The Uses of Division
Rick Perlstein chronicles the fall of the American consensus and the rise of the right.
By George Packer
Anyone old enough to have lived through the
nineteen-seventies knew them as a long and often embarrassing
anticlimax—a shapeless, burned-out interregnum between the high dramas
of the sixties and the bright, hard edges of the Reagan era. Unlike the
decades that preceded and followed, the seventies seemed to have no
plot: a mishmash of musical styles and fads, a blur of failed
Presidents, a series of international fiascoes, a mood of cynicism and
farce. Preparing for a thoroughly ironic fin de decade party,
Zonker Harris, of “Doonesbury,” raised his mug: “To a kidney stone of a
decade!” “Try to retrieve the seventies and memories crumble in one’s
hand,” the critic Irving Howe wrote in his autobiography. “The decade
itself lacks a distinctive historical flavor. It’s as if the years had
simply dropped out of one’s life and all that remains are bits and
pieces of recollection.” In my memory, the seventies began in an
atmosphere of antic nihilism—Mad, “ratfucking,” Richard
Pryor—and ended on the downer of “malaise” and the hostage crisis. I
mainly remember longing to be somewhere else—it didn’t matter whether it
was the future or the past. (Admittedly, I was a teen-ager.) If there
was any theme to that decade, it was the lack of a theme, of any higher
meaning to events.
In recent years, there has been an onslaught
of books, academic and popular, whose titles insist that the decade
marked a major turning point: “The Seventies: The Great Shift in
American Culture, Society, and Politics,” “How We Got Here: The 70s, The
Decade That Brought You Modern Life—for Better or Worse,” “Mad as Hell:
The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right,” “Pivotal
Decade,” “Something Happened.” What happened, we now know, was the
collapse of the American consensus, the postwar social contract, founded
on a mixed economy at home and bipartisan Cold War internationalism
abroad. The seventies turned out to be the decade when the country began
its transformation from steady economic growth to spasms of
contraction, from industry to information and finance, from
institutional authorities to individual freedoms, from center-left to
right. Global competition happened in the seventies, and so did populist
politics, special-interest money, the personal computer, and the cult
of the self. The obsessed-over sixties seem increasingly remote and sui
generis, while the trademarks of the seventies are strangely persistent.
Wages have remained largely flat since 1973. Gas prices never stopped
outraging drivers. “The Happiness Project” updates “Jonathan Livingston
Seagull.” We’re still, or again, talking about the decline of American
power and prestige. Ted Cruz today sounds a lot like Jesse Helms did
back then.In other words, the seventies were important because of what’s happened since. At the time, Americans weren’t conscious of a great shift, pivot, or crisis. The nature of historical writing, of memory itself, is to distort by selecting and compressing events, making the past seem more dramatic and coherent than it ever was, but this is especially true of accounts of the seventies. Back then, only true believers saw those years as the final way station on the conservative movement’s path to victory. In histories of the seventies, that destination now seems to have been obvious all along—maybe even inevitable. Narrative history, in bringing the past to life, asks us only to forget about the other turns we might have made.
For Americans younger than fifty-five, the story of conservatism has been the dominant political factor in their lives, and Rick Perlstein has become its chief chronicler, across three erudite, entertaining, and increasingly meaty books: “Before the Storm” (2001), about the birth of the conservative movement in the late fifties and early sixties, up to the landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential election; “Nixonland” (2008), about Richard Nixon’s strategy of amassing power by dividing the country into two antagonistic camps; and now “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan” (Simon & Schuster), which finally brings into focus the saga’s leading character, Ronald Reagan, who made cameo appearances in the earlier books.
