The Invisible Bridge

The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

Rick Perlstein

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781476782430
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The New York Times bestselling portrait of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the tumultuous political and economic times of the 1970s is “a Rosetta stone for reading America and its politics today” (Frank Rich, The New York Times Book Review).

In January of 1973 Richard Nixon announced the end of the Vietnam War and prepared for a triumphant second term—until televised Watergate hearings revealed his White House as little better than a mafia den. The next president declared upon Nixon’s resignation “our long national nightmare is over”—but then congressional investigators exposed the CIA for assassinating foreign leaders. The collapse of the South Vietnamese government rendered moot the sacrifice of some 58,000 American lives. The economy was in tatters. And as Americans began thinking about their nation in a new way—as one more nation among nations, no more providential than any other—the pundits declared that from now on successful politicians would be the ones who honored this chastened new national mood.

Ronald Reagan never got the message. Which was why, when he announced his intention to challenge President Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination, those same pundits dismissed him—until, amazingly, it started to look like he just might win. He was inventing the new conservative political culture we know now, in which a vision of patriotism rooted in a sense of American limits was derailed in America’s Bicentennial year by the rise of the smiling politician from Hollywood. Against a backdrop of melodramas from the Arab oil embargo to Patty Hearst to the near-bankruptcy of America’s greatest city, The Invisible Bridge asks the question: what does it mean to believe in America? To wave a flag—or to reject the glibness of the flag wavers?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Preface
• Chapter One: “Small and Suspicious Circles”
• Chapter Two: Stories
• Chapter Three: Let Them Eat Brains
• Chapter Four: Executive Privilege
• Chapter Five: “A Whale of a Good Cheerleader”
• Chapter Six: Sam Ervin
• Chapter Seven: John Dean
• Chapter Eight: Nostalgia
• Chapter Nine: The Year Without Christmas Lights
• Chapter Ten: “That Thing Upstairs Isn’t My Daughter”
• Chapter Eleven: Hank Aaron
• Chapter Twelve: “Here Comes the Pitch!”
• Chapter Thirteen: Judging
• Chapter Fourteen: “There Used to Be a President Who Didn’t Lie”
• Chapter Fifteen: New Right?
• Chapter Sixteen: Watergate Babies
• Chapter Seventeen: Star
• Chapter Eighteen: Governing
• Chapter Nineteen: “Disease, Disease, Disease”
• Chapter Twenty: New Right
• Chapter Twenty-One: Weimar Summer
• Chapter Twenty-Two: The Nation’s Soul
• Chapter Twenty-Three: “Has the Gallup Poll Gone Bananas?”
• Chapter Twenty-Four: Negatives Are Positives
• Chapter Twenty-Five: “Not the Candidate of Kooks”
• Chapter Twenty-Six: Born Again
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: “Always Shuck the Tamale”
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: They Yearned to Believe
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: Bicentennial
• Chapter Thirty: “You’re in the Catbird Seat”
• Chapter Thirty-One: “Don’t Let Satan Have His Way—Stop the ERA”
• Chapter Thirty-Two: The End?
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Sources
• About Rick Perlstein
• Index
• Photo Credits
• Copyright