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

by Rick Perlstein

  Impeachment hearings had begun behind closed doors in the Rayburn Office Building. Twenty-one Democrats and seventeen Republicans sat earnestly on a two-tiered mahogany dais beneath stately portraits of illustrious predecessors from a Judiciary Committee that had only recently been a very different sort of body: a redoubt of backbench conservatives, a sleepy graveyard for progressive legislation. By the late 1960s, though, it suddenly found itself the white-hot center of all the most interesting issues, from open housing to criminal jurisprudence to privacy rights. Fresh-faced young liberals soon clamored to join; now more than half the membership was under fifty. Eleven were freshmen, and blacks and women were represented far out of proportion with their number in the rest of the House. “These aren’t Southern gentlemen like Sam Ervin,” a Republican member warned his caucus. “These guys are out for blood.”

  Chairman Rodino and his deputy John Doar determinedly refused to give it to them. Doar began his evidentiary presentation on May 9 in numbing chronological order, “with a level of precision,” Jimmy Breslin wrote, “that approached life.” His drone was interrupted by intervals in which members listened, using earphones clamped to their heads, to Oval Office conversations so contextless and of such poor audio quality that they often ended up more perplexed than when they began.

  And since the hearings’ very first vote had been to clear the room of both spectators and cameras, and had been accompanied by members’ pledges to keep what happened behind those closed doors to themselves, reporters would lurk for hours on end in the marble corridors for those precious moments when a quorum call, lunch, or closing gavel sounded like a starting gun—when, as the New York Times’ Anthony Lukas described the spectacle, “eighty to a hundred reporters thundered down the hallway after their favorites, begging for a scrap of data.” One freshman Republican, New Jersey’s Joseph Maraziti, dashed so quickly every evening in order to get on front pages proclaiming the president’s innocence, he earned the nickname “Streaker.” Liberals rushed to launder the opposite impression. What ended up running on the front page frequently revealed nothing useful at all. For instance, the day early in June when the New York Times headline NIXON TAPE IS SAID TO LINK MILK PRICE TO POLITICAL GIFT faced off against the Washington Post’s TAPE PROVIDES NO NIXON TIE TO MILK FUNDS: the future of the republic, viewed through a glass darkly—in the hearing room, and everywhere else.

  On May 20 Judge Sirica upheld an appeal by the impeachment inquiry for sixty-four more taped conversations. The president refused, filing an appeal refusing to comply with this or any “such further subpoenas as may hereafter be issued”—a position so uncompromising it shook loose some die-hard supporters who had taken at face value what had been his former public line that he could be forthcoming only in the event of an impeachment inquiry. The committee voted 28–10, with eight of seventeen Republicans voting with the majority, to dispatch a public letter calling his refusal a “grave matter” that “might constitute a ground for impeachment.” Independent Prosecutor Jaworski asked the Supreme Court to hear the case immediately. On May 31, the Supreme Court agreed. The committee doubled down, subpoenaing forty-five more conversations.

  Bantam Books printed seventy thousand more copies of Philip Roth’s 1971 anti-Nixon satire Our Gang in a new “Pre-Impeachment Edition.” And Richard Nixon did what he always did when the political going got most tough: he found a friendly audience to appeal to. In March, it had been the Grand Ole Opry. In June, it was the rest of the world, on a stature-enhancing foreign trip.

  IN CAIRO, EXUBERANT STREETSIDE CROWDS crushed twenty bodies deep for seven miles: Anwar Sadat, only recently armed to the teeth with Soviet planes, tanks, and antiaircraft batteries, now stood beaming beside Nixon in an open-topped limousine—a sight Americans hadn’t seen since November 22, 1963. Millions more lined Nixon’s rail route to Alexandria. In case of an assassination attempt, one of the train cars included a mobile operating room. It hardly seemed necessary: Egyptians proved delirious Nixon fans, waving American flags, beating the air with palm fronds, trilling ululations, even strewing rose petals across his path. In Saudi Arabia, King Faisal embraced him, bestowed upon him the Highest Order of King Abel Aziz al Saud, and implored the American people “to rally around you, Mr. President.” Landing in Damascus after Air Force One was escorted by four Soviet-built MiGs, Nixon announced reestablished diplomatic relations with Syria. In Jordan he and King Hussein pledged “continued close friendship and cooperation.” Israel, his next stop, had reason to take offense at all of that; King Faisal, after all, had said that peace would come in the Middle East only after Jerusalem was “liberated” from the Jews—but Nixon did pretty damned well there, too. After speeding at 75 mph from Ben Gurion Airport to Jerusalem in a forty-car procession that included thirty military vehicles, he promised enriched uranium and nuclear reactors to the Jewish state just as he had done for Egypt, proclaiming, “This is the cradle of civilization. We must make sure it is not its grave.” Crowds went wild again—with help from the sixty thousand dollars the Israeli government spent on American flags.

