Perlstein's bridge to nowhere.

• Author: Kabaservice, Geoffrey
• Position: 'The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan' - Book review

Rick Perlstein, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 880 pp., $37.50.

On a sweltering Monday in August 1976, delegates began to arrive at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Missouri, for the start of the Republican National Convention. Unlike today's tightly scripted party conventions, which have become little more than four-day infomercials, the outcome of this convention was in serious doubt. The presumptive nominee was President Gerald Ford, who had assumed the office only after the resignations of Spiro Agnew and Richard M. Nixon. His challenger was Ronald Reagan, the conservative former governor of California, who could seize the presidential nomination by winning over a comparative handful of uncommitted delegates. It was a moment of high and historic drama. As Rick Perlstein relates, when the delegates arrived at the arena, they were to be greeted by "what was supposed to be a stirring sight": a fifty-foot, 1,500-pound inflated elephant soaring overhead. Unfortunately, in "classic 1970s fashion," the beast's stomach had been accidentally punctured by its rigging and it now wallowed limply in the parking lot.

The American public imagination has long preferred to overlook the 1970s, seeing it mainly as a regrettable decade marked in hindsight by embarrassments that were both national (Watergate, stagflation, the oil crisis) and personal (disco, leisure suits, bell-bottom pants, quaaludes, ridiculous hairstyles). Many historians, however, recently have proclaimed its importance as the period in which the conservative movement gained strength, giving rise to neoconservatism as well as the religious Right, and culminating in 1980 with the election of the most conservative president since Calvin Coolidge. Now Rick Perlstein has added to that historical literature with The Invisible Bridge, his retelling of the period between Nixon's 1972 reelection and Reagan's challenge to Ford in 1976.

Perlstein is a talented but erratic writer. Emerging from a background in journalism that included a stint at Lingua Franca, he entered the ranks of best-selling historians with Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. In all of his books, Perlstein has attempted to chronicle the rise of modern conservatism through a biographical focus on its emblematic leaders. He also seeks to convey the feel and flavor of the period through a sprawling mass of incident and detail. Unfortunately, all of this history is filtered through a New Journalism writing style that is more annoying than stimulating.

The New Journalism that came into being in the 1960s and 1970s with the work of writers like Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion was an attempt to expand the possibilities of journalism by borrowing some of the techniques of novelists. Perlstein partakes of this tradition principally through his hyperactive prose style. He deploys peppy phrases--helicopters "swojfed," pundits become "chin-stroking penseurs," hotels "were putting on the dog"--and makes frequent resort to italics, capital letters, one-sentence paragraphs, mantra-like repetition, sentence fragments, grammatical solecisms, odd mashups of tense and other writerly pirouettes. He continually inserts himself into the narrative with sarcastic asides that make reading the book akin to watching an episode of the cult television show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which the movie onscreen is drowned out by its wisecracking spectators.

Perlstein's spastic writing detracts from the historical material he presents, which can be captivating. The period from 1973 to 1976 was one in which "America suffered more wounds to its ideal of itself than at just about any other time in its history." These included the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the subsequent collapse of its South Vietnamese ally, the shocking revelations of Watergate, congressional investigations into unsavory intelligence operations, and the economic privation produced by the Arab oil embargo and stagflation--not to mention the afflictions of crime, terrorism and urban decay.

Perlstein tells a tale of a divided and unhappy society through vignettes about the return of prisoners of war from Vietnam, demonstrations against skyrocketing food prices, the Watergate hearings, Patricia Hearst's kidnapping and participation in the crimes of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and growing public interest in ufos and the occult. He describes the...