THE DEBATE UNFOLDED WITH WHOLESALE prices up 60 percent since the beginning of the year. The University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center reported consumer confidence was at the lowest point in its twenty-five years of measuring. Only 30 percent expected “good times” in 1974. Meat prices spiked again. A cartoonist depicted a grocer frantically stamping items that were still in a housewife’s cart: “Hold it—prices just went up again!” Another had a newsman grimly reading a report from the White House: “The wholesale price index soared—with honor, of course.” A Washington Post letter writer suggested that “meatless Mondays” was too timid a response, and proposed foodless Mondays instead. Perhaps this was dry humor. But he offered no indication he didn’t mean it.
It was an inauspicious time to make an argument that government was too active; most took for granted that government bore direct responsibility for controlling prices. That was why, on September 7, the president’s Cost of Living Council set a new ceiling for domestic crude oil prices, at $4.25 a barrel, about a dollar below the prevailing world price. And it was an inauspicious time, one of economic crisis, to press the notion of handcuffing the government with tax cuts and expenditure ceilings. So Bob Moretti challenged Reagan to a televised debate. Reagan called that a “campaign gimmick” and refused. Moretti said Reagan refused because “he cannot answer the questions we raise as to which programs will be cut.” So he challenged the governor again. And again and again. Five times Reagan said no. He was playing an entirely different game. And playing it very well.
It was true that his statistics did not add up. In fact they contradicted each other—a circumstance he dispatched with the casual blitheness that drove his opponents insane. They claimed his plan would create deficits. He responded it would produce $41.5 billion in new revenue over the next decade and a half. But at that, he also stated that the plan’s intention was to give the state less money to spend.
To those who said it would force cuts in popular programs, he pointed out that it included an emergency fund that would protect them. But then he would say he didn’t want to protect government bureaucracies anyway. His critics would scratch their heads—and unveil another brace of statistics. Reagan in turn would respond with moralistic perorations: “When the advocates of bigger and bigger government manage to get their hands on an extra tax dollar or two they hang on like a gila monster until they find some way to spend it.” At which his opponents would respond, yes, with many more statistics. But they only ended up looking like pedantic asses. Which was just the game Reagan was playing.
ON ONE THING ALL PARTIES agreed: Proposition 1 was a vehicle for the governor’s national ambitions. Wrote the National Review contributor and syndicated columnist John Chamberlain, “If the tax revolt is as real as Reagan thinks, and if individuals are alive to their opportunity to keep special interest politicians from raiding their bank accounts, November 6 in California could mark a genuine turn in history.” Said Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., who was California’s secretary of state and son of the man Reagan beat to become governor in 1966, and who hoped to succeed him in 1974, Proposition 1 was “just a vehicle to use to run for President,” and “a hoax, pure and simple.” Indeed Reagan said he’d like to see constitutional tax limitation at the federal level, and proposed an amendment “requiring that no congressman can introduce a spending measure without at the same time introducing a revenue measure to pay for it.”
Reagan’s national profile was raised further on September 13 when he was roasted on The Dean Martin Comedy Hour. That he hadn’t been much of a movie star was the standing joke of the affair. Don Rickles, the bald-headed master of insults, joked about how people couldn’t remember how to pronounce his name. “The greatest thing I can say about Governor Reagan, or Governor Ree-gan, or whatever they call you . . .” Quipped roast master Dean Martin, “He never made an X-rated movie. All his movies were rated ‘M.’ You couldn’t get in unless you were accompanied by a moron.” They were also “so bad they were shown at drive-outs.”
The Man of the Hour, crinkle-eyed and square-shouldered, chortled genially. “He laughs at anything!” Rickles thrusted—
“My brother died!”
Rickles mimicked guffaws.
Cut to Reagan—guffawing.
Rickles turned serious: “Black, white, Jew, gentile, we’re all working for the same cause.”
Thoughtful pause.
“To figure out how you became governor!”
Rickles mocked the guest of honor’s national ambitions: “I’ll never forget the story about you standing on the White House lawn throwing rocks at the president’s window, yelling, ‘Dick! Dick!’ ” Paternally, he turned to him: “Don’t beg!” Jack Benny collapsed in convulsions on Reagan’s shoulder—and Reagan, amiably, laughed.
