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

by Rick Perlstein

  Aaron was certainly no hero in the city where Martin Luther King was buried. He drew ten thousand extra fans in any opposing ballpark he visited. He hit his 711th home run at home—and only 1,362 Atlantans showed up.

  THE HOME RUN CHASE ALSO indexed America’s new paranoia, its wariness toward formerly trusted institutions, its new lack of respect for formerly taken-for-granted norms of decency. Before the 1973 season began, back when the POWs were coming home, the Braves’ traveling secretary said publicly that the team hoped Aaron would break the record at home; then “we’ll sell out every night.” So every time Aaron struck out, fans accused him of doing it on purpose. Every time he sat on the bench, it was a scam. Then, as the 1974 season approached, when Braves owner Bill Bartholomay announced his intention to bench Aaron during the opening series in Cincinnati, the New York Times called it “a brazen defiance of baseball’s integrity”—even though the practice was venerable and common. “Baseball’s gone crooked,” Dick Young of the New York Daily News wrote. “There is no delicate way of putting it. . . . I would feel slightly better, and so would the fans, if the Commissioner of Baseball had come out with a blistering order to the Braves that Hank Aaron must play the first three games, under threat of forfeit.”

  Came the big day in Cincinnati. Aaron blasted 714. He was, yes, promptly benched—and then, in the seventh inning, his moment in the sun was superseded when a young man ripped off his clothes and ran naked across the left-field upper deck for a full three minutes. He got two standing ovations, then signed a clutch of autographs as he was being taken away by police.

  “Streaking” was the springtime’s new fad: fifty Columbia University kids dashing nude through the streets of New York City; 2,500, a world record, through the campus of the University of Georgia; a female streaker at the University of Montana braving 30-degree temperatures—and, from the University of Pennsylvania, a “streak for impeachment” to encircle the White House was proposed. (A political cartoon showed a relieved President Nixon looking out a White House window: “Oh, it’s only a streaker. For a moment there I thought you said leaker!”) Right-wing North Carolina senator Jesse Helms seriously suggested “college authorities ought to take all the naked students into custody and herd them into a football stadium under guard and then require them to spend the night naked until their mothers come and request their release.” He added, “It might be useful to hose down the streakers with cold water every 15 or 20 minutes.” In Washington, the National Campaign to Impeach Nixon drew 6,500 for a raucous parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, five of them streaking through the line of march, past a Ford Edsel with the presidential seal on its side and an effigy of Nixon in a jail cell on the roof. And at the Academy Awards, just as David Niven was introducing Elizabeth Taylor to present the Best Picture award, to The Sting, a man named David Opel dashed across the stage to display what a quick-witted Niven called his “shortcomings.” A streaker also raided the 1974 National Book Awards, crying “Read books! Read books!” (Then Adrienne Rich refused her poetry award—or rather, awarded it collectively to the two other female nominees, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, and to “all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world.” Allen Ginsberg sent up a friend who accepted his prize and shouted at the top of his lungs, “There is no longer any hope for the salvation of America!”)

  Later that season the Cleveland Indians offered beer for a dime a cup at a game against the Texas Rangers. There had already been a bench-clearing brawl between the two teams at a cheap-beer night in Arlington, Texas, a week earlier. Before this game, kids started setting off fireworks from their seats and the Texas manager Billy Martin tipped his cap and blew kisses to the booing crowd. In the second inning a hefty gal flashed her breasts on the on-deck circle and tried to kiss an umpire. In the fourth, a streaker slid into second base. In the fifth, a father and son mooned the outfield stands. By the sixth the fireworks were rocketing into the Texas dugout and fans started throwing golf balls, rocks, and batteries onto the field—and, following the seventh-inning stretch, they invaded the playing field, overwhelming security guards. In the ninth inning, when the home team tied the game at 5–5, a fan tried to celebrate by stealing the Rangers’ star right fielder Jeff Burroughs’s glove. The two got into a fistfight, and that was when the real riot began: Clevelanders armed with knives, chains, Chinese martial arts “nunchaku,” and shards of seats they liberated from the stadium’s concrete floor sent Texas players fleeing for their lives—but not before Martin, armed with a bat, led the rest of his team from the dugout to join the melee, crying “Let’s get ’em boys!” like a demented Henry V recalling St. Crispin’s Day.

  Once upon a time, Grantland Rice said sports “help build up clean living, cool heads, stout hearts, and sound judgement under fire.” Grantland Rice was long dead.

  The night before Opening Day in Atlanta, the Braves’ publicist was unable to sleep, terrified of what would happen if the off-duty cop who traveled everywhere with Aaron disguised as a fan, with a service revolver hidden away in a binocular case, plugged a streaker in the head. Aaron approached Cincinnati pitcher Al Downing, the first black pitcher ever to start a Yankees World Series game, and handed him a note wishing him good luck. The encounter was soon the subject for racist conspiracy theories: two black men conspiring together to rob Babe Ruth of his glory.

  Aaron’s dad, seated for the game next to Governor Jimmy Carter, threw out the first ball. The second inning, the historic smack . . .

