Note: This is part five of five articles examining the National Republican Party from Nixon to Trump and how lies, cheating, bullying and racism became the favorite tools of the GOP.

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Note: This is part four of five articles examining the National Republican Party from Nixon to Trump and how lies, cheating, bullying and racism became the favorite tools of the GOP.

George Herbert Walker Bush was born into the kind of American aristocracy where failure simply wasn’t part of the vocabulary—his father Prescott a Wall Street titan turned U.S. Senator, the family’s Greenwich estate the sort of place where power was inherited like the family silver. But young George, the genuine war hero who enlisted on his 18th birthday and became the Navy’s youngest aviator, shot down over the Pacific and plucked from the ocean by a submarine, seemed determined to prove he’d earned his own way. After Yale and Skull and Bones—because of course there was Skull and Bones—he decamped for the oil fields of West Texas in 1948, trading his Connecticut patrimony for the dusty plains of Midland, making his fortune with Zapata Petroleum and positioning himself as a self-made man, though the family connections that financed his ventures told a more complicated story.

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His résumé reads like a guided tour through the corridors of American power: congressman from Texas in 1966, ambassador to the United Nations under Nixon, chairman of the Republican National Committee during Watergate, envoy to China, and then—the capstone of his pre-presidential career—Director of Central Intelligence from 1976 to 1977, tasked with restoring the CIA’s battered reputation after Vietnam and Watergate. By the time Reagan tapped him as vice president in 1980, Bush had accumulated more high-level government experience than virtually anyone who’d ever sought the presidency. He’d been everywhere, done everything, knew everyone. And therein lay both his strength and his fatal weakness: he was the ultimate insider in an era increasingly hostile to insiders, a man whose entire identity was bound up in duty and service to institutions that millions of Americans had come to distrust.

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Note: This is part three of five articles examining the National Republican Party from Nixon to Trump and how lies, cheating, bullying and racism became the favorite tools of the GOP. You can read Part One on Nixon and Part Two on Ford by clicking the links.

Picture Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1976, standing at the podium of the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, having just lost the nomination to Gerald Ford by a whisker. The house lights catch the Brylcreem in his hair, that architectural marvel of male vanity that wouldn’t move in a hurricane. He’s sixty-five years old, ancient by political standards, but the makeup and lighting—always the makeup and lighting with Reagan—make him look like a mature leading man, which is exactly what he was.

Ford has just invited him to speak, a desperate gesture to heal the party he’d split like a ripe melon. Reagan takes the microphone and delivers an impromptu sermon about nuclear war and human survival that has delegates weeping into their Goldwater buttons. In that moment, everyone in the Kemper Arena knows they’ve nominated the wrong man. They’re watching Ford, that human paperweight, while the star glows in the wings. Four years later, they’d correct their mistake and unleash something far more dangerous than Nixon’s paranoid criminality or Ford’s enabling mediocrity: they’d elect an actor who would make American cruelty look like kindness, make devastation feel like morning, make the destruction of the poor seem like their own fault.

Reagan didn’t just continue the corruption Ford had enabled—he perfected it, gift-wrapped it, sold it with a wink and a smile that made Americans feel good about feeling nothing for their suffering neighbors. If Nixon was the criminal and Ford the enabler, Reagan was the magician who made the crime disappear even as he was committing it.

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Nancy watched from the VIP box that night in Kansas City, her face a porcelain mask of practiced adoration, already calculating the comeback. She understood something the political establishment didn’t: Americans didn’t want truth, they wanted performance. They didn’t want complexity, they wanted cowboy movies. They didn’t want to face what they’d become, they wanted an actor to tell them they were wonderful just as they were, even as he picked their pockets and poisoned their children.

The myth-making began immediately. By the time Reagan announced for 1980, he’d been transformed from a B-movie actor who’d informed on his colleagues to the FBI into Moses himself, come down from the mountain to lead conservatives to the promised land. The fact that he’d been a New Deal Democrat until General Electric literally paid him to change his mind? Memory-holed. His presidency of the Screen Actors Guild when he was feeding names to HUAC? Ancient history. The messy divorce from Jane Wyman, who’d grown tired of his emotional absence? Never mentioned.