Dean Martin pretended to read a congratulatory telegram from Play-girl that invited Reagan to pose as a centerfold: “We feel the American public would like to see a politician who has nothing to hide.” An older comedian took the podium. He made quite a contrast to comics like George Carlin, Cheech and Chong, and Richard Pryor, who were revolutionizing the field with sewer-mouthed sex-and-drug stuff, who could never abide the evening’s formal dress. “How can you aspire to such a high office?” he mock-asked. “You’ve never even had a good scandal attached to your name. No cheating, no lying, no bugging . . . Who’s going to trust a politician like that?”
It got a pretty good laugh, even though it was not true. In 1967 his administration was thrown on its heals when one of Reagan’s (male) top aides was caught having sex with a younger (male) aide, and another aide leaked the “homosexuality ring” scandal to a columnist. But that had been forgotten, or perhaps forgiven, now that men having sex with each other was not so scandalous. But the leak itself fit Watergate to a T: it came about because Reagan’s press secretary Lyn Nofziger spied on the aide’s hotel room to get the incriminating evidence to crush a bureaucratic rival. But no one watching TV knew that. The viewers just saw a genial man on the dais laughing along with Jack Benny and Phyllis Diller.
He took the podium for the traditional final riposte, giving as good as he got.
To Jack Benny: “He’s not a tightwad. That’s just an act. On my last birthday he gave me a set of encyclopedias.” (Pause, perfect timing.) “Paperback.”
To Dean Martin: he really was a lot like Reagan. “We both like horses and golf. We both made a lot of movies. The only difference is—”
Pause.
“I knew how to quit!”
On Watergate: “I’ve sat here watching this whole show, and the best thing I can do for you all is invoke executive privilege.”
Perfect pause.
“I refuse to release the tape.”
Dean Martin himself didn’t get any laughs bigger than that. Reagan then concluded to a standing ovation.
It must have been quite a spectacle for liberals—for instance the state senator in California, George Moscone, who said the governor’s recent veto of a bill to increase aid to a half million elderly, blind, and crippled welfare recipients would cause “mass starvation and suicide among those who could no longer afford to live.” Reagan was also about to sign a bill restoring the death penalty in California, making capital punishment mandatory for eleven different categories of murders. You might, if you happened to follow the news out of California, have considered him a heartless man. But here he just seemed like a great guy.
THE SHOW PLAYED TO A core of his appeal. Dean Martin’s TV roasts were new that year, and at the same time very old-fashioned. They danced to the music of classic Hollywood, as it was once depicted in magazines with names like Photoplay and Modern Screen, which shaped the notion of the “movie colony” as an intimate little village of folks who were, yes, glamorous, but also, it just so happened, a lot like you and me. Sure, the jokes could be a little racy (“Mark Spitz wasn’t always Jewish. But he was swimming in the ocean when he had a run-in with a swordfish”), but that was a part of the fun, too:
the thrill of being let in (or seeming to be let in) on these slightly dangerous lives, their inside jokes, their peccadillos. That old Hollywood was gone now—killed by the death of the studio system and the rise of arty directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and outlaw stars like Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda, enraptured by authenticity and left-wing political engagement and disdainful of mere “entertainment.” (Sending up an Indian to accept your Academy Award: hard to imagine Jimmy Stewart doing that.) But fans of the former Hollywood now got to enjoy the good old days in comforting visits: in disaster movies cast to the gills with all the old familiar stars; in TV variety shows hosted by has-beens like Jackie Gleason—and in the political career of Ronald Reagan, whose appearances beside the likes of Bob Hope and Jimmy Stewart and Martha Raye were part of what made him so pleasant. It was part of what made Reagan’s national prospects seem grand. Because nostalgia was becoming a national cult.
