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

by Rick Perlstein

  One month later, the Sacramento Bee broke the story of what these “business reverses” entailed, and it was a doozy: the governor had contracted with a company that advertised to clients with a net worth of at least $500,000 that “tax laws favor cattle. . . . When you buy them, you become a farmer and can keep your books on a cash basis. You put in dollars that depreciate or are deductible. You take out capital gains.” Voilà: newly minted cowboys, whose ranks included Jack Benny, Alfred Hitchcock, and Arnold Palmer, “lose” enough money, in the company’s boast, “to avoid or postpone payment of any income tax.” The inquiries compounded, sending Reagan’s wife Nancy into a rage. She said she hoped her husband would never run for office again, because “I’d always believed that people are basically good, and I’m trying very hard to hold on to that,” but politics, she now realized, was “dirty.” The New York Times discovered steers with “Reagan Cattle Company” brands in states hundreds of miles away—a “Trident Bar” mark in Wyoming, a “Gunsight R” in Montana, and a “Gunsight Rocking R” in Nevada. They also tracked down a copy of Reagan’s contract with the company, signed by his personal attorney and close friend William French Smith. This, apparently, was what he meant two years later when he called himself a “rancher.”

  But the story had quickly faded: of the networks, only ABC paid attention, giving it all of twenty seconds; Democrats were too high-minded in their attacks to be effectual; and only one politician proved palpitatingly ambitious enough to leverage the story for publicity and release his own taxes (Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, who had paid $13,339.31 on $46,542.66 in income). But here Reagan was now, raising the issue again, of his own volition—and reporters pounced:

  “Governor, a few years ago there was a revelation of your investment in beef cattle. Do you still have an investment in that area?”

  Firmly, confidently, he returned: “They were bulls. Breeding bulls. A small herd of breeding bulls. And I have been disposing of those.” Then he deftly changed the subject with a blizzard of authoritative-sounding gibberish about two-year-old weather statistics and the role of corn in determining cattle prices in the marketing stage. His inquisitors gave up. Once he got wrapped into one of his stories, they knew further questioning was futile. The way he managed to convey simple innocence in the face of a complex morass: it was almost preternatural. How could you make anything stick to someone who radiated confidence like that? He was like that stuff pots and pans were covered with—Teflon. Some reporters had given up attempting to interview him altogether: “It’s just like hearing the same record over and over again. I don’t think he knows how to be candid.” Sacramento novices who scored interviews nonetheless would emerge thrilled with the wonderful material they unearthed—only to look at old Reagan speeches, and find out the words were identical.

  THE DAY BEFORE JAMES MCCORD’S letter, the United Auto Workers endorsed the April meat boycott. Representative William Cotter introduced into the Congressional Record the culinary sensation sweeping the nation: the Virginia Citizens Consumer Council’s “one week meatless menu,” starring lentil soup, macaroni, tuna fish casserole, and, for Sunday dinner, “lasagna without meat.” Fast-food executives discussed selling “soybean burgers.” A Cleveland judge set bond at three thousand dollars for a man accused of stealing seventy-seven pounds of sirloin from a restaurant, and lectured that “this should be a warning to the public generally that society will not countenance the stealing of meat, which is more precious than jewels.”

  Like this was the Soviet Union or something.

  The White House, growing desperate, sent word through the first lady’s press secretary that the Nixons were eating more leftovers and fresh vegetables: “They like zucchini a lot.” A chain of thirteen stores in the Washington area announced they would shut down for a day in solidarity against Nixon’s glib inaction. Three days later, a thirty-six-store Massachusetts chain joined them. The prices for cattle and pork belly futures started plummeting. A Dubuque, Iowa, packing company curtailed operations.

