A thread for Rick Perlstein's THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE

Might as well aggregate posts here…

http://www.post-gazette.com/image/2014/07/29/ca4,2,676,874/The-Invisible-Bridge-by-Rick-Perlstein.jpg

Why is John Hinckley in his Secret Service detail?

I posted Joan Walsh's review on my blog yesterday. On liberals fucking up at the height of their power:

We trust in our own moral superiority – and lately, in our moral superiority tied to demographic destiny, which seems unbeatable. But they just get busy trying to out-organize the other side – whether the other side is Ford Republicans or Obama Democrats – and after a few setbacks, they beat us anyway.

Our friends at NRO dismiss the plagiarism charge because they're ladies and gentlemen.

My favorite comment in months:

Jason O'Hara • 9 minutes ago

Card carrying liberal... I love that

I learned in recent years my great-grandfather was a politically active card-carrying communist.

Thanks

what a pathetic hit-piece that is. perlstein must really have them scared.

Copy arrived yesterday, just started. When I found it in the mailbox, I was just like the kid getting her Harry Potter book in Boyhood. I wasn't dressed like Nixon, though.

You'd bugged the mailbox though, yeah?

if you want a kaleidoscopically magical mystery tour of how seventies malaise paved the way for the Reagan Revolution, check out Decade of Nightmares by Philip Jenkins — a writer who really isn’t convinced of his own superiority to his “ideological opposites.” It’s only 352 pages, unlike Perlstein’s 784, and it’s all Jenkins’s own work.

doesn't a kaleidoscope distort/reorder your vision? wasn't magical mystery tour the beatles' film analogue to an acid trip? talk about sloppy writing! anyway jenkins book is an interesting but narrowly focused view of the late 70s/early 80s, zooming in on the dread aspects of the time like cults, serial killers, horror movies. and iirc jenkins' method mirrors pearlstein, i.e. drawn from archival research with no new interviews. tut, tut.

haven't read the invisible bridge yet but will am massively looking forward. even gonna BUY a hard copy (not from scamazon)

a writer who really isn’t convinced of his own superiority to his “ideological opposites.”

this dude spends the whole piece ragging on leftists and then makes the above pronunciation? NRO is like Hypocrisyville!!

Maybe this can be used as a general thread on Nixon books (there's a Nixon movies thread...started by me, actually). Never knew until today that Dan Rather put out a Nixon book in 1974; just ordered a used copy.

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1184313580l/1499156.jpg

I finished it two weeks ago and am still in a bit of a mood to gobble up more.

Moving along. I loved the excerpted editorial that ended the "Weimar Summer" chapter:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19750929&id=u9VVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MuADAAAAIBAJ&pg=6863,7428994

Probably a little more dramatic when you excerpt all the apocalyptic stuff. And yes, some of it is dated--in the context of the book, works great.

One of the more amazing throwaways in the book, just as Reagan enters the '76 race:

Barely four years earlier there had been all but a consensus that cheap handguns--"Saturday night specials"--had to be removed from city streets; when a bill was introduced in Congress in 1971 to ban them, the National Rifle Association announced, "We are for it 100 percent."

Perlstein spends a lot of time on the POWs, and some on the calamitous evacuation of Vietnam; this looks fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTWX-BB4aAA

Also, while I did pay attention to the '76 election as a teenager, and was aware of Regan's challenge, it's amazing to read how incredibly close it really was. The numbers are constantly shifting, but at one point, just prior to the convention, Time had the delegate count at 1,104-1,090 in favor of Ford. Closer even than Obama-Clinton.

Yeah, stuff like that is worth detailing, but there sure have been a lot of Nixon and Reagan books--his Goldwater consideration was more revelatory, at least to me. Although, if he's going to stick to Presidents, Daddy Bush is another under-examined figure, seems like ("Zelig" is a tag I've seen for his career arc, at least pre-POTUS; so rong). But I hope at some point he'll deal with the sugar daddies, like Richard Mellon Scaife, who did so much to class up the joint, and fearsome mullahs like Grover Norquist (who is now suspect because his wife is from the Middle East, "and he has a beard," a Tea Party sage recently added).

