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

by Rick Perlstein

  And so he took bold steps to remake Washington in his image. Chief of Staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman sent a curt letter to hundreds of presidential appointees demanding their resignations; they were replaced with more loyal men. Nixon announced a radical reorganization of the executive branch to give the new loyalists more power. He announced a labor leader as his new labor secretary, a historic first. That held out the promise of consummating one of his dearest dreams: to peel off the white working class from its historic attachment to the Democratic Party. “I think we’re going to keep them split,” his consigliere on the project, Charles Colson, enthused, “and I’m awful bullish about what we can do in this country.”

  The four burglars and their supervisor, Howard Hunt, pleaded guilty. The zealous G. Gordon Liddy refused to testify in the trial. Only James McCord appeared in the courtroom. The indictment was extraordinarily narrow—making the claims of Ted Kennedy or Woodward and Bernstein that this strange crime stood at the center of a matrix of Nixonian corruption sound fantastical. The trial began, ten days before the inauguration, in the gilded ceremonial courtroom of John J. Sirica, an obscure federal judge whose badgering of witnesses about matters beyond his brief—“Did they get any money to go in there? Was it purely for political espionage? What was the purpose?”—made him look like a fool. For example a handsome and smooth young treasurer in the Nixon campaign, Hugh Sloan, was asked about the time in the spring of 1972 he was authorized by his boss, an even smoother deputy campaign manager named Jeb Stuart Magruder, to pass over an enormous wad of cash:

  “What was the purpose of turning over $199,000 to Liddy?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You have no idea?” the judge chuffed incredulously—and started pressing even more intently. Why, he wondered, every time cross-examination led to Nixon headquarters, or to questions regarding the hundreds of thousands of dollars other investigations had already established had been laundered through Mexico before passing through the malefactors’ hands, did memories grow vague?

  Timorous prosecutors did not follow his lead. On January 29, 1973, they closed their argument, noting that the defendants were “off on an enterprise of their own,” apparently at the sole instigation of G. Gordon Liddy. At a cocktail party, the judge was asked only half jokingly if “the McGovern people have hired you to try to reverse what happened in November.” The jury convicted McCord after only ninety minutes of deliberation. Judge Sirica complained, “I am still not satisfied that all the pertinent facts that might be available—I say might be available—have been produced before an American jury.” He set bond at one hundred thousand dollars. Then he ran to the media to spread more imprecation. It got little coverage. The New York Times dismissed the judge’s “dignified clamor.” On February 7, the Senate set up a special subcommittee under Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina—not a nationally prominent name—to investigate 1972 Nixon campaign abuses. The resolution to establish it passed 77–0, and hardly would have been unanimous had anyone in Washington imagined it would amount to much. Senator Ervin himself considered it “simply inconceivable that Nixon might have been involved.”

  Operation Homecoming dawned. Borne aloft by its political capital, the president announced a budget that slashed his predecessor’s Great Society programs. Newsweek called it “one of the most significant American political documents since the dawning of the New Deal.” He also announced an unprecedented plan to simply refuse to spend—“impound”—$12 billion in funds already authorized by Congress. The Constitution said the legislative branch decided how tax dollars got spent. So Senator Ervin labeled him “King Richard,” and opened a hearing on “whether the Congress of the United States shall remain a viable institution.” Congressman Wright Patman, the day before Valentine’s Day, said, “I have been in Congress under seven presidents . . . and never during this 44-year-old period have we been closer to one-man rule.” Arkansas senator J. William Fulbright said Nixon might literally be committing an act of treason. Let them bray. Fulbright’s hometown paper editorialized that he sounded like “an arcane and vaguely academic version of Joe McCarthy.”

  In March, in a speech flaying “soft-headed judges,” Nixon proposed stern new anticrime measures. Then he vetoed a bill to help the handicapped. Exhilarated liberals, certain the president had overstepped, brought patients in wheelchairs to cheer the veto override vote. That vote, however, failed. Richard Nixon’s approval rating was a staggering 65 percent. He looked forward to a spectacular second term.

