The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
Page 113
Acknowledgments
AMERICA HAS EXPERIENCED QUITE THE wild ride since my agent and I completed the agreement to write this book, in the week after Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, and America began its most dramatic economic collapse since the Great Depression. Its author has experienced a quite a ride, too. A profound period of personal transition and growth accompanied the gestation of this volume. So first off, I want to thank the extraordinary friends who stood by my side, inspiriting me, teaching me, listening to me, succoring me. They include, in no particular order (I swear), Allison Xantha Miller; Jared Sagoff; Karl Fogel (whose expert editorial ministrations defrenzified the manuscript by a welcome 11.83 percent); Elizabeth Prince (who graciously worked through her contempt for the book’s protagonist to take on editorial tasks); Barrie Cole; Margarita, Simon, Eryk, and Maya Cygielska; Jade Netanya; Steven, Renée, and Iris Klein; Jennifer Timmons; Jason Vest; Leon Pasker, Harry Osoff; Karen Underhill, Elijah Underhill-Miller, and Rick Meller; Lucy Knight; Ethan Porter; the late Aaron Swartz; Laura Schaeffer; Tom Geoghegan; Lew and Joanne Koch; Victor, Isabella, and Victoria Harbison; Micah Uetricht; Neil Landers; Aaron Lav and Heather Blair; and J. Robert Parks. And I thank Roberta Walker for bringing yet more meaning to my life, and reminding me of the infinite gifts of literacy. I thank Kath Duffy and Lisa Meyerson for their support and for their critical readings of parts of the manuscript, too.
I’d be nowhere without the writers and scholars upon which my work is all but parasitic. The research and analysis of Michael Allen, H. Bruce Franklin, Mary Hershberger, and especially Craig Howe undergird my account of Operation Homecoming, which serves as this opera’s overture. Jeanine Basinger and Thomas Schatz taught me what I needed to know to place Ronald Reagan in his Hollywood context. Kathleen Geier helped with that and much more besides. Thomas W. Evans and Timothy Raphael gave me Reagan at GE, and Mark Inabinett taught me about the Golden Age of Sports.
Speaking of early Reagan biography, Anne Edwards’s is the best—and her public-spiritedness in depositing her research materials at the UCLA Library made my own hack at the subject much, much richer. The shared obsession of the late Paul Cowan and the late Tony Lukas—dedicatees of my last book—with the warfare of America’s tribes on the left and right once more informed my project’s foundation. It was built out thanks to the crucial contributions of Ronald P. Formisano (on the Boston busing crisis), William Graebner (on Patty Hearst), Kathryn Olmsted (on the Church and Pike committee investigations), and Carol Mason (on the Kanawha County textbook war). I was fortunate to meet Monica Schneider and get hold of her Oberlin University bachelor’s thesis, because it forms the core of the book’s insights on the Bicentennial celebration; ditto for Sam Black’s bachelor’s thesis of the New York City fiscal crisis. (Kids today!) Elizabeth Drew’s careful real-time chronicle of the political events of 1976 saved me 4.38 months of labor. Craig Shirley’s book on Reagan’s 1976 campaign saved me 3.76 months; and once more I couldn’t have completed the marathon without the benefit of Jules Witcover’s contemporary reporting.
