The Invisible Bridge

Quotes

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.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 223-32 - Added on Tuesday, October 07, 2014, 02:29 PM

General Taylor had once been a favorite general of Kennedy-era liberals. Robert F. Kennedy had called him “relentless in his determination to get at the truth,” and named one of his sons after him. Now Maxwell Taylor was a tribune of the other tribe, the one that found another lesson to be self-evident: never break faith with God’s chosen nation, especially in time of war—truth be damned. This was Richard Nixon’s tribe. The one that, by Election Day 1980, would end up prevailing in the presidential election. Though Richard Nixon, like Moses, would not be the one who led them to that promised land.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 617-21 - Added on Tuesday, October 07, 2014, 03:09 PM

“WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES,” A wise woman named Joan Didion once said, “in order to live.” It is how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just to carry on. And in the life of the young Ronald Wilson Reagan, there was more than the usual ration of chaos to organize.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 738-40 - Added on Wednesday, October 08, 2014, 05:26 AM

Until the day Ronald Reagan died, in fact, he was almost never photographed wearing glasses. Here was a constant: if a camera was present, or an audience, he was aware of it—aware, always, of the gaze of others: reflecting on it, adjusting himself to it, inviting it. Modeling himself, in his mind’s eye, according to how he presented himself physically to others. Adjusting himself to be seen as he wished others to see him—until the figure he cut became unmistakable.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 841-44 - Added on Wednesday, October 08, 2014, 05:43 AM

Her mother’s beloved pastor died suddenly. Dutch made his replacement practically his surrogate father. He assures us that his actual father could occasionally show “great sensitivity”—like the time Moon’s senior class decided to wear tuxedos for graduation, and Moon decided not to show up because the family could not afford one. Then Jack invites him on a walk. They end up at Mr. O’Malley’s clothing store, where the haberdasher is waiting to fit him for a tux. It is telling that Moon, the family cynic, did not interpret the gesture as sensitive. He remembered it as Jack trying to save face in public. There is also the fact that sudden, extravagant acts of generosity are a frequent mark of alcoholic patriarchs, making up for equally extravagant failures.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 957-63 - Added on Wednesday, October 08, 2014, 05:59 AM

in the writing of Grantland Rice, who also wrote, “The true democracy in the United States is not to be found among politicians, our so-called statesmen, our labor union leaders or our capitalists. It is only to be found in sport. . . . Here you are measured by what you are and what you can do. Nothing else counts.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1007-10 - Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:28 PM

And, said the young liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the Nation, it could not last: “Heroes can thrive only where ignorance reduces history to mythology. They cannot survive the coldly critical temper of modern thought when it is functioning normally, nor can they be worshipped by a generation which has every facility for determining their foibles and analyzing their limitations.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1019-21 - Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:30 PM

Heroes were everywhere, every day, in a small-town Midwestern paper like the Telegraph. It was part of the culture of the 1920s—headlines like ROUND WORLD FLIERS RESUME FLIGHT TOMORROW; UNSUNG HEROES OF U.S. / BOYS IN POSTAL SERVICE FACE UNTOLD HARDSHIPS / BUT ARE NEVER RECOGNIZED IN HONORS; “HUMAN FLY” TO SCALE BANK BUILDING. Charles Lindbergh dipped a wing when he flew over town on the way to an appearance in Peoria.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1035-39 - Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:32 PM

How deeply did the canons of sports heroics inform Ronald Reagan’s inner transformation? His son Ron once told a story about his father’s last days, when he could look back at a life in which he had become, by any reasonable reckoning, precisely the kind of man he had dreamed of: first a movie star adored by millions; then the most powerful man in the world, the slayer of evil empires. Weakened by Alzheimer’s disease, his mind reduced to its most primal constituents, he would wake with a start and cry that there was somewhere he needed to be: not a movie set where Bette Davis or George Cukor was waiting for him, nor the White House Situation Room, but a locker room. “There’s a game,” he would murmur; “they’re waiting for me.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1044-49 - Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:33 PM

F. Scott Fitzgerald, right around this time, defined “personality” as “an unbroken series of successful gestures.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1058-59 - Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:34 PM

“He always left people with a way of saying ‘God bless you,’ ” a classmate recalled, “that made them feel—just maybe—he had an inside track.” Some began seeing him as a figure of destiny.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1150-52 - Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:47 PM

