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

by Rick Perlstein

  Energy czar William Simon was busy meting out fuel supplies state by state from Washington—more like a Soviet commissar: he dictated prices down to a penny, and when he announced that 90 percent of the nation’s gas stations now had permission to raise prices an extra two cents a gallon, they dropped threats of a nationwide gas-station shutdown. But truckers barricaded freeways to protest skyrocketing operating costs: 350 rigs backed up traffic for twelve miles in the crucial Philadelphia-to-Wilmington corridor; the Ohio Turnpike was virtually motionless for twenty-four hours. Then independent carriers went on a wildcat strike, leaving the same arteries virtually deserted. Truckers who scabbed risked having bricks hurled down at them from overpasses; in Delaware, one was shot to death. “In no instance will we tolerate violence from those with grievances,” the president said in a national radio address on that particular crisis, and pleaded for calm, adding that “despite the threat of violence from a handful of desperadoes, at least 80 percent of the nation’s truckers stayed on the job.”

  Also on the highways, the “Honk for Impeachment” movement spread (“I even got a cop to honk,” an enthusiast told a Michigan newspaper). Nixon’s approval rating was a record-low 25 percent. And in Grand Rapids, the same citizens who had returned Gerald Ford to Congress thirteen times voted in their mild-mannered book collecting neighbor with 53,008 votes to 45,159. The sweating, celebrating crowds chanting “Nixon Must Go!” at Eastern Avenue Hall before the national and international news cameras stamped so hard, authorities feared the floor might collapse.

  Maybe that flawed vessel the Democratic Party could save us after all. A book called Plain Speaking, composed of interviews a journalist named Merle Miller had done with the thirty-fourth president for an early 1960s TV special that never aired, was the year’s runaway bestseller. Harry S. Truman, who had died in January 1973, was drafted from beyond the grave as the exorcist of the nation’s Nixon demons. “There was not a duplicitous bone in his body,” Miller wrote. He wore shirts “that could have come from J.C. Penney.” “As nearly as he could remember,” his “last act in the White House was returning a pencil or maybe it was a pen to the desk of the man he borrowed it from.” (He was not a crook.) The first thing he did upon returning home after his presidential term, back at the old house at 219 North Delaware in Independence, Missouri? (His mother-in-law owned it, and “never stopped ruminating, aloud and whenever possible in the presence of her son-in-law, about all the people who would have made better Presidents than Harry. . . . And don’t track up the kitchen with your muddy feet, Harry.”) “I carried the grips up to the attic.”

  Here was a hero who said things like “I just never got to thinking I was anything special.” And “I’m just an old Missouri farmer.” And “Everything, all of it, belongs to the people. I was just privileged to use it for a while. That’s all . . . it was only lent to me, and by that I’m includin’ the power of the Presidency.” There was the time, for instance, when his military aide presented him with some transcripts of FBI phone taps left over from Franklin Roosevelt’s time. He recalled himself responding with vituperation: “I haven’t time for any such foolishness as that. Tell them I don’t authorize any such thing.”

  “One’s blood congeals at the thought of how far we have gone since those days,” Miller wrote. “And it’s been downhill all the way.”

  The fact that Truman, like FDR and JFK and LBJ, had also secretly recorded White House conversations was not then known—but people should have known better than to buy the idea of Truman as a reluctant wielder of presidential power: Harry S. Truman had made the most extraordinary extensions of executive authority in the history of the office, an entire new national security state, licensing many of the practices later associated with Joseph McCarthy. This had been documented in a bestseller from the previous year, Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger’s The Imperial Presidency, but the public forgot about that—and the fact that this supposed unblemished scourge of corruption was nicknamed an “Office Boy” of Kansas City’s crooked boss Tom Prendergast, or that his estimate of how many American lives he had saved by dropping atomic bombs kept ballooning as the decades went by (in 1946 he said that several thousand American men would have died in an invasion of Japan; by 1959, he claimed the number was upwards of a million). Then Garry Wills, one of the deans of American journalism’s suspicious circles, documented in Esquire that many of the dramatic instances of “plain speaking” Truman presented to Miller, such as his supposed public dressing down of General MacArthur, actually did not happen—and also that Truman was driven by much the same ego-damaged defects of character associated with Richard Nixon. Never mind. A grateful citizenry was glad to look the other way and savor the myth. Suspicious circles were being cowed into abatement everywhere. Nostalgia, heroes, and myth was the flavor of the month.

