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

by Rick Perlstein

  On the merits, it was a devastating rebuttal. But perhaps not devastating enough. As the fall weather turned crisp, the Las Vegas odds-maker Jimmy the Greek concluded that, all in all, Proposition 1 had a 3-to-1 chance of passage.

  ON SEPTEMBER 26 THE ERVIN Committee squeezed in its last witness whose testimony was televised live before folding up its green table. In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the headline introducing him read “NIXON WRITER BACKS POLITICAL SPYING TACTICS.” The Nixon writer in question was Patrick J. Buchanan, and in addition to writing speeches, his job had been preparing Nixon’s summaries each morning of what was in the papers and newscasts—an angry daily soupçon of liberal perfidy, media bias, and, wherever possible, news from the heartland of ordinary Americans who loved the person Buchanan affectionately called the “Old Man” as much as he did. Later, the American people would learn that Pat Buchanan had advised the president to build a bonfire on the White House lawn and burn the tapes. His testimony was the first time a witness provided a thoroughgoing strategic overview of what all the 1972 dirty tricks that had become known as “Watergate” were intended to accomplish: sabotaging all the other Democratic candidates in order to leave George McGovern, the field’s weakest link, as the last man standing, and in the process to turn the Democratic Party into a nest of recrimination and distrust.

  But first, leading up to Buchanan’s appearance, candid memos he had written were leaked: for instance, advice to “cut the Democratic Party and country in half,” as he put it in 1971, to end up with “by far the larger half.” And his question, also in 1971, not long before Edmund Muskie’s presidential run collapsed following his emotional reaction to attacks on his wife, “Who should we get to poke the sharp stick into his cage to bring Muskie howling forth?” And his gloating, in April 1972, that “[o]ur primary objective, to prevent Senator Muskie from sweeping the early primaries, locking up the convention in April and uniting the Democratic party behind him for the fall, has been achieved. The likelihood—great three months ago—that the Democratic Convention could become a dignified coronation ceremony for a centrist candidate who could lead a united party into the election—is now remote.” Watergate buffs insisted this proved that Nixon had stolen the 1972 election.

  In his opening statement, Buchanan went on the offensive. He accused the leakers of a “covert campaign of vilification” against him, and claimed he had never recommended “that the reelection committee infiltrate the campaigns of our opposition.” And that he had known nothing of “any ongoing campaign of political sabotage.”

  “The election of 1972 was not stolen!” he concluded. It had been won on “the quality and character of our candidate.”

  Then he spent the next hours boasting of how the Nixon team had infiltrated the campaigns of the opposition and carried out an ongoing campaign of political sabotage. It was an extraordinary performance.

  He proudly admitted to arranging fake demonstrations against Democratic candidates; setting up fake Democratic campaign committees; drumming up fake enthusiasm for the black female candidate Shirley Chisholm; sending insulting letters to Democratic candidates, ostensibly from other Democratic candidates; personally writing ads ostensibly written by independent groups; planting letters to editors ostensibly written by private citizens. (“When will you people realize that he was elected President and he is entitled to the respect of that office no matter what you people think of him?” read one.) Then he would ask what all the fuss was about: “I’ve ghosted speeches for Presidents, for Vice Presidents, senators, Republican chairman. I have ghosted letters to editors. . . . What is illicit about ghosting an ad in which individuals are going to put their names on them?”

  Documents pointed to a note from Colson to Haldeman to organize a White House public relations campaign attacking CBS; one from Magruder to “get independent station owners to write NBC saying they should remove [anchorman Chet] Huntley now”; others on how to create “an inhibiting effect on the networks” by exploiting “their professed concern with achieving balance”—for instance by having the Republican National Committee chair charge “that there is a political conspiracy in the media to attack this Administration. . . . Utilize the antitrust division to investigate various media. . . . Utilize the Internal Revenue Service . . . Just the threat of an IRS investigation will turn their approach.” All the sorts of things Buchanan was defending as normal politics—somehow simultaneously with a smile and a sneer, even admitting to turning down the assignment to run the Plumbers, not because it was “something that was illicit or unethical or wrong,” but because he thought it was bad strategy.

  The gobsmacked committee began the grilling. “Turn to tab 16 of your July 28, 1971, memo,” Sam Dash asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Turn to page five.”

  Dash read: “We would like to utilize Ron Walker’s resources where possible to handle some close-in operations, pickets and the like, and candidate visits to various cities.” He asked Buchanan what that meant. The speechwriter with the slicked-back hair answered, “If you have at the airport a group of individuals with a sign that they throw up at the right moment, ‘This is Nixon country,’ for example, you are liable to get an Associated Press photograph with Senator Muskie with the sign, which is, we feel, advantageous.”

  Dash came back: “This would be to give the appearance of a demonstration against the candidate.”

  Which was where the witness was supposed to get defensive. That was what every other witness had done. Instead, Buchanan took it as an opportunity to boast some more, musing that “if Senator Muskie were having difficulty with some particular questions, something like that, you could draft the questions and get the local Republicans there to put them on the press bus, or to hand out their fliers at the Muskie rally, put them on the seats of chairs.”