IN RONALD REAGAN’S CHAOTIC CHILDHOOD the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears. He pushes doubt and confusion from the forefront of his consciousness with the furious energy of a boy who fears that if he does not do so he might somehow be consumed. The strategy can backfire, however, when the boy becomes a man and must finally face the austere everyday ambivalence and incoherence of the adult world. The long-delayed realization that one’s fantasies do not actually map reality can leave behind a wrecked grown-up more alienated, helpless, and terrified than he ever was before. Which is why most people, with greater or lesser degrees of success, simply grow out of it.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1152-58 - Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:48 PM

At his inauguration he promised to “bring us together”; pundits swooned. A little more than nine months later he delivered one of the most politically successful addresses in the history of the presidency: the “Silent Majority” speech, which in a single evening increased the number of Americans who approved of his handling of the Vietnam War by 19 percentage points.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1176-79 - Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 08:50 PM

The price of onions started soaring, too. Horse meat, slide rules, a world in which anything that reliably had cost one dollar might soon suddenly cost two: it did something to people.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1406-7 - Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 09:13 PM

And then there was Watergate—of which Attorney General Richard Kleindienst had just testified before Congress, defending Richard Nixon’s novel doctrine of executive privilege in a way that drove senators insane. “The Congress has no power at all to command testimony from the executive departments?” asked Senator Edmund Muskie, the object of the worst Watergate dirty tricks during the 1972 presidential campaign season. Replied Kleindienst, “If the President of the United States so directs.” “Do we have the right to command you to testify against the will of the President?” “If the President directs me not to appear, I am not going to appear.” “Does that apply to every appointee of the Executive Branch?” “I’d have to say that is correct.” And if Congress did not like that, Kleindienst continued, it could “cut off our funds, abolish most of what we can do, or impeach the president.” Senator Ervin, startled, followed up: how could an impeachment take place if none of the president’s men could be compelled to supply facts? Kleindienst’s answer was chilling and strange: “You don’t need facts to impeach a president.” Republicans and Democrats both fumed that they had never heard senators addressed like that in their chamber. A Harvard constitutional law expert called Kleindienst’s claims “utterly ridiculous.” A Yale professor said they “can’t hold water.” Democratic senator Lawton Chiles of Florida said it sounded “so unreal that I wondered if it was really me—if I hadn’t parted from my senses.” The chair of the House Republican Conference, John Anderson of Illinois, said it “borders on contempt for the established law of the land.” A Pennsylvania Democrat called it “monarchical or totalitarian.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1664-78 - Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 11:21 PM

The reporters kept pressing him, question after question after question. On the eighteenth query, he uttered the immortal words: “This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.” Time magazine helpfully catalogued what statements were now “inoperative”: The White House’s claim that what had happened at the Watergate on June 17, 1972, was merely “a third-rate burglary attempt”; the claim of Attorney General Kleindienst on August 28, 1972, of “the most extensive, thorough, and comprehensive investigation since the assassination of President Kennedy”; the president’s reassurances the next day that his counsel John Dean had carried out an investigation on his behalf, such that he could now “say categorically . . . that no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident”; his statement the next day that while “overzealous people in campaigns do things that are wrong,” “what really hurts is if you try to cover it up,” and that he himself wanted the guilty to be prosecuted “as soon as possible”; his campaign manager’s October 16 avowal that the Washington Post had “maliciously sought to give the appearance of a direct connection between the White House and the Watergate, a charge which the Post knows—and a half-dozen investigations have found—to be false”; three days later, the promise of the campaign’s deputy director Jeb Magruder that “when this is all over, you’ll know that there were only seven people who knew about the Watergate, and they are the seven who were indicted by the grand jury”; then the president’s statement that he had “absolute and total confidence” in John Dean’s 1972 investigation; and John Mitchell’s statement on March 29 that claims he had known about the burglary beforehand were “slanderous and false.” All, apparently, inoperative.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1695-1710 - Added on Friday, October 10, 2014, 11:23 PM

