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

by Rick Perlstein

  In their allergy to government activism they resembled Wisconsin’s Democratic senator William Proxmire, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, a former investment banker who in an interview in the New Republic “fondly allud[ed] to Ricardo, Marshall, and Pigou”—the grandfathers of neoclassical economics. Proxmire listed sixteen federal agencies he’d like to see go the way of all flesh—including the Small Business Administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission (because it “reduced competition” and protected “inefficient producers”), and, even though he was D.C.’s most famous jogger, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness (its work “should be left to individuals and private institutions”). He complained of his fellow Democrats, “Say ‘spend’ and they salivated.” “He seemed,” the New Republic’s reporter Thomas Geoghegan marveled, “to invite a taxpayer revolt against government itself.” His stock refrain was a Reaganite one: “If you want to get the government off your backs, get your hands out of the government’s pockets.”

  THIS NEW BREED OF DEMOCRATIC candidate was soon christened with a nickname: the Watergate Babies. JFK was their first vote, an indelible touchstone. “I would guess everyone my age remembers ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,’ ” David Broder quoted one of them, who was twenty-nine years old, as saying. Another, Norm Mineta, had devoted himself heart and soul to electing the first Catholic president as a rebuke to the prejudice he’d experienced as a Japanese-American who spent part of his childhood in a World War II internment camp. Joining the Kennedy campaign had steered Gary Hart away from a planned career as professor of philosophy and religion.

  A remarkable number of Watergate Babies were professors: the thirty-two-year-old Ball State political science prof who ran against Judiciary Committee Republican David Dennis; the Purdue professor, Floyd Fithian, up against Earl “don’t confuse me with the facts” Land-grebe; a chaplain on leave from Drexel University. Another of their formative political experiences was fighting against the Vietnam War. For example, an Iowa congressional candidate, Tom Harkin, was among the first to document the U.S.-built “tiger cages” in which our South Vietnamese allies tortured political prisoners. A candidate for the Democratic Senate nomination from New York, Texas-born Ramsey Clark, the son of Truman’s right-leaning attorney general, then Supreme Court justice, had traveled to Hanoi in 1972 at the invitation of the Communist Party.

  Clark chose as his campaign manager a radical journalist, Victor Navasky, whose last campaign experience was running for high school student government president. Clark limited donations to one hundred dollars a person and refused to hold a press conference to announce his candidacy. He wouldn’t spend sixteen thousand dollars for a “benchmark poll” (“How am I to explain to a poor person in Harlem that I had to spend $16,000 for a ‘benchmark’?”); he wouldn’t rent a cheap campaign office in the Empire State Building because the art deco masterpiece was “a symbol of Rockefeller money”; he had Frank Serpico and one of the leaders of the Attica prison riots put his name in nomination at the state convention. A profile in the left-wing magazine New Times (entitled “The Anti-Politician”) said it was as if campaign consultants had dreamed up “a candidate that would be positively unelectable”: “He’s lousy in crowds. Ignores his staff. Is bored by the press. Awkward shaking hands. Death on small talk. Wears suits out of the ’50s (the top and bottom seldom match) and, are you ready, hush puppies.” He shocked the New York Democratic establishment by winning. Then he called his Republican opponent Jacob Javits—who was nearly as liberal as he—a “Nixon thug.”

  Now, even reformers needed political machines. These couldn’t be labor unions—they were part of the ossified aristocracy that got us into this mess in the first place. (“We are not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” Gary Hart said about his young ideological fellow travelers, citing the politician most closely associated with the AFL-CIO.) Instead the reformers had Common Cause, the “citizen’s lobby” founded in August 1970 by John Gardner, the Republican former college professor and LBJ’s secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. He said he’d started the group because Washington was “teeming with interest groups. Everybody is organized but the people.”

  The “people” were not, by this reckoning, blue-collar construction workers perfectly happy to see their twenty-term congressman scratch colleagues’ backs in behalf of a project like the Supersonic Transport, the better to create union jobs. Common Cause was proud to have helped kill the SST. Instead, its several hundred thousand mailing-list members were well-educated, often suburban professionals whose most important political issues were reform of congressional processes, public financing of elections, and strict disclosure laws for both corporate and labor donations. Armed with this mailing list Common Cause had scored extraordinary successes both helping get the voting age lowered to eighteen and winning a lawsuit forcing the Committee to Re-elect the President to release the names of its donors—one of the things that had led to the Watergate investigation in the first place.

  Their electoral crusade for 1974 was christened “Open Up the System.” For it, they recruited six hundred volunteer “steering committee coordinators,” 350 “publicity coordinators,” and two hundred Washington-based full-time organizers, dedicated to training volunteers in classic campaign techniques. They were joined in their efforts by a media campaign sponsored by the Democratic Study Group, the liberal House caucus founded in 1959 by Eugene McCarthy to break the hold of the Jurassic seniority system, which had bottlenecked progressive legislation for generations. In the late 1960s they turned to fund-raising to elect like-minded colleagues, drafting Hollywood stars like Henry Fonda and Rod Serling as spokesmen. In 1974, they seized on Watergate as their opportunity to pack Congress with reformers to break the back of the seniority system once and for all. The Democratic National Committee kicked in with a surprisingly spirited coordinated effort, with the chairman of its campaign committee, the term-limited Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, surprising all and sundry with the Nixon-like intensity of his travel schedule in what in previous years had been a primarily ceremonial job.