“Before the Storm” told the New Right’s origin story, peopled by “a little circle of political diehards”—forgotten names like Clarence Manion and F. Clifton White. In a brilliant move, Perlstein showed that the early-sixties conservative movement was just as revolutionary and hostile to the political establishment as the much more famous New Left. The book made a persuasive case that, of the many insurgencies in the sixties, the one on the right had the most lasting significance. Perlstein, who was born in 1969, is a man of the left, but he explored the archives of the New Right in a spirit of imaginative sympathy, excited by the characters he found—activists from Young Americans for Freedom, National Review editors, members of the John Birch Society. His favorite targets were not diehard segregationists or fringe anti-Communists but the leading commentators of the era—Richard Hofstadter, James Reston, Walter Lippmann—who saw in Goldwater’s flameout proof that conservatism had no future in American politics. “It was one of the most dramatic failures of collective discernment in the history of American journalism,” Perlstein wrote.
If Perlstein seemed to be half rooting for the early conservative movement, it was because, from across the divide, he shared its combative approach to politics, admired its steadfastness in the face of crushing defeat, and wanted to emulate its ultimate success. This unexpected identification gave “Before the Storm” its energy and freshness. Always lively and sometimes cocky, Perlstein can’t resist poking a finger in the sober faces of “the wise men,” “the sophisticates,” “polite Georgetown insiders,” “the guardians of elite discourse,” the New York Times columnists, New Yorker reporters, and Democratic Party mandarins who didn’t like to admit that politics is often a conflict between unreasoning wills, and who therefore couldn’t begin to understand the likes of Phyllis Schlafly or Louise Day Hicks. In his preface to “The Invisible Bridge,” Perlstein writes, “A central theme of my previous two books chronicling conservatism’s ascendancy in American politics has been the myopia of pundits, who so frequently fail to notice the very cultural ground shifting beneath their feet.” The demise of liberalism after the sixties had more than a little to do with the self-satisfied blindness of liberals, and the targets of Perlstein’s mockery often deserve what they get. But failures of collective discernment are always easier to spot half a century on.
“Nixonland”
was necessarily a different kind of book. Its subject was “the
fracturing of America,” a larger and harder story to tell than that of
the early New Right; it encompassed the whole of American culture, not
just a single political movement. Perlstein began with the Watts riots
in 1965 and ended, seven hundred and fifty pages later, with Nixon’s
reëlection, in 1972. In between came the Republican victories in the
1966 midterms, the Newark riots, the ’68 campaign, assassinations, the
mayhem in Chicago, Nixon’s triumph, the Manson killings, the Silent
Majority speech, Agnew and “positive polarization,” Kent State, the Hard
Hat Riot, George Romney, George Wallace, George McGovern—less focussed
than “Before the Storm” but higher-octane. Perlstein developed a twofold
method for harnessing his unruly material. Combing through the written
record and television clips, he narrated well-known events in such
minute detail that historical distance collapsed and readers began to
feel that they were living through them week by week (or, in the case of
his bravura reconstruction of the 1968 Democratic National Convention,
watching them on TV hour by hour). Perlstein tried to convey what it
felt like when political combat was no metaphor and Americans turned on
one another in the streets. What the subject lacked in newness, the
prose made up in heavily researched zest.
Perlstein, who has a
propensity to view politics through the lens of psychology, organized
this sprawling narrative under a single conceit. At Whittier College,
Nixon founded a club, the Orthogonians, for the uncool strivers like
himself who couldn’t make it into the Franklins, the club for those born
to effortless success. Franklins against Orthogonians, Kennedyesque
liberal élites against Nixon’s Great Silent Majority: on the back of
this conceit Perlstein piled a great deal of explanation—in the end,
more than it could support—about the social resentments beneath the
explosions of the sixties.If Nixon needed any encouragement in turning Americans against one another—and at times his caution and his desire to sound like a statesman held him back—he always had young Patrick Buchanan at his side, urging him on. Buchanan, a Catholic editorial writer who was raised by his father to admire General Franco and Joe McCarthy, joined Nixon on the lonely campaign trail in 1966 as a speechwriter, and remained his loyal lieutenant until Nixon resigned the Presidency, on August 9, 1974, forty years ago this week. In “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority” (Crown Forum), Buchanan shows Nixon tirelessly clawing his way back to the top of American politics after barely losing to Kennedy in 1960 and being humiliated in the race for governor of California in 1962. Buchanan was Nixon’s cheerful id—Nixon minus the inner torments and the pious hypocrisy—always encouraging “the Boss” to savage an opponent, feed the public’s anger, carve out slices of the Democratic coalition. The Nixon of “The Greatest Comeback” is basically the same dark figure we recognize from the Watergate tapes, though in better times: ordering a reporter off the campaign plane, calculating how to exploit the disorders of 1968. Buchanan (who cites “Nixonland” in his bibliography) conceals none of this, because he welcomed Nixon’s polarizing impulses.