Yep. I keep waiting for a new comprehensive Poppy Bush bio but I'm afraid we'll have to wait til he croaks, in part b/c of the CIA career. His stints as congressman, China ambassador, and RNC chair, on the other hand, are well documented because he did shit

Always thought it was interesting that the Real Conservatives, esp. old school, didn't trust him very far. Found an old Almanac of American Politics, in which Michael Barone said that some thought of him as a Man Without A Constituency, because he left his blue blood habitat for Texas. Though he always wrote his thank-you notes, ate his pig ears, tried to mix and mingle---like Willy Loman, he was liked, but not well liked. No matter what else he did. in '92, Reagan put out the word, "He doesn't seem to stand for anything." Spokesman to the end.

what was gerald ford's beef w/solzhenitsyn?

As presented in the book, wasn't it just that he didn't want to upset the Soviets during détente negotiations (until Reagan forced his hand)?

yes and it makes sense up to a point. but calling him "a horse's ass" seemed i don't know, inapt somehow. especially coming from the buffoon-ish ford.

then again, a guy who surrounds himself w/rumsfeld, cheney and geo hw bush clearly knows his way around the rear end of a horse

39th anniversary of Squeaky Fromme's assassination attempt today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNB1_j69sfI

crossposting from Watergate thread, where apparently no one clicked... Pardon 40th anniversary.

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/08/watergates_most_lasting_sin_gerald_ford_richard_nixon_and_the_pardon_that_made_us_all_cynics/

oh I clicked

Long interview:

A: People thought he was dumb his entire career. Even people who…

Q: …got their ass kicked by him?

A: And recognized that they could get their ass kicked by him. Recognized his presence, his emotional intelligence, his quick thinking. They still thought he was dumb.

A: Richard Nixon thought he was dumb. In 1971 there’s an Oval Office conversation between him and Kissinger, talking about how they can’t possibly imagine him sitting in this chair, he’d start a nuclear war. And then, lo and behold, in 1973, during the Yom Kippur war, they’re facing this geostrategic dilemma, in which the Egyptian government keeps claiming that they’re shooting down Israeli planes that they’re not really shooting down, and they give Ronald Reagan a call—what they call in politics a “stroking” call, and Ronald Reagan says, “oh, it’s easy, just say that you’ll replace all the planes that Egypt claims to have shot down on a one-to-one basis.”

And suddenly, no more problem. And Kissinger says, “I wish I had someone that smart on my staff.”

By the opposite token, Jimmy Carter’s strategy in 1980, all [Carter’s team] wants to do, they’re certain they could just have the election in the bag if they could just get Ronald Reagan on the stage and debate him, and people would see how shallow and stupid he was.

They do. It comes a week before the election. From that moment forward, Reagan takes the lead and builds it into a landslide. How dumb is that? Who’s the stupid one there?

Well answered, and great Kissinger anecdote, but this isn't a breakthrough insight of Perlstein's; many writers/commentators have made the same point before (even SNL, in their Reagan-drops-the-act-sketch from the early '80s).

the phenomenally stupid American people, then and forever? xp

i'm a little wary of this idea that reagan succeeded because he was a political genius who was smarter than everyone around him (and good at hiding it). i mean, there's definitely truth in that and i don't deny his considerable political gifts, but i dunno, there's a lot of luck going on in his career too -- carter was in a lot of trouble by 1980 no matter who ran against him, the economy revived midway through reagan's second term (and not really through his doing), and iran-contra could've been a bigger deal than watergate if the dems of the late '80s had had the courage of the dems of the early '70s.

they’re facing this geostrategic dilemma, in which the Egyptian government keeps claiming that they’re shooting down Israeli planes that they’re not really shooting down

As geostrategic dilemmas go, this one is hardly first rate. So fucking what if Egypt shoots down a bunch of imaginary airplanes? What are the grave geostrategic consequences likely to be? Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater's broadcast of the War of the Worlds probably caused more problems in real life than those Egyptian communiques ever did.

