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

by Rick Perlstein

  The transcribers had left in some of the “hells” and “damns,” though rarely from the president. With him, and where the language was saltier, the transcripts made an enduring contribution to American comic discourse: expletive deleted. This was the man who, during one of his debates with John F. Kennedy in 1960, soon after Harry Truman had said, “If you vote for Nixon you ought to go to hell,” piously invoked “the tremendous number of children who come out to see the presidential candidates. It makes you realize that whoever is President is going to be a man that all the children of America will either look up to or will look down to, and I can only say that I am very proud that President Eisenhower restored dignity and decency and—frankly—good language to the conduct of the presidency.” Now came the news that he swore worse than the little girl in The Exorcist. Then Seymour Hersh in the New York Times reported that in a Nixon-Dean conversation on February 28, 1973, the president made disparaging remarks about Jews and called Judge Sirica a “wop.” The White House denied that any such language appeared on the tapes.

  CBS’s Eric Sevareid called the transcripts “a moral indictment without known precedent.” Joseph Alsop recorded his “sheer flesh-crawling revulsion.” At the annual Southern Baptist Convention, the pastor of a 4,300-member church in Columbia, South Carolina, told delegates that the transcripts were “one of the most pornographic, vulgar, and blasphemous documents” he’d ever read. (In his turn on the podium, Governor Carter of Georgia told his fellow Baptists they shared the blame: “There has never been an adequate role played by Christians in this nation . . . in shaping the standard and quality of public life.”)

  Republican officials were the most vituperative. Hugh Scott, the Senate minority leader, called it “deplorable, disgusting, shabby, immoral.” Senator Robert Packwood lamented the lack of “even any token clichés about what is good for the people” A “Republican hierarch” told Newsweek he was “sickened” at having to “live with the fact that such a man is still in the White House.” A Justice Department official pointed out that if this was the stuff Nixon was forced to release, in transcripts the White House provided, “Can you imagine what’s in the stuff he’s holding back?” William Safire wrote that the man who had rescued him from a public relations career and set him on a course as a New York Times columnist was “guilty of conduct unbecoming a president.” However, Safire said he himself hoped the “personal humiliation” would save Nixon from those ravening for impeachment. This appeared unlikely, given that newspapers that had endorsed Nixon in 1968 and 1972 and now called for his removal included such Silent Majority standbys as the Kansas City Times, Omaha World-Herald, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Chicago Tribune, and even his hometown Los Angeles Times, which said, “Justice for the President and the nation now requires his impeachment.”

  Then the Judiciary Committee, flooded with telegrams saying things like “Impeach the (expletive deleted),” ruled in a 20–18 party-line vote that the transcripts did not fulfill the subpoena. John Doar said, “Quite candidly, these transcriptions are not accurate.” A grand jury concluded of the March 21 tape that “Mr. Nixon would be indictable for obstruction of justice if he were not president.” Congressman William Steiger, Republican from Wisconsin, said running for Congress as a Nixon supporter was “a prescription for suicide.”

  WILLIAM HEARST, UNCLE OF PATTY and editor of the nation’s largest newspaper chain, might have been excused for having other things on his mind. The U.S. attorney general, William Saxby, had just labeled the Symbionese Liberation Army part of an international criminal conspiracy, and stated that “based on her taped pronouncements Miss Hearst is part of it” and that the FBI would be willing to risk a shoot-out if it found where they were hiding—then he backed down, saying no action would be taken that would put Patty in jeopardy. (It indexed a debate that would rage for years: whether Patty Heart should be judged as responsible for her own actions. “Tania” herself weighed in without equivocation in the SLA’s sixth taped communiqué, released on April 23, calling the idea she had been brainwashed “ridiculous to the point of being beyond belief.”) Her uncle still found energy to speak of other taped voices—those of the president and aides, acting like a “gang of racketeers talking over strategy as they realize that the cops are closing in on them.” He observed, “If any of the participants—ever—gave any consideration to what was right for the nation instead of themselves, then I must have missed it in the thousands of words I have waded through.”

