Angry Planet - How Reagan Made Us the Armaggedon Generation

Episode Date: October 3, 2020

America is perhaps more conservative today than it’s ever been. For some on the right, Obama, Biden and Clinton look like socialists. For people on the left, they look like moderate republicans. There’s a reason for both of those views that’s steeped in America’s recent past. U.S. culture was shaped by a suave and smooth talking President who promised we could be a beacon of hope for the world and a shining city on a hill.Here to talk about what happened is Rick Perlstein. Perlstein is a returning guest and the author of the new book Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980. The book is, among other things, the story of how a Southern Evangelical Democrat paved the way for a divorced actor from California to ascend to the presidency and shape America’s destiny.Recorded 9/10/20How voters go from voting for Johnson to voting for NixonAmerica’s moral reckoning, from Vietnam to WatergateWhat Star Wars tells us about America todayStable government under a crook vs unstable government under an honest manCall of Duty: Cold War and the hero worship of ReaganJimmy Carter as the redeemer of America’s sinsThe nightly hostage wrap upHow the Camp David Accords set the Middle East against CarterAfghanistan as a stop on the Hippie trailWhen Carter cancelled the OlympicsNuclear debatesRick’s Reagan impersonationHow the press and politicians misread the momentAngry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The Afghanistan thing is seen as a Soviet expansionist move. And it was just mind-blowing to me to read, Zvignu Brzynski, who was the very hardline, hawkish, Cold War, National Security Advisor Jimmy Carter had. Speaking of ambiguity, his secretary of state was basically like, you know, almost like a pacifist in a lot of ways, Cyrus Vance. Zabignew Brzezinski was absolutely convinced that this was, they were establishing a beachhead to invade Iran and take over the oil fields in Saudi Arabia. And, you know, this was such a terrifying prospect that Jimmy Carter was a present an option to bomb the passages between Iran and Afghanistan with nuclear weapons. Right. But again, very much. Anarchyan. And immediately, public opinion shifts away from this kind of more detent-based human rights-based foreign policy.

And next thing you know, Jimmy Carter is promising a 20% increase in America's defense budget if he wins a second term. There's Reagan land right there. They're also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know, we don't know. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time, will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost with

immunity, and when it is near to completion, people talk about intervention. They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. Hello, welcome

to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Gohm. And I'm Jason Field. America is perhaps more conservative today than it's ever been, for some on the Obama, Biden and Clinton look like socialists. For people on the left, they look like moderate Republicans. There's a reason for both of those views that steeped in America's recent past. U.S. culture was shaped by a suave and smooth-talking president who promised we could be a beacon of hope for the world and a shining city on a hill.

Here to talk about what happened is Rick Perelstein. Pearlstein is a returning guest and the author of the new book, Reagan Land, America's right turn, 1976 to 1980. The book is, among other things, the story of how a Southern Evangelical Democrat paved the way for a divorced actor from California to ascend to the presidency and shape America's destiny. Rick, thank you so much for joining us. Hi, Matthew. Hi, Jason. Okay. So your books aren't really biographies in the traditional sense, but rather these cultural histories of the country as reflected by these specific leaders.

So with that in mind, what is the psychic? space of Reagan land. That's right. So in the preface for Nixon land, which was my second book, I say that my subject is, yeah, not Nixon, but it's actually the voter who in 1964 voted for Lyndon Johnson because to do otherwise seem crazy. But the same guy in 1972 votes for the Republican, Richard Nixon, instead of George McGovern because to do otherwise seems crazy, right?

So what is the psychic, political, cultural, social, economic space that kind of creates the mentality of the country that embraces these leaders? And what is the fact that the fact of that embrace say about the transformation of basically the country in a much broader sense than just its politics? And I would say that Reagan land represents a psychic space in which, the reckoning that America, the moral reckoning, I would say that America had begun after Watergate and after losing its first war and after losing its sense of permanent economic dominance that came from the Arab oil embargo in 1973

in the rise of statulation, kind of withered away under the appeal of this man who basically was arguing that America is God's chosen nation and that anyone who says otherwise is in some subtle but real way, not quite American at all. I, of course, use a lot of popular culture in these books. and I would say the most kind of sharp way of drawing this comparison

is to compare the kind of movies that were galvanizing everyone's attention in the early and mid-70s and that we're actually doing kind of gangbusters box office that were full of adult themes, you know, moral ambiguity, critique of powerful institutions. movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or The Godfather or a taxi driver. And how those were superseded in the cultural imagination by movies like Star Wars, which George Lucas quite specifically said he had designed as a children's movie, a movie to teach kids that there are hard and fact. lines between good and evil.

And what came to mind when you framed the question was something actually that's not in the book. I had a much longer discussion of Superman that I published as an article in the Washington Spectator. And in Star Wars, you have these kind of scrappy guerrilla warriors who are on the run, who are, you know, undermanned, underarmed, and they're fighting this empire. It's called the empire, obviously, that has a death star, these massive weapons that's, you know, colonizing the rest of the world. And the striking thing about that political scenario is that only two years earlier,

you know, America makes this final retreat for Vietnam. And we were fighting a band of scrappy underground guerrilla warriors who were underarmed. It was the Viet Cong. And we were the empire, right? We were the Death Star, you know, our death-dealing juggernauts like the USS Midway, right? And one of the pleasures that Star Wars afforded the nation was the ability to imagine ourselves as the underdog in this kind of battle between good and evil, right? It comprised precisely inverted reality. And you see that in a lot of Vietnam war films at the time.