Buchanan once described to me a sweaty, raucous rally he and Nixon attended at a hotel in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1966, stumping for local Republicans in that year’s midterms. Nixon, along with Senator Strom Thurmond and Representative Albert Watson (South Carolina segregationists who had recently defected to the Republican Party), whipped a room full of cigar-smoking men into a rage that “burned the paint off the walls,” shouting about freedom, patriotism, and law and order. In “The Greatest Comeback,” Buchanan calls this event “the most memorable” of that 1966 campaign—the first election of the backlash—and afterward Nixon exulted, “This is where the energy is! This is where the future of the party is!” Buchanan denied that the speakers had appealed to racism—before a crowd of incensed white men, in South Carolina in 1966, they didn’t have to. Nixon didn’t condone racial prejudice, as Buchanan protests (a little too much), but he walked a carefully calibrated line—keeping some public distance from the likes of George Wallace, while rousing the anxieties and anger of Wallace’s millions of supporters and encouraging them to think of Nixon as their man. In a memo during the 1968 campaign, Buchanan warned Nixon not to go after the Alabama governor: “Wallace is the symbol of Southern resistance to Washington in the South, just as we would like to be the symbol of resistance to Washington and its policies in the nation. We will want, I would think, the people who are supporting Wallace now to be in our corner perhaps later.” This approach came to be known as the “Southern strategy,” and Buchanan was its unapologetic advocate.
“The Greatest Comeback” is a final act of loyalty to “the Boss,” drawing our gaze away from Watergate (in 1973, Buchanan advised Nixon to pile his tapes on the White House lawn and light a bonfire) and reminding readers of that earlier, underdog Nixon from the good old days of the endless campaign, risen from the grave to claim the Presidency—because, with his acute political intelligence and deep personal grievances, he understood exactly how millions of Americans felt at the end of the sixties. Those are the qualities that made Nixon the ideal anti-hero for Perlstein’s second volume.
With “The Invisible
Bridge,” Perlstein picks up where “Nixonland” left off, chronologically
and formally. There’s the same week-by-week narration, intercutting
between several story lines, now covering 1973 to 1976. The tragedies of
the sixties are repeated as farce: instead of the Kennedy and King
assassinations, Lynette (Squeaky)Fromme, of the Manson family, and Sara
Jane Moore (a fellow-traveller of the Symbionese Liberation Army) can’t
shoot straight in their attempts on Gerald Ford; instead of Vietnam,
there’s the botched Mayaguez rescue; instead of the Moratorium to End
the War, there’s “Saturday Night Live” ’s Weekend Update with Chevy
Chase. Three years, eight hundred pages, the final third wholly devoted
to the Presidential primaries and conventions of 1976: the mass of
detail is spread even thicker here than in “Nixonland,” and over a
smaller canvas. It’s good to have one’s crumbled memories of the Patty
Hearst kidnapping and the Hank Aaron home-run record reassembled, but at
times it feels as if Perlstein were just indulging his love of archival
newspaper research, all the way down to the killer bees.