  Which was not precisely true: they just spoke of the nation’s interests as consubstantial with themselves. For instance, the time Haldeman told the president that Dean would never “sink low enough” to spill the beans, because “he’s not anti-American and anti-Nixon.”

  In the middle of May, an SLA “combat unit” including Patty Hearst, resting in a motel near Disneyland after holding up a sporting goods store, watched live on TV as the FBI burned down a safe house holding six other SLA members, including their mysterious guru “Cinque.” In other news, the president made plain he would not resign. Instead, as the “Honk for Impeachment” movement reinfested Lafayette Park, he mounted a public relations tour. In Phoenix, there were 16,000 people and five hundred pounds of confetti. In Seattle, the day the House Judiciary Committee, behind closed doors, began debating impeachment, he cut the ribbon for Expo ’74 before a crowd of 55,000 on the banks of the Spokane River—where “IMPEACH NIXON” banners unfurled as he motorcaded to the dais with Governor Daniel J. Evans, and he made a Freudian slip and mispronounced his host’s name as “Governor Evidence.”

  Then he promised “to develop the great resources in this country that will not pollute the atmosphere.” A protester shrieked back: “Clean up the White House first.”

  HIS ENEMIES, YES, WERE VICIOUS and amoral. And so he sent forth determined armies of citizens to slay them.

  Syndicated humorist Art Buchwald put out a column in mock sympathy for that army, a list of talking points ranging from “Everyone does it” (no. 1) to “What about Chappaquiddick?” (nos. 2, 9, 19, and 32) to “A President can’t keep track of everything his staff does” (no. 3)—all the way up to no. 36: “If you say one more word about Watergate I’ll punch you in the nose.” Nixonites didn’t need the favor. They said those same things on their own. Letters poured into the White House. One, from a restaurant owner, included a check for ten thousand dollars with instructions to the president to apply it to his back taxes. Tom Charles Huston was introduced to enthusiastic applause for an address to a symposium on “Government Surveillance of Private Citizens: Necessary or Ominous?” It was convened by the conservative youth group Young Americans for Freedom, or “YAF,” of which he used to be president. He offered the audience an extraordinary statement of contrition for trying to set up a private spy outfit in the White House: “The risk of the remedy was as great as the disease. There was a willingness to accept without challenge the Executive’s claim to increased power. That’s why we acted as we did, and it was a mistake.”

  A middle-aged woman responded that it was anything but a mistake: “When a kid has got a knife stuck in your back, you don’t set up a commission and call in the professors.” By way of illustration, she went on to tell a story about the time her son had been harassed by bullies the cops wouldn’t do anything about. So she sent him to school with a baseball bat: “Here, you handle that punk!” The room rocked with delighted applause. She said the bully’s mother came to complain. “So you know what I do? I go at her with a baseball bat!” Huston, incredulous, unable to get a word in edgewise, watched in horror from the podium as the cries went up: “Hooray for Liddy!” “Hooray for Watergate!”

  A weekly White House “Defense Group” worked to amplify such voices. It was led by former Goldwater campaign official Dean Burch, a young communications staffer named Ken Clawson, and another young deputy assistant, Bruce Herschensohn, nicknamed “Dr. Happiness” for his relish for the job. Burch explained to the press, “What emerges from the transcripts i
s life as it is . . . in government and politics, life in industry and business—and yes, life in the editorial offices of every newspaper.” Clawson riffed, “Those bastards can rip a single page out of the Bible and if they play it right they can make Jesus Christ sound like the devil,” and called the impeachment drive “an attempted coup d’etat of the U.S. government.”

  Another defender was a grandiose and self-important Jesuit priest on the White House staff named John McLaughlin. The press office couldn’t get any staffers to present the president’s case before reporters. Father McLaughlin, though, volunteered. In a self-described “theological” analysis of the transcripts held for a gathering of reporters in Clawson’s office, he said the tapes’ foul language had “no moral meaning” but was instead a “form of emotional drainage” and “therapy”; he called claims of the conversations’ amorality “erroneous, unjust” and described Nixon as “the greatest moral leader of the last third of this century.” The priest was soon a celebrity, well-known for his luxurious pad at, of all places, the Watergate, and for the attractive young female aide from when he’d been an antiwar congressional candidate frequently seen on his arm. His religious superiors ordered him to leave the White House job for abusing his sacred calling. He left the priesthood instead.

