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

by Rick Perlstein

  On Day 11, President Ford ventured out of Washington for the first time, to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in Chicago. He earned a huge, whistling standing ovation for stating his “strong conviction that unconditional blanket amnesty for anyone who illegally evaded or fled military service is wrong”—and then, citing precedents of Lincoln and Truman, and invoking the same biblical injunction to justice and mercy that graced his inaugural speech, he enraged his audience by saying draft dodgers and military deserters should get “a second chance” to earn their way back into United States without punishment. “I want your help and understanding,” he concluded. “I ask all Americans who ever asked for goodness and mercy in their lives, who ever sought forgiveness for their trespasses, to join in rehabilitating all casualties of the tragic conflict of the past.”

  He believed himself to be accomplishing something profound. The issue of “amnesty” had been one of Richard Nixon’s favorite hatchets in his strategy of governing by division. In Nixon’s first news conference of his second term, a reporter asked why, with the Paris Peace Accords now sealed, he didn’t offer amnesty to “help heal the wounds in this country.” Nixon responded with a rant: he had just brokered “peace with honor”—“I know it gags some of you to write that phrase”—and though military service “had very little support among the so-called better people, in the media and the intellectual circles and the rest,” it did have the support of “a majority of the American people, despite the fact that they were hammered night after night and day after day with the fact that this was an immoral war, that America should not be there, that they should not serve their country, that morally what they should do was desert their country.” He concluded, “Amnesty means forgiveness. We cannot provide forgiveness for them.” He then ordered Bob Haldeman to get an amnesty bill introduced in Congress and “make every dove vote on it”—to exploit a tender national wound in order to destroy his political enemies.

  That was how wedge politics—Nixon politics—worked. Ford wished to model how the nation might transcend it.

  The pundits found such gestures stupendous, crowning him a glorious statesman. But among millions of Americans who had long since stopped taking anything a powerful man said at face value, the reviews were quite different. Why had he kept saying, leading up to the resignation, “I can say from the bottom of my heart that the President of the United States is innocent?” Why was he speaking of “justice,” “mercy,” and “understanding” right now? Because he was greasing the skids for a con: amnesty for Richard M. Nixon. A letter writer to the New York Times predicted, a week before the Nixon presidency’s end, “Before President Nixon will allow all of the dirty linen to be washed in the process of an impeachment and trial, he will resign. When Gerald Ford becomes President, he will grant Mr. Nixon executive clemency, and thus Mr. Nixon will avoid criminal prosecution. . . . And once again justice will have been debauched, as has happened so frequently with those lesser politicians who are guilty of gross sins against the body politics. Ah, well, such is the corruption of power.”

  And, the morning of Day 31, that was exactly what happened.

  It was a Sunday, 11:05 A.M., when many Americans would have, like Ford, just returned from church—maybe in the mood for justice, mercy, and understanding. Their president appeared on TV. He began flatly:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I have taken a decision which I felt I should tell you and all my fellow American citizens as soon as I was certain in my own mind and in my own conscience that it is the right thing to do.”

  He had been advised, he said, that “years will have to pass before Richard Nixon could obtain a fair trial.” He agreed with “equal justice for all Americans”—but “during this long period of delay and political litigation, ugly passions would again be aroused. And our people would again be polarized in their opinions. And the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad”—and the courts might not yet believe Nixon had been accorded due process even then. “My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed. My conscience tells me that only I, as President, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book. My conscience tells me that it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to ensure it.”

  He quoted Abraham Lincoln, just as Richard Nixon used to quote Abraham Lincoln: “I do believe that right makes might, and that if I am wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.” He said he also believed, “with all my heart and mind and spirit,” “not as President but as a humble servant of God,” that he failed the nation if he failed to show mercy. After all, he said, “I feel that Richard Nixon and his loved ones have suffered enough and will continue to suffer, no matter what I do, no matter what we, as a great nation, can do together to make his goal of peace come true.”

  He read a proclamation, then signed it, right there on TV:

  “Now, therefore, I, Gerald Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed, or may have committed or taken part in during the period from July 20, 1969—”

  That’s what he said: July 20, 1969. He meant January 20. He was nervous.

  “—through August 9, 1974.”

  That evening the daredevil known as Evel Knievel was strapped into his custom-built, spike-tipped “X-2 Skycycle” rocket, with which he hoped to soar at 200 mph over the 1,600 feet between the banks of the Snake River Canyon, clad in his trademark red-white-and-blue jumpsuit. Knievel’s loony jumps were television fixtures. Grown-ups watched, in these death-haunted times, in the half-unconscious wish to see someone snuffed out live on TV, Christine Chubbuck–style, as Knievel had almost been snuffed out live on TV in 1967 when attempting to jump the fountain at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, landing short, then flopping end over end like a rag doll (ABC showed it again and again, in slow motion). Little boys watched because Evel Knievel was the coolest human being in the world. Until that evening, when, having begged to stay up past their bedtimes, little boys saw his parachute deploy almost immediately after ignition, and kindergarten classrooms across the nation erupted into impassioned arguments over whether he had chickened out and done it on purpose—whether the hero was a hustler.

