Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 880 pp., $37.50.

 

ON A SWELTERING Monday in August 1976, delegates began to arrive at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Missouri, for the start of the Republican National Convention. Unlike today’s tightly scripted party conventions, which have become little more than four-day infomercials, the outcome of this convention was in serious doubt. The presumptive nominee was President Gerald Ford, who had assumed the office only after the resignations of Spiro Agnew and Richard M. Nixon. His challenger was Ronald Reagan, the conservative former governor of California, who could seize the presidential nomination by winning over a comparative handful of uncommitted delegates. It was a moment of high and historic drama. As Rick Perlstein relates, when the delegates arrived at the arena, they were to be greeted by “what was supposed to be a stirring sight”: a fifty-foot, 1,500-pound inflated elephant soaring overhead. Unfortunately, in “classic 1970s fashion,” the beast’s stomach had been accidentally punctured by its rigging and it now wallowed limply in the parking lot.

The American public imagination has long preferred to overlook the 1970s, seeing it mainly as a regrettable decade marked in hindsight by embarrassments that were both national (Watergate, stagflation, the oil crisis) and personal (disco, leisure suits, bell-bottom pants, quaaludes, ridiculous hairstyles). Many historians, however, recently have proclaimed its importance as the period in which the conservative movement gained strength, giving rise to neoconservatism as well as the religious Right, and culminating in 1980 with the election of the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge. Now Rick Perlstein has added to that historical literature with The Invisible Bridge, his retelling of the period between Nixon’s 1972 reelection and Reagan’s challenge to Ford in 1976.

Perlstein is a talented but erratic writer. Emerging from a background in journalism that included a stint at Lingua Franca, he entered the ranks of best-selling historians with Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. In all of his books, Perlstein has attempted to chronicle the rise of modern conservatism through a biographical focus on its emblematic leaders. He also seeks to convey the feel and flavor of the period through a sprawling mass of incident and detail. Unfortunately, all of this history is filtered through a New Journalism writing style that is more annoying than stimulating.

The New Journalism that came into being in the 1960s and 1970s with the work of writers like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion was an attempt to expand the possibilities of journalism by borrowing some of the techniques of novelists. Perlstein partakes of this tradition principally through his hyperactive prose style. He deploys peppy phrases—helicopters “swoffed,” pundits become “chin-stroking penseurs,” hotels “were putting on the dog”—and makes frequent resort to italics, capital letters, one-sentence paragraphs, mantra-like repetition, sentence fragments, grammatical solecisms, odd mashups of tense and other writerly pirouettes. He continually inserts himself into the narrative with sarcastic asides that make reading the book akin to watching an episode of the cult television show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which the movie onscreen is drowned out by its wisecracking spectators.

 

PERLSTEIN’S SPASTIC WRITING detracts from the historical material he presents, which can be captivating. The period from 1973 to 1976 was one in which “America suffered more wounds to its ideal of itself than at just about any other time in its history.” These included the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the subsequent collapse of its South Vietnamese ally, the shocking revelations of Watergate, congressional investigations into unsavory intelligence operations, and the economic privation produced by the Arab oil embargo and stagflation—not to mention the afflictions of crime, terrorism and urban decay.

Perlstein tells a tale of a divided and unhappy society through vignettes about the return of prisoners of war from Vietnam, demonstrations against skyrocketing food prices, the Watergate hearings, Patricia Hearst’s kidnapping and participation in the crimes of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and growing public interest in UFOs and the occult. He describes the success of morally bleak films (like Death Wish and The Parallax View) and blockbusters (like The Exorcist and Jaws), along with scares over acid rain and killer bees. He also covers the rise of self-righteous “Watergate baby” Democrats as well as conservative antibusing protests in South Boston and antitextbook protests in West Virginia.

This is hardly a comprehensive history; it barely touches on the music, art, fashion and literature of the period, or phenomena such as the founding of Microsoft and Apple, immigration, deindustrialization, a growing assertion of ethnic identity and the rise of supply-side economics. But even for people who know the history of this period fairly well (or who lived through it), the book contains lots of surprises. Who knew that the first message passed through “tap code” by Vietnam POWs was “Joan Baez sucks,” or that one of Nixon’s advisers suggested that Americans compensate for higher meat prices by dining on offal? Would an eBay search turn up a “Watergate Scandal” card game (“No one wins, there are just losers”)? Did a Washington Post columnist seriously propose that an appropriate response to the energy crisis would be to impose a speed limit on car racing at the Indianapolis 500? Did theaters showing The Exorcist really keep kitty litter on hand to soak up audience vomit? Did daredevil Evel Knievel make his ill-fated jump attempt over the Snake River Canyon on the same day that Ford pardoned Nixon?

