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

by Rick Perlstein

  And, from the other side: the POWs were villains. That was all many on the left cared to know. The week of Brudno’s suicide, Jane Fonda published a long letter on the POWs in the Los Angeles Times accusing the POWs of “trying to pose as the heroic victims when they are responsible for killing countless Vietnamese.”

  The full House Foreign Affairs Committee approved the War Powers bill 31 to 4. Clem Zablocki, meanwhile, opened hearings on the Vietnam “Missing in Action” issue. The point was to debunk a spreading fantasy. It failed. That 1,300 men were still counted as MIA was just an artifact of misleading statistics, he said: from the testimony both of the returnees and of the North Vietnamese, we know “there are no missing in action or prisoners of war in Southeast Asia at this time that they believe are alive.” Which only meant, to many POW-MIA families whom the White House had politically organized for cynical reasons in the first place, that Congress was part of the cover-up. “Why are you willing to believe the enemy on this subject when they do not tell the truth on any other subject?” the Corpus Christi, Texas, chapter of the National League of Families soon raged in a letter to the Pentagon. “The fact is, you have no proof our men are dead.”

  AT LEAST NEARLY ALL AMERICANS agreed on one thing: the country was in the midst of an “energy crisis.” In January, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington had called it “the most critical problem—domestic or international—facing the nation today.” Newsweek spoke of “doomsday implications.” Des Moines almost ran out of heating oil in a record cold winter; Denver high schools went on three-day weeks to conserve fuel. Then came spring, and panic. Utility officials in San Antonio cut gas allotments by 67 percent and the eleventh-largest city in the nation nearly went dark for the foreseeable future, but for a mercy mission of borrowed out-of-state fuel trucks, like the United Nations rescuing some tropical banana republic. Factories closed in West Virginia, Illinois, and Mississippi. Grain shipments were stranded on barges, and flights from New York’s JFK Airport scheduled as “nonstop” had to make landings to refuel.

  White House aide Peter Flanigan promised that “the United States is not going to go back to the cold, the dark, and the bicycle.” That just sounded like another government lie. In June, two thousand independent service stations simply shut down. Thousands of others began imposing ten-gallon limits per purchase. The “Skylab” space station, just launched into orbit, was meant to pave the way for a permanent human presence in space. Soaring temperatures within the spacecraft almost scuttled the launch. An editorial cartoon parked the astronauts at a gas station: “Don’t worry,” a NASA official told them, “you guys can’t go anyway. He can let us have only 10 more gallons of gas.”

  The most traumatic thing about the shortages was that nobody had heretofore dreamed such a thing possible. “Popeye is running out of cheap spinach,” the commerce secretary said. But the idea that energy was a commodity subject to scarcity was a new concept. It was just there, like the birds in the air, like the air itself, an American birthright like milkshakes and spring rains and Opening Day. In 1955 the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had said electricity would soon be so cheap it would no longer be metered. In 1966 a government report predicted, “The nation’s total energy resources seem adequate to satisfy expected requirements through the remainder of the century at costs near present levels.” Now that abundance had become scarcity as if overnight, conspiracy theories multiplied. The Nixon administration “was acting in concert with the major companies to produce a shortage” in order to kneecap the independent oil producers, Senator Adlai Stevenson III rumbled; Senator Walter Mondale said energy companies were faking the shortage to spur construction of the controversial oil pipeline to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, where oil had been discovered in 1968.

  But Americans also blamed themselves. It was part and parcel of a new vernacular ideology: civilization was destroying the earth. The evidence seemed to be everywhere. In Los Angeles, beaches were closed after five million to six million tons of raw sewage flowed into the Pacific when the pumping system failed. In New Jersey, thick, frightening patches of “red tide” choked the beaches—harmlessly, authorities insisted, though they were contradicted by newspaper warnings that “a toxic variety can irritate the ears, eyes, nose and skin.” Annually, millions of pounds of smelly dead alewife fish washed up on Lake Michigan’s shores; record earthquakes hit Nicaragua, Mexico, Peru, China, and Italy; dormant volcanoes mysteriously erupted in Iceland; Jerusalem suffered a snowstorm; 1,500 birds suddenly died in England; massive fish kills appeared in Lake Erie; floating islands of decaying vegetable matter emerged in the middle of the Caribbean; this spring, 1973, the Mississippi River spilled over flood protection gates in Louisiana for the first time in decades. “A growing, man-made dead sea of waste matter has seemingly come to life off the Atlantic Coast”—this was a Los Angeles Times editorial—“and is moving to rejoin the civilization that created it. At the center of this water contamination, no ocean creatures survive. On its fringes, diseased and rotted fish have been found. Within, chloroform bacteria and the viruses of encephalitis and hepatitis thrive, waiting for targets to attack.” Two years earlier there had been a biblical infestation of gypsy moths on the East Coast. Who could deny the planet was in full-bore rebellion?

