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

by Rick Perlstein

  In between, in chapters with titles like “The Evil of Slavery” and “The Price of Plenty,” figures ignored or derided in classrooms of past generations—Eugene Debs, Jane Addams, William Jennings Bryan (“He spoke of the wrongs done to the poor by America’s rich men . . . who crushed the dreams of poor people”), and Chief Joseph (study question: “Do you think Chief Joseph was right to keep his promises when the white men did not keep theirs?”)—occupied George Washington’s and Andrew Carnegie’s former pride of place. Chapters concluded with discussion questions that sounded open-ended, but pressed a thumb plainly on the scales. On Henry Ford: “Do you think it would be fun to work on an automobile assembly line? Why or why not?” On the Gilded Age: “The poor and weak . . . had difficulties defending themselves against the rich and powerful. Since there were so many more poor people, why do you think they usually were so helpless?” Descriptions of America’s failings were blunt. “Chicago, 1889 . . . The alleys running off Halsted Street, near Polk Street, smell like open sewers.” “The United States really wanted to go to war. Spain just happened to be the enemy. . . . Perhaps it was not right, as some said, for the ‘land of liberty’ to be an imperial nation. But after the Spanish-American War there was no turning back.” A previous generation’s patriotic triumphs were colored in faintly embarrassed tones. Of the Panama Canal, for instance, Teddy Roosevelt’s Watergate-like boast was quoted: “I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate.” Black power leader H. Rap Brown—who at rallies in the 1960s would ask, “How many white folks did you kill today?”—was described neutrally, as one of the “new black leaders” who “disagreed with King.” Martin Luther King himself, whom many conservatives still considered a Communist, was compared to Gandhi and Jesus Christ, “men of peace who gave their own lives to make the lives of others better.” The Gablers, for their part, asked Macmillan whether, if it was going to compare MLK to Jesus, it couldn’t at least mention Benjamin Franklin’s invocation to Christ at the Continental Congress. According to the Gablers, Macmillan refused, saying, “That would be teaching religion.”

  Conservatives felt victimized by a sort of radicalism that, because it graced Middle American classrooms, did not seem radical to most Americans at all. They felt victimized by the TV shows invading their living rooms, too. Take the one that opened its third season that September with an extended metaphor comparing the Korean War to a cesspool. M*A*S*H had debuted in the fall of 1972, an obvious commentary on the war that was still going on, and spent its first season at the bottom in the ratings—and survived, legend had it, only because of the pillow talk of CBS honcho William Paley’s wife, a fan. It was only in reruns in the summer of 1973 that ratings exploded. That was Watergate summer—and M*A*S*H fit the nation’s new anti-institutional mood.

  The villain was the guy who thought like John Wayne: Major Frank Burns, depicted as an oaf and hypocrite, his devotion to military discipline played for comic relief. (“I can’t disobey an order. Unless someone gives me an order to do it.”) The heroes, Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre, broke every rule, were constantly drunk on homemade moonshine, made incessant passes at nurses, and refused to recognize any moral distinction between the Communist North Koreans who were supposed to be the enemy and the South Koreans who were supposed to be America’s allies. (“Throw away all the guns and invite all the jokers from the North and the South in here for a cocktail party. Last one standing on his feet at the end wins the war.”) In one episode that fall, a Douglas MacArthur–type general dies in flagrante delicto. His aide-de-camp tries to get Hawkeye to falsify the paperwork to make it look like he fell leading troops into battle: “I appeal to your sense of decency. And your sense of fair play.” Comes back Hawkeye: “Make up your mind!” Everything traditional patriots held sacred was a colossal joke on M*A*S*H, except when it was a colossal tragedy—as in the episode that ran on October 8, 1974, without a laugh track, and just showed scene after scene of horrifying combat surgery. There had never been a situation comedy like this.

  For conservative parents who had had quite enough of all that, Kanawha County could be their Lexington and Concord. As Sweet Alice Moore put it to Paul Cowan of the Village Voice: “You just don’t understand what you’re doing to us. How can any school board force me to send my kids to a school that teaches that God is a myth, that justifies mothers who kill their young?”

