If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.
Imaginary. Invisible. Guess that one must have been changed by the editors. Either way, the point is the same -- and it is a wonderful metaphor for this book’s main protagonist and the political divide he helped create.
That protagonist is Ronald Reagan, and the political divide he would come to straddle was first spiked by Barry Goldwater in Perlstein’s first book Before the Storm, and then split open by Richard Nixon in Perlstein’s second Nixonland. In The Invisible Bridge, Perlstein will help us understand how Reagan first leveraged and then would come to represent the essential divide of American politics -- the one between liberals and conservatives, the one that still drives so much of our rhetoric today.
A Polarity of Opinion
As usual, Perlstein’s preface provides a helpful frame that will help you understand his subsequent 800 pages.
Before Reagan had served a single day in any political office, a polarity of opinion was set -- and it endured forevermore. One one side: those who saw him as a rescuer, hero, redeemer. … On the other side: those who found Reagan a phony, a fraud, or a toady.
But this divide is not really about Reagan the man, as evidenced by the reaction Perlstein got from a “Reagan-hating” friend when he asked her to review his manuscript. She refused, admitting that she could not think straight about Reagan for her rage.
Her beef, and that of millions of others, was simple: that all that turbulence in the 1960s and ‘70s had given the nation a chance to finally reflect critically on its power, to shed its arrogance, to become a more humble and better citizen of the world -- to grow up -- but Reagan’s rise nipped that imperative in the bud. Immanuel Kant defined the Enlightenment, the sweeping eighteenth-century intellectual-cum-political movement that saw all settled conceptions of society thrown up in the air, which introduced radical new notions of liberty and dignity, dethroned God, and made human reason the new measure of moral worth -- a little like the 1960s and ‘70s -- as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” For these citizens what Reagan achieved foreclosed that imperative: that Americans might learn to question leaders ruthlessly, throw aside the silly notion that American power was always innocent, and think like grown-ups. They had been proposing a new definition of patriotism, one built upon questioning authority and unsettling ossified norms. Then along came Ronald Reagan, encouraging citizens to think like children, waiting for a man on horseback to rescue them: a tragedy.
This, pointedly, is the part that is not about Reagan, but about the larger dichotomous current of American life that he represented. When confronted with evidence of our own failing, two different sets of Americans react in two different ways. One wants to push through the ugliness and repair the damage that has been done. The other wants to ignore the ugliness and return to the days when such things weren’t talked about. Perlstein’s friend was in the first camp. Ronald Reagan was in the second.
The Protective Bubble of Propaganda
Again and again throughout Perlstein’s narrative we see these forces acting in opposition to one another. And the most compelling are when people in one camp are rudely confronted by the viewpoints of those in the other, often leaving them, and the reader, somewhat shellshocked by the clash.
Case in point is the effort during the peace talks that would eventually end the Vietnam War, when American housewives, somewhat as part of a political publicity stunt, worked honestly and diligently to secure the release of the prisoner-of-war husbands.
On Christmas Eve, three airliners leased by Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot lifted off. One, christened “The Spirit of Christmas,” bore fifty-eight POW wives and ninety-four of their children to demand a meeting with Communist negotiators in Paris. The others, christened “Peace on Earth” and “Goodwill Toward Men,” tried to deliver thirty tons of Christmas dinners, holiday gifts, clothing, and medical supplies directly to the prisoners in Hanoi.
But, outside the protective bubble of propaganda, the women were in for a rude awakening, which Perlstein conveys in a parenthetical comment..
(In Paris, the wives were lectured on truths stern-faced North Vietnamese diplomats considered self-evident: that the way to free their husbands was to prevail upon their government to stop the futile and sadistic terror bombing of North Vietnam, for which there was no sanction in international law. A wife asked: “What should I tell my son, age nine, when he asks where is my father and when is he coming home?” An apparatchik responded: “Tell him his father is a murderer of North Vietnamese children and that he is being punished.” The wives emerged too shattered to speak to the press.)
It’s not my intent to take sides here, to claim that one perception (that of American POWs as heroes) or the other (that they are murderers) is the correct one. I’m merely pointing out that the perceptual divide here exists -- and that like many of the political fights that swallow our ability to make progress, the divide is deep and unbridgeable (by spans visible or invisible).
But there is propaganda here, and propaganda is often comprised of lies of the simplest construction. To use Khrushchev’s phrasing, they are the imaginary bridges that politicians build over the imaginary rivers of their supporters.
