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

by Rick Perlstein

  The format, at each gathering, was question-and-answer—which served as cues for favorite colorful (but not too colorful) Hollywood stories. He might show off his shirt, custom sewn by Jimmy Cagney’s tailor to make his head look bigger on camera. That might open up to a tale of how Cagney just missed out on the role of Knute Rockne in Knute Rockne, All American (Coach Rockne’s widow preferred Pat O’Brien). He might call forward his road manager, a former FBI agent named George Dalen, for a knockabout demonstration about how fights were staged for the camera. He might dip a toe, gingerly, in politics, relating that heroic tale about actors thwarting the Communist conspiracy to take over Hollywood—“against tremendous odds while they faced bombing of their homes, overturning of their cars, and burning of the buses that carried them through the picket lines to the lots.”

  Then the next stop on some yawning plant floor. The women might flock beside him, pressing mash notes into his hand, begging for autographs; the men, watching, glowered (“I bet he’s a fag. . . .”). “He would carry on a conversation with the girls just so long,” remembered his handler; “then he would leave them and walk over to these fellows. . . . When he left them ten minutes later, they were all slapping him on the back, saying, ‘That’s the way, Ron!’ ”

  Spouting statistics, he might start in on an obsession: the nation’s misperception that movie actors “live in a state of legalized prostitution because of the numerous divorces.” That mind of his, always hoovering up statistics, throwing them back in a blizzard: some called it his “photographic memory.” Better to say it was a preternatural confidence: details hurled forth with sufficient confidence always sound true—but “facts,” in sufficient profusion, whatever their reliability, can serve as fables as well. He said the twenty-six thousand citizens of the movie colony, making up but 1 percent of Los Angeles’s population, made 12 percent of its charitable contributions; that 70 percent were married and 68 percent had children and that they led the nation in adoption of children, in church membership, in the absence of crime. And in the solidity of marriage: their divorce rate was 29.9 percent. “So we’re asking that you catch up with our high moral standards!” A remarkable claim to make of the homeland of Fatty Arbuckle, Errol Flynn, Lionel Barrymore—and, well, of the recently divorced contract player who kept waking up at the Garden of Allah next to starlets whose names he didn’t know.

  It opened him up to hecklers: “So why did you divorce Jane Wyman?” “How much are they paying you for this shit?” He learned to put them down with dispatch: “None of your business, buster!” “They haven’t got enough to make me put up with you.”

  He denied there was anything political about it. (“Actors are citizens and should exert those rights by speaking their minds, but the actor’s first duty is to his profession. Hence, you can rest assured that I will never again run for mayor or anything but head man in my own household,” he wrote in the November 1955 Hollywood Reporter.) But if he happened to change his mind, this was a splendid apprenticeship in retail politics. And soon an ideological apprenticeship as well. He began speaking to community groups. His other road manager, Earl Dunckel, a conservative who liked to debate his companion over politics, recollected how that began. A massive meeting of high school teachers scheduled for the Schenectady armory was on the verge of cancellation when “their speaker came down ill.” That led to that speech, reported in national newspapers, in which Reagan castigated the “vicious attacks of the ultra-professional patriotic organizations that can eventually wreck our school system.” Dunckel, who had no idea how to write a speech about education and so hadn’t wanted to accept the invitation, remembered Reagan coming up with it on his own—and winning a ten-minute standing ovation.

  Reagan himself, though, claimed an entirely different genesis for his political speeches under GE’s auspices. In his account the transition took place a year later, and his account stuffed his liberalism down the memory hole. He remembered being drafted to speak to a group of employees on the subject of charity—and giving “a speech about the pride of giving and the importance of doing things without waiting for the government to do it for you,” and about how “when individuals or private groups were involved in helping the needy none of the contributions were spent on overhead or administrative costs” (a nice fairy tale). “Unlike government relief programs where $2 was often spent on overhead for every $1 that went to needy people.” He wrote in a memoir, “As we were driving away from the plant, the man from G.E. said, ‘I didn’t know you could give speeches.’ ”

  Either way, the company started sending him out as its rhetorical ambassador.

