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

by Rick Perlstein

  He had been preparing all his life as if for exactly that. He described the last quarter of a game between Eureka and Western State in which the good guys won in the final twenty seconds with a sixty-five-yard touchdown run. There were “long, blue shadows settling over the field.” There was a “chill wind coming in through the end of the stadium.” There were—lots more details, unspooled for a full fifteen minutes with such sweaty aplomb that he was offered on the spot bus fare to Iowa City to share a tryout with a more experienced broadcaster at a real game. There, in the third quarter, his legend went, the station manager scrawled a message: “Let the kid finish the game.”

  Now he was a professional sportscaster—soon praised by a Davenport paper for “a crisp account of [a] muddy struggle [that] sounded like a carefully written story . . . his quick tongue . . . as fast as the plays.”

  Next he was transferred at a hundred dollars a week to the much bigger Des Moines affiliate, a 50,000-watt clear channel station audible in forty-four states and five Canadian provinces at night. It made “Dutch” Reagan—the only name by which anyone there ever knew him—a celebrity in farm towns across the Midwest.

  More than ever, his very life became a performance. In descriptions from those who knew him, words recur like “dashing,” and “blade.” And “rakish”: how he combed his hair, and wore his hats tipped to the left, and—after he took over announcement duties for a show sponsored by the Kentucky Club Pipe Tobacco Company—for the pipes that he was rarely photographed without, but which he never lit. He also, a friend recalls, had a way of “holding a slightly receding posture so that people often had to lean toward him to hear what he was saying (a manner that created an almost instant sense of intimacy).”

  He became a frequent dinner speaker at events outside Des Moines (at father-son dinners, Frank Merriwell at Yale–style, he would exhort boys against “drink, cigarettes, and cheating”). And after his high school and college sweetheart Mugs Cleaver, the minister’s daughter, decamped for a year in France, he became Des Moines’s most eligible bachelor—at Club Belvedere, the town’s one genuine night spot; and at Cy’s Moonlight Inn, home of the city’s first jukebox, and a dimly lit dance floor known as the “passion pit.” “Next to spiked beer,” someone said, “Reagan was the Moonlight’s top attraction.” When he was headed there after a broadcast shift he’d alert his entourage, which included much of the coaching staff at Drake (like Eureka, a Disciples of Christ school), in a special code. A light drinker, he was the designated driver; a hail-fellow-well-met, he also liked to buy beer for underage guys. He was ever alert to ways of placing others in the hero’s debt.

  Another stage setting was the public pool at Fort Dodge, a massive thing that supposedly held three thousand bathers; arriving, he would wave to admirers like a politician working a crowd. He bought his first car, a convertible two-seater Nash Lafayette, one of the first off the line, with a striking metallic brown finish. He loved to gun the motor and keep the top down, even in inclement weather—quite a show in the middle of a depression. But depressions could be occasions for demonstrative heroics, too. Thrilled by the way Franklin Roosevelt had sparked the nation back to life on the radio, Dutch developed an accomplished imitation, complete with dramatic waves of the imaginary cigarette holder.

  He developed another stage for his performance of personality as well. He had, he admitted, “no particular desire to be an officer,” holding to the fashionable opinion that America had already fought the “war to end all wars”—but he joined the cavalry regiment stationed at Fort Dodge nonetheless, because he was willing to do just about anything to get astride a horse. Luckily, the regiment didn’t seem to notice that even after he matriculated in the equestrian course he kept on delaying the application process: it required an eye examination. (When the day for the eye test finally arrived, he cheated.) He especially liked his cavalry uniform’s riding breeches. Sometimes he wore them to work, especially when interviewing celebrities. “All he ever wanted to talk about was horses,” a professional gambler who owned stallions remembered of their conversations at Club Belvedere.

