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

by Rick Perlstein

  Maybe Reagan really didn’t know that the deal was dirty. Maybe he just convinced himself of his friend and benefactor’s incorruptible character. As usual, in those he believed innocent, innocence was all his eyes saw. It was his gift. In any event, he soon would be delivered a gift from Wasserman in return.

  THINGS WERE LOOKING UP. IN 1953 he finally got a script that he loved—an “outdoor” script. Prisoner of War was based on the headlines: POWs held by the enemy in the Korean War had just been repatriated after reportedly ghastly torments and tortures. But some had elected not to come home at all—professing loyalty to the Communist cause. The development brought on great drafts of soul-searching, an anguished national conversation about whether the Communists had mastered the power of “brainwashing”—diabolically rewiring men’s entire personalities. This picture had been written with the help of a technical advisor who’d been a North Korean prisoner. It began with our hero, Webb Sloane—Reagan—volunteering to parachute behind the lines to enter a prison camp. There he sees prisoners suffering in excruciating stress positions, confined naked in open holes in the ground, and subjected to cruel psychological manipulation like mock executions. Some respond with selfless heroics. (“Confess to germ warfare or you’ll never see your wife again!” says the evil Russian colonel in the blazing white tunic. “PETER REILLY, LIEUTENANT, OC806032,” a hero responds every time.) Others thought themselves clever for appearing to cooperate in order to earn favors like drugs for a suffering fellow prisoner. Reagan’s Sloane berates a soldier for this. Then, in a twist, he changes sides, pronouncing himself a persuaded “progressive” now. This was a spy’s ruse, of course, giving him access to the tools to get word back home about just how diabolical the Communist torture regime truly is.

  Here was a key to Reagan’s pleasure in the film—its vision of American innocence. Prisoner of War implicitly proposed a theory, one set to ease all that anguished national soul-searching: maybe, just maybe, those handful of defecting soldiers, rather than exposing the weakness of America’s will, confirmed its strength. Maybe the defectors actually were spies, infiltrating the enemy and acting above and beyond the call of duty. Maybe America’s will was greater than we had ever dared dream. “The spirit of man can run deep,” ran the movie’s opening invocation—“far beyond the reach of Communist torture.”

  That theory, though, didn’t help at the box office. Prisoner of War came out in the spring of 1954 to lukewarm business. Some reviewers questioned the premise (the Christian Science Monitor referred to “atrocities supposed to have been practiced on prisoners”). Others found the execution slapdash and absurd. (Why did the torments never seemed to disturb the actors’ perfectly coiffed hair, nor their exquisite physiques?) Reagan was flummoxed. “The picture should have done better,” he said disappointedly. Americans had just been presented a portrait of real-life heroism on their screens. And yet they rejected it. Something was wrong. He blamed “the reluctance of extreme liberals to enthuse about anything that upset their illusion about ‘agrarian reformers’ ”—the term of endearment used by those duped that Communists were actually humanitarians.

  He was still not a convinced man of the right. In the spring the Army-McCarthy hearings dragged the disapproval ratings of the red-baiting senator from Wisconsin to a record low 45 percent. The nation was now neatly divided between those willing to believe the Communist conspiracy could be present anywhere, capable of subverting anything—and those who found the former group guilty of the same kind of thinking we were supposed to be fighting. That fall Reagan planted his flag with the latter group. “Professional patriots,” as he angrily dubbed them, had targeted the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a vector of Communist indoctrination. In Los Angeles, the school superintendent, Dr. Alexander Stoddard, introduced UNESCO study materials into the schools. Stoddard had been the scheduled speaker at a dinner marking the hundredth anniversary of the school system in Schenectady, New York, where the corporation General Electric was based. Then he fell to a heart attack. Reagan, who happened to be in town, was drafted to speak in his place—attributing Stoddard’s collapse to “the vicious attacks of the ultra-professional patriotic organizations that can eventually wreck our school system.”

  He was, however, about to round the final ideological bend—making much the same vicious attacks himself. The development came largely of that gift from Lew Wasserman and MCA.

