Suspicious minds: the '70s saw a strange interplay of skepticism and nostalgia.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan - Book review

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, by Rick Perlstein, Simon & Schuster, 856 pages, $37-50

As the Watergate scandal exploded and Richard Nixon's hold on the presidency started to slip, one group stood steadfast in its commitment to the man in the West Wing. Its members took to chanting "God needs Nixon" outside Congress' Rayburn Office Building. At the 1973 White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony, over a thousand of them showed up to pay their respects. When the president emerged to greet the throng, Garry Wills later reported in Harper's, "they knelt down to worship him."

They were Moonies.

The 1970s were a time of decay for traditional forms of authority, from the president in the White House to the parent in the home. In the resulting void, dozens of would-be alternatives offered substitute certainties, from a flurry of peculiar self-help movements to the strange new religions whose critics called them cults. The Moonies--a dismissive nickname for the followers of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church--belonged to one of the most infamous young faiths. The fact that the president was leaning on them for support summed up just how jumbled American attitudes toward authority had become.

The Moonies' appearance at the White House is just one small but telling anecdote in a volume stuffed with such stories. The Invisible Bridge, the third entry in Rick Perlstein's absorbing series of books on recent American history, devotes over 800 pages to an interval of just three and a half years, beginning with Nixon's 1973 claim to have reached "peace with honor" in Vietnam and ending with Ronald Reagan falling just short of the Republican nomination in 1976. In between, it covers not just the obvious episodes--the Watergate scandal, the fall of Saigon--but smaller moments, deeper social trends, and illuminating cultural artifacts, from the early episodes of Saturday Night Live to the fiction of Judy Blume. It is probably the only book where a revolution in sexual mores is discussed in a chapter called "Sam Ervin," and it is surely the only book that makes that combination work. At times it feels less like a '70s history than a '70s movie: one of those Robert Altman pictures with an enormous cast, multiple interwoven storylines, overlapping dialogue, and a climax--in this case, the 1976 GOP convention--where petty personal squabbles and world-changing decisions share center stage.

In Perlstein's telling, the two great currents of the time were suspicion and nostalgia, a skepticism toward American institutions and a yearning for American innocence. "There were two tribes of Americans now," he writes. "One comprised the suspicious circles, which had once been small, but now were exceptionally broad, who considered the self-evident lesson of the 1960s and the low, dishonest war that defined the decade to be the imperative to question authority, unsettle ossified norms, and expose dissembling leaders." The other tribe "found another lesson to be self-evident: never break faith with God's chosen nation."

He's partly right. Americans in the 1970s were indeed torn between a drive to question authority and a longing for an authority they could believe in. But the evidence in Perlstein's own book shows how hard it is to divide those forces into two distinct tribes. Suspicion and nostalgia were woven up with one another, tangled so tightly that they might be inseparable. Even a nostalgist might need a suspicious story to explain how things had gone wrong. And even a skeptic might believe that the country had once been on the right path, that progress required us to turn back the clock.

Like many histories, Perlstein's book offers readers a sort of double vision. On one hand, he shows us the past through the eyes of the future, letting our hindsight reveal truths that contemporaries missed. One lesson of the book, for instance, is how frequently people underestimated Ronald Reagan. Time...