But the narrative suffers from Perlstein’s desire to squeeze the era into a procrustean analytical framework. He posits that the stresses of the mid-1970s split American society into two tribes. One was the “suspicious circles,” made up of those who felt that realism and a higher patriotism now required Americans to “question authority,” overturn outdated morality, come to grips with the world’s complexity, and accept uncomfortable truths about the dark aspects of America’s history and the fallibility of its leaders. The other was made up of those who continued to believe that America was “God’s chosen nation” and who nostalgically yearned for heroes, simplicity, comforting myths and a return to national innocence.

Perlstein leaves little doubt that he’s on the side of the “suspicious circles.” The Watergate controversy, he tells us, was “a battle over the meaning of America,” pitting rule-of-law idealists against the majority of Americans, who apparently wanted to suspend the First Amendment to end disruptive protests and “who believed, with Richard Nixon, that our neighbors might be our enemies, and our enemies might destroy us.” Those in the “suspicious circles,” conversely, felt “that all that turbulence in the 1960s and ’70s had given the nation a chance to finally reflect critically on its power, to shed its arrogance, to become a more humble and better citizen of the world—to grow up.” Perlstein laments that the reactionary innocents won the battle, as now even Democrats like Barack Obama praise America as “the greatest nation on earth” and an exception to history. “What does it mean to truly believe in America?” Perlstein asks rhetorically. “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?”

For all Perlstein’s desire to spur debate, however, his suspicion-versus-innocence framework is too muddled and historically inapt to hold any real contemporary resonance. The reader’s own suspicion grows that Perlstein’s motive is not so much to explore the 1970s in all their complexity as to expose the villains who forced America into its alleged contemporary cult of optimism and willful blindness to national faults—and, unsurprisingly, he finds nearly all these moustache-twirlers on the conservative side.

But even a casual viewer of Fox News will know that today’s conservatives are simultaneously critics and boosters of America, fearful of its big government and deeply suspicious of its politics and culture while in the same breath maintaining that it is still the envy of the world. Liberals, too, mix censure and approval in their views of the country and its history. Americans of all political stripes are, in Perlstein’s terms, both innocents and skeptics in various measures. Their views of government and American institutions are informed by a complicated blend of partisanship, the performance of those institutions, personal experience, media exposure and historical events such as the attacks of September 11, 2001. Americans in decades past held equally complicated and sometimes contradictory views. Any attempt to treat them as political naïfs, as Perlstein does, reveals what historian E. P. Thompson termed “the enormous condescension of posterity.”

 

THIS IDEOLOGICAL agenda makes Perlstein an unreliable narrator—incapable, for example, of attempting any objective evaluation of a complicated historical figure like Richard Nixon. Perlstein is content to present Nixon, largely through the lens of Watergate, as a black-hearted conservative malefactor and two-dimensional doer of dastardly deeds. But this is a tired and indeed anachronistic interpretation that serious historians haven’t held for decades. Any fair historical accounting of Nixon’s presidency also has to consider his achievements in statecraft, his progressive record on issues from the environment to the arts to Southern school desegregation, and his masterful ability to balance different factions of the Republican Party.

Perlstein offhandedly notes that Nixon had “proposed programs of such dubiously conservative provenance as wage and price controls, a guaranteed minimum income, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency,” yet also had been expert at “damping the ideological passions of his party’s right wing.” How did he maintain that balance? (And can someone let John Boehner in on the secret?) Perlstein also refers in passing to the “delirious” welcome Nixon received from millions of Egyptians on a visit to Cairo in 1974, after which he went on to almost as rapturous a reception in Jerusalem. Why was that, and doesn’t it seem a bit strange in view of America’s current unpopularity in the region? And isn’t it odd that Nixon, the realpolitik exponent of a foreign policy rooted in pragmatic recognition of the relative decline of American power, should be presented as an enabler of national innocence?