  Just like in college, he was again master of all he surveyed—a perfectly calibrated persona. He somehow always managed to throw himself in the way of opportunities for demonstrative heroics—like the time when, his window open on a hot night, he heard a scream, saw a nurse in her white uniform fighting off an attacker, and grabbed a .45 automatic he kept on his mantel and aimed it out the window. The blade, as he himself told the story, for instance to the editors of Sports Afield in 1984, cried, “Leave her alone or I’ll shoot you right between the shoulders!” Then he dashed down in pajamas and saw the damsel in distress to her destination. “He was so strong-sounding in his command,” she recalled, “that the robber believed his gun was loaded—and so did I.” He never invited anyone to his modest apartment in a run-down neighborhood—but did invite people when he moved into a ground-floor flat that used to be the sitting room of a sumptuous Victorian house, a more suitable stage.

  Simultaneously acquiring the company of VIPs and maintaining an image as an ordinary guy, always making others feel good in his presence: here was the most exquisitely cultivated skill of the Boy Who Disappears. The reviews were sterling—mostly. “He was always just one of the guys, never stuck up,” a Drake football star and drinking buddy remembered. However, as ever, there were suspicious circles. Dutch bragged so often to a lifeguard at Camp Dodge about his heroics at Lowell Park that the lifeguard started searching for discrepancies. “Some just got a push,” he came away concluding. “He had a good imagination.” A girlfriend remembered, “I always had the feeling that I was with him but he wasn’t with me. He was always looking over his shoulder, scanning the crowd. I’d say he was a born politician, courting important people, favoring good will—wanting it.” Some found him a hero, and followed him; others thought him a ludicrous sham. It would ever be thus.

  Back home the Depression had brought Jack Reagan to the direst of straits. The first job he could get when the Fashion Book Shop disappeared was at the Dixon State Hospital, where Nelle volunteered. The family sublet all but one room in their apartment. A succession of traveling sales jobs culminated at a seedy shoe store 170 miles away. Roosevelt’s New Deal saved him: he got a job with the Works Progress Administration, distributing food and scrip to his fellow down-and-outers—many of them his former social superiors. He was happy. He stopped abusing alcohol. A Reagan biographer thinks these “days of government employment were, perhaps, the finest of his life, more exciting and fulfilling than any previous experience. The desperation and hope had helped him discover a capacity to fight for others as well as himself.” His youngest son may well have agreed. Like his father, he had always been a Democrat.

  At college, as college students tend to do, Reagan had planted his flag further to the left. Eureka had been founded by abolitionists. The grandchildren of abolitionists dominated it now, recruiting black students, pushing women’s suffrage, dedicated to changing the world (even if dancing between the sexes was forbidden). Its faculty was full of radicals—including a teacher recruited from a Duluth, Minnesota, college run by the International Workers of the World where the required texts included Marx’s Das Kapital and Engels’s The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, and which an investigating committee of the New York legislature called the “mainstay of Finnish radicalism in this country.”

  Reagan was very much a part of this political culture—more than the school’s Christian culture (one year he got a D in religion class). “He was a liberal,” a religion professor remembered, “almost a socialist when he was here.” His favorite professor, Alexander Charles Gray, was a former Disciples minister who became a socialist economist; Reagan called him “Daddy Gray” and took seven courses from him. One former student of Gray’s founded the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in 1934, one of the few agricultural unions of the time and practically the only Southern institution that was racially integrate
d; another founded the Highlander Folk School, where the song “We Shall Overcome” was composed. In 1933, the year after Reagan’s graduation, 877 showed up on campus to hear socialist leader Norman Thomas. There were 250 students at Eureka at the time; one-third of them belonged to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.

  Then, in Des Moines, he was exposed to other ways of seeing the world. His next surrogate father was the station’s news director, H. R. “Charlie” Gross, the “fastest tongue in the business.” Gross was a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, gifted at depicting federal spending as a colorful theater of the absurd. Reagan boldly tried to sell him on the New Deal in lunch-counter debates—rigidly holding to positions, like Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace’s program to pay farmers to kill pigs, that he privately considered absurd himself. What Gross’s ripostes might have consisted of is suggested by the speeches he gave decades later as one of the most conservative members of the United States Congress: against Medicare (“I’m simply trying to save this country from bankruptcy”); against foreign aid (“I don’t care whether you describe it in English, Latin, or Pig Latin”); against federal funding of rodent control in the slums (“How many children are bitten by squirrels that they feed and try to handle? On the basis of that, does anyone suggest a program to exterminate squirrels?”); the National Endowment for the Arts (grants “for the study of the tune Nero played as Rome burned”)—and especially, that “Tower of Babel, the United Nations.”

