Jacob Weisberg pans Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, the latest installment of his history of how conservatism came to dominate American politics in the second half of the twentieth century:
As a political history, The Invisible Bridge suffers from more serious deficiencies: a lack of interest in character, and a failure to engage seriously with ideas. Both Nixon and Reagan appear here as flat figures, for whom the author musters no human sympathy and about whom he offers no fresh understanding. At various points Perlstein calls Reagan a “divider” and accuses him of telling lies. Every politician surely divides and misleads to some extent, but these loaded terms fit his subject badly. They jar because they’re in conflict with Reagan’s fogginess, his lack of cynicism, and with what he accomplished politically, which was to unify divided strands in his party, win over an entire class of Democratic voters, and achieve more bipartisan consensus in Congress than any politician has in the 34 years since he was first elected. The lack of any apparent inner life, about which Edmund Morris expressed his frustration in his Reagan biography, Dutch, makes the fortieth President a confounding biographical subject. But unlike Morris, Perlstein doesn’t wonder about what made Reagan tick. He doesn’t find him an enigmatic figure at all.
The second, more serious problem is the author’s tendency to pathologize conservative views rather than reckon with them.
Perlstein builds his Nixon-Reagan bridge not out of Reagan’s policies, domestic or international, but out of the nostalgia-clouded vision of American life he embodied. He believes Reagan triumphed not because he proposed reining in government but because he told Americans they were fundamentally good and decent and didn’t have to face up to their collective misdeeds. Perlstein writes almost as if Reagan had won the general election in 1976, instead of losing the nomination to Ford. The seeds of Reagan’s appeal may have been planted during his losing campaign. But there was a lot more of the 1970s ahead—four more years of energy shocks and disco infernos—before Reagan triumphed by challenging an incumbent President who told Americans that they weren’t perfect and that they would have to accept limits. Reagan’s broad vision of renewed national possibility made for a powerful contrast with Jimmy Carter, to be sure, but he won in 1980 running on a nationalistic, anti-government platform that was more popular than his opponent’s.
In an interview, Perlstein does his best to explain his understanding of Reagan – which is as the son of an alcoholic father:
Once you wrap your mind around the adult children of alcoholics trying to negotiate the chaos of their lives, they form their characters around that. That’s a very strong foundation for understanding. Most people who cover up their inner wounds with this hard shell of fantasy, once that shell faces adult reality, it cracks, and the result is often trauma and neurosis. I call Reagan an “athlete of the imagination.” He worked out in that mental gymnasium ten times harder than us mortals, right? His shell ended up going all the way down.
He was able to use that set of resources and skills he brought in order to do some pretty powerful things, in order to manage and negotiate and the political and social situations around him in a strikingly effective way, and lead quite effectively. I think previous biographers thought they could crack the shell open and get at the real Reagan. I think this is the real Reagan. There are people like that.
I’m haunted and struck by a story that Ron Reagan tells in his wonderful memoir, My Father at 100. He said that, when his dad was toward the end and wracked by dementia and Alzheimers, he’d wake up in the middle of the night with a start and say “the guys need me, the guys need me.” As Ron points out, it wasn’t that the guys needed him on the set of a Warner Brothers film, or the White House situation room, it was the guys in the locker room needed him on the football film. It really just kind of shows that, at the deepest levels of his being, this projection of himself as a hero on the field of battle went all the way down, for good or ill.
Recent Dish on the book here.
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