  It seemed that most rare and precious thing, a genuine advance toward Middle East peace. It buttressed the sturdiest defense the president’s diehards could make, that he was a peacemaker. (“Pssst! China!” an offstage voice helpfully whispered to Doonesbury’s football-helmet-wearing Republican partisan B.D., as he haplessly attempted to defend the president in a June strip.) Politically, however, none of it mattered. Americans watched, Teddy White reflected, like voyeurs at a Judy Garland concert, seeing if the drug-addled old trouper could stagger her way through “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” one more time. Gallup revealed during Nixon’s nine days in the Middle East that 52 percent of Americans favored impeachment or resignation. The Supreme Court agreed to rule on whether the grand jury was within its authority when it named him an “unindicted co-conspirator.” The trip certainly hadn’t relaxed him. In Egypt, amid glorious China-style photo opportunities at the Pyramids and the Sphinx, he endured a painful outbreak of an inflated vein—phlebitis, which caused his left leg to inflate to twice the size of his right.

  Articles started appearing in the press demonstrating that, according to analyses done on the sophisticated audio equipment the Judiciary Committee was using, the White House’s transcriptions of the subpoenaed conversations had been systematically distorted. Here was the president, in words entirely missing form the White House transcripts, telling John Mitchell, “I don’t give a shit what happens, I want you to stonewall it, plead the Fifth . . . save the plan.” There he was barking cover-up orders two months before he was even supposed to know a cover-up existed. The White House version had John Dean saying Hunt’s blackmail demands were “worth buying time on” when actually those were the president’s words. And it had the president preferring a “hang-out”—letting justice take its course, whereas he actually had rejected it. The White House said the discrepancies were honest mistakes. Yeah, right, answered the suspicious: honest mistakes like depicting the words “a phone call reporting the burglary” as “our phone calls. Bully!” Sure. The [expletive deleted] president’s men talked like Teddy Roosevelt all the time.

  THE PHLEBITIS-RACKED PRESIDENT INVOKED CHINA while boarding the plane back home: “This journey, as that of two years ago, will contribute to peace not only in that area but throughout the world.” Then he flew to the Soviet Union on five days’ rest, the twenty-eighth country visit and 137,500th mile logged for peace during the course of his presidency. “He probably felt more at home now in the familiar walls of the Kremlin,” Anthony Lukas reflected, “than he did on Capitol Hill.” Nixon and Brezhnev, practically pals, loved exchanging extravagant gifts; this time around, the car-crazy Soviet leader got a Chevy Monte Carlo, which he had read was Motor Trend’s Car of the Year. But the old magic was gone. The Russians, who did not appreciate being cast as saviors for a political cripple, struck the words “close personal relationship” from Pravda’s text of the toast Nixon offered Brezhnev
at the Grand Kremlin Palace.

  That same day, Nixon’s poor lawyer James St. Clair stood before the Judiciary Committee struggling through the impossible task of defending a client who would not tell him the truth. In California, Herb Kalmbach began a six-to-eighteen-month jail term. Then, the day before the Fourth of July, the president returned from Russia to his own virtual hermitage, Key Biscayne, where he hid out for a full four days.

  This is not what Richard Nixon’s Independence Day was supposed to look like. Presiding over the nation’s July 4, 1976, Bicentennial had been a Nixonian obsession at least since he had rechristened Air Force One “Spirit of ’76” for his 1972 trip to China. “The Spirit of ’76” was also the theme for his January 20, 1973, inauguration ceremony. A federal Bicentennial commission had been established in 1966; he massively expanded it. Now his megalomania mocked him—as each Fourth of July became an occasion for ironists to hold forth on just how far from its patriotic ideals this nation and its leader had fallen.