  It was working. In October the president added three more states to his homestretch campaign tour. “Whip Inflation Now” was soon seen as a joke and a colossal political failure (a New York magazine cover story titled “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States” depicted Bozo the Clown on the presidential podium with a giant red “WIN” button in his tweedy lapel). So Ford abandoned his homespun homilies and campaigned by means of right-wing hysteria instead. The “election of these extremists of the Democrats Party,” he now said at campaign rallies, would threaten “the survival of the two-party system in the country.”

  THE WATERGATE BABIES, OVERWHELMINGLY, WON.

  Enough Democrats were elected to the House of Representatives to outnumber Republicans in the 94th Congress by a ratio of more than two to one; thirty-one members were holding elective office for the first time. Three new Democratic senators increased the Democrats’ margin in the upper chamber, 61 to 39. In a new survey on party identification by Republican pollster Robert Teeter, only 18 percent were willing to associate themselves with the GOP. States traditionally dominated by Republicans were now represented by Democrats: seven out of nine congressmen in Wisconsin, seventeen out of twenty-five in New England, five out of six in Iowa, nine out of eleven in Indiana. Gary Hart scored 23 percentage points more in Colorado than George McGovern had only twenty-four months earlier. Jerry Brown would be governor of California. He was thirty-seven years old. The man he replaced was sixty-four. (Ramsey Clark lost, after Jacob Javits exploited his trip to Hanoi.)

  However, what kind of mandate Hart, Brown, and their Watergate Babies possessed was not entirely clear. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee said the victory revitalized “the old Democratic coalition” of FDR. The New York Times said Democrats in Congress were confident they could now enact that long-anticipated liberal holy grail: nati
onal health insurance. But few of the newly victorious Watergate Babies had even mentioned such New Deal–style legislation on the campaign trail. Vermont elected its first non-Republican senator since the founding of the Grand Old Party in the 1850s, though that senator-elect, Patrick Leahy, said there was “no place for partisanship” in celebrating his victory. A thirty-two-year-old congressman-elect from Michigan, James Blanchard, said, “I’m not entirely sure what my political philosophy is.” Said Ronald Reagan of the Democratic speeches that fall, “Listening to them I had the eerie feeling we were hearing reruns of Goldwater speeches. I even thought I heard a few of my own.”

  Then there was the question of whether anyone was interested at all in following these new political leaders—or any sort of leader. Only a third of eligible Americans had bothered to cast a ballot. “Don’t vote. It only encourages them,” the bumper stickers said. Many of the bumpers that sported it still featured the sticker that popped up after Nixon was pardoned by Ford: “IMPEACH SOMEONE.”

  THE NEW RIGHT DIDN’T REGISTER in the electoral tallies. Four returned prisoners of war had won Republican primaries; one, Leo Thorsness, challenging George McGovern, received backing from both the White House and RNC chairman George H. W. Bush and a warm profile as an up-and-comer in the New York Times. All lost in the general election.

  The New Right registered in the streets and the hollers instead—where the electoral analysts in the media could safely ignore them, or dismiss them as crazies.

  In West Virginia the Thursday before Election Day, someone exploded fifteen sticks of dynamite under the gas meter at the school board building just minutes after the superintendent left (he had just announced he would start enforcing truancy laws). Thousands of anti-textbook protesters rallied in the Charleston Civic Center, wearing huge stickers reading JESUS WOULDN’T HAVE READ THEM, singing “Amazing Grace” and “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “America the Beautiful,” and cheering speeches about starting their own independent school system, given from a podium flanked by Old Glory on one side and a crucifix-emblazoned flag on the other. They shouted that it was time to shovel books into bonfires—a development that tested the limits of Paul Cowan’s empathy: “Some of these protesters,” he wrote, “were clearly capable of outright totalitarianism.”

  On November 8 the board voted 4–1 to return the most noncontroversial volumes to the curriculum and let the others be read only with special parental permission. Once more, compromise only poured gas on the flames. Dozens of white men patrolled Campbell Creek with shotguns, following rumors over citizens’ band radio that carloads of blacks were on their way to burn churches. The next day school buses were shot at, and a car owned by parents who insisted on sending their kids back to school was blown up. A police cruiser escorting a school bus was punctured by a rifle shot.

  In Boston, October ended with a tally of sixteen assaults against teachers. A two-thousand-car cavalcade snarled traffic from Quincy to South Boston. Then activists boycotted Election Day. On Thanksgiving Day, four thousand rallied at East Boston Stadium—replacing the annual Eastie-Southie football game, traditionally the greatest public event of the year, but not this year, because the football season had been canceled. On December 11, a white student was stabbed by a black student at South Boston High. A mob of white parents formed a blockade around the school to trap the black students and made ready to storm the building. Shattering glass; police horses charging. “Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers!” “Niggers eat shit! Niggers eat shit!” A chorus of mothers led that cheer. President Ford put the 82nd Airborne on alert.