  Dash followed up by reading a memo in which Buchanan recommended joining a club for top-dollar Democratic donors: “This would give us many advantages in keeping track of Democratic contenders and their strategy.”

  Dash didn’t even have time to ask a question.

  “Yes, sir, that idea is taken out of Larry O’Brien’s campaign book that it is a good thing for Democrats to get on the mailing list for all Republican materials they find.” Spying on the opposing camp was “a common thing done in American campaigns.”

  Young Pat Buchanan could turn the proposition that two wrongs made a right—especially if the second wrong was triple the size of the first—into a sublime sort of political poetry. The New York Times quoted a White House insider who said it was “the only day of hearings I’ve really enjoyed.” The Nixon-friendly newspaper Sun of Durham, North Carolina, hosannaed “A NEW KIND OF WATERGATE WITNESS”: “Billed as an expert on ‘dirty tricks,’ Mr. Buchanan played the dirtiest trick of them all on the committee members by taking the wind out of their inquisitorial sails and making them and their counsel look like a bunch of confused nitpickers.”

  The committee’s caucus of suspicion did tear into Buchanan’s recommendations for defeating the influence of liberal tax-exempt foundations like the Ford Foundation, which was promoting allegedly nefarious activities like registering voters in Negro areas. The foundations, Buchanan returned, affected to be serving some neutral public good but were actually “quasi-political operations”—which was why he promoted right-wing quasi-political foundations to take them on. He called the left-wing think tank the Institute for Policy Studies an “arm” of Ford, and claimed it funded one of the most scabrous underground newspapers, the Quicksilver Times, in its plans to disrupt the 1972 Republican convention. The New York Times, in an editorial called “Anatomy of a Smear,” pointed out that the Institute for Policy Studies had never given a penny to the Quicksilver Times.

  But by the time Buchanan said that, the mood of the proceedings had shifted: he charmed the panel to his side, and most of the panelists ended up praising him as the best witness they had called. Senator Weicker even, meekly, thanked him. The Times was
amazed to find the senators “too enthralled by Mr. Buchanan’s joviality to question his arrogant insistence that even the most outrageous election abuses perpetrated by the President’s surrogates were nothing more than politics as usual.”

  But then again, maybe the Times was guilty of the same thing. The next week it gave him space to respond, in an op-ed titled “Anatomy of a Lynching Syndrome.” And in fact, within media circles, the brazen way Buchanan played the game had been enjoyed as a guilty pleasure. Columnist Jules Witcover, for instance, penned a fulsome profile dubbing him a “man of spirit.” We were now “in a kind of movie-set society,” a correspondent from the suspicious circles wrote the Times about the embrace of Buchanan. “In considering the damage Watergate has done to so many of our accepted values, perhaps the one that has been most dangerously undermined is face value—that reality is what we perceive it to be.” Maybe this young man had a future.

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  The Year Without Christmas Lights

  ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1973, THE evening news reminded Americans that their country was still so much saner and safer than most of the rest of the world. In the South American nation of Chile, warplanes began strafing radio stations and newspapers. Images arrived of people scattering in fear ahead of tanks in the streets. Fearsome generals in coats with starred epaulets ordered President Salvador Allende, the world’s only elected Marxist leader, to step down. A military communiqué: “The armed forces and the body of carabineros are united in their historic and responsible mission of fighting to liberate Chile from the Marxist yoke. Signed, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, Commander-in-Chief of the Army.”

  Pinochet’s coup came the day before a planned national referendum scheduled by Allende, a man as fastidiously obsessed with his nation’s constitution as Sam Ervin was about his, to ratify or reject his government. But the military chose not to chance democracy. Instead they rounded up thousands and deposited them in the national stadium, some marked for execution. In the streets of Santiago, loudspeakers barked out commands: “All people resisting the new government will pay the price.” For at least seventy-five people, in the first three weeks, the price was execution by Pinochet’s Caravana de la Muerte—the “Caravan of Death.” One bullet-riddled body, belonging to the popular, pacifist singer Víctor Jara, was found dumped in a Santiago backstreet, his hands broken and his wrists cracked.

  The ousted president, refusing to yield, made his way to the parliament for one last speech. Then he fell back to the presidential palace, now strafed by planes and pummeled by tanks, forty civil servants still pinned inside. The majestic building nearly burned to the ground. “Oh, baby!” a CBS Radio correspondent intoned on the air with an intake of breath as machine-gun volleys sounded. “We’re in the wrong place. . . . We are pinned down on a corner . . . looking at a policeman with an automatic rifle. . . . What the hell am I doing here?”