  KEVIN PHILLIPS, NOW A NATIONALLY syndicated newspaper columnist, called this burgeoning populist movement of which Moore was a part the “New Right.” Soon, Charleston, West Virginia, became its mecca.

  A fledgling right-wing Washington, D.C., think tank called the Heritage Foundation sent two staffers to West Virginia. James McKenna, a lawyer who had won a string of cases defending the rights of parents to “homeschool” their children, came to the defense of the alleged terrorists under indictment for violence. Connie Marshner, another Heritage Foundation emissary, was a young University of South Carolina graduate who in 1971 had accepted a job on Capitol Hill as a secretary for Young Americans for Freedom, which was where she quietly transformed herself into a power player, as an expert on Senator Walter Mondale’s bill to establish a national system of federal child-care centers—the “therapeutic state invading the home,” Marshner said. On her own, she started a letterhead organization to fight the bill. When Nixon vetoed it, calling it a threat to “the family in its rightful position as a keystone of our civilization,” she claimed victory, and was hired as Heritage’s first director of education. Soon she was hard at work finding “little clusters of Evangelical, fundamentalist Mom’s groups” and transforming them into ground troops in the conservative movement army.

  The Heritage Foundation had been incorporated in February 1973. Its two key principals, young congressional staffers named Edwin Feulner and Paul Weyrich, had conceived the idea while working on legislation to preserve funding for a supersonic transport plane. Washington’s existing right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, came out with a paper favoring their position—after, however, Congress voted down the idea. Weyrich complained to AEI’s president, William Baroody. Baroody defended his organization: “We didn’t want to try to affect the outcome of the vote.” It was then that these two conservative firebrands decided AEI had outlived its usefulness: the point of a think tank shouldn’t be sobersided scholarship. It should be political action.

  They approached an eager funder, the beer magnate Joseph Coors, who agreed. Within four months of Heritage’s founding, Feulner and Weyrich were boasting of helping to kill a number of wage and price controls, cutting federal mass transit funding, keeping strikers from access to food stamps, and making progress toward a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. A year later, they saw the civil war in Kanawha as an opportunity to build their strategic capacity yet further. “If you pick the right fight at the right time,” McKenna later reflected on this moment in Heritage’s history, “it can be profitable. You can make your political points, you can help the people involved, and you can become a force in the political community.”

  A self-described “populist militant” named Robert Hoy came, too, aiming to link the activists in Massachusetts and West Virginia—to serve, he wrote, “as an introduction service among otherwise isolated groups around the country,” to turn “the controversy from a local dispute over a few textbooks into a debate with national implications about basic questions of power and cultural destiny.” The Gablers arrived. A group called Citizens for Decency Through Law, led by a Cincinnati banker named Charles Keating, sent Robert Dornan, the Orange County TV host who had invented the POW bracelet and had recently hung Jane Fonda in effigy after a mock trial on the campus of the University of Southern California.

  Conservatives used to call people like this “outsider agitators.” They were supposed to be in retreat, Joseph Kraft had just informed the cognoscenti. And on October 6, they were the stars of a Sunday night rally before eight thousand people, right alongside the self-ordained Holy Roller pr
eachers wearing combat fatigues and coonskin caps and buckskin boots, as things started getting insane.

  “If we don’t protect our children we’ll have to account for it on the day of judgement!” Rev. Horan cried. The next day he was among the twenty militants arrested at a garage for sabotaging school buses. So was Rev. Graley, who was immediately sentenced to a sixty-day jail term. Twelve hours later, in protest, two elementary schools were firebombed.