And as I put it in the book, people were willing to vote with their dollars at the box office for Reagan-like movies before they were willing to vote for a Ronald Reagan at the ballot box. So that's the psychic space I'm narrating. That's the transformation I'm narrating. And do we know what Reagan himself thought of Star Wars? Oh, he loved it. Yes, and I say Ronald Reagan, Star Wars was a very Ronald Reagan style movie.

Of course, years later, his Space Shield was named the Star Wars program, right? Complete fantasy, just like Star Wars. And we can also surmise that Star Wars really wasn't a Jimmy Carter sort of movie, you know, Jimmy Carter like Reinhold Niebuhr. He liked, you know, moral ambiguity, and he was not a black and white kind of guy, you know. he loved Reinhold Nievers quote that the aim of politics

is to establish justice in a fallen world, you know? I don't even think Ronald Reagan would be able to wrap his mind over that concept. But it's a very, it's a very Christian concept. That this is the foreign world

that we live in. Yes. Fallen, yes. Yes, it's a certain kind of Christianity, but not the kind of Christianity represented by, say, a Pat Robertson, you know, who's, you know,

character in this book, one of the Christian ministers who abandons Jimmy Carter because Jimmy Carter, you know, has all the wrong positions on things like gay rights and feminism. He says that God, who he apparently knows intimately, would much rather have stable government under a crook than unstable government under an honest man. So it's basically saying, you know, Richard Nixon, you know, the reactionary is better than Jimmy Carter, the liberal who's, you know, letting sexual iniquity into the gates of the American family. I feel like just at the moment, and I'm going to throw a couple data points at you, we have Reagan on the brain, too. Your book is out, obviously. Do you, speaking of pop culture, do you mess with video games at all?

Is this the call of war thing? Not just that. So there's Call of Duty Cold War is coming out this holiday season in which Reagan personally puts the player on to go do Black Ops missions abroad. I saw the trailer for that and I definitely have some thoughts about that. What's the other one? The other one, this is really interesting. I'm playing it right now. It's a game called Wasteland 3, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic world that's set in like as if,

the nukes had launched in the 80s. And there is a faction of people that you have to deal with who worship Reagan as a god king. They call him a god president. And they have an AI that's this AI that's essentially been fed, just been fed his speeches. And it's a robot that just kind of repeats things that he says and they worship it. Oh, I could write that computer program. Yeah. And it's fascinating.

How does the nuclear war start? Is it kind of like there was Able Archer where there was a nuclear exercise that causes an accidental nuclear explosion? Yeah, it was Russia and America, and it's one of these things where it's a little ambiguous and lost to history as to exactly who threw the first blow. Right. That's probably a likely scenario. The Gippers is what they call themselves. They tell the story that Reagan survived and then wandered into the wilderness and uploaded his consciousness into this robot. and now they are the stewards of it.

I'm going to have to check that out. That's pretty fascinating. There's a female priest class called the nancies that take care of everything. It's, yeah. Is it ridiculous or is it kind of compelling? It's both. I would say that it is so over the top and surreal. Like a watchman or something.

Yeah, but it has to be to kind of drive home the absurdity of some of the stuff. Yeah. I mean, I will comment that like, you know, Growing up in the early 80s, we were just absolutely terrified. It was going to be nuclear holocaust. It was just completely a part of everyday life. So I can't really comment on that, but on the call of duty, I did see the trailer. And I've kind of like, that's one of the things I've had in the back of my mind.

I've been super busy promoting the book. But just to write about, if only on social media, because that's the fascinating thing about the trailer is it really is, you know, the world of popular culture and video games really wrenching. the Overton window to the right in a very disturbing way in that this scenario is you're kind of down in the situation room and there's a guy who, you know, sounds just like James Baker and there's like, you know, and there's a guy who looks like Robert Redford with a scar in his face and he's the super spy and they're talking about some

Russian spy who is responsible for everything bad in the world And, yeah, Perseus. And they're like, we need to undertake an illegal mission to wipe him out. And are you willing to do it? And of course, the steely Robert Reef for guy says, of course. And then Ronald Reagan walks in. And if I recall correctly, there's someone says, well, of course, this is illegal. Are you going to authorize this mission? And Ronald Reagan says, you know, it's the fate of the universe. You know, who cares about the laws, right? So it's this popular culture. rewriting something that was literally a fantasy, which was the idea that the Soviet Union was going to somehow conquer America through Central America, which is why we needed to directly break laws passed by Congress in order to arm these people with money skimmed from illegal arms sales to Iran that didn't even work because whenever we would pay off these people with missiles in order to free hostage, they would just take another hostage. So it was a moral, political, constitutional fiasco that led to, you know,

maybe at this point a million corpses in Central America because of generations of civil wars being turned into this Star Wars-like narrative in which, you know, the moral rightness is kind of wrenched into a way that can't even be questioned. So I'm very disturbed by that. I'm very intrigued by that. And hopefully people who read my book will, I don't know what you do with a video game now. Put it in the trash bin of your computer. I don't know.