  The president tried a televised speech, turning to a rhetorical formula that used to work: self-pity and patriotic bromides:

  “Good evening: Four years and two months ago, when I first came into this office as president, by far the most difficult problem confronting the nation was the seemingly endless war in Vietnam.” He ended it. “Hundreds were being held as prisoners of war.” He brought them home. He then quoted one of them, Colonel George McKnight, who had told him, “Thank you for bringing us home on our feet instead of our knees.” Only then did he bring up inflation—as “one of the most terrible costs of war,” framing a logic that those who did not patriotically endure it dishonored warriors’ heroic sacrifices. He mentioned a policy intervention—a price ceiling on beef, pork, and lamb—then concluded, as he had every big TV speech since “Checkers” in 1952, with a sentimental allegory: “A few days ago, in this room, I talked to a man who had spent almost eight years in a Communist prison camp in North Vietnam. For over four years he was in solitary confinement. In that four-year-period he never saw and never talked to another human being except his Communist captors. He lived on two meals a day, usually just a piece of bread.”

  You could stop eating meat for two days. But wouldn’t you be dishonoring him?

  It didn’t work. More people boycotted than the organizers dared dream. The Chicago Tribune found 85 percent support, and 50 percent fewer meat sales—and 25 percent more business at a place called the “Green Planet Health Food Restaurant” on Lincoln Avenue. Sales were down 80 percent in some parts of New York City. Another new movement the American people learned about that week was the “Gray Panthers”: old people were “ready to be radicalized,” their leader insisted. “I’m just serving warning.” She singled out the high cost of food as one of the reasons. A frustrated, defiant Nixon served roast prime tenderloin of beef—“selling in San Clemente markets,’ ” Walter Cronkite reported, “for upwards of three dollars a pound”—at a dinner for South Vietnamese strongman Nguyen Van Thieu.

  Time put “Food Prices: The Big Beef” on the cover April 2; it hadn’t yet run a cover on Watergate. Seventeen percent of the country hadn’t even heard yet of the scandal; of those who had, only a third thought it was a serious thing.

  The Silent Majority might be ignoring Watergate. The sense that something was rotten in Washington spread nonetheless. “I’ve never protested anything before,” a new insurgent told the Tribune. But now that the price of bologna had risen 40 percent, she was ready to start. Rumor had it that the summer might bring gas rationing. In Atlanta, a witness in a prostitution case complained to the federal Price Control Board that the fee for sexual services had leaped from $25 to $35. The price of onions started soaring, too. Horse meat, slide rules, a world in which anything that reliably had cost one dollar might soon suddenly cost two: it did something to people.

  Crime, meanwhile, was becoming a national obsession—the upcoming TV season would have ten cops-and-robbers shows, a record—and crime had begun getting stranger. On New Year’s Eve, a twenty-three-year-old black veteran named Mark James Essex, who lived in a New Orleans shack spray-painted with slogans like “My Destiny lies in the BLOODY DEATH of Racist PIGS,” shot three policemen. Two weeks later—to kick off the revolution, he said—he began massacring white guests at a downtown Howard Johnson’s. Two dozen policemen opened fire on someone they believed to be the perpetrator. They actually were shooting at each other. They didn’t know that Essex had already been machine-gunned to shreds by a Marine combat helicopter—also live on TV.

  Toward the end of January what the New York Times described as “a two-day ordeal of blazing gunfights, death, and terror at a Brooklyn sporting goods store” ended in a daring roof escape of nine people held hostage by four gunmen identifying themselves as “servants of Allah”: “O Muslims!” went their manifesto. “Unite against the oppressive infidels whose aim is the destruction of Islam.” At the end of February, activists of the American Indian
Movement seized the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, site of the last massacre of the nineteenth-century Indian wars. Set upon by federal marshals, they staged an armed standoff that lasted nine weeks. Two Indians died from sniper fire. A marshal was paralyzed from a gunshot wound. (At the Academy Awards ceremony, in solidarity, Marlon Brando sent a Native American woman named Sacheen Littlefeather to accept the Best Actor award on his behalf.) Black September, the terrorists responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, stormed the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, demanding the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, and murdered two U.S. diplomats.

