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

by Rick Perlstein

“ ‘I believe in a dictatorship,’ ” one patron told her.

  “ ‘More strongly than you did before?’

  “ ‘Much more strongly. This whole thing is a black eye to the country. . . . I think the President should be above the law, definitely.’ ”

  Three times as many protesters clogged Lafayette Park as when the Saturday Night Massacre went down a week earlier. But they weren’t all protesting the president. Some were protesting the protesters. GOD BLESS NIXON, one of the signs read: “We’re glad that we have a President who still has nerve. We’re glad we have a President who isn’t namby-pamby. He should have gotten rid of Cox a long time ago.”

  Ronald Reagan seemed to agree. The Los Angeles Times canvassed prominent California Republicans after the Saturday Night Massacre. The vice chairman of the state party was “appalled”; Houston Flournoy, the likely Republican nominee to replace Reagan as governor, was “dismayed and appalled.” Reagan, on the other hand, released the statement: “I will not comment on the issue of Archibald Cox being discharged since it is relatively unimportant.” Then, naturally, he commented. The dilemma Nixon faced in Cox’s defiance was “the same problem that confronted President Truman during the Korean War.” He referred to Truman firing Douglas MacArthur after the general made personal public statements advocating the invasion of China—apparently an offense of equal gravity to rejecting the Stennis compromise. “What is important,” he said, “is that the President has agreed to make available the pertinent information contained in the tapes. Now we should have patience until the content of those tapes is known.” Then, the next day, when the White House violated the Stennis compromise, Reagan announced he agreed with that, too: it “justifies our continued patience and confidence that our system of government is continuing to work. . . . Yesterday, I urged that all of us should be patient. The President’s actions today avoids any appearance of defying the courts.”

  SOON, THOUGH, THE WHITE HOUSE acted in a way that made its defiance of the courts unmistakable. Meeting with Judge Sirica in chambers to discuss procedures for handing over the subpoenaed tapes, White House Watergate lawyer Fred Buzhardt admitted that two of the tapes, including what was allegedly the very first recorded presidential discussion of the Watergate break-in, and a crucial April 15 meeting in which John Dean told the president he was meeting with Watergate prosecutors, did not exist.

  The Detroit News had been among Nixon’s most stalwart Watergate defenders. Now it editorialized, “Someone in the White House is guilty of either unbelievable stupidity or outright lies.” Reporters called House Speaker Carl Albert for his reaction: “I am past the point of reacting,” he said with a weary shake of the head. The cartoonist Herblock depicted Richard Nixon as a conjurer holding his magic wand over a puff of smoke marked “disappearing justice officials” and “disappearing tapes.” A widely read Wall Street newsletter reported that the New York Stock Exchange had contingency plans in place, quietly announced to top traders, to cease trading immediately for as long as two days immediately upon Nixon’s resignation. (Reportedly traders were angry; they expected a big rally when Nixon stepped down.) Time magazine published its first editorial in fifty years of publication. It called for Nixon’s removal from office.

  William F. Buckley Jr. sent around wires to prominent conservatives asking whether the National Review should do the same. The most prominent recipient: Ronald Reagan. He sent a two-word reply: “HELL NO.”

  Time’s title legend read, “Nixon’s Jury: The People.” The jury was not leaning the president’s way. The issue sold a record 350,000 copies on the newsstands. The next Gallup poll recorded a historic low in presidential approval ratings: 27 percent. A Los Angeles Times letter writer observed, “Please to remember the Fifth of November gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.”

  A genuinely scary Halloween. In New Jersey a weeklong swamp fire threw up smog that produced a sixty-car pileup and nine deaths. In New York the Times editorialized on a subway accident in which “miraculously no one died”: “According to passengers’ testimony, it was nearly an hour before either instructions or help reached this dangerous and frightening scene.”