That’s the first string—those without whom the project’s core conceptions would not exist. Others on whom I relied include Howard Bryant, the late Clifford Doerksen, John Dean, Jefferson Cowie, Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Robert M. Collins, Adam Clymer, Robert A. Hargrove, Yanek Mieczkhowski, Joshua B. Freeman, David Frum, Vic Gold, David Greenberg, John Gorenfeld, Ernest B. Ferguson, Philip Jenkins, Andreas Killen, Stanley Kutler, Laura Kalman, J. Hoberman, Nina Silber, John B. Judis, David Farber, Christopher Capozzola, Kim Philllips-Fein, Karen R. Merrill, Tanya Melich, Allen J. Matusow, Louis P. Masur, William Martin, Jane Mansbridge, Edward D. Berkowitz, Peter Carroll, James Mann, Geoffrey Kabaservice, Bob Colacello, Natasha Zaretsky, Lou Cannon, Jesse Walker, Ron Reagan, Tom Edsall, Marc Eliot, Seth Rosenfeld, Richard Reeves, Jonathan Schell, Julian E. Zelizer, William Shawcross, Whitney Strub, Karen Staller, Judith Stein, Connie Bruck, Dennis McDougal, the late Tom Wicker, Norman E. Wymbs, Alicia C. Shepard, and Bill Boyarsky—and Martin Anderson, Kiron K. Skinner, and Annelise Anderson, valuable archivist of the public record. Thanks, also, to William Staudenmeier and Junius Rodriguez of Eureka College for their guidance both at, and about, Reagan’s alma mater.
I am a political animal, and once more Heather “Digby” Parton and her blog Hullabaloo fed my heroin-like habit of tacking between past and present in order to make sense of our strange United States. Thanks, too, to her partners in crime-fighting, Howie Klein, John Amato, and David Neiwert; and also Josh Marshall’s crew at Talking Points Memo; and Corey Robin and Ta-Nahesi Coates, the two writers I read online whenever I crave inspiration. And my lively and cherished community of Facebook friends came to the crowdsourcing rescue when I needed, say, stories about what it was like to watch the Watergate hearings on TV, or see The Exorcist for the first time.
I thank Matthew Sawh for his research assistance. And, wow, that Doug Grant. Somewhere along the way some college kid started sending me nagging email: Mr. Perlstein, can I be your research assistant? “No money for that sort of thing,” said I. No, I’m not looking for a job, I just love history, and I want to help you out. That went on, and on, for months. Finally I had the good fortune to assent to his insistent entreaties. How much better did that decision end up making this book? By 15.03 percent. I suspect that Doug, astonishingly, knows more 1970s political history than I do. I became used to his drumbeat of questions—like “Do you have all the chaos in Kansas City at the 76 GOP convention? where Rockefeller broke in half a Reagan delegate’s sign?” I didn’t. Thanks to Doug, though, I do now, and so do you (pages 784–85)—not to mention dozens of other amazing details that he seemed to turn up almost weekly. Thank you, Doug.
Moshe Marvit, David Glenn, Howard Park, and Ryan Hayes all generously and thoughtfully passed on items from their personal collections—DVDs of Ronald Reagan on General Electric Theater, rare and ancient books, kitschy detritus from political campaigns past—that helped add texture to my research. David’s gift of Richard Vander Veen’s self-published memoir was especially useful.
I praise, collectively, my community in Hyde Park, Chicago, especially its political activists; and the proprietors who kindly provided me office space with the daily rental of a single cup of joe, first at the late, lamented Third World Cafe on Fifty-third and Kimbark, then at Cafe 53 on Fifty-third and Kenwood (I’ll give some praise to my friends at Dolce Casa in Ravenswood, too); and the Seminary Co-op bookstore for sponsoring my monthly interview series with Chicago authors and activists and for helping launch this project into the marketplace; and the gang at Freehling Pots and Pans; and, for their wise counsel and love, my friends Jane Averill and Tom Panelas, Liz Goldwyn, Teresa Kilbane, Joe and Betty Check, Larry Boyle, and especially Vicky Stein.
I thank the scholars who invited me to their campuses and arranged the honoraria that helped me sustain the project; I thank Rolling Stone for providing a home for my journalism in 2012; and I especially thank the Nation, and Richard Kim and Katrina vanden Heuvel, for giving me such freedom and support all through 2013 and beyond to do journalism and tell people what I thought they should think about history. I thank Kath Duffy for her helpful manuscript comments as well. I thank my wise, kind, savvy agent, Tina Bennett (and her able assistant Svetlana Katz), and I thank Jonathan Karp for the extraordinary grant of trust he gifted me with at the beginning and end of this process. I’m grateful, too, for his team at Simon & Schuster, including Cary Goldstein, Larry Hughes, and Nicholas Greene.
