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

by Rick Perlstein

  The cancellation was the fruit of a White House campaign of manipulation that began in 1969, when Nixon sent Spiro Agnew to attack news commentators as “a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one.” Behind the scenes, they assaulted the networks with threats—as revealed in several of the most revealing memos entered into evidence during the Ervin Committee hearings. In one, from September 1970, Charles Colson bragged of a meeting in which he warned network executives that unless the White House saw more “balanced coverage,” TV stations would start losing broadcast licenses. “They are very much afraid of us,” Colson reported, “and are trying hard to prove they are ‘good guys.’ ”

  Apparently they were even now—despite the president’s maximal political weakness. Maybe having to report so many dastardly things about a Republican inspired network brass to proactively censor the left.

  Of the Cavett episode, ABC singled out five areas in which the guests’ opinions concerned it: on “the capitalist system, the administration, our system of justice and the courts, and U.S. foreign policy with regard to Vietnam and Cambodia.” Cavett pronounced himself baffled. “If people eventually get to see the show,” he said, “they won’t be able to understand what the fuss was all about.” They did eventually get to see it, heavily edited, five days after they got to see their president fondle a yo-yo at the Grand Ole Opry. They saw Jerry Rubin say that the real revolution lay in getting in touch with one’s body and that when enough people did, capitalism would collapse. They saw Rennie Davis moon over his spiritual guru, the fifteen-year-old Maharaji Ji, and Abbie Hoffman say he’d been busy with “quiet things.” Cavett, a little desperate to enliven the proceedings, asked what they would do if someone told them he or she was about to bomb a munitions plant. But only lip readers would have been able to discern that Abbie Hoffman thought it would be much more productive these days to monkey-wrench an oil refinery office—because ABC smudged out the sound. Then two conservatives spoke for half an hour, because “under the terms of his contract,” a network spokesman explained, Dick Cavett had “to provide an opposing viewpoint.”

  Soon after, Pat Buchanan, the right-wing White House staffer, began a column in the nation’s most widely read magazine, TV Guide, which reached a third of the adult U.S. population every week. Buchanan was one of five rotating columnists penning a new feature called “News Watch.” The others were the former editor of the Republican National Committee’s magazine; Edith Efron, the author of a 1971 book alleging liberal media bias that the White House (in another Ervin Committee revelation) had bumped onto the bestseller list by secretly purchasing thousands of copies; Kevin Phillips, a former Nixon Justice Department staffer and author of The Emerging Republican Majority, now working on a project to break up the networks on antitrust grounds; and John P. Roche, who had once been the Johnson administration’s liaison to the liberal intellectual community but now fit the description of a “neoconservative”—a newly popular coinage for conservatives who used to be liberal. TV Guide was published by Walter Annenberg, Nixon’s former ambassador to the United Kingdom and a social companion of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

  It all reminded the New Yorker of another Buchanan memo flushed out by Watergate investigators, this one proposing that scholars at the “private” foundation he had proposed the White House set up as a political front group “produce a book of papers on [the media’s] lack of objectivity and need for reform.” There was, too, the case of William Safire, the White House speechwriter and former public relations agent whose specialty had been coming up with terms of abuse for the media to put in the mouth of Spiro Agnew. The New York Times gave him an op-ed column, which debuted in April: clever pieces in the acceptable argot of the Georgetown villagers that somehow always also ended up letting Richard Nixon elegantly off the hook—like the one in which he recommended “a public bonfire of the tapes on the White House lawn,” but only, mind you, to “re-establish the confidentiality of the presidency.”

  These apparent successes chipping away at the media’s supposed anti-Nixon bias were cold comfort for Nixon. The day after the Cavett show the Judiciary Committee won a major procedural battle when John Doar, melodramatically guarded by police, picked up what the press called the “bulging briefcase”—a cache of evidence the special prosecutor insisted it would violate grand jury secrecy for Congress to see. Woodward and Bernstein of the Post reported it contained evidence that the president himself was involved in the cover-up. Judge Sirica ruled against Nixon after Rodino warned that without access to the documents, the impeachment inquiry would drag on for a year (and wasn’t Nixon’s latest slogan that “dragging out Watergate drags down America”?).