  Facing audiences primed by unceasing company propaganda to despise liberal demagogues, he found favor with them by telling tales of corporate heroes doing thankless battle with ceaseless tides of intellectual error, including some in his own beloved movie industry—for instance, tales of the “tremendous harassment” of studios by the IRS via measures like the 20 percent amusement tax and the 90 percent top marginal income tax rate. He spoke against the Justice Department’s ban on “so-called block booking that splits up some of the risk in movie making”—block booking being the monopolistic practice of studios of forcing theaters to buy every one of their pictures. In a speech in Youngstown, Ohio, he called that “censorship”—a windup to a peroration about how unless Americans recognized that such injuries against one industry’s liberties was an injury to all, they “might be on your doorstep next, and by then it might be too late.”

  Once more: freedom was always on the verge of extinction; in 1948, the predators were the tax evaders; the prey was the common man. By 1960 the lion and the lamb had switched places: now it was the likes of Standard Oil and Hollywood who were the put-upon martyrs—moral role models, in fact.

  One way he found his way to this new set of identifications was psychological: the speaker pulled himself toward his audiences as much as the other way around. “An interesting thing happened,” he said of these conclaves of people he might once have judged to be off-putting Babbitts: “No matter where I was, I’d find people from the audience waiting to talk to me after a speech and they’d all say, ‘Hey, if you think things are bad in your business, let me tell you what is happening in my business. . . .’ I’d listen and they’d cite examples of government interference and snafus and complain how bureaucrats, through overregulation, were telling them how to run their businesses.” He adjusted course to better solicit their approbation. This was how he became a hero among the new company he kept.

  Another contributing factor: the spokesman was afraid of flying on airplanes. (“I’ve decided,” he wrote to the GE executive who accompanied him during his first two years, Dunckel, decades later, “that I am not going to say I get on planes, I’m just going to say—I wear them.”) He was a voracious reader. So the cross-country Super Chief train became his study room. He pored over right-wing fare: William F. Buckley’s new biweekly, National Review (Reagan was a charter subscriber); Human Events, the gut-punching conservative activist newsletter; his old favorite, Reader’s Digest, more and more given over to horror stories of the H. R. Gross variety about government programs as well-intended sinkholes of waste, fraud, folly, and abuse. He also read books, the sort of books the GE managers read in living-room study groups alongside their wives and neighbors. He called it “a postgraduate course in political science.”

  One of the books that made an impression on him was Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. The one lesson, which opened that slim volume as an overture, was only two pages long—though the author said it could also be reduced to a sentence: “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effect of any policy; it consists of tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” The rest was but commentary. For example, in chapter four, Hazlitt wrote of how “taxation for public housing . . . destroys as many jobs in other lines as it creates in housing,” in the form of “unbuilt private homes
, in unmade washing machines and refrigerators.” The Tennessee Valley Authority was Hazlitt’s example par excellence of the calamities would-be do-gooders wrought, because of all the “private power plants, the private homes, the typewriters and television sets that were never allowed to come into existence because of the money that was taken from people all over the country to build the photogenic Norris Dam.” Beware liberal demagogues bearing gifts. They would bring us an apocalypse that would become evident only when it was too late—but not if patriots sounded the tocsin while they still stood a chance.

  And so Ronald Reagan began sounding that tocsin, with the energy of an erupting volcano.

  One time, his next GE handler marveled, he did it Mr. Smith–style, before an audience of startled schoolchildren he happened upon after asking for a tour of the Rhode Island state capitol in Providence. His handler remembered the words indelibly:

  “If we believe nothing is worth dying for, when did this begin?”

  (He waved at the glorious Early Republic edifice before them.)

  “Should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery rather than dare the wilderness?