  Kanawha County, West Virginia, and Boston, Massachusetts: the same sort of politics of rage was coursing through both. In Boston that day a Haitian maintenance man stopped at a red light and was nearly beaten to death by a gang wielding hockey sticks. The next day 1,500 students poured out of Roxbury High after someone pulled a fire alarm. They rained stones on the adjacent Mission Hill neighborhood and overran riot-equipped police. The next day Judge Garrity refused the mayor’s request to deploy federal marshals. President Ford was asked in that afternoon’s news conference whether he would seek to change the judge’s mind. Sandwiched between a boilerplate denunciation of violence and a shrugging apology that he had no power to intrude on another sovereign branch of government, Ford gratuitously offered the opinion that Judge Garrity’s decision was “not the best solution to quality education in Boston.”

  White kids at Southie, as if in celebration, started a riot at lunch. Two weeks later, the White House made its first statement on Kanawha. Spokesmen pledged to do “whatever we can to help forestall additional violence in Charleston.” This sounded neutral and conciliatory, but it actually followed a two-hour meeting between Ford’s special assistant and anti-textbook activists, including the preacher who had circulated the flyer with the giant penis, Rev. Graley, who had just spent eleven days in jail for illegal picketing. From the jailhouse to the White House: Graley emerged to report to the media that a presidential assistant had assured him he had “read the books and said he was very shocked and depressed by what he had seen.” Graley also announced that protesters had no intention of ceasing any of their activities. The next day a stick of dynamite was hurled through a window into an elementary school classroom containing hundreds of books and toys a teacher had spent a decade collecting for kids whose families could not afford them.

  ONE OF THE THINGS RICHARD Nixon had been most expert at as president was damping the ideological passions of his party’s right wing. Now, with Nixon gone, those passions thrummed. And when Ford appointed Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller as his vice president, those passions exploded.

  For Ford the choice was easy: Rockefeller was most qualified to be president. The New York Times had trilled how the appointment “reunited venerable symbols of Main Street and Wall Street in a balmy revival of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inclusive, middle-ground politics.” But the conservatives for whom Kanawha was a debutante’s ball were not having any of that. Barry Goldwater had become their hero in the 1950s precisely by savaging Dwight Eisenhower’s centrism. Nelson Rockefeller was their villain for taking on Barry Goldwater. No matter that “Rocky” had moved far to the right since—for instance by passing the nation’s most stringent drug law. No matter that Jerry Ford had sided with them on Boston and Kanawha. These were long-memoried elephants. They saw Ford’s pick as his declaration of war against them. The American Conservative Union polled its members about what project they wished to see the group take on; they chose a movement to “discredit Rockefeller.” Senator Helms, for his part, said the divorced and remarried Rockefeller “stole another man’s wife” and advanced abortion legislation (he’d done neither); Helms testified before the Rules Committee that as a representative of “a dynasty of wealth and power unequaled in the history of the United States,” Rockefeller could never place “the survival of the national interest” over “the survival of ingrained dynastic values.” He added, “Needless to say Senator Gold-water is my choice for the vice presidency.”

  He didn’t name Ronald Reagan. The California governor had been talked up as a possibility, first after Agnew’s resignation, then with Ford’s ascent. But it turned out he hadn’t even been on Ford’s list of top prospects. (Second place had been George Herbert Walker Bush, but Jules Witcover of the Washington Star noted, “Everyone knowledgeable in Republican politics considered Bush incompetent to be President.”) Then Rockefeller told the press his new boss had “every intention” of seeking a full term in 1976. The UPI put out a story the next day quoting one of Reagan’s political associates: “The chances of Gov. Ronald Reagan running for president or vice president in 1976 seemed to go out the window.” Reagan, shrugging it off—he never admitted to seeking the presidency anyway—said it would have “no effect” on his plans to continue on the mashed potato circuit. The next week he humped it out to Maryland to speak at an event for Congressman Robert Bauman, the former chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, where he held that Ford dared not defy the “conservative mandate” of 1972—as if nothing at all had happened since Nixon won that mandate.