  In April came the news that Nixon had paid $72,682.09 in taxes in 1969 but less than $800 in 1971—and got a $72,000 tax refund in 1970. The magic was due to a deduction received by donating his vice presidential papers to the government. Allegedly, he falsified the deed of gift to make it look like he donated them before the law under which he claimed the deduction expired. Now the IRS announced he owed the government $476,431, and that one year he had donated only $252 to charity. The New York Times banner on the subject was approximately as large as the one announcing the attack on Pearl Harbor. For the first time, a poll recorded a plurality, 43 to 41 percent, favoring impeachment.

  On April 4, Judiciary Committee members reminded the White House they had waited thirty-eight days so far for a reply to their request for forty-two more tapes. One White House spokesman responded that the president was suffering under the yoke of a runaway prosecution seeking “carte blanche to rummage through every nook and cranny in the White House” and that this coequal branch of government was behaving “like a lot of children in homes all over the United States. When you are at meals and you want seconds, you have to clean your plate first.” Another spokesman cried, “The mere fact of an impeachment inquiry does not give Congress the right to back up a truck and haul off White House files.” Hotheads on the Judiciary Committee said that the White House was being criminally insolent, because the committee request had precisely designated which conversations they wanted and why, down to the minute. At that, Rodino made a public announcement: “We have been respectfully patient. The courts were patient. . . . The people have been patient for a long time. But the patience of this committee is wearing thin.” He then granted the White House five more days, until April 9, to comply before this became the first House committee in history to subpoena a president.

  The Saturday Night Massacre, with its visuals of agents of one branch of the government facing down another and its specter of a Strangelovian military takeover, had come last October 24. Now, a mere twenty-four weeks later, that same fear crept forth once more.

  THEN THIS: AMID HEADLINES ABOUT the new Judiciary Committee deadline and an announcement by the IRS that the president owed it almost a half million dollars, the SLA released a new tape featuring Patricia Hearst’s voice.

  “I would like to begin this statement by informing the public I wrote what I would like to say,” she said. “I have never been forced to say anything on tape. Nor have I been brainwashed, drugged, tortured, hypnotized, or in any way confused.” She went on to accuse her parents of being part of an FBI plot to assassinate both her and the people whom she now called her comrades. She had been given a choice, she said, of release or “joining the forces of the Symbionese Liberation Army and fighting for my freedom and the freedom of all oppressed people.” She had chosen to join the SLA.

  She ranted on and on: about how she learned that “the corporate ruling class will do anything in their power in order to maintain their position of control over the masses, even if this means the sacrifice of one of their own.” That the food distribution had been “a sham”—this was obvious because “as members of the ruling class, I know for sure that yours and Mom’s interests are never in the interests of the people.” That if Randolph Hearst was interested in the people, he would have used his power to explain that the
energy crisis was a conspiracy to reduce the labor force to “a small class of button pushers,” and that “the law and order programs” of people like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were “just a means to remove so-called violent (meaning aware) individuals from the community in order to facilitate the controlled removal of un-needed labor force from this country, in the same way that Hitler controlled the removal of Jews from Germany.” She concluded, “I should have known that if you and the rest of the corporate state were willing to do this to millions of people to maintain power and to serve your needs you would also kill me if necessary to serve those same needs.” This was why, she went on to explain, she had shed the name Patty and chosen “Tania” instead—“after a comrade who fought alongside Che Guevara in Bolivia for the people of Bolivia. . . . It is in the spirit of Tania that I say, ‘PATRIA O MUERTE. VENCEREMOS.’ ”

