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

by Rick Perlstein

  This banquet was the president’s chance to thank them. “Rabbi Korff’s eloquence, his intelligence, his dedication,” Nixon’s disembodied voice boomed across the huge Shoreham banquet hall, “have been a great source of strength to me and all of us in these difficult times.” The rabbi hung up the phone receiver, intoned, “We love you dearly,” and brushed away a stubborn tear.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  * * *

  Judging

  SHORTLY AFTER 11 A.M. ON JULY 24, a hot, sticky, overcast Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in Case 73-1766, United States v. Nixon, and cross petition 73-1834, Nixon v. United States. Reading its opening argument, a Nixon hater would have reason to worry. The Court affirmed, for the first time in its history, that something called “executive privilege” did in fact exist: the president had a right to keep his deliberations with subordinates from congressional scrutiny.

  Next, though, came the thermonuclear explosion.

  The man whom Nixon had appointed chief justice, reading out this next part in the courtroom, drew in a breath, then uttered: “The generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated specific need for the evidence in a pending criminal trial. . . . Accordingly, the judgment under review is affirmed.”

  Meaning, every subpoenaed conversation was now the property of the Congress of the United States.

  From the Western White House, there was no immediate response.

  AFTER WHAT SEEMED LIKE AN eternity a statement from the Surf and Sand Hotel was issued in the president’s voice: “While I am disappointed in the result, I respect and accept the court decision, and I have instructed Mr. St. Clair to take whatever measures are necessary to comply with that decision in all respects.”

  “That’s news?” a cameraman asked. It was: that this president now accepted the authority of the Supreme Court was a relatively surprising proposition.

  The timing was remarkable. Only minutes later, Chairman Peter Rodino sat poised with his gavel in the air waiting for the signal from the TV cameraman to smack it down to open the Judiciary Committee’s public impeachment hearings.

  Nine impeachment counts were up for debate. The allegations ranged from Nixon’s role in accepting the ITT and dairy industry’s bribes to his refusal of Congress’s subpoenas: his secret, falsified bombing of Cambodia, his obstruction of justice in bribing defendants, his misuse of the CIA, his lying to investigators, his making up the story of John Dean’s investigation, his misuse of federal funds to gussy up his private residences, and, finally, his violation of the oath to faithfully execute the laws by deploying the IRS, FBI, and Secret Service in “disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens.”

  The members got fifteen minutes each for opening statements. Rodino’s counterpart in the Republican minority, Edward Hutchinson, said there wasn’t sufficient evidence to go forward with hearings in the first place. Jack Brooks, Democrat of Texas, returned in thunder: “Never in our 198 years have we had evidence of such rampant corruption in government.” Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, one of the committee’s liberal firebrand Democrats, started quietly, conversationally—and ended near to a bone-shattering shout: “Society, through its elected representatives, must condemn this conduct! Otherwise we will cease to be a government of laws. . . . I will, therefore, vote for the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon, and I do this with the belief that the House of Representatives will agree and that his trial in the Senate will result in his conviction and removal from office.”

  There followed a hush: he now was the first committee member to commit to the removal of the president.

  That added fire to the presentation by Republican Charles Sandman of New Jersey, “his voice a snarl reminiscent of Joe McCarthy’s twenty years before,” Theodore White wrote. He called the inquiry “the joke of the century”—and said only the wickedness of the liberal media made anyone think differently.

  Crowds overwhelmed the air-conditioning; on TV, congressmen’s skin glistened, wet—much like another August day, in 1948, when the youngest member of the House Un-American Activities Committee turned himself overnight into a national figure while questioning the accused Communist Alger Hiss, the first time this strange, sweating man divided his country in two, catalyzing two separate and irreconcilable sets of apocalyptic fears about the state of the nation in the minds of two separate and irreconcilable groups of Americans, pro- and anti-Nixon.

  Tom Railsback of Moline, Illinois, the last Republican to speak this first day, earnestly, desperately sought to cut through Nixonland’s division. Railsback owed this president: he was one of Congress’s dozens of fourth-term reps who might not have been elected had it not been for Nixon’s campaign stops for them in 1966. Once there, Railsback had been tapped for the “Chowder and Marching Society,” a social club for hot young Republican prospects, cofounded by Nixon in 1949. Now he spoke pensively, soberly, as if suppressing anguish. Richard Nixon had won the reelection vote in his district with nearly two-thirds of the vote. Richard Nixon “had only treated me kindly whenever I had occasion to be with him.” He “has done many wonderful things for this country.” Someday “historians are going to realize the contributions he had made.”

  But, Railsback offered, maybe it was time for him to go.

  Not, Railsback said, for things like the ITT and dairy bribes, the bombing of Cambodia, or the income tax shenanigans—to impeach on those would be pettily partisan. He singled out instead areas “where a conservative or a moderate or a liberal should be more concerned about the state of our government”—what he called “the abuses of power.” The president’s knowledge that John Dean was ordering the IRS commissioner to audit McGovern’s contributors. His knowledge, too, within a week of the break-in, of the plan to use the CIA to get the FBI to stop investigating the laundering of money through Mexico. Ordering Dean to falsify an exonerating Watergate report even while Dean was ordered to figure out how to bribe the burglars.

