8220;The Invisible Bridge, by Rick Perlstein, about Reagan and the rise of the conservative movement, has got that big sweep of history.”

Auteur

Rick Perlstein

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A dazzling portrait of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the tumultuous political and economic times of the 1970s.

Résumé
In January of 1973 Richard Nixon announced the end of the Vietnam War and prepared for a triumphant second term-until televised Watergate hearings revealed his White House as little better than a mafia den. The next president declared upon Nixon's resignation "our long national nightmare is over"-but then congressional investigators exposed the CIA for assassinating foreign leaders. The collapse of the South Vietnamese government rendered moot the sacrifice of some 58,000 American lives. The economy was in tatters. And as Americans began thinking about their nation in a new way-as one more nation among nations, no more providential than any other-the pundits declared that from now on successful politicians would be the ones who honoured this chastened new national mood.

Ronald Reagan never got the message. Which was why, when he announced his intention to challenge President Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination, those same pundits dismissed him-until, amazingly, it started to look like he just might win.He was inventing the new conservative political culture we know now, in which a vision of patriotism rooted in a sense of American limits was derailed in America's Bicentennial year by the rise of the smiling politician from Hollywood. Against a backdrop of melodramas from the Arab oil embargo to Patty Hearst to the near-bankruptcy of America's greatest city, The Invisible Bridge asks the question: what does it mean tobelieve in America? To wave a flag-or to reject the glibness of the flag wavers?

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The Invisible Bridge

CHAPTER ONE

“Small and Suspicious Circles”

ONCE UPON A TIME WE had a Civil War. More than six hundred thousand Americans were slaughtered or wounded. Soon afterward, the two sides began carrying out sentimental rituals of reconciliation. Confederate soldiers paraded through the streets of Boston to the cheers of welcoming Yankee throngs, and John Quincy Adams II, orating from the podium, said, “You are come so that once more we may pledge ourselves to a new union, not a union merely of law, or simply of the lips: not . . . of the sword, but gentlemen, the only true union, the union of hearts.” Dissenters from the new postbellum comity—like the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who argued that the new system of agricultural labor taking root in the South and enforced by Ku Klux Klan terror hardly differed from slavery—were shouted down. “Does he really imagine,” the New York Times indignantly asked, “that outside of small and suspicious circles any real interest attaches to the old forms of the Southern question?”

America the Innocent, always searching for totems of a unity it can never quite achieve—even, or especially, when its crises of disunity are most pressing: it is one of the structuring stories of our nation. The “return to normalcy” enjoined by Warren Harding after the Great War; the cult of suburban home and hearth after World War II; the union of hearts declaimed by Adams on Boston’s Bunker Hill parade ground after the War Between the States.

And in 1973, after ten or so years of war in Vietnam, America tried to do it again.

On January 23, four days into his second term, which he had won with the most commanding landslide in U.S. history, President Richard Nixon went on TV to announce, “We have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and South Asia.” The Vietnam War was over—“peace with honor,” in the phrase the president repeated six more times.

But “it wasn’t like 1945, when the end of the war brought a million people downtown to cheer,” Mike Royko, the Chicago Daily News’ regular-guy columnist, wrote. “Now the president comes on TV, reads his speech, and without a sound the country sets the clock and goes to bed.” He was grateful for it. “There is nothing to cheer about this time. Except that it is over. . . . Mr. Nixon’s efforts to inject glory into our involvement were hollow. All he had to say was that it is finally over.”

Royko continued, “It is hard to see the honor. . . . Why kid ourselves? They didn’t die for anyone’s freedom. They died because we made a mistake. And we can’t justify it with slogans and phrases from other times.

“It was a war that made the sixties the most terrible decade our history. . . . If we insist on looking for something of value in this war then maybe it is this:

“Maybe we finally have the painful knowledge that we can never again believe everything our leaders tell us.”

Others, though, longed for the old patriotic rituals of reconciliation. And their vehicle became the prisoners of war held in Hanoi by our Communist enemies. “The returning POWs,” Secretary of Defense Elliot Richardson told the president, “have dramatically launched what DOD is trying to do to restore the military to its proper position.” The president, pleased, agreed: “We now have an invaluable opportunity to revise the history of this war.”

It began twenty days after the president’s speech, at the airport in Hanoi. What the Pentagon dubbed “Operation Homecoming” turned the network news into a nightly patriotic spectacle. Battered camouflage buses conveyed the first sixty men to the planes that would take them to Clark Air Base in the Philippines; a Navy captain named Galand Kramer unfurled a homemade sign out the window, scrawled on a scrap of cloth: GOD BLESS AMERICA & NIXON. The buses emptied; officers shouted out commands in loud American voices to free American men, who marched forth in smart formation, slowing to accommodate comrades on crutches. On the planes, and on TV, they kissed nurses, smoked too many American cigarettes, circulated news magazines with their wives and children on the cover, and drank a pasty white nutrient shake whose taste they didn’t mind, a newsman explained, because it was the first cold drink some of them had had in eight years. On one of the three planes they passed a wriggling puppy from lap to lap. “He was a Communist dog,” explained the Navy commander who smuggled him to freedom in his flight bag, “but not anymore!”

At Clark, the tarmac was thronged by kids in baseball and Boy Scout uniforms, women in lawn chairs with babes in arms, airmen with movie cameras, all jostling one another for a better view of a red carpet that had been borrowed at the last minute from Manila’s InterContinental Hotel because the one Clark used for the usual round of VIPs wasn’t sumptuous enough. In a crisp brocaded dress uniform with captain stripes newly affixed, Navy flier Jeremiah Denton, the first to descend, stood erect before the microphone and pronounced in a slowly swelling voice:

“We are honored to have the opportunity to serve our country—”

(A stately echo: “country–country—country . . .”)

“We are profoundly grateful to our Commander in Chief and our nation for this day.”

(“Day—day—day . . .”)

“God—”

(“God—God—God . . .”)

“Bless—”

(“Bless—bless—bless . . .”)

“America!”

(“America—America—America . . .”)

In days to come cameras lingered on cafeteria tray…