  Heroes like soft-spoken Richard Vander Veen. On the plane to Washington for Vander Veen’s congressional swearing-in, the captain sent his party a flight of champagne. The congressman-elect gave his first news conference: “The silent majority has spoken and its message is clear: Richard Nixon has failed us. Richard Nixon cannot lead us.” It was picked up on all three networks. In a Florida paper, the news brief below Vander Veen’s words described the town of 1,200 in Washington State that had been without gasoline for a week, even for police cars; above that an AP wirephoto depicted motorists in an endless gas line looking on enviously as a family cruised by for their shopping trip in a horse and buggy. Things were still falling apart. That is why we needed heroes.

  From Democrats Vander Veen got a standing ovation during his swearing-in ceremony for calling for impeachment. Republicans were simply shell-shocked. The new vice president, who found his coattails did not even extend to Grand Rapids, was reported to have muttered, “You can’t mean that” at news of the election returns. Then, thinking fast, he told the press that the reason the Democrat won was “temporary turmoil” due to the energy crunch. RNC chair George H. W. Bush insisted Republicans still looked strong for 1974. At that, a conservative GOP congressman from Iowa literally leaped out of his sickbed and shouted at a reporter, “I’m damned sick and tired of the damned leadership of our party running around with their heads in the sand. They’re a bunch of drunken optimists and if we don’t face reality we’ll lose fifty seats in November. We’ll be having our Republican caucus in a phone booth.”

  The Grand Rapids Press, which endorsed the Republican as it always did, now editorialized, “As for our endorsement last week of Republican Robert VanderLann, the Press is eating crow . . . and it ain’t that bad!”

  And impeachment?

  Once upon a time it had been the White House’s favorite blunt instrument to shut people up about Watergate. As in: if you think Richard Nixon is so bad, then why don’t you impeach him? It was such a drastic remedy, so historically discredited by the precedent of Andrew Johnson in 1868, that constitutional scholars dismissed it as unserious and unthinkable.

  Not anymore.

  The House had authorized $1.5 million to staff the Judiciary Committee inquiry. Late in 1973, the committee picked a lead investigator: John Doar, a Republican, because committee chairman Peter Rodino was obsessed with building a dispassionately nonpartisan inquiry. Doar had investigated civil rights crimes so thoroughly for Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department that George Wallace once barked, “Someone should get a shotgun and blow Doar’s head off.” A week after the 1974 State of the Union address, the House voted 410 to 4 to give the Judiciary Committee broad power to subpoena anyone, including the president. And by spring Doar’s staff of one hundred was working so thoroughly in their suite across the street from the Rayburn House Office Building that workmen had to reinforce the floor for all the extra file cabinets.

  THEIR FIRST JOB WAS FIGURING out what impeachment was. A congressman had once argued on the floor of the House, concerning the attempt to unseat Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, “The only honest answer is that an impeachable offense is whate
ver a majority of the House of Representatives considers to be at a given moment in history.” But now that that congressman, Gerald Ford, had been chosen as Nixon’s vice president, he apparently no longer believed this to be the case. Nixon said at a February 25 press conference, “You don’t have to be a Constitutional lawyer to know that the Constitution is very precise in defining what is an impeachable offense.” That definition, he said, was a serious criminal offense on the part of the president. In fact the Constitution could not be more vague. The Judiciary Committee’s legal staff had just released a massively researched report arguing that the charter’s reference to “high crimes and misdemeanors” was meant to encompass anything the House thought undermined the integrity of the office, disregarded constitutional duties, or violated the presidential oath of office—“a constitutional safety valve,” as the report put it, which the Founders intended as “flexible enough to cope with exigencies” they couldn’t have foreseen.