Just to clarify, I wasn't speaking to the truth or non-truth of what Perlstein says; just that it's not a new theory.

i'm a little wary of this idea that reagan succeeded because he was a political genius who was smarter than everyone around him (and good at hiding it). i mean, there's definitely truth in that and i don't deny his considerable political gifts, but i dunno, there's a lot of luck going on in his career too -- carter was in a lot of trouble by 1980 no matter who ran against him, the economy revived midway through reagan's second term (and not really through his doing), and iran-contra could've been a bigger deal than watergate if the dems of the late '80s had had the courage of the dems of the early '70s.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.),

To be fair, this is Perlstein's theory too. Shrewd politicos seize opportunities, etc.

btw this book also tells the story of how cannily Carter himself saw a moment in '76 for a conservative peanut farmer who wasn't from Washington.

Right.. Carter is the big winner of the book, lest we forget

halfway thru this and i think i'm getting a handle on what feels weird about it: like the goldwater/nixon books it alternates straightforward biography with those long panorama sequences (all the newspaper headlines and movie plots and ultradetailed descriptions of tv broadcasts) but it feels more frantic than those books and more weighted towards the panoramas (sometimes to its detriment imo because its detail on how, in the 70s, gas was very expensive and there were often murders, does not necessary become more revelatory with volume). it's got less psychoanalysis of its protagonist/lens than either previous book, which in nixon's case at least is understandable cuz that's a whole industry, but the psychoanalysis that is here (the "Boy Who Disappears" stuff) also seems way sketchier and less convincing to me; i want to cut it almost every time it's invoked. for hundreds of pages i attributed this to lax post-success editing but it's not: it's a necessary weakness of the biographical part of the book. it can't even try to be authoritative on reagan's inner life; the clues it has are useless compared to the ones nixon's ungoverned self was always vomiting out. it reports on reagan like it reports on the parallax view and dick cavett episodes: he is too shallow to enter, like a screen. (the best perlstein has so far on reagan's sharp rightward turn is: he might have had some problems with the irs, maybe, probably, he never talked about it.) meanwhile the rest of the book spins faster and louder around this structuring absence. the thing i like most about the book so far (besides the usual fun of the media-immersion sections, which i guess are this series' big draw anyway) is the way this weird central void starts slowly but surely to induce The Creeps.

Reagan said often that he started thinkin' things through on learning the IRS took most of his dough.

I haven't said much about the book because I read it too quickly and burned out on Perlstein, but I like how each book has it own approach. If Nixon's id shaped its predecessor and a clinical dissection of conservatism dominated BTF, then the digressions of TIB feel necessary – the required correlative to Reagan's insistent, numbing recollection of an America no one experienced, and to the '76 primary voter this virtue, according to Perlstein, tasted like hot chocolate after reading about killer bees.

there's a new book that lays LBJ alongside Reagan? got a middling review in the NYTBR. Too much "narrative," which is certainly enough to keep me away.

the bit about the Nixon administration apparatchik going on TV and sharing recipes for livers and kidneys felt precise and right even though I was too young to experience it: part of the surreal fabric of a decade when Grandpa grew mutton chops and Mom read Good Housekeeping recipes often no different than creamed kidneys.

he often said that the 90% tax rate prevented him from working as often as he wanted to, but i was thinking of this graf, a noble but doomed stab at empathy and detail:

His obsession with the unfairness of the IRS may be better explained by a secret that came out only after his death. A researcher discovered a tax lien against Reagan in the amount of $24,911 ... Who knows what frustrations, during this most frustrating period of his life, lay behind that? What endless phone calls with IRS bureaucrats, what tortured discussions with accountants, what fears that this man for whom appearances counted for everything might be found out? Who knows. If he ever talked about it, no one ever told.

