Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

president’s taste for Niebuhrian moral complexity was one of the things that made him so ideologically ambiguous—not an easy thing to be in a culture clamoring more and more for easy solutions in confusing times. You could see this in July after the Washington Post reported the existence of a secret strategy document, “Presidential Review Memorandum

May, the state senate’s criminal justice committee advanced a revised bill written by Republican George Deukmejian, even though a majority of that committee opposed capital punishment. The reason it advanced anyway was that the majority feared an even more draconian version might be put forward if this one was not. That became one of the signposts of the extremely emotional debate that would rock the state in the weeks to come: a fear of the lengths demagogic politicians might go to sate the public’s bloodlust in a state where the homicide rate had quintupled since 1963.

and issued no objection when the California Senate Judiciary Committee passed a “law and order” bill allowing prosecutors to obtain convictions with evidence that had been obtained illegally. The concessions were to no avail: consistently,

Liberals thought they knew him. They thought he was one of them. Now many were beginning to despise him. Such were the wages of election by making everyone think you were on their side. Jules Witcover and Jack Germond, joint authors of a widely syndicated column, encapsulated Carter’s political problems at the six-month mark by quoting a Republican voter: “The party told me last year he was a liberal, but now everybody says he’s a conservative, and then he does something like cave in on that bomber. I don’t know what the hell

July when Viking published Jules Witcover’s massive best-selling chronicle Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency, 1972–1976. The cover featured a collage of Carter, Ford, and the eleven other serious aspirants for the White House from the previous year—with Reagan squeezed onto the very end, nearly falling off the side. In

Public financing of congressional elections was defeated on August 21. “We put together a massive public relations effort,” Viguerie said, “and we’re going to do the same for the Panama Canal.” He was already well on his way when a White House scandal threatened to knock the nation’s moralist in chief off his pedestal at

Nixon hired Safire as a presidential speechwriter. Upon leaving the White House in 1973, he joined the New York Times as a Washington columnist, enjoying the fruit of one of Richard Nixon’s most successful PR coups: intimidating the Eastern establishment media into hiring conservatives. Sneaking the norms,

The case seemed to him unanswerable—as it had for presidents Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. Morally, the chicanery that loosed the 553-square-mile Canal Zone from the native inhabitants had been one of the ugliest chapters in the near-continuous history of interventions by the United States into Latin American sovereignty going back to America’s invasion of Puerto Rico in 1809. “What nation,” Panamanian president Omar Efrain Torrijos Herrera asked plaintively,

When Ronald Reagan was running for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976, he coined a resounding slogan to signify his belief that the Canal Zone was sovereign American territory: “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours.” Which was not quite true: the 1907 treaty granted America the right “in perpetuity” to operate the Canal Zone “as if” it were sovereign. But Reagan’s

that was before Watergate—and also before the Georgia Mafia came to town. The White House became more and more convinced: the media onslaught of inquiries into Lance was little more than the establishment seeking to confirm their prejudice that Jimmy Carter surrounded himself with bumpkins. So they circled the wagons. They did so according to a narrative framed by Bert Lance himself. He had dropped out of college to work at the bank in his hometown of Calhoun, Georgia, population 3,231; after marrying the founder’s granddaughter, he took the bank over. Even after making it big in Atlanta—and buying himself a forty-room

“Each time a new allegation was raised against me and my practices as a country banker,” he complained, “the media didn’t go to a country banker as a source”—who would have told them that extending the privilege of overdrafts to citizens of good character was a sound and honorable practice. Instead, they asked “big-city bankers… like asking a football scout to evaluate a baseball prospect. It’s just not logical.”

