There He Goes Again

“The Presidential election is just too stupid to watch…you see Ronald Reagan in these neighborhoods with poor people and you can just hear him saying ‘Oh my God what am I doing here?’ But his hair looks really good.”

— The Andy Warhol Diaries on August 21, 1980

My mom, a moderate-to-liberal Rockefeller Republican, intuited the political future in 1976. Though my intention was pulling the lever for the Democratic nominee in my first Presidential election, Mary Louise insisted that I register as Republican so as to vote against Ronald Reagan in the primary. Switching parties could come later. “If that lousy actor becomes President, I’m moving to Canada!” Four years later, he did and she didn’t.

Though the fourth and final installment in Rick Perlstein’s chronicle of the conservative revolution is titled Reaganland, it might just as easily been called Carter Country. Jimmy Carter dominates this capacious narrative’s first half and then some. Which is only appropriate, as he was President during the years under scrutiny. Regarded as a failure on both sides of the aisle, Carter nevertheless was much more than a foil or fall guy for the opposing party, and he emerges from Reaganland‘s thousand-plus pages as a complex character: equally earnest and arrogant, insightful and inept, pious and prickly.

Perlstein’s newest doorstop volume, similar to its three predecessors, is a comprehensive social history. Roughly, Reaganland encompasses three overlapping narratives: the post-convention 1976 election and Carter’s presidency, the so-called Religious Right’s rise to power, the 1980 campaign and election. The book’s sheer breadth and depth prove the adage about history being messy yet this deluge of information offers clarifying flashes of foresight while avoiding pat summary of the past. It’s no data dump.

Still, little is left out of the dismal late Seventies hit parade: Son of Sam, New York City’s blackout, Jonestown, SALT II, Phyllis Schlafly’s successful blockade of the Equal Rights Amendment, Anita Bryant’s shockingly hateful anti-gay rights crusade, the murders of San Francisco’s liberal mayor George Moscone and gay city supervisor Harvey Milk, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and, inevitably, the events leading up to and including the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in revolutionary Iran, even the “Disco Sucks” melee at Chicago’s Comiskey Park during the summer of 1979.

Though Jimmy Carter was in fact a devout born-again Christian, the self-styled Moral Majority, fueled by the booming popularity of religious broadcasting aka televangelism, was ripe for plucking by Ronald Reagan. To this day (though perhaps not eternally), the Religious Right forms the Republican Party bedrock.

“Do you ever feel that if we don’t do it now, if we let this become another Sodom & Gomorrah,” mused Ronald Reagan to the Reverend Jim Bakker, “that we might be the generation that sees Armageddon?” As transcribed by Perlstein, their televised exchange reminded me of first encountering televangelism in 1976, snowbound in a Canton, Ohio motel: Jim Bakker simultaneously raising funds & faith-healing while Tammy Faye shed crocodile tears was the most outlandish television spectacular I’ve ever witnessed.

Reagan’s Armageddon rhetoric about nuclear weapons and the Soviet threat served red meat to his grass-roots supporters, and indigestion to power brokers in both parties. Basically, he had to reassure Republican leaders that he wouldn’t push the doomsday button in a fit of pique. Remembered now as an all-conquering hero, Reagan secured the 1980 nomination at a slow, steady turtle-like pace. He systematically knocked off formidable challenges from Howard Baker, Bob Dole (maybe not that formidable), George H.W. Bush, John Connally, and eventual third-party candidate John Anderson. As Perlstein unpacked the convention drama surrounding Reagan’s vice-presidential pick, I momentarily got lost in a counterfactual daydream. What if Reagan had chosen Gerald Ford as running mate, instead of George Bush, as he seriously considered? We may have been denied, or spared, both future Bush presidencies.

Of course there’s truth underlying the clichés about Jimmy Carter being a scold and Ronald Reagan a sunny optimist. “This is a painful step,” Carter told the American people, “and I’ll give it to you straight: Each of us will have use less oil and pay more for it.” Funny thing is, this speech and others where Carter took to the pulpit and sounded a severe note, did not result in a drop in his popularity. Not at first. Not until the Republican front-runner began to offer a contrasting note of uplift. Even when facts – those funny things – contradicted his homespun anecdotes, Reagan radiated Hope.

“Once Ronald Reagan convinced himself of something,” writes Perlstein, “no one was better at crafting a persuasive case for it, even if it was based on evidence that existed mostly in his imagination.” For the record, this is not at all what our current President practices on a daily basis. Donald Trump doesn’t invest belief in anything or anybody but his own bad self.

