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

by Rick Perlstein

  Here was a moment that framed what Watergate meant: a battle over the meaning of America.

  Two visions of patriotism clashed that summer in the letters pages. Why, an Indianan asked, was Ted Kennedy “always finding fault with our good, hard-working President? Our country needs Richard Nixon. We need more men like him. Many people prayed for his re-election. I am one of them.” They believed the Ervin Committee was “so intent on putting a noose around Nixon’s neck that they are blindly acting as pallbearers for the nation.”

  The other side critiqued—decorously, usually, for they were liberals—the “alarmingly high percentage of Americans more than willing to tolerate lawlessness as long as it is conducted in the name of ‘Americanism’ or even ‘law and order.’ ” They addressed Sam Ervin as a man who “holds the future of the right of free citizenship in your hand as fully as have only a few others in history”; quoted the Federalist Papers; complained “that the most thoroughgoing effort to convert the United States into a police state came from the most publicly pious, God-Fearing President of modern times.” One boasted in a letter to the Washington Post of his son’s ambition to be a public servant—even though “he possesses two qualities that ‘at this point in time’ appear to be definitely undesirable . . . he is scrupulously honest and he has a very good memory.” Their appeal to the word patriotism was just as explicit as the conservatives’ appeal to it: “Any President’s true patriotism would show in his own rejection of unlimited power,” one of them wrote.

  In recent years the first group’s version of patriotism had ruled public opinion. In April 1970, for instance, on the eve of the Kent State shootings and in the wake of the frightening disorder of the late 1960s, 76 percent in a Gallup poll maintained that the First Amendment should be suspended if that meant no more disruptive protests in the streets. These were the people who had elected Richard Nixon in 1968, in a tangle of rage and piety. Who believed, with Richard Nixon, that our neighbors might be our enemies, and our enemies might destroy us.

  But now a shift was afoot. The suspicious circles were expanding into places like the Worcester, Massachusetts, living room of a conservative blue-collar worker whose son happened to be Abbie Hoffman, the Chicago Seven defendant and hippie savant. Now John Hoffman sat in front of his tiny black-and-white TV and told himself that, yes, “Abbie had been right all along”: American decency was indeed a sham.

  They expanded, too, into a Republican county thirty miles down the road from Pekin, Illinois, that a liberal college professor visited late in July and wrote about for the Chicago Tribune. The first person he visited was the state’s attorney, who showed his visitor the little plastic bug he had placed atop a framed letter from Richard Nixon thanking him for running the local reelection effort. “Sometimes I can just sense what people are thinking when I pass them on the street. They’re saying to themselves: ‘If that’s what goes on in Washington, I wonder what Paul’s got to hide up in his office.’ ”

  Down the hall, the local circuit court judge said regretfully that if John Dean’s testimony had been given in his courtroom he would have had to find it credible.

  A young farmer’s wife told the visitor: “It’s just so stupid. Why didn’t the man”—Nixon—“just have more trust in the American public?”

  And down the highway, in the men’s grill room at Bloomington Country Club, the guys shooting the bull after the first round of a golf tournament started in about Watergate.

  “You know,” one exclaimed, “this thing is just like cheating on your wife. I mean, if you were cheating on your wife, you wouldn’t stand up and tell everyone the truth about it. Would you?”

  When most of the golfers chortled their agreement, another told them all to shut up: “Cut it out. You know darn well that this thing isn’t like that at all.” The liberal college professor reported that the consort finally agreed: “Cheating on your wife is just not the same thing as cheating on your country.”

  In a new poll, the majority of the American people said they wished they’d voted for George S. McGovern. Nixon’s approval rating fell to 31 percent, the lowest of any president since Hoover. The favorability ratings of the Ervin Committee members ranged from 69 to 84 percent. Howard Baker was mentioned for the 1976 Republican nomination. Only 17 percent believed the press was out “to get President Nixon on Watergate,” and only 40 percent now thought there was too much coverage. Americans did tell the Harris poll they found the president more believable than John Dean—but only by 38 to 37 percent. “Apparently,” one dry wit wrote to his local newspaper, the “President of the United of States is one percent more believable than a confessed felon.”

