Morning Must-Read: Frank Rich: ‘The Invisible Bridge,’ by Rick Perlstein

Frank Rich: ‘The Invisible Bridge,’ by Rick Perlstein: “It says much about Perlstein’s gifts as a historian…

…that he persuasively portrays this sulky, slender interlude between the fall of Nixon and the rise of Reagan (as his subtitle has it) not just as a true bottom of our history but also as a Rosetta stone for reading America and its politics today. It says much about his talent as a writer that he makes these years of funk lively, engrossing and on occasion mordantly funny…. ‘The Invisible Bridge’ takes its title from a bit of cynical political advice bestowed on Nixon by 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’…. One of Perlstein’s enduring themes is that when it comes to the steady ascent of the conservative movement, contemporaneous journalists and Democratic and Republican elites alike are the last to figure out what is going on. He’s a connoisseur of wrong calls, many of them premature obituaries for the right, from now all-but-forgotten opinion titans of the day (Reston, Kraft, Alsop, Sidey, Evans and Novak)…. What’s particularly striking in the new book, though, is the cluelessness of the stalwart Republican grandees of the Ford presidential campaign, who were both blindsided and baffled by Reagan’s guerrilla victories in their own midst…”