Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

“aimed not at the reason of men but their ids and hypogastria.”

Nixon vetoed the 1972 Clean Water Act, for its “staggering, budget-wrecking” $24 billion cost—but his veto was overridden with considerable Republican votes.

a liberal is someone, as Robert Frost said, too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Delaware, there was Joseph Biden—who, after his 1972 Senate election at the age of twenty-nine as a liberal, became the senator from outside the deep South who did the most to stymie busing to achieve school desegregation, and pioneered the imposition of mandatory sentences for federal crimes. (He said drug dealers were “potential killers” who should be tracked down “like we track down killers.”) He boasted in full-page ads that he was “one of the stingiest senators”—the sixth most conservative, according to the National Taxpayers Union (having long ago reversed his previous conviction that balancing the budget “would have a minimal effect on inflation while potentially worsening the economy”). He voted against Humphrey-Hawkins and for the capital gains tax cut of his Delaware colleague William Roth, whom he outflanked from the right with an even more stringent bill to sunset federal programs if they were not specifically reauthorized. He even won Howard Jarvis’s endorsement (“You have shown yourself to be in the forefront of the battle to reduce government spending”). He glided to reelection. As,

On January 27, Nelson Rockefeller’s publicist announced that the former New York governor, working alone late the previous night in his Rockefeller Center office on a book about his art collection, had died of a heart attack. The next day, the spokesman issued a correction: the magnate had actually expired five blocks away, in his Manhattan apartment. “It’s one of those stupid goofs,” he apologized. “I had the wrong office.” Next, it emerged that he hadn’t been alone; he was with his thirty-one-year-old “staff assistant and coordinator of his art books,” Megan Marshack. Then that Marshack was “out of town and unavailable for interviews”; and was not thirty-one but twenty-five; and that Rockefeller had hired her away from a $15,000 job as a night editor at AP Radio at a salary of $60,000 even though she had no apparent expertise in art, and afforded her a $45,000 interest-free “loan” to buy an apartment two doors down from his town house; and, finally, that one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America had died naked amid boxes of unfinished Chinese food and a bottle of Dom Perignon, found by authorities wearing pants but no shoes. His panicked mistress had tried to put some on the corpse. But the feet were already too swollen.

NEW FILM STARRING ORSON Welles began appearing in multiplexes in January that brought to the screen one of the most spectacular publishing sensations in history. The Late, Great Planet Earth, by the evangelist Hal Lindsey, had sold nearly ten million copies since its original appearance in 1970. By March, the movie version was one of Hollywood’s top ten moneymakers. “Seventy percent of the prophesies written in the Bible have already been fulfilled,” Orson Welles boomed. “If the visions of the prophet John are truly prophetic, the remaining visions will be fulfilled in our lifetime.… What are these perils that could mean the end of life on planet earth?”

THERE IS A SAYING: CONSERVATIVES seek converts, liberals seek heretics. And: Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.

Among them was Teddy White. The author of The Making of the President 1960, The Making of the President 1964, The Making of the President 1968, and The Making of the President 1972 had not produced a Making of the President 1976—perhaps because he was so sickened by the duck-nibbling rituals presidential campaigns had become. His diary suggested he was almost to the point of a nervous breakdown—or a breakdown, at least, in his democratic faith. “It’s gone on too long,” he wrote on September 30. “How long can you stay interested in the problems of inflation and the tax cut? There were five national elections in Germany the year before Hitler came to power in 1933; the last, which Hitler won, showed a sharp drop-off in votes. We’ve had politics up to our ears, are gorged with it.”