As one immediate example -- and an example of the kind of revelations that come from reading Perlstein’s well-researched text -- is the issue of how many American prisoners of war were held after the war by the North Vietnamese.
Operation Homecoming had returned 587 American prisoners of war -- but for years Nixon had referred to 1,600 Americans being held in North Vietnam. That number folded in more than one thousand personnel, mostly pilots, who crashed in the dense Vietnamese brush and in previous wars would have been classed as “Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered” -- but had been reclassified as “MIA” so the president could make the North Vietnamese look bad for his Paris negotiations. Now the families of those other 1,013 were making insistent noises: what was the government going to do about them?
It was a lie, like many on the political right, that would take on a life of its own.
[U.S. Representative] Clem Zablocki, meanwhile, opened hearings on the Vietnam “Missing in Action” issue. The point was to debunk a spreading fantasy. It failed. That 1,300 men were still counted as MIA was just an artifact of misleading statistics, he said: from the testimony both of the returnees and of the North Vietnamese, we know “there are no missing in action or prisoners of war in Southeast Asia at this time that they believe are alive.” Which only meant, to many POW-MIA families whom the White House had politically organized for cynical reasons in the first place, that Congress was part of the cover-up. “Why are you willing to believe the enemy on this subject when they do not tell the truth on any other subject?” the Corpus Christi, Texas, chapter of the National League of Families soon raged in a letter to the Pentagon. “The fact is, you have no proof our men are dead.”
Like the lie of welfare cheats described in Before the Storm, and like the lie of forced busing described in Nixonland, this seems to be another one of those political lies that spawned a movement -- years, if not decades, of angst, agitation, and activity focused on bringing home men who would have otherwise been assumed dead. All but for the carefully placed words of a conservative icon with a particular axe to grind.
Political Lies
And if I can take an aside inside of an aside, I found here in Perlstein’s text what might be the first appearance of what I consider the biggest political lie of them all. In a bitter re-election fight while in the California governor’s mansion, Reagan was caught talking out of both sides of his mouth regarding an economic stimulus plan.
It was true that his statistics did not add up. In fact they contradicted each other -- a circumstance he dispatched with the casual blitheness that drove his opponents insane. They claimed his plan would create deficits. He responded it would produce $41.5 billion in new revenue over the next decade and a half. But at that, he also stated that the plan’s intention was to give the state less money to spend.
Did you catch it? The great lie? It’s this: Tax cuts create more tax revenue to the government because of the stimulus effect they have on the economy. Reagan would play that phony card again and again during his political career, and because he did, now there are legions who believe it as gospel.
Want another? How about this classic chestnut?
“The proposition had the surface appeal of the politicians’ favorite, but false homily,” the [Milwaukee] Journal patiently explained, “that says government should ‘live within its income’ like everyone else.”
I mean, my household has a checkbook, right? I can’t very well spend money unless there’s money in my checking account. Right?
Wrong.
“Government in fact is not like everyone else, but uniquely different. It alone can, and must be able to, determine the level of its own income, through the taxing power. To equate its financial situation with that of a private household is utter illogic. To say the resources of a sovereign government shall be chained forever after to whatever the tax laws happen to yield at a given moment in the past is dangerous nonsense.” A government, they said, was a vehicle for sorting out human priorities. “Reagan’s demagogic ploy would have gone at them all backward, by starting with an arbitrary, pre-fixed revenue ceiling regardless of what had to be done and who would get hurt. And it’s always the poor who get stuck worst under that kind of tax philosophy.”
Exactly.
And in a broad sense, it is important to note that, while these lies were first being told, there were many who saw the truth of what was happening. Let’s go back, for a moment, to the Republican veneration of the POWs and those “MIA.”
That same day, the Yale psychology professor Robert J. Lifton, who a decade and a half earlier had helped explain how Communist captors had “brainwashed” American POWs during the Korea War, argued in the New York Times that it was the American people who now were being brainwashed -- in the very act of sanctifying men whose job was “saturation bombing of civilian areas with minimal military targets,” but who were now held up as vessels of “pure virtue,” propaganda tools for the “official mythology of peace with honor,” in order to prevent the possibility of “extracting from this war its one potential benefit: political and ethical illumination arising from hard appraisals of what we did and why we did it.”