  THE PRESS RELEASE WENT OUT April 4, 1954, while he was still emceeing his feeble Los Vegas nightclub act: “NEW ‘GENERAL ELECTRIC THEATER’ SERIES STARTS IN SEPTEMBER WITH RONALD REAGAN AS HOST.” The show was the first major product of Revue, MCA’s new TV company, which was enjoying its blanket waiver to produce the very shows whose talent it represented as agents. “There was much talk around Hollywood about how Reagan had managed to land this fancy new job, which resurrected his career,” Wasserman’s biographer wrote. “The connection was hard to miss.” Though it also had to be said that he was a natural for the job. In its first year, before Reagan’s arrival, General Electric Theater ranked nineteenth in the Nielsen ratings. Within four months it climbed to tenth, and in the next year it scored third. It beat its Sunday night competition Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Ed Sullivan Show consistently for the duration of Reagan’s run as its host.

  What he was hosting was an “anthology” show—one of those 1950s relics in which a completely different cast of actors each week played in a completely different mini motion picture, in a bewildering array of genres: light comedy, Westerns, Hitchcock-style thrillers, miniature sword-and-sandal epics, family melodramas, slapstick, and more, sometimes starring actors on their way up (James Dean), sometimes those on their way down (Bette Davis), though more often actors who would never be much known at all. What held the crazy quilt together was the host: a “continuing personality on which to hang the production and advertising of the show,” as Reagan described it to an interviewer. Sometimes he was an actor in the productions, but he was always there as each episode’s introducer, frequently in the same jaunty lean over the TV lights that featured in his 1937 trailer for Love Is on the Air, and projecting that same customary aw-shucks ease—and almost always with a trademark puffy silk handkerchief protruding from his suit coat.

  He starred in GE commercials, too. The short ones. (A shock of lightning crashing across the screen, punctuating the words rushing at the viewer: “IN THE HOME . . . ON THE FARM . . . IN RESEARCH . . . IN ENGINEERING . . . IN MANUFACTURING SKILL . . . At General Electric, progress is our most important product!”) The long ones, which were a GE Theater innovation. Instead of the standard stretch of thirty- or sixty-second spots dotting the program, each episode featured a sort of halftime intermission, a mini General Electric documentary.

  “That was act one of ‘Big Break,’ starring Johnny Ray with Nancy Gates,” Reagan twinkled in the middle of one show, about a pop singer who refused to give up his ethnic surname and sing teeny-bopper songs as his record label demanded (“My great grandfather was Pulaski . . . the finest cabinet maker in all Warsaw. . . . I won’t change my mind, sir. Not about this”), is fired, then is begged to come back. (“I’ll go back. And I’ll stick it out. But this time as Johnny Pulaski!”)

  “Now for a story with a twist, our Progress reporter Don Herbert visits another company, not General Electric—but one in which General Electric is very interested!”

  Thereupon the viewer got to tour one of six Junior Achievement companies sponsored by the General Electric Foreman’s Association at the twenty-thousand-worker turbine plant in Schenectady, New York: kids capitalizing their own company by selling shares of stock, forming a board of directors and a managerial cadre directing a happy crew manufacturing magazine racks for sale on a veritable production floor. “General Electric employment groups sponsor 68 Junior Achievement chapters in 34 communities. And it’s no surprise. General Electric as a company, and its men and women as individuals, have always been interested in buildi
ng a better America, with and for our young people. For today’s youth will bring tomorrow’s progress. And at General Electric, progress is our most important product!”

