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

by Rick Perlstein

  QUESTIONS LIKE THESE WERE HOW Watergate truly became a national conversation—water-cooler fodder for people who didn’t know Haldeman from Ehrlichman from Adam. Moments like that were how the crystal-chandeliered hearing room, flanked by fifty-foot Corinthian columns and faced with marble, became as familiar a TV setting as Fred Sanford’s junkyard in Sanford and Son or Mary Richards’s bachelorette apartment in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Watergate was now everywhere—for instance, on the Minneapolis street where CBS filmed the establishing shot for the exterior of Mary Tyler Moore’s character’s apartment. The building had become an attraction for tourist buses, which was why the owner hung a large banner outside reading “IMPEACH NIXON.” It could be agonizing—“like a national funeral that just goes on day after day,” Senator J. Bennett Johnston Jr. of Louisiana said. But in a sense it also could be fun.

  Father’s Day, June 17, dads received gag gifts: A “fine heavy-quality towel with ‘Watergate Hotel’ embroidered upon it. Let your friends think there was more than one burglary.” “A jigsaw puzzle that will bug you.” The “Watergate Scandal” card game. (“No one wins, there are just losers.”) The Watergate Comedy Hour LP (released on the “Hidden Records” label), and Mort Sahl’s latest, Sing a Song of Watergate. “DON’T BUG ME!” sweatshirts. (Images of ladybugs became ubiquitous, code that its wearer was a Watergate buff.) “Candles for those burned up about Watergate. In red, white, or blue.”

  Unfamiliar with how criminal defendants talked when trained by criminal lawyers, Americans found the exotic language from the witness table fascinating. Harry Reasoner of ABC did a humor piece on a married couple on vacation arguing about who was responsible for forgetting the toothpaste: “ ‘Since there was no cap on it, I hesitated to place it in my shaving kit, where it might compromise my razor. I assume, in fact my recollection is that I was told, that you would seek out the cap and complete the packing of the toothpaste while I was eating breakfast.’ ” Such phrases as “at this point in time” and “at that point in time” (legalese for “now” and “then”) became the nation’s favorite inside joke: On Sesame Street, Cookie Monster stood accused of stealing, what else, cookies—an offense, after whispered consultation with his lawyer, he happened not to recollect at this point in time. Then he started eating the microphone.

  It was everywhere, and soon it would be even more so. One thing Magruder insisted on throughout his five hours of self-incriminating testimony was that Richard M. Nixon had nothing to do with any of it. That was why John Dean was so intensely anticipated: he was the one who insisted the president had something to do with it all. Dean was scheduled to begin on June 19. Viewers bated their breath.

  And then they released their breath, when the committee announced hearings would be postponed for a week while the president hosted Leonid Brezhnev.

  THE PRESIDENT WHO NEVER HAD time to watch Watergate hearings did have time to dash first to a tiny town in the middle of Illinois where Watergate was an “unknown word,” the Chicago Tribune explained. The Trib was incorrect concerning Pekin, Illinois, where Nixon unveiled the cornerstone of a research center dedicated to the late Illinois Republican senator Everett McKinley Dirksen: actually, the crowd was lousy with signs protesting both Watergate and the bombing of Cambodia, though just before the presidential motorcade passed through, Secret Service men confiscated those placards for destruction. In his speech there, the president said, “We live in a time when many people are cynical about politics and politicians,” and “it would be a tragedy” to “let our disappointment with some aspects of the system turn into despair with the system as a whole.” It would take a cynic, apparently, to point out that Dirksen was the father-in-law of Ervin Committee panelist Howard Baker, and that this might have had something to do with why the president chose this particular cornerstone to dedicate following a period in which he made fewer public appearances than in any other month in his presidency.