  Bruce Herschensohn was in charge of ringing up supporters—some of whom had sent literally cartons of supportive anti-impeachment petitions to the White House—and inviting them to the Oval Office. “I remember the tulips in bloom through the windows,” gushed a housewife who personally delivered forty-eight thousand signatures to the commander in chief, paying her own way to Washington at Herschensohn’s invitation on but a day’s notice. And the president, she said, wore “one of the most direct ‘I-don’t-have-anything-to-hide’ looks I’ve ever encountered.”

  The dean of the last-ditch supporters was a tiny retired Orthodox rabbi from Taunton, Massachusetts, named Baruch Korff. In the suspicious circles, he was fast becoming the tragedy’s comic relief, rumbling in his borscht belt–comic Ukrainian accent that a great man’s “blood has been sapped by vampires” and his body set upon by “vivisectionists . . . unworthy of polishing his shoes.” “This entire administration is being held captive by the Washington Post,” he said. “I feel like I am in Hanoi and not in Washington.” Full-page newspaper ads for his “National Citizens Committee for Fairness to the Presidency” denounced the “ASSASSINS” perpetrating this “RAPE OF AMERICA.” He made endless rounds of media interviews: “If Nixon’s guilty, then so were Johnson and Kennedy and Eisenhower and Truman. And, my God, could I tell you things about Roosevelt!” Fellow rabbis called him an embarrassment—“an apologist for rampant immorality,” said the president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. So, according to Time magazine, did “some members of the President’s inner circle.” Not, though, the President of the United States. On May 13, he entertained Rabbi Korff in the Oval Office for a full ninety minutes.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  * * *

  “Here Comes the Pitch!”

  RONALD REAGAN WAS ALSO A Watergate apologist—still. Asked about the Oval Office tapes at his regular press conference, he replied, “I was struck by what appears to be a difference between some of the interpretation and the verbatim transcript”—which favored the president, he insisted—which “some commentators have left out.”

  He added, “I don’t think anyone can make any judgment until they have read the entire 1,200 pages, the verbatim transcript, and not the interpretation of them”—which presupposed, since he was making a judgment, that he himself had read the thing (a week later he admitted he had read only two-thirds). So a reporter followed up, asking about the apparently incriminating things that were in the verbatim transcript. Reagan replied, cryptically, that commentators were ignoring “the flat statement by Dean to the President when he said, ‘Mr. President, I know from my conversation that you were not aware of these things’ ”—a Reaganesque distortion of something rather different. What Dean actually said was “The reason I thought we ought to talk this morning is because in our conversations I have the impression that you don’t know everything I know,” upon which Dean told Nixon everything he knew—the precise evidence that Nixon was thereafter party to the cover-up. As usual, in those Reagan believed innocent, innocence was all he saw.

  The governor was back in the network news on May 10 for the first time since the speculation over who would be Nixon’s new vice president. He was introduced by NBC’s weekend anchor Tom Brokaw as “one of the leading candidates for the Republican nomination.” Brokaw then threw to reporter Tom Pettit at one of the sixty-three-year-old governor’s old stomping grounds: the Drake Relay regatta, which he used to cover for a sportscaster on the radio in Des Moines, in the state whose early nominating caucuses were newly influential in deciding presidential nominations.

  “No other presidential prospect has his experience,” Pettit narrated over a jaunty snapshot of a young self-dramatizing Ronald Reagan holding one of the pipes he liked to collect back then: “Reagan was in his early twenties when he broadcast over 600 Major League baseball games without ever going to the ballpark.”