And there it is again -- that desire to make the conflict mean something, to finally pass through it and into something more noble and life-affirming. To avoid the simpler retreat into the illusionary grandeur of what once was.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
Into this breach steps Ronald Wilson Reagan. A man Perlstein aptly describes as…
...an athlete of the imagination, a master at turning complexity and confusion and doubt into simplicity and stout-hearted certainty. Transforming his life, first in his own and then in others’ eyes, into a model of frictionless ease -- and fashioning the world outside him into a stage on which to display it -- was how he managed to fly.
It is Reagan’s drive towards simplicity and stout-hearted certainty, not just in rhetorical framing, but in how he interpreted reality, that has had such dangerous consequences for our republic. Living today, almost forty years after Reagan’s first election as president, we still see these consequences on display, enshrined in the Republican party and the minds of those who support it. Not everyone sees the danger today, but then, in the 1970s, even then there were those who were able to see it for what it was.
During the beginnings of the Watergate scandal, for example, Reagan had a hard time understanding what it was that the burglars had done wrong.
The marquee editorialists granted Nixon the benefit of the doubt. … [J]ust about every commentator and official of any significance united in a new consensus: Watergate was something historically awful -- and the men responsible, whoever they turned out to be, were louts.
Everyone, that is, except Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan of California.
He offered his thoughts after greeting a group of high school visitors in his Sacramento reception room. … It all was part of the usual “atmosphere of campaigning,” where pranks were just part of the game. “They did something that was stupid and foolish and was criminal” -- then corrected himself: “It was illegal. Illegal is a better word than criminal because I think criminal has a different connotation.” He said, “The tragedy of this is that men who are not criminals at heart” had to suffer. It saddened him “that now there is going to have to be punishment.”
Sorry, can’t resist my own editorial comment here. “Men who are not criminals at heart.” As if such a thing could be honestly said about political hacks of whatever stripe. But, fortunately, for this Reagan was roundly ridiculed in the press.
NBC’s John Chancellor smirked, “Reagan, who talks a lot about ‘law and order,’ described the burglars as ‘well-meaning individuals committed to the reelection of the president.’” Tom Wicker [of The New York Times] used Reagan, “that exponent of law and order,” as Exhibit A in a sermon about what happens in a world run according to the Gospel of Richard Nixon, where good guys were always good no matter what they actually did, bad guys were always and everywhere ontologically evil, and no one will be safe until “‘we’ crack down on ‘them,’ occasionally adopting their tactics.”
Ronald Reagan divided the world into good guys and bad guys. Richard Nixon and his team were good guys. So they could not have done evil at all.
But like many of his acolytes today, being scolded in the press didn’t seem to affect Reagan’s affection for simplicity and stout-hearted certainty. Indeed, any lie told in service of the “good guys” was just one more “truth” that Reagan would be responsible for creating.
Before becoming a politician, of course, Reagan was an actor, famous mostly for the bit parts he played under several studio contracts. His break really came not from the movies (Bedtime for Bonzo be damned), but when he began lending his familiar face to political causes, first on behalf of democratic candidates.
“This is Ronald Reagan speaking to you from Hollywood. You know me as a motion picture actor. But tonight I’m just a citizen, pretty concerned about the election next month, and more than a little impatient about those promises the Republicans made before they got control of Congress a couple of years ago.”
He went on to flog the Standard Oil Company for reporting a “net profit of $210 million, after taxes, for the first half of ‘48 -- an increase of seventy percent in one year”: proof, he said, that Republicans were lying in their central election claim: the claim that the postwar epidemic of inflation had been caused by higher wages -- not “bigger and bigger profits.”
This was boilerplate liberalism, circa 1948. What was extraordinary was the way he found to illustrate the argument. Noting “an Associated Press dispatch I read the other day,” he introduced America to one Smith L. Carpenter, who “retired some years ago thinking he had enough money saved so that he could live out his last years without having to worry. But he didn’t figure on this Republican inflation which ate up all his savings. So he’s gone back to work.” He paused for ironic effect: “The reason this is news is Mr. Carpenter is 91 years old.”
Here was that soon-to-become trademark skill: illustrating abstract questions of public policy with true heart-tugging stories from genuine folks. Or rather, apparently true. Generations later, when a wondrous technology would let the complete contents of dozens of newspapers be searched in less than a second, the fact could be told. And that fact is that none of these dozens of newspapers ran any Associated Press dispatch about someone named “Smith L. Carpenter,” nor anyone else who went to work when he was ninety-one years old because inflation ate up his savings.