  Many knowledgeable observers no longer thought even the lower standard would save Nixon. “Had he been a mafia associate,” Joseph Kraft columnized, “he would have long since been tried and convicted and jailed just on the basis of the circumstantial evidence.” There was also, as with the proverbial mafia prosecution, the question of his associates. The same day as the press conference, his personal attorney Herbert Kalmbach pleaded guilty to setting up fake political committees to launder Senate campaign contributions in 1970. (A Los Angeles Times cartoon: “I’d like to see my lawyer,” Nixon says, to a jail guard, outside a cell marked “Kalmbach.”) Four days later, the special prosecutor’s office announced indictments including Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Colson, on twenty-four counts of conspiracy, lying, and obstruction of justice. At Nixon’s next live televised news conference, CBS’s Dan Rather asked: “Would you consider the crimes returned in the indictments last week—those of perjury, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy—to be impeachable crimes if they did apply to you?” Taken aback at the harshest question in his career, the president fumbled a cliché. “Well, I have also quit beating my wife,” he said, to nervous laughter.

  No wonder he was nervous. A charge in Haldeman’s indictment for lying to Congress fired up that old question of what the president knew and when did he know it. John Dean had claimed that the president in March 1973 had asserted it would be no problem raising the million dollars in hush money. In his Senate testimony, however, Haldeman said he’d been there, too, and told the panel he later reviewed the tape, and confirmed that the president had actually said that it wouldn’t be a practical problem to raise a million dollars for hush money, but that it “would be wrong”—meaning, unethical. TAPES CLEAR NIXON—HALDEMAN, was what the slugs had read on July 31, 1973. But what the headlines now revealed was that the Watergate grand jury had been allowed to listen to those tapes, too—and it was indicting Haldeman because Nixon had never said anything of the kind. It was the first practical confirmation of just how stunning these tapes could be for the very future of the republic. And the Judiciary Committee had just requested forty-two more.

  The whole thing now was political: was it imaginable, whatever the evidence, that Congress would impeach? And, because Nixon was a consummate politician, these were the terms on which he was now fighting. He hemmed around his latest refusals to turn over evidence with a campaign-like slogan—“One year of Watergate is enough”—and a pointed set of metaphors to match: his tormenters were off on “a fishing expedition requiring 42 tapes and a U-Haul truck.” Then he got out on the old campaign trail, below what one editorial wag called the “Mason-Nixon Line,” where he might find the fifty to sixty Democratic congressmen he would need to save his ass.

  ON MARCH 16, A YEAR after Nixon had hosted Merle Haggard at the White House, Air Force One pulled into a National Guard hangar in Nashville, Tennessee, where an invited crowd waved little American flags to lyrics urging people to “stand up and cheer for Richard Nixon,” set to the tune of “Okie from Muskogee.” Thereupon, the president motorcaded to opening night of the Grand Ole Opry’s new theater, where he banged out “Happy Birthday” and “My Wild Irish Rose” to his wife on the piano with a big red ersatz barn in the background, then goofed about with a yo-yo presented to him by “King of Country” Roy Acuff, who was resplendent in a stage costume of brilliant blue with snazzy silver piping.

  The president repeated his favorite corny old joke about the mystic powers of moonshine, which he’d been repeating on political sojourns in Dixie for years. Ignoring the man with the sign reading “He Ain’t Country, He’s Crooked,” Nixon, looking clammy and awkward without a podium to protect him, pronounced, “Country music is America.” Then, after a little yo-yo lesson from Acuff, he led the crowd in a booming rendition of “God Bless America.”

  Emboldened at a Houston question-and-answer session with the National Association of Broadcasters two days later, he made an extraordinary pledge of defiance to an impeachment inquiry he insisted was out of control: “I am suggesting the House follow the Constitution. If they do, I will.”

  The presidency, after all, was America. Richard Nixon was the president. The presidency must be preserved. So Richard Nixon had to be preserved. For the sake of America.

  SENATOR JAMES BUCKLEY OF NEW YORK, the nation’s most prominent conservative politician, did not agree. Two days after the president’s return to Washington, Buckley gave a speech announcing, that Nixon’s “credibility and moral authority” were “beyond repair,” the presidency jeopardized “by a long, slow, agonizing, inch-by-inch process of attrition.” So for the sake of the republic and the conservative mandate of 1972, he must voluntarily resign—as an “extraordinary act of statesmanship and courage.”