Unfortunately, Call of Duty is so wildly popular. It's going to make millions and millions of dollars. Oh, well, maybe I can give them a run for their money with this podcast. So another thing I think is interesting in the book is, is that. this is so much about the Carter administration, right? It's about how the Carter administration sets up this Reagan world, Reagan land that you're talking about. And in many ways here, Reagan kind of defines himself in opposition to Carter and U.S. politics in general, right? What was it about Carter? So I always remember my father telling me, father of Vietnam veteran,

always kind of telling me that Carter was a good man in a terrible president. president. Why do we have this cultural memory of him? And how did Reagan kind of, I don't know if exploit is the right word, but take advantage of it? Yeah, I mean, I would say my judgment as not a foreign policy expert is that when it comes to actual foreign policy, he actually wasn't a terrible president. And that as a scholar of Jimmy Carter as a person and a politician, he was not really that good a man. So we can kind of get into that. It maybe has a little more to do with the domestic stuff than the foreign policy stuff.

But certainly their perception was there and perception can become reality in politics. So you got to really start at the beginning of what Jimmy Carter ran as and why he won, right? he you know if you buy the hardcover of the book you can you know see the photographs i chose and one of them is a poster from the democratic convention with jrador with a giant beard and a robe saying uh jc can redeem america so this idea that um jimmy carter could wash america on the blood of the lamb after the the serial sinning of vietnam and watergate was just a huge part of what he was up to. And there was very little that he offered specifically when it came to policy. It was all an appeal made through the language of symbolism, whether it was that he was this

humble peanut farmer who wore a flannel shirt or a guy who wasn't a lawyer, who was not a professional politician. That was his big applause line. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a politician, right? And in terms of foreign policy, it was something that was articulated in a very famous speech at Notre Dame in May of 1977, that America's foreign policy would be reoriented in terms of human rights and made the very striking formulation that the problem with American foreign policy was that we allied with any dictator that, you know, we believe advance our interest no matter how, you know, corrupt or repressive they were. And very much in people's minds at that time, because of the 1975 Senate Church

Committee investigations were the crimes of the CIA. And the fact they'd spied on Americans and the fact that they'd assassinated foreign leaders. And one of the first bureaucratic acts he did was to cut the CIA's, what do you call, at the part of the underground, you know, kind of covert, covert missions, covert, covert staff in half. He nominated as his CIA director, Ted Sorensen, the former Kennedy speech writer, who had been a conscientious objector in World War II. The right wing shot that down. He was very committed to arms control and put on the table, the elimination of nuclear

weapons, all these sorts of things. And I basically made our, made an argument that America should not project force over the world as it had. And was talking about, you know, removing America's troops from from South Korea, just to give one example. And, you know, over the course of, and then another great example is he continued the negotiations and took him to the finish line that started with Lyndon Johnson to return the Panama, Panama Canal, the Panama Canal in the Panama Canal zone to Panama. So Panama Canal being his last vestige of kind of high 19th century imperialism. And, you know, the right wing was absolutely apoplectic about it. It was one of their big organizing crusades.

He won that fight, which is one of the things that makes him, you know, such an impressive figure when it comes to foreign policy. But he wasted so much political capital and that he wasn't able to get any thing done in terms of arms control. But his timing was terrible, right? Basically, the bill, America's bill, for having enthroned the Shah of Iran after Mossadegh in Iran nationalized the oil supply in 1953 and a joint operation between the CIA and and British intelligence,

inspired a successful revolution that brought this theocrat, I had told a community to power. One of the fascinating things about that was that basically every party involved in Iran, basically everyone except for the theocrats in Iran, presumed that either the secular liberals or the Marxists that were part of the revolutionary coalition, would prevail. One of my big influences in this, by the way, is a book by Carol,

Strange Rebels, 1979 in the birth of the 21st century. And it's a book about Iran and Afghanistan and the liberalization of the economy in China and Margaret Thatcher. And in all these cases, all the experts who are supposed to know everything, think all these things are impossible, right? There's no sense within the security world or the intelligence world. that political Islam has any purchase at all. So that happens in February of 1979. And as a lot of people do not know, there was actually hostages taken in the American embassy

on Valentine's Day in 1979, the same day as America's ambassador in Afghanistan was assassinated, probably by the Soviet Union, in February, 1979. and of course the revolution becomes bloodier and bloodier and bloodier and in this fascinating movement of the tail wagging the dog a group of militant students, most of them engineering students

are having a debate over taking over an embassy. They, the first idea is to take over the Soviet embassy because the Soviet Union is just as evil to them as the great state in the United States. they, for various reasons, decided to take over the American embassy with, as their model, the 1960s student citizens of, you know,

university administration buildings that they learned as students sent to America to become sort of the secular elite of the Shah's, you know, kind of white revolution. And they become radicalized, radicalized Muslims. And

basically, through a comedy of airs, they end up holding these hostages permanently. At first, the Ayatollah Khomeini is horrified. But then he sees the enormous publicity value. It's very much a news event, a media event. And Iran sets up a 24-hour television feed from the gate of the embassy. And that turns it into this global melodrama.

