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Next to the more apocalyptic spells of
American history, the dismal span of 1973 to 1976 would seem a relative blip of
national dyspepsia. A period that yielded the blandest of modern presidents,
Gerald Ford — “a Ford, not a Lincoln,” as he circumspectly described himself —
is not to be confused with cataclysmic eras like the Civil War, the Great
Depression and the Vietnam ‘60s. The major mid-70s disruptions — the Watergate
hearings and Richard Nixon’s abdication, Roe v. Wade, the frantic American
evacuation of Saigon, stagflation, the dawn of the “energy crisis” (then a newly
minted term) — were adulterated with a steady stream of manufactured crises and
cheesy cultural phenomena. Americans suffered through the threat of killer bees,
“Deep Throat,” the Symbionese Liberation Army, a national meat boycott, “The
Exorcist,” Moonies and the punishing self-help racket est, to which a hustler
named Werner Erhard (né Jack Rosenberg) attracted followers as diverse as the
Yippie Jerry Rubin and the Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Even the hapless
would-be presidential assassins of the Ford years, Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme and
Sara Jane Moore, were B-list villains by our national standards of infamy.
“I must say to you that the state of our Union
is not good,” our unelected president told the nation in January 1975. That was
true enough. America’s largest city was going bankrupt. Urban crime was
metastasizing. The C.I.A. was exposed as a snake pit of lethal illegality. The
nostalgic canonization of the Kennedy presidency, the perfect antidote to the
Nixon stench, was befouled by the revelation of Jack Kennedy’s mob-moll
paramour. Yet the mood of the union was not so much volatile as defeated, whiny
and riddled by self-doubt. As Americans slouched toward the Bicentennial
celebrations of July 4, 1976, pundits were wondering whether the country even
deserved to throw itself a birthday party. “Everyone wanted to be somewhere
else,” Rick Perlstein writes in “The Invisible Bridge.”
It says much about Perlstein’s gifts as a
historian that he persuasively portrays this sulky, slender interlude between
the fall of Nixon and the rise of Reagan (as his subtitle has it) not just as a
true bottom of our history but also as a Rosetta stone for reading America and
its politics today. It says much about his talent as a writer that he makes
these years of funk lively, engrossing and on occasion mordantly funny.
Perlstein knows how to sift through a culture’s detritus for the telling
forgotten detail. Leave it to him to note that the WIN buttons peddled by Ford
to promote a desperate “Whip Inflation Now” campaign were “designed by the same
guy who invented the yellow ‘smiley face.’ ” Or to recall that the Republican
Party tried to combat its dire post-Watergate poll numbers by producing
“Republicans Are People Too!,” three fund-raising network television specials
starring “everyday Republicans who want to tell why they have stuck with the
G.O.P.” Competing against “M*A*S*H” in prime time, the second installment
brought in $5,515. The third never ran.
“The Invisible Bridge” takes its title from a
bit of cynical political advice bestowed on Nixon by Nikita Khrushchev: “If the
people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s
no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.” The
book is the third volume in a project that is as ambitious in its way as Robert
Caro’s magisterial biography of Lyndon Johnson. Caro’s promised final
installment will pick up roughly where Perlstein’s first ends, with Johnson’s
1964 landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater. The writers’ chosen turfs and
techniques are antithetical, however. Caro’s protagonist is our last unabashedly
liberal president. Perlstein’s focus is the modern conservative movement that
rose in reaction to the New Deal and Great Society. Caro is a relentless
reporter who tracks down primary sources, human and otherwise. Perlstein is an
obsessive researcher who often relies (and fully credits) the writers who did
the investigative spade work before him. He doesn’t break news. It’s his
insights that are the news, and have been since his first book, “Before the
Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” (2001), which
was sound enough to persuade conservative readers that a writer with liberal
sympathies could write a revealing and balanced history of his ideological
opposites.
One of Perlstein’s enduring themes is that
when it comes to the steady ascent of the conservative movement, contemporaneous
journalists and Democratic and Republican elites alike are the last to figure
out what is going on. He’s a connoisseur of wrong calls, many of them premature
obituaries for the right, from now all-but-forgotten opinion titans of the day
(Reston, Kraft, Alsop, Sidey, Evans and Novak). “Before the Storm” ended with
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s triumphalist judgment that the lopsided 1964 election
results presaged Democratic victories for the foreseeable future. At the
conclusion of “The Invisible Bridge” — which closes with Ford’s narrow Pyrrhic
victory over the Reagan insurgency at the 1976 Kansas City convention —
Perlstein turns to The New York Times for the epitaph. “At 65 years of age,” it
said, Reagan was “too old to consider seriously another run at the
presidency.”