  In case anyone missed the point, they enclosed a photograph of Hearst in a beret and a guerrilla uniform, posed as if firing a machine gun at a running dog of the fascist imperialists, a dreamy look on her face and the SLA’s seven-headed serpent emblem in the background. “HEARST QUITS FAMILY,” a headline read. Demons had possessed her. Who could say it would not happen to your children, too?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  * * *

  Hank Aaron

  SPRINGTIME, AND YOUNG MEN’S FANCIES turned to thoughts of baseball. Surely, this of all years called for a good old-fashioned heroic saga straight out of the days of Grantland Rice—and, as if on cue, on Opening Day, on the very first swing of his twenty-first season, Henry Aaron of the Atlanta Braves cracked a sinker that did not sink right on over the left-center wall at Riverside Stadium in Cincinnati for the 714th home run of his career, tying the “unbeatable” record Babe Ruth had held since 1935.

  In that same fortnight members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, including Patty Hearst, were seen on security cameras robbing Hibernia Bank in San Francisco with machine guns; also in San Francisco, two hitchhiking teenagers became the tenth and eleventh victims of a spree of random murders of white citizens by black men in what police labeled the “Zebra” shootings. In a single two-hour period, at least six F5 tornadoes formed, the worst “Super Outbreak” of storms in U.S. history. One destroyed half of Xenia, Ohio, in a space of minutes, killing thirty-four. Nationwide the storms covered thirteen states and left a path of destruction 2,500 miles long, killing three hundred.

  Women reporters marched with picket signs outside the National Press Club, demonstrating against their exclusion from its annual Gridiron Dinner. Ronald Reagan vetoed all but $1 million from a $5 million bill to help unemployed veterans get jobs. Henry Kissinger went, hat in hand, before the United Nations, in the wake of the OPEC oil humiliation, to plea for the world’s resource-rich Third World nations to share their resources more fairly with the formerly mighty United States. Excerpts of the new book by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward about how they cracked Watergate, All the President’s Men, ran in Playboy, where readers could also thumb through “The Devil Made Us Do It: A Ten Page Pictorial on the Occult.” The Harris poll recorded that the public trusted the President of the United States less than the whistle-blower John Dean.

  And in the age of John Dean and Patty Hearst, it seemed, even sports could not provide uncomplicated pleasure.

  Hank Aaron’s day soured before it began. He was already haunted by the news from Xenia, Ohio, when the Cincinnati Reds front office asked how they could accommodate him on his special day. It was April 4—the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. A black man and a civil rights supporter, Aaron asked that there be a moment of silence before the game. They refused. “I should have known better,” he later reflected: Cincinnati was one of the most reactionary cities in the North. And for millions of white Americans, “Hammerin’ Hank” represented not something beautiful given to them but something taken: their secure sense of racial supremacy in a world gone dangerously mad.

  For a year now he had been getting letters like these:

  Dear Nigger,

  Everybody loved Babe Ruth. You will be the most hated man in this country if you break his career home run record.

  Dear Jungle Bunny,

  You may beat Ruth’s record but there will always be one Babe. Go back to the jungles.

  I hope you join brother Dr. Martin Luther King in that Heaven he spoke of.

  His career had tracked the progress of integration in the major leagues: born poor near Mobile, Alabama (his dad found steady work for the first time thanks to President Roosevelt’s executive order integrating war industries), inspired to become a major leaguer by Jackie Robinson, he was one of the last black stars to begin his career in the dying Negro Leagues. He was snapped up in 1952 by the Milwaukee Braves, and his first minor league stop was Eau Claire, Wisconsin, whose population included but seven blacks; he had never been inside a white person’s home before. At his next, the Class A South Atlantic League, black players weren’t allowed to argue the umpires’ calls, and the best compliment Hank Aaron and his one black teammate ever got was “I just wanted to say that you niggers played a hell of a game.” When he was in spring training the next year for the Braves, the Milwaukee papers nicknamed him “Stepin Fetchit.”

