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

by Rick Perlstein

  “What sort of bad things?”

  “She pushes a guy out a window and masturbates with a crucifix—”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s like jerking off, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, do you know about jerking off?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Do you do that?”

  “Yeah, don’t you?”

  Here was another 1974 pain to be purged: the fear that someone you loved would disappear. A Missouri bank president and his wife disappeared, then were discovered shot to death, trussed to a tree, the banker with dynamite strapped to his chest. The editor of the Atlanta Constitution disappeared, kidnapped by individuals claiming to be members of an “American Revolutionary Army” seeking “to return the American government to the people.” An IRS agent in Wisconsin was lured out to a farm, tied up, and threatened by right-wing extremists of the new “Posse Comitatus” movement, which pledged massive tax resistance against the United States.

  Young people disappeared. A typical news report, from California: “The nude body of a young woman found in a desert wash near Blythe was tentatively identified as that of Laura Louise Escamillo, 20, of Idyll-wild, sheriff’s detectives reported. Officers said Miss Escamillo was last seen July 11 near Blythe attempting to hitch a ride home.” In August, a pit full of decomposing corpses, most of them teenage runaways, was discovered outside Houston; the serial killer, Dean Arnold Corll, who had once owned a candy shop, lured them in with promises of drugs, food, and shelter. He piled up a final toll of twenty-seven corpses.

  Sometimes, and even more frighteningly, children made themselves disappear. They ran away. They became willing captives to strange Svengalis and gurus, their personalities suddenly changed—or of a sudden it seemed they had no personalities at all. Like the onetime cheerleaders who joined the “Manson Family” and became obedient mass murderers. Or the bright college students discovered by their parents selling flowers on a street corner on behalf of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon (whose favorite movie was The Exorcist). Their parents, Time noted, “almost uniformly describe their children as having been well-rounded, industrious, and studious until they went off to college and became captured by drugs and radicalism.” Steve Allen, the TV personality, discovered that his missing son had joined the “Love Israel” cult and now went by the name “Logic.” In Houston in November 1973, a city traumatized by the Corll killings, tens of thousands gathered over three days in the Astrodome to celebrate the fifteen-year-old guru Maharaji Ji. As the scoreboard flashed HOLY BREATH WILL FILL THIS PLACE AND YOU WILL BE BAPTIZED IN HOLY BREATH, like some of the lines from the Exorcist script, his agents combed the aisles to recruit devotees willing to live a life of total regimentation on his ashrams, give up all their worldly goods, and never speak to their families again—in exchange for the promise of levitation and communion with extraterrestrials.

  Then there were the children disappearing into lives of drug-filled dissolution, making of it some sort of moral rebuke to “the system.” John Paul Getty III, heir to the great oil fortune, appeared to have done just that—then his mother started getting ransom notes for millions of dollars with the threat that unless they were paid “he will arrive in little pieces.” Just before Christmas he turned up at a truck stop outside Naples, Italy, missing an ear. His grandfather refused to talk to him when his heir called to thank him for putting up the ransom; the elder Getty apparently believed he had got what he had deserved—one more child possessed by demons, unrecognizable to his family.

  A national hotline opened, “Operation Peace of Mind,” advertised with a poster of a scruffy-haired hitchhiking teenage boy. His sign said “Anywhere,” and the caption read: “Are you still alive? Let somebody know.” The massage parlors beloved by journalist Gay Talese were largely staffed by such runaways, as were the Times Square peep shows and whorehouses—like the one out of whose tenth-floor window a twelve-year-old named Veronica Brunson fell, or was pushed. “One wonders what a modern version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would be like, or even if it would be permitted reading in our nation’s high schools,” Indiana senator Birch Bayh, whose son Evan was seventeen, reflected at a hearing on his proposed Runaway Youth Act.