  Dutch held Charlie Gross in awe, whatever their ideological differences. Gross was the only person he never swore around, the only colleague he consistently addressed as “Sir.” “Somewhere around the last months of Dutch’s employment at WHO,” a colleague remembered, “I recall thinking that maybe Gross was winning him over.”

  Meanwhile, Reagan’s regional fame grew apace. He wrote an “inside dope” sports column in the Des Moines Dispatch, aping Grantland Rice’s purple prose (the Sugar Bowl was the “Saccharin Saucer”) and soppy moralism: “Mr. and Mrs. Public shell out to see the Old College try,” he wrote of a fight between Joe Louis and Bob Pastor he thought obviously fixed (no matter that the facts were not clear), not “sporting mud holes like the Black Sox Scandal.” Most famously, he did play-by-play of the games of the Chicago Cubs. In an age before jet travel, the relevant technologies were a telegraph and a typewriter: a witness present at the game would relay the on-field goings-on to Des Moines in Morse code, and a clerk in the studio would type out the action on slips of paper and pass them through a slit in the soundproof wall to Ronald Reagan, who’d fill in the rest with his imagination while working a foot pedal to amplify and attenuate canned crowd applause. He got so good at it that he toured around delivering the show in person, including at the chapel at Eureka College and the Iowa State Fair.

  Thus the skill that landed him, some four decades later, one spring day six weeks after Henry Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record, in a lavish feature on NBC Nightly News, calling the nation back to those simpler bygone days of Grantland Rice. In this sordid spring of 1974, it was just of the sort of nostalgia a traumatized nation was desperate to lap up.

  NEWS CAME THAT THE HOMICIDAL gang who had swallowed up Patty Hearst included the former social chair of Chi Omega at the University of Indiana, a high school golfer and scion of an Episcopalian building supply family in Indianapolis, and a cute and perky former cheerleader and Sunday school teacher and Goldwater girl from Santa Rosa. In the sporting news, pitcher Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates attempted to bean every batter in the Reds lineup in retaliation for a run-in two years earlier with a racist Cincinnati security guard. The May 10 newscast on NBC began with speculation on whether a rare face-to-face meeting between Vice President Ford and the president had included talk of presidential succession; it then segued to G. Gordon Liddy’s conviction for contempt of Congress; then to the latest leak from the impeachment hearings that the president probably knew about the April 1972 meeting in the attorney general’s office where Liddy proposed his “Operation Gemstone”—then to fears of a housing market collapse, news that a federal judge had ruled William Calley, the perpetrator of the My Lai Massacre, could remain free on bail, and a report on how colleges and universities across the country were running out of money.

  Then came genial Ronald Reagan, regaling a giant Drake Relays audience with the story of how he did Cubs play-by-play:

  “So you’d say, ‘Here comes the pitch!’ and . . .”

  (“He worked from very brief telegraphic descriptions which had to be typed up for every play of the game. . . .”)

  “. . . now at this point you wait for the typewriter again and you say that ‘there’s a stall’—and if he doesn’t start typing you say he’s waved off the sign, wiped his hand on the rosin bag . . .”

  (Pan to a sepia-toned shot of dashing Dutch at the microphone in trench coat, tie, and rakishly angled hat.)

  And then, at jackrabbit speed, mounting in rhythm and intensity, his audience pulled in deeper and deeper—

  “. . . thereitgoesahardhitgroundballsecondbasemangoveroveraftertheballmakesaonehandstabgrabstheballalmostfallingdownthrowsit just in time for the out!!”