What troubles me most about this strategy, I think, is not so much that it is a lie. Lies are pretty common in politics. This lie, however, is a lie in service of an ideology -- one that, evidently, can’t be effectively communicated without lies. Framing stories are one things. But making up facts like this has created a slippery slope that our politics today is still trying to fight its way back up.
But that’s only the first step -- making up facts that support your ideological position. The next step, and the more insidious one, also mastered by Ronald Reagan, is framing your made-up facts not in the complex reality that surrounds us, but on an overly-simplified moral foundation.
He framed economy measures, where he achieved them, not just as cost savings, but as shimmering moral advances -- for instance his success paring the budget of the state’s mental health system. It was, his budget aides suggested, one area where a 10 percent reduction could easily be realized -- given that the number of mental patients was already plummeting due to new medical advances like tranquilizing drugs. First in 1967, and then again in 1972, thousands of positions were eliminated from the state’s Department of Mental Hygiene. He called that in a 1972 speech a “new approach to the treatment of the mentally ill that has reduced the number of patients sentenced to a hopeless life in our asylums from 16,500 to 7,000”; and who could object to that? Harried, baffled psychiatrists, it turned out, one of whom later recollected how “Reagan with one bold, brilliant stroke abolished mental illness in California,” and hospital staffs were required to turn away the most broken people imaginable: “Back to violent alcoholic families. Back to angry spouses … to rag-filled grocery carts … to sleeping in moldering cars. Back to the community of cocaine-crazed friends and pitiless dealers awaiting them outside the hospital gates.” The apparent earlier, salutary decline in mental patients requiring hospitalization, it turned out, had been a mirage -- because the ones who were left were the ones unresponsive to the new procedures, and had always required by far the most care. The hospitals themselves had always been understaffed in the first place. The reductions were a plain and simple nightmare. And yet Reagan proved able to blithely deny a problem existed. When a visiting expert from Sweden called a ward in Sonoma County the worst he had seen in several countries, the governor accused the staff there of having “rigged” the poor conditions to sabotage his planned cutbacks. “We lead the nation in the quality of our mental patient care,” he simply said, “and we will keep that lead.”
None of it is true -- but because the narrative it supports is a moral one, then all of it must be true, and any evidence to the contrary is part of a subversive plot to undermine our moral advances. See how wonderfully circular that is?
And the glimpses inside the Reagan family life are just as twisted and phony. Throughout Perlstein’s narrative, occasionally one of the Reagan children will speak up, revealing with a transcendent knowing what it must have been like growing up in that house. Here, for example, is something from Patti Davis.
“I had been taught to keep secrets, to keep our image intact for the world,” she wrote in a memoir. “Under our family’s definition of ‘loyalty,’ the public should never see that under a carefully preserved surface was a group of people who knew how to inflict wounds, and then convincingly say those wounds never existed.”
So there are lies of political calculation. But then there are also the lies that make you think that Reagan really did live in a reality that he was unaware was of his own making.
“I have called attention to the fact that when I was a sports announcer, broadcasting major-league baseball, most Americans had forgotten that at the time the opening lines of the official baseball guide read, “Baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,’ and in organized baseball no one but Caucasians were allowed. Well, there were many of us when I was broadcasting, sportswriters, sportscasters, myself included, [who] began editorializing about what a ridiculous thing this was and why it should be changed. And one day it was changed.”
And indeed, he had called attention to that, in 1967, in a televised debate with Robert Kennedy, when he told the same story about baseball. In the interim, if anyone had bothered to point out to him that there was no line in the official baseball guide asserting that “baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,” or had pointed out to him that he stopped broadcasting baseball in 1937 and the sport wasn’t integrated until 1947, the intervention clearly didn’t take. He was still telling the story in the White House nine years later.
Blithe Optimism in the Face of Chaos
It’s important to remember that Perlstein’s book largely details Reagan’s primary fight against Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination, not Reagan’s eventual election fight against Democrat Jimmy Carter for the 1980 presidential election. This means that many of these lies of political calculation and moral certainty were told to better position Reagan not against the Democrats, but against his fellow Republicans. No matter. After all, they are all just demagogic tools to help acquire and concentrate political power. In that world, everyone that is not the candidate is at least one kind of enemy.