  That vignette was a perfect portrait of Ronald Reagan’s new corporate benefactor’s vision of the world. Few corporations were as obsessed as GE with the problem of corporate image—an image, it was at great pains to establish, of GE as a keystone institution of the American Way. It was a constant target of Progressive Era antitrust enthusiasts when in 1922 a new president named Gerard Swope took over and utterly reorganized the corporation’s strategy. Swope now branded its flowing, stylized logo, formerly all but invisible to ordinary consumers, on every product he could—and hired experts in two novel professions, public relations and advertising, to “brand” it in customers’ minds as well. An adman from GE’s lamp division named Bruce Barton became an articulate propagandist for the new model. “In Barton’s theology,” a scholar has written, “advertising was a sacred calling primarily concerned with the revelation of the corporate soul.” One of Barton’s campaigns styled GE (founded by Thomas Edison) as the inventor not just of lightbulbs but of light: its employees, he said, were “engaged in the great profession of lighting the world,” under a charter from “the beginning of time . . . recorded in the four words, ‘Let there be light.’ ” His colleague, the public relations consultant Edward Bernays, christened the fiftieth anniversary of Edison’s 1879 invention “Light’s Golden Jubilee.” The goal, Barton said, was instilling “electrical consciousness”—a corporate desideratum all the more pressing with the coming of World War II, when GE anticipated the rich prospect of a postwar building boom with ads featuring, for example, a soldier sitting on a park bench with his gal sketching their future home for “when Victory is won”: a house, naturally, crowded with the “new comforts, new conveniences, and new economies” of “electrical living.”

  From the start, GE identified television, which first surpassed radio in ad revenue in 1952, as electrical living’s best salesman. GE was an innovative decentralized corporation, with each division and factory managed relatively independently of the others; the TV show was its first “all-company project”—and a pure product of its department of public relations. The show spoke to another Bruce Barton innovation: the notion of a “corporate culture,” one that could be sold both internally to its scattered workforce of hundreds of thousands, and externally to millions of consumers. The TV show needed a host who embodied that culture. “We had been very, very definite as to the kind of person we wanted,” an executive recalled, “a good, upright kind of person.” And when MCA approached GE with Ronald Reagan—the guy whose future agent, in 1937, found him so “likable,” “clean-cut,” and “all-American”—it approved the casting almost immediately.

  He loved the role. Previously a TV-basher in the mold of his erstwhile boss Jack Warner, he now adored the medium for delivering exactly what the newly entrepreneurial world of movie acting could not: job security. As he told the Hollywood Reporter in 1955, with a strikingly corporate self-consciousness, “my kind of association with a big business firm not only adds half or better of the economic value of my name, but provides a degree of security entirely foreign to the movie business, which is ruled so much by suicidal fluctuations, fads, and whims.” And that self-consciousness—his identification of himself with the fortunes of his corporate sponsor, and the corporate system itself—soon made him even more useful to GE in another role.

  Another facet of the self-image GE sought to project to the world was as a steward of America’s very well-being. The way those Junior Achievement kids were depicted—niftily and uncomplainingly dividing themselves into an organic hierarchy, owners and managers and workers; frictionlessly coordinating their activities toward economically useful ends, each for the benefit of all; free from any and all resentment—reflected GE’s self-image, too. The corporate behemoth saw its 166 plants in nearly thirty-eight states, manufacturing everything from tiny transistors to the nuclear reactors that got Ralph Cordiner on the cover of Time in 1959, as miraculously frictionless planes, free from conflict, let alone class conflict—that dreaded notion, beloved of labor unions, that workers and owners just might have interests in contradiction with one another and that their relationship was defined by a contest of wills. Selling that notion of industrial consensus became all the more crucial to GE brass following World War II, after the same 1946 strike wave that convulsed Hollywood shuttered nearly every GE plant in the country, just as the company hoped to flood all those GI starter homes with all the accoutrements of electrical living. The union representing its workers, one of the most radical in the country, won an eighteen-and-a-half-cent raise for production workers—and still they ravened for more.

  Almost every GE plant had gone on strike—all except the seven manufacturing subsidiaries managed by a man named Lemuel Boulware, who soon was promoted to be the entire firm’s vice president for labor relations. Though Boulware himself requested his title be changed to one that better suited his more visionary understanding of his undertaking: “vice president for public and community relations.” An executive with a strong background in marketing, he conceived of his job as far transcending negotiating labor contracts—as, in fact, reshaping the nature of the capitalist firm itself. Quietly, he soon became the most influential American most people have never heard of. More than any other figure before him, he conceptualized a way to promote the sort of right-wing politics traditionally favored by corporate behemoths—low taxes and neutralized union power; unchallenged managerial control and freedom from government regulatory interference; a vision of American power and benevolence backstopped by a conception of the owners of capital as the exemplary citizens of the republic—as a problem in modern marketing. He conceived his most important audience as GE’s 250,000 employees, their families, and the communities in which they lived. His goal was to teach them to identify their most intimate interests with the well-being of the company—and their company’s with the well-being of the free world itself.

