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

by Rick Perlstein

  The story, lately, was about finances. On November 17 the Washington Post front page trumpeted devastating new findings in the old saga of the “milk money,” the hundreds of thousands donated to the Republican Party as early as August 1969 from dairy interests in exchange for price supports for their industry: the Associated Milk Producers’ lawyer now revealed the donations came after a conversation with Attorney General John Mitchell about how to buy favor with the administration. Other stories concerned the president’s personal finances: about how he had hidden profits from a Florida land sale by registering the deed in the name of his daughter Tricia; about how he claimed California as his voting residence even though he paid no state taxes there; about three previously undisclosed financial trusts benefiting Nixon controlled by Haldeman and Ehrlichman. The evening of the Post’s dairy story the president submitted himself on live TV to the questions of the nation’s newspaper managing editors, who were meeting at Disney World. Before they could ask him about his financial dealings, he volunteered his own account—one uncannily similar to the first grand slam he hit on live TV: the 1952 “special fund” speech, which had saved his political life under circumstances at least as dire as the ones he faced now. His conclusion gave the water-cooler wags the most memorable catchphrase of the scandal so far.

  “I have never profited, never profited from public service—I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”

  The President of the United States was not a crook. That was surely good to know.

  The Operation Candor reviews were not kind. Time said “the list of . . . the distortions, innuendoes, and false assumptions is astonishing.” And that was before the story of the Gap.

  THE ANNOUNCEMENT CAME FROM FRED Buzhardt, a White House lawyer: his review of the tapes to prepare them for the court subpoena revealed that for eighteen and a half minutes in the middle of a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman from June 20, 1972, all you could hear was a buzz.

  A now-private citizen named Archibald Cox explained the import before Judge Sirica’s bench: the June 20 meeting had been “the first opportunity for full discussion on how to handle the Watergate incident. The inference that they reported on Watergate and may well have received instructions is almost irresistible.” Another inference flowed immediately from the revelation: No claim of Richard Nixon’s had been more strenuous than that the tapes were under “my sole personal control.” So didn’t that make the gap his sole personal responsibility? The prosecution team, now under the direction of a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, got to work investigating whether the president had personally destroyed evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Earthquake upon earthquake: this was Watergate now.

  The prosecution put forward a female lawyer, Jill Wine Volner, to question the scandal’s latest, unlikely, protagonist: Rose Mary Woods, Richard Nixon’s personal secretary since 1951. On November 8, Judge Sirica asked her whether it was possible to accidentally erase a tape. She replied, “I don’t think I’m so stupid as to erase what’s on a tape.” Now, under rapid-fire questioning from Volner, she offered a convoluted, contradictory tale of how she had done exactly that—one involving foot pedals, push buttons, an unexpected phone call, and a long bodily stretch. Investigators and news photographs then found themselves assembled in her White House office for a demonstration of the push-button-and-foot-pedal stretch in question. But during the demonstration, she couldn’t push down the pedal and the button at the same time. She had to have been lying.

  Newsweek’s next cover: “Rose Mary’s Boo Boo.” You soon could buy the image on a souvenir silver ingot, comically embossed, “18 Minutes of Hum Along with Dick and Bob 1973,” to add to your expanding collection of Watergate kitsch—which also now included an eight-track tape starring eighteen and a half minutes of silence, “Sealed in a ‘perfectly clear’ plastic case for all to see.”

  IN RHODE ISLAND, A PRIZE high school composition was customarily chosen to be signed by the governor as the official state Thanksgiving proclamation. The governor refused to sign this year’s winner, in which a seventeen-year-old wrote, “Thanksgiving seems to be pretended, a farce, little more than an outdated tradition no one has yet found time to discard.” Time’s Thanksgiving cover had Archie Bunker in his trademark easy chair, stalactites of frost hanging from his cigar and winter cap—he couldn’t afford home heating oil. Newsweek’s featured a freezing Uncle Sam holding an empty cornucopia and the legend “Running Out of Everything.” Jesse Jackson said, “When the energy crisis is exposed as the hoax it is, it will be bigger than Watergate.” Adding to the sticky precipitate of national dread was an issue that was supposed to be dead and buried: Vietnam. Governor Reagan, in Singapore as a special presidential representative for a trade deal, said North Vietnam must “return” the POWs and MIAs supposedly still being held, and that if it didn’t, “bombing should be resumed.” He accused liberals in Congress of taking away “the power to sway those monkeys over there to straighten up and follow through on the deal.”