For instance, in the fall of 1968, a Berkeley faculty member recruited Black Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver as guest lecturer for Social Analysis 139X—Dehumanization and Regeneration in the American Social Order. Reagan said if it happened he would investigate the school from “top to bottom”—for “if Eldridge Cleaver is allowed to teach our children, they may come home one night and slit our throats.” Cleaver taught anyway, proclaiming in one lecture, “Ronald Reagan is a punk, a sissy, and a coward, and I challenge him to a duel to the death or until he says Uncle Eldridge. I give him a choice of weapons—a gun, a knife, a baseball bat, or marshmallows.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1943-48 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 01:22 PM

The next month, the same movement surfaced at Berkeley. He visited the campus for an inspection; a throng started chanting “Fuck Reagan”; the governor responded with an outstretched middle finger.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1956-57 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 01:23 PM

Later that spring, when Berkeley students forcefully seized a spit of vacant campus land and declared it a “People’s Park,” Reagan dispatched not just National Guard troops but a Sikorsky helicopter that spewed tear gas at students cornered into a crowded campus square. A student was shot observing events from a rooftop. Reagan said, “The police didn’t kill the young man. He was killed by the first college administrator who said some time ago it was all right to break the laws in the name of dissent.” His address at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco defending the military deployment—he was beating back, he said, “a revolutionary movement involving a tiny minority of faculty and students finding concealment and shelter in an entire college generation. . . . Stand firm and the university can dispose of this revolution within the week”—made all three networks.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1963-69 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 01:24 PM

Marx-minded student leaders welcomed such incidents as “heightening the contradictions”—a necessary precursor to the longed-for revolution. Reagan barked back, four days before the shootings at Kent State: “If it’s to be a bloodbath, let it be now. No more appeasement.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1971-73 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 01:25 PM

Reagan couldn’t even count on the loyalty of Republican conservatives, either: their hearts belonged, as their bumper stickers proclaimed, to “Spiro of ’76.” And there was this: Vice President Spiro Agnew would be fifty-six at convention time. John Connally would be fifty-nine. Chuck Percy would be fifty-six—and Reagan, at sixty-five, would be eligible for Social Security. “Around the mouth and neck,” George Will of National Review wrote, “he looks like an old man.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1984-87 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 01:27 PM

Bad accounting and an improving economy had left California with a nearly $1 billion budget surplus. Reagan said he intended to “return the money to taxpayers”—novel language at the time. His method would be unprecedented: the state’s first ballot initiative sponsored by a sitting governor. The state made a tactical decision the pundits called ill-advised: to put it on the ballot for November 1973, instead of in 1974. It set off an apparently impossible scramble to get six hundred thousand signatures by June to get it on the ballot. The plan baffled the pundits. George McGovern had made middle-class tax relief a centerpiece of his presidential campaign only a few months earlier; that, obviously, had gone nowhere. The details of the plan devised by four right-wing Reagan advisors—economist Milton Friedman, Martin Anderson, a lawyer named Anthony Kennedy, and Chief of Staff Edwin Meese—were confusing. The aim was to put a ceiling on state taxes and spending. But it seemed to bestow most of its favors on those who were already well-off—and what sort of political sense did a giveaway to the rich make for Ronald Reagan?

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 1989-97 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 01:28 PM

The previous year a divorced father in the ABC TV movie That Certain Summer explained his “homosexual lifestyle” to his fourteen-year-old son. The sitcom Maude featured an arc of episodes concerning abortion. The ancient Anglo-Saxonism fuck was introduced for the first time into the Oxford English Dictionary. Johnny Carson was no longer required to have his Tonight Show monologues prescreened by network censors. In January 1973 the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, made “abortion on demand”—in the words of its vociferous detractors, who were not many, were not well organized, and were most of them Catholic—legal in all fifty states. In 1969, 68 percent of respondents had told Gallup that premarital sex was wrong; only 48 percent said so now.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 2255-61 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 02:05 PM

White House aide Peter Flanigan promised that “the United States is not going to go back to the cold, the dark, and the bicycle.” That just sounded like another government lie. In June, two thousand independent service stations simply shut down. Thousands of others began imposing ten-gallon limits per purchase. The “Skylab” space station, just launched into orbit, was meant to pave the way for a permanent human presence in space. Soaring temperatures within the spacecraft almost scuttled the launch. An editorial cartoon parked the astronauts at a gas station: “Don’t worry,” a NASA official told them, “you guys can’t go anyway. He can let us have only 10 more gallons of gas.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 2395-2400 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 02:20 PM

