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

by Rick Perlstein

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  * * *

  Watergate Babies

  FISHBAIT WAS GONE.

  William “Fishbait” Miller had been the official doorkeeper of the House of Representatives since 1949. Sixty-five years old, fat, his straight gray hair parted down the middle and his ties unfashionably thin, he was vaguely recognizable to the country for the magnolia drawl that announced presidents, prime ministers, generals, and queens before joint sessions of Congress. But his post was also an administrative one, for which he was paid $40,000 a year (House members made $42,500), and for which he controlled 340 patronage workers. He got and kept the job as reward for holding the coat of Mississippi reactionary William Colmer since the congressman’s first campaign in 1932. He never was particularly good at his job, such as that job was; at one joint session he was supposed to announce a dignitary whose face he couldn’t quite recall. A member from Texas whispered to him, “For God’s sake, Fishbait, it’s the Chief Justice!” He was, instead, the perfect symbol of the Dixie-crats’ corrupt control of Capitol Hill. So in a move symbolic of their determination to break that power, the seventy-five new House freshmen voted in a bloc at the first Democratic caucus meeting on December 2, 1974, for his dismissal.

  Wilbur Mills had managed to survive his reelection campaign. In December, the morning of the caucus meeting that cashiered Fishbait, the front pages reported that Fanne Foxe, the Argentine Firecracker, made her stripping debut in Boston. The event was newsworthy enough to draw a clutch of political reporters—whose astonishment was visible in the pictures that appeared on the nation’s front pages of the eighteen-term solon leaping onstage and joining the show. Such was the image seared in Watergate Babies’ retinas as they reported that morning for the first battle in what the Washington Post called a “revolution,” and U.S. News & World Report labeled Washington’s “biggest power shake-up in more than a century.”

  One vote was over who would chair the caucus. The establishment candidate was B. F. Sisk, a sixty-five-year-old eleventh-termer and loyal member of the Rules Committee—in whose back rooms, for decades, power brokers from both parties decided which bills would live and which would die, and how debate over those they granted the gift of life would be systematically limited. “Debate,” in fact, was an overstatement; debates almost always took place under the notorious “closed rule,” which made it all but impossible to amend a bill on the floor.

  Sisk’s opponent, Democratic Study Group fixture Phillip Burton, had led a fight to pressure the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1973 to report out the first bill since the 1920s without a closed rule. The bill called for ending funding in Vietnam by a fixed date. “For the first time, we in DSG have broken through the parliamentary barricades erected by the Republican-Dixiecrat conservative coalition and forcefully condemned the Nixon administration’s unnecessary prolongation of this bloody war,” Burton gloated then. Now, the Republican-Dixiecrat coalition was in retreat, DSG was in the saddle, and with the votes of almost every one of the freshmen, Phil Burton became chair of the 94th Congress’s mighty Democratic caucus.

  Then, over the next few days, they got to work reinventing the House. First, they took away from Mills’s Ways and Means Committee the power to pick who served on committees. Then, since Ways and Means was still powerful enough, they expanded its membership from 25 to 37, diluting the clout of its incumbent membership by adding reform-minded youngsters.

  On December 10, 1974, Wilbur Mills retired. Promptly, House freshmen caucused and summoned all the other old committee chairs to audition, before what seventy-four-year-old Armed Services Committee chairman F. Edward Hébert of Louisiana called “a mob of crusading knights out to slay evil dragons.” Hébert lied to their faces about his record approving nearly every request the Pentagon ever made. Then he said “we should have bombed the hell out of” North Vietnam.

  One fresh feature of the 94th Congress was its six new women, bringing the total to eighteen, a record. One of them, thirty-five-year-old Pat Schroeder of Colorado, had seen her 1972 campaign as an antiwar housewife spied on by the FBI. At the meeting, she accused Hébert of having discriminated against her in the Armed Services Committee (he had once insisted she and the committee’s black member, Ron Dellums, literally share a seat in the hearing room) because she was a woman. He responded that he would have treated her better if she had acted like a woman. The caucus fired him by a vote of 152–133. Afterward, to reporters waiting outside the hearing room, he called his inquisitors “boys and girls.” He was not entirely wrong. One of them, freshman representative Tom Downey of New York, had attended his first peace march ten years earlier, at the age of fifteen.

  Appropriations chair George Mahon (seventy-five years old) and the half-deaf chairman of the Agriculture Committee, W. R. Poage (seventy-six), who voted against the majority Democratic Party position more than he voted for it, were unhorsed for what a Common Cause report called “serious abuses” of procedural fairness and “arbitrary” treatment of colleagues. (Poage was replaced by the chairman of the Democratic Study Group.) Wright Patman lost his chairmanship of Currency and Banking, not for being a reactionary—he had been fighting concentrated power since the Progressive Era, and was the first congressman to undertake an investigation of Watergate—but solely for his age. “You can’t have an 81-year-old chairman,” even one who “was a hero to 90 percent of us,” a young insurgent of the first Congress in history with an average age under fifty told the Associated Press. “Congress will never be the same,” another new member told the press. “It’s permanent. . . . I think the feeling is the sun is shining and now we really have a chance to do something.”

  One Old Bull, however, portentously survived. Wayne Hays of Ohio was known on Capitol Hill as the “meanest man in Congress.” His Administration Committee enjoyed few powers outside the Capitol building but was a dictatorship within it. In charge of congressional staff allowances and benefits, he was known to cut them, and even to shut off members’ air-conditioning, to settle personal scores—and to dock the pay of elevator operators and barbers who would not put up with his voluminous abuse. The New York Times called him “a disgrace to Ohio, the Democratic Party, and the House of Representatives.” An Ohio paper pointed to his committee’s one jurisdictional power of national import—federal election law—and claimed his work delaying implementation of the 1971 campaign finance law “made Watergate possible.” But congressmen had a use for their very own sonofabitch: with his committee doling out perquisites like stationery allowances and government-paid trips home, they didn’t have to vote for such appropriations themselves, on the House floor, on the public record. Such hustles seemed just the thing the Watergate Babies had in their sights. But after the Steering and Policy Committee voted 13–11 to strip his chairmanship, Hays began a furious overnight lobbying campaign promising to bestow on them more fringe benefits and a pay increase. Which his committee didn’t have the jurisdiction to give—until, after the caucus voted to save him, they voted to newly give it to him.

  “The clear inference,” newspapers reported, “was that Congress expects Hays to give them a pay hike.” Hays then confirmed the inference by telling reporters that “our take-home pay is like that of a peasant.” (It was about four times America’s median household income.) “The new idealists betrayed a small streak of venality,” Howard Smith editorialized on ABC; the Washington Post said that “self-styled congressional reformers have tackled the establishment in order to establish themselves instead.” Ralph Nader, whose Congress Watch had built much of the intellectual case for the House’s decrepitude, cried sellout: “This is the type of political wheeling and dealing built on conflicts of interest that was widely rejected by voters in November. Surely the reform-minded members of the 94th Congress can do better than to perpetuate a man in office [in] response to the same old tradeoffs that have bred such cynicism about Congress in the public mind.”

  The Republican Party, it was true, seemed near to death.
The Washington Post’s new conservative columnist George Will said visiting Republican National Committee headquarters was like visiting “the set for a political disaster flick, a political Poseidon Adventure.” The bank holding the mortgage on the Capitol Hill Club, the private retreat where Republicans took their refreshment, was threatening to foreclose on