NYT Sunday Book Review: "The Invisible Bridge"

[Scuba]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/books/review/the-invisible-bridge-by-rick-perlstein.html?_r=0

Next to the more apocalyptic spells of American history, the dismal span of 1973 to 1976 would seem a relative blip of national dyspepsia. A period that yielded the blandest of modern presidents, Gerald Ford — “a Ford, not a Lincoln,” as he circumspectly described himself — is not to be confused with cataclysmic eras like the Civil War, the Great Depression and the Vietnam ‘60s. The major mid-70s disruptions — the Watergate hearings and Richard Nixon’s abdication, Roe v. Wade, the frantic American evacuation of Saigon, stagflation, the dawn of the “energy crisis” (then a newly minted term) — were adulterated with a steady stream of manufactured crises and cheesy cultural phenomena. Americans suffered through the threat of killer bees, “Deep Throat,” the Symbionese Liberation Army, a national meat boycott, “The Exorcist,” Moonies and the punishing self-help racket est, to which a hustler named Werner Erhard (né Jack Rosenberg) attracted followers as diverse as the Yippie Jerry Rubin and the Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Even the hapless would-be presidential assassins of the Ford years, Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, were B-list villains by our national standards of infamy.

...

What’s particularly striking in the new book, though, is the cluelessness of the stalwart Republican grandees of the Ford presidential campaign, who were both blindsided and baffled by Reagan’s guerrilla victories in their own midst. A panicked internal Ford camp memo struggles to parse the “unexpected Reagan success in certain caucus states,” where the voters who turned out in shockingly large numbers were “unknown and have not been involved in the Republican political system before” and were “alienated from both parties.” As if describing an Indian ambush in the Old West, the memo goes on to exclaim that “we are in real danger of being out-organized by a small number of highly motivated right-wing nuts.” Among those shocked was the canny Texas political operator James Baker, the George H. W. Bush paladin, who couldn’t get over how “absolutely ruthless” these uppity Reagan shock troops were. “Our people just aren’t used to this uncompromising hardball stuff,” he told Time.

Baker’s people should not have been caught napping any more than his 21st-century descendants were by the Tea Party. As Perlstein writes, the failed Goldwater campaign of a dozen years earlier “ingathered an army” that “could lose a battle, suck it up and then regroup to fight a thousand battles more.” That army was now busy exploiting a loophole in the post-Watergate 1974 Campaign Finance Reform Act allowing independent political groups to raise unlimited cash as long as they didn’t “coordinate” with any candidate’s campaign. Its swelling ranks included mail-order wizards like Richard Viguerie, ambitious new firebrands like Jesse Helms of North Carolina, independent right-wing organizations (the American Conservative Union), new activist think tanks (the Heritage Foundation) and an emergent religious right invisible to the mainline Christians reading the still liberal Christianity Today. So out of touch was the Republican hierarchy with its own grass roots that in 1975 the White House didn’t bother to send a representative to the second annual Conservative Political Action Conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. There the movement faithful vilified Ford even though he was, as Perlstein writes, “the most conservative president, in many respects, since Harding.” A Newsweek correspondent in attendance was startled to discover that “the right’s idea of broadening the party” is “purifying it.”

...

Once Nixon did make way for Ford, the bipartisan rapture in Washington was off the charts. Of 81 articles in The Times on the day Ford was sworn in, Perlstein writes, two-thirds “resounded with the very same theme: The resignation proved no American was above the law, that the system worked, that the nation was united and at peace with itself.” The new president was hailed universally as “dependable, solid, uncontroversial — just like the cars Ford built.” But as Perlstein adds, “wasn’t it also the case to partisans of Chevrolets, Fords were controversial indeed? And that Americans, being Americans, had always found things to passionately disagree about, to the point of violent rage — and that when American elites reached most insistently for talismans of national unity, it usually portended further civil wars?” So it was with the euphoric celebration of national unity that greeted Ford’s swearing in: The moment he pardoned Nixon a month later, the country’s civil war resumed just where it had left off. Even the false honeymoon of reconciliation that greeted the election of America’s first black president lasted a little longer than that.

[hifiguy]

1. Already got this one on pre-reserve

at the library. Read Nixonland about a month ago and that was a brilliant book.

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. "The moment he pardoned Nixon a month later, the country’s civil war resumed...."

I distinctly remember saying to a politically aware friend, right after Nixon had left in that helicopter ( I have to admit I was hoping it would crash)
"You just wait.....Ford is gonna pardon him".

In truth, I did not think it would be that quickly.

I sure remember the howls of rage when Ford announced the pardon.
And by the way, I always thought Ford was stupid, and it was not until I realized Cheney was his chief of staff that everything made sense.

Cheney was Assistant to the President under Gerald Ford. When Rumsfeld was named Secretary of Defense, Cheney became White House Chief of Staff, succeeding Rumsfeld.[19] He later was campaign manager for Ford's 1976 presidential campaign.[25]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney