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

Rick Perlstein (Get this book)
After the swamping of the Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964, it seemed unlikely that 16 years later another stridently conservative candidate, Ronald Reagan, would be elected in a landslide. After all, Nixon had run and governed as a centrist who accepted most New Deal and Great Society programs. Perlstein is an award-winning author who has written extensively on politics in the 1960s and 1970s. Here, he recounts the events between the slow decay of the Nixon administration in 1973 as Watergate unfolded, up to Reagan's surprisingly close, if failed, effort to unseat the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford, in 1976. That failure, of course, proved, in retrospect, that Reagan could succeed as a national candidate. This is a masterful interpretation of years critical to the formation of our current political culture.--Booklist