And then at the end of the year of 1970, The story in Afghanistan is also this bizarre Cold War comedy of airs in which a Marxist government takes over in Afghanistan. There's this faction fight between these sort of moderate Marxists who are allied with the Soviet Union and these sort of Stalinists who basically want to institute a reign of terror in Afghanistan. in, the extremist win. The Soviets, again, are horrified, right? But there's this fascinating, very ambiguous debate within the Kremlin over what they should do, very similar to the debates within the American security establishment about Vietnam. There's this kind of reluctant invasion.

And the Reaganite part of this and the part that makes it so frustrating for Jimmy Carter's view of the world and how American foreign policy should work, is that these events are both interpreted in very manichy in terms, right? So the hostage is being taken is seen as this blow to America's masculinity itself, right? And the Afghanistan thing is seen as a Soviet expansionist move. And it was just mind-blowing to me to read, you know, Zivignu, Brazil. who was the very hard line, hawkish, coal war, national security advisor Jimmy Carter had.

Speaking of ambiguity, his Secretary of State was basically like, you know, almost like a pacifist in a lot of ways, Cyrus Vance. Zivignew Brzezinski was absolutely convinced that this was, they were establishing a beachhead to invade Iran and take over the oil fields in Saudi Arabia. And, you know, this was such a terrifying prospect that Jimmy Carter was a present an option to bomb the passages between Iran and Afghanistan with nuclear weapons, right? But again, very Manichaean. And immediately public opinion shifts away from this kind of more detent-based human rights-based foreign policy.

And next thing you know, Jimmy Carter is promising a 20% increase in America's defense budget if he wins a second term. There's Reagan land right there. Well, there's so many questions I have based on all of that. One thing I do want to highlight that I didn't know this, and I learned it from your book, is it's really interesting. The press doesn't help at all. In the way the hostage crisis in particular is covered, it doesn't help. Especially when you have hostages kind of being let out piecemeal and then going on television

and saying things that sound a lot like what people remember from the 60s, right? They sound like Weatherman, right? They're talking about evil American empire and, you know, the global capitalism as this evil. Well, they're also telling the truth about what America's role in destroying, you know, the prospects where democracy are in Iran. Absolutely. But it looks to the average viewer at home as if they're being brainwashed. And I believe that you even said that one of the news stations was saying, said falsely that people were being tied to chairs and forced through 23 hours of brainwashing, right? Yeah, there was, I mean, I think there was some.

The thing is, you got to remember, these guys were like kids, you know. I mean, they look like, you know, like, they look like high school students. They were college students, you know, and they had no idea what they were doing. And, you know, there were these ham-handed attempts to kind of, to, to, engage in torture slash enhanced interrogation of the people that were reeled as CIA agents, right? I mean, there was lots of conspiracy theories. There was presumption that, you know, the place was marbled with CIA agents, i.e. the nation of Iran, where there were really only like five in the entire country.

But you refer to the media stuff. This immediately became this sentimentalized narrative of American innocents defiled. And, you know, you can say a lot of things about America. America's policies in Iran, but, you know, innocence is not one of them, right? But, you know, one of the extraordinary confluences that played into this story was this guy, Rune Arledge, right, who was the head of ABC News was elevated to the head of the news division simultaneously while he was the head of his previous job, the sports division. and he basically is the first person to try and turn the evening television news, which had traditionally been a lost leader for the networks, basically their bit to say,

we're serious public-spirited institutions, and we deserve our free and privilege access to this public trust, the community airwaves, turns it into like a circus. And he's the guy who invented wide world of sports. You know, he's the guy invented Monday Night Football. He's the one who imposed Howard CoSell on a, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, , uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,

hostages are freed, you know, on, on Ronald Reagan's inauguration day, and he tells the, um, the whole hostage drama, um, and the guy refuses, like, that's ridiculous. So he gets his sports producer to do it instead. And he turns the, um, the whole hostage drama into, a soap opera. And that really limits Jimmy Carter's freedom of movement. I point out that in 1968, an almost equal number of hostages were taken by North Korea when they captured an American merchant vessel to Pueblo.

And that almost got like no news coverage at all. The only people cared about it with a John Birch Society. I point out that during, I think it was during World War II, the Chinese communists took a bunch of Americans hostage in the embassy, and I couldn't find any news coverage of that at all. But because of the medium became the message, because the centralization of TV and TV news, you guys were probably around then.

Did you have a hostage penpail? Well, actually, I mean, I remember Nightline going, on the year. That was, that was, that was, that was, that was Rune Arledge and ABC had been trying to find something to go head to head against Johnny Carson. And, uh, local stations would play like, you know, um, old mash reruns and stuff. And then Rune Arlidge came up with the idea of having a nightly hostage wrap-up. And that's what became Nightline.

And, uh, even like the, the night, he produced the, 1980 winter Olympics. and Nightline became a commercial for the Olympics, and the Olympics became a commercial for Nightline. And the ribbons that were tied around people's trees and stuff, the yellow ribbons. A yellow ribbons from the popular song, tie a yellow ribbon about the old old tree, yeah. And the role of the families of the hostages was really fascinating.