  In Washington on June 18 government employees were excused early from work. They waved Soviet flags before Brezhnev’s arriving motorcade. (“How disheartening,” a Washington Post reader wrote, “so soon after our returning POWs have been tortured by the Communists!”) The global chessboard had been the scene of Nixon’s greatest triumphs ever since the freshman congressman had won a berth on a fact-finding commission inquiring into the success of the Marshall Plan in 1947, and once more Nixon scored points: a parley with the premier at Camp David brought agreement on guidelines for restarting arms limitation talks in Geneva and an accord on joint cooperation on peaceful uses for atomic energy. Those meetings were followed by a reception at Nixon’s Western White House in San Clemente, where the Soviet leader met Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, and Gene Autry—and one of the only politicians present: Governor Ronald Reagan, who emerged to once more dismiss Watergate before the press: “I just think it’s too bad that it is taking people’s attention from what I think is the most brilliant accomplishment of any president of this century, and that is the steady progress towards peace and the easing of tensions.”

  The distraction didn’t work. Monday’s Time magazine featured a picture of a nebbishy blond man and the cover slug “Dean Talks,” reporting the latest leaks: that he would testify that the president discussed granting executive clemency to Howard Hunt (“if true, this is an outright admission of the President’s willingness to consider cover-up activity”); that he knew of the cover-up as early as September 15, 1972; that after the Sirica letter the president “discussed with Dean the possibility of his own impeachment—a damaging indication of how seriously Nixon took his own involvement.” And also the latest on Dean: that he had “borrowed” four thousand dollars from the secret campaign fund to finance his honeymoon. Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott was quoted concerning that: “Nothing is so incredible that this turncoat will not be willing to testify it in exchange for a reward. . . . A man who can embezzle can easily tell lies.” Time also reported that the White House had hired its own private detectives to dig up that particular piece of dirt.

  A government lawyer who the Wall Street Journal said “had distinguished himself at practically nothing before being admitted to the White House inner sanctum” was about to accuse the President of the United States of criminality. Nothing like it had ever happened before. In Central Park, a busking folksinger tried to make his way through Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” But he just couldn’t concentrate; he was quivering with joyful anticipation of what beans the young White House counsel might spill to hasten the undoing of Tricky Dick. In suburban D.C., meanwhile, the counsel was prisoner in the home he shared with both his beautiful new wife and, now, a complement of U.S. marshals; his lawyers took seriously the rumors that he might be rubbed out.

  He’d noticed from his only TV interview that his eyelids flickered in a squirrelly twitch. So he dug up a pair of old glasses to wear. Then he went to the barber because his hair was too long. The president, in fact, had once chosen him to sit in on an Oval Office meeting with college newspaper editors because he was the one who looked most like a “hippie.”

  The barber made polite conversation on the one subject every last customer was interested in: “What do you think of these Watergate hearings?”

  “They’re pretty interesting, but I haven’t been able to see much of them.”

  “I’ll say they’re interesting. I’m bringing my TV set to the shop next week. I want to see this guy Dean get his butt kicked.”

  “Yeah, that’s going to be something. We’ll find out what the squealer has to say for himself.”

  “Right. You know, I can’t imagine a guy lying that way about President Nixon. The guy is crazy, maybe.”

  “Could be,” John Dean said, with all sincerity.

  ABC’S VOLUBLE CAPITOL HILL REPORTER Sam Donaldson and anchorman Frank Reynolds bantered back and forth like football announcers before the big game. Donaldson explained that the room was always standing room only for these hearings. “But today the staff members, and they
can be pretty blasé here on Capitol Hill, have a line outside, and that line stretched all the way down the hall this morning.” A sprig of curled wire sprouted from his ear, he fanned a sheath of paper: “The word is that the Xerox broke down! So they could only get out 98 pages!” Dean’s full statement was 245 pages. That made it all the more suspenseful. No one knew what he was going to say.

  How, Reynolds wondered, with all the imprecations flying around that John Dean was a self-serving prevaricator, could viewers know whether he was making all this up?

  Answered Donaldson: “Well, many of the lawyers on this committee say you just look at him the same way you’d look at any witness: Does he look credible? Does he sound credible? You test his story against the stories of others. Where are there discrepancies? How many people buttress him?”