  The Club of Rome, a gathering of wizards from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology supported by seventeen top scientists from six nations, published Limits to Growth, a report based on computer simulations that concluded the most benign possible outcome of current trends was the complete collapse of civilization by the year 2100—unless, that is, the world resolved to immediately shift to a “no-growth” economy. The book version sold four million copies. Another perennial bestseller, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, predicted “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” The New York Times’ new “environmental reporter” explained, “The industrial society is getting dangerously crowded, complex, and putrid. . . . We urgently need a change in social values,” and “the shift can occur only if we have what the MIT group correctly calls a Copernican Revolution of the mind.”

  With that new household phrase, energy crisis, a new ideology arose: a sort of hair shirt patriotism. Young marrieds proudly announced their intention never to reproduce: “We’ve messed up this earth so badly it’s going to come to an inglorious end in another generation or so,” one couple told a researcher, “and so I don’t want to be responsible for creating someone who has to live with the mess we’ve made.” Christianity Today suggested readers walk more and ride bikes, the better, in the words of the Eighth Psalm, to “consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars.” In Burlington, Vermont, which announced its intention to become “Energy Conservation City USA,” families signed a pledge to return to 1950 levels of energy use. A Chicago Tribune reader wondered, “It is hard to understand how, in the face of a gasoline shortage, we can continue to encourage stock car racing, the Indianapolis 500, and pleasure boating. . . . Better to go slow on gasoline than to be cold next winter.”

  Actually the synthetic methyl-based alcohol used to fuel Indy cars contained no petroleum. But people weren’t getting hung up on details. Fuel companies started advertising for people not to use their product (Mobil: “Smart drivers make gasoline last”). Senators urged states to lower their speed limits. A citizen from rural Carpentersville, Illinois, wrote to the Chicago Tribune to chime in: “The oversized, overpowered, and status-styled car is no longer needed in modern living. Nor can we afford the waste of fuel to propel it. Its size also makes extra-wide highways essential.” A new movie came out, about a future New York City grown to 40 million, homeless people lining the streets, the inhabitants rioting for the scarce “high-energy vegetable concentrates” they survive upon. Strawberry jam costs $150 a jar. The authorities encourage suicide to cull the herd, gifting those who choose death with access to video clips of all the animal and plant life the earth used to enjoy. In the movie’s shock endi
ng, it turns out food processors—the fictional doppelgängers of the rapacious energy companies—secretly harvested these human bodies to produce food. Soylent Green become one of the summer’s hits.

  The Los Angeles mayoral election the Tuesday after Memorial Day was watched as a national bellwether. Tom Bradley, the city’s first black city council member, had lost his race for the office four years earlier, even though opinion polls predicted he would win. Political scientists interpreted the results as suggesting white voters either lied to pollsters so as not to sound racist, or simply could not bring themselves to pull the lever for a black man on Election Day. The same opponent, Sam Yorty, ran the same sort of scare campaign—only this time, Bradley did win. Perhaps Angelenos had become less racist—but the main reason for Bradley’s success in a city that was only 20 percent black was his unprecedented “antigrowth” platform. In Los Angeles, planners had long boasted of having the most freeways of any city in the world and looked forward to the day when L.A. would have 10 million residents. Bradley pledged public transportation instead. He also promised no more new housing would be built in open spaces. The day before yesterday, such ideas would have seemed downright un-American.

  The statewide electorate had already approved a ban on all construction along the Pacific Coast and almost half of California’s incumbent county supervisors had been voted out that year by amateur politicians promising curbs on their communities’ growth. At the spring convention of the California League of Cities, 70 percent of the assembled mayors and councilmen attributed their election to their antigrowth positions. Selling austerity was the new political imperative. Richard Nixon’s new Environmental Protection Agency proposed controls to contain smog, intended to reduce auto traffic by 60 percent in New Jersey by 1977. In Georgia, Governor Carter ordered state police to use slower patrol speeds and state workers to use stairs instead of the elevators for trips of two floors or less.

  But some conservatives called the idea of an energy crisis a liberal conspiracy. One Chicago Tribune reader complained that our new “can’t-do nation” had “followed the Nader flag into a forest of empty gas tanks.” And Ronald Reagan said that if California ran short of energy that summer it would be the fault of environmentalists who wouldn’t let nuclear power plants be built. And “there wouldn’t be an awful lot” government could do about a fuel shortage anyway. The head of the state government’s resources agency countered that there were plenty of things government could do—and that the reason nuclear facilities weren’t being built was that their sites were on earthquake faults.

  The 1970s were throwing up so many new ways for Americans to disagree.

  IN A CURIOUS DEVELOPMENT, THE presidential aspirant who said we shouldn’t do anything about Watergate or the energy crisis was enjoying a political boom.

  Nixon administration aide Kevin Phillips, author of The Emerging Republican Majority, published a feature in the June issue of Harper’s called “Conservative Chic”—Harper’s headline writers were ironic; the author was not—predicting the Nixon administration would “cement its coalition by creating a new managerial and communications establishment that merchandises the values that Middle Americans hold dear,” and that “the liberal establishment of the Sixties will begin to wither.” The nationally syndicated columnist Reg Murphy called that “the most ludicrous political analysis of our time.” Most conservatives agreed with Murphy: all the ascendant ideological forces came from the left. The Wall Street Journal’s editorialists agonized over an 85–10 vote on Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s bill to develop a mandatory national fuel-allocation formula: “The way the mood was out there today,” they quoted a Democratic Senate source as saying, “they would have voted to nationalize the oil companies.” Which, indeed, Scoop Jackson would soon be proposing.