  THE NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER OF RANDOLPH Hearst, son of the founder of the newspaper empire fictionalized in Citizen Kane, disappeared February 4. She was sitting at home in her bathrobe in Berkeley, where she was a sophomore, in the apartment she shared with her boyfriend, a cohabitation unthinkable among respectable people only a few years before. Two armed men pushed in, struck her in the face with a rifle butt, and forced her into the trunk of a car. No news was forthcoming for a couple of days; and then a “military communique” arrived in the mail at the radical Bay Area radio station KPFA from the abductors, announcing they had served a “warrant” from the “Court of the People” to arrest the child of a “corporate enemy of the people,” and that “all communications from this court must be published in full, in all newspapers, and all other forms of media. Failure to do so will endanger the safety of the prisoner,” and in the event of a rescue attempt, “the prisoner is to be executed.” The next communiqué promised future abductions, in order to finance “war against the establishment.” It concluded: “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.”

  The kidnappers came from something called the “Symbionese Liberation Army”—which had recently claimed responsibility for the assassination of the black superintendent of the Oakland school system, whom they called the “black Judas of Oakland.” Two SLA members were soon arrested—but others found easy shelter within Berkeley’s radical underground.

  A cassette tape arrived at KPFA on February 11 bearing Patricia Hearst’s voice. Wearily, she informed “mom and dad” that she was “not being starved or beaten or unnecessarily frightened.” She urged her parents to cooperate with the demands of what she called the “combat unit,” assuring them, “They are not just a bunch of nuts and have been very honest with me.” Officials pointed out that the recording appeared to have been stopped and started several times, suggesting she had been fed what to say; others, however, noting rumors that her boyfriend, Steven Weed, had been a member of Students for a Democratic Society, detected suspicious gestures of sympathy toward her captors. A man who identified himself as “Cinque,” the SLA’s “general field marshal,” pronounced in a calm, clear voice, “I am not a savage killer and madman, we do hold a high moral value to life, but I am quite willing to carry out the execution of your daughter to save starving men, women, and children of every race.” His “preliminary demands” were for Randolph Hearst to oversee the distribution of seventy dollars’ worth of groceries to every Californian eligible for any form of public assistance and anyone who had ever been in prison or on parole—an outlay of $147 million by one estimate, $400 million by another. “If you do not meet these demands in good faith we will assume there is no basis for negotiations and we will no longer maintain in good health prisoners of war,” the document concluded, demanding the SLA’s emblem, a seven-headed snake, be printed in all the newspapers.

  Placards of solidarity showed up on Bay Area lawns: GOD BLESS YOU, PATTY HEARST. Three mornings later, the fascist insect who preyed upon the life of the people, Patty’s dad, stepped up to a bank of microphones and addressed his daughter directly—“Patty, I hope you’re listening!”—and said that while meeting the SLA’s demands as specified would be impossible, he was preparing “some kind of counteroffer that’s acceptable.” Randolph Hearst continued, struggling to compose himself: “Tell them not to worry. Nobody’s going to bust in on them to start a shootout. You take care of yourself. We love you, Patty.” He turned away, unable to continue. His wife, Catherine, a member of Ronald Reagan’s conservative bloc on the University of California Board of Regents, sobbing beside him and clasping his hand, took over: “We love you, Patty, and we’re all praying for you. I’m sorry I’m crying, but I’m happy you’re safe and strong.”
She was sure, she said, that the captors had “good ideals,” but “just went about it the wrong way.”

  “God bless you, honey. Take care of yourself.”

  British journalist Alistair Cooke, one of those European Tocquevilles who are better able to see us than we can see ourselves, begged his British readers’ indulgence of the extreme indignity of parents negotiating with moral monsters over TV: “We were hearing a girl zombie apparently drained of all feeling except that of a beggar; and we were identifying, in a helpless way, with the sleepless anxiety of a mother and father at the end of their rope.”