Murdoch invited them to resign. A dozen took him up on the offer—a remarkable act in the midst of the city’s near depression. Son of Sam was caught. The next day’s Post sold twice the usual number of copies. When the young suspect, David Berkowitz, was arraigned, mobs surrounded the

Sure, I love them and they’re adorable, and they’re turning out fine. But I never knew that I’d have to give up myself in the bargain.” A stay-at-home mother wrote in a book, “When my baby was born, I wanted to be a good mother, but I felt even more trapped… then three more babies were born in rapid succession and each one, so beautiful, terrified me.” After her fourth, she tried to commit suicide by jumping out of a moving car. A third described “the smoldering resentment caused from the endless little tasks that had to be repeated over and over again and seemed so futile”: picking up the dirty socks, hanging up wet towels, “creating

having children had been worth it. The flood of letters she received in response—70 percent of them voting no—recorded the same sort of agonies. But women who chose careers instead weren’t necessarily any more satisfied. “I work in an office,” wrote another correspondent to the same women’s magazine. “I feel bored, abused, and angry. I go home and snap and cry at everything and feel useless and empty.” The complaints were similar. The complainers

Between the end of World War II and the oil shocks of 1973, the real income of ordinary American working families approximately doubled—then, it flatlined or even declined. The change came so suddenly, and felt so foreign to Americans’ received way of knowing the world, that it could hardly be perceived whole. It registered, instead, as millions of uncoordinated individual family decisions, in response to millions of individual family struggles keeping up with mortgage payments, car payments, tuition, grocery bills, and the

the height of World War II, only 26 percent of married women worked. By

For child-rearing help, turn to Dr. James Dobson, a psychotherapist whose Christian-inflected self-help books, such as Dare to Discipline (1970) and What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women (1972), and “Focus on the Family” seminars and videos distributed on 16-millimeter film or videotape, were so popular by 1977 that Dobson quit his therapy practice and incorporated a nonprofit to produce a fast-growing radio advice show. (Dobson was particularly revered for his guidance on how to “cure” homosexuality.) Or, in extremis, you could call the Reverend Pat Robertson’s crisis counseling service, staffed by six thousand friendly folks who worked around the clock fielding one and a quarter million calls in the first half of 1976 alone. Most “concern potential suicides, alcoholics, unwed mothers,

made extraordinary efforts at diversity—as they understood it: they reached out to African American women, bilingual women, Native American women, elderly women, welfare women, handicapped women, even formerly incarcerated women. They did not reach out to conservative women. Which was how the trouble

Thomson sent her the necessary materials, and received by return post a cassette tape recorded by Edmondson: “They want your child taught that there is no right or wrong, nor normal or ideal circumstances for sexual intercourse, such as, you might be teaching your child the ideal place for sex is within marriage.… I can’t even share with you some of the language in some of the books they recommend.” The tape became

But then, five conservative women had broken ranks, standing up in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. Chaos ensued. Perhaps they had been convinced by the hot-pink stickers in the ladies’ room stalls: “Washington has had an Equal Rights Amendment for five years. Do you see any men in your bathroom?” The

This was the state where, hardly more than a decade earlier, the governor had refused to investigate Klansmen who lynched civil rights workers and burned Black churches. This was the summer when 69 percent of Miamians voted against giving gay men and lesbians equal access to employment, the death penalty was passing in state after state, gun-rights militants had taken over the NRA, and the ERA was going down in flames. And, against that backdrop, the Magnolia State chose their keynote speaker: the director of the U.S. section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, who had been one of two Americans invited by the Communists to represent the peace movement at the signing ceremony ending the Vietnam War. She had just recently

Then came the imperative of fighting the liberals on every front—and political necessity begat theological flexibility. Baptists might consider Pentecostals heretics. But the Pentecostals Pat Robertson and Oral Roberts were two of the most-watched conservative TV preachers—allies not worth offending for reasons of theological nicety. The anti-abortionist movement, Christianity Today advised in a 1975 editorial imploring evangelicals to join it, should “no longer be dismissed as a group of cold-hearted Catholics simply taking orders from

explained it with a parable: “If I live in a suburb and suddenly the sewer system begins to back up into the water system and all my neighbors are atheist, it does not mean we cannot sign a petition together.… I do not have to wait for them to become Christians to do that. It is the same for the issues we are discussing. We should be glad for every co-belligerent.” When Jerry Falwell had at first proved reluctant, Dr. Schaeffer reminded him that it was Cyrus the Great of Persia, after all, who had ended Israel’s exile and ordered the Temple rebuilt. “God used pagans to do his work in the Old Testament, so why don’t you use pagans to do your work now?”