  The New York Times took up half its editorial page on July 4, 1973, to argue that never “has the nation been so shaken by doubt and uncertainty directly affecting its topmost leaderships, its most revered institutions, and the very structure of democratic government.” Alongside that essay it featured one by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, who those in the know recalled had been Richard Nixon’s psychotherapist, arguing that a board of psychiatrists should certify presidents for sanity. In November one Benjamin Levine of Brooklyn expressed a common sentiment in a letter to the Chicago Tribune: “It would be a sin and a shame if our President were still presiding over the affairs of our great nation when we celebrate the 200th anniversary of this country on July 4, 1976.” In December, a corporate-sponsored reenactment of the Boston Tea Party, complete with National Guardsmen decked out in eighteenth-century period costume boarding a seventy-five-foot replica of the HMS Beaver, was humiliated by a “People’s Bicentennial Commission” counterprotest, staged from a more impressive 150-foot ship, complete with museum displays on impeachment and explaining how the actual 1773 Tea Party was a protest against corrupt transnational capitalists like Richard Nixon’s favorite ITT—whose Boston building, the protesters pointed out, had served as staging ground for the official commemoration.

  This year, on July 4, 1974, Mike Royko compared presidential rhetoric: Jefferson said, “The whole of government consists of being honest.” Nixon said, “Is it too late to go the hangout road?” Esquire published a full-page graphic, “On the Bicentennial of the United States of America,” listing national “heroes”—including Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Richard Speck, Leopold and Loeb, Charles Starkweather, Robert Vesco, Joe McCarthy, and G. Gordon Liddy. The Today show’s Barbara Walters and Douglas Kiker needled the Bicentennial Commission director with questions about whether Watergate wouldn’t “surely spoil” the celebration. Newspapers covered the “Boypower ’76” scandal, revealing that a Boy Scouts of America drive to recruit one of every three eligible American lads by the Bicentennial had resulted in padding the rolls with fictitious names. Members of Congress spent their Fourth of July recess back home with, as one of them put it, “wet fingers sticking out of their heads”: people like Senator Dole, up for reelection in Kansas, where in his home county Nixon’s opponent had won but 25 percent in 1972; 25 percent was Nixon’s approval rating now. Unfortunately, that quarter of the electorate comprised the very Republican diehards he needed to win. When asked dozens of times a day about Watergate, which it had been his job to minimize in 1972 as Republican National Committee chair, he was reduced to snapping back in that bizarre third-person Bob Dole way, “. . . but I’m running a campaign to re-elect Bob Dole!”

  The scandal would completely rewire the off-year elections. That much now was plain.

  THE PRESIDENT NEXT SPENT FOUR days in the White House, taking in news of Supreme Court oral arguments in United States v. Nixon and of the release of the full Judiciary Transcripts and four thousand new pages of Watergate evidence. They included St. Clair’s disastrously unpersuasive pleading; open-and-shut evidence that Nixon heard about the cover-up as early as June 30, 1972; top-level Oval Office memos ordering the establishment of “a political intelligence capacity” in 1971; evidence of the laundering of almost a million dollars officially earmarked for polling, but actually to be used for black operations—and the discovery of yet another nineteen-minute tape gap.

  At that, the president decamped for a fortnight in the California ghost towns that once thrived by supporting his presidential retreat at San Clemente. The San Clemente Inn, disinclined to reserve blocks of rooms for a company about to go out of business, evicted White House staff and Secret Service agents from the quarters they had comfortably enjoyed since 1969; the Surf and Sand in Laguna Beach, whose brochures advertised “Our private meeting and banquet room is named the Press Corps Room in recognition of the members of the Fourth Estate,” evicted the press. On July 13, John Ehrlichman was convicted of perjury and conspiring to violate Daniel Ellsberg’s civil rights; on the fourteenth, new evidence emerged that at his Senate confirmation hearings to become secretary of state Henry Kissinger had lied about ordering phone taps and Senator Weicker said Nixon’s personal role in editing the transcripts proved the Watergate cover-up was ongoing; on the fifteenth the Judiciary Committee released a devastating chapter-and-verse report on how the administration used the IRS to reward friends and punish enemies; on the sixteenth Judiciary Committee member Elizabeth Holtzman reported they were considering developing a bribery charge against the president in the milk money case; and on the seventeenth the panel released documents demonstrating that the Plumbers were intended for political, not “national security” purposes, and that the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division testified under oath that the president told him to stop investigating the Ellsberg break-in—because he had known about it, and considered it “fully justified by the circumstances.”