  Ronald Reagan answered Buckley an hour later at his regular Sacramento press conference. “I think all the evidence is to the contrary, including the fact that we are now going to get some oil from the Middle East.” Impeachment had to be allowed to take its course, and would not disrupt the country: “I think there is something far more disruptive in establishing a precedent, if we ever do so, that by pressure alone the President can be forced to resign.”

  All winter Reagan had been framing the situation, as per usual, in terms maximally advantageous to the president. In Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Utah, he lambasted the “Eastern press establishment” for harassing a president so committed to patriotically preserving the future integrity of the office by not handing over documents to his prosecutors. Reagan pioneered, too, a critique of the supposed integrity of the Judiciary Committee investigation. In actuality, Rodino had been proceeding as fairly as humanly possible—so much so that he no longer even spoke back home in his New Jersey district: “They want a bell-ringer of a speech against Mr. Nixon,” he said, “and I just can’t give it.” John Doar refused to hire any staffers who had ever expressed an opinion about Watergate. Reagan’s argument pressed the opposite case—that such labored deliberateness was corrupt: “I sometimes suspect the Rodino Committee,” Reagan intimated darkly, “of trying to keep this thing going through this election year.”

  Soon the ranking minority member on the Judiciary Committee, Edward Hutchinson, was saying that, too. Then it became a right-wing refrain. But Reagan’s newfound influence was not much boost for his national political prospects. Around the same time he began tongue-lashing the Judiciary Committee, he was also in the news as the first California governor in twenty-eight years to have a veto overridden. What he had vetoed was the legislature’s attempts to block his plans to phase out the state’s hospitals for the mentally ill and retarded. Oil, meanwhile, $2.70 a barrel in September 1973, was going for $13 now. The energy crisis flared with special intensity in California—where competitors in the Ontario 500 were granted just 200 gallons of fuel each for qualifying and 280 gallons for the race, and a plan went into effect restricting who could buy gas on what days based on whether their license plate ended with an odd or even number. Their governor blamed the problem on consumers—they were gui
lty of “panic buying.”

  Volunteers organized under the banner “People in Need” were hard at work fulfilling the SLA’s demands to free Patty Hearst: distributing 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. In some places, the distribution process descended into riots. Reagan, in Washington, D.C., for a governors’ conference, was quoted by a reporter as saying at a fund-raising lunch, “Sometimes you wonder whether there shouldn’t be an outbreak of botulism.”

  Baffling and bizarre, wishing botulism on poor people; reporters asked him to elaborate. He said it was a “joking remark”—much as he had said that his 1970 remark about student protesters, “If it’s to be a bloodbath, let it be now,” was a “figure of speech.”

  A Los Angeles Times reader noted, “Governor Reagan’s remark about botulism will probably destroy him as a presidential candidate.” But “even Republican governors must be allowed an occasional primal scream.” Democrats in the state legislature piled on: “We have tried repeatedly to provide a program in which children could get through the school day without going hungry. Repeatedly the governor has vetoed these programs. . . . I hope the governor and his fat-cat Republican friends enjoyed their lunch.” At that, Reagan blamed the newsman who reported his words for recklessly endangering Patty Hearst’s life. “Frankly I think that he was as irresponsible as I have been accused of being.”

  THAT, FINALLY, WAS THE SMART play. To attack the media from the right, and thereby to intimidate it into quiescence for fear of being accused of “liberal bias,” was the new name of the game. One day in February, four of the erstwhile defendants from the notorious Chicago Seven trial, legendary 1960s radicals Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden, were scheduled to appear on Dick Cavett’s talk show. The appointed evening arrived—and Cavett was replaced by a rerun, with no explanation. “ABC, as a broadcast licensee,” a network spokesman eventually said, “has an obligation to insure fairness and balance in its programming in accordance with Federal Communications Commission requirements.” This show as taped, the network said, had not been “balanced.”