  A coffee table book, They Could Not Trust the King, with text by William Shannon of the New York Times editorial board, went to press. It called Watergate “a complex and far-reaching political plan that could serve as dress rehearsal for an American fascist coup d’etat.” In Memphis, Nixon addressed governors for an “Operation Candor” meeting where, one of the governors leaked, he had reassured them that no Watergate bombshells were imminent and that all seven extant subpoenaed tapes were “audible”—even as he knew about the eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. A court-appointed scientific panel ruled with virtual certainty that the erasure had to have been deliberate.

  Senator Jackson opened hearings investigating the energy crisis with an accusation: “For the major oil companies,” he said, “the shortages were good business.” He said the White House knew the crisis was coming and did nothing, in order to help his friends’ bottom lines. Plastic bags, made with petroleum, became prohibitively expensive; petrochemicals were also ingredients in many lifesaving drugs—so pharmaceutical executives projected a shortage. Twenty-five New Hampshire towns suspended police, fire protection, garbage pickups, road repair, and school transportation. The mayor of Rensselaer, Indiana, turned off the city’s 425 streetlights, until a rash of burglaries forced him to turn them on again. In an interview he revealed his motives as less than Christian: “If everyone in the country would make this kind of effort, we could tell the Arabs to go to hell.”

  Unchristian motives were everywhere. A gas station owner stopped letting drivers of big cars buy more than a dollar of gas at a time—“just enough to keep them off the road.” People started driving with a full can of gas in the trunk, which turned their cars into inadvertent firebombs. The Senate came within eight votes of passing a law rationing gasoline.

  Then December, and the presidentially mandated closing of service stations from Saturday evening until Monday morning. A Hanford, California, gas station owner shot up six of the pumps of a rival who stayed open across the street. A Miami man yelled to a gas station attendant who wouldn’t sell to him on a Saturday night, “I am going to get some gas even if I have to kill somebody”—and then, waving a pistol, almost honored his pledge. Auto supply houses ran out of siphons, tools for the new street crime of choice, and locks for gas caps. Amid reports of gas going at some stations for 99.9 cents a gallon, more ambitious crooks started hijacking petroleum trucks. Brooklyn motorists filled up with “Gambinoil”—oil the Gambino crime family stole from industrial oil tanks and sold to area dealers at 70 percent more than legitimate distributors. But who were the real mafiosi? “I hear about organized crime,” a citizen wrote to the Berkshire Eagle in Massachusetts, “but has anyone tried to find out why these same companies are responsible for organized famine, or
ganized monopolies, organized profiteering? . . . I’m an avid supporter of free enterprise, but what the oil companies are doing isn’t free enterprise; it’s free back-stabbing aimed at the public.” The newspapers reported oil tankers stacked twenty deep at U.S ports waiting—a kind of maritime arbitrage, the suspicious circles imagined, all the better to produce a false shortage, then make a killing once the price became high enough to unload them.

  The Senate Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations released a poll indicating that 55 percent of Americans felt “alienated and disenchanted,” compared with 29 percent in 1966. On the bright side: Gerald Ford replaced Spiro Agnew, and gave a stirring inaugural address. “In exactly eight weeks,” he said, “we have demonstrated to the world that our great republic stands solid.” In other good news, Time magazine pointed out that the gas crisis made it harder for people to abandon their families. And Ronald Reagan told reporters at the Southern Republican Conference in Atlanta that the “average citizen,” by his own private initiative, could solve the energy crisis himself “by turning off the lights as he goes through different rooms to go into the den and watch television.”

  Outside, the protesters held up signs reading, for example, DIG UP THE BODIES IN THE WHITE HOUSE LAWN.

  And then it was Christmastime, when darkness literally descended.