  THEN AN ENTIRELY NEW WHITE House crisis presented itself: Vice President Spiro Agnew, that pathetic man a heartbeat away from the presidency, was in legal trouble.

  A virtually unknown figure nationally in 1968, with only a year’s experience as Maryland governor and four years as Baltimore County’s chief executive before that, he had become Nixon’s running mate for the most craven of political reasons: he had caught Nixon’s eye after putting down urban riots with unmatched ruthlessness. He was a veritable freak for conformity and order. One of his county employees told a journalist the story of how he once returned from a two-week camping trip unshaven, eager to get back to work; Agnew sent him home with orders not to return until he shaved. Agnew had accepted the nomination, intoning, “I stand here with a deep sense of the improbability of this moment.” In office he was reduced to attending ribbon cuttings and attending to a policy portfolio of fifth-tier issues like maritime affairs and Native American rights—until, in October 1969, Pat Buchanan, practically his only West Wing fan, came up with the idea of drafting him as the administration’s attack dog against the radicals, and the liberal media elites the White House believed to be cosseting radicals. Or, in Agnew’s memorable words, “the cacophony of seditious drivel emanating from the best-publicized clowns in our society and their fans in the Fourth Estate.”

  He was still sticking to that script—blasting the Ervin Committee for using “McCarthy tactics,” and for exploiting “the misguided zeal of a few individuals” in order to “wash our dirty linen in public.” He said he’d “never been more proud of my party” than during Watergate, and called Ervin’s hearings a “rain dance” that could “hardly fail to muddy the waters of justice beyond repair.” On August 6 he said he agreed with his president that Watergate was not an issue for Congress but belonged in the courts instead—because he had “confidence in the criminal justice system of the United States.” Which had to be a bit embarrassing when it was announced on August 7 that the criminal justice system was investigating him—for accepting bags full of cash from construction companies from his years as Baltimore County executive and Maryland governor.

  “I am innocent of any wrongdoing,” Agnew declared, pinning the hubbub on “masochistic persons looking for all that is wrong.” His lawyer, writing to the presiding judge, mimicked the arguments of the president: “I do not acknowledge that you or any Grand Jury have any right to the records of the Vice President. Nor do I acknowledge the propriety of any Grand Jury investigation of possible wrongdoing on the part of the Vice President so long as he occupies that office.”

  Investigators, undaunted, kept investigating.

  Nixon gave his next speech to the public on August 15. For this one, unlike every other speech from the Oval Office, the picture of his family, the bust of Abraham Lincoln, and the American flag were out of view. The previous evening, at 11:45 P.M., bombing strikes over Cambodia ended fifteen minutes before the War Powers Act, passed over the president’s veto, would have rendered their continuation a violation of federal law. But those who thought the president might finally be humbled heard him say instead, “Not only was I unaware of any cover-up, I was unaware there was anything to cover up.” He said those who kept vigil over their “backward-looking obsession with Watergate” might “destroy our hopes for the future,” and keep the government f
rom “matters of greater importance.” (The phone-tapped Joseph Kraft responded mercilessly: “Like, for instance, what? . . . No business before the American people is anywhere near as important as achieving honest government—which is what the Watergate affair is all about.”) Nixon pointed to his predecessors: “Every President since World War II has believed that in internal security matters, the President has the power to authorize wiretaps without first obtaining a search warrant.”

  Bottom line: releasing tapes “would set a precedent that would cripple all future Presidents.” So he would refuse to do it. (Barry Gold-water Jr., a congressman from Los Angeles, answered curtly: “He asks for the trust of the American people, but he doesn’t trust them enough to let them hear the tapes.”) The reason, Nixon concluded, was that the relationship between a president and his aides was like that “between a lawyer and his client, between a priest and a penitent, and between a husband and wife”: it required confidentiality. (A letter writer wondered if it was accidental that he omitted the relation between a psychiatrist and his patient.)