Here’s a quick excerpt from when both Reagan and Ford sparred on the campaign trail in the Lone Star State.
Privation, though, and the president’s insults -- and receptive foot-stomping Texan audiences -- turned out to concentrate Reagan’s mind beautifully. Ford hadn’t even opened his campaign at the Alamo when Reagan claimed he’d seen a transcript of some obscure testimony from the State Department’s negotiator in Panama, Ambassador-at-Large Ellsworth Bunker, to the Panama Canal Subcommittee of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, which Reagan said laid out the administration’s intention to “give away” the canal. He would say that the Panama Canal Zone was “sovereign U.S. territory, every bit the same as Alaska and all the states that were carved from the Louisiana Purchase.”
He would say it, and the Texas foot-stomping would commence; it was something to behold.
Even though it was not true.
The 1904 treaty granted the United States not sovereignty but “right, power, and authority” there “as if it were the sovereign of the territory,” a crucial distinction: if a baby was born to a foreigner in Alaska or Louisiana, that child would be an American citizen, certainly not the case for Panamanians who gave birth in the Zone.
Tell that, though, to a foot-stomping Texan. You might get stomped upon yourself.
It’s clear from Perlstein’s pacing that he believes all this lying -- against political ally and opponent alike -- is leading to something critical. It isn’t the 1976 presidential election, because in The Invisible Bridge, that rather anticlimactically ends after Reagan’s eventual loss to Ford and Ford’s eventual loss to Carter. Reagan’s brand of facetious optimism would not rule the day in 1976 -- but, of course, if would four years later in 1980. Everyone in the media and in the political establishment would see its transparently false foundation, both in 1976 and in 1980, but the America that Reagan was talking to would change almost irrevocably in those four years. As Perlstein summarizes near the end of his work, in 1976…
America had not yet become Reagan’s America. Not yet. Reagan’s America would embrace an almost official cult of optimism -- the belief that America could do no wrong. Or, to put it another way, that if America did it, it was by definition not wrong. That would come later. But signs were already pointing in that direction.
Certainly they had been there in the Bicentennial celebration, when Americans surprised themselves in their simple patriotic joy -- as if Watergate, as if Vietnam, had never even happened; as if the nation’s economy had never in fact been held hostage by Arab oil sheikhs; as if the Church and Pike committees had never revealed the nation’s security agencies as cold-blooded outlaws.
And here is what [journalists] Evans and Novak [who thought Reagan and the Republicans should distance themselves from Watergate and Nixon] had not understood: that Reagan’s refusal to wax morose about Watergate was not an impediment to his political appeal. It was central to his political appeal.
At the beginning of 1973, the editor of Intellectual Digest explained on the Today show what was different about the time when the POWs went off to war and the time when they returned: “For the first time Americans have had at least a partial loss in the fundamental belief in ourselves. We’ve always believed we were the new men, the new people, the new society. The ‘last best hope on earth,’ in Lincoln’s terms. For the first time, we’ve really begun to doubt it.”
We’ve come full circle. Perlstein’s angry friend -- who felt that Reagan and all who followed him avoided a needed catharsis of the American experience -- is grinding her axe in much the same way all of Reagan’s political enemies have, be they Democrats or Republicans.
And here was an answer to the Ford aide who was so frustrated that this campaign even had to be fought, even more frustrated that it had become so close. Every time a major distinction emerged between the two candidates, the nub was what kind of nation America was. The Panama Canal issue, for example. Ford’s argument was, fundamentally, that the world’s rules must apply to America as well, that the way America had all but annexed the sovereignty of another nation was an embarrassing and dangerous relic of another time. Reagan’s riposte: the world’s rules did not apply to America at all -- for into the hands of America God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind.
These, then, are the seeds of the new conservative movement -- the one that would begin with Reagan and which is still limping along today. And it’s fundamental ground rule?
Don’t doubt. Blithe optimism is the face of what others call chaos had always marked his uniqueness -- at least since, around the time of his tenth birthday, he began mastering the art of turning the chaotic and confusing doubts of his childhood into a simple and stout-hearted certainty. It marked, too, what made others feel so good in his presence -- and what drove still others, those suspicious circles for whom doubt was the soul of civic wisdom, to annoyed bafflement at his success.
Today, we have a word for this phenomenon. In homage to its prophet, we call this kind of confident conservative gospel (and all the lies, to ourselves and to others, on which it is built) Reaganesque.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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