brought here in chains long before the Irish decided voluntarily to leave Ireland or the Italians thought of leaving Italy. Some Jews may have left their homes in Europe involuntarily, but they were not in chains when they arrived on these shores. Other immigrant groups came to America with language and economic handicaps, but not with the stigma of color. Above all, no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil, and no other group has had its family structure deliberately torn apart. This was why the appearance of Roots on TV the month of Jimmy Carter’s inauguration

was based on a true story: in 1975, boxing promoter Don King had announced that Muhammad Ali, as an “equal opportunity employer,” was seeking out a Caucasian for a shot at his title. The palooka that emerged, a thirty-five-year-old liquor salesman from New Jersey named Chuck Wepner, went the distance. The delirious cheers he received from an all-white audience in a closed-circuit showing in Philadelphia inspired Sylvester Stallone

Back in spring, Carter had called passing comprehensive energy reform the moral equivalent of war. Now, a White House staffer said, it felt like the moral equivalent of the Vietnam War. Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his diary that he smelled the welcome possibility of Carter being denied re-nomination.

On October 31, by a vote of 52 to 35, the Senate passed an energy tax bill so different from the House’s that it felt more like a step backward. The White House announced a televised speech for November 8 to rally the nation. The speechwriting shop brought in a ringer: Richard Goodwin, the scribe behind some of JFK’s and LBJ’s most stirring words. The president inspected their draft, pronounced it a failure, and wrote his own. Time’s Hugh Sidey ranked it among the worst speeches ever given. The

Conservative opinion and organizing now was everywhere. A formerly liberal magazine, Harper’s, was becoming a veritable neoconservative organ. A typical contribution, by Norman Podhoretz, on Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy, argued, “The parallels with England in 1937 are here, and this revival of the culture of

The pro-life movement, for instance, had formed working alliances, the New York Times noted, “with groups that range from those fighting to ‘Stop the Equal Rights Amendment!’ to ‘Stop the Panama Canal Giveaway!’ ” This was how the right worked: each discontent reinforced the others. All of which became glaringly evident as the November 18 opening of the

then, the next morning, a direct descendent of an original Seneca Falls attendee handed it to the first of over two thousand runners who would bear it 2,600 miles to Houston, where it would be presented at the nation’s second national women’s conference. In November, it crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. “That’s when the trouble started,” a relay official

The cheers as the flame crossed the threshold of the Sam Houston Coliseum drowned out a fundamentalist preacher’s bullhorn: “Men are designed to lead! The women are designed as a help to the man!” Conservative

Phyllis Schlafly presided, singling out the movement to provide government-funded shelters for battered women for opprobrium: “It is beyond me how giving a wife who has been beaten an R&R rest tour or vacation at the

would think that the husband would be more inclined to beat her more if he thinks she will just get a taxpayers’ paid rest cure.” Martha Griffin, the former U.S. representative

“If you think this idea is shocking, read what the IWY is proposing for your children.” It listed gay marriage, abortion, compulsory daycare, and the “destruction of the American way of life” as among the conference’s goals. The line for the delegate credentials was so long an Arizona delegate

Then, during debate on the plank calling for affirmative action for officeholders, women at the back began raising signs, as if on a signal: “ABORTION EXPLOITS WOMEN.” “RESCIND ERA.” “ONLY A RAT WOULD RATIFY.” “ERA: SIT ON IT!” (That was a catchphrase from Happy Days, the sitcom celebrating 1950s domestic bliss.) Delegate-at-large

Bella Abzug had tabbed a charismatic newcomer from Texas, a county commissioner named Ann Richards, to give the first pro-ERA speech. Then Dianne Edmondson, Schlafly’s Oklahoma lieutenant, gave one, introducing an amendment opposing efforts to extend the deadline for ratification of the constitutional amendment in the states from the original date in 1979 until 1982. Next came Susan B. Anthony’s niece—who concluded, to pandemonium, “Failure is impossible!” “Impossible! Impossible!” “Three

Sadat’s speech to the Knesset was heralded by bugle calls. The media was spellbound. Time described the visit “as if a messenger from Allah had descended to the Promised Land.” The Today show devoted its entire Monday program to it; and on that evening’s newscasts, Sadat received seven times more coverage than the convention intended to reveal the political will of half the American citizenry.