  “You and I, my friend, have a rendezvous with destiny,” he said soaringly. This was striking: it paraphrased the peroration Franklin Roosevelt had given at his inauguration in March 1933. He concluded, “If we flop, at least our kids could say of us that we justified our brief moment here, ‘We did all that could be done.’ ”

  GENERAL ELECTRIC THEATER’S EPISODES ENCODED an ideology in themselves: its writers devised the most extraordinary conundrums—comic ones, dramatic ones, whichever—each and every time resolving them within the half hour, in perfect expression of that 1950s faith that nothing, anything, need ever remain in friction in the nation God had ordained to benevolently bestride the world.

  Then, in mid-story, those commercials. For instance, amid a 1955 episode in which Reagan starred in a melodrama on the Irish civil war, “G.E. Progress Report” correspondent Don Herbert (who’d formerly starred in a show called Watch Mr. Wizard) explained to an agog little boy the great strides GE was making on a new technology, “transistors,” which might someday produce TVs with flat screens and radios smaller than cigarette packs:

  “Where’s my Dick Tracy wrist radio?”

  “Not so fast! Right now the armed forces have first call on miniaturization developments. It might take ten years before we have them in our homes. But General Electric scientists are always looking for new ways to make living easier and more comfortable.”

  “And more fun!”

  “That’s right, Billy. And all that adds up to progress. And at General Electric, progress is our most important product!”

  Or the ones that took the viewer, literally, into Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s home. This was another facet of the GE corporate culture: the company, in Barton’s coinage, as “the headquarters of progress.” At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, GE sponsored an “all-electric home” with a “Magic Kitchen that moves, talks, and tells a timely story.” Now the Magic Kitchen was in Pacific Palisades, and it starred a handsome movie couple and their cute little kids.

  What a historian has called TV’s first reality series began in the second season, when his “total electric house,” housing “television’s first all-electric family,” was still under construction. Reagan strolled around the site as his electrical contractor demonstrated how you, the viewer, might wire your property for “full house power.” Nancy, in her first screen role since Donovan’s Brain, broke comically into her husband’s technical meanderings to deliver the bottom line for the ladies: “Well I’m glad we have it. Because we’re going to have some wonderful electric equipment and we want to have all the entertainment and pleasure and comfort out of that equipment that we can!”

  In 1957, the Western Too Good with a Gun cross-fades to Don Herbert:

  “Tonight we’re going visiting at the Ronald Reagans’ again, in their new home, to see how their many wonderful electrical servants are helping them, just as they’ll help you live better electrically!”

  Cue Nancy and four-year-old Patti, and the “perfect meal” courtesy of GE’s “electrical servants”: a toaster oven for the English muffins covered in melted cheese, an automatically timed electric skillet that “makes a tricky dish like soufflé ‘easy and safe to make’ ”—“My electrical appliances do everything!”

  (In actuality Nancy didn’t cook. Or, as a fan magazine item on their courtship had put it, “Nancy knits Reagan argyle socks, though she doesn’t cook for him. Her talent in the kitchen doesn’t equal her talent before the cameras, concerning which her boss, Dore Schary says, ‘she’s a fine actress.’ ”)

  Patti, adorably: “What’s elesses apolotz?”

  “They’re all the things around the house that make Mommy’s work easier.’ . . . One at a time or all together, they make quite a difference in the way we live. That’s why every housewife wants them, the latest models with the newest improvements.”

  Ronnie: “Because she knows that you really begin to live when you live better—”

  Patti: “—Eletriffly!”

  A market research company studying “impact scores” called GE Theater “the leading institutional campaign on television for selling ideas to the public.” TV Guide called its leading salesman “the ambassador of all things mechanical.” A retracting patio canopy roof. A painting of a sailboat that slid to one side to reveal a “projection machine for home movies.” Something called a “garbage disposal.” A wall cabinet hiding a “high fidelity.” (Nancy: “It’s almost as if the orchestra were playing right here in the living room”; Ronnie: “There’s no trick to it; it’s just a matter of starting in easy stages, one item at a time.”) “Everything electric but the chair,” went Reagan’s own joke. Or the one about the guy who watched too much GE Theater. “I didn’t really need a nuclear submarine,” he said. “But I’ve got one now.”

