946, when she was twenty-two, she called upon a St. Louis alderman running for Congress. He hired her on the spot as his campaign manager. “I had to keep looking at

That same year her father hit it big with a patent he’d been tinkering with. So there: in the fullness of time, conservatism and capitalism

had provided—no government meddling necessary, thank you very much. She graduated Phi...

She won first prize in a national essay contest sponsored by the Washington Daily News, opposing a postwar version of affirmative action: “The cards are stacked against the enterprising and ambitious person,” she wrote, “in favor of… the unqualified veteran.” She took

She won the primary. Newspapers ran pictures of her in an apron, standing at the stove. (Caption: “She doesn’t allow politics to interfere with her wifely duties.”) This introduced what would become Schlafly’s trademark: her insistence that the biblically ordained role of wifely subservience could be perfectly harmonious with a life of accomplishment. Later, she would begin her anti–Equal Rights Amendment speeches, “First of all, I want to thank my husband Fred, for letting me come—I always like to say that, because it makes the libs so mad!” Conservative ladies adored it. The example she set—squaring the circle of Christian duty and worldly ambition—was the greatest gift Phyllis Schlafly provided them.

It was a little like how Lawrence of Arabia described his insurgent Arab army that captured great chunks of the Middle East during World War I—“a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas”; or Von Clausewitz on guerrilla warfare, where “the element of resistance will exist everywhere and nowhere.” Schlafly’s own contribution to counterinsurgency

an an Eagle Forum pamphlet distributed in the South suggested, “the sexes fully integrated like the races”—including ending separate men’s and women’s restrooms. That was almost certainly not so—but even just the suggestion of defilement of that most private of social spaces proved an exceptionally powerful weapon. And, just maybe, ERA would even let men marry men and women marry women—a strange notion first raised in the 1972 Senate hearing by Senator Sam Ervin, who so despised the ERA that he lent Phyllis Schlafly his senatorial franking privileges. Schlafly amplified that concern

So, that June, did the gay bar where the New Orleans branch of his Metropolitan Community Church met, killing thirty-two. Ashamed families refused to claim the bodies; churches refused to hold memorial services. Syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers answered a letter-writer agonizing over her gay brother’s suicide by quoting a psychiatrist: “Over and over again it is found that a homosexual male has had an intense relationship with the mother and a deficient relationship with the father.” The advice columnist concluded, “Perhaps just knowing these facts will help some parents to rear their children to be sexually normal.”

Local churches chartered buses full of congregants bearing signs reading things like “GOD SAYS NO, WHO ARE YOU TO SAY DIFFERENT?” and “PROTECT OUR CHILDREN, DON’T LEGISLATE IMMORALITY FOR DADE COUNTY.” Among their number was a surprise witness. Anita Bryant had been Miss Oklahoma 1959, and a runner-up for Miss America. She recorded a string of hit pop songs and became a regular at USO shows and Bob Hope’s annual Christmas specials from Vietnam. In 1968 she belted out the National Anthem at the Republicans’ convention in Miami and her trademark rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at the Democrats’ in Chicago.

In the bicentennial year she was so in demand she earned $700,000, even though

became most famous for the commercials she starred in for the Florida Citrus Commission. They began with a chirpy “Hi! I’m Anita Bryant!” and closed with the tagline, “Breakfast without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.” But “the best role I could possibly play,” she insisted in her 1972 bestseller Bless This House, “is Anita Green, Bob’s wife and our children’s mother… People keep asking me what I think of women’s lib. I tell them I was liberated when I received Christ as my personal Savior. That’s

Bryant was quoted the next morning: “We are not going to take this sitting down. The ordinance condones immorality and discriminates against my children’s rights to grow up in a healthy, decent community.” But what could they do? The law was the law. To the ordinance’s proud supporters, Bryant’s argument sounded self-evidently absurd: how could granting homosexuals the right not to be fired or evicted or kicked off a seat at a lunch counter constitute “discrimination”?

Even the community’s friends were not particularly friendly. “Homosexuals make me feel creepy inside,” wrote another columnist in a piece otherwise excoriating Bryant. “The folly of publicly flaunting bedroom preferences disgusts me.” And few in the liberal activist world, separated into an ever-proliferating number of interest-group silos, saw what was going on in Miami as

Most radically, he recommended a constitutional amendment to scrap the Electoral College, which, three times so far, had selected as president a candidate who had received fewer votes than his opponent. It was among the most sweeping political reform proposals in U.S. history—and soon afterward, legislators from both parties stood together at a news briefing to endorse all or most of it. The bill for universal registration, which RNC chairman Brock called “a Republican concept,” was cosponsored by four

Republicans. Senator Baker suggested going even further by making Election Day a national holiday, keeping polls open twenty-four hours, and instituting automatic registration. House minority leader John Rhodes, the conservative disciple of Barry Goldwater, predicted the proposal would pass “in substantially the same form with a lot of Republican support, including my own.” More democracy—who could object? The answer was: the New Right, which took their lessons about “electoral reform” from legends of Kennedy beating Nixon via votes received from the cemeteries of Chicago. The next issue of Human Events was bannered “ELECTION ‘REFORM’ PACKAGE: EUTHANASIA FOR THE GOP.” It argued that the current electoral system had never disenfranchised a single citizen—at least