  Republicans were on the ropes, their titular leader an embarrassment: the press reported that the Richard M. Nixon Foundation, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, chairman of the board, was putting plans for Nixon’s presidential library “on the back burner”; the Week in Review reported, “In private, some Congressional Republicans are beginning to consider the political benefits that might flow from a Nixon resignation and the resultant ascent of Spiro T. Agnew.” A big Republican National Committee fund-raising dinner in Washington, meanwhile, had been only half subscribed.

  But a dinner for the state GOP in California headlined by Ronald Reagan was standing room only.

  NBC News did a report on the curiosity. The governor, his head tilted to the side, his evening wear exquisite, was soon to head out for another turn on what he called the “mashed potato circuit.” He said he was “itching” to sell his conservative beliefs. Asked whether the Watergate scandal helped his presidential chances, he replied charmingly, practically blushing, “Ahhhh, um—maybe distance lends enchantment!” His most prominent “kitchen cabinet” backer, Henry Salvatori (an oilman, which made him popular culture’s new villain, though the Reagan camp apparently had no compunctions about putting him out front), said his man was in clover: “Because—I’ll ask you a question: have we had one little ounce of scandal in California on anything in this administration? I’ll answer for you—none at all!”

  “So Governor Reagan as a national figure within the Republican Party has been strengthened by this Watergate?”

  “Oh, he has been and will be. He stands twenty feet tall!”

  “Or at least tall enough to keep his head above Watergate. Tom Brokaw, NBC News, Los Angeles.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  John Dean

  IN WASHINGTON, WATERGATE WAS NOW all but the fourth branch of government. Some days it threatened to supersede the other three. Which was why the day before the hearings were set to resume on June 5, Clark Clifford, a towering figure among Washington’s bipartisan “Wise Men,” who had served all the Democratic presidents since Harry S. Truman, published an op-ed in the New York Times. “[T]he executive branch virtually has ceased to function,” he lamented. “The public’s loss of confidence is widespread and increasing. The credibility of Mr. Nixon has been seriously affected by four public statements he has made which are sharply contradictory.” Foreign policy crises were being ignored; talented people had stopped applying for government jobs; the stock market was crippled, and it all would only get worse “as additional witnesses tell their stories and as men faced with the forbidding prospect of lengthy prison sentences decide to tell the truth.”

  Clifford proposed a solution. Under the Twenty-fifth Amendment to “that noblest of all documents, the Constitution of the United States,” Vice President Agnew could resign; Congress, working in healthful bipartisan fashion, could propose three replacements from both parties of “outstanding ability and the highest character”; Congress would confirm a new vice president who would promise not to run for president in 1976; then the president could resign, an act that “would assure him a place in history for his unselfish dedication to the nation’s good.” The new chief executive would usher “into the Government the ablest individuals in the country,” make “decisions based solely upon merit,” and govern in concert with Congress just as the Founders intended.

  The graphic accompanying the piece was Nixon removing the crown from his own head. If he did so, Clifford triumphantly concluded, a “government of national unity” could “transform the next three and a half years from years of bitterness, divisiveness, and deterioration to years of healing, unity, and progress.” Civilization: saved. Who could disagree?

  Conservatives, it turned out. Pat Buchanan, Nixon’s right-wing speechwriter, took to the pages of the New York Times to howl that “the President’s traditional adversaries are happily drawing up surrender terms.” His conspiracy theory claimed that Clifford, Joe Kraft, and an unnamed political reporter had combined to force the president to “betray the mandate of 1972,” not as nonpartisan patriots but as de facto operatives for George McGovern, who, Buchanan gloated, had won no more than “nine percent of the Florid
a and Wisconsin primaries.” A former Republican congressman wrote to the Chicago Tribune that the “Watergate hullaballoo” was a “cover-up for an unconscionable attempt by Nixon foes to seize the presidency.” Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina said the “emphatic rejection of liberalism” at the ballot box in 1972 “was a bitter pill for some to swallow. Through a process of selective indignation, Watergate became the lever to reverse the judgment of the people”—even though Democratic improprieties “make Watergate look like a Sunday school picnic.”

  Opinions like these accounted for perhaps a third of the Watergate letters to the editor published by newspapers that spring and summer. Richard Nixon’s aggrieved defenders insisted that his Javerts were “sabotaging our country here and abroad”; that a hysterical press “has made us appear to be a nation of adolescents” (this came from conservative publisher Henry Regnery); that they were “making an irresponsible attempt to destroy confidence in government itself just because of the admitted stupidity of a handful of people.” It was, wrote a woman from Richmond, Virginia, “a disgrace to downgrade our President as some have.” They did so, a City University of New York math professor argued, in order to deny President Nixon a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.