There's an amazing memoir by one of the hostage wives and one of the hostages that they wrote jointly. and she wrote with just unbelievable searing eloquence about how much this sentimentalization of the hostage's plight harmed them, right? And she tells us a story about some crazy right-wing radio host in New York City who somehow got the phone number of the embassy, you know, instead issuing threats to the students,

you know, and how like the government worked really hard to keep their name secret. But the New York Daily News, one of those sentimental tabloids in New York printed the names of all the hostages with their faces, with their faces on them. And I talk about how the Thanksgiving Night broadcast on ABC, you know, from a roaning table in Iowa of one of the hostage families that looked just like a Norman Rockwell painting. That's Reagan Land too. And this stuff did also have real world, like not real world.

It had domestic consequences. as well, right? One of the things you highlight in the book is, like, what happened to Iranian embassies and Iranian people in America while all this was going on. Yes. Yeah, that was a real striking, striking part of my research. I mean, if you want to know where the feral energies that produce Trumpism came from, you know, just look at the plight of Iranian students in the United States,

some of them Iranian-Americans, sometimes even citizens, the vigilante violence. I depict basically an anti-Iranian riot in all places, Beverly Hills, in which, you know, people are just being pummeled within an inch of their lives while the cops watch and cheer them on. You know, I have a picture in the book of, you know, someone holding up a sign saying, you know, Iranians go home. You know, the same thing happened to the Cuban refugees from the Muriel Boatlift, right? That's sort of nativist energies. That's Reaganland, too. All right, Angry Planet listeners.

We're going to pause there for a break. We'll be back after this. Thank you for sticking with us. You are listening to Angry Planet. We are talking to Rick Pearlstein about his new book, Reaganland. One thing I kind of want to set up is, can we talk about there's a reason I feel, or there's many reasons. Obviously, the CIA is a big one. But there's reasons, I think, that a lot of animus in the Middle East was directed specifically towards Carter.

And I put some of that around the Camp David Accords. Right. Can you tell us a little bit about that and like what the reaction was like in the country and abroad to that? Right. Well, in in America, it was, you know, celebrated as this great breakthrough, right? I mean, that's one of my childhood memories was being marched to the grade school auditorium to watch the signing of the peace treaty, you know, early in 1979. So basically, Jimmy Carter, you know, as an evangelical Christian, was very, very interested in. Israel, right? I mean, it was this kind of living presence in his life and his imagination.

And in his memoir, why not the best? He has this very telling line in which he says, um, his childhood was on a farm was on a farm that wasn't that different from a farm, you know, two thousand years earlier, you know, and, you know, he lives in this place where all the biblical names, you know, all the name, the place names are biblical. And so he kind of makes it his big project to get Egypt and Israel at the table to, uh, You know, they've had an official state of war ever since the Israeli-Israeli-Egypt war of 1973. And he handles this in a very sophisticated way.

I mean, Jimmy Carter was really bad at politics when it came to dealing with, like, Congress and other politicians. But he was pretty good at diplomacy because he could kind of, when he could just kind of, like, come up with some sort of plan on his own, right, outside of any kind of political influence, he could really move the chess pieces around in a really sophisticated way.

For example, he knew he needed buy-in from Saudi Arabia. So he did this arms deal for Saudi Arabia that was a very tough fight that he got through the Senate that basically secured the royal families as intermediaries to the rest of the Arab world. And, you know, Nixon and Kissinger get all this credit for doing that kind of stuff when it comes to China, but really this is what

Carter was doing with regard to the Arab world and it really sophisticated way and he gets them to Camp David and he keeps them there for two weeks. And there's a really wonderful text 13 days by Robert Wright. Is it Robert Wright? No, I'm sorry.

No, it's the guy who wrote the Scientology book and Lawrence Wright. Yeah, Lawrence Wright. Texas. And, yeah, it's just this hour by hour chronicle of how many times, you know, Manacham Began and Anwar Sadat were ready to walk away from the table. And Jimmy Carter's brilliance and steelyness in keeping them at the table.

And, you know, they agree to this accord. The tragedy of the court is they basically can only agree to it by putting the Palestinian issue to table the Palestinian issue indefinitely. right and it almost breaks apart but he gets them back to agree with some personal diplomacy from both to both Egypt

and Israel and yeah like the consequences for this actually for Carter are a huge bump in his poll ratings but it goes down almost immediately so that's March of 1979 it's right on the cost of the oil crisis

in that spring and that summer but internationally the this is terrible for Anwar Sadat, who really much more than Menachem Begin was the party who took the most courageous risks for peace. Anwar Sadat, of course, eventually was assassinated as soon as he took the first initiative by visiting Israel, which was an extraordinary thing. And when the plane, when Amwar Sadat's plane landed, in the tarmac in November of Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem, I don't remember which,

in November of 1977, Israeli commandos were at the ready, snipers were at the ready, because there was this, there was this fear that this was actually kind of like a Trojan horse, that the plane was going to open, and as Egyptian commandos were going to come out firing. Right. So, but this was terrible for America's image in the Middle East, because all these Arab potentates, of course,

bought all their domestic loyalty by scapegoating Israel for all the troubles in the world. And it also certainly, you know, my dad went to his grave insisting that Jimmy Carter was an anti-Semite, right? Because maybe it was because of all the terrible things he said about Monacham Began and his diary, because Monaco Muggan was an asshole, you know.