  Surely now, the village of elite Washingtonians reasoned, the president in whom they had so unwisely invested their trust would take their advice and move to resign, sparing the nation the agonizing search for what was now being called a “smoking gun”—some still-elusive piece of evidence, preferably from the president’s lips, proving he had absolutely, positively, committed a criminal act.

  No such luck.

  Instead, on July 18, James St. Clair gave an hour and a half of closing argument claiming that none of the indiscretions of the president’s aides could be traced to Nixon in any “clear and convincing manner.” And at Washington’s stately hilltop Shoreham Hotel, 1,500 of the president’s staunchest supporters attended a dinner as guests of Rabbi Baruch Korff’s National Citizens Committee for Fairness to the Presidency, eagerly dancing to the Lionel Hampton tune “We Need Nixon,” patiently awaiting a promised phone call from the president from his hidey-hole in San Clemente. Several of his top officials were present, and also Julie Nixon Eisenhower, the president’s lovely younger daughter, who had by then given 138 interviews and press conferences proclaiming her father’s innocence. A journalist called her the de facto first lady. Her presence at this late date provided the president’s remaining diehards further confidence for the fight—for surely he would not send out his own daughter to lie for him.

  The defense case grew increasingly surreal and sordid. Judiciary members’ switchboards were swamped by identically phrased phone calls concerning “the lynch-mob atmosphere created in this city by the Washington Post and other parts of the Nixon-hating media”; these were scripted by a George Mason University student named Karl Rove and his faux-grassroots group “Americans for the Presidency.” In Richmond Hills, New York, the superannuated president of the Republican Club, which sported a gargantuan SUPPORT YOUR PRESIDENT across the entire face of the building, told Newsweek “they”—the presidents’ persecutors—“were encouraging poor Negroes to come up here and endorsing fornication and supporting illegitimate children. And Patty Hearst! She’s a product of a liberal enviro
nment.” The Georgia state Republican chairman, for his part, maintained, “If the news media is attacking the President, he must be doing something right.”

  Then there were the glassy-eyed young people crowding the U.S. Capitol steps every morning bearing signs reading FORGIVE, LOVE, UNITE and chanting “God needs Nixon” in front of the Rayburn Office Building wearing sandwich-board images of Judiciary Committee members reading, “I am praying for ____.” “This nation is God’s nation,” their leader explained. “The office of the President of the United States is, therefore, sacred.” This leader was the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Thousands of brainwashed “Moonies,” it turned out, had been placed front and center at the White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony back in December in “Project Unity” armbands. They were the ones waving banners reading “God Loves the President” and “God Loves America” in time to “Deck the Halls.” The president had come out to pay his respects; the Moonies literally knelt down to worship him.

  Moon didn’t actually believe God loved America—or at least its form of government, democracy, which he considered the work of Satan; nor did he much love the deity whose birth Christmas celebrated, whom he considered decidedly inferior to himself. In fact his plan was to take over the country by 1977, lest Armageddon come. That was why the Moonies had been loaded into vans across the country, allowed five or four hours or even just three hours of sleep a night while chanting “Our Satan” incessantly to stay awake, all under the discipline of handlers who watched Hitler Youth films for their training in disciplinary techniques. Here they were: the president’s people. And the president welcomed their devotion. In February, Moon had visited the Oval Office. Together, they bowed their heads for a prayer in which Moon proposed a national fast to preserve his presidency. The fast took place that July, kicked off in a ceremony attended by Bruce “Dr. Happiness” Herschensohn and Rabbi Baruch Korff.