 

PERLSTEIN’S REAL focus, however, is on his main villain, Ronald Reagan, whose biography unfolds in flashbacks through the first half of the book. Perlstein brings considerable verve and originality to the oft-told tale of Reagan’s midwestern boyhood and college years, his radio and movie career, and his job as a pitchman for General Electric. His digressions through Reagan’s cultural influences (including Frank Merriwell novels and the Golden Age of Sports) and mentors (such as Hollywood’s Lew Wasserman and GE’s Lemuel Boulware) are fascinating.

But Perlstein’s portrait of Reagan is deeply unflattering. Reagan comes across as a near-lifelong fantasist: “An athlete of the imagination, a master at turning complexity and confusion and doubt into simplicity and stout-hearted certainty.” Perlstein implies that Reagan lied about virtually every aspect of his life, consciously molding his past, his physical presentation and his persona in order to come across as a hero and leader to other people. (Not, of course, that Perlstein believes his subject was a truly principled hero, as he infers that Reagan was willing, as head of the Screen Actors Guild, to countenance corrupt insider deals for Wasserman and then to shave his political convictions to meet the business needs of Boulware’s GE.) As a politician, Reagan used his appeal to make his blithe optimism and innocence into America’s unofficial cult. Reagan promulgated “the belief that America could do no wrong. Or, to put it another way, that if America did it, it was by definition not wrong.” Reagan’s black-and-white moral certainties helped to put an end to the budding American Enlightenment of the 1960s and 1970s, “encouraging citizens to think like children, waiting for a man on horseback to rescue them: a tragedy.”

The book’s curious title comes from some cynical advice Nikita Khrushchev once gave Nixon: “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 core of Reagan’s appeal, in Perlstein’s view, was that he used his considerable political gifts to allow people to forget the traumas of the 1970s and recover their cherished myth of America as a blessed and exceptional nation.

Perlstein’s assessment of Reagan as a human being is ungenerous at best. He does make some perceptive points about Reagan’s preternatural awareness of the camera—the book’s stunning cover photo of him campaigning in his Illinois hometown, arms outstretched and poised dramatically on the bumpers of two cars, is ample testimony to that—and ably dissects Reagan’s rhetoric. But he has almost nothing to say about Reagan as a practitioner of politics. This lacuna is highlighted by Perlstein’s bizarre decision to devote no more than a few pages to Reagan’s eight years as governor of California, or more than a few paragraphs to his seminal 1966 election.

The result is that Perlstein fails to grapple with what made Reagan a successful conservative politician in a liberal state, who would use his broad appeal first to come close to toppling Ford in 1976 and then to win the presidency outright in 1980. Perlstein equates Reagan’s early 1960s conservatism with the paranoia of the John Birch Society, but makes little effort to figure out why Reagan was able to campaign as a big-tent Republican or govern as a pragmatist. Perlstein claims that Reagan’s goal was to purify the GOP by kicking out all who did not subscribe to rigid conservative principles, when in fact Reagan opposed this sort of ideological cleansing. Reagan told California’s conservative activists in 1967 that they had an obligation “not to further divide but to lead the way to unity. It is not your duty, responsibility or privilege to tear down or attempt to destroy others in the tent.” He warned that “a narrow sectarian party” would soon disappear “in a blaze of glorious defeat.” The conservatives would have booed anyone else off the stage for offering this diagnosis, but they obeyed Reagan.

It’s still a mystery why a governor who passed the largest tax increase in his state’s history, signed the nation’s most liberal abortion bill and no-fault divorce law, and supported gun control and pioneering environmental legislation could have remained a hero to the conservative movement. It would never happen nowadays, but Reagan somehow threaded the needle. It’s not enough to say, as Perlstein does, that Reagan was merely opportunistic or sought to blame his actions on the liberals in the California legislature, who were “furtive and diabolical in ways unsullied innocents could not comprehend.”

 

PERLSTEIN LOOSELY ties Reagan’s ascent to that of the New Right, a populist and antiestablishment political movement he outlines without defining and which he views as an entirely pernicious development in American history. He dolefully relates the growth of conservative evangelical churches, the creation of political action committees, the rise of activist organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council to supplement existing outfits like the American Conservative Union (ACU) and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), and protests against busing and abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. Ironically, however, Perlstein buys into conservatives’ triumphant accounts, written after Reagan’s 1980 presidential election, of the movement’s irresistible rise, internal harmony and exquisite coordination. In fact, few of the right-wing impulses of the 1970s cohered into a unified movement, and conservatism likely would have had limited national impact if not for the singular figure of Reagan.