  Two days later, a massive New York Times front-page story featured someone named Ted Patrick, who made a living “deprogramming” young people snatched from religious communes and cults. “They are worse than the Manson sect because he had only a small number of followers,” Patrick claimed. “If authorities don’t do something about this, our nation is going to be controlled by a handful of people.” They were groups like the “Children of God,” whose members “regard all existing social structures as corrupt and show their ‘100 percent discipleship’ by surrendering their worldly goods to the organization.” The liberal National Council of Churches, the umbrella organization for mainstream denominations like the Methodists, said it found “nothing bizarre, coercive, or secretive” about such “high-demand religious groups, of which there are hundreds.” The ACLU called what Patrick did “criminal acts of abduction.” A defiant parent replied he would stick with Patrick and kidnap his kid back nonetheless: “if they want to put me in jail, I’ll go to jail.” A deprogrammed disciple said if it hadn’t been for Patrick, “I’d still be under the mental control of these people.”

  March was also the month when it seemed as if every other local official was headed to jail. Miami’s mayor was indicted for conspiracy to bribe a judge to free a convicted drug offender. The circuit court judge who had dismissed the case was indicted, too. Another Miami judge was indicted for taking a bribe to free a child molester. New York State released a report on “systematic and organized burglaries, larcenies, and thefts” by Albany police. New Orleans’s district attorney, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist Jim Garrison, was about to go on trial for playing footsie with pinball companies. In Maryland’s lower legislative chamber, a delegate was arrested for conspiring to distribute forty pounds of heroin. A Queens assistant district attorney was indicted for shutting down the investigation of a Ponzi scheme whose victims included his own son-in-law, and was under suspicion for ignoring two gruesome gangland slayings. A former Philadelphia city commissioner got six years for contract kickbacks; a former chairman of the city planning board was sentenced for selling bank stock below market value to political pals. That capped off a three-year period in the City of Brotherly Love in which a judge went to jail for check fraud, the housing authority advisory board chairman went down for bribery, the stadium construction coordinator went to jail for extortion, and a former chief court clerk got two-to-ten for robbery. Former Illinois governor Otto Kerner was on his way to jail for kickbacks from a racetrack owner, and one of Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s right-hand men cut a deal for the provisioning of voting machines that profited him $187,000—and then a three-year jail term. A Republican alderman was on the way to a bribery conviction that could earn him eighty-six years in jail. “Over the past three years in New Jersey alone,” observed Time, “sixty-seven officials have been indicted and thirty-five convicted”—mayors, legislators, judges, highway officials, postmasters, and a congressman.

  And then there was Washington, D.C., where on April 4 came the next turn of the Watergate screw.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  Executive Privilege

  OFFICIAL WASHINGTON HAD ALWAYS BEEN a little nervous at the president’s appointment of L. Patrick Gray as acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: he was a Nixon loyalist in a position that was supposed to be nonpolitical. In his Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings, Democrats began grilling him on an even more worrisome matter: allegations that he had cooperated with White House attempts to interfere with the Watergate investigation. Nixon tried to put the matter to rest by giving senators a chance to look at the investigation’s records—but only for a half hour each day. John Dean had received unlimited access to those selfsame records; Donald Segretti, the young prankster who had traveled the country in 1972 sabotaging Democratic campaigns, had been shown records of the investigation on him by Gray, too. What was supposed to have been a routine hearing turned into the Senate’s first Watergate inquisition.

  The name of the president’s personal lawyer and the campaign’s chief fund-raiser, Herbert Kalmbach, came up: he had been ordered to pay Segretti’s salary by presidential appointment secretary Dwight Chapin. John Dean’s name kept coming up, too: what did it mean that he had apparently been the one to hire G. Gordon Liddy in the first place?

  Meanwhile, what the New York Times called “a little-understood and seemingly mundane issue called ‘executive privilege’ ”—by which the president claimed that the Constitution’s doctrine of separation of powers kept him or his staff from providing any information requested by Congress involving his conduct of office—was sending Sam Ervin through the roof: “Divine right went out with the American Revolution and doesn’t belong to White House aides,” he said. “That is not executive privilege. It is executive poppycock.” He added that if the president would not allow aides to testify under oath voluntarily, he himself would force them to do so under pain of arrest.