Even political mavens who weren’t alive forty years ago will recognize the decisive “There you go again” moment in the fateful debate between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. I recall watching it on a portable black and white TV in the offices of The Michigan Daily. However, until I read Rick Perlstein’s detailed recounting, I had forgotten how a stolen briefing book helped Reagan best Carter in that celebrated contest. At the time, I was dead certain Carter won but hey, I was living in a lefty college-town bubble.

Throughout Reaganland, Rick Perlstein mostly avoids facile comparisons with Donald Trump so I’ve tried to follow suit here. Yet in conclusion I can’t help reflecting that whether or not one highly rates Ronald Reagan as a leader, it’s hard – impossible – to imagine him or Jimmy Carter (or frankly any subsequent President through Obama) not rising to the challenges of the pandemic in a manner that shames the current White House occupant.

The Congressman Who Kicked a Hornets’ Nest

There is a history in all men’s lives, 
Figuring the nature of the times deceased; 
The which observed, a man may prophesy, 
With a near aim, of the main chance of things 
As yet not come to life… — Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 2

A newly elected congressman at age 35, Newton Leroy “Newt” Gingrich hardly fit the mold of a future Speaker of the House in 1978. He’d already run for Georgia’s Sixth congressional district seat twice before, in 1974 and ’76, losing both times. Though the former history professor (West Georgia College) came across as a nerdy scholar and political wannabe to some observers, he clearly viewed himself as a great statesman in the making. Right from the start, Newt Gingrich’s aspirations were always grand. Some might say grandiose.

In Burning Down the House, Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party, Julian E. Zelizer follows the Georgia congressman’s ruthless and relentless path to power during the Eighties, step by step.

As an assistant professor at West Georgia, Newt “lacked the patience for the slow crawl of university life. He couldn’t understand why the administration rejected his application to serve as university president after one year on the job or why the dean didn’t select him as chair of the department a year later.” Winning election to Congress amped up his already-healthy ego.

His personal style was dynamic, high-energy, yet he could also be unfocused and distant. “Newt was frenetic, moving from one idea the next, unconcerned with pushing any notable legislation. He was in constant conversation with everyone but intimate with almost no one. He found it easier to speak in slogans than to relate to the person in front of him.”

Reading about Gingrich’s bottomless self-confidence and sheer nerve can be comical today, though at the time, his Democratic opponents were not amused. Recognizing the majority party as vulnerable, Newt latched onto House Majority Leader (soon to be Speaker) Jim Wright of Texas as a soft target for his anti-corruption crusade. In perhaps his one truly brilliant and utterly cynical insight, Newt Gingrich identified the emerging media platform of cable TV news as the perfect medium for his partisan assaults as well as his personal assent. Especially C-SPAN, which he exploited as a sort of proto-Internet.

“This new cable television medium, a press without sentries, created opportunities to communicate with mass audiences that older Republicans didn’t understand and senior Democrats couldn’t handle. Through cable television, Gingrich would be able to carry out the guerrilla tactics.”

Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton, didn’t interview Newt Gingrich for this book but did gain access to his voluminous papers. The bulk of his narrative details how Gingrich eventually unseated Wright, mostly through accusations of financial impropriety regarding a slim bound volume of speeches that the Speaker of the House had published by a small press and peddled at campaign events. It’s a complicated chain of events, bordering on convoluted even in Professor Zelizer’s careful retelling. The fact that Gingrich simultaneously fell under scrutiny for a sketchy book-publishing deal of his own reveals much of what we need to know about how far chutzpah can get you in politics.

“The purification that Gingrich was demanding from Democrats was almost entirely one-sided. Gingrich, who was under an ethics cloud of his own, one eerily similar to the charges he had leveled against the Speaker, had no intention of demanding the same strict standards from his own allies. The campaign against Speaker Wright was all about politics, not good government…[O]nce politicians lowered the bar as to what kinds of actions were permissible in the political arena, it was virtually impossible to restore conditions to where they had been. When politicians see a colleague get away with something, the temptation is strong to replicate what they have witnessed in one form or another.”

One can only hope Julian E. Zelizer writes another book about Newt’s Nineties: his contentious tenure as Speaker of the House including the hyped-up Contract With America, his beyond-hypocritical condemnation of Bill Clinton’s sexual misadventures while conducting his own extramarital dalliance with a decades-younger female assistant, his departure from the Speakership and eventually the House itself under looming ethical shade.