Take, for example, the perspective of William Rusher, publisher of National Review and an important and well-respected liaison between the Old and New Right. In June 1975, he complained that he found it impossible to make contact with the leaders or institutions of the social conservatives:

 

Does anybody speak for these people? Is there anybody I can sit down and have a drink with, who has the slightest influence over them and their actions? We traditional or economic conservatives are, as you know, organized up to the eye teeth: in ACU, YAF, etc. But where on earth are the social conservatives?¹

 

Nor were all of these developments working in Reagan’s favor in the mid-1970s. The incipient religious Right, for example, was drawn to Jimmy Carter in 1976 rather than to anyone on the Republican side. (Rusher thought Carter’s nomination “makes it likely . . . that the Democratic Party itself will turn out to be the vehicle of the anti-Establishment conservative-populist trend.”²) The conservative movement was hardly unified around Reagan, as many preferred younger or harder-edged potential candidates like John Ashbrook, James Buckley, Phil Crane and George Wallace. A lot of conservatives who supported Reagan’s challenge to Ford did so out of a sense of resignation; as Ashbrook put it, “Ron has always looked for easy answers and yet, he is the only one conservative at the present time who has national visibility.”³ And Reagan secured the presidency in 1980, despite his role in torpedoing Ford’s 1976 candidacy, precisely because he was the one conservative leader who was able to win over a majority of the GOP’s moderates.

 

FOR A WRITER who insists that respect for complexity is a moral virtue, Perlstein proffers a surprisingly simplistic analysis. Part of this stems from a lack of original archival research. Before the Storm was a splendidly researched book, but in this one he relies mainly upon newspaper clippings available online. Perlstein’s analysis is also weakened by his bogus dichotomy of sophisticates versus innocents and his insistence that American society was completely bifurcated into hostile opposing camps, an assertion that was no truer in the 1970s than it is now.

Other shortcomings in Perlstein’s analysis stem from the defects of his New Journalism style and his penchant for overstatement. It may be that Spiro Agnew was “that pathetic man a heartbeat away from the presidency,” or that “no one trusted much of anything” in the 1970s, or that the 1970s were “suspicious times. Or maybe not. America couldn’t decide.” These and a dozen other overgeneralizations may be true—but as they say in the writers’ workshops, “Show, don’t tell.”

And while New Journalism–influenced historians can borrow from the techniques of fiction, they have no business at all inventing history, as Perlstein does by giving us the thoughts of an imaginary audience at a Reagan speech on the Panama Canal:

 

His listeners remembered those shameful images of the evacuation of Saigon, that line of bodies snaking up the ladder to that shack atop the CIA station chief’s home. God’s chosen nation, with its tail between its legs. They remembered those Panamanian riots from 1964, and now Panama was being rewarded for rioting—just like those ungrateful Negroes in those Northern cities they had left behind to retire in Florida; they had rioted, and then got more civil rights bills and social programs. . . . And now Jerry Ford was ready to let it happen again. 

 

Dwight Macdonald famously excoriated New Journalism as “parajournalism,” which he defined as “a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction.” In passages like the one above, Perlstein doesn’t just come close to parahistory—he embraces it.

There’s also a basic inconsistency in Perlstein casting nostalgia as a vice, given that his main strength as an author is precisely his ability to spin nostalgic, detailed, you-are-there narratives of events such as the 1976 Republican National Convention. Readers who make it through all eight hundred pages of The Invisible Bridge most likely will enjoy immersing themselves in the 1970s and, even more, being able to put the book down and leave that troubled decade.

But Perlstein ultimately is purveying a shallow and tendentious version of history that will only convince the already converted: those who believe in the innate baseness of conservatives. He is not writing what his publisher boasts “is becoming the classic series of books about the rise of modern conservatism in America” in order to investigate and understand but rather to mock and condemn. This is history that sets out to expose the limitations of conservatives but ends up exposing the limitations of the author. Anyone seeking a definitive history of the transition from Nixon to Reagan should look elsewhere.

 

Geoffrey Kabaservice is the author, most recently, of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford University Press, 2012).

 

¹ William A. Rusher to James Gavin, June 3, 1975. William F. Buckley Jr. Papers (Yale University) 34:5.

² William A. Rusher to Jameson G. Campaigne Jr., May 10, 1976. William A. Rusher Papers (Library of Congress) 18:6.

³ John Ashbrook to Michael Djordjevich, March 21, 1975. Rusher Papers 26:3.