Because, Kevin Phillips insisted, it would “blow the Republican Party sky high.” Phillips claimed that Carter had calculated that since he had won Wisconsin by a tiny margin, defying predictions, and since “most electoral analysts credited that upset to the 210,000 allowed to register on election day,” he wanted to expand the scam to all fifty states. A Berkeley political scientist, Human Events noted, predicted national turnout would go up 20 percent under Carter’s reforms—a bad thing, the editors said, because “the bulk of these extra votes will go to Carter’s Democratic Party… with blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups accounting for most of the increase.” The Heritage Foundation, meanwhile, got out one issue brief arguing that instant registration might allow the “eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote, and another arguing that it was a mistake to “take

noted that Stone, “under the alias of Jason Rainer,” had been “waist-deep in 1972 Nixon campaign dirty tricks.” Now Stone was raising unprecedented amounts, tens of thousands of dollars, in his campaign to rule the Young Republicans. Where was the money coming from? It made the Republican establishment awfully nervous. SHREWD DEMOCRATS

Frost’s off-camera voice then introduced some context: that one of the ways Nixon sought to weaken the antiwar movement was by approving staffer Tom Charles Huston’s plan to spy on and sabotage it, using tactics that they knew to be illegal. He addressed Nixon directly: “So, what in a sense, you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal?” Nixon: “Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.” In Atlantic City, Reagan was asked about that astonishing claim. He replied that he could “understand” it: “When he was made

then launched into an elaborate story, his go-to whenever he was called upon to defend the necessity of extraordinary measures in the interest of public safety. Radicals had threatened to kidnap his wife and send him her head if he would not release certain prisoners from jail. His criminal intelligence division had learned of the plot through underhanded means, and “the purpose of law and order, and civil rights and human rights, was served by someone being able to find that intelligence.” In precisely the same way, “When the commander in chief of a nation finds it necessary to order employees of the government or agencies from the government to do things that would technically break the law, he has to be able to declare it legal for them to do that.” The comment rendered Reagan a laughingstock: “Has

on a political limb where public opinion was concerned. Of those who watched the Frost interviews, 72 percent responded that Nixon was a criminal, for which there could be no place in public life. But Reagan was hardly alone. More and more conservatives, in fact, were making similar arguments themselves, with the same sort of unapologetic brazenness with which Richard Viguerie tested campaign finance laws. A Nixon speechwriter who was now a widely syndicated columnist, Patrick J. Buchanan,

back Edmund Muskie. “The senator is putting a cap on my income, and he doesn’t give a damn what the consequences are for my family.” The

“Before rebuking them,” he said of the two African nations ruled by white minorities, “we should keep in mind an American Indian maxim, whose origin is lost in time. It is this: ‘Before I criticize a man, may I walk a mile in his moccasins.’ ” He then flayed Carter for negotiating “with the conquerors of South

That weekend, he spoke in Memphis before the Young Republicans convention—the same one that elected Roger Stone the group’s president, after an extraordinary campaign that vindicated every one of the Republican establishment’s fears. Stone’s campaign manager, a twenty-eight-year-old named Paul Manafort, had brought along an organization that more closely resembled those at national party conventions: custom-installed telephone lines; thick “whip books” with intelligence on each of the eight hundred delegates; a rented Mississippi River paddleboat upon which

“Delegates to the Young Republicans convention in Memphis have chosen as chairman a conservative with a Watergate past.” They also, however, treated Ronald Reagan like a god. They welcomed him to the stage with an original song: “If Reagan Would Only Run.” Then they interrupted him for applause a dozen times.

“HUMAN RIGHTS” WAS ALSO MUCH in the air in Miami. Geto and Foster noted a poll going into the home stretch before the June 6 vote indicating that 62 percent of Dade Countians favored the gay rights ordinance—but that only 15 percent of them were likely to turn out: “They are too removed

“ANITA BRYANT VERSUS THE HOMOSEXUALS,” read Newsweek’s cover eight days before the election. (Inside, she called gays “human garbage.”) The sheriff of San Francisco

rival New York Post, recently purchased by the Australian yellow-journalism magnate Rupert Murdoch, ramped up the sensationalism to keep pace. You could read the terror at a distance, just walking down the street; an inordinate number of women cut their hair in Dorothy Hamill bobs. Son of Sam’s victims all had long hair. A week later, another alleged serial killer was on the loose—an

But at the ceremony on March 28, 1977, the Academy overlooked sophisticated New Hollywood fare like All the President’s Men, the Watergate thriller; Bound for Glory, a visually luscious biopic of Woody Guthrie featuring depictions of American poverty as searing as any ever committed to the screen; and Taxi Driver, a sepulchral masterpiece of urban alienation, about a Vietnam veteran named Travis Bickle, driven insane by the “open sewer” that New York City had become, who tries to assassinate a presidential candidate to impress a child prostitute played by a thirteen-year-old.

Pauline Kael of the New Yorker wrote in dismay, “The excitement of those who call it the film of the year goes way past nostalgia to the feeling that now is the time to return to childhood.” By November, Star Wars had become the highest grossing movie of all time. The public longed for escape. There was more than enough unpleasantness outside the theater