  THE IDEA HAD BEEN PIONEERED by no less an institution than the Norman Rockwellian Sears, Roebuck. Already, custodians in Sears’s hometown, Chicago, were cleaning offices by flashlight. The public safety committee of the Milwaukee Common Council held an evening meeting by candlelight. New York banned outdoor store lighting after 9:30 P.M. So why not suspend energy-wasting yuletide illumination? It seemed only the patriotic thing to do.

  A lead editorial in the Los Angeles Times proposed readers voluntarily forgo “decorative fountains, waterfalls, and related décor,” “outdoor security lighting during daylight,” and “outdoor Christmas decorations. . . . And even a small reduction in the number of lights on indoor Christmas trees would save some of our limited electricity.” The city obliged, passing an ordinance surpassing even the restrictions during World War II. Officials said they had no choice—for the Department of Water and Power had contracted for 48 percent of the city’s power supply from Arab nations: the sheikhs who stole Christmas. Across the country, the New York Times headlined “LOS ANGELES A SHADOW OF ITS USUAL RADIANT SELF.”

  A letter writer from Whittier, California, proposed a moratorium on energy-wasting Christmas cards. Reno, Nevada, decided to extinguish an “eternal flame” lit with fanfare back in March by a returned Vietnam prisoner of war to honor veterans. Others debated whether the eternal flame that burned at the grave of President Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery ought to be doused. The 2,200 cubic feet of natural gas it used a month cost $37. “Wouldn’t it seem logical,” a newspaper letter writer asked, “to use that gas for a better use such as heating homes or office buildings rather than just burning it for no real purpose whatever?” However, another correspondent called that heresy: “In this time of widespread public distrust for many of our political leaders, it is common to hear the statement, ‘all politicians are crooks.’ But to this I answer, ‘But that’s not true. I remember John Kennedy.’ He was loved and trusted by the nation he led. He set high ideals for that nation to live up to, and he gave it great challenges to face.”

  That seemed so very long ago. On the cover of Time, a flaxen-haired boy who looked as if the bogeyman had just stolen his teddy bear. The accompanying article, “A Child’s Christmas in America,” began with vignettes:

  “In St. Louis, ten-year-olds suit up for karate class. . . . ‘Gonna teach ’em not to rip me off,’ murmurs a disciple. ‘Like A Clockwork Orange.’

  “In Brooklyn, a boy scarcely old enough to go to school composes a graffito with a spray can against a handball court. The word: NIXON—with the X in the form of a swastika.

  “In Anaheim, Calif., a group of preschoolers ponder the wonders of Disneyland. ‘I’m going to live here when I grow up,’ one of them vows. Why? ‘Not a pollution anywhere.’ ”

  Hijackers from the Palestinian group Black September set fire to a Pan Am jetliner in Rome, killed thirty people, then threatened to crash another flight into the center of Athens. The POWs showed up in the news again around Christmastime, in a cavalcade of stories about their high divorce rate. One wife described her husband’s homecoming in McCall’s. He couldn’t accept that she had voted for George McGovern. By the end of March, she wrote, she was “on the verge of tears all the time” and “ready to can the whole thing.” John McCain gave an interview in U.S. News debunking the emerging narrative of the inevitable breakdown of the POWs’ marriages: “Let me emphasize that there were many, many fine women who supported what they knew their husbands believed in. My wife, Carol, was one of those, and I’m very proud of her.”

  Merle Haggard, the felonious White House guest from March, sang a new hit song: “If We Make It Through December.” And on Christmas Eve, OPEC unilaterally raised the price of crude, this time by a factor of four. Gas went up to fifty-five cents a gallon, gas lines up to as long as four hours. Richard Nixon’s new “energy czar,” William Simon, announced a mandatory emergency fuel allocation program that would provide for 20 percent less gas than currently demanded.

  And alone among prominent public officials, Ronald Reagan said such “redundant, unclear, and contradictory rules” were not necessary at all.