I would love to read an Edmund Morris review of this book.

Patti Davis' living in sin with an Eagle never gets a mention as one of the decade's horror stories.

the digressions of TIB feel necessary – the required correlative to Reagan's insistent, numbing recollection of an America no one experienced

yeah this is what i meant by "spins faster and louder" -- otm abt how the series goes in form from antediluvian structure+calm --> things falling apart --> unstructured chaotic liver-eating postapocalypse.

what the Reagan children experienced in that house is its own post-fifties horror story.

Reagan was an actor. To the best of my knowledge, he never had any training in acting, but fell into it naturally. I suspect he's hard to psychoanalyze in part because his inner life seems to have been very plastic and formless, and his intellect was built upon a hodgepodge of random personal experiences and Reader's Digest types of influences. The fact remains that he was very good at what he did, so he wasn't dumb. I'd call him a genial self-made man, bright but malleable, who took direction well and had a mastery of simple ideas.

he never had any training in acting

well he went through the star machine. idk if that counts as training in acting or not; probably not. but one of the keyer things the book identifies is his total cheerful acquiescence to all of the process' insane human-product indignities, the ones which more vivid presences, actual stars, were rebelling against all over.

at some point he's beaten out for a role by erroll flynn and a fanmag perlstein quotes calls reagan "the least temperamental person in hollywood ... sometimes temperamental pays off!"

I don't remember if Perlstein remarks on the phenomenon whereby the cold fury Reagan showed as governor evaporated as the seventies unfolded. Conservatism rolled and raged, he kept smiling.

yeah! no remarks on this in the book so far but i was youtubing some classic berkeley-induced rage and it was v surprising to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCr3nL78qWs

yeah, he's an angry motherfucker back then, you wish someone w/ a gun and good aim had shown up sooner.

(i can say that cuz he's dead)

Excellent. Where does Reaganland end? The hallowed Reagan basically holds sway over the party right up till 2016, although I think Perlstein could end this volume earlier and start Trumpland before Trump actually steps to the fore. Palin would be a good place to start the one after the new one, or maybe all the insanity around Gingrich (and, to a lesser degree, Herman Cain) in 2012. Gingrich's debate showdown with John King would be a good beginning for Trumpland.

His books typically don’t cover more than a handful of years iirc so I’d be very surprised if this one went beyond ‘88, if it even goes that deep

Next Up: Poppy Bush Interzoneland.

(My phone's auto-complete correctly offered both Bush and then Interzone after typing Poppy)

Bushland actually would make sense for '88 to Jeb's coronation in the summer of 2015 (even if that all exists in the shadow of Reaganland and involves a lot of the same people). In any event, looks like he's making this series his life's work. Hope I'm around long enough for the whole thing.

I'm ready to write it as soon as I figure out how to weave Roxette into it.

Reaganland will be 1976-1980.

I'm ready to write it as soon as I figure out how to weave Roxette into it.

Bushland: It Must Have Been Love, But It's Over Now

Wasn't '76-80 The Invisible Bridge?

It ends at the '76 convention.

My memory's going--could have sworn it ended with Reagan's election. That's kind of weird, then, if Reaganland ends in '80; it's more like Prelude to Reaganland.

He just picked vice president GEORGE
He's goin' to Reaganlaaaaand

can't wait for 200 pages about the Panama Canal Treaty

I have never read any of the Perlsteins--best to start at the beginning or...?

I found it to be so. Haven't read Invisible Bridge yet but it sounds like it continues directly on from the first two. I'd long sought a clear summary of the conservative hijacking of the GOP and the Goldwater book was everything I could've asked for on that front.

I bet many people have read the last two but not the first (Before the Storm, mostly focused on Goldwater and '64)--which is still my favourite of the three, in no small part because I read it against the backdrop of the 2008 election.