  In Esquire Tom Wolfe noted the fact that people who hijacked airplanes and took over buildings were becoming cultural heroes to an alienated populace—seen as men “at the end of their ropes” risking it all in a struggle against the “system.” The terrorist, as his fan construed it, created “his own society, his own system: in the bank vault, in the Olympic quarters, in the prison courtyard . . . striking out against the endless exfoliations of American power. . . . I finally cut through the red tape. . . . I am a celebrity!”

  Trick-or-treating was just about too frightening to contemplate. The Copley newspaper chain’s advice columnist was asked how to “protect our small ‘spooks.’ ” He replied he could do “five columns on this subject.” His best advice: don’t let children enter anyone’s home; don’t let them follow a stranger anywhere; and most of all—don’t accept unwrapped items, or eat anything before it’s been examined by an adult: “Sadists have been known to insert pins, razor blades, glass and even poison into food for the children.” (This actually was just an urban legend.) The AP’s advice columnist added “drugs hidden in malted milk balls.” After a nine-year-old girl was murdered on Halloween in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Journal questioned whether trick-or-treating itself just provided a time and place to make “children easy marks for sick minds.”

  Parents too scared to let their kids trick-or-treat alone would have missed a Bill Moyers special on PBS that was pretty scary in itself. He argued that the Cold War had drenched the nation in “something of the paranoia Germany had when Hitler came in.” Grantland Rice’s “it’s how you play the game” had transmogrified into Vince Lombardi’s “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” Watergate, then, was no less about Richard Nixon than it was about us, an emanation of our national soul: a nation that now believed “it’s us against them, and the only goal is to win, with no quarter asked or given.”

  Moyers closed the show with a roundtable. One member was a political science professor. The other two were a former Republican official and the Washington editor of National Review, a bow-tied young gentleman named George Will. The Republican official was contrite: “We felt only Nixon could save the world.” George Will was utterly scathing, granting Nixon no quarter. He blamed Watergate on hysterical Republicans partisans insisting “that virtually every possible Democratic candidate was a garish sham who would destroy the country, but we couldn’t trust the American people to choose that way in a fair fight.” The panel suggested the near impossibility of finding any Republican who would defend the administration.

  It thus revealed the political isolation of Governor Reagan, still maintaining that “when they calm down a bit,” the American people would “take pride” in a system that so efficiently rooted out a few bad apples.

  RONALD REAGAN WAS NOT JUST isolated on Watergate. He was isolated on the energy crisis, too. With thousands of San Francisco gas stations shuttered and Los Angeles officials projecting 35 percent energy deficits for 1974, and state demand for electricity increasing 8 percent annually, on October 3 he vetoed a bill to create a five-member commission with power to approve and site new power plants, devise and implement conservation plans (including invoking regulations controlling the sale of electrical devices like toasters and irons, amending building codes, and requiring fluorescent instead of incandescent lighting), and promote research and development of new energy sources—“independent,” an aghast Los Angeles Times editorial pointed out, “from the kind of special interest influence that has helped retard sound energy policy planning for so many years.” He also shocked observers by simultaneously vetoing a bill that he had previously supported to establish air pollution control districts in six California counties.

  Democrats predicted “blackouts for years to come.” Moretti sai
d Reagan had just killed “the most important and far-reaching piece of legislation of the last ten years.” Others pointed out “serious conflicts of interest”: hadn’t Reagan been a paid propagandist for General Electric? Reagan, with blithe confidence, just said the program hadn’t been studied thoroughly enough and contained too many “unacceptable features.” (The next month the pilot of his state-leased Cessna 500 announced he had cut the craft’s cruising speed 25 knots and began flying higher to reduce air resistance, saving twenty-five to thirty gallons per round-trip between Sacramento and Los Angeles.)

  Reagan defied the spirit of the age: Americans believed government could easily and harmlessly tell economies what to do—on meat prices, fuel prices, wages, whatever. Richard Nixon hardly hesitated to oblige them; his program of price controls announced in August 1971 was already in “Phase IV,” extending governmental authority to dictate prices into the following spring. Administration skeptics like George Shultz called it intellectually bankrupt: “We have seen baby chicks drowned, pregnant sows, and cows bearing next year’s food slaughtered,” he told the president, all because of the hubristic refusal to let the free market allocate scarcity. That fell on the deafest of ears—as the president, on the day of Reagan’s energy veto, used his discretionary authority to control the allocation of home heating oil and propane gas to dealers nationwide. He was only giving the people what they wanted.