What’s particularly striking in the new book,
though, is the cluelessness of the stalwart Republican grandees of the Ford
presidential campaign, who were both blindsided and baffled by Reagan’s
guerrilla victories in their own midst. A panicked internal Ford camp memo
struggles to parse the “unexpected Reagan success in certain caucus states,”
where the voters who turned out in shockingly large numbers were “unknown and
have not been involved in the Republican political system before” and were
“alienated from both parties.” As if describing an Indian ambush in the Old
West, the memo goes on to exclaim that “we are in real danger of being
out-organized by a small number of highly motivated right-wing nuts.”
Among those shocked was the canny Texas political operator James Baker, the
George H. W. Bush paladin, who couldn’t get over how “absolutely ruthless” these
uppity Reagan shock troops were. “Our people just aren’t used to this
uncompromising hardball stuff,” he told Time.
Baker’s people should not have been caught
napping any more than his 21st-century descendants were by the Tea Party. As
Perlstein writes, the failed Goldwater campaign of a dozen years earlier
“ingathered an army” that “could lose a battle, suck it up and then regroup to
fight a thousand battles more.” That army was now busy exploiting a loophole in
the post-Watergate 1974 Campaign Finance Reform Act allowing independent
political groups to raise unlimited cash as long as they didn’t “coordinate”
with any candidate’s campaign. Its swelling ranks included mail-order wizards
like Richard Viguerie, ambitious new firebrands like Jesse Helms of North
Carolina, independent right-wing organizations (the American Conservative
Union), new activist think tanks (the Heritage Foundation) and an emergent
religious right invisible to the mainline Christians reading the still liberal
Christianity Today. So out of touch was the Republican hierarchy with its own
grass roots that in 1975 the White House didn’t bother to send a representative
to the second annual Conservative Political Action Conference at the Mayflower
Hotel in Washington. There the movement faithful vilified Ford even though he
was, as Perlstein writes, “the most conservative president, in many respects,
since Harding.” A Newsweek correspondent in attendance was startled to discover
that “the right’s idea of broadening the party” is “purifying it.”
“Before the Storm” told how the Goldwater
presidential campaign became the national coming-out party for this
under-the-radar political movement, upending the postwar assumption that a broad
liberal consensus reigned in America. Perlstein’s second volume, “Nixonland”
(2008), detailed the sharpening of the invaluable tool that Nixon, no movement
conservative, bequeathed to the New Right’s political arsenal: a permanent
class-tinged culture war pitting intellectual elites, liberals and the news
media against a “silent majority” dominated by the once loyally Democratic
working-class whites alienated by the social revolutions of the civil-rights and
Vietnam ‘60s. In “The Invisible Bridge,” it’s Reagan who is the star actor —
though, as is made clear in the book’s savvy recounting of the relevant
Hollywood history, he was never actually a movie star and was washed up in
television by the time he entered politics in earnest. Had Reagan realized his
gilded show business ambitions, one wonders if he might have been content to
play a president on screen rather than in real life.
True to form, Perlstein doesn’t condescend to
this conservative icon but seeks to understand him. He does as good a job as
anyone at working through the psychological and intellectual puzzles attending a
charismatic public figure whose own family often found the private man opaque.
The key to Reagan’s political success, in Perlstein’s telling, was that he
recognized what many Republicans did not — that Americans craved “a liturgy of
absolution” and “an almost official cult of optimism” postulating “the belief
that America could do no wrong” or “that if America did it, it was by definition
not wrong.” That’s why Reagan stubbornly insisted on minimizing the
crimes of Watergate even though polls suggested he might be punished for it and
even after most of his ideological soul mates jumped ship. That’s why Reagan
never stopped insisting that we came home from our humiliating defeat in Vietnam
“as winners.” He propped up such illusions by ignoring facts or inventing them.
But the will of his listeners to believe — and his gift for making them feel
good in his presence — conquered all. As Perlstein observes, Jimmy Carter (whose
meteoric rise was similarly unforeseen by his own party’s Establishment) also
tapped into this “seller’s market in innocence” by hawking a strain of the same
healing uplift. Like Reagan, Carter could be a huckster: He straddled hot-button
issues like abortion, misrepresented himself as a “farmer” (he owned a peanut
warehousing business) and played down the extent of his past political
engagement with the segregationist George Wallace. His folksy, corny platform of
faith and love swamped the fine print. No less a skeptic than Hunter S. Thompson
fell for it hard, in a 15,000-word Rolling Stone encomium titled “Jimmy Carter
and the Great Leap of Faith.”