What they sold instead was the Gipper—that scene-stealing performance from “Knute Rockne, All American” where he dies young and beautiful, asking his team to “win one for the Gipper.” It was Reagan’s only memorable movie moment, and he’d spend the rest of his life reenacting it in various forms, always dying nobly for the cameras, always asking America to win one for him. The fact that George Gipp was a pool shark and a drunk who’d contracted strep throat from a prostitute? Well, darling, that didn’t fit the narrative.

The 1980 campaign was a masterclass in racial dog-whistling wrapped in sunny optimism. Reagan announced his candidacy in Philadelphia, Mississippi—not the one with the Liberty Bell, but the one where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. Standing where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner had been lynched for the crime of registering Black voters, Reagan talked about “states’ rights.” The message was as subtle as a burning cross but delivered with that twinkly grandfather smile that made white suburbanites feel sophisticated rather than complicit.

His campaign manager, the reptilian Lee Atwater—who would later die of a brain tumor, proving that occasionally there is justice in the universe—perfected Nixon’s Southern Strategy for the television age. “You can’t say n****r anymore,” Atwater explained with the casualness of a man ordering coffee. “That backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Reagan delivered these abstractions with the timing of a professional actor. The welfare queen driving her Cadillac—a complete fiction based on one woman in Chicago who’d committed welfare fraud, transformed into an entire Black population gaming the system. The “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps—another fantasy delivered with just enough indignation to make white voters feel their resentment was justified. This wasn’t racism, heavens no. This was just common sense, fiscal responsibility, morning in America.

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Note: This is part one of five articles looking at the National Republican Party from Nixon to Trump and how lies, cheating, bulling and racism became the favorite tools of the GOP. You can read Part One on Nixon by clicking here.

1974-1977: The Pardoner’s Tale

The first domino fell not with Nixon but with Spiro Agnew—that sweating, snarling pit bull of a vice president who turned out to be exactly what he looked like: a crook. While America was fixated on Watergate, Agnew was conducting his own criminal enterprise from the vice president’s office, taking bribes in literal paper bags like some third-rate mob enforcer shaking down contractors in Baltimore. Cash in envelopes. Paper bags of money. This was the Vice President of the United States conducting business like he was running a protection racket in Little Italy.

Agnew’s resignation in October 1973 should have been the first major red flag—not just about Nixon’s judgment in choosing a running mate, but about the rot that had infected the entire administration. If the vice president was this corrupt, this brazen, this criminally stupid, what did that say about the man who’d selected him? What did it say about the Republican Party that had twice nominated this ticket? But Washington, in its infinite capacity for denial, treated Agnew’s crimes as an isolated incident, a regrettable footnote, when it should have been seen as the opening act of a much larger tragedy.

Into this void stepped Gerald Rudolph Ford—appointed, not elected, the first vice president chosen under the 25th Amendment. Here is history’s cruel joke, its warning written in neon that we chose to ignore: Ford became the 38th President of the United States without receiving a single vote for national office. Not one. Not for president, not for vice president—nothing. It was as if the political gods themselves were trying to warn us, sending us a leader through the back door of constitutional succession like a thief in the night, though Ford was no thief. He was something worse: an enabler of thieves.

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The pie…

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Note: This is part one of five articles looking at the National Republican Party from Nixon to Trump and how lies, cheating, bulling and racism became the favorite tools of the GOP.

1969: The Seeds of Destruction

The snow that January was particularly harsh, as if nature itself was offering commentary on what was about to unfold. Richard Nixon took the oath of office with his hand on two family Bibles, his Quaker mother Hannah’s spirit surely turning in her grave at what her son was about to do to the Republic. But there he stood, that fascinating gargoyle of American ambition, promising to bring us together while his henchmen were already drawing up the enemies lists in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building.

The transition period had already shown Nixon’s true colors. Before even taking office, he had sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks through Anna Chennault, his secret liaison to the South Vietnamese government, promising them a better deal if they refused to negotiate with Johnson. This treasonous act—yes, treasonous—prolonged a war that would kill 20,000 more Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. But winning mattered more than lives.

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The tapes from this first year—oh, those glorious, damning tapes!—reveal a man drunk on the wine of finally, finally having made it. The recording system, ironically installed to preserve his legacy, would become the instrument of his destruction. Voice-activated, capturing everything, missing nothing—every slur, every criminal conspiracy, every paranoid rant preserved for posterity in magnetic clarity.

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