He would completely consistently break agreements he made with Jimmy Carter. He would consistently, you know, build settlements in the occupied territories. And he would consistently go back on his work. And he was originally a member of the year, Gunn, wasn't he? Well, that's, I mean, both, you know, that's what makes this actually a beautiful story, is that both Monachem Begin and Anwar Sadat had terrorist passed. Anwar Sadat was an admirer of Adolf Hitler. He was kind of part of the anti-British underground.

And, you know, and Monarchum Began was the guy responsible for a terrorist bombing that, what, killed like 50 people at the King David Hotel? And, you know, that's the fascinating thing about the rise of Monachem Begin was he was kind of like Israel's Reagan in that no one saw him coming. I actually have a textbook on Israeli history, which was a big deal when I was growing up from like, that was published in like 1978 for kind of American Sunday schools. And they had to like paste the page in the back because they didn't have anything about revision of Zionism and and Lekud and the entire movement that was just as instrumental of the founding of Israel as labor Zionism, which was kind of the official liberal narrative of what liberal, what Israel was, which was basically this

kind of full of kibbutzs and Israeli dancing and peace-loving Israelis who were reluctantly forced into conflicts with this hostile Arab world. Let's switch gears then and talk about Afghanistan, if we can,

dig a little bit deeper into that. And one thing I want you to kind of talk to us about, and this is one of those things that, like, I kind of knew, but I don't think ever registered in the back of my mind is like how Afghanistan's importance as this weird American cultural touchstone before the Soviet invasion. That was something. Yeah, the author is Christian Carroll.

He's the guy who wrote Strange Rebels from my source for Afghanistan. So credit to him, we should definitely have on the show. But like it's this, it's this play. It's this hippie paradise. Where you went to smoke hashish. And it's really funny when I started reading that section of the book, I was like, oh, of course. I actually, for a little bit, I had this weird tendency to, I would run into these people and then do long interviews with them about them sneaking into Afghanistan at the beginning of the Soviet invasion. And it was like one of them was a playwright who ended up using like writing a script about his experience and then kind of got turned into a movie that no one remembers that was then co-opted and turned into.

Rambo 3. And another was a photographer that was kind of looking for adventure after Vietnam ended. And it's like Morocco. Yeah. It's like, yeah, it's, it's, it's kind of like, like, think of the Led Zeppelin's on cashmere. I mean, the association, the signifier cashmere was here's this fun place where you can smoke hashish and, you know, take naps all day and for like $3 a day, you know. So then what is the, the reaction, what's the reaction and how does it, like, how does this all fit into Reaganland when there's a... The reaction at the Cole Wars back on. Yeah. You know, this, this, this human rights nonsense. And, and Jimmy Carter feeds into this. He gives his first speech on Afghanistan. And,

and by the way, uh, it is very much like Vietnam in the following sense. You guys know about, you know, I plan 34B, you know, in 19, late 1963 and 64, where Lyndon Johnson's like, we are going to patrol their harbors. We're going to send you know, we're going to send patrols, you know, out of the countryside. We're basically, you know, just a couple scoches short of acts of war, you know,

secretly in Vietnam. The same way, Jimmy Carter, at the fervent prodding of Zabegnau Brizinski, who's, by the way, such a weird kind of Rambo-Mankay figure that when the hostage rescue happened. He wanted to be actually in the helicopter when it landed in the desert to kind of, you know, he was like such a gung-ho cold warrior.

He got Jimmy Carter to sign a directive authorizing the CIA to undertake covert action in Afghanistan, which almost certainly was what helped the Soviet Union decide that they had a security threat on their hands, right? and after they invade, it's a total shock. It appears to be a total shock for Jimmy Carter. And when he gives his first speech to the nation, he says something that's very damning and not very politically smart. He basically says I didn't realize the Soviet Union was still the Soviet Union, you know. And it sounds terribly naive.

And it destroys the salt two negotiations, right? and all this pressure have been building up for years on the part of very, very active organizing on the part of the new right, on the part of the neo-conservatives, people like Scoop Jackson who are saying that all this Ronald Reagan, who's saying that Jimmy Carter's human rights policies are basically surrendered to the Soviets, you know, the idea that dictatorships and double standards, that he doesn't care what a country does if they're communist, he only is, you know, beating up on our, you know,

our allies, you know, the Samozas, you know, or, you know, the Shah of Iran, right?

And so when this happens, it's almost like a back-to-the-future movement. It's like, you know, it's 195 again, you know, and, it's morning in America.

