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

by Rick Perlstein

  The sane were a fragile coalition. “Many Americans are in the middle of a depression,” ran an advertisement in the Chicago Tribune for the psychology columnist Dr. Joyce Brothers. “And a lot of people feel trapped and helpless to change things. If the state of the union has put you in an unhappy state of mind, take heart. . . . There are things you can do as an individual to attack the national problems and to fight your own depression. Find out ‘How to Beat the Blahs’ in this 3-part series starting Monday.” Or maybe you could watch Gentle Ben.

  THE NEXT WEEK OPENED WITH news of the indictment of John Connally, the man Nixon had hoped would succeed him, in the milk bribery case, and the sentencing of John Dean. There were votes passing the Fragile Coalition’s impeachment Article II, on obstruction of justice, and Article III, on defying subpoenas; and votes striking down articles on the president’s taxes and the Cambodia bombings. The ten Republicans who voted against every article were confident, just as Charlie Wiggins said, that “smoking gun” evidence simply wasn’t there—evidence, say, that the president ordered the CIA to get the FBI not to investigate the laundering of money through Mexico. Ronald Reagan, too, said he was “not convinced that the evidence of an impeachable offense had been presented to the Congress or the people.” Though he wasn’t paying much attention. When Reagan was late to his press conference one morning, a reporter asked if it was because he had been watching the hearings on TV. “No, I was sound asleep,” he responded. “As a matter of fact I was having a wonderful dream when they knocked on the door.” And not, he denied with a chuckle, about becoming President of the United States.

  That seemed unlikely. He was back in the national news—because his handpicked lieutenant governor, Ed Reinecke, whom he was grooming as his successor, had just been convicted in Washington, D.C., of lying to a Senate committee when he claimed he had never discussed with John Mitchell ITT’s pledge to underwrite the Republican convention. Reagan said he had “no right” to ask Reinecke to resign until his appeals were exhausted.

  The Nielsen ratings came out. Once again Ronald Reagan was an outlier. Only 10 percent of adults had not heard or watched any of the hearings. And a Harris poll taken August 2 found 66 percent of the country wanted to fire their president—up 13 points in a week.

  Richard Nixon still would not budge. Nor Vice President Ford, who got a new nickname to describe his serpentine route around the country, fifty thousand miles in his first six months as vice president alone, delivering Agnew-style speeches in which he declaimed, “I can say from the bottom of my heart that the President of the United States is innocent!” That nickname was “Zigzag.”

  THE NEXT MONDAY THE WHITE House postponed the regular 11 A.M. press briefing. The morning’s Washington Post suggested a reason—a story by Woodward and Bernstein that something damning had emerged in new transcripts about to be released on the Supreme Court’s order. The hearings had recessed; network correspondents went on vacation—and now they were called back by their bosses. Fragile Coalition members came back from vacations, too, though they hadn’t quite been relaxing: Railsback reported that people left the room or turned their backs on him when he went home; others reported death threats; at least one was pelted with stones.

  The White House postponed the briefing. And then did so again. Ron Ziegler finally appeared at lunchtime. He had tears in his eyes. He announced the president would go on TV that night, and in time for the evening newscasts, the nation learned why.

  Good evening. President Nixon stunned the country today by admitting that he had held back evidence from the House Judiciary Committee, keeping it secret from his lawyers, and not disclosing it in public statements. The news caused a storm in Washington, and some of Mr. Nixon’s most loyal supporters are calling for his resignation.

  They included Charlie Wiggins, choking back tears, who said “the magnificent public career of Richard Nixon must be terminated involuntarily.” The new transcript bludgeoned Wiggins’s soul. It recorded the president strategizing with Haldeman, on June 23, 1972, about how to use the CIA to get the FBI not to investigate the laundering of money through Mexico. “That’s the way we are going to play it,” the president exulted—exactly the smoking gun Wiggins had expended all his political capital and brilliant advocacy claiming didn’t exist.

  George Will called it a “smoking howitzer.” Republican National Committee chairman George H. W. Bush posted an open letter: “Dear Mr. President, It is my considered judgement that you should now resign.” Charles Sandman said he had to resign. The studiously apolitical Johnny Carson announced, “Tonight’s monologue is dedicated to Richard Nixon. I’ve got a monologue that just won’t quit.” He got a standing ovation unlike any he had ever experienced. Surely, Nixon would resign now.

  A REPORTER CALLED RONALD REAGAN “deeply disturbed” by the new transcript. In a prepared statement, the governor passively voiced a most unusual conclusion: that “for the first time, it has been revealed that neither the Congress nor the American people have been told the entire truth about Watergate”—for the first time. He fell short of asking the president to resign. Instead, he said it was “absolutely imperative that he go before the Congress immediately and make a full disclosure of all information he has on this matter, answering any and all questions the members may have. The Constitutional process should then go forward in order to bring about the speedy resolution of this issue.” He took questions for a half an hour—a strong man who seemed almost helpless, pitiably refusing conflict with a more powerful man, repeating over and over, “I think the process should go forward,” suggesting Nixon step aside temporarily under the Twenty-fifth Amendment “during the Congressional investigation.”