  THEN THINGS BEGAN TO GO off the rails.

  Saturday, March 17, the day Pat Nixon had observed her birthday for as long as her husband had been a politician—because that was St. Patrick’s Day; she was actually born on March 16—the White House staged a concert starring Merle Haggard. Country music fans and Irish Catholics: both were among the traditionally Democratic blocs Nixon was trying to cement for the Republicans for all time—with some apparent success.

  Guests wearing tuxedos arrived to a serenade of violin and harps. Haggard wore boots, an open-throated shirt, and a cowboy hat. The president toasted him: “We can’t offer you moonshine, we can’t offer you Irish whisky. But there’s California champagne—watch out!”

  A bluegrass band took the stage. Guests appeared to be embarrassed at the cultural mismatch.

  Merle Haggard took the stage. He later said it felt like performing to mannequins. Came the dramatic highlight: a giant American flag rose from the back of the stage. Haggard swung into his law-and-order hit, “Okie from Muskogee.”

  The New York Times observed an incongruity: the president had three days earlier sent his message asking Congress to attack crime “without pity,” but Haggard was a felon, convicted for robbery. The next week the Chicago Tribune ran a query from a reader: “Do you know whether he’s the first ex-convict to perform in the White House?”

  It spoke to an emerging dilemma: when people thought of the White House, crime was the image coming to mind. Watergate news stories had been accelerating. The Committee to Re-elect the President, mysteriously still in operation, kept on returning campaign contributions made by shady characters: $305,000 to a “reclusive Texas land dealer”; $100,000 to a Gulf Oil executive that “found its way through a Mexican bank to the leader of the bugging raid”; $250,000 to Robert L. Vesco, the “principal defendant in a Securities and Exchange Commission suit against the alleged looting of $224 million from Investors Overseas Services, Ltd.” The General Accounting Office referred the cases to the Justice Department. The Times asked, “WHAT WAS THE MONEY FOR?” And: “Why, long after the election was over and the giant surplus was well-known, did an additional $246,000 dribble into the Nixon treasury in January and February?”

  In hearings to permanently confirm L. Patrick Gray, acting FBI chief since the death of J. Edgar Hoover, Democrats accused Gray of coaching witnesses appearing before the Watergate grand jury. It arrived that an obscure White House aide named John Dean might be able to clear up the question of whether and why this had happened. But the president, citing an unfamiliar constitutional doctrine called “executive privilege,” said Dean could not testify before any investigating body. A political cartoonist depicted Pat with a rolling pin as the president tried to sneak into bed after midnight: “And don’t give me any of that ‘executive privilege’ nonsense!”

  On March 23, in the ceremonial courtroom at the D.C. criminal courts building, Judge Sirica convened the apparently routine sentencing hearing of the “Watergate 7”—the four burglars, Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and James McCord. Boredom was written in the sketch artists’ faces. Then the judge announced he had received a letter from one of the defendants, McCord, and asked for a sealed envelope.

  Faces perked up. This was not ordinary procedure.

  The judge began reading aloud McCord’s letter. It began by explaining why he hadn’t responded frankly to the judge’s questions about details of the case: “Several members of my family have expressed fear for my life if I disc
lose knowledge of the facts in this matter either publicly or to any government representatives. Whereas I do not share their concerns to the same degree, nevertheless, I do believe retaliatory measures will be taken against me, my family, and my friends should I disclose such facts. Such retaliation could destroy careers, income and reputation of persons who are innocent of any guilt whatever.”

  If he had answered those questions frankly at the time they were asked, the defendant said, the answer would have been, “There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent.

  “Perjury occurred during the trial of matters highly material to the very structure, orientation, and impact of the government’s case and to the motivation of and intent of the defendants.

  “Others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial when they could have been by those testifying.