ACCORDING TO THE THEORIES OF Karl Marx, revolutions happen when a group of people in a similar position in the economic structure becomes a “class for itself”: when they become conscious of their collective grievances, stop fighting one another, and organize to fight their common oppressor instead. That was what was happening in America now. Only the class in question wasn’t the proletariat. It was the corporate executives.

United States Chamber of Commerce, chartered in 1912 at the request of President William Howard Taft as a bulwark against organized labor, accomplished surprisingly little in its first two decades; organized business’s callous response to the Great Depression helped ensure it would subsequently accomplish even less. The prosperous decades

Ordinary blue-collar workers now had just about more economic security than they had ever known in history, anywhere. Some resisted these developments. In 1947 the Advertising Council spent $100 million on a promotional campaign preaching that the free market was “the most democratic institution ever devised by man.” General Electric distributed millions of copies of a cartoon version of the laissez-faire economist Friedrich Hayek’s best-selling 1944 polemic The Road to Serfdom,

It heralded a remarkable shift in public opinion. In 1966, 55 percent of Americans had a “great deal of confidence in the leaders of major companies.” Five years later, the percentage was 27 percent. Between 1968 and 1970, the portion believing “business tries to strike a fair balance between profits and the interest of the public” fell from 70 percent to 33 percent. Wrote pollster Lou Harris, “People have come to be skeptical about American ‘know-how,’ worried that it might pollute, contaminate, poison,

The collapse of American economic dominance was one factor: 1971 was the first year since 1893 when the U.S.

ran a trade deficit with the rest of the world.

how Detroit sold necessary safety features as costly options, and GM buried the life-and-death fact information that the Corvair’s rear tires should be inflated at approximately twice the pressure as the front ones (if owners didn’t want the car to flip over) deep inside

Federal agents had never had the authority to inspect individual businesses for health and safety violations. OSHA gave them the power to do it without warrants, then levy hefty fines with no avenue for appeal. Richard Nixon didn’t dare

Then, however, following his landslide reelection, he proposed a radical right-wing budget that Newsweek described as “one of the most significant American political documents since the dawning of the New Deal,” intended to “pull the government back from the proliferating social concerns of the years from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson.” Thanks to Watergate, he never got the chance. Senator Sam Ervin’s televised

And that was before spectacular revelations, following Nixon’s resignation, that the same slush funds companies maintained to bribe Nixon were also used to pay off foreign officials. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s chief of enforcement was gobsmacked. “Until two or three years ago,” he said, “I genuinely thought the conduct of business… was generally rising. But what can you say about the revelations of the last couple or three years?”

very first batch of radio commentaries he recorded in 1975 included one introducing the proverbial housewife whom arrogant far-off bureaucrats presumed “too dumb to buy a box of corn flakes without being cheated,” who resented being bossed around by “the professional consumerists in Washington,” who “are really elitists who think they know better than you what’s good for you.” He called it the “biggest threat to our free economy as anything that’s been proposed,” the “big new federal government bureau that would have the power to supersede all other government agencies.”

1950, America’s share of the world economy was 40 percent. Now it was 11 percent. America’s first trade deficit, in 1971, was $1.3 billion; now it approached $27 billion. The seventeen-month recession following the Arab oil shock in the

The president sat in on vocals for Gillespie’s signature tune, “Salt Peanuts,” and said it was a high point of his life when the New York Times complimented his singing. In their meeting afterward, Carter challenged the shah on his record of human rights violations.