  THOSE IMAGES ON THE NEWS had become a numbingly familiar: exhausted, gaunt, mystified parents, helpless against the demons who had stolen their child—a reason The Exorcist signified so heavily. And though it couldn’t have been more different from the previous summer’s surprise movie hit, American Graffiti, it also could not have been more the same. Both ended by strenuously maintaining that the world would have turned out just fine, had we just stayed in 1962.

  The Exorcist’s turning point came as the gaunt, frantic mother begs Father Karras, the faithless priest, to look into performing the ancient and mysterious rite of exorcism. Science, after all, has been helpless to explain her daughter’s mysterious possession. Father Karras, a man of science, tells her that she is being ridiculous and that her daughter . . . but the mother interrupts:

  “I’m telling you that thing upstairs isn’t my daughter!”

  Like the real-life middle-class Angelenos flocking to the downtown branch of State Savings Mutual Bank to embrace the healing powers of astrology, numerology, palmistry, tarot, and the comet Kohoutek, reason and progress having failed to deliver us from evil, why not embrace mystical solutions instead? And so, in the movie’s dramatic final fifteen-minute set piece, ministrations of holy water, prayers declaimed in Latin, the simple profession that Satan is one and indivisible and perfectly, obviously evil, but that God is one and indivisible and perfectly good, together restore the innocent little girl to herself—and, incidentally, restore Father Karras’s faith as well. Evil abated. Order restored.

  The 1970s abated, too. In the last scene, the mother replaces the loose, flowing earth-toned slacks of earlier reels (unisex: remember that word) with a Jacqueline Kennedy–style tailored pink dress, long white gloves, and a fur hat and coat. Regan is presented in an old-fashioned coat of red, white, and blue. “She doesn’t remember any of it,” the mother tells a priest, and stares dreamily at his Roman collar, and then, as if instinctively, throws her arm around him in loving gratitude.

  Just as in American Graffiti it was 1962 again, the time before the storm, before children disappeared.

  AMERICANS NOW LONGED FOR INTIMATIONS of innocence wherever they could find them—even from that most degraded class of citizen: the politician.

  The demon in the White House delivered his State of the Union address on January 30, 1974, pledging neither to resign nor to compromise the presidency by giving up more tapes and documents. (Once more the governor of California was about the only prominent figure to defend him: “Any President would resign if in his own mind he believed it would be for the good of the country to do so,” he said on Meet the Press, then dismissed the latest news of more missing tape segments: “I certainly don’t feel like I’m qualified to sit . . . from 3,000 miles away and try to tell lawyers before a judge how to conduct that case.”)

  Nixon spoke nine days after his “energy czar” published plans for a nationwide “contingency rationing plan,” variable from month to month according to available supplies. “Under the plan,” the New York Times reported, “all licensed drivers at least 18 years old would receive coupons, which are being prepared by the Bureau of Printing and Engraving”; the White House had ordered more than 10 billion of them. Present projections were that “eligible drivers” in New York and its suburbs would be entitled to thirty-seven gallons a month. “There is nothing,” an official admitted, “to keep anyone from going into the coupon buying-and-selling business”: black-market America, like Casablanca during the war. Czar Simon then announced he might mandate a three-dollar minimum purchase—to prevent the very panic buying his previous announcements had engendered. Next, on February 4, Gulf Oil closed its terminal in Linden, New Jersey, for fear that picketing truckers would attack the employees or sabotage the facility—engendering more panic anew.

  In Washington the harried president’s lawyer James St. Clair argued that the prosecution of his client had become a persecution. Jaworski came back that this was nonsense—and that subpoenas of people at the White House might once more be forthcoming. A subpoena from another judge was already in the works, ordering Nixon’s testimony in the trial of John Ehrlichman for ordering the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. (“Watergate West,” the trial was nicknamed.) It was the first subpoena to a president by a state judge in the history of the United States. The White House said it would ignore it.