  “I would appreciate the opportunity to talk with you privately in chambers,” the letter concluded. “Since I cannot feel confident in talking with an FBI agent, in testifying before a grand jury whose U.S. Attorneys work for the Department of Justice, or in talking with other government representatives, such a discussion with you would be of assistance to me.”

  “What all this means,” wrote columnist Joseph Kraft—the kind of pundit editors around the country consulted to know exactly how much criticism of sacred cows was advisable—“is that the issue is obstruction of justice by a coverup at the highest levels.” Watergate was about to be blown wide open.

  Sirica’s hunger for truth was displayed in the sentences he pronounced. Forty years for the four Cuban burglars, thirty-five years for Hunt, and forty-five years for McCord. These were terms more appropriate to unrepentant murderers than to the perpetrators of a “third-rate burglary.” The judge then explained why he had issued them: the sentences were “provisional.” If the defendants explained what they knew to the soon-to-be reconvened grand jury or the forthcoming Senate hearings, they would be reduced. That explained the shorter, six-year, eight-month sentence G. Gordon Liddy got: his lawyers had told Sirica that no matter what his sentence was, he would never, ever talk.

  AT HIS WEEKLY MEETING WITH the Republican congressional leadership, the president with the 65 percent approval rating was unexpectedly forced into a defensive crouch: “Hugh, I have nothing to hide,” he told the Senate minority leader, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania.

  He repeated it: “The White House has nothing to hide.”

  Then, he said it a third time: “I repeat, we have nothing to hide and you are authorized to make that statement in my name.”

  He also repeated that he could not permit any members of his White House staff to appear before any grand jury or committee of Congress whatsoever: executive privilege. The senators, the papers reported, were “disturbed by the White House attitude.” That was obvious enough, simply from the fact they’d leaked the meeting in such detail.

  Kraft wrote that a “flurry of developments has transformed the Watergate affair from a sideshow into a political bomb that could blow the Nixon administration apart.” Woodward and Bernstein got space on page A1 to remind readers of McCord’s connection to all the most Godfather-like incidents, like the time the previous summer when former Nixon attorney general and campaign manager John Mitchell’s unhinged wife, Martha, called UPI reporter Helen Thomas to say that she was being held in California as a “political prisoner.” It had been McCord’s arrest in the Watergate burglary, Bernstein and Woodward explained, that originally set Martha Mitchell off. “McCord also leased an office in downtown Washington last spring next to Senator Edmund S. Muskie’s presidential campaign headquarters,” they pointed out. “Muskie was the chief target of an elaborate campaign of political espionage and sabotage conceived in the White House and conducted against the Democratic presidential candidates in 1971–1972, according to federal sources.”

  Patterns were beginning to add up.

  Patrick Gray admitted at his confirmation hearings that White House counsel John Dean had been present at FBI interrogations of Watergate witnesses. International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation, the company suspected of bribing the Nixon campaign in exchange for the dropping of an antitrust suit, was revealed to have hired a former CIA chief to influence a presidential election in Chile. Robert Vesco was reported to have allegedly delivered $200,000 in cash-filled suitcases to the Nixon campaign three days after a new campaign disclosure act made it illegal to do so. The Sunday New York Times’ Week in Review section, which ran its Watergate roundup under a graphic of the roof of the White House blowing off, reported that the FBI had spied on hard-hitting reporter Daniel Schorr of CBS under the pretext of considering him for a fictitious White House job. Time gingerly wondered how “persistent allegations . . . about safes full of secret campaign cash” comported with a White House “that has so strongly denounced the permissiveness and the decaying morality of modern life.” Senator James Buckley of New York, brother of William F., likewise gingerly said the “reports indicate less than wholehearted cooperation by the administration.” Lowell Weicker, the Connecticut Republican who would sit on the subcommittee investigating Watergate, was more blunt: he said that “somebody still in the White House” had to have directed political espionage in the 1972 Nixon reelection campaign.