  CHAPTER TEN

  * * *

  “That Thing Upstairs Isn’t My Daughter”

  THE NEW YORK CITY WINTER turned fierce for the New Year, but people were still willing to wait in lines up to four hours long for tickets to a new hit movie—and then wait again to see it a second and third time. People started paying scalpers fifty bucks to get in. “It’s like a cult,” a theater manager said. “People must see it.”

  The Exorcist begins in the desert sands of the mysterious Middle East, where wicked oil sheikhs live. Cut to Georgetown, where wicked politicians live. There we meet Christine MacNeil, played by Ellen Burstyn. Christine is a liberal Hollywood movie actress, perhaps an atheist, perhaps based on George McGovern campaign volunteer Shirley MacLaine, who is starring in a movie about left-wing student radicals, and who may or may not be having an affair with her director. Her fascination is piqued by a liberal priest she accidentally encounters, Father Karras, who is also a psychiatrist, frequents singles bars, and suffers from an awful, soul-crushing alienation: “There’s not a day in my life when I don’t feel like a fraud,” he says.

  The condensation point for all the demonic energies circling around this broken society is a twelve-year-old girl, the actress’s daughter, cute little Regan, played by a newcomer named Linda Blair. The devil is struggling to possess her, and wins. She shrieks and snarls, vomits—and murders a priest. Her head spins around 360 degrees. And, in a shot that might have been the most mind-blowing to yet appear in the entire history of cinema, she shouts like a deep, dark, guttural flamethrower, “LET JESUS FUCK YOU! LICK ME! LICK ME!” while shoving a crucifix between her twelve-year-old labia.

  When scenes like these unspooled on the movie screen, unbelievable things started happening. At the first press screening in New York a woman in the sixth row started pacing the aisle, holding her head and murmuring, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” When The Exorcist opened in Los Angeles, a theater manager counted an average of six vomiters and six fainters per showing. Exhibitors started stocking up on, of all things, kitty litter; it helped absorb the puke. A guard at the Manhattan theater told reporters about all the heart attacks and miscarriages he had witnessed.

  Warner Bros. had thought the film’s commercial prospects unpredictable at best—religious pictures didn’t do well in these allegedly faithless times. The Exorcist opened in twenty-six theaters. As word of mouth spread, the studio struck new prints as quickly as possible—and in each new city, emergency room visits skyrocketed. In Boston the audience assaulted
the image with rosary beads. In San Francisco a patron charged the screen. In Germany a boy shot himself in the head after a screening; in England a boy died of an epileptic seizure. In Chicago six people ended up in psychiatric wards, convinced demons had come to possess them, too; others showed up at rectories with their little ones in tow, begging for exorcisms.

  Which of course only made people want to see it more. Within two months of its release Variety reported it was the fifth-highest-grossing film in history.

  Why? What was the awesome appeal? Some of it was surely the shocking physicality of what showed up on the screen—like the arc of pea-green vomit Regan sends soaring into a startled priest’s eye. Some of it was old-fashioned marketing genius. Publicists let it be known that director William Friedkin had seen five hundred aspirants for the role of the little girl who would be doing such awful things onscreen. They trumpeted the awful coincidences alleged to be haunting the production.

  Beyond all that, the fact was this: within the relatively safe confines of a darkened, popcorn-scented hall, it is fun to be haunted. And yet, there were dozens of movies entering theaters that year that aimed to haunt. But only this one was sending patrons to the emergency room. Why?

  Aristotle was the first writer to try to explain why it is pleasing to be horrified in a theater. A tragic story, he said, “has pain as its mother.” Displaying that pain, containing it—“arousing these emotions through the representation of them”—storytelling thereby reduces it; viewers, he wrote, “settle down as if they have attained healing.” The Greek word for this, catharsis, came from a medical term: “cleansing,” “purification,” or, more dramatically, purgation.

  What was it that The Exorcist purged? What were the social pains that were its mother? Here was one: our actual little girls, our perfect symbols of innocence, had become alien and frightening. Take for example the real Linda Blair, the fourteen-year-old who beat out five hundred other aspirants to play the demon-filled Regan. The director had asked her if she knew what the movie was to be about. Because she had read the book, she reported, she did: “It’s about a little girl who gets possessed by the devil and does a lot of bad things.”