  Only a little over a quarter of the 77 percent of the country who heard the speech believed it. Fifty-four percent found it “not at all convincing.” A habitual presidential defender, columnist William S. White, called it “extraordinarily weak.” Barry Jr.’s dad, the 1964 Republican nominee, said Nixon “did not add anything to his other speeches that would tend to divert suspicion from him.”

  He stepped into the box again a week later for his first press conference in fourteen months to announce the appointment of Henry Kissinger as secretary of state in addition to his current post as national security advisor. But eighteen of the twenty-one questions hounded him on Watergate. Of the three exceptions, two were on Spiro Agnew, and the third was on whether Nixon would apologize to the American people for ordering some 3,700 bombing raids over Cambodia, hiding the fact even from the top military brass via, the public had just learned, a falsified set of ledgers, while publicly claiming to “have scrupulously observed the neutrality of Cambodia.” Clark Mollenhoff, the toughest old bastard in the Washington press corps, all but accused the president of being a dictator: “Where is the check on authoritarianism by the executive if the president is the sole judge of what the executive branch makes available and suppresses?”

  AT LEAST NIXON STILL HAD Ronald Reagan.

  On August 2, 1973, returning from a monthlong vacation, the California governor called the Ervin Committee a “lynching” and a “witch hunt”—even as the Washington Post reported Nixon had spied on him, spreading stories about him behaving oddly at a party. He managed to excuse the president even for that. “I don’t know what they’re referring to,” he told the Post. “I was a perfect picture of decorum. You’ve really caught me here with mixed emotions because I don’t know whether to get a sort of glint in my eye and let you think there’s a side of me that no one knows.”

  But what about Nixon taping him when he visited the Oval Office? What did he think about that? No big deal. “Matter of fact,” Reagan said, the tapes probably “made me sound good.” (They did not. In one 1971 conversation, Nixon called him “pretty shallow” and of “limited mental capacity.” Kissinger called the notion of Reagan as president “inconceivable.”)

  When the news came out that Vice President Spiro Agnew was under federal investigation for taking bribes not just as county executive in Maryland, but in his vice presidential office, David Broder quoted Republican after Republican not daring to defend him. “After the Watergate experience, no one is eager to be the first to rush into print with a denial,” a state chairman said. Ronald Reagan, however, was plenty eager. “I have known Ted Agnew to be an honest and honorable man,” he told Broder. “He, like any other citizen of high character, should be considered innocent until proven otherwise.” (The same week he said an alleged cop killer, not yet tried, deserved the electric chair.)

  Came next the president’s August 15 speech, and another Reagan encomium: “His message was the voice of reason which went a long way toward putting the whole situation in better perspective.” It came as Agnew’s legal trouble, as one wag had recently put it, became “the best news to reach second-string Presidential candidates since Edward Kennedy’s car went off that bridge.” The second-string presidential candidate named Ronald Reagan seemed determined to sabotage that opportunity. It drove his advisors to distraction.

  Rowland Evans and Robert Novak had published a column about the Reagan aides positioning their boss as a presidential prospect. They cited his record as “the successful architect of clean, frugal government, free of scandal and geared to lower taxes,” and his distance from an irretrievably corrupted White House. Problem was, his backers complained, Reagan kept defending Watergate conspirators “as no worse than double parkers.” His aides were quoted rejoicing that Reagan finally seemed to get it—that he had ceased his defense of the president and was concentrating instead on his new bid for national attention: Proposition 1, the tax-limitation initiative for which he had won a spot on the November 6 California ballot. “He believes the appeal of lower taxes, limited spending, and reduced government is universal.”

