The tie that binds: how Ronald Reagan, the sunniest president in recent memory, cemented the Republican Party to the dark vision of Richard Nixon.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed

The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

Simon & Schuster, 800 pp.

It's central to the nature of "contemporary" (as defined by "in living memory") history that reactions to it will vary according to one's personal experiences. So I approached writer Rick Perlstein's third volume in his history of the American conservative movement, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, with curiosity not unmixed with some trepidation. As someone who came of age during the period Perlstein writes about (undergrad, law school), from 1973 through 1976,1 never bought into the conventional wisdom that the 1970s were a formless slough between the happenin' '60s and '80s. Now along comes Perlstein (born, I might add, in 1969), and he confirms that the '70s were years of social, cultural, and political chaos that in many respects formed the world in which we live today.

The Invisible Bridge, like its predecessor Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, addresses a great puzzle of political history. How was it, the earlier book asks, that the apparent liberal consensus reflected in Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 landslide victory ended so very quickly? The Invisible Bridge similarly explores why Richard Nixon's forced resignation, followed by the "Watergate Election" of 1974, gave way to an era dominated by Nixon's most obdurate defender, Ronald Reagan. And even as Nixonland suggested that the 1964 "consensus" disguised powerful fault lines in the New Deal/Great Society coalition that Nixon so skillfully exploited, this latest volume suggests that Reagan, even more skillfully, encouraged Americans to deny the evidence of their own eyes and ears and reimagine their country as the "shining city on the hill"--a vision threatened only by self-doubt and excessive domestic government.

There's another important parallel between the two books. Nixonland recounted its protagonist's searing college experience as part of an outsider group that Perlstein sees as crucial to his determination to mobilize a "silent majority" against "liberal elites." To Nixon these elites were contemptuous of bourgeois values (including patriotism) and were in cahoots with a minority underclass constituency dependent on government. The Invisible Bridge argues that Reagan's chaotic childhood, full of frustrations and fears, helped make him what Perlstein calls an "athlete of the imagination." He could effortlessly...