  And then, three weeks later, the evening news had once more reminded Americans of how terrifying the world so blessedly far beyond our borders could be. With canny savagery, Egypt and Syria launched a simultaneous attack on Israel at the one time the entire nation shut down: Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Eight hundred tanks of Soviet manufacture rolled over the Suez Canal on pontoon bridges. Seventy thousand troops, some paddling rubber boats, attacked in wave after wave. High-tech Soviet surface-to-air missiles crushed the supposedly unbeatable Israeli air defenses, which in 1967 had wiped out the Egyptian Air Force before they could leave the ground in only two hours, leaving ground troops naked and exposed. New missiles, manned by highly trained infantry, not the hapless amateurs Israel had faced in the 1956 and 1967 wars, began crushing the Israeli tank corps, also supposedly undefeatable. Israel’s defense minister declared it “the start of all-out war again”—the fourth in the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob since the modern state of Israel was declared twenty-five years earlier. Sheikh Amid Fahan, Egypt’s highest religious authority, declared it a “jihad”—a holy war—and called on every Muslim to join the battle against “the enemies of Allah.” Iraq and Tunisia immediately promised to do so. Egypt’s foreign minister said there could be no peace while Israel occupied Palestinian lands; Israel’s foreign minister said occupation would continue until there was peace.

  BACK HOME, A UFO SCARE was afoot: two men from Pascagoula, Mississippi, reported a cigar-shaped vessel with flashing blue lights pulled them up in its tractor beam; there claw-handed beasts paralyzed them and performed a medical examination. Within weeks Gallup reported 51 percent of Americans thought extraterrestrial visitations were real. Fifteen million said they’d seen one themselves. The Pascagoula witness showed up on The Dick Cavett Show.

  It was around this time that Time put drug mystic Carlos Castaneda on the cover, and three books battled it out on the paperback bestseller list: The Gods from Outer Space and Chariots of the Gods, both by Erich von Däniken, which proposed “ancient aliens” had built monuments like the Pyramids, Stonehenge, and the sculptures on Easter Island; and Bermuda Triangle, which wondered whether the lost city of Atlantis was responsible for the supposedly mysterious disappearances there. You could learn about such theories at an exhibit in Montreal, at the municipal fairgrounds that once hosted Expo ’67—or at the downtown branch of State Savings Mutual Bank on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, where before opening an account you could “talk to experts on ESP, hypnosis, bio-feedback, shape energy, plant sensitivity, and acupuncture, hosted by Leah Caverhill of the National Academy of Applied Awareness,” the “lady who predicted the Watergate scandal a year before it happened. Enter a room-size energy pyramid for an actual demonstration.” Learn “extraordinary facts about UFO’s, astrology, numerology, graphology, palmistry, tarot, and the comet Kohoutek. . . . Come with an open mind.” It was advertised alongside the bank’s seminars on tax law.

  In that same city, a neuropsychologist named Thelma Moss claimed that a technique known as “Kirlian photography,” which captured the electrical coronal discharges around objects, could reflect the physical and emotional states of living subjects, perhaps to diagnose illnesses. Perhaps that sounded absurd. But if it were all merely hokum, why would UCLA have let Dr. Moss open a laboratory that studied extrasensory perception, poltergeists, and telepathy under the auspices of the great university’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, and why would the journal Behavioral Neuropsychiatry (vol. 6, nos. 1–12, pp. 71–80) have published a paper of which she was a coauthor: “A Laboratory Investigation of Telepathy: The Study of a Psychic”?

  On The Tonight Show, an Israeli “paranormalist” named Uri Geller tried and failed to demonstrate his signature claim—that he could bend metal spoons with his mind—but then, as he explained to host Johnny Carson, he had simply not felt “strong” that particular night; and after all in the prestigious British scientific journal Nature, two physicists claimed results affirming that Geller may indeed “have the ability to receive and send information in a way other than by the known normal senses.” The editors did acknowledge that several referees found the experiment “weak in design and presentation”—but then again, might not those reviewers be entrapped within the same sort of limited “linear” paradigms of thinking it was the work of savants like Geller and Moss to transcend? Once upon a time “the occult” had been the redoubt of rubes. Now, in a world where the usual sources of authority no longer had answers for anything, the weird stuff was getting more serious consideration.

  A cheap paperback soon came to market. Predictions for 1974 starred a panoply of psychics with names like “Countess Amy” and “Aquarius.” It featured, alongside news-to-come about traffic accidents (“A submarine and a UFO will collide off the Aleutian Islands”), the occult (“reincarnation will be espoused by more and more young people as a valid explanation for the dislocations in modern society”), celebrities (“Dean Martin may have a health problem and definitely should be careful of his nose”), and celebrities and the occult (“A youthful female
actress of sudden fame will publicly announce that she used witchcraft to obtain her current level of success and happiness”), prediction after prediction about how the world would collapse. That was what the future looked like now. Deaths from record bitter cold. Deaths from a “nerve gas leak” off the coast of Florida. A 1929-style stock market collapse. A declaration of bankruptcy by New York City—“the first tangible sign of the collapse of our entire civilization.” Single people banned from buying big cars. Locusts and floods, “like the plagues of Egypt,” worldwide droughts, rising sea levels “inundating all coastal areas throughout the world.” Rationing of every staple, urban blackouts, riots, martial law. “Disaster will hit one of New York’s skyscraper landmark buildings.” “Man is an endangered species,” as one soothsayer put it—and he wasn’t even the most morose of the lot.