  WITHIN A YEAR OF HIS GE debut he shared master-of-ceremony duties with Art Linkletter for the most-watched live television broadcast in history, the grand opening of Disneyland (Reagan introduced Walt Disney). In 1957, when the legendary host of This Is Your Life, Ralph Edwards, missed a show for the first time in seventeen years, it was Reagan who filled in for him. He made a triumphant return to deliver the commencement address to Eureka College’s Class of 1958. (“This is a land of destiny,” he said, “and our forefathers found their way here by some divine system of selective service—gathered here to fulfill a mission to advance man a further step in his climb from the swamps.”) That was the year a survey found that Reagan had one of the most recognized names in the country. His corporate Medici had delivered him. In turn, the thrum of corporate life itself came to delight him.

  “Reagan Says Business Beats Hollywood at Its Own Game,” ran one profile headline. “The Actor in the Gray Flannel Suit,” ran another. “Ronald Reagan is one of the few actors in Hollywood who always carries two brief cases,” that profile reported. “One of them is jammed with scripts, the other thick with business correspondence and memos.” Corporate titans had become his new heroes, his new role models—his new cowboys. They also became his social intimates. That contributed to the ideological transformation, too.

  Nancy Reagan had applied herself to an aspiration: to join the ranks of Los Angeles society—the Beverly Hills types with a traditional distaste for sullying their ranks by seeking picture folks out. So Nancy sought them out: sending Patti in 1956 to prekindergarten at the exclusive John Thomas Dye School in Bel Air; telling the proprietress of her favorite Beverly Hills boutique, Amelia Gray, “I’d like to meet some girls out of the picture industry”; charming the ladies she met in said boutiques, such as Betty Adams, scion of one of Los Angeles’s first families, and seeking to insinuate her family into their circles—and, soon, famously, succeeding.

  Adams hosted a dinner party to introduce “Ronnie and Nancy” to the likes of the Wilsons and the Bloomingdales and the Jorgens
ens—Betty Wilson and Bill Wilson, whose father in 1913 founded Pennzoil; Betsy Bloomingdale and Alfred Bloomingdale, president of Diners Club, heir to the department store fortune; Marion Jorgensen and Earle Jorgensen, steel and aluminum magnate. Soon she was prowling the boutiques with the former model and legendary clotheshorse Harriet Deutsch, whose husband, Armand, was grandson of the founder of Sears and reputedly its biggest stockholder. The Reagans began hosting regular barbecues for a tight-knit cadre—“The Group”—of eighteen plutocrats and their society wives, and star couples including the Bill Holdens, the George Burnses, the Jack Bennys. (Benny, for some reason, tabbed Reagan with the nickname “the Governor.”)

  Maybe it had something to do with his especially close bond with Walter Annenberg, whom Reagan had first met in 1937 when the young publishing heir was running Screen Guide and they competed for the same woman. Now with his wife, Lee (Annenberg, like Ronnie, called his wife “Mother”), he owned one of the greatest private art collections in the world, was plumping for Richard Nixon for president as one of the Republican Party’s most generous benefactors, and published TV Guide—which featured its publisher’s dear friends on the cover in November 1958, relaxing in front of a barn with an adorable collie in tow, Ronnie boasting inside about the small profit he made each year in his horse breeding business, reflecting on the secret of General Electric Theater’s consistent spot high up the ratings—“keeping the show on an intimate basis where the star is playing to one viewer. There has to be a feeling between the two”—and chuckling about the days when he used to be a liberal: “When you’re younger, you have fiery ideas.”