  Charles Lindbergh had just died. Time said, “America lost not only one of its pioneers of the machine age but perhaps its last authentic hero.” Everything was rotten. As Walter Cronkite had said, upon the resignation: “I think we ought to take Lysol and scrub out the Oval Office.” Now the Lysol was needed again.

  Ford would explain later—much to his surprise and chagrin, because he thought his country trusted him—that, with Nixon loudly claiming that the rest of the tapes and his presidential papers were his personal property, he, Ford, was spending a quarter of his time as president dealing with the legal issues surrounding Nixon. But the pardon was just more proof that everything about Washington was crooked.

  Within moments, Western Union’s lines were jammed by angry citizens eager to post telegrams of protest to the White House. Ford’s press secretary, who had been kept in the dark on the decision though he was a friend going back twenty-five years, and who had told reporters his first day on the job that Ford wouldn’t give Nixon a pardon, given that Ford had said so when asked about a pardon during his Senate confirmation hearings to become vice president, resigned immediately. By lunchtime, a throng descended upon Lafayette Park, calling for the president’s head. During his next out-of-town trip, to Pittsburgh, Ford circulated among a crowd of students with a portable microphone—a symbol of the anti-Nixonian candor he had hoped would mark his presidency. The students shrieked “Jail Ford!” in his face. Congressmen fielde
d messages demanding his impeachment. Within the week, the president’s approval rating dropped from 66 to 49 percent, the steepest decline in history. The New York Times discerned in his action the opposite of his intention: it was “unwise, divisive, unjust.” Newsweek said he had “embraced the demon of Watergate.” The previous weeks, these organs had lionized him.

  Reflected Mary McGrory, the liberal syndicated columnist, “The Washington press corps lost its head over Gerald Ford. A thousand reporters turned overnight into flacks for Jerry Ford. They raved about his decency, his smile, his English muffins, his peachy dancing. . . . He perhaps did us all a favor by slapping us awake.” Ordinary folks gave it to him worse. From a small town in Wisconsin called Slinger, whose ornaments were a ski hill called “Little Switzerland” and a dirt car racing track, a fellow wondered in the Milwaukee Journal, “How can a man be pardoned for crimes before he has been convicted of any? . . . I have always heard that a person was innocent until proven guilty and that all men are created equal, but now it appears that what I learned was all wrong. Perhaps in a week or two Mr. Ford will overrule the Ten Commandments.”

  Ronald Reagan disagreed. “I support him in the pardon,” he told newsmen upon arriving for a speech in Louisville on overhauling the food stamp program. He was asked, too, about his future political plans. He said they would be “based on the record of the administration in the next two years.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  * * *

  New Right?

  PRESIDENT FORD WASN’T THE ONLY man that summer declaring a preliminary truce. In June, the Washington Post’s Joseph Kraft wrote a column about primary elections in the biggest state: “Reaganism has had it in California,” he concluded. “Moreover, given California’s record as political pacesetter for the nation, the primary here may be handwriting on the wall for right-wing populism everywhere.”

  He singled out specific results to make his argument. There was a good-government ballot proposition promoted by Ralph Nader, instituting the nation’s strictest limits on campaign expenditures, which passed with 70 percent even though “all the big spenders in the Reagan camp” went to the mat against it. Second, “the triumph of Proposition 13, providing for the use of gasoline taxes for public transit.” And finally there were the elections in which the two parties chose their gubernatorial candidate to succeed Reagan in the State House in 1975. The Democrats went with “just the kind of limousine liberal right-wing populists love to put down.” He was Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr., the Yale-educated son of the man Reagan beat in 1966, “identified with liberal causes from peace in Vietnam to racial harmony.” And Republicans chose Houston Flournoy, “a political scientist from Princeton who takes the progressive stance in politics,” who beat Reagan’s hand-picked successor, Lieutenant Governor Ed Reinecke, by a margin of two to one.

  The piece was called “The End of Backlash Politics”—which Kraft defined as “reaction against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.” And it was well and truly on the run—everywhere: “Recent developments in Detroit, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and New York, as well as Los Angeles, suggest the decline of backlash mayors. At their conference in Seattle early last week, the governors were lining up to be seen in opposition to Mr. Reagan and the other leading right-wing populist, George Wallace.” That heralded “the possibility of closing the parentheses on the era of backlash politics which has been so strong in the country since Ronald Reagan rode out of the TV movies back in 1966.”

  It took until the school year for those parentheses to jolt wide open.

  IN BOSTON, A FURIOUS, IRRECONCILABLE debate for more than a decade had only recently appeared on the verge of tidy resolution.

  In 1963, black militants organized school boycotts to protest the decrepit, overcrowded schoolhouses their children were forced to attend. The Massachusetts state legislature passed a Racial Imbalance Act, which required Boston to submit a desegregation plan. The city’s school committee—what other cities call a school board—responded with a plan, according to a critic, “whose impact on racial balance it would take a theologian to discern.” The state’s Board of Education acted to suspend the city’s school funding; the school committee sued the board to prevent the suspension, and lost in 1967. The charismatic lace-curtain Irish matron who led the school committee’s backlash faction, Louise Day Hicks, promised she would fight for neighborhood schools “as long as I have breath left in my body” and almost won a Democratic primary for mayor.