The
Nixon we meet at the start of “The Invisible Bridge” is less
interesting than the protagonist of “Nixonland.” He has become the Nixon
of popular revulsion. It’s January, 1973, the President has won
reëlection in the greatest landslide in U.S. history, and Watergate is
about to blow up. In announcing the end of the American war in Vietnam,
“peace with honor,” and the return of almost six hundred prisoners of
war, Nixon launches Operation Homecoming—a bald play to exploit the
P.O.W.s and further his project of pitting the patriots against the
America-haters. It turns out that the freed soldiers themselves have
become polarized, in captivity and after their release: some heap praise
on the President; others refuse to say that their sacrifice was on
behalf of a noble cause. Pundits and politicians fight over the meaning
of the prisoners and the war. The P.O.W.s missed out on the “Nixonland”
years, and they’ve come home to a divided country.“There were two tribes of Americans now,” Perlstein writes, in a characteristic formulation. “One comprised the suspicious circles, which had once been small, but now were exceptionally broad, who considered the self-evident lesson of the 1960s and the low, dishonest war that defined the decade to be the imperative to question authority, unsettle ossified norms, and expose dissembling leaders—a new, higher patriotism for the 1970s.” The other tribe consisted of believers in “America the innocent.” It was led, cynically, by Nixon, and then, after Nixon’s fall, wholeheartedly by Reagan.
These are not the analytical categories of “Nixonland,” let alone of “Before the Storm.” In his accounts of the sixties, Perlstein had a more complex view of the decade’s political passions—he took pains to understand the mental world inhabited by Goldwater, Nixon, and their partisans. In “The Invisible Bridge,” he descends from his omniscient perch and takes up the cause of “the suspicious circles,” implicitly throughout and explicitly in his preface: “What does it mean to truly believe in America? To wave a flag? Or to struggle toward a more searching alternative to the shallowness of the flag-wavers—to criticize, to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent?” If you put it that way, there’s only one answer. Perlstein continues to show up the liberal commentariat—notably its failure to foresee Reagan’s success. But, as the story of modern conservatism moves toward the present, Perlstein’s attitude toward it begins to resemble the dismissiveness of those liberal critics, which takes some of the tension out of his dialectics.
“The Invisible Bridge” covers the three years between the return of the P.O.W.s and the Republican National Convention in the summer of 1976—years in which “America suffered more wounds to its ideal of itself than at just about any other time in its history”: a criminal Presidency; oil shock; inflation, followed by stagflation; America’s first military defeat, with the ignominious fall of Saigon; congressional revelations of dark deeds by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.; violent, bankrupt cities; failed leaders; and on and on. Perlstein has looked under every rock. He has dug up the long-buried meat-inflation crisis from the spring of 1973, and he knows what the Birmingham News editorial page had to say about the bicentennial. The barrage of artifacts is arranged to convey a sense of panic, nervous breakdown, “a world gone mad.” At one point, Perlstein riffles through the March 15, 1975, issue of the Milwaukee Journal and finds “a cabinet of horrors”: a Purdue coed kidnapped by a professor, devastating tornadoes in the South, a bribery conviction in Oklahoma, a French journalist murdered in Saigon, new leads in the search for Patty Hearst, an attempted hijacking in Ethiopia, purse snatching in Milwaukee. “Horrors, of course, drench the news in any decade,” Perlstein admits. “By the middle of the 1970s, however, the perception of the density of horrors was so much worse.”
The horrors in that day’s Milwaukee Journal don’t actually seem that dense. When I checked the Daily News Web site this morning, it featured an Arkansas man accused of stabbing his pregnant girlfriend to death, an attempted mass shooting at a hospital in Pennsylvania, a poll showing that a third of Americans are in favor of impeaching the President, the latest on the influx of tens of thousands of Central Americans into Texas, a plane crash in Mali, the evacuation of the Malaysian Air Flight 17 corpses, Russian cross-border attacks on Ukraine, Israeli air strikes in Gaza, and an account of how a 2012 solar storm almost caused two trillion dollars’ worth of damage around planet Earth. Future historians might conclude that the summer of 2014 felt apocalyptic to Americans. Instead, it’s an anxious and depressing muddle—not unlike how 1975 felt. But even the most capacious chronicle is bound to scant the dismal ordinariness of life.