  Reynolds: “But on the question of conversations Dean has while with the President, how does the committee go about getting corroborating or discrediting testimony on that?”

  Now there was a question: could you call the president before a Senate panel to ask whether or not he was a liar?

  At which, with perfect dramatic timing, the doughy-faced chairman in a cream-colored summer suit and yellow tie stirred into action.

  “There’s the gavel! Sam Ervin, the chairman, and the session is under way!”

  HE LOOKED HARDLY MORE THAN a boy. Behind him sat his beautiful wife, Maureen, her hair piled tight in a blond bun, eyes green, eyebrows gorgeously shaped. There was another contrast, too, with all the other witnesses: they all had had lawyers beside them to whisper in their ears. Dean was alone.

  He began reading the statement he had been working on in isolation since April. It would take him all day. He got a ninety-minute break for lunch—which he spent lying on his back, exhausted.

  The voice belied the baby face: deep, even, intense, a monotone. As a rhetorical strategy, for five days John Dean would fight every urge to emote, even to smile. “Laughter,” he had told himself, “sounds insincere.” Photographers crouched before the table pointing their cannons at him, elbowing each other for angles, and he reacted not at all. For minutes at a time, hunched, he did not even look up. From time to time he took birdlike sips of water. His text was unliterary, unadorned; it simply reconstructed everything relevant he could remember about his White House experience. The most astonishing revelations, and he read them like a grocery list.

  First he explained what he had learned immediately upon his ascension to White House counsel: the abiding obsession of the President of the United States was not foreign policy, nor getting his program through Congress, nor even his reelection. It was protesters—any protester, no matter how innocuous: even the lone man, one day, who stretched out a ten-foot banner in Lafayette Park across from the White House. The word came straight from Dwight Chapin, the president’s personal assistant: “get some ‘thugs’ to remove that man from Lafayette Park.” (The gallery murmured. Ervin admonished them: “The audience is here by the consent of the committee, and I am going to request the audience to refrain from giving expression of their feelings by laughter or otherwise.”) Dean described his role in that incident as the one, he claimed, to which he would become most accustomed: talking down White House janissaries from insane acts. He got the Secret Service to talk to the man instead. Orders also constantly came demanding he task the FBI and CIA with figuring out whether protests were being run by Democratic Party saboteurs. “We never found a scintilla of viable evidence,” Dean said. “This was explained to Mr. Haldeman, but the President believed the opposite was, in fact, true.” A madman, it seemed, lived in the White House.

  Leaks were an obsession. Dean elaborated on a story that had percolated in the media for months: the White House plan to firebomb the Brookings Institution, to uncover alleged damning information about the Kennedy administration. Dean said presidential confidant Charles Colson personally ordered him to arrange it. Dean then flew to San Clemente at the earliest possible moment to stop it.

  Then there was the proposed twenty-four-hour surveillance of Senator Ted Kennedy. Dean said he had sought to turn that off, too, by arguing that stalking a man whose two brothers had been murdered by mysterious gunmen might prove an unwise proposition. Surveillance continued nonetheless. One of the documents Dean introduced into evidence was a 1971 spy report on Kennedy’s stay at a private estate in Honolulu: “Discreet inquiry determined that Kennedy used the estate solely for sleeping purposes.”

  Illegal spying operations, Dean said, had been continuous. “Operation Sandwedge”: an attempt to create a dummy security corporation (“Security Consulting Group”) to support “the capacity to provide ‘bag men’ to carry money and engage in electronic surveillance.” “Operation Gemstone”: Dean described what it was like in the attorney general’s office at that infamous January 24, 1972, meeting in which Gordon Liddy proposed hiring prostitutes to entrap Democrats at their national convention, and docking a boat offshore to incarcerate protest leaders. “I recall Liddy saying that the girls would be high class and the best in the business.”

  Guffaws.