  The political war of position intensified; that was how Boston worked: as a city of fiefdoms, of parish boundaries, of “turf.” No American municipality governed more purely according to the pluralist principle of politically contending ethnic blocs—which, according to the settled wisdom of political science, was the best system yet devised to ensure urban peace. The Irish of South Boston, Dorchester, and Charlestown, and to a lesser extent the Italians of East Boston, saw themselves as political gangs—and the Brahmins who composed the lion’s share of the city’s population of do-gooders as just another rival gang. So were the blacks of Roxbury—who the Irish certainly did not see as victims of anything requiring legal redress. “Our children are innocent victims,” Hicks insisted. An “open enrollment” compromise was supposed to be in effect, but the school committee sabotaged it. As a result, in 1971, the state board voted to end Boston schools funding. Cooler heads then worked out another compromise, which included enrolling a mixed student body at two spanking-new schools built with 25 percent state aid. Hicks, though, would have none of that: she lashed her people into a fury, boycotting the new schools, just as blacks had boycotted in 1963. They would outlast the rival gangs yet.

  Brahmin do-gooders had their own tribal beliefs. These included the notion that insular, anachronistic fiefdoms like South Boston High, with its defiantly anticosmopolitan worldview, its defiant indifference to the game of upward mobility, its football and blood-soaked street fights, which produced the urban American version of Homeric epics, was—as the state commissioner of education put it—an “ugly institution” that “deserved to be changed.” They got to work using their tribe’s favorite tool: the federal judiciary, which had been nobly undoing the atavistic tribalism of the Southern states since Brown v. Board of Education. In March 1972, they sued the school committee in U.S. District Court. The case was assigned to Arthur Garrity, a formerly obscure federal judge appointed by President Johnson in 1966 at the recommendation of Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

  At that spur, it seemed, politics started to work—just as a mandarin pundit would have predicted and preferred.

  In April 1974, the state legislature repealed the divisive Racial Imbalance Act. That May, after an all-night vigil led by Hicks outside the State House, Governor Francis Sargent announced it would be replaced with a new, voluntary plan. Hicks spoke in favor. So did her antibusing comrades on the committee: like John Kerrigan, who once described a black reporter as “one generation away from swinging in the trees”; Ray Flynn, who compared school buses to the Soviet tanks that overran Budapest in 1956; and state senator William Bulger, who said that thanks to the Brahmin integregationists, his “constituents live under Orwellian conditions, saturated by an Orwellian media.” But now the Brahmins were lying down with the brawlers, and as if according to Joe Kraft’s script, peace seemed to have been achieved.

  Then, on June 21, the last day of school in Boston, in between Nixon’s trips to the Mideast and the Soviet Union, Judge Garrity handed down a decision that amounted to no less than a sociological blueprint for rewiring the entire Boston school system. Thus began the great battle of Boston’s educational civil war.

  The school committee majority called what they wanted “neighborhood schools.” As Kerrigan put it: “Government has made continued concessions to convicted felons, homosexuals, abortionists, and others, yet persists in ignoring the pleas of parents who ask that they be accorded their rightful privilege of sending their children to their own neighborhood schools.” But what Judge Gar
rity had exhaustively and indisputably demonstrated was that the school committee’s district boundaries frequently required black children to travel greater distances from their homes in order to go to “neighborhood schools” than they would if schools were integrated.

  Part of his remedy—the most controversial part—was “pairing” South Boston High School with Roxbury High School, a school serving six all-black housing projects. Every South Boston sophomore was ordered to attend Roxbury High, previously virtually all black. Every Roxbury junior would go to South Boston High. But “Southie” was the most tribal neighborhood in America’s most tribal city. “We practice ancestor worship here,” a forty-two-year-old factory worker explained to a reporter visiting from New York; a button sported by many protesters printed the title of a favorite tavern song, “Southie Is My Home Town.” It also had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, during one of the worst recessions in history, in a city so decrepit that water from decaying mains left over from the Victorian era regularly sent poisoned residents to the hospital. Memories of high school salad days were what fueled these middle-aged men in dead-end jobs and dead marriages and families with too many mouths to feed. It saved their souls—as assuredly as the parish church down the street. And now some goddamned federal judge with a lifetime appointment was taking it all away. “Why doesn’t Governor Sargent just fire Judge Garrity?” one partisan asked, not quite grasping that the world wasn’t South Boston.

  Six weeks after Garrity’s decision, ten thousand rabid busing opponents walked from Boston Common to City Hall Plaza to raise hell. They carried signs like “BOSTON FIREFIGHTERS LOCAL 718 DO NOT WANT THEIR CHILDREN FORCIBLY BUSED,” and “EQUAL JUSTICE FOR ALL.” Their two United States senators were scheduled to attend a meeting in the federal building in the plaza that day. Men in chicken masks implored them to face the crowd. The brother of America’s first Catholic president, grandson of the man who built Boston’s first Irish political machine, decided to oblige them.