The spectacle of Newt Gingrich today, in the twilight of his career, comes as no surprise: he pumps out book-length jeremiads (three so far) positing the current President as the only possible cure for the decayed state of our nation, and preaches to the peanut gallery on Fox News. Trump and Newt: these first-name-basis icons, or their brands, have much more in common than might be first evident between a history professor-turned-politician and a real estate mogul cum authoritarian demagogue. They’re both men with an eye for the main chance, guys who managed to grab the brass ring without having much of a clue about what to do with it. Or what to do next.

“I’ve had to fight like hell for everything I have, because for some reason people don’t like me.”

When Prince Hamlet says “what a piece of work is man” in the timeless tragedy, musing on the contradictory and self-defeating nature of human beings, Shakespeare coined a phrase that lives on to our day. “Piece of work” fits the late Richard Holbrooke like a bespoke suit. In Our Man, his unconventional biography of this veteran U.S. diplomat, George Packer takes the full measure of a complicated guy who set his sights at the uppermost level of government service — the “treetops” in Packer’s phrase — and only got about halfway there. Why Dick Holbrooke never became Secretary of State becomes obvious early on, though Our Man remains riveting through his postings in Vietnam (under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson), Bosnia (Clinton) and Afghanistan (Obama).

Holbrooke was the definition of a difficult personality. In Packer’s not-unsympathetic recounting, his subject comes across as a volatile — nearly toxic — cocktail of ambition and idealism, arrogance and intelligence, insight and effrontery. In other words, Dick can’t help being a dick. Even when he does the right thing, as in trying to warn LBJ about the impending quagmire in Vietnam, his abrasiveness and lack of self awareness push away even those who might be sympathetic to his cause, i.e. agree with him. Still, his heart was often in the right place though his head was perpetually up his ass. “He was that rare American in the treetops,” writes Packer, “who actually gave a shit about the dark places of the earth.”

And in his mad scramble up the career ladder, Holbrooke seemed determined to kick down at every rung. “His central nervous system required losers. There’s something heedless and needless about these scattered cruelties, as if none of them mattered — but in the end they would all count.” Bad karma eventually catches up with, and pulls down, the most nimble professional and/or social climber.

But what an ascent! Even war criminals marveled at our man’s sheer chutzpah.

“‘You have to admit Holbrooke has reached some minimal level of intelligence. But he is the most viperous character I know around this town.” This town is Washington DC, of course, and the speaker is none other than Henry Kissinger, who knows from viperous characters. Or this, from Slobodan Milošević,  former president of Serbia: “I like Deek, but for the sake of career he would eat small children for breakfast.”

Helping negotiate an end to the brutal civil war in Bosnia, even a far from perfect or permanent one, stands as Hobrooke’s main achievement. But as Packer notes, recognition didn’t follow the Dayton accords. “[He] devoted three years of his life to a small war in an obscure place with no consequences in the long run beyond itself.”

During the Bosnia talks, Holbrooke was “in his prime, his powers engaged to their fullest capacity, bringing out his very best and simultaneously, reducing him to his very worst.”

Alija Izetbegović, President of Bosnia and Herzegovina, later gave Dick his due.

“They say that diplomacy and power are two ends of the scale. The more power you have, the less diplomacy you need. In the extreme case, if you are a superpower, you don’t need diplomacy of any kind. Holbrooke gave the lie to this theory. Although he represented the greatest superpower — in fact, the only true superpower in the world — he was to the fullest extent a diplomat, and used his persuasive skills like the most powerful of weapons.” That said, Alija Izetbegović personally disliked Holbrooke. 

Late in his career Holbrooke’s legendary energy became even more fitful, scattered. He was all over the place. “No one was spared his inattention,” notes Packer about Dick’s final diplomatic gig, “only Obama, who didn’t want it, had his full attention.” Holbrooke thought Barack Obama “had ice water flowing through his veins” while the president was repelled by the endless gusts of hot air erupting from Holbrooke’s mouth. 

Packer’s narrative voice may feel intrusive, or too casual to some readers but I found it refreshing. “I don’t know what you were doing in your mid-thirties, but I wasn’t trying to establish diplomatic relations with two of America’s former enemies simultaneously.” He’s frank about his subject’s flaws while giving credit, and respect, where it’s due.

Two sentences, neither offered as summary, nevertheless capture the essence of Richard Holbrooke.

“He hadn’t wanted the job, but he poured himself into it.”

“Try to separate the best from the worst — you can’t.”

Perhaps there’s little to admire about Richard Holbrooke; his lifelong indifference to his sons and mercenary womanizing stuck in my craw. But the story of his professional life, as relayed in Our Man, summons a sense of wonder, of awe, mixed with humor and fear. He was a force of nature, not to mention a piece of work.