  On April 4, Pat Gray withdrew from consideration as acting FBI chief. WOR radio in New York called it the “first blood Congress has drawn in the Watergate affair.” Time called it the president’s biggest setback since 1970. The magazine also featured a fawning profile of “Watergate Prober Sam Ervin,” whose impending inquiry “could easily lead to the most fascinating Capitol Hill TV drama since the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954.” Not quite what the president wanted to hear.

  AT LEAST ALL THE POWS now were home. That meant another round of patriotic festivities. In Washington, Captain Jeremiah Denton and soon-to-be-admiral James Stockdale were awarded the Navy’s John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational Leadership; Denton sobbed openly. Portsmouth, Virginia, only recently the site of a bloody desegregation brawl, honored native son Fred Cherry, who not incidentally was black, with a parade featuring eight brass bands. He told the assembly, “I do not regret one moment in North Vietnam.”

  Because all the prisoners were released, the stricture that had prevented them from describing their captivity was lifted. They began sitting at press conferences to describe their awful ordeal. The front pages of conservative heartland newspapers from Fredericksburg, Virginia, to Spokane, Washington, featured a serialized Associated Press interview with Jeremiah Denton—the POW, editors reminded readers, who had “stepped to the microphones and, in a moment the nation will long remember . . . said, ‘God bless America’ ”—under headlines such as “I WAS LIKE A CRIPPLED ROACH” and “PRAYERS HELPED DENTON ENDURE TORTURE.” The UPI ran a competing series from Air Force Major Charles Boyd. The right-leaning weekly U.S. News & World Report gave thirteen pages to an account from Lieutenant Commander John S. McCain, son of the former chief of naval operations in the Pacific. He said, “I admire President Nixon’s courage . . . he had to take the most unpopular decisions that I could imagine—the mining, the blockade, the bombing.” (Actually, according to polls, these actions were popular.) He added, “In the context of history, Watergate will be a very minor item as compared with the other achievements of this administration.” And he enthused, “I see more of an appreciation of our way of life. There is more patriotism. The flag is all over the place.”

  Their stories: downed fliers with cracked vertebrae and shattered ankle sockets, facing villagers seeking to tear them limb from limb, led to prison camps with overflowing toilet buckets, maggot-
ridden rice, bones set without anesthesia, and solitary confinement in cold cement rooms for months at a time. They did not know whether they would ever see another American again. Then men furtively glimpsed shadows through cracks in walls, found notes marked on toilet paper with matchsticks, read legends like GOD WILL FIND STRENGTH. ROBINSON RISNER, SEPTEMBER 18, 1965 scrawled upon bare stone walls—and eventually someone remembered the “tap code” used by Korean War POWs (“Joan Baez Sucks” was one of the first successful messages). Through such glancing communication they were able to reestablish a full-fledged military chain of command—the “4th Combined POW Wing,” they called it—to enforce the code of conduct the military established for prisoners of war after several Korean War prisoners defected to the Communists. Its central tenets included: “If I am captured I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. . . . I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy. . . . I will make no oral or written statements disloyal to my country or harmful to their cause.”

  Out of suffering, Americans learned, they devised a miraculous sort of makeshift civilization. Then their captors, cruel Oriental despots with names like “The Bug” (“a psychotic torturer, one of the worst fiends that we had to deal with”) and “Zorba” (a hideously incompetent doctor) and “The Cat” (“a dapper and effeminate intellectual”), sought to crush it, punishing with torture captives who maintained their status as proud American fighting men. So these stout-hearted men fought back by taking actions that invited more torture. “We now began to lie on the railroad tracks,” Denton explained at his April 1 press conference. “We forced them to be brutal to us.” Welcoming torture, enduring it, absorbing it, was how they proved their mettle as warriors.