  Railsback spoke of mail from constituents who said the country could not afford to impeach a president. He wondered if we could afford not to. For “if we’re not going to really try to get to the truth, you’re going to see the most frustrated people, the most turned off people, and it’s going to make the period of LBJ in 1968, 1967—it’s going to make it look tame. So I hope we just keep our eyes on trying to get to the truth.”

  That named a spirit of the age. Like the New York Times reporting on how the POWs’ Operation Homecoming was a hustle. Like the Judy Blume novel that quoted a psychiatrist on how boys and girls needed to know that divorced fathers who did not visit them “do not love their children at all.” Like Life magazine mocking Frank Merriwell, and Wacky Packages teaching kids that consumerism is a scam. Like Garry Wills in Esquire explaining the ways Harry Truman wasn’t a plain speaker. Americans had to train their eyes on ugly truths. They had to abandon their heroes. They had to join the suspicious circles—to abandon blithe optimism. Did not the survival of the republic depend on it?

  THE NEXT MORNING A REPUBLICAN named Charlie Wiggins, a good lawyer, made the first effective case for the president. He began, like Rodino, booming out hosannas to equal justice under law. He spoke of how he had heard himself described on television as the president’s “chief defender,” and how he had winced: “In the context of the law, Mr. Chairman, personalities become irrelevant. . . . The law requires that we decide the case on evidence.” He then unfurled a dazzling forensic presentation that picked up from Railsback’s point about the CIA—allowing that the CIA’s interference with the investigation was an obvious “wrongful act,” but pointing out that in the committee’s thirty-eight volumes of evidence there was “not a word, ladies and gentlemen, of presidential knowledge and awareness of that wrongful act.”

  No smoking gun: as simple as that.

  The argument drove others to distraction. William Hungate, Democrat of Missouri, said that if an elephant walked into a room his Republican friends would ask for proof tha
t it wasn’t a mouse with a glandular problem. William S. Cohen, Republican of Maine, said if his colleagues woke up in the morning to a blanket of white they would demand proof that it had snowed the night before. Hamilton Fish Jr. said that of course “there was no smoking gun. The whole room was filled with smoke.”

  Smoke, magicians know, makes for a useful distraction. Just so, Wiley Mayne of Iowa called the president’s accusers “extreme partisans” (though they came from both parties) and asked why there had never been a congressional investigation of how Lyndon Johnson became a millionaire. Trent Lott, whose Mississippi district voted 85.2 percent to reelect the president, recited a ledger full of statistics about how much the government had spent on the investigation—“Could any man withstand such scrutiny?”—without any “counterbalancing presentation of the other side of the story.” (Maybe there would have been such counterbalancing presentations, had the president allowed his aides to testify before Congress.)

  It took an unlikely woman in schoolmarmish glasses to call the proceedings back from the brink of silliness. A minister’s daughter and freshman congresswoman from Austin, Barbara Jordan, got her fifteen minutes, though it took her only thirteen. She was black—she and Andrew Young of Georgia were the first two African Americans to be sent to Congress from the South since Reconstruction—and did not shy from foregrounding the fact: “Earlier today,” she intoned solemnly, “we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States: ‘We, the people.’ It’s a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that ‘We, the people.’ ”

  And then, because this young woman was one of the greatest orators the United States had ever produced, she did what great orators do: she loosened up her audience with a joke. “I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake.”

  Now, however, we were a more perfect union. Now the Constitution made her an equal “in-quis-i-tor.” She pronounced with great rounded booming accents, “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution—the subversion—the destruction—of the Constitution.”

  And, from that majestic foundation, she scolded her seniors with such a severe power that even hard-bitten reporters were mesmerized.

  She pointed to a basic constitutional fact these colleagues had been too obtuse to honor: that a vote for an article of impeachment was not a vote to remove the president, only a license for a Senate trial. (Stop insulting the Framers. “They did not make the accusers and the judges the same person.”) She annihilated the argument that had been maintained for months about the standard for impeachment: the Founders were perfectly clear it was not a punishment for maladministration, nor for technical crimes, but—she quoted The Federalist, No. 65—“a method of national inquest into the conduct of public men,” as a check on tyranny. She quoted the wise reminder of a former political scientist, Woodrow Wilson, that the Constitution’s requirement of a two-thirds vote in the Senate guaranteed that “nothing short of the grossest offenses against the plain law of the land will suffice to give them speed and effectiveness. Indignation so great as to overgrow party interest may secure a conviction, but nothing else can.” She turned to the evidence on record—that as of June 23, 1972, the president knew that money from his reelection committee had been found in the possession of one of the burglars, and that arrestee Howard Hunt had earlier committed illegal acts on the president’s behalf, and that the president had been recorded discussing how to shelter him from prosecution. She quoted the opinion of James Madison, speaking at the Virginia ratification convention: “If the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person and there be grounds to believe that he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach.” And Madison to the Constitutional Convention: that a president “is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution.” She repeated that. She concluded, “If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that 18th century Constitution should be abandoned to a 20th century paper shredder.”