  Then the country heard for the first of many times the tale about the time he had Dizzy Dean pitching against Billy Jurges (though in other tellings the batter was Augie Galan), and the telegraph machine malfunctioned: “I looked at Curly and Curly looked at me and I just couldn’t say that to the audience, ‘We’ve lost our service, we’re going to have a brief interlude of transcribed music.’ ”

  He laughed: “So I said, ‘Diz Dean’—I slowed him down a lot, had him use the rosin bag, had him shake off signs, lengthy windup—‘finally lets go with the other pitch.’ And he fouled that one off to the right. Then he fouled one back to the stands! Then he fouled one off back of third base and I described two kids trying to get the ball. Then he fouled one off that just missed a home run by a foot—until finally, in the nick of time, Curly sat up, started typing, and I started another ball on the way to the plate, grabbed the wire, and said—‘Jurges popped out on the first ball pitched.’ ”

  As the laughter billowed he thanked his audience and stepped down. That old trouper’s rule: always leave ’em laughing when you say goodbye.

  THE IDEA OF A REAGAN presidential boomlet, though, seemed hardly to last longer than a pop fly on the first ball pitched. “To the dismay of his political handlers,” Washington dopesters Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote in their “Inside Report” column a few weeks later, “Ronald Reagan is no closer to a polite but clear break with President Nixon than he was a year ago and continues to resist that politically necessary rupture even as he prepares to run for President.” The columnists were frankly astonished: “During a one-hour interview with us in his state capitol office, Reagan uttered not one discouraging word about Mr. Nixon.” The political architects of his presidential run, they reported, “meeting secretly and regularly”—who having “watched plain, dull Jerry Ford in action, are confident their man can win”—were anguished at what they called their man’s stubborn “Christian charity toward a fallen political comrade.” In an interview, Reagan lectured Washington’s most influential columnists, saying that he found no evidence of criminal activity—which was why, he said, Nixon’s detractors were training their fire on “vague areas like morality and so forth.” Expletives deleted did not dismay him; he made of them, in fact, a virtue: “I’ve had some meetings in this office when I’ve been enraged at the legislature that I would not have wanted my mother to hear!”

  Evans and Novak concluded, “For such ‘Christian charity’ Reagan pays a price”: in polls of California Republicans regarding a theoretical head-to-head matchup with Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, in a state where Nixon’s approval rating was but 18 percent, Reagan was down 7 points since November. Still he stuck to his guns: asked about Evans and Novak’s column in his next press conference, he said that they may have “stretched it a little bit,” but t
hat he still presumed Nixon to be an unfairly harassed innocent.

  No one seemed impressed with Ronald Reagan. At NBC News the reporter had signed off from Des Moines with the jape, “Sportscasting is clearly good training for politics. You learn the fine art of speaking with conviction—even when you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Anchor Brokaw, unable to help himself, grinned from ear to ear. Reagan did not appear again on a national newscast until June 19, in a mocking CBS item on his success turning graffiti into a criminal offense carrying a five-hundred-dollar fine. He did not show up after that until October. Ronald Reagan might be charming, but Richard Milhous Nixon would require more credible defenders than this.

  A STRIKE BY TEN THOUSAND municipal workers in San Francisco reduced hospital patients to two meals a day, served on paper plates, and diabetics got no special meals; transportation was paralyzed; hundreds of millions of tons of raw sewage surged into the world’s most beautiful bay. A school strike in tiny Hortonville, Wisconsin, made Time magazine for the vociferousness of the passions it raised: a “teacher” hung in effigy from the local water tower by a gang of local toughs who designated themselves “The Vigilantes”; school board members finding Playboy magazine subscriptions they hadn’t ordered showing up in their mailboxes and being woken up by harassing phone calls at 3 A.M.; a strike critic discovering his favorite hunting beagle hanged to death on his front porch on its own chain.

  And meanwhile on the funny pages, Gary Trudeau followed a series of strips about oil barons reveling in the record profits with ones of congressmen agonizing in poker-game colloquies about how they might vote on impeachment.

  Even conservative Republicans were on the fence—like Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., a Judiciary Committee member from a New York district that was fifty-fifty for impeachment. What had tipped the scales for him toward impeachment was a constituent’s letter reading, “Is Mr. Nixon utterly amoral? Or does he know the difference between right and wrong, but firmly believes that a lie repeated often and loudly enough can fool all of the people all of the time?”