In 1955 the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had said electricity would soon be so cheap it would no longer be metered. In 1966 a government report predicted, “The nation’s total energy resources seem adequate to satisfy expected requirements through the remainder of the century at costs near present levels.” Now that abundance had become scarcity as if overnight, conspiracy theories multiplied. The Nixon administration “was acting in concert with the major companies to produce a shortage” in order to kneecap the independent oil producers, Senator Adlai Stevenson III rumbled; Senator Walter Mondale said energy companies were faking the shortage to spur construction of the controversial oil pipeline to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, where oil had been discovered in 1968.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 2403-8 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 02:21 PM

But Americans also blamed themselves. It was part and parcel of a new vernacular ideology: civilization was destroying the earth. The evidence seemed to be everywhere. In Los Angeles, beaches were closed after five million to six million tons of raw sewage flowed into the Pacific when the pumping system failed. In New Jersey, thick, frightening patches of “red tide” choked the beaches—harmlessly, authorities insisted, though they were contradicted by newspaper warnings that “a toxic variety can irritate the ears, eyes, nose and skin.” Annually, millions of pounds of smelly dead alewife fish washed up on Lake Michigan’s shores; record earthquakes hit Nicaragua, Mexico, Peru, China, and Italy; dormant volcanoes mysteriously erupted in Iceland; Jerusalem suffered a snowstorm; 1,500 birds suddenly died in England; massive fish kills appeared in Lake Erie; floating islands of decaying vegetable matter emerged in the middle of the Caribbean; this spring, 1973, the Mississippi River spilled over flood protection gates in Louisiana for the first time in decades. “A growing, man-made dead sea of waste matter has seemingly come to life off the Atlantic Coast”—this was a Los Angeles Times editorial—“and is moving to rejoin the civilization that created it. At the center of this water contamination, no ocean creatures survive. On its fringes, diseased and rotted fish have been found. Within, chloroform bacteria and the viruses of encephalitis and hepatitis thrive, waiting for targets to attack.” Two years earlier there had been a biblical infestation of gypsy moths on the East Coast. Who could deny the planet was in full-bore rebellion?

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 2408-20 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 02:22 PM

The Club of Rome, a gathering of wizards from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology supported by seventeen top scientists from six nations, published Limits to Growth, a report based on computer simulations that concluded the most benign possible outcome of current trends was the complete collapse of civilization by the year 2100—unless, that is, the world resolved to immediately shift to a “no-growth” economy.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 2420-23 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 02:23 PM

A new movie came out, about a future New York City grown to 40 million, homeless people lining the streets, the inhabitants rioting for the scarce “high-energy vegetable concentrates” they survive upon. Strawberry jam costs $150 a jar. The authorities encourage suicide to cull the herd, gifting those who choose death with access to video clips of all the animal and plant life the earth used to enjoy. In the movie’s shock ending, it turns out food processors—the fictional doppelgängers of the rapacious energy companies—secretly harvested these human bodies to produce food. Soylent Green become one of the summer’s hits.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 2440-44 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 02:25 PM

on that page he recollected, “I used to say to him, ‘You’re a nice guy, Jeb, but not yet a good man. You have a lot of charm but little inner strength. And if you don’t stand for something you’re apt to fall for anything.’ ” Magruder was, he said, a very 1950s kind of fellow—“agreeing his way through life.” He argued that the 1960s had given America the gift of skepticism, that people no longer need to agree their way through life to succeed—and that through Magruder “we have the opportunity to learn . . . the ancient lesson that to do evil in this world you don’t have to be evil.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 2807-12 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:05 PM

Unfamiliar with how criminal defendants talked when trained by criminal lawyers, Americans found the exotic language from the witness table fascinating. Harry Reasoner of ABC did a humor piece on a married couple on vacation arguing about who was responsible for forgetting the toothpaste: “ ‘Since there was no cap on it, I hesitated to place it in my shaving kit, where it might compromise my razor. I assume, in fact my recollection is that I was told, that you would seek out the cap and complete the packing of the toothpaste while I was eating breakfast.’ ” Such phrases as “at this point in time” and “at that point in time” (legalese for “now” and “then”) became the nation’s favorite inside joke: On Sesame Street, Cookie Monster stood accused of stealing, what else, cookies—an offense, after whispered consultation with his lawyer, he happened not to recollect at this point in time. Then he started eating the microphone.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 2824-31 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:07 PM