  Then, on February 5, a forty-one-year-old Democratic state legislator named John Murtha won a special election to Congress in a rural district in Pennsylvania that had sent only Republicans to Washington for the last thirty years. Nearly the only Republican who didn’t seem worried about the omen was Ronald Reagan—traveling the country so aggressively that an aide’s memo plotting a potential presidential campaign strategy warned, “The Governor must look to the public as if he still cares about California.” At a Lincoln Day dinner in Oklahoma City, Reagan roused the troops by insisting that it was the Democrats who should be under the microscope for corruption: “We in our party have too often been the victim of big city political machines voting tombstones, warehouses and county lots against us in every election.” The ensuing ovation was ecstatic.

  In a week, Michigan’s Fifth District was to pick a replacement for Vice President Gerald Ford; he had been elected thirteen times with never less than 60 percent of the vote, and no Democrat had served in the Fifth District since 1910. The Democrat now running insisted Watergate was almost the only issue that mattered. “This country and this district cannot continue to survive so long as the moral and leadership vacuum exists in Washington,” soft-spoken Richard Vander Veen said in announcing his candidacy. “Our constitution provides no equivalent to the British vote of no confidence,” he said, “and my campaign could be just that—a referendum on Richard Nixon.” He also said Nixon had to resign—and that if the president didn’t, he would go to Washington to work for impeachment.

  Vander Veen was a peculiar kind of Democrat—one apparently indifferent to being a Democrat at all. He spoke rarely if at all about the New Deal accomplishments upon which the party of Jefferson and Jackson had been winning elections for a generation. He took as his model instead George Romney, the Republican governor who had entered public life by fielding a nonpartisan citizens’ commission to reform the Michigan constitution. He had imagined the previous year that a similar commission might help heal the entire mess in Washington itself. “We could style ourselves as Democrats or independents,” he wrote; it didn’t matter which; his and Ford’s own Kent County had gone to ruin precisely because the only people allowed to run for office were those willing to “pledge their souls to the party store.” Watergate, he thought, was caused by an excess of partisanship, and wasn’t really the fault of Republicans at all: “Democrats can take an equal share of the blame for failing to present the country a candidate of sufficiently broad base in the presidential election of 1972.”

  The worst thing he would say about his Republican opponent, the head of the state senate, who had never lost an election in fifteen tries, was that he was a “career politician.” (Vander Veen had never held elected office.) He had an ironclad policy of never speaking ill of a political foe; Gerald Ford, Vander Veen said in a hapless run against him in 1958, was “a fine fellow.” For America needed politicians who were not politicians—who had “proven themselves to be successful in an honorable line of endeavor other than politics,” one who “has a code
of moral values and has demonstrated a capacity to adhere to . . . values.” (Vander Veen was a corporate lawyer by trade, but his real passion was collecting rare books.) “I am a lifelong Democrat, and I have not always agreed with Gerald Ford on the issues,” he said on the stump. But the vice president’s integrity and reputation were beyond question, and that was the important thing: “We need Gerald Ford as President.”

  This was just the sort of antipolitician, it turned out, Americans longed for to effect their political deliverance.

  The special election arrived on February 18—the same day as the start of the trial of John Mitchell and Maurice Stans for hoovering up $200,000 of Robert Vesco’s cash, and the same day Richard Nixon engaged his own impassioned form of bipartisanship as a guest of Alabama governor George Wallace before forty thousand enthusiastic fans at “Honor America Day” in Huntsville, Alabama. “We in Alabama have always honored the office of the Presidency of the United States,” the governor intoned from his wheelchair, a remarkable lie (he had made his political reputation by daring President Kennedy to send troops to Alabama to enforce federal law). The president said thanks to “you all” for “reminding all of us that here in the heart of Dixie, the heart of America is good and we are going to continue to be a great nation.” Enthusiasts waved signs like the one with a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the legend, WHAT IF HE HAD QUIT? (once upon a time, Alabamans had dearly hoped he would), and another enjoining, REBELS SAY “HANG IN THERE” MR. P!