A thread for Rick Perlstein's THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE

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)

is that the "if they want a bloodbath let's have it" speech?

sadly no but it does contain an excellent description of stoner filmstrips:

THEY CONSISTED OF COLORED SEQUENCES THAT GAVE THE APPEARANCE OF DIFFERENT-COLORED LIQUIDS SPREADING ACROSS THE SCREEN. FOLLOWED BY SHOTS OF MEN AND WOMEN, ON OCCASION. SHOTS OF MEN AND WOMEN'S NUDE TORSOS, ON OCCASION.

I have to find the clip of Governor Reagan meeting with the Board of Regents, denouncing them, throwing a pencil down, and stalking out of the room.

gyrating on occasion

In that youtube he gives a odd-looking shake at about 21 or 22 seconds which is very actorly to my eye, like he's getting into the role almost by slithering into it like a new skin.

that's just a flicker of his annunaki form

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MWEAA9a-Xc

those long panorama sequences (all the newspaper headlines and movie plots and ultradetailed descriptions of tv broadcasts)

I eat that kind of thing up--I'm always looking for omens and coincidences--but I thought Perlstein maybe overdid it a bit in the new book. You could pick up a newspaper from 1975, 1985, 1995, 2005, or tomorrow, and if your objective is to connect a bunch of stories that suggest the world is on the brink of collapse, you could probably find them.

yeah i agree. lots of "in washington this politician said america would be ok ... but if you read beyond the front page, you saw that in wisconsin, a man had been shot." in general tho i don't think his thesis is wrong.

What a historian has called TV's first reality series began in the second season [of General Electric Theater], when [Reagan's] "total electric house," housing "television's first all-electric family," was still under construction. Reagan strolled around the site as his electrical contractor demonstrated how you, the viewer, might wire your property for "full house power." Nancy, in her first screen role since Donovan's Brain, broke comically into her husband's technical meanderings to delivery the bottom line for the ladies: "Well I'm glad we have it. Because we're going to have some wonderful electric equipment and we want to have all the entertainment and pleasure and comfort out of that equipment that we can!"

there's some good reagan-in-berkeley quotes in this classic john dolan piece:

http://exiledonline.com/reagan%E2%80%99s-cheshire-snarl/

i was in high school during the years chronicled. while i remember the individual crises and a larger sense of creeping dread/disillusionment, the world-on-the-brink theme leaves me wondering if a) i was too young & sheltered to grasp the end-times zeitgeist or b) perlstein exaggerates a bit for dramatic effect.

could've done w/less reagan bio and more on the rising religious right. during 1973-76 the post-hippie jesus freak movement morphed into the moral majority.

for the religious right business William Martin's With God On Our Side is a good read.

I haven't read any of Perlstein's books yet; feel like I have to work up the energy to get lost in them

will look for that. perlstein mentions hal lindsey's apocalyptic mega best-seller the late great planet earth. one of those paperbacks i remember seeing everywhere back then. never knew lindsey was a born-again doomsayer. i thought he was just another pre-newage crank/guru.

the rise and fall of TV preachers - televangelists as they were known - is also worth exploring. i saw jim bakker for the first time around 1976 and was transfixed. never seen anything like it on TV - curing people over the air while soliciting donations, tammy faye emoting like crazy. it was bizarre and uh, prophetic.

The one whose bizarreness transfixed me most was Ernest Angley in the early '80s. He was like something from the WWF.

Ernest is back in the news:

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/10/21/1021-Televangelist-Ernest-Angley-urged-vasectomies-abortion.html

Asked for, and received, this for my birthday:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51-sjuXJb6L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

In time, god will forgive me.

Nixon's resurrection was one of the more bizarre occurrences in a very bizarre era.

Dick looking like Tony Hopkins in that photo.

Buchanan's publishers hoping to reel in the Perlstein crowd with that sleeve, as if if they were the Eagles tempting fans with Long Road Back to Eden by including a sticker that sez "not INCLUDING THE HITS "HOTEL CALIFORNIA" AND "TAKE IT TO THE LIMIT"

I know Pat will express deep sorrow over the harm the Southern Strategy left in its wake.

Up to 1974 in The Invisible Bridge, I'm finally into stuff I remember having an informed take on, even as a child: Hank Aaron 715. (Sure, I remember the Year Without Christmas Lights, but in elementary school we were simply told that we were really having an energy crisis....probably most kids believed it too, unless they had conspiratorial minded parents...I actually don't even know if we were or not, never really looked into it).

I was a bit worried when I found out this book would be 800 pages on just four years. The culture-reading stuff in Nixonland struck me as more convincing than the stuff I've been seeing in Bridge. I don't think Perlstein's handling of the cultural significance of Hank Aaron is particularly insightful at all (and he is no Bill James on baseball stats argumentation).

The racism directed against Aaron was widely noted, publicized and deplored at the time. For that matter, Aaron's 715th home run (which was nationally televised) was much more widely celebrated than Barry Bonds breaking Aaron's record (different time & circumstances I know, but still).

So, Frank Sinatra didn't think much of it eh? To whom was Frank Sinatra's opinion on anything a matter of significance in 1974? I feel like Perlstein is grasping a bit here to put this into the 'divisive' narrative.

Meanwhile, I'm still wondering if Reagan's tedious stopped-clock routine on Watergate is supposed to be viewed as prescient. I'm guessing it's-a-gonna-be.

Anyway, I love these books, but I'm not sure if every bit of culture-reading is all that convincing for Perlstein's grand argument. (My only criticism of him as a writer in general is that he does tend to keep hammering his theses - trust your reader a bit more, pal).

Finally, I may be making a fool of myself by critically commenting while still reading the book.

I saw him and John Dean at the Miami Int'l Book Fair yesterday; he and Dean were chummy, whispering in each other's ears calling each other "Brother Perlstein" and "Brother Dean."

When asked whether Nixon or Reagan were most responsible for the partisanship Perlstein didn't blink: "No. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was responsible."

That event was shown on C-Span2. It will probably be rerun today.

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.