Yeah, right. And if we don't contain the Soviet threat, I mean, like I say, literally, they're going to be, controlling the oil fields in Saudi Arabia and then that's it they're going to take over the world

right and it kind of undoes all the work that Jimmy Carter's been trying to do to make American foreign policy a different sort of thing and as I hope to have demonstrated it was also based on this the set of illusions that you know the Soviet Union we can actually read the translations of at the National Security Archive of these Kremlin meetings, and they're just as baffled, they're just as afraid of, that Americans are making provocative expansionist moves in this traditionally, you know,

the graveyard of empires, you know, there's this place that have been this kind of strategic crossroads for centuries. It's, I call it the fog of Cold War. It's a real tragic situation. And it's just full of misunderstandings. And, you know, I place a lot of, I'm not the first person to place a lot of moral censure on Zabignu Brzynski. You know, I mean, talk about blowback. You know, these are the, these Mujahideen are basically the guys who become the Taliban.

And they're armed by us. And by the way, this is all in Jimmy Carter's diary. I was very surprised that he cops to this because the book of the diary is edited. You know, it's thousands of pages, but the book was only a couple hundred pages. He says, we funneled weapons to the Mujahideen that CIA operatives bought in arms bazaars that were Soviet weapons, so no one would knew we were arming them. It's very Vietnam-style stuff. And, you know, the lesson of only four years earlier hasn't been one, hasn't been taken aboard. Carter had to deal with the Olympics, too, right?

Right. Can you talk a little bit about that? He canceled America's involvement in the Olympics. Well, there's a summer Olympics and there's a winter Olympics, and they both make a fascinating part of this story. So, like, you know, I'm 11 years old. I'm 10 years old, actually. I turned 11 in September of 1980.

And the 1980 Olympics was, like, the biggest thing in my life to that point. I was like a passionate skier. And I could tell you exactly who won the silver medal in Slalom. It was Steve Mayer and his brother, Phil Mayer. And I could tell you about Eric Hayden, who was from Wisconsin, who won five speed skating medals. and, of course, there was the hockey team, right? And the Soviet hockey team,

I found this very interesting report on YouTube that I put in my last book, Invisible Bridge, in which an ABC News reporter, this is before Rune Arles, took over ABC News, is talking about how tragic it is that the 1976 Winter Olympics have been turned into this coal proxy for the Cold War,

you know, and how people are talking about the Soviet team and the American team as if, you know, who won, you know, proves that who has the best system, right? The Soviet team by 1980 is just insanely dominant. And there's a really nice little Disney movie about this. The American team is a bunch of scrappy, you know, bad news bears and has this coach, you know, who, you know, basically gets all these misfits who play well together and some are from Minnesota and some are from Boston.

And, you know, this is quite remarkable just on a level of sports. but it becomes this absurdly huge deal, you know, with, you know, do you believe in miracles and American flags? I mean, it's like the biggest thing ever. And, you know, it's actually, I say that it's actually great for the political fortunes of both Ronald Reagan and the New Hampshire primary, but also Jimmy Carter against Ted Kennedy because anything that, you know, he brings him to the White House, like anything that kind of,

you know, rallies around the flag, you know, redounds to the benefit of the president. But then after the, and also these guys are training the whole time in this question of whether the Soviet Union is going to respond to Jimmy Carter's announcement that America's going to boycott the summer Olympics in Moscow by boycotting the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid in New York. So they don't even know if it's going to happen. So we do boycott. And the Soviets boycott the 1984 Olympics. in Los Angeles.

But of course, Jimmy Carter gets, you know, no political credit for this. It's seen as, you know, more symbolism. One of the problems

with Jimmy Carter's political fortunes when he's president is the very things that get him elected in 1976, which is a successful creation of this

symbolic edifice. It's seen as artifice, right? So anytime he's doing anything that seems like political artifice, he's just absolutely hammered by the press. And yeah, so this is going on the Olympics in Moscow are going on like during the Democratic Convention, actually.

Which is so funny because it feels like Reagan is all artifice to me. Right. That's so interesting. I mean, the villain in all my books is always the political media because when you read it in retrospect, you realize how shallow and stupid they are. So in this case, you know, the big narrative that, you know, I found documents proving was, you know, kind of seated and very assiduously created by the Reagan team working the refs is that Jimmy Carter used to be a nice guy and now he's a mean guy. And meanwhile, you know, Jimmy Carter is, you know, seething because Ronald Reagan is accusing him of, you know, starving babies, you know. and that's a huge part of the dynamic of the fall election between Reagan and Carter is Carter is champing at the bit to attack Reagan and his aides are telling he can't do it because he has to preserve its reputation as a nice peanut parmer from Plains, Georgia.

And finally, he just boils over. And the issue that does it is actually nuclear proliferation. So Reagan, to win the Republican primary in New Hampshire, to come back against George Bush, who won Iowa and was the media darling, every day he's saying something provocative to get on the front page about foreign policy. And one of the things he says is that he doesn't mind if Pakistan gets the nuclear bomb. And Carter just understands how horrifyingly disastrous that would be. And he just kind of boils over. And he attacks Reagan for the truth, right? I mean, as I always say, Jimmy Carter can't win for lose it, right?

And the media responds by saying, by literally calling him out for insubility for criticizing Ronald Reagan by name. It's a very maddening part of the book. Well, in that, and this nuclear theme recurs. I think it's during one of the debates when Carter's. That's proliferation. Yeah, yeah. He says that his daughter. one of the, I think it's Amy, one of the biggest concerns that she has as nuclear proliferation.