Perlstein’s account depends on things falling apart in spectacular fashion—a version that’s advanced by drawing chiefly on the news media, which fills everything with extra voltage, rather than on personal interviews. And it fits with the theme of an America dividing into two warring tribes in a world gone mad. Political ideas dominated “Before the Storm,” but “The Invisible Bridge” has less to say about, for example, the influence of Milton Friedman’s monetarist theory or the neoconservative critique of urban policy than about “The Exorcist” and “Jaws.” The politics that matters to Perlstein here is rhetorical. He’s concerned with the country’s mood, and “The Invisible Bridge,” like “Nixonland,” has an organizing psychological insight. This one involves the radiantly smiling man with the glossy black hair in the book’s perfectly chosen jacket photograph, speaking outside his birthplace while straddling two car bumpers with the grace of Cary Grant. (Though the title seems off—wouldn’t “The Imaginary Bridge,” from the Khrushchev quote in the epigraph, have been a more apt evocation of the fantasist on the cover?) Perlstein’s Reagan is not new: the product of an alcoholic father and a chaotic boyhood, who learns to tell stories, first to himself and later to the world, stories that bear little relation to the truth but which make everything come out right in the end, and in which he is always the hero, the rescuer. What gives “The Invisible Bridge” its originality is the way Perlstein embeds Reagan’s familiar biography in the disillusionments of the seventies. America was on its knees, where it finally had a chance to face its flaws and learn from them—“to grow up.” Along came Reagan out of the past, a has-been in his mid-sixties who looked like Dean Martin, peddling a tale about a country blessed by divine providence. We know where the story went from there. “People want to believe,” Perlstein concludes. “Ronald Reagan was able to make people believe.”
It’s
notoriously hard to write about Reagan. His authorized biographer,
Edmund Morris, given unprecedented access to the President while he was
still in the White House, was so defeated by Reagan’s opacity and quips
that he resorted to fictionalizing. Perlstein synthesizes what other
historians have uncovered about Reagan’s earlier years into a vivid
psychobiography (“Perhaps it was that he worked out in the psychic
gymnasium of boyhood fantasy with ten times the furious determination of
an ordinary boy”). The book punctuates a rich cultural history of
Watergate with increasingly astonishing quotes from Reagan on Nixon’s
behalf. Reagan doesn’t sound like an angry partisan; he tilts his head,
smiles, and shrugs, as if the whole thing were an overblown kerfuffle.
After the Saturday Night Massacre—on October 20, 1973, Nixon had ordered
Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate
special prosecutor; Richardson refused and resigned, as did his deputy;
F.B.I. agents raided the special prosecutor’s office; and John
Chancellor, of NBC News, reported, “The country tonight is in the midst
of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its
history”—Reagan said, “I will not comment on the issue of Archibald Cox
being discharged since it is relatively unimportant.” His dismissiveness
seems especially ominous in retrospect, since Watergate shows the
country’s democratic institutions still healthy and able to respond.
(For two deeper excursions into the scandal, whose extent still seems
breathtaking, there’s “Washington Journal,” a reissue of collected
pieces by Elizabeth Drew, this magazine’s Washington correspondent at
the time; there’s also John W. Dean’s “The Nixon Defense,” a heroic
paraphrase, in narrative form, of the thousand Watergate-related
conversations recorded on the White House taping system, conversations
in which the author plays no small role: “Nixon continued, ‘Dean is
obviously the kind of guy that likes to screw anything, that’s really
what he is. And that’s what we need.’ Haldeman burst out laughing at
Nixon’s sexual double entendre, as the president repeated, ‘And that’s
what we need. That’s what we need.’ ”)
No matter what happened in
the seventies, Reagan kept giving the same speech—“preaching the gospel
of free enterprise”—that he’d been perfecting ever since his half-hour
TV appearance on behalf of Goldwater at the end of the 1964 campaign,
which, in turn, was based on the speech he’d been giving in the years
before that, as General Electric’s pitchman. By 1976, the speech, in one
form or another, was more than two decades old, but Reagan kept giving
it all the way to Kansas City, where, at the Republican National
Convention, he came within a handful of delegates of beating the Party’s
own President. It was the last Convention whose outcome wasn’t a
foregone conclusion, and Perlstein makes the most of it, noting every
detail, down to the steel casing around the Ford campaign’s phone lines
that ran underneath Reagan’s trailer—protection against bugging. As the
chaos mounts on the Convention floor, Perlstein’s paragraphs get
shorter, sounding more and more like the New Journalism of the time, and
for a moment we seem almost to be back in Mailer’s “Miami and the Siege
of Chicago”:Rockefeller held up the severed phone for the cameras, sweat breaking through his dress shirt. He then gave the sign back to a Reagan delegate—after ripping it in half.The book ends with one of Reagan’s great moments, the last act of the Convention—a closing speech about a note he had written for a time capsule. (“Will they look back with appreciation and say, ‘Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now a hundred years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction’? And if we failed, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom, and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it.”) It brought the Republican delegates to tears, and gave them the distinct sense that they’d just nominated the wrong man. His stirring lines were widely believed to have been delivered impromptu—but, according to Perlstein, that’s just another Reagan story.