  He seemed to be repeating White House talking points. For White House Deputy Press Secretary Gerald Warren insisted the president would not resign but instead “pursue the Constitutional process.”

  Warren went on to say that Nixon had only “great admiration and affection” for communications director Herb Klein. Of whom Nixon had said, on the newly released transcripts, that he “just doesn’t have his head screwed on.” And so the White House’s perpetual mendacity machine ground on, as if it just didn’t know how to stop. “If the current impeachment process were a boxing match,” George Will wrote, “the referee would stop the fight.” But there was no referee. And Richard Nixon would not throw in the towel.

  Until, that is, a political man was presented by a group of political men with an unanswerable political argument.

  The 1964 Republican presidential nominee had recently been the subject of a New York Times Magazine profile: “In 1964 He Was Bela Lugosi, but the Liberals Love Barry Goldwater Now.” It confirmed Goldwater’s new image as a comforting senior statesman, a refreshingly straightforward contrast to the monster occupying the Oval Office. Now he served as spokesman for the House and Senate Republican leaders who emerged from an Oval Office meeting. They had been “invited,” he said. “The discussion was quite general in tone.” They were just “four old friends talking over a very painful situation.” They could report no decision on whether or not the president would resign. Hugh Scott, holding his pipe, looked disoriented, as if stuck in some surreal Buñuel scene, as he recited his lines: “The President is in entire control of himself. He was serene and he was most amiable.” He was speaking to insistent rumors that the president was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and might stage a military coup.

  Wednesday, August 7, the words “NIXON SAYS HE WON’T RESIGN” emblazoned atop the Washington Post, a mad insouciant team of French-led conspirators broke into the nearly completed construction site of the World Trade Center with more than half a ton of equipment, ascended the building’s twin towers, and somehow rigged a high wire spanning the sixty yards in between. A spritely daredevil named Philippe Petit proceeded to dance in the sky for forty-five minutes for astonished and delighted pedestrians a quarter mile below. This was a first-rate burglary—though it took a Frenchman to achieve it. Americans couldn�
��t do anything right.

  Representative Earl Landgrebe, Republican of Indiana, showed up on the Today show the next morning and said, “I’m sticking with my president even if he and I have to be carried out of this building and shot.” The NBC interviewer, incredulous, asked him about the new facts in evidence. He answered, earnestly, “Don’t confuse me with the facts.”

  And on Thursday, August 8, Richard Nixon went on TV at nine for his thirty-seventh address to the nation as president, 852 days since the third-rate burglary at the Watergate. The public areas outside the White House were more crowded than on November 22, 1963—people honking for impeachment, shouting “Jail to the Chief,” comparing rumors about how the military coup would go down. Then the airwaves crackled, the president spoke—and made a merely political argument, free of contrition, that although resignation was “abhorrent to every instinct in my body,” it had become “evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough base in Congress to justify continuing the effort.”

  He was resigning. Effective noon the next day. The Goldwater delegation had sternly informed him he didn’t have the one-third of senators’ votes it would take to survive an impeachment trial, and he decided that he could no longer fight.

  What thoughts were in this strange man’s head, after he had risen so celestially high, then fallen so infernally low? He revealed them in an extraordinarily raw, intimate, improvised farewell address to his staff assembled in the White House—and to the Americans assembled, astonished, in front of their TVs. He suggested he didn’t do all that much that was wrong: “Mistakes, yes. But for personal gain, never.” That he was just a modest, plain, ordinary man, from a modest, plain, luckless family: “I remember my old man. I think that they would have called him sort of a little man, common man. He didn’t consider himself that way. You know what he was? He was a streetcar motorman first, and then he was a farmer, and then he had a lemon ranch. It was the poorest lemon ranch in California, I can assure you. He sold it before they found oil on it.” (His staff laughed; some might even have known the story was not true.) “And then he was a grocer. But he was a great man. . . .”

  He choked back tears: “Nobody will ever write a book, probably, about my mother. Well, I guess all of you would say this about your mother—my mother was a saint. And I think of her, two boys dying of tuberculosis, nursing four others in order that she could take care of my older brother for three years in Arizona, and seeing each of them die, and when they died, it was like one of her own. Yes, she will have no books written about her. But she was a saint.” (They only wrote books about Kennedy’s mother, he was implying—the bastards.)

  Then he almost suggested it really wasn’t his fault—simply a natural response to enemies besieging him from all sides. Still, he regretted that he ever listened to them: “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

  And then he was gone—boarding the presidential helicopter with an incongruously wide grin and a V-for-victory salute.