  But like in the words of the old Negro spiritual, he overcame—leading the Braves to the 1957 World Series title, and winning individual titles for runs, RBIs, and home runs.

  He did so quietly, modestly, an introvert in an extrovert’s job. But he was also a rich black man—living, when the Braves moved to Atlanta the year Lester Maddox won the governorship after brandishing an ax handle to chase blacks from his restaurant, in the Deep South. By the time Aaron approached Babe Ruth’s record, the heroic era of the civil rights movement, with its soaring images of melodramatic showdowns between vicious Southern sheriffs wielding clubs and humble warriors for justice wielding freedom songs, was over. It was replaced with something called “affirmative action”: a bureaucratic, top-down attempt to compensate for past racial disadvantage by setting aside opportunities for blacks. Anger over that knew no regional bounds.

  In Boston a cadre of liberals, including the congressman who was the former dean of the Boston College Law School, Father Robert Drinan, urged affirmative action for construction projects in their city, arguing, “If serious disorders break out in the near future, the Department of Labor can be cited as the proximate cause of such disorders.” By 1974 a settlement was arrived at requiring 30 percent minority employment at sites in minority areas. The jobs were brokered through a “Third World Jobs Clearing House,” supported by city funds, which soon was demanding a 50 percent share. Two thousand angry white Boston construction workers marched on City Hall. One told a reporter, “You been workin’ ten to twelve years, some guy comes along from this Third World and grabs your job. What the hell?”

  This noble attempt to redivide the economic pie, instituted by un-elected judges, guilt-ridden bureaucrats, and litigation-shy corporate personnel officers, happened to go forward at a time when that pie was shrinking: in 1974—a year, to take one affirmative action milestone as an example, when the federal government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission handed down a consent decree to both the nation’s nine largest steel manufacturers and the United Steelworkers of America union, ordering hiring quotas for women and minorities. But this same year, unemployment hit its highest level since 1961. Inflation had quadrupled, and for the first time in a generation real take-home pay dropped. In that context the attempt to redress past inequalities seemed to whites to come one-for-one out of their hides.

  In the culture at large, Hank Aaron absorbed the brunt of that sort of anger. Stealing Babe’s pride of place, to his new pen pals he was like one of those black construction and steel workers who’d stolen theirs—just another swaggering black man empowered to lord it over whites as if he owned the world. Soon, as one of them put it, “You boogies will think that you invented baseball or something.”

 
In real life it didn’t matter if Hank Aaron never swaggered. It was enough that he succeeded. On sports talk radio the argument was ubiquitous: he could not possibly have beaten a white man without sneaky unfair advantages, just like those affirmative-action hires: the baseballs he hit were more lively than the ones Ruth had to hit. He played in more games than Ruth. (The consensus seemed to be that Ruth would have hit 900 had the number of at-bats been equal, though the math became more creative in proportion to the racism: “Had Ruth played and been at bat as many times as you, old nigger, he would have hit just short of 1100 home runs.”) Ballparks were smaller. (“Dear Nigger, you can hit all dem home runs over dem short fences, but you can’t take dat black off your face.”)

  Were the claims of unfair advantage true? Not really. To cite another record, by the time his career ended in 1976 Aaron had hit for 722 more total bases than anyone else who had ever played the game—which had nothing to do with lively balls, tiny ballparks, or the number of games in a season. But stats were not driving this argument. The terror of racial displacement was. “I deplore the desecration of the memory and immortality of a great baseball player by extolling a modern pretender as ‘the greatest,’ ” a Connecticut fan wrote as the death threats began coming daily, as if Jackie Robinson had never blazed the way at all. On days the FBI relayed to him a credible threat, Aaron politely informed his teammates not to stand too close to him in the dugout. One writer asked him to think of the children: Ruth “would do anything for a kid. . . . It is what is commonly known as a hero. Therefore, how could you, Mr. Aaron, ruin, destroy, and shatter to pieces the one record which separates Babe Ruth from any other man to play the great game of baseball?”