The Washington Post favorably reviews Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge:

Perlstein, who has written for the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, among other newspapers and magazines, positions The Invisible Bridge as the third installment of his history of the emergence of modern American conservatism. In fact it is much more. … Perlstein ranges far beyond political history, in his case touching on just about everything interesting that happened in the United States between 1973 and 1976. The familiar stories are here: the dispiriting end of the Vietnam War, the unfolding of the Watergate scandal, renewed conflict in the Middle East, the first oil shock, Richard Nixon’s resignation and his pardon by Gerald Ford, the revelations of wrongdoing by the CIA, the puzzlingly simultaneous experience of high unemployment and high inflation, the near-bankruptcy of New York City, the midterm elections of 1974, the national political conventions of 1976 — which is where Perlstein ends this book. …

Perlstein identifies certain themes. “This is a book about how Ronald Reagan came within a hairs-breadth of becoming the 1976 Republican nominee for president,” he writes. Readers might wonder at this choice of topic, since not only did Reagan not win the Republican nomination, but the Republican nominee, Gerald Ford, lost to Democrat Jimmy Carter. “This book is also a sort of biography of Ronald Reagan,” Perlstein continues. Again a bit curious, given that the book stops well before Reagan achieves the only thing that makes him interesting to biographers or anyone else: the presidency.

Perlstein’s broadest theme resolves the puzzle, partly. He describes a shift in the American mood roughly coincident with the bicentennial celebrations of July 4, 1976 — from the disillusionment of the immediate post-Vietnam, post-Watergate years to a reaffirmation of belief in the country’s abiding values. “This book is about how that shift in national sentiment took place,” Perlstein writes.

In Perlstein’s earlier volumes, Barry Goldwater and Nixon were his organizing protagonists; here Reagan serves the purpose. Perlstein walks us through Reagan’s youth, his Hollywood career and his two terms as California governor. Perlstein sees Reagan as a polarizing figure, despite his repeated appeals to a unifying recognition of America’s historical mission.

The polarization was political, but it was also social and cultural. Perlstein is a prodigious and effective consumer of newspaper articles (he acknowledges his debt to Google on this score). The narrative bounces entertainingly and revealingly from high policy to low humor; it segues from the sentencing hearing of the Watergate burglars to Johnny Carson commenting on the rapid increase in the price of meat, which had risen so high that “Oscar Mayer had his wiener appraised.” Hank Aaron chases Babe Ruth’s career home run record while cops at Columbia University chase streakers across campus, prompting an editorial cartoonist to portray a nervous Nixon looking out a White House window and saying: “Oh, it’s only a streaker. For a moment there I thought you said leaker!”

The movies “The Exorcist” and “Jaws” set a tone of horror and suspense as congressional committees uncover the skulduggery of the CIA. Werner Erhard peddles the snake oil of est mind-training seminars while politicians of both parties peddle the traditional political version. “Killer bees” invading the United States from Central America strike fear into American hearts already anxious about the parlous condition of the economy. The New York Post characterizes Washington’s response to New York City’s financial distress as “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.” Betty Ford tells McCall’s that reporters ask all manner of impertinent questions about everything short of how often she and the president have sex. “And if they asked me that I would have told them, ‘As often as possible.’ ”

Perlstein covers the 1976 race for the Republican presidential nomination in greater detail than anyone has done before. He doesn’t much like Ford, but he likes Reagan even less. And what he doesn’t like about Reagan is Reagan’s insistence on seeing only the good in America. For the most part, Perlstein’s own politics enter his account obliquely, as in the extensive coverage he gives Sen. Frank Church, the scourge of the CIA. The closest Perlstein comes to an outright admission of belief appears at the end of his preface. “What does it mean to truly believe in America?” he asks rhetorically. “To wave a flag? Or to struggle toward a more searching alternative to the shallowness of the flag wavers — to criticize, to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent?” He allows himself to observe that America needs that dissenting spirit in 2014 — “a time that cries for reckoning once more, in a nation that has ever so adored its own innocence, and so dearly wishes to see itself as an exception to history.”

Perlstein ends his tale abruptly at the moment of Reagan’s defeat by Ford for the GOP nomination. He gives the last word to the New York Times, which asserted that Reagan, at 65, was “too old to consider seriously another run at the Presidency.”

Cue volume four.

Max Boot has another view:

Rick Perlstein has established himself as one of our foremost chroniclers of the rise of the modern conservative movement. It’s an unexpected niche for a card-carrying liberal. But if he’s occasionally tart in his comments about conservatives, he is not entirely unsympathetic either. In fact, he reserves some of his most cutting barbs (and there are many in his well-crafted if slightly over-caffeinated works) for clueless establishment liberals who all too readily dismissed the significance of conservative champions such as Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. …

The book’s clunky title is drawn from a comment Nixon made to Nikita Khrushchev : “If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.” The metaphor doesn’t seem quite apt because, as Mr. Perlstein shows, the U.S. in the mid-1970s confronted real, not imaginary, obstacles. “In the years between 1973 and 1976, America suffered more wounds to its ideal of itself than at just about any other time in its history,” he claims. And he provides ample evidence to back up that assertion.