Nixonland is downright eerie against today's backdrop.

Sorry, missed OL's post just before mine.

Before the Storm is the best so yes, start there

clemenza unless Perlstein has cheanged his mind recently this will be the last volume

I’m thinking it will end with the 84 landslide like nixonland did with 72

idgi wasn’t his last book the reagan one

they’re all the reagan one

i saw perlstein speak at a book signing a couple years ago, he said the next book would end with reagan's election and that he had no plans to write any further books in the "series."

i thought that was interesting because i don't really think of reagan as dominating the culture pre-1980 in the way he did as president -- but an argument that america slowly became "reaganland" in the years leading up to his election, that the slow backlash against the 60s and liberalism made his presidency possible, yeah, i could see that.

he had no plans to write any further books in the "series."

tf else is he gonna do

maybe work on his music idk

He'd probably do well to stop--the transformation from Reagan to Trump has been covered to death by now, and in many different ways.

https://res.cloudinary.com/teepublic/image/private/s--YRHwQ3ru--/t_Resized%20Artwork/c_crop,x_10,y_10/c_fit,w_470/c_crop,g_north_west,h_626,w_470,x_0,y_0/g_north_west,u_upload:v1462829015:production:blanks:mtl53ofohwq5goqjo9ke,x_-395,y_-325/b_rgb:eeeeee/c_limit,f_jpg,h_630,q_90,w_630/v1527645092/production/designs/2736516_0.jpg

someone buy me that t-shirt so I can wipe my arse on it

Or at least put 'WATCH FOR ARMED DOTARDS' in a US flag font across the top.

Anyone else here start in on Reaganland?

shut your mouth

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/books/review/reaganland-rick-perlstein.html

I'm balking at the $55 cost.

Got mine on Sunday, I’m 85 pages in. Probably need about a three month head start to finish before Alfred.

My copy arrives tomorrow. Race you!

Why did you have to make it racist?

hard to believe the publisher passed on that as a title for the series as a whole

Heh. "From Goldwater to Reagan: The Rise of Conservatism in America, or, Why Did You Have to Make It Racist?"

Where's the Racist of Me?

Who Moved My Racism?

Racist Soup for the Soul

Racist to the Bottom

Girl, Wash Your Racism

President Keyes delivers the lol.

This piece from 2012 is just scarily on the mark for current era. And. as we look towards Romney's potential role during the Biden administration, a good reminder about Romney's past. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con

Reading this now. I find these books to be oddly comforting. The parallels to whatever is going on now to, say, West Virginia in 1972 makes me think "this country has always been insane". This one, yes, but especially Nixonland. The 70s were fucking ~insane~.

Most interesting insane decade ever.

Still holding out hope for a bringing-it-all-back-home final book.

The 70s were fucking ~insane~.

Living through the 70s is what formed all the now-insane boomers.

I love when Perlstein points out the obvious about the audience for some right wing knuckle-dragging talking-point. Like here where Reagan had just recorded a long form talk-to-the-camera speech:

One reviewer -- Elizabeth Drew -- found it "rather poor. Reagan jumped from subject to subject, just as he had in his early speeches when he shuffled his 4x6 cards; he talked too fast about too many things [...]" But New Yorker writers did not have a vote in North Carolina Republican primaries.

In Nixonland, it was the opposite -- when some horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing bureaucrat would spout statistics that would lead to Perlstein would write something like "it all made so much sense" to liberals, only to have Nixon pull the rug on them again with some inanity.

Picking up The Invisible Bridge and Reaganland from my local library tomorrow. Just finishing Season 2 of Mindhunter, which mostly deals with the Atlanta child murders, so I guess late '70s/early '80s is where my brain is right now.

Picking up The Invisible Bridge and Reaganland from my local library tomorrow.

That is a lot of pages. Glad my copy of Invisible Bridge auto-renewed...twice.