But Reagan added another powerful element to
his pitch. Realizing, as Perlstein puts it, that “governing is not a hero’s
profession” but is instead “a profession of compromises,” Reagan distanced
himself from the very job he sought. By making a mantra of his formulation that
“government is the problem,” he placed Republican opponents who tried
to govern on the defensive. Much like the majority of present-day Republicans,
Ford and Reagan agreed on most issues, but that fault line proved a great
divide. So it remains today, separating the party’s uncompromising radical base,
epitomized by the obstructionist Ted Cruz, not just from Democrats but from that
dwindling klatch of Washington Republicans who aspire to make government work
even if that sometimes means bending rigid principle to forge a deal.
In one of the many close readings of pop
culture that enliven “The Invisible Bridge,” Perlstein revisits the uncannily
prescient 1975 Robert Altman film “Nashville,” in which a platitudinous
never-seen presidential candidate from the “Replacement Party” offers redemption
from Washington’s Nixon-era evils much as both Reagan and Carter would do in
actuality a year after its release. “Nashville” also lends this book a narrative
strategy: As Altman was fond of making “random, unmotivated” cuts between
“apparently entirely unrelated” scenes, so, at times, is Perlstein. Should you
wonder why he is tracking Hank Aaron’s pursuit of Babe Ruth’s home run record,
rest assured the answer will arrive, in Reagan’s fabled early history as a radio
baseball announcer and the racial dynamics of the Louise Day Hicks-led protest
of enforced school busing in Boston. Perlstein’s only real sin as a writer, a
forgivable one, is a tendency to fall in love with his research. This book’s
text could have been slimmer than 804 pages. Some of the longer narrative
modules — the marathon Senate C.I.A. hearings presided over by Frank Church, the
national culture war over the New York City bailout — would have benefited from
streamlining. Perlstein is not one to settle for a representative example or
three of any particular phenomenon — say, Chevy Chase’s bumbling Ford gags on
“Saturday Night Live” — when he can compile a mini-anthology.
These excesses are a small price to pay for a
book that is both enjoyable as kaleidoscopic popular history of the old Mark
Sullivan-Frederick Lewis Allen school and telling about our own historical
moment. Much as in 1973-76, we live in a time when political insiders are
repeatedly shocked by the comebacks of conservative populists (whether carrying
the Tea Party brand or not) they’d previously declared dead. Much as in 1973-76,
Washington remains enthralled by the sentimental centrist fantasy that
bipartisan power brokers of good will can somehow come together and bridge the
nation’s intractable political divisions. At the height of the Watergate crisis,
one reigning wise man, the Democratic fixer Clark Clifford, wrote a New York
Times Op-Ed article seriously suggesting that high-minded patriots in Congress
could eject Nixon and select a new president without any messy interference from
the voters. His scheme was nothing if not the ur-text for present-day bipartisan
pipe dreams like the doomed, if august, Simpson-Bowles commission to remedy the
national debt.
Once Nixon did make way for Ford, the
bipartisan rapture in Washington was off the charts. Of 81 articles in The Times
on the day Ford was sworn in, Perlstein writes, two-thirds “resounded with the
very same theme: The resignation proved no American was above the law, that the
system worked, that the nation was united and at peace with itself.” The new
president was hailed universally as “dependable, solid, uncontroversial — just
like the cars Ford built.” But as Perlstein adds, “wasn’t it also the case to
partisans of Chevrolets, Fords were controversial indeed? And that Americans,
being Americans, had always found things to passionately disagree about, to the
point of violent rage — and that when American elites reached most insistently
for talismans of national unity, it usually portended further civil wars?” So it
was with the euphoric celebration of national unity that greeted Ford’s swearing
in: The moment he pardoned Nixon a month later, the country’s civil war resumed
just where it had left off. Even the false honeymoon of reconciliation that
greeted the election of America’s first black president lasted a little longer
than that.
For now, Rick Perlstein has taken this story
only through the summer of our Bicentennial year. But much of what has happened
in the nearly four decades since, and perhaps much that is yet to come, can be
found in the pages of his epic work.
THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE
The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
By Rick Perlstein
Illustrated. 856 pp. Simon & Schuster.
$37.50.
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