  At Ford’s first presidential news conference a reporter noted that “already some of your natural, conservative allies are grumbling that you are moving too far to the left. Does that trouble you?” He shrugged, indicating that it did not—and said that none of his decisions “fall in the political spectrum of left and right.” Evans and Novak filed their next syndicated column in the autumn of 1974 dismissing the potential of a right-wing ideological rebellion against Ford—concluding it came from “a fringe of hardcore Reaganites . . . desperate to breath life into Reagan’s expiring presidential hopes.” In one paper that column was accompanied by a syndicated cartoon depicting two draft dodgers working off their crime with picks and shovels as Reagan walked by bearing an “AMNESTY FOR NIXON” picket sign. “Say,” one asks the other. “Isn’t that Ronald Reagan leading the new wave of permissiveness?”

  This rattletrap “New Right” knew no compromise; its latest outrage was over conservative senators Barry Goldwater, John Tower, and Strom Thurmond not seeking to block Rockefeller’s confirmation. Evans and Novak reported that these rightists were proposing a third-party presidential run by Reagan. Third parties being the last refuge of losers, “the Reagan rebellion,” the duo concluded, “would soon be forgotten.”

  The president was not paying much attention. On September 23 he attended the Ninth World Energy Conference in Detroit, a conclave dominated by what used to be called the Third World, now known more respectfully as the “Lesser Developed Nations” since they had started using their natural resources to bid for superpower status. They seemed like the tail that wagged the First World dog. At the meeting, Ford all but threatened war against the next nation engaged in “rigging and distortion of world commodity markets.” Henry Kissinger, speaking at the United Nations, offered similar threats: “The world cannot sustain even the present level of prices, much less continued increases.” Unbowed, Kuwait’s oil minister replied, “No one can wave a finger at us because we will wave a finger back.”

  FOUR DAYS LATER THE PRESIDENT learned that a lump in his wife’s right breast was malignant, and that even a full mastectomy might not contain the cancer. He had little time to worry, as he was putting the finishing touches on his speech introducing an unprecedented two-day open-door “conference on inflation.” Eight hundred invited guests including the nation’s top economists from both parties, and more than 1,200 onlookers and reporters jammed the International Ballroom at the Hilton Hotel in Washington as if Mick Jagger were about to give a graduate seminar. A certain degree of partisanship ensued. Right-wing economists recommended ending the U.S. Postal Service’s monopoly on first-class mail, the Davis-Bacon Act mandating fair wages on government construction projects, and certain other federal regulations; labor-aligned economists asked Ford to keep wage and price controls. More extraordinary, however, was the thing on which the economists agreed. It was named by a brand-new word, one that would haunt the rest of the decade: stagflation.

  Paul Samuelson, the 1970 winner of the Nobel Prize for economics and author of the f
ield’s definitive textbook, had twenty years earlier made a famous description of the triumphs of Keynesian economic science: “By the proper choice of monetary and fiscal policy we as the artists, mixing the colors of our palette, can have the capital formation and rate of current consumption that we desire.” The formulation was translated into layman’s terms by no less than Richard Nixon, in his 1969 inauguration speech: “We have learned at last to manage a modern economy to ensure its continued growth.” It was one of those rare things in politics, a genuine consensus. It was, in fact, one of the reasons there existed a Nobel Prize for economics, first bestowed in 1969—the formerly dismal science’s reward for devising an intellectual endeavor that seemed genuinely to maximize the public good for all.

  Until, that is to say, these mid-1970s, when the economy stopped growing, and, as with a car thrown into neutral, furious application of all the old managerial tools brought no solution at all.

  At his turn at the apex of the giant U-shaped table at the Hilton, Samuelson tried to explain why—though he wasn’t too certain himself. It used to all be so simple: Economists knew that inflation and economic growth had a simple inverse relation. That if the economy stagnated, the Federal Reserve could loosen the money supply, or Congress could induce government spending, and the economy would speed back to health. Or if inflation was the problem, the economy could be cooled into balance by checks on government spending or by increased taxes—such as the income surtax Ford had proposed earlier that month. But that trade-off no longer worked, the bow-tied Democratic economist explained: “Our number one problem is ‘stagflation’ ”—stagnation and inflation, simultaneously. Which, under the previously prevailing Keynesian theories, could not possibly coexist. But there now was no consensus among economists, nor even any promising theory, about what to do.