  In New York, Frank Sinatra, opening a concert at Carnegie Hall: “To ease any tension in anybody’s mind, Hank Aaron has hit the home run tonight.” Sinatra had once been a man of the left. Now the former chairman of Democrats for Reagan in 1970 was much more a tribune of the sort of people who suspected any advance for blacks meant a reversal for whites. He said it without enthusiasm, to no more than polite applause. But Hank Aaron’s response was anticlimactic as well: “Thank God it’s over,” he said when offered the microphone during the ceremony that interrupted the game. Then it started to rain, and for a moment it looked as if a cancellation would force the ordeal on him some other day. The ceremony ended. Half the crowd left. The president, too busy agonizing over his tapes to come to Atlanta, called only after Aaron had trotted out to right field. The call was accidentally disconnected before the hero made it back to the dugout.

  THREE DAYS LATER, ON APRIL 11, the House Judiciary Committee voted 33 to 3 to subpoena forty-two more taped conversations and gave the president two weeks to produce them. The next week Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski requested a court order for sixty-four others—and then, the day after that, the Judiciary Committee asked for another 142. The president’s lawyer James St. Clair requested one last extension to consider their response. By a vote of 34 to 4 the committee acceded to what Rodino called this “one last request”—that single word last veritably echoing across the marble walls.

  Lawyer and president repaired to Camp David, and reached a historic decision. And night owls in Washington at 2:45 A.M. on April 29—about the hour when on a certain night in 1972 four Cubans were being arrested for burglary—could have spied several presidential employees rushing forth from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with typed manuscripts to the gloomy brick buildings where the 7,400 employees of the U.S. Government Printing Office impressed each day’s Congressional Record into hot lead type on turn-of-the-century Linotype machines. They would soon be producing for the benefit of an eager nation a volume the size of a phone book with the portentous title Submission of Recorded Presidential Conversations to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives by President Nixon, April 30, 1974. After that, the world would change.

  It had been a year to the day since the president promised the nation, “There can be no whitewash in the White House.” Now, his hair trimmed, his voice cool, his manner serene, he appeared on TV beside stack upon stack of blue volumes. “In these folders that you see over here on my left,” he began, gestur
ing at the impressive array, “are more than twelve hundred pages of transcripts of private conversations I participated in between September 15, 1972 and April 27 of 1973. . . .”

  (Skeptics soon pointed to the stagecraft: each book contained about twenty-five pages with wide margins and space between lines, making the release look much bigger than it actually was.)

  “As far as what the President personally knew and did with regard to Watergate and the cover-up is concerned, these materials, together with those already made available, will tell it all. . . .”

  (To those same skeptics that sounded like a hint he would resist further demands.)

  “I have been reluctant to release these tapes, not just because they will embarrass me and those with whom I talked—which they will—and not just because they will become the object of speculation and even ridicule—and not just because certain parts of them will be seized upon by opportunistic opponents—which they will . . .”

  (People just had to get their hands on these transcripts.)

  “Because, in these and in all other conversations in this office, people have spoken their minds freely, never dreaming that specific sentences or even parts of sentences would be picked out as subjects of national attention and controversy.”

  He continued, to the point of tedium, with an elaborate and legalistic set of rationalizations, quoting the transcripts to explain why they precisely proved he had committed no crime, and no cover-up. For instance, he said the ones for March 21, the day concerning which John Dean had testified he had accepted the necessity of bribing defendants to perjure themselves, “show that I did not intend the further payment to Hunt or anyone else be made,” that “by the end of the meeting, as the tape shows, my decision was to convene a new grand jury and to send everyone before the grand jury with instructions to testify.”

  He wound up after thirty-five minutes—the length of almost all his television speeches, the ideal length for a speech, he had long ago convinced himself—with sentimental bromides: that in an age when “peace may become possible in the Middle East for the first time in a generation,” an age on the verge of “fulfilling the hope of mankind for a limitation on nuclear arms,” there was “vital work to be done . . . so that Americans can enjoy what they have not had since 1956: full prosperity without war and without inflation. . . .”

  (This was a retreat. He used to say the Americans already had full prosperity without war and without inflation.)

  “[E]very day absorbed by Watergate is a day lost from the work that must be done by your President and by your Congress . . . the materials I make public tomorrow will provide all the additional evidence needed to get Watergate behind us and get it behind us now. Never before in the history of the presidency have records that are so private been made so public. In giving you these records—blemishes and all—I am placing my trust in the basic fairness of the American people . . . no questions remaining about the fact that the President has nothing to hide in this matter.”

  Then he wrapped up by quoting Lincoln.

  IN THE YEARS TO COME Americans would learn in a blizzard of bestselling books precisely the strategy behind this unexpected capitulation: he thought it would help cool the fires. Instead it was like a bomb going off—the biggest blunder of Nixon’s political career.

  To Mike Doonesbury, the titular alter ego of Gary Trudeau’s house comic strip of the suspicious circles, what came out of his TV sounded like this.

  Panel one: “Of course, different people will no doubt have very different interpretations of what was said—particularly at the so-called hush money meeting.”