Late that summer an unusual film became a surprise hit. Whereas the cool movies these days were rather depressing, American Graffiti was light and buoyant. It was set in 1962, and nothing much happened—high school kids in a small California town cruising up and down the local strip, listening to rock and roll, hanging out at Mel’s Diner. No sex, hardly even hints, remarkable for a movie about high school kids in summertime; the men were more interested in their eroticized cars. The contrast could not have been stronger to a quintessential New Hollywood picture from two years earlier set in a similar period and milieu: The Last Picture Show, which displayed high school students in explicit poolside orgies.
The ads, which explicitly invited the viewer into his own nostalgic reverie, helped: “Where were you in ’62?” they asked. A postscript explained what the characters were doing in the present day. One was killed by a drunk driver. Another was missing in action in Vietnam. American Graffiti promised to deliver us across the bridge of years to the time before the 1960s storm. So did the new nostalgia magazines, obsessively focused on trivia like Tarzan’s costars and the Lone Ranger’s wardrobe—and a revived Saturday Evening Post, complete with recycled Norman Rockwell covers. Life magazine had been out of business since December, but a fat photo compendium The Best of Life had a 800,000-copy first printing. Heavy on pictures from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, it excluded Life’s most famous photo: a Vietnamese girl running naked down the street after her school was napalmed by U.S. warplanes.
A restaurant chain called “Shakey’s Pizza Parlor and Ye Old Public House” booked Dixieland combos in candy-striped vests and handed out ersatz straw hats made of Styrofoam; another, the Ground Round (“the robust eating & drinking emporium”), promised diners “a happy atmosphere filled with checkered tablecloths . . . stone fire-place, nostalgia-filled jukebox, and free peanuts in the shell for everyone.” (You could throw the peanut shells on the floor. There seemed something welcomingly old-fashioned in that.) Comic books were big; at the “Nostalgia ’73” convention in Chicago you could buy a copy of the first Superman comic for a thousand dollars, like it was a Picasso or something. “It’s a form of escape,” one collector told the Tribune. “It’s just like you want to recapture the past.” (This gentleman so obsessed with recapturing the past was nineteen years old.) Buster Keaton festivals were in, and Grease, a Broadway musical about high school in the 1950s.
Fashion was all shaped suits for men and long skirts for women, hats for both—and, of all things, saddle shoes. Bette Midler had a hit with the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy,” and Herman Wouk’s sprawling World War II novel The Winds of War was on the fiction bestseller list, as was The Class of ’44. Another hit movie, The Sting, was set in the 1930s—and scored with Scott Joplin rags from the 1890s. Later it was shown in double features with American Graffiti, and was still running a year after its release. The patriotic belter Kate Smith was hauled out of mothballs to sing “America the Beautiful” for the white working-class fans flocking to see the “Broad Street Bullies”—the Philadelphia Flyers hockey club. A Canadian broadcaster named Gordon Sinclair recorded himself reading an editorial praising the United States as “the most generous and least appreciated nation on earth” over the strains of a band playing “America the Beautiful.” It became a bestselling record. Some disc jockeys played it every hour on the hour, and columnist David Broder called him “the fellow who’s probably had the greatest impact on American opinion these past couple of months,” other than Judge John Sirica. The preternaturally warm and supportive Walton clan scrapped through the Great Depression together every week on TV. Everyone wanted to be somewhere else. A somewhere else with clear-cut heroes and villains. Anywhere but the 1970s, which just kept getting less innocent each day.
Late in August, at the annual Soap Box Derby in Akron, Ohio, a fourteen-year-old was stripped of first prize after officials X-rayed his car and discovered an electromagnet in the nose to pull him out of the starting gate more quickly. Immediately, special pleaders argued he had done no wrong. A publicist at the University of California, Los Angeles reminisced in an op-ed on all the ways he and his buddies used to cheat, and said he couldn’t wait to help his son do the same: “Grownups should put their expectations of youngsters in line with reality.”