And then both the press and Reagan just pounce on that, right? Yeah. The coverage of the 1980 debate was all drama criticism and completely, just completely all lied at the fact that Reagan lied from the first to the last. and it's a real, just really damning indictment of the political media. So everyone knows the most famous line of the 1980 debate, right? Jason, you're nodding your hand. I won't hold my opponent's youth in an experience against him. I got to sound the buzzer.

That's 1984. But that was the exact same thing. Reagan was already, you know, completely, you know, dottering. You probably had Al-Sides, Hammers by then. And that was how he completely got. that issue off the front page. Now, in 1980, Jimmy Carter,

so their whole strategy was based on getting Jimmy Carter's whole strategy was based on getting Reagan on a debate stage with him. With as much time as possible for Jimmy Carter to fact-check what Ronald Reagan was saying in order to prove, as I put it in a chapter title from one of the Carter strategy memos, Carter is smarter than Reagan. And it all goes according to plan. Ronald Reagan completely makes something up, fabricates something about his record and Social Security, claims he'd never called for it to become voluntary, but he had.

And Jimmy Carter accuses him on that. Ronald Reagan makes up a completely ridiculous just-so story to deny it. and Ronald Reagan he says these tones of how dare you wounded innocence. And Jimmy Carter's like, wow, he's rocked in his heel. So he tries again with Medicare. He says that Ronald Reagan started his political career

in 1961, campaigning against Medicare, completely true. He made a record album for the American Medical Association saying if Medicare passes, we'll be telling our children's stories of what America was like when it was free. and immediately Ronald Reagan sees that he has his prey in his sights, and he gives his charming Ronald Reagan smile,

and he looks the audience in the eye, and he says, there you go again. And he tells, makes up another lie, and claims he'd been for one Medicare bill, but against another. It was complete fabrication. And one of my favorite little pieces of research was that Rick Hertzberg, the Carter speechwriter, told me that backstage they were high-fiving each other.

They knew they'd won the debate because they knew that the headlines the next day would be Ronald Reagan lies about his record. Instead, the headlines where Ronald Reagan charms the nation and proves that he's not incompetent extremist, dottering old man. And that's on the press. It's so fascinating to watch. And we're seeing this play out right now as we record this on 9, 10 days after the Bob Woodward tapes have come out. It's fascinating to watch, like, the political press and typical politicians, like, misread the moment, I think. I think we're seeing that happen again now. I don't want to get into that too much because the audience will be mad at me.

But do you have trouble getting into Reagan's head at all? Like, you're pretty good. Like, you've got this great analogy about Carter that kind of recurs where he's both the engineer and the preacher, right? But I'm thinking about, like, Reagan, in the way everyone kind of writes about Reagan is, because it's always a little bit at a remove. There's that really famous story that Edmund Morris tells, you know, one of his first biographers about how he had to invent a story about a personal relationship we had with Reagan that wasn't true in order to be able to write about him.

Did you, like, what kind of sense did you have of this person? Because, again, I just feel like he feels like he's all artifice. I mean, I know something about how. the mentality of adult children of alcoholics works. And if you look at Ronald Reagan's, the traumas of Ronald Reagan's childhood, of a family that moved, you know,

had like 20 different rented apartments by the time he was 11. And all these stories he tells that he somehow manages to give happy endings, like the time he was wandering around to the city of New York and was returned home by a hobo, you know, or at the time he was playing, you know, with his friend, and they found his friend's dad's rifle and, you know, shot a hole through the roof, you know. I mean, this is, this is just a childhood that was, you know,

one step shy of Dickensian, you know, and his mom was always off, you know, saving the world for other families, right? And then you look at how the pictures of Ronald Reagan before he was, you know, basically 10 years old and discovered reading and discovered, you know, kind of, heroic young adult fiction, and he looks like he's, you know, this kind of lost child. Then you see afterwards he's clearly created this sense of himself as a hero. And this is the period after which you can't find a picture around Reagan that he doesn't

look completely aware of the camera and doesn't have this narrative in his head. You know, you realize that at a certain point, the artifice, the shell you create around the trauma is what you are, right? I mean, Nancy Reagan said she couldn't even penetrate the shell, right? does not some kind of like core self that exists, you know, once you kind of find the magic key to get into his, you know, you know, wounded being. You know, the shell is the person, right? I mean, in the same way with Donald Trump. It's the great line from Vonnegut.

We are what we pretend to be. Well, yeah. And he was, he was, I call him the Michael Jordan of self-methodological civilization. I mean, exactly his ability to kind of project. blithe optimism in the face of what anyone else would judge his chaos was the heart of his political appeal. And unlike his story about the guy shoveling the poop and why is he doing it? There's no pony at the bottom. All right. Well, I think that that is a good place to end. The book is Reagan Land. The author is Rick Perlstein.

Sir, thank you so much for coming onto the show and walking us through Reagan and Carter and a little bit of how we got where we are now. Thank you. It's a pleasure. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. Thank you for letting me get it out a little bit late this week. We had a vet emergency here at the Matthew household. Angry Planet is Matthew Galtz, me, myself, Jason Fields, and Kevin Odell, who's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please subscribe to our substack. Go to Angry Planet pod.com or AngryPlanet.substack.com, where $9.5.5.

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