  Reagan had a different way of looking at things. He said the public was hoodwinked about the power of government to solve their economic problems by those same devouring Gila-monster bureaucrats he had cast as the enemy in the Proposition 1 fight, now in its home stretch.

  Moretti campaigned in the homestretch with an anti–Proposition 1 op-ed that included the following inspiring passage: “The 1973–74 state revenues, as defined by the plan, are divided by 1973 estimated personal income to reach the starting point of 7.6 percent. In 1974–75, 0.1 percent is subtracted from this number (thus, 7.5 percent) which is then multiplied by estimated 1974 personal income. The resulting amount is what the state is permitted to spend in the next fiscal year. When this amount, roughly $9.3 billion, is compared to how much the state will have to spend next year simply to maintain existing programs and services, roughly $9.9 billion, the only option remaining is to cut more than $600 million from existing programs.” Snooze. Reagan campaigned by spending four times more than the opposition on snazzy television commercials. The campaign also sent out a fusillade of automated recorded phone messages. The governor, meanwhile, made frantic rounds of the state on what critics pointed out was a jet plane partially paid for with taxpayer funds, as he bellowed forth about the Gila monsters: “When a government becomes powerful, it is destructive, extravagant, and violent.”

  The voters went to the polls, defied Jimmy the Greek, and sided with the Gila monsters—voting down Proposition 1 by 54 percent to 46.

  Objectively speaking, it was hard to pry much of a message about the mood of the public from the results. Turnout was anemic. Voters were confused at the initiative’s stupefying complexity. Be that as it may, pundits outside the state drew a simple conclusion: as a national political figure, they wouldn’t have Ronald Reagan to kick around anymore.

  “VOTERS SMARTER THAN REAGAN,” editorialized the far-off Milwaukee Journal. “The proposition had the surface appeal of the politicians’ favorite, but false homily,” the Journal patiently explained, “that says government should ‘live within its income’ like everyone else.’ Government in fact is not like everyone else, but uniquely different. It alone can, and must be able to, determine the level of its own income, through the taxing power. To equate its financial situation with that of a private household is utter illogic. To say the resources of a sovereign government shall be chained forever after to whatever the tax laws happen to yield at a given moment in the past is dangerous nonsense.” A government, they said, was a vehicle for sorting out human priorities. “Reagan’s demagogic ploy would have gone at them all backward, by starting with an arbitrary, pre-fixed revenue ceiling regardless of what had to be done and who would get hurt. And it’s always the poor who get stuck worst under that kind of tax philosophy.” This conventional wisdom did not look to be changing anytime soon.

  A victory on Proposition 1 was supposed to propel Reagan on a nationwide tour to sell the concept to other states. Now he had lost—and promised to make the tour anyway. His janissaries promised to fight alongside him. “What if,” the governor’s director of consumer affairs sincerely asked, “Martin Luther King Jr. had said, ‘I have no dream’?” Reagan himself proclaimed, “How can trying to reduce the people’s taxes be a defeat?” Everything always works out in the end, gloriously.

  THE DAY AFTER THAT CALIFORNIA vote, Richard Nixon went on TV and announced “a very stark fact: we are heading into the most acute energy shortage since World War II.” Americans, he said, would have to cut back: “less heat, less electricity, less gasoline”—almost stop being Americans at all.

  There had been no panic up until then. Oil tankers loaded with Middle Eastern crude when the embargo was announced were not about to turn back; any practical decrease in supply would probably take at least six weeks to develop; the amount of oil at stake was only a small fraction of the supply anyway. The president, however, pushed urgency. Maybe he wanted to reassure Americans that they still actually had a president. Maybe he wanted to reassure himself.