  The president could hardly take comfort in the fact that for the moment, the public’s attention was still mostly elsewhere—on food prices, which had jumped more in January than any other month in twenty-five years. He promised they would drop soon. Instead, the Consumer Price Index for February rose at the highest rate since 1951. The price of meat was on a course to doubling within the year. In political cartoons, housewives asked butchers for steak on the layaway plan. Johnny Carson said meat prices were so high that “Oscar Mayer had his wiener appraised.”

  NO ONE WAS SURE WHERE the idea of a national boycott of meat in the first week in April came from. Perhaps Connecticut, where a housewife saw a cartoon about the butcher selling beef on the installment plan, and explained to newspapers about the day she persuaded the junior members of the Connecticut Federation of Women’s Clubs, then got her congressman to back them: “The more I laughed, the more I wanted to cry.” Perhaps in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, where another housewife returned from her neighborhood market, telephoned her friend, and simply said: “It’s time.” Each telephoned five others, asking them to boycott on Tuesdays and Thursdays. (“We are focusing on particular days so they can see we have clout,” the organizer said, like a Chicago ward heeler. “The American mother feels her family is threatened, you see. And you threaten a mother bear’s cubs and watch out.”) They distributed eighteen thousand leaflets, whose recipients mimeographed them in turn; by the middle of March they started getting calls from around the country—including one from a panicked executive of the South Dakota Stock Growers Association, who suggested they find cheaper cuts for their “family servings of protein.”

  President Nixon’s consumer advisor, Virginia Knauer, made a presentation for the press, suggesting “liver, kidney, brains, and heart can be made into gourmet meals with seasoning, imagination, and more cooking time.” She then trilled, “From my own experience I have found a shopper can generally trim as much as ten percent off her food budget.” An aide demonstrated a cost-per-serving slide rule for the cameras. On NBC that night, Knauer’s lesson in home economy was the lead story. It was followed by a field report on a schoolteacher’s wife who surreptitiously slipped horse meat into her husband’s sandwiches (a similar story made it onto an episode that fall of All in the Family).

  Cut to an ad for Bayer pain reliever.

  The president repeated Mrs. Knauer’s let-them-eat-liver advice from his news conference podium; the mail in response, the Week in Review reported, was “unprintable.” At the Merle Haggard concert the White House served broiled chicken as a national example. Fishmongers started profiteering: a pound of striped bass went for fifty cents on Monday, and ni
nety cents at week’s end. “It makes me literally sick to go into the grocery store,” a suburban Washington mother told the Post.

  The White House begged the boycotters to have patience, saying price controls would only compound the problem. Instead, the movement snowballed. Housewives in Manhattan marched behind a cow marked “WE WANT MEAT NOT PROMISES,” demanding prices be rolled back to December 1972 levels. In Chicago activists passed out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to pedestrians at the Dirksen Senate Office Building—demanding 1967 prices. “I don’t know what Nixon is eating for lunch today,” said one of them, a housewife named Jan Schakowsky, a leader in the burgeoning consumers’ movement, “but I bet there’s meat on the table.” San Francisco demonstrators mailed yard-long sticks of bologna—a pound of which having gone up forty cents in price in two years—to President Nixon and Governor Reagan.

  RONALD REAGAN AT HIS SACRAMENTO press conference that week was remarkably blithe about the whole thing, as if the government shouldn’t be concerned about popular outrage at all. This price rise, he said, was caused by bad weather, that’s all—and “I’m not in favor of picketing Him.” He said he knew what he was talking about, as a cattle rancher himself. The press gaggle thought that was a curious thing to bring up, for it only reminded people of his biggest controversy as governor so far.

  In 1971, a student-operated radio station at Sacramento State College reported that Reagan’s 1970 tax return claimed he owed precisely zero dollars and zero cents. Reagan was befuddled when confronted with the news at a press conference; then he offered a recollection that he might have got a refund on his federal taxes. The governor’s office released a statement saying the reason was unspecified “business reverses.” He refused to say anything more—with a vengeance: “We fought a war about that! I say all men have a right to be safe in their books and records. That’s what the Revolution was about.”