Ford had never been elected by anyone outside of his own Michigan congressional district and so seemed to lack a popular mandate. Ford had been appointed Vice President, and so ascended to the Presidency upon Nixon’s resignation. He wasn’t the type of leader to restore America’s faith in its institutions, especially after pardoning Nixon. There were frequent (botched) assassination attempts on Ford. These years were plagued by an onslaught of troubling events, including the POW/MIA episode, acts of domestic terrorism, hearings on CIA abuses, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, the sudden doubling of meat prices and sharply higher oil prices. His thesis is that American politics had grown so cynical in the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Church Committee hearings (on CIA abuses of power), that Ronald Reagan’s optimistic brand of neo-conservatism found its national voice in 1976, a time when Congress and the nation as a whole seemed overwhelmingly Democratic. His next book will cover the four years before Reagan’s election in 1980. Including the earlier books, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and Nixonland, his enthusiastic studies in conservatism now run more than 2,000 pages. The Invisible Bridge continues Perlstein’s multi-book project depicting the American conservative movement in the culturally liberal period of the 1960s and 1970s. Many people were looking for a savior from the uncertainties of the age, and Ronald Reagan served that function for many in 1976.

It chronicles that time of serial debacle (1973–1976) between Watergate and the election of Jimmy Carter, an era when Americans were deeply and publicly suspicious of their institutions. The Invisible Bridge is a guilty pleasure for those who enjoy 1970s nostalgia.

The invisible bridge perlstein