Reagan campaigning in L.A. before the 1976 Republican National Convention. His closing speech brought delegates to tears, and left many with a sense that they’d chosen wrong. Photograph by George Rose/Getty.

Anyone old enough to have lived through the nineteen-seventies knew them as a long and often embarrassing anticlimax—a shapeless, burned-out interregnum between the high dramas of the sixties and the bright, hard edges of the Reagan era. Unlike the decades that preceded and followed, the seventies seemed to have no plot: a mishmash of musical styles and fads, a blur of failed Presidents, a series of international fiascoes, a mood of cynicism and farce. Preparing for a thoroughly ironic fin de decade party, Zonker Harris, of “Doonesbury,” raised his mug: “To a kidney stone of a decade!” “Try to retrieve the seventies and memories crumble in one’s hand,” the critic Irving Howe wrote in his autobiography. “The decade itself lacks a distinctive historical flavor. It’s as if the years had simply dropped out of one’s life and all that remains are bits and pieces of recollection.” In my memory, the seventies began in an atmosphere of antic nihilism—Mad, “ratfucking,” Richard Pryor—and ended on the downer of “malaise” and the hostage crisis. I mainly remember longing to be somewhere else—it didn’t matter whether it was the future or the past. (Admittedly, I was a teen-ager.) If there was any theme to that decade, it was the lack of a theme, of any higher meaning to events.

In recent years, there has been an onslaught of books, academic and popular, whose titles insist that the decade marked a major turning point: “The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics,” “How We Got Here: The 70s, The Decade That Brought You Modern Life—for Better or Worse,” “Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right,” “Pivotal Decade,” “Something Happened.” What happened, we now know, was the collapse of the American consensus, the postwar social contract, founded on a mixed economy at home and bipartisan Cold War internationalism abroad. The seventies turned out to be the decade when the country began its transformation from steady economic growth to spasms of contraction, from industry to information and finance, from institutional authorities to individual freedoms, from center-left to right. Global competition happened in the seventies, and so did populist politics, special-interest money, the personal computer, and the cult of the self. The obsessed-over sixties seem increasingly remote and sui generis, while the trademarks of the seventies are strangely persistent. Wages have remained largely flat since 1973. Gas prices never stopped outraging drivers. “The Happiness Project” updates “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” We’re still, or again, talking about the decline of American power and prestige. Ted Cruz today sounds a lot like Jesse Helms did back then.

In other words, the seventies were important because of what’s happened since. At the time, Americans weren’t conscious of a great shift, pivot, or crisis. The nature of historical writing, of memory itself, is to distort by selecting and compressing events, making the past seem more dramatic and coherent than it ever was, but this is especially true of accounts of the seventies. Back then, only true believers saw those years as the final way station on the conservative movement’s path to victory. In histories of the seventies, that destination now seems to have been obvious all along—maybe even inevitable. Narrative history, in bringing the past to life, asks us only to forget about the other turns we might have made.

For Americans younger than fifty-five, the story of conservatism has been the dominant political factor in their lives, and Rick Perlstein has become its chief chronicler, across three erudite, entertaining, and increasingly meaty books: “Before the Storm” (2001), about the birth of the conservative movement in the late fifties and early sixties, up to the landslide defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential election; “Nixonland” (2008), about Richard Nixon’s strategy of amassing power by dividing the country into two antagonistic camps; and now “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan” (Simon & Schuster), which finally brings into focus the saga’s leading character, Ronald Reagan, who made cameo appearances in the earlier books.

“Before the Storm” told the New Right’s origin story, peopled by “a little circle of political diehards”—forgotten names like Clarence Manion and F. Clifton White. In a brilliant move, Perlstein showed that the early-sixties conservative movement was just as revolutionary and hostile to the political establishment as the much more famous New Left. The book made a persuasive case that, of the many insurgencies in the sixties, the one on the right had the most lasting significance. Perlstein, who was born in 1969, is a man of the left, but he explored the archives of the New Right in a spirit of imaginative sympathy, excited by the characters he found—activists from Young Americans for Freedom, National Review editors, members of the John Birch Society. His favorite targets were not diehard segregationists or fringe anti-Communists but the leading commentators of the era—Richard Hofstadter, James Reston, Walter Lippmann—who saw in Goldwater’s flameout proof that conservatism had no future in American politics. “It was one of the most dramatic failures of collective discernment in the history of American journalism,” Perlstein wrote.

If Perlstein seemed to be half rooting for the early conservative movement, it was because, from across the divide, he shared its combative approach to politics, admired its steadfastness in the face of crushing defeat, and wanted to emulate its ultimate success. This unexpected identification gave “Before the Storm” its energy and freshness. Always lively and sometimes cocky, Perlstein can’t resist poking a finger in the sober faces of “the wise men,” “the sophisticates,” “polite Georgetown insiders,” “the guardians of elite discourse,” the New York Times columnists, New Yorker reporters, and Democratic Party mandarins who didn’t like to admit that politics is often a conflict between unreasoning wills, and who therefore couldn’t begin to understand the likes of Phyllis Schlafly or Louise Day Hicks. In his preface to “The Invisible Bridge,” Perlstein writes, “A central theme of my previous two books chronicling conservatism’s ascendancy in American politics has been the myopia of pundits, who so frequently fail to notice the very cultural ground shifting beneath their feet.” The demise of liberalism after the sixties had more than a little to do with the self-satisfied blindness of liberals, and the targets of Perlstein’s mockery often deserve what they get. But failures of collective discernment are always easier to spot half a century on.

“Nixonland” was necessarily a different kind of book. Its subject was “the fracturing of America,” a larger and harder story to tell than that of the early New Right; it encompassed the whole of American culture, not just a single political movement. Perlstein began with the Watts riots in 1965 and ended, seven hundred and fifty pages later, with Nixon’s reëlection, in 1972. In between came the Republican victories in the 1966 midterms, the Newark riots, the ’68 campaign, assassinations, the mayhem in Chicago, Nixon’s triumph, the Manson killings, the Silent Majority speech, Agnew and “positive polarization,” Kent State, the Hard Hat Riot, George Romney, George Wallace, George McGovern—less focussed than “Before the Storm” but higher-octane. Perlstein developed a twofold method for harnessing his unruly material. Combing through the written record and television clips, he narrated well-known events in such minute detail that historical distance collapsed and readers began to feel that they were living through them week by week (or, in the case of his bravura reconstruction of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, watching them on TV hour by hour). Perlstein tried to convey what it felt like when political combat was no metaphor and Americans turned on one another in the streets. What the subject lacked in newness, the prose made up in heavily researched zest.