  And in Sacramento, Ronald Reagan read a statement from handwritten notes: “It is a tragedy for America that we have come to this, but it does mean that the agony of many months has come to an end.” Concerning whether Nixon should be prosecuted for illegality, the man who the previous day had said he should go before Congress and tell the nation “the whole truth” now said his farewell speech had been disclosure enough: “I think the man has had a punishment beyond anything any of us could imagine.” He was asked about speculation he might be tapped as vice president under President Gerald Ford. He demurred, suggesting Barry Goldwater instead, but added, “anyone who did receive such a call or was asked would have to consider it a call to duty.” Then he traveled to Lake Tahoe as featured speaker at a national Young Republicans meeting, and blithely told them not to fear: “You can have faith in the Republican philosophy of fiscal common sense, limited government, and individual freedom.”

  He told the Washington Post’s Lou Cannon, “I don’t believe the story has come out yet. I sure tried to read those transcripts and I think for myself mistakes were made but at the same time I think history [is] probably going to be far more kind to the administration with regard to accomplishments. When all this is going on our world leadership in times of trouble is far more effective than anything we’ve had for a great many years.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  * * *

  “There Used to Be a President Who Didn’t Lie”

  THE DIGNITARIES, STANDING AT CHAIRS still in place after Nixon’s maudlin farewell speech to his staff, couldn’t stop beaming, like people at a marriage ceremony where the bride looked exquisite. And after Chief Justice Warren Burger put forth the same words George Washington first intoned 185 years before, “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”—he stopped there for the briefest moment, letting that glorious word sink in—“of the United States,” the newly invested chief executive kissed beautiful Betty Ford upon both cheeks, and it was hard not to swell up inside.

  The chief justice announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States”; and, hearing someone other than Richard Nixon introduced that way, and seeing the pride in the faces of his four handsome children—teenagers Steve and Susan; Jack, the college kid; and Mike, the mop-topped seminarian—it was hard not to swell up again.

  He spoke for less than eight minutes: “not an inaugural address,” he said, “not a fireside chat, not a campaign speech—just a little straight talk among friends.” He addressed these friends directly. Since he was acutely aware that he hadn’t been elected, he said, “I ask you to confirm me as your president with your prayers. And I hope that such prayers will also be the first of many.” And he told them that since he had campaigned for neither the presidency nor the vice presidency, he was “not subscribed to any partisan platform,” was “indebted to no man—and only one woman: my dear wife.”

  Nixon used his wife in speeches, too, most famously in the Checkers speech, when she gazed at him with an adoration so sanctimonious, humorist Mort Sahl said she ought to have been knitting an American flag. When Jerry did it, it sounded just right: sincere. As did his affirmation that those who confirmed him as vice president were “of both parties, elected by all the people, and acting under the Constitution in their name.” He pledged to be president of all the people, unlike you-know-who, and said he believed “that truth is the glue that holds government together, not our government but civilization itself”—unlike, well, you-know-who.

  Who was entirely gone now.

  “In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end. My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great republic is a government of laws and not men. Here the people rule.”

  It was a masterpiece of American oratory, and seemed fully equal to its awesome historical moment. Its themes echoed the morning’s New York Times front page, where Nixon’s farewell address was praised as “conciliatory”; pundit R. W. Apple wrote of how the end of the “Watergate agony” presaged “an era of more open government”; a news article predicted a “honeymoon,” even a permanent happy marriage, between Congress and the executive. Ford was described as a “pragmatic conservative” offering an “essentially unchanged foreign policy.” Another article on foreign policy was headlined “Abroad, Officials and Citizens Call Outcome of the Crisis a Tribute to Democracy.” There was a little profile of Frank Wills, the black security guard at the Watergate whose eagle eye in spotting an errant strip of tape that kept a door in the Watergate parking garage unlocked eventually brought a president down: “GUARD SAYS NO POSITION TOO HIGH,” the headline ran—in America even the president was not above the law. The business page proclaimed “PSYCHOLOGICAL UPLIFT FOR ECONOMY SEEN IN SHIFT TO FORD.” The op-ed page saw the Times’ most respected columnist, James Reston, celebrating “A SE
NSE OF NATIONAL RECONCILIATION,” and guest editorialists including James Madison—who wrote from beyond the grave (“Notes on Nullification,” 1835) that “a political system which does not contain an effective provision for a peaceable decision of all controversies arising within itself, would be a Government in name only.” Precisely two-thirds of that Times A-section’s eighty-one articles concerned the nation’s new transition of power. They all resounded with the very same theme: the resignation proved that no American was above the law, that the system worked, that the nation was united and at peace with itself.

  OTHER PIECES, TELLING OTHER STORIES, were contained in that day’s paper, too, of course. You just had to plunge well into the inside pages to find them.

  From Philadelphia: three female Episcopalian deacons who had been ordained as priests were banned from performing their offices by their more conservative superiors in New York. From Texas: the sentencing, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 1972 5–4 decision suspending the death penalty even though 60 percent of Americans supported it, of a serial killer to a term of nearly six hundred years in prison. From Jamaica, Queens: a criminal gang of police sergeants had extorted $250,000 from legitimate business owners. From Los Angeles: cops were buying bulletproof vests on their own dime because so many police officers were being cut down by remorseless perps, and the brass wouldn’t do anything about it.