  Panel two: “In this meeting, we discussed the options with great candor. First, we could have paid the money in the interests of national security. But we might have bled dry.”

  Panel three: “Or, we could have taken everyone with knowledge of the case out and shot them. But as a lawyer, I knew that would be wrong. No, we wanted to get the whole thing out in the open!”

  Panel four: Doonesbury buries his head in his hands.

  The volume was the size and heft of a phone book, 1,308 pages of transcripts. It became available to the public the next day at the low, low price of $12.25. But you didn’t even have to read it to get the drift. Just look at the magazine racks. Newsweek, announcing a special section of twenty-two pages of excerpts, from a “transcript team” of fifteen, part of “the most extensive treatment of a breaking story in the magazine’s history,” put this bit of dialogue from the crucial March 21 conversation on the cover:

  “D That’s why for your immediate things you have no choice but to come up with the $120,000 or whatever it is.”

  “P Would you agree that that’s the prime thing that you damn well better get done.”

  “D Obviously . . .”

  “P (Expletive deleted) . . .”

  Time’s cover, “Nixon’s Gamble,” featured the following excerpts:

  “Nobody is a friend of yours.”

  “You could get a million dollars.”

  “You can say, I can’t recall.”

  “I say (expletive removed) don’t hold anything back.”

  That morning, lines at the printing office stretched around the block. Its three thousand copies sold out in three hours. Everyone turned first to March 21, on the page stamped “187,” where John Wesley Dean (“D”) explained why hush money posed a legal problem: “One, Bob is involved in that; two, John is involved in that; I am involved in that; Mitchell is involved in that. And that is an obstruction of justice.” He added that “the blackmail is continuing.” He detailed the problem of keeping it continuing: “You have to wash the money. . . . People around here are not pros at this sort of thing. . . . This is the sort of thing Mafia people can do: washing money, getting clean money, and things like that. We just don’t know about these things, because we are not criminals and not used to dealing in that business.”

  The president, eagerly interested, replied: “How much money do you need?”

  Dean answered, “I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years.”

  And then came the president’s astonishing boast that the mafia had nothing on him: “You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. It is not easy, but it could be done. But the question is who the hell would handle it? Any ideas on that?”

  This was the conversation the president insisted proved he had not participated in a cover-up.

  United Press International clogged its wires for four days transmitting the 350,000 words to member newspapers, many of which published the whole thing as supplements, sometimes for free. The Chicago Tribune published its forty-four-page section within hours of the official release—a herculean effort involving three hundred staffers and a budget of $250,000. (Congressman Dan Rostenkowski said their account of how they did it “would make a wonderful movie.”) National Public Radio hit the air with a marathon reading of every last word; CBS’s ninety minutes of key scenes starred correspondents Bob Schieffer as John Dean, Barry Serafin as the president, and Nelson Benton as Bob Haldeman. Bantam Books and Dell Paperbacks released a combined total of three million copies within a week; a bookstore owner called it his hottest-selling item since William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. “We didn’t realize the extent to which this book touched some kind of nerve in the American public,” a publisher said. Neither did Richard Nixon.

  Reporters soon realized how much of it was, simply, off. For example, 1,878 bits were designated as “inaudible” or “unintelligible”—and the president was inaudible twice as often as all other speakers combined, most often in conversations with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. Members of the public simply immersed themselves in the astonishing privilege of listening to these intimate moments of the powerful. To both, it soon became plain that the White House was a more sordid place than they had imagined. It wasn’t the question of legal jeopardy that transfixed the country. It was the atmosphere the transcripts
revealed.

  The delight the participants took in what they got away with (infiltrating the Muskie campaign via an undercover secretary and chauffeur: “There is nothing illegal about that”). The endless intervals the president’s men spent discussing how a principal might skillfully skirt perjury; the bizarre third-person grandiosity. A columnist for the Hartford Courant wrote: “They evince no concern for what might be the national interest, no idea of what might be right and what wrong. They just don’t care. The only thing that bothered them was to keep secret as much as possible of the whole disaster.” Speaking for multitudes, he concluded, “If the White House circle was innocent, why did they talk, over so many countless days and hours, just as though they were criminals?” The CEO of the United Presbyterian Church said it felt “almost as if the public had been admitted to the most private plotting within a felon’s lair.” Billy Graham literally vomited when he read it.

  The sordidness emanated from the very language. The jock-macho talk (“game plan,” “playing ball,” “the big game”). The violence talk. (“Maybe someone will shoot him,” followed by “Laughter.” They were speaking of L. Patrick Gray, their nominee to head the FBI.) The martial talk, the enemies they saw as intent on seeing the president “bled to death.” The new words, the mafia words: “absolute hang-out” (which meant telling the truth, which Nixon rejected); “modified hang-out” (which meant making it look as if you were telling the truth, which was the course they ultimately arrived at); the “stonewall” (a particularly favorite piece of jargon to the press, given how aptly it explained what reporters had been dealing with from Ron Ziegler for five years now).

  And the fact that the president swore so damned much. That seemed to shock a blushing nation most of all.