The Invisible Bridge

This narrative history by Rick Perlstein covers the period from early 1973 to August 1976, tracing two interwoven stories: the collapse of public faith in American institutions following Vietnam and Watergate, and the simultaneous rise of Ronald Reagan as a political figure who insisted these crises said nothing essential about America's character. Perlstein argues that a polarity of opinion about Reagan maps onto a deeper national divide between those who believed the era's traumas demanded a searching reckoning with American power and those who refused to break faith with America as God's chosen nation.

The book opens in January 1973 with President Richard Nixon's announcement of "peace with honor" in Vietnam. The Pentagon orchestrated the return of 587 prisoners of war as a patriotic spectacle, with televised reunions and flag-draped ceremonies. Perlstein documents how the Nixon administration cynically cultivated the POW issue since 1969, reclassifying downed pilots as "Missing in Action" to inflate the count for diplomatic leverage. The patriotic narrative, however, was contested from multiple directions: liberal columnists pointed out most POWs were bomber pilots in an undeclared war, and the POW community itself was divided between hard-liners who enforced the Code of Conduct, the military rules governing prisoner behavior in captivity, and an antiwar faction known as the "Peace Committee." Reagan hosted a ball for the POWs, telling them, "You gave America back its soul" (21), and dismissed Watergate as irrelevant, calling the conspirators "not criminals at heart" (81).

Perlstein pauses the political narrative for an extended biographical portrait. Born in 1911 in Tampico, Illinois, to a father with an alcohol addiction and a devoutly Christian mother, Reagan grew up in more than a dozen rented homes. He retreated into adventure stories whose moral frameworks taught that heroes born under grace always triumph. Around age ten he underwent a transformation from withdrawn loner to confident performer, becoming drum major, star lifeguard, and class president. At Eureka College in central Illinois, he recast a confused student strike as a morality tale with himself as hero. His gift, Perlstein argues, is the ability to turn complexity into simplicity and certainty.

After college, Reagan talked his way into a radio sportscasting job in Iowa and in 1937 leveraged a trip to Cubs spring training into a screen test at Warner Bros. His Hollywood career stalled in B movies until breakthrough roles in Knute Rockne, All-American (1940) and King's Row (1942). World War II confined him to a stateside training-film unit, and younger actors passed him by. After the war, his career flatlined while his wife, Jane Wyman, won the Best Actress Oscar. He channeled his frustration into Hollywood politics, becoming president of the Screen Actors Guild and an FBI informant who named suspected Communists. His marriage collapsed. He married Nancy Davis in 1952, and through her social connections they joined a circle of wealthy Southern California industrialists whose conservative politics reshaped his worldview.

The ideological transformation accelerated after 1954, when Lew Wasserman, head of the talent agency MCA, placed Reagan as host of General Electric Theater. Reagan toured GE's plants nationwide, absorbing the free-market ideology promoted by labor relations chief Lemuel Boulware. His speeches grew increasingly political until GE canceled the show in 1962. Reagan transitioned to campaigning for Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, delivering a nationally televised address that raised a fortune and launched his political career. Two years later he was governor of California.

Meanwhile, Perlstein traces the escalation of Watergate. The Senate Watergate Committee, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin, began televised hearings that riveted the nation. White House counsel John Dean testified for five days, describing how Nixon knew of the cover-up from the beginning. Former White House aide Alexander Butterfield then revealed that Nixon secretly recorded all Oval Office conversations. In October 1973, the Arab oil embargo quadrupled oil prices, and Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to tax evasion. Gerald Ford, the House minority leader, replaced him. Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the "Saturday Night Massacre," provoking a public firestorm. The House Judiciary Committee conducted an impeachment inquiry; Texas freshman congresswoman and Judiciary Committee member Barbara Jordan declared, 'My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total' (263). The "smoking gun" tape proved Nixon had ordered the cover-up. He resigned on August 8, 1974. Ford took office, declaring, "Our long national nightmare is over" (273). Thirty-one days later he pardoned Nixon, and his approval rating plummeted.

Cultural upheaval compounded the political crisis. The Exorcist (1973) functioned as a catharsis for parents' fears of losing their children to outside forces such as cults and drugs. Patty Hearst, a nineteen-year-old newspaper heiress, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and later declared she had joined them. A wave of nostalgia swept the country through films like American Graffiti and the television show Happy Days, transporting Americans to a simpler past.

Beneath the radar of mainstream pundits, a "New Right" emerged. In Kanawha County, West Virginia, school board member Alice Moore led a revolt against new multi-ethnic, multicultural textbooks that escalated to firebombings and dynamite attacks. In Boston, a federal desegregation order produced violent confrontations. Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative activist leading the Eagle Forum, mobilized opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. The pro-life movement grew from a Catholic concern into a broader evangelical crusade. Conservative infrastructure expanded through direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie and Senator Jesse Helms's Congressional Club in North Carolina.

Ford struggled with "stagflation," the unprecedented coexistence of inflation and recession. Comedian Chevy Chase's Saturday Night Live portrayal of the president as a bumbling oaf created a devastating public image. Congressional investigations revealed that the CIA had plotted to assassinate foreign leaders and that the FBI had conducted campaigns to destroy Martin Luther King, but the investigations provoked a backlash that produced only weak oversight reforms. Reagan dismissed them on his radio show, saying the CIA's misdeeds amounted to very little. The fall of South Vietnam in spring 1975 produced chaotic images of desperate Vietnamese clinging to helicopters as Saigon fell on April 30. Ford asked Congress for military aid; Congress refused. Reagan framed even the debacle as evidence of American goodness.

Reagan announced his presidential candidacy on November 20, 1975, attacking détente, the policy of easing Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union. He lost New Hampshire by only 1,587 votes and four more primaries before a turnaround in North Carolina on March 23, 1976, engineered by Helms's political machine. Reagan swept Texas, Indiana, Georgia, and Alabama, drawing crossover Democratic voters with populist attacks on the Panama Canal treaty and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. On the Democratic side, Jimmy Carter, the former Georgia governor, rose as the ultimate antipolitician, exploiting the post-Watergate mood by emphasizing trust and faith. He clinched the Democratic nomination by early June.

America's Bicentennial on July 4, 1976, became an unexpectedly joyous occasion that surprised even cynical commentators. The Republican convention in Kansas City opened with the nomination in doubt. Ford won 1,187 to 1,070 after a bruising floor fight, but Reagan's forces secured a "Morality in Foreign Policy" platform plank that repudiated détente and praised exiled Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The platform also included, for the first time, antiabortion language. Ford chose Senator Robert Dole of Kansas as his running mate.

After Ford's acceptance speech, the president invited Reagan to the podium. Reagan delivered what observers called his greatest speech, about a time capsule to be opened in a hundred years: "Will they look back with appreciation and say, thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom?" (801). The ovation dwarfed anything Ford received; delegates wept openly. Pundits declared the sixty-five-year-old Reagan finished, an assessment that would prove spectacularly wrong. The book closes by observing that a nation surprised by its own patriotic joy on the Bicentennial was moving toward the politics of reassurance Reagan embodied: The suspicious circles were in retreat, and the longing for innocence was ascendant.