  In other words, to turn millions of Americans into right-wing conservatives.

  Lemuel Boulware was said by labor experts to understand the mind of the American working class better than any other executive in America. He won that knowledge by means of innovative techniques: surveys; interviews with ministers and voluntary organizations in the communities containing GE’s plants; even what marketers would later call “focus groups”—gathering GE toilers before members of his staff of three thousand “job marketers” to test which messages about company benevolence and union malevolence resonated and which ones failed.

  The story was sold through slogans: “The Best Balanced Interests of All”; “G.E.—The Initials of a Friend”; “Steady Jobs Through Steady Friends”; “More Sales—More Jobs—More Pay—More Earnings—More Taxes—AND MORE GOOD DONE, TOO!” A constant stream of company-sponsored newspapers and magazines published articles like “How General Electric Keeps Trying to Make Jobs Better” and “What Is Communism? What Is Capitalism? What Is the Difference to You?” and “How Big Are General Electric Profits—Are They Too Big?” (no, that was impossible; if profits were too big, the free market would punish GE when other manufacturers undercut its prices) and “The How and Why of Curbing Inflationary Settlements.” (If a contract set wages any higher than what GE’s benevolent management, objectively following the dictates of the competitive market, offered at the beginning of contract negotiations, it would only harm workers in the long run when the company was forced by that selfsame market to increase the price of the GE products they bought in the stores and whose profits paid their wages.)

  The work drilled down to the most basic conceptions about how society ought to be organized. Every supervisor received a copy of a short book by the right-wing ideologue James Flynn, The Road Ahead, which argued that the New Deal was a first step toward a totalitarian nightmare. Every employee received instruction on company time in free-market economics from a s
pecially commissioned textbook by an economics columnist who had once been a radical, Lewis Henry Haney. (Ironically, he had written the socialist economics textbook Ronald Reagan had studied in college.) It advocated repealing the 1937 law that made union organizing a right. It also included the chapter “Seven Ways to Lose Freedom or Save It.” (Freedom was always on the brink of extinction.) Managers were also encouraged to convene study groups in their homes. The recommended reading included a free-market primer by the Wall Street Journal columnist Henry Hazlitt, called Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics (1946); according to Hazlitt, “economics was haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man,” put forward by political demagogues who “recommend squandering on a national scale as a way to economic salvation.” One company publication ran a cartoon version of Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek’s libertarian manifesto The Road to Serfdom.

  And then, even before General Electric Theater debuted on CBS one Sunday night in September 1954, another front in the Boulwarite scheme was opened up: GE’s in-house movie star, swooping down on the cities, villages, and burgs containing GE plants, and getting down to the business of his life’s work—charming other human beings, making them feel good.

  A day might begin at, say, the Skylark Hotel in Hendersonville, North Carolina, a town where GE made outdoor lighting. (The company’s expansion into under-unionized Southern states honored a theory of GE’s own coinage: valuing a community’s “business climate,” defined as “an absence of unwarranted strikes and slowdowns,” “an adequate supply of people” with “a good work attitude”—and most of all low taxes and prevailing wages.) Then came a series of fifteen-minute talks with general managers and section managers; then tours of four separate parts of the plant—doing his best to meet the eyes of the blurry figures before him (the industrial dust kept him from wearing his contact lenses). Then lunch, meaning separate fifteen-minute back-to-back sessions with hourly and salaried employees; then another factory tour; then a jaunt to the local high school for a preview of the next GE Theater episode for employee families; then finally an evening reception at Hendersonville Country Club, where he might avail himself in respectable mixed company of yet one more of his charming gifts: “He was the most inventive man with a dirty joke I’ve ever known,” a GE executive along for the ride marveled. “He could clean up filthy stories and make them fit for an old nun . . . funnier than the original and it was impossible to take offense.”