PROXIMATELY, THAT REALITY INCLUDED: IN Chicago, the resignation of the police superintendent after thirty-five of his officers were convicted of shakedowns; and in Boston, the collapse of the shabbily constructed Tobin Bridge, where a single strike by an errant truck caused two hundred feet of the upper roadway to collapse into the Mystic River. In Florida, a jury acquitted eight activists from Vietnam Veterans Against the War indicted by the Nixon Justice Department for planning violence at the Republican National Convention in 1972—for the same reason a similar indictment against alleged conspirators in Camden, New Jersey, had been rejected by a jury in May: both plots had been instigated by FBI agent provocateurs. The acquittal was quietly devastating to the moral excuses of Watergate malefactors like James McCord, who claimed in his Ervin Committee testimony that reports of planned violence at that convention were the reason they’d been willing to break the law for Richard Nixon.
A reader wrote to the Los Angeles Times: “Tell the students that on their way home they should be exceptionally careful about strangers sitting around in cars. Students should be told not to accept money, rides, or presents from strangers.” That same day, elsewhere in the paper, you could learn about plans to cut the municipal workweek to four days to help unclog the city’s dystopian traffic congestion, and that in Sacramento lawmen pondered whether to abandon the state capitol after a study revealed the building might collapse in the event of even a minor earthquake or fire. It was easy to feel that civilization was falling apart.
Meanwhile in Sacramento, the governor was fighting for Proposition 1 so hard he even managed to find a way to acknowledge something bad might have happened at the White House: the way his opponents distorted statistics, he said, was “a little bit like Watergate.” At utterances like these, opponents were still throwing up their hands. If Reagan wanted to cut taxes and spending, Jerry Brown pointed out, why had he raised both in his previous seven years as governor, despite having a line-item veto? (He had even authorized a surprise tax increase for the Los Angeles school district two weeks after his initiative made the ballot.) “How can a magic formula, written by invisible lawyers, do what Ronald Reagan has been unwilling or unable to do?”
And indeed, if government employees were such money-sucking monsters, why did the state budget have a surplus in the first place?
Reagan would say something like “The real issue is that these people believe the government should be taking more taxes from the people.” Then his aides would have to concede the point that actually no tax increases were expected for years. Their boss would point to “some of this country’s most distinguished economists,” who’d signed off on the plan because they believed spiraling taxes would create “the biggest economic bellyache America has ever known unless we do something about it
.” Critics would point out that the only economists saying this were right-wing ones who despised taxes as such. And that writing intricate tax policy into a constitutional amendment that could not be adjusted without further constitutional amendments turned the state’s governing charter into a laboratory experiment, straitjacketing its flexibility to respond to crises.
He told a cheering crowd at the Disneyland Hotel: “What they mean by ‘flexibility’ is the unlimited ability to get into your pockets.” And made yet more moralistic perorations: “Have we really forgotten what the Constitution is for? It is not designed to protect government from the people; it is to protect the people against government. It is not a document in which government tells the people what they can do. It is a contract by which the people tell the government what we, the people, will permit government to do.”
The only consistency in his story was the casting. There were the good guys: anyone fighting to cut taxes. And the bad: the government bureaucrats after your hard-earned cash. As a morality tale, it was compelling. The public opinion expert Samuel Lubell had a new book out in which he reported his interviews around the country with middle-class Americans. “Every use of government was becoming a tax issue,” he observed. “Welfare brought protests that ‘people on relief are crushing the middle class.’ ”
But whether Reagan could convince people that Proposition 1 wouldn’t also crush the middle class was still an open question. Moretti said that if Proposition 1 passed, “by the time the walls come crashing down around whoever the next governor of this state is,” Reagan would “be campaigning in Mississippi someplace, saying, ‘I don’t understand the problems they’re having out there; when I was in charge, things ran smoothly.’ ” He published an op-ed eviscerating Reagan’s key claims—especially his favorite claim, that state, federal, and local taxes ate up 44.7 percent of the average person’s income and would increase to a whopping 54 and maybe even 67 percent. That was “sheer deception,” Moretti said, citing the estimate of the Tax Foundation—another respected outfit no one had thought to call ideological before—that the tax burden was actually 32.7 percent, and to reach the more extravagant figures “the governor included receipts to government which are not taxes,” like private donations to the University of California, college bookstore revenues, U.S. postal receipts, sale of agricultural products by the federal government, and admissions to college athletic events. He also double-counted many of the government’s receipts.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 24
