The Meaning of Ronald Reagan

by Christopher Phelps

The lawsuit against Rick Perlstein is a distraction from a much-needed debate over Reagan’s rise.

New Orleans’s “red-light district” was “festooned with red, white, and blue bunting” during the 1976 Republican National Convention, the “smut peddlers” placing “elephants” in their store windows.

Those twelve quoted words are the only real overlap between the 804 pages of Rick Perlstein’s newly-released The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan and a prior Reagan biography by right-wing publicist Craig Shirley. But Shirley’s attorneys are demanding $25 million in damages from Simon and Schuster and a pulping of all copies of Perlstein’s book.