First and foremost, of course, was the defeat in Vietnam. Then, too, there was the first-ever resignation of a president and the Arab oil embargo, which led to nationwide shortages and rationing. Along with, as Mr. Perlstein writes, “A recession that saw hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers idled during Christmastime [of 1974]; crime at a volume and ghastliness greater, according to one observer, ‘than at any time since the fifteenth century.’ Senate and House hearings on the Central Intelligence Agency that accused American presidents since Dwight Eisenhower of commanding squads of lawless assassins.”

These were just a few of the headline events. An assiduous researcher, Mr. Perlstein has unearthed numerous “smaller traumas,” too, such as “the near doubling of meat prices in the spring of 1973, when the president’s consumer advisor went on TV and informed viewers that ‘liver, kidney, brains and heart can be made into gourmet meals with seasoning, imagination, and more cooking time.’ ”

Mr. Perlstein suggests that this accumulation of crises had the potential to remake the U.S. into a very different kind of country. He quotes, for example, the editor of Intellectual Digest magazine writing in 1973: “For the first time, Americans have had at least a partial loss in the fundamental belief in ourselves. We’ve always believed we were the new men, the new people, the new society. The ‘last best hope on earth,’ in Lincoln’s terms. For the first time, we’ve really begun to doubt it.”

Liberals hoped to harness such self-doubt to redefine what it truly meant to “believe in America.” They wanted to displace wave-the-flag patriotism with a supposedly higher form of loyalty rooted in the freedom “to criticize, to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent,” and to replace boundless belief in America’s potential with a conviction that, as Jerry Brown (then, as now, governor of California) put it during his 1976 presidential campaign: “We have fiscal limits, we have ecological limits, we even have human limits.”

Mr. Perlstein argues that this revolution in American thought was effectively thwarted by the ascent of that perpetual optimist Ronald Reagan, who insisted on seeing even the most traumatic events in his own life (such as his father’s alcoholism or his own divorce) as being part of a providential design for the greater good. Reagan made no concessions to the self-critical weltanschauung of the 1970s. Unlike many other Republicans, he did not attack Nixon over Watergate bugging (he quipped that Democrats “should have been happy that somebody was willing to listen to them”), and he never wavered in his belief that the Vietnam War was fully justified, that the only mistake we made was not fighting hard enough to win. Despite the oil shock and claims that natural resources were running out (which look ludicrous in hindsight), Reagan refused to believe that America’s best days were behind it. “Ronald Reagan was an athlete of the imagination,” Mr. Perlstein writes, with more than a bit of condescension, “a master at turning complexity and confusion and doubt into simplicity and stout-hearted certainty.” …

The question is whether this was ever a realistic prospect. Is it possible that a nation such as the United States, with more power than any other (even now, after the post-1979 rise of China) and a sense of optimism built into its very founding, could ever have given in to doubt and despair for long? Mr. Perlstein never examines this issue. Nor does he delve into the question of whether Reagan revived American spirits with his sunny rhetoric—or whether, as seems more probable, his presidential accomplishments, which showed that the country was far from ungovernable (and which fall outside this book’s scope), were more important.

Luckily, readers do not have to be convinced of Mr. Perlstein’s thesis to enjoy his work. Indeed, much of “The Invisible Bridge” is not about politics per se but about American society in all its weird, amusing and disturbing permutations. He seems to have read every word of every newspaper and magazine published in the 1970s and has mined them for delightful anecdotes involving half-forgotten characters such as the self-empowerment guru Werner Erhard (formerly Jack Rosenberg ), the rabidly pro-Nixon rabbi Baruch Korff, kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst, beer-swilling presidential brother Billy Carter and Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo, who bragged: “I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”

I haven’t read this book, though thanks to these reviews I am reading Perlstein’s Nixonland. I’ll be interested in reading them because I lived through the 1970s and remember at least some of these listed events, including Nixon’s resignation.

I am skeptical about an author who goes in with the preconceived notion, basically, that America sucks. That is the only conclusion one can make from a phrase like “so dearly wishes to see itself as an exception to history,” when this country is in fact an exception to world history, in giving minorities (however you define that, including political minorities) rights instead of jailing and executing them, as seen throughout the Middle East, a place the U.S. started having to pay attention to after the first energy crisis. Perlstein’s not questioning; he knows the answer already, or so he thinks. Moreover, while he’s obviously focusing on the U.S. in 1974, he must not be paying attention to the U.S. in 2014, when Americans who are not blind worshippers of Barack Obama feel it their patriotic duty “to criticize, to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent.”

In addition to an incomplete index, something that drives me batty in nonfiction, Perlstein is flat out wrong in Nixonland when he writes condescendingly of the supposed condescension of a “University of Wisconsin president” who wore a red vest, had the initials LSD, and announced to his students that they were all going on a trip together. Lee Sherman Dreyfus wore a red vest, but he was the UW–Stevens Point chancellor, not president (a distinction news media of the period almost certainly would have made). More importantly, Dreyfus said what he did to reach out to his students, not condescend to them. Anyone who knew or observed Dreyfus would not ever use the word “condescending” to describe him. This misreading therefore makes you wonder how accurate the rest of Perlstein’s work is.