I thank Judy Cohn, because I love her, and she loves me.
I thank my family: mom Sandi, brother Ben, sister Linda, and brother Steve. (Steve, I should probably return those 1970s Doonesbury books I stole from you in the middle of the 1980s. Forgive me, but I couldn’t have found my vocation without them.) We lost my father, Jerry Perlstein, in September 2013. This book is dedicated to him.
A Note on Sources
THE PLEASURE OF WRITING AND reading recent history has deepened
these last several years, now that we all carry computers in our pockets and pocketbooks and on our laps that allow us to sate our skepticism about whether a claim is true or a source really said what an author said it said or even to watch an event or listen to the events that exist on the page only as a word picture—be it Evel Knievel trying and failing to rocket over the Snake River Canyon or Gerald Ford, that very same day, proclaiming a “full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed, or may have committed or taken part in.” The Internet has, paradoxically, made source documentation simultaneously less and more useful: less useful, in that the customary dozens of pages of source notes that burden the end pages of a book like this become mostly superfluous—and make the book more expensive to produce and purchase; and more useful in that the chance to actually follow up on those sources, either to check them or to delve deeper into the subject, no longer requires arduous trips to libraries or archives. Oh, and there’s this: they no longer require the historian to make nearly so many such trips, either. When I wanted to know about the telegrams of protest that piled up backstage at the Oscar ceremony in 1975 after the producer of a scouring anti–Vietnam War documentary paid tribute to the North Vietnamese, it took but a few moments of googling to stumble upon the page on the Library of Congress website that reproduced them—hip-pocket history, a net gain for the republic of letters if there ever was one.
That is why my publishers and I have decided to put the source notes for the book online, with clickable URLs whenever possible. Perhaps 80 percent of the newspaper articles quoted herein were found, and remain findable, via Google’s project of scanning dozens of newspapers and making them fully searchable and browsable—try it yourself: go to http://news.google.com/newspapers and type in, say, “Children in one school joked about shooting a few”; and while you’re there, hell, type in the name of your grandfather the opera singer and see what kind of reviews he got for his 1947 debut in La Traviata. Those with access to a university library with Proquest Historical Newspapers can delve even deeper, into papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
And though Google’s book search isn’t as useful when it comes to reading books (Google likes to drop out one of every ten pages or so for copyright purposes), it’s a great way to confirm citations, so you can do that here, too. Same for several archives; Gerald Ford’s presidential library, for instance, has an excellent collection of source documents. There are limits, however: to reconstruct the story of the return of the Vietnam War POWs and to document Ronald Reagan’s relative absence from the national political discussion in 1973–74, I spent a dazzling week at the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, where I’d spend half my life if I could. It’s the closest thing we mortals will ever get to being inside a time machine: every single second of every single network newscast is fully accessible on a computer screen within seconds, just like it was YouTube. And although the catalogue is available and searchable online, the actual videos are not, because the networks consider them intellectual property, not what they actually are: part of our nation’s historical patrimony. So I link to the archive’s record of the relevant newscasts, though to actually watch them requires a trip to Nashville, which I heartily recommend.
Find and explore my source notes at rickperlstein.net.
About Rick Perlstein
© K.A. WESTPHAL
Rick Perlstein is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by more than a dozen publications, and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history and appeared on the best books of the year lists of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune. His essays and book reviews have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Village Voice, and the New Republic, among others. He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for independent scholars. He lives in Chicago.