  RETURN TO 1932. THE ADVENTURE of Ronald Reagan, sportscaster, had begun shortly after college graduation: another summer on his lifeguard perch, then Labor Day and the close of the swimming season—and the harrowing possibility of Depression-era unemployment. There was an opening in the sporting goods department at Montgomery Ward. The position went instead to a high school basketball star. “If I’d gotten the job I wanted at Montgomery Ward,” related his postpresidential memoir An American Life, “I suppose I never would have left Illinois.”

  However, that story contradicted one told in his other memoir, in which he had said he had already determined to make himself a star.

  The previous summer he succeeded in causing an older male mentor to take a shine to him—one of his lifelong patterns. An out-of-town businessman named Sid Altschuler asked Dutch about his career plans. He said that he didn’t know what he wanted to do, though he actually did: after winning an award for his performance at a theater festival at Northwestern University, Dutch had decided once and for all that he wanted to be an actor. But in 1932 in a small town back in the Midwest, you didn’t say out loud to someone that you wanted to be an actor. “So I told him that I had thought about radio and being a sports announcer.”

  Reagan’s account has Altschuler advising Dutch in Babbittish can-do argot: hit the road, cold-call radio stations one by one, pitch himself as a bright-eyed enthusiast so excited about the future of radio “I would take any kind of job simply to get inside the station.” That pitch he would have been able to make quite sincerely. In Reagan’s accounts of his childhood, his mentions of a passion for the movies are rare—but he was always a fanatic for radio.

  There was the time his brother tried to build their own radio set and managed to blow out all the circuits in the house. There was the crystal set at his mother’s family’s farm: “I remember sitting with a dozen others in a little room with breathless attention, a pair of earphones attached tightly to my head, scratching a crystal wire. I was listening to raspy recorded music and faint voices saying, ‘This is KDKA, Pittsburgh, KDKA, Pittsburgh.’ ” The brand-new medium, before the rise of the national networks, was an entertainment Wild West—a surreal farrago of fundamentalist preaching, gutbucket jazz, hog-calling contests, old-time fiddling, advertising jingles sung by groups with names like “the Cornfield Canaries” and “the Seed House Girls,” and political snake-oil peddlers like “Baker the Great Emancipator,” who did battle with a submachine gun by his side lest the “financial octopi” come after him in his studio. One of the most popular radio acts of 1924 was an orchestra of jailbirds led by a convicted armed robber that performed weekly under guard in a studio beneath the capitol dome in Jefferson City, Missouri. Because the airwaves were so uncluttered, the most meager signal could reach nearly nationwide, much to the disgust of aesthet
es like the man who wrote to Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover aghast that this “most thrilling achievement of modern science” was being “prostituted” to “bad English” and “cheap jazz” and “advertising of doubtful resorts and speakeasies to such an extent to be a source of common disgust.”

  Dutch loved it. It was one of the ways the Boy Who Disappears came into himself. The first time he heard that crystal radio set, he ventriloquized the announcer, to the delight of his family, who made him do it again and again; in high school he broadcast basketball games; in slow moments at the Lowell Park Beach he deployed a photographic memory to recount the weekend’s football games in a rapid-fire staccato.

  So he stuck out his thumb and hitchhiked to Chicago. He said he hid the plan from his father because of the daily announcements over the radio “urging people not to leave home looking for work because there was none.” Historians of the New Deal say there were no such announcements. That detail, however, did set up a melodramatic tale of redemption.

  On his first trip, after striking out at four radio stations, the story went, he was advised at the fifth to try out in the “sticks.” He hitchhiked shamefacedly back to Dixon, accompanied, in his recollection, by a melodramatic thunderstorm. Jack offered him the dilapidated family Oldsmobile to scout the surrounding towns. The first station he alighted on was WOC in Davenport, Iowa, where an employee told him to go away, because the station had just hired someone else.

  “How does anyone get a chance as a sports announcer if you can’t even get a job in a radio station?”

  “Not so fast, ye big bastard, didn’t ye hear me callin’ ye? Do ye perhaps know football?”

  (The story’s melodramatic turning point, when everything hung in suspense.)

  It was the Scottish station manager, who rapped him on the shin with his picturesque cane and demanded, “Do ye think ye could tell me about a game and make me see it?”