The American flag on the stage fell over.
New York and North Carolina delegates, whose standards were next to one another on the floor, issued catcalls at one another, waving fists, making threats.
Dole, at the podium, was livid.
Compared with Chicago in 1968, there wasn’t much at stake in Kansas City. Ford was racing toward Reagan’s right-wing positions as fast as he could, in order to forestall defeat. The platform, with pro-life, pro-gun, pro-God, and anti-détente planks, was the first that sounded like the Republican Party we now know. “The fight here was between two groups of conservatives,” an old Goldwater hand said. The battle for the Republican Party was over, and the winner was the loser. Reagan’s failed challenge in 1976 became a grand dress rehearsal for 1980—the subject of the next, and concluding, installment of Perlstein’s epic tale.
History comes with a kind of retrospective determinism. Just as it’s impossible to imagine Kennedy beyond Dallas, Reagan’s victory now seems contained in Goldwater’s defeat. But the conservative ascendancy wasn’t inevitable, and its triumph was far from complete. It’s true that the center of gravity in American politics began moving toward the right in the mid-sixties and then, in the mid-seventies, did so more dramatically. We know the reasons, from reading Perlstein and many others: the broken promises of liberalism, the disorienting changes of modernity, the chaos in the streets, the shrinking of the pie. By 1980, Americans desperately wanted to be inspired and reassured, and Reagan, who knew how to do both, was the beneficiary of that longing. In his decisive debate with Jimmy Carter one week before the election, Reagan prevailed through charm, clarity, confidence, and the grim state of the Union (“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”). To win, however, he had to mute long-held positions, dissembling his radical views of Social Security and Medicare, and toning down his hawkish anti-Communism.
Jimmy Carter, appearing humorless and angry, was no longer capable of inspiration, and had never been particularly reassuring. These were not superficial defects in a leader, and at the Democratic National Convention of 1980 it was the soaring oratory of Edward M. Kennedy—the primary’s loser, though at one point he was far outpolling both Carter and Reagan—that gave delegates an indelible vision of a better country. If you listen to Carter’s Oval Office addresses on inflation, energy, and the nation’s “crisis of confidence,” the level of honesty is shocking, and deflating. No President has ever spoken that way since. The lesson he taught all his successors was not to tell the American people hard truths. Instead, Reagan set the tone. He forced American politics to be played on his turf—a rhetorical achievement that continues today.
In other ways, though, the conservative agenda of Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan never took. If we see the seventies not as an apocalyptic war between two Americas but as a time of profound uncertainty, in which conflict and contradiction were found just as often within as between Americans, it’s possible to imagine the country, at the end of the decade, turning for inspiration to a vision quite different from Reagan’s brand of denial. His vision was the one on offer—but a majority of the country didn’t vote for the destruction of blue-collar America in 1980, or the creation of a new plutocracy, or the rigging of legislation in favor of organized money. Most Americans still want their social programs kept intact, dislike being told how to conduct their private lives, and don’t want their country to go looking for foreign dragons to slay. What Perlstein calls the “cult of official optimism,” founded by Reagan, requires our leaders, including Barack Obama, to genuflect ritually before America the innocent. That rhetoric has grown extremely thin, however—not many Americans these days are optimistic. Reagan won, but the seventies never ended. ♦
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