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Index
Aaron, Henry, 225–31, 248, 585
ABC, 59, 89, 102, 104, 132, 135–36, 221–22, 283, 329, 489, 510–11, 599, 637, 648, 662, 727, 768, 799
ABC News, 605, 638, 702
abortion, 300–301, 640, 753, 760–61, 763, 766–67, 787–88
public support for, 446–47
Reagan and, 445–46
see also pro-life movement
Abourezk, Jim, 145
Abzug, Bella, 127, 456, 521–22, 715, 771
Academy Awards, 62, 165, 229, 341, 349, 351, 366, 372, 424–25, 659
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 424
Act of Marriage, The: The Beauty of Sexual Love (LaHaye and LaHaye), 652
Acuff, Roy, 218–19
Adams, Betty, 397
Adams, John, 1, 708, 797
Adams, John Quincy, II, 1
Addams, Jane, 304
Aesop, 292
AFL-CIO, 5, 189, 320, 331, 406, 488, 517, 652–53, 693, 744
Committee on Political Education of, 399, 741
Africa, 470, 635, 671–72
African-Americans, 732
African Methodist Episcopal church (Archery, Ga.), 584
After Dark, 274
Agee, James, 590
Agee, Philip, 331, 576, 598
Agence France-Presse, 697
Agnew, Spiro T., 115–16, 129, 157–60, 177–80, 202, 221–22, 267, 308, 441, 457, 585, 607, 612, 736, 756, 777
Agnew (POW), 19
Ah-One! Ah-Two! (Welk), 541
Air Force, Egyptian, 175
Air Force, U.S., 5, 15, 67, 146, 500, 577, 616
SERE training of, 618
Air Force One, 218, 252, 254, 466–67, 497, 597, 631, 735, 769
Air France, 706
Akron, Ohio, 167, 342
Alabama, 213, 293, 625, 644, 676, 786
Alabama, University of, 590
Alameda Plaza Hotel (Kansas City, Mo.), 764, 769–70, 798
Alaska, 183–84, 197, 643, 665, 786
Albany, Ga., 608
Albany, N.Y., 63, 482, 501, 525
Albert, Carl, 190, 192, 569
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), 400
Aldrin, Buzz, 21, 574
Aleutian Islands, 176, 448
Alexander, Ross, 341
Alexandria, Egypt, 252
Alexandria, Va., 461
Alfred Hitchcock Presents (TV show), 386
Alger, Horatio, 34–35, 38, 93, 335
Ali, Muhammad, 670
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (film), 277
Alive (Read), 323–24
Allah, 175, 293
Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (report), 535
Allen, James, 644
Allen, Lew, Jr., 521–22, 524
Allen, Steve, 207–8
Allen, Woody, 533
Allende, Salvador, 174, 298, 535, 655
Allied Chemical, 559–60
All in the Family (TV show), 58
Allman, Gregg, 612, 715–16
Allman Brothers Band, 715–16, 729
All the President’s Men (Bernstein and Woodward), 225, 275, 418, 658
All the President’s Men (film), 658–59
All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation (Scanzoni and Hardesty), 324
Allyson, June, 368
Alsop, Joseph, 123, 127, 236, 520
Alsop, Stewart, 121
Altman, Robert, 274, 277, 581
Alton, Ill., 458, 777
Altschuler, Sid, 242
Alvarez, Everett, Jr., 103
Alzheimer’s disease, 43
Ambush at Vladivostok (Schlafly), 777
Americana Hotel, 717
Georgian Ballroom at, 721
American Airlines, 108
American Association for the Advancement of Science, 615–16
American Baptist Association, 301
American Bar Association (ABA), 188, 280, 615
American Bureau of Narcotics, 108
American Christian College, 615
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 19, 62, 189, 511
American Communist Party, 402–3
American Conservative Union (ACU), 308, 451, 640–41, 675
Conservative Victory Fund of, 668
American Council for Capital Formation, 480
American Enterprise Institute (AEI), 306, 666
American exceptionalism, xix–xx
American Federation of Labor (AFL), 361
American Graffiti (film), 166–67, 210–11, 463
American Independence Party, 674–75
American Indian Movement, 62
American Legion, 29, 40, 74, 461, 744–45
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), 457
American Life, An (Magruder), 590
American Life, An (Reagan), 24–25, 242
American Medical Association (AMA), 401, 405, 675
American Motors, 333
American Psychological Association, 20, 67
American Revolution, 59, 64, 638
American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, 606, 689, 711