  He remembered Liddy’s excuse after his men were caught at the Watergate: that it was Magruder’s fault for cutting his spying budget. And that Liddy “told me that he was a soldier and would never talk.” Then he told the mind-blowing story of cleaning out Howard Hunt’s safe. The General Services Administration was summoned to open it using drills. Dean took custody of a briefcase inside the safe that “contained loose wires; Chapsticks—for your lips—with wires coming out of them; and instruction sheets for walkie-talkies”; and the forged cables meant to frame John F. Kennedy in the assassination of South Vietnam’s President Diem. He then said Chief of Staff Haldeman had been the one who ordered the destruction of it all:

  “I remember well his instructions. He told me to shred the documents and ‘deep six’ the briefcase. I asked him what he meant by ‘deep six.’ He leaned back in his chair and said: ‘You drive across the river on your way home at night—don’t you?’ I said, ‘yes.’ He said, ‘Well, when you cross over the bridge on your way home, just toss the briefcase into the river.’ ”

  Murmurs.

  He methodically described his attempts to influence the CIA to shut down the FBI’s Watergate investigation, his arrangements with Herbert Kalmbach (at the instruction of John Mitchell and with the approval of Haldeman and Ehrlichman) to finance the payoff to the defendants to perjure themselves. Then the proceedings recessed for lunch.

  Frank Reynolds, lips pursed, looked haunted. “Very difficult to summarize what Dean said,” the anchorman uttered. “Every paragraph contains some sort of a bombshell.” But “if you found this morning’s testimony startling, I can only say that you will find this afternoon’s testimony equally startling.” And as he previewed the extraordinary things they would hear about the conduct of the President of the United States, innocence seemed to drain from his face.

  FOR MORE THAN A YEAR Richard Nixon had been consistent: not just that he hadn’t known anything about plans to burglarize any buildings, but that in the aftermath he had cordoned himself off from any knowledge of it so as not to influence the course of justice. Alleged promises of executive clemency, money offered to defendants to testify in a certain way, even the lawsuits the Republican National Committee had taken out against the Democratic National Committee for defamation: he had learned about all of that in the newspapers—until, he always adamantly insisted, March 21, when, as he had explained while looking the American people in the eye back on April 17, John Dean schooled him on the cover-up, and he turned all the power at his disposal toward making sure justice was served.

  Methodically, Dean led the panel through his personal meetings with the president that he said showed each of these claims were lies.

  On September 15, 1972: the president called Dean in for a stroking session to congratulate him on his work keeping the suspicion limited to Liddy—Nixon expressing special delight when Dean volunteered that he had made
ex parte contacts with the judge handling the DNC’s civil case, to influence him. “I left the meeting with the impression that the President was well aware of what had been going on,” he concluded.

  Then, after his re-inauguration, in February: Nixon called Dean into the Oval Office and said that from now on he would be reporting directly to the president with Watergate updates. It was a reward for having helped shut down a House Watergate inquiry; distracting the media from the Oval Office’s direct ties to campaign dirty trickster Donald Segretti; working to launder donations left over from the 1968 campaign into a bribery slush fund; and plotting strategy on how to deal with the Ervin Committee. Dean said he kept trying to warn Nixon: that the cover-up since June 17 had been criminal; that he, Dean, shared culpability; and that perhaps the president did not want a liaison in the Oval Office who was guilty of obstruction of justice. “He would not accept my analysis and did not want me to go into detail.”

  March 13: “I told the President that there was no money to pay these individuals to meet their demands. He asked me how much it would cost. I told him that I could only estimate, that it might be as high as a million dollars or more. He told me that was no problem and he also looked over at Haldeman and repeated the statement.”

  The President of the United States, talking like a mafia don.

  March 21: “I began by telling the President that there was a cancer growing on the presidency, and if the cancer was not removed, that the President himself would be killed by it.” He related how, in a panic, he reviewed for the president the whole story: the Gemstone meetings in Mitchell’s office; Haldeman’s and Mitchell’s receipt of wiretap transcripts; Kalmbach raising and distributing hush money; Magruder’s perjury. “I concluded by saying that it is going to take continued perjury and continued support of these individuals to perpetuate the cover-up and that I did not believe that it was possible to continue it.”