  He was about the only one who believed it. At the annual June governors’ conference at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel, everything he said seemed calculated to remove him from serious consideration as an important voice in the national conversation. A columnist surveyed the governors about what they thought should be the top national priority. Democrat Reuben Askew of Florida said “learning to live with nature.” Tom McCall, Republican of Oregon, listed “strong land-use planning.” Republican governor Otis Bowen of Indiana said “improved transportation services.” Almost everyone mentioned inflation, the environment, and restoring the integrity of government. Governor Reagan alone, as if from a different political planet, said, “Our highest national priority should be to halt the trend toward bigger, more expensive government at all levels before it is too late.” He added an apocalyptic fillip: “We as citizens will either master government as our servant or ultimately it will master us.”

  He called a press conference on the ballot initiative. Reporters asked only about Watergate. (“About 90 percent of everything said so far is unfounded rumor, accusations, and so forth,” he answered.) He explained the tax-limitation idea at a session of fellow governors. With a single exception (Governor Meldrim Thomson Jr. of New Hampshire, who was such an extremist he’d once proposed issuing atomic weapons to members of the National Guard), they called it foolhardy—“a political ploy and an insult to the legislative branch,” said one Democrat. A Republican called it “superfluous, unwise, and unnecessary.”

  Reagan, unfazed, said the governors simply hadn’t understood it. Then he got to work selling it back home. He was nothing if not a salesman.

  He also had an ace in the hole. Wealthy backers pumped out $436,452 (including a $110,000 loan guaranteed by thirteen of them, including car dealer Holmes Tuttle, oil scion William H. Doheny, and construction magnate J. Robert Fluor) to collect the 520,806 signatures needed to get it for the ballot—the most spent to qualify a ballot initiative since these same men spent $396,000 on a 1972 drive to cut state workers’ salaries.

  The 5,700 words of the complicated measure included a rollback of the personal income tax rate from 8.3 to 7 percent and a provision that if the state collected more than an allotted amount in any year the surplus would be refunded to taxpayers. It established an emergency fund of not more than 0.2 percent of taxpayer income to maintain government functions—but only the governor could declare the emergency. It also set tax limits for cities, counties, and special districts. Finally, it exempted the wealthy from California tax law’s $10,000 mandatory minimum assessment, and included a rebate for lower-income taxpayers. At the end of August the state government’s official nonpartisan fiscal legislative analyst, a highly respected bureaucrat of thirty years’ standing named A. Alan Post, whom Reagan had once offered a job as his administration’s finance director, weighed in
with his assessment: Proposition 1 would force an immediate $620 million reduction in next year’s state budget. Reagan roared back that Post was serving as a “cat’s paw” for Democratic Assembly Speaker Robert Moretti. He said he only wished Post’s were “honest mistakes—they were not. They were deliberate distortions.”

  Post had just been profiled as a model of objectivity and rectitude on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. He had once been, in fact, a registered Republican—then changed his status to “declined to state,” to foreground his nonpartisan scrupulousness. The chairman of the California senate Republican caucus rose to defend him: “Alan Post doesn’t slant figures.” So did the Republican floor leader in the California assembly: “I have never personally been of the opinion he is partisan.” Post appeared before the assembly Ways and Means Committee to patiently explain his statistics-laden seventy-five-page conclusions that over a four-year period Prop 1 would require budget cuts totaling $3.5 billion, and would merely shift the tax burden to localities and property taxes. The governor’s chief deputy director of finance called that “misleading, distorted, and biased.” A shouting match nearly broke out.

  Post appeared a second time, offering five ways the governor could shrink state government without forcing a fiscal crisis, including privatizing the Department of Consumer Affairs, increasing tuition and student fees, and reducing tax relief for senior citizens. Moretti listed all the nonpartisan organizations that called Proposition 1 irresponsible, including the League of Women voters. Michael Deaver, one of six top gubernatorial aides who’d taken a leave of absence to work for the referendum campaign, promptly declared that the League “has lost its right to be regarded as a non-partisan, fact-finding organization.” Complained Moretti, “Apparently anybody who disagrees with him is just ‘bad people.’ ” Indeed, Reagan had first attempted to pass his tax reform via statute, but a state senate committee bottled it up. He had labeled that partisan “sabotage”—even though it lost a vote in plain daylight, by a margin of 80 percent, including a majority of his fellow Republicans.