This was the United States, the week of its 197th birthday. “The Roman Empire crumbled from within,” wrote a Chicagoan in the Tribune. “Isn’t that what is happening to us?” So when the sixty-seventh attorney general of the United States denied outright what six previous witnesses had attested to in sworn statements before Congress, it just seemed like the way of the world. Mitchell offered no quarter, either growling, glowering, or sitting in stony silence in the face of questions he did not prefer, cracking sadistic one-liners at the ones he deigned to answer. He knew nothing. The panel reacted with incredulity. He had frequently cruised along the Potomac with Nixon on the presidential yacht Sequoia, they pointed out, and yet the president had never bothered to ask him what he knew about Watergate? (No—and if he had, “I would have spelled it out chapter and verse.”)

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 3074-81 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:34 PM

Francis Ford Coppola’s “thriller about privacy,” The Conversation, was in production; it starred Gene Hackman as a surveillance technician consumed by paranoia following his efforts to get to the bottom of a murder he has accidentally recorded with a powerful long-distance microphone. It was as if the zeitgeist could predict what was coming.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 3134-37 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:41 PM

But now a shift was afoot. The suspicious circles were expanding into places like the Worcester, Massachusetts, living room of a conservative blue-collar worker whose son happened to be Abbie Hoffman, the Chicago Seven defendant and hippie savant. Now John Hoffman sat in front of his tiny black-and-white TV and told himself that, yes, “Abbie had been right all along”: American decency was indeed a sham.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 3263-66 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:54 PM

Buchanan, practically his only West Wing fan, came up with the idea of drafting him as the administration’s attack dog against the radicals, and the liberal media elites the White House believed to be cosseting radicals. Or, in Agnew’s memorable words, “the cacophony of seditious drivel emanating from the best-publicized clowns in our society and their fans in the Fourth Estate.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 3292-95 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:57 PM

Bottom line: releasing tapes “would set a precedent that would cripple all future Presidents.” So he would refuse to do it. (Barry Gold-water Jr., a congressman from Los Angeles, answered curtly: “He asks for the trust of the American people, but he doesn’t trust them enough to let them hear the tapes.”) The reason, Nixon concluded, was that the relationship between a president and his aides was like that “between a lawyer and his client, between a priest and a penitent, and between a husband and wife”: it required confidentiality. (A letter writer wondered if it was accidental that he omitted the relation between a psychiatrist and his patient.)

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 3315-20 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 04:59 PM

But what about Nixon taping him when he visited the Oval Office? What did he think about that? No big deal. “Matter of fact,” Reagan said, the tapes probably “made me sound good.” (They did not. In one 1971 conversation, Nixon called him “pretty shallow” and of “limited mental capacity.” Kissinger called the notion of Reagan as president “inconceivable.”)

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 3335-38 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 05:02 PM

Said Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., who was California’s secretary of state and son of the man Reagan beat to become governor in 1966, and who hoped to succeed him in 1974, Proposition 1 was “just a vehicle to use to run for President,” and “a hoax, pure and simple.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 3416-18 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 05:10 PM

Late in August, at the annual Soap Box Derby in Akron, Ohio, a fourteen-year-old was stripped of first prize after officials X-rayed his car and discovered an electromagnet in the nose to pull him out of the starting gate more quickly. Immediately, special pleaders argued he had done no wrong. A publicist at the University of California, Los Angeles reminisced in an op-ed on all the ways he and his buddies used to cheat, and said he couldn’t wait to help his son do the same: “Grownups should put their expectations of youngsters in line with reality.”

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 3496-3500 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 05:20 PM

Moretti said that if Proposition 1 passed, “by the time the walls come crashing down around whoever the next governor of this state is,” Reagan would “be campaigning in Mississippi someplace, saying, ‘I don’t understand the problems they’re having out there; when I was in charge, things ran smoothly.’

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 3533-35 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 05:24 PM

Egypt’s foreign minister said there could be no peace while Israel occupied Palestinian lands; Israel’s foreign minister said occupation would continue until there was peace.

- The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (Rick Perlstein) - Highlight Loc. 3641-42 - Added on Monday, October 13, 2014, 06:38 PM