  She yielded back the balance of her time, having efficiently laid out just what the president’s defenders were demanding: specifics of what he did wrong. It was one of the greatest speeches an American politician had ever delivered, this from a politician no one had heard of—and live on TV. Though, this being politics, she hardly changed any minds. The next day, a Friday, debate began with Charles Sandman whining, “I want answers, and this is what I am entitled to! . . . This is a charge against the President of the United States, he is entitled to know specifically what he did wrong!”

  SANDMAN WAS SHRIEKING AGAINST SOMETHING called the “Sarbanes Substitute”: a carefully worked out impeachment article accusing the president of violating his constitutional oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution,” and his “duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” by obstructing justice and delaying and impeding the investigation of the events of June 17, 1972, and subsequently.

  The article was the product of a motley caucus of seven Republicans and seven moderate Democrats, all natural allies of Nixon, half from districts where Nixon got more than 62 percent of the vote in 1972. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for members like this to vote to save the president for political reasons, no matter what. Instead, conscience had guided these fourteen to the conclusion that the president did deserve to be impeached—but that it had to happen in a bipartisan, passionless manner. Rodino asked Representative Walter Flowers of Mississippi, whose constituents had given George McGovern only 22.9 percent of their vote, to gather the fourteen into a working team to draft impeachment articles. They became known as the “Fragile Coalition.”

  It was by then plain that all but three of the committee’s twenty-one Democrats would impeach the president on any charge that came to a vote—liberal hotheads like the “Mad Monk,” colleagues’ nickname for Father Drinan, who had introduced his first impeachment resolution in July 1973 over the secret bombing of Cambodia. Working to strike down Drinan’s charge about Cambodia was the soul of the Fragile Coalition’s reasoning: large majorities in both parties had voted funds to continue the bombardment, so how could they impeach over that?

  Ten of the seventeen committee Republicans, meanwhile, seemed willing to go to their graves defending their president. Rabbi Korff’s people—who now, in communiqués to a hard-core ten thousand culled from his volunteer list of 2.5 million, seemed on the verge of advocating violent revolution: “Don’t be stalled. Don’t be jived. Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Your congressman and his staff are paid by your taxes, so make them listen to you. If they walk away, follow them. If they hang up the phone, call again. If they lock the doors, get their home addresses and meet them there. If they treat you with disdain or condescension, tell them what you think of them. And don’t delete your expletives.” They concluded, “One does not reason with lynch mobs.”

  This kind of recriminatory atmosphere strengthened the coalition’s resolve: the House Judiciary Committee must not be a lynch mob. Any legitimate grounds for impeachment had to represent continuing offenses, had to be bipartisan, had to be a self-evident emanation from the Oval Office itself. Maybe, then, impeachment could become an opportunity—an opportunity to show, as the Fragiles liked to say among themselves, that “the system worked.” That maybe extremism, the awful consequences of the cacophonous 1960s, could be excised from American life once and for all.

  This was serious business. Fifty Capitol police now lined the Senate-side entrance when Vice President Ford was presiding, a platoon of their motorbikes forming a wedge around his car in addition to his regular Secret Service convoy—as if for someone who was about to be president.

  And so, Saturday night, after a long day of parliamentary wrangling, came the slow
, stately roll call on the Sarbanes Substitute: twenty-seven in favor, eleven opposed. A committee vote of 71 percent for impeachment. That meant it would probably happen.

  Almost immediately after that vote, Peter Rodino hurriedly cleared the hearing room. Reports were that a plane had taken off from National Airport, with the intent of crashing into the Rayburn Office Building, or the Capitol, perhaps in coordination with military units loyal to the president. The reports seemed credible enough. These were death-haunted times. Back in February, a madman named Samuel Byck drove to Baltimore/Washington International Airport, shot an airport cop, stormed a DC-10 on the runway, and threatened to blow up the plane with the gasoline bomb he had strapped to his body unless the pilots flew it into the White House. Two weeks later, the media reported that had he chosen the less secure airport in his hometown of Philadelphia, Byck might have succeeded.

  Inflation was up above 12 percent. The currency markets were on the verge of panic. Oil, $2.70 a barrel in September, now went for eleven bucks. The world seemed nigh unto apocalypse. (“Live today,” a Pan American Airways commercial went. “Tomorrow will cost more.”) Two weeks before the impeachment hearings, the perky hostess of the chat show Suncoast Digest, who incorporated homemade puppets into the program, was angry that the station owner had told the staff to concentrate on “blood and guts,” and had cut away from her show to cover a shoot-out at a local restaurant. She began her broadcast with an uncharacteristic hard-news segment, with film from the restaurant shooting—which jammed in the projector, at which point she announced, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, you are going to see another first—attempted suicide.” She then shot herself in the head and died, leaving behind the script she had been reading from, which included a postscript: a third-person account of the breaking news story, to be read by whoever took over the news desk next. The Sarasota Herald Tribune ran a photo: “THIS Is the 38-Caliber Pistol Christine Chubbuck . . . used in her on-the-air suicide.” The show Gentle Ben, about a little boy and the tame bear who was his pet, replaced Suncoast Digest.