  He called for shorter school and factory hours. And the cancellation of 10 percent of jet flights. The federal government would provide an example by setting thermostats to 68 degrees or less, he said (“and that means in this room, too, as well as in every other room in the White House”); government vehicles would be limited to 50 miles an hour. He told governors to pass 50-mph speed limits in their states, Congress to pass an emergency statute returning to year-round daylight saving time, relaxing environmental regulations, hastening construction of nuclear plants and the Alaska pipeline. Start carpooling, he recommended: “How many times have you gone along the highway,” he quizzed, “with only one individual in that car?”

  Thousands of times, of course—for wasn’t zooming alone across endless vistas of highways supposed to be the most American pastime of all?

  Not anymore, apparently. What he was describing, Nixon allowed, sounded “like a way of life we left behind with Glenn Miller and the war of the forties.” The president implored his hearers instead to make another comparison: that time, which seemed so long ago, when America first landed a man on the moon:

  “Let us unite in committing the resources of this nation to another new endeavor, an endeavor that in this Bicentennial era we can appropriately call ‘Project Independence.’

  “Let us set as our national goal, in the spirit of Apollo, with the determination of the Manhattan Project, that by the end of this decade we will have developed the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy sources.

  “Let us pledge that by 1980, under Project Independence, we shall be able to meet America’s energy needs from America’s own energy resources.”

  Then the president went off script. Jutting out his chin, he said he would like “to close with a personal note.” He began with a brag. “We have ended the longest war in America’s history. All of our prisoners of war have returned home. We have made progress toward our goal of a real prosperity, a prosperity without war.” And yet: “some publications have called on me to resign the office of President of the United States.”

  “I have no intention whatever of walking away from the job I was elected to do. As long as I am physically able, I am going to continue to work 16 to 18 hours a day for the cause of a real peace abroad, and for the cause of prosperity without inflation. . . . And I am confident that in those months ahead, the American people will come to realize that I have not violated the trust that they placed in me when they elected me as President of the United States in the past, and I pledge to you tonight that I shall always do every
thing that I can to be worthy of that trust in the future. Thank you and good night.”

  THE PUBLIC STILL TRUSTED HIM enough to behave as if the energy equivalent of Pearl Harbor had already arrived. Honoring a nonbinding presidential request, gas stations began closing down from 9 P.M. Saturday through midnight on Sundays. So people began “topping off”—filling their tanks every time they passed a gas station, leading to hours-long lines in which idling cars . . . just wasted more gas. Everyone wanted to get to a pump before the last drop was gone and one of the ubiquitous SORRY, NO GAS TODAY signs was hoisted up. Then they would have to return tomorrow—when prices were usually two cents a gallon higher. Tempers flared, no architect having thought to design a corner gas station for the eventuality of dozens of angry motorists cutting fellow motorists off at street corners like drivers in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

  Time called the energy crisis the “most serious economic threat to face the nation since the Depression.” Schools in Massachusetts and Connecticut, states reliant on oil for heat, announced Christmas break for the entire months of December and January. At the New England School of Art, heated only to 65 degrees in the Boston chill, nude models were afforded the comfort of roasting in their own body heat in a clear plastic tent. A farmer in Muncie, Indiana, became famous for a Rube Goldberg contraption to convert manure into methane to power his lights, refrigerator, and Ford pickup; another in Leslie, Michigan, achieved his fifteen minutes of renown by doing the same with leaves, brush, and garbage. Children begged permission not to bathe; didn’t heating water waste energy, too?

  On the Watergate front, on November 13, Ronald Ziegler announced “Operation Candor”: over the next weeks, the president would “fully and publicly” answer all charges. Joseph Kraft, in a column titled “Toward Impeachment,” was not impressed: “President Nixon, in fact, is one of the least trustworthy witnesses on his own behalf.” Time pointed out this was the thirteenth time since the scandal began to unfold that “Richard Nixon vowed to disclose all of the facts and put the story to rest.”