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

Editor’s note: This review of Rick Perlstein’s new biography, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, was written by Ronald Reagan expert, Lee Edwards, and originally appeared in Human Events.

Not since Edmund Morris’s bizarre semi-fictional biography of Ronald Reagan has there been such a deeply disappointing Reagan book as Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. No sooner was it published than it was greeted with charges of plagiarism, egregious misstatements, and “invisible” footnotes.

It is always useful to know what the Other Side is doing, and Perlstein is a committed liberal journalist who writes for the far left The Nation and was a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future that describes itself as “the strategy center for the progressive movement.”

I first met Perlstein more than a decade ago when he was researching his book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.  He usually quoted me and other conservatives accurately but not always. And there were times when he lifted portions of my Goldwater biography without citing my work.

Read the rest of the article in Human Events