  THE ELECTION OF A CONGRESS in which Democrats outnumbered Republicans two to one obscured a simple underlying fact: right-wing culture was not in retreat. You could see it in the ongoing celebration of POW heroes like Jeremiah Denton, now commandant of the Armed Forces Staff College, who on November 19 was awarded the Navy’s second-highest decoration, the Navy Cross, for blinking out the letters “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse code during a 1966 broadcast from North Vietnam he was forced to make. (He also said then to his captors, “I don’t know what is happening, but whatever the position of my government is, I support it fully. Whatever the position of my government, I believe in it, yes sir. I am a member of that government, and it is my job to support it, and I will as long as I live”—at which they tortured him yet more brutally, but never tried to use him for propaganda purposes again.) You could see it on the bestseller lists—but only if you knew how to look. A nonfiction thriller called Alive, for instance, spent twenty weeks on the New York Times list. The yarn about how twenty-nine South American student rugby players survived a plane crash in the frozen remote Andes seemed simply a riveting tale to those trend-spotters, in D.C., in Manhattan, in Hollywood, who didn’t understand the subculture that actually was driving the sales: evangelical Christians, enraptured by the fact that the students saw the most dramatic detail of their survival—cannibalism of their dead teammates’ preserved, frozen flesh—as, in the words of one survivor, going “back to the source of Christianity.” The continued explosion in sales of The Late, Great Planet Earth was invisible to those same cultural elites—because the Christian bookstores where many of its readers purchased it were not surveyed for bestseller lists.

  The elites paid more attention to the new, second report from the Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point, whose mass-market paperback edition announced, “Mankind today stands at the brink of a precipice.” It argued that unless worldwide birth control was instituted in the next twenty years, starvation and disease would claim as many people as would be born and that the OPEC-driven explosion in energy prices was a blessing in disguise, because under previous prices fuel would have run out by the end of the century. Science magazine found the book’s prescriptions “perhaps the only hope we have.” Time found its plea for “a truly interwoven global economic system in which all nations helped one another for economic gain” a convincing alternative to “mankind’s lemming-like rush toward disaster.”

  The 1968 book The Population Bomb was still selling (its worst-case scenario was the destruction of mankind in a nuclear holocaust by 1974; its best case was that America would be reduced to food rationing as most of the Third World fell to famine and anarchy). Paul Ehrlich, along with several other environmentalist writers, including Theodore Roszak, E. F. Schumacher, and Barry Commoner, published an anthology titled Notes for the Future. It proposed that precisely the things that were supposed to be the glory of our civilizations—technology, industry, the mastery of nature—were in fact “symptoms of a diseased society.” Left-leaning apocalypticism had become a background hum within mainstream politics. Ehrlich himself had become a regular on The Tonight Show.

  But both Alive and The Late, Great Planet Earth formed part of the background hum for their readers’ politics, too: both books, and many others, argued that the militantly secular culture suppressing the “Christian worldview” foretold a far worse disaster than mere environmental collapse—it foretold the end of the world in fire and brimstone. Other such volumes were more explicitly political—like The Politics of Pornography, a selection that fall of the Conservative Book Club, which proposed that “streaking and similar crazes” were part and parcel of the conspiracy to “replace the dominion of God with one that makes man the measure of all things.” Its author, Dr. Rousas J. Rushdoony, was a leader of a Christian Reconstructionist movement, which sought to “return” the United States government to biblical law. His 1972 book, The Messianic Character of American Education, which argued that “the nuclear family is the basic unit of God’s covenant” and that this unit was being deliberately undermined by the education establishment, which worshipped the false messiah of the secular humanist state, was an inspiration for the professional conservatives organizing in Kanawha.

  One place you could read about such books was Christianity Today—but not in the editorial content, which still took strikingly liberal positions. (The editors were so impressed with the arguments
in All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation that they came out in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. In their survey of eighty-seven denominational leaders, eight of fourteen Baptist officials supported it, too.) Most of its ministerial readers still stayed away from social issues entirely, hewing to a theologically informed reluctance to get involved in “worldly” concerns, traditional in evangelical circles ever since the humiliations of the 1925 Scopes trial. Instead, the politics of the emerging “Christian right” was most visible in Christianity Today’s margins—its literal margins, in the ad columns.

  “It is no longer expedient for Christians to be secluded from the mainstream of human events,” read an advertisement in the September 13, 1974, issue from the Christian Freedom Foundation, a Buena Park, California, organization underwritten by the fantastically wealthy, right-wing DeVos family of Michigan. “Our country was established on a certain harmony of values preserved by our Christian heritage. As long as the majority of citizens were committed to these basic values, compliance with standards and national stability followed. But now this value consensus is disappearing. The tidal wave of defection from former standards is sweeping away good laws which once held firm. The decline of conscience renders the law ineffectual. The end of self-restraint is paving the way for a breakdown of order itself.”

  It concluded: “This is not the time for either panic or lethargy; it is time for critical thought, brave commitments and vigorous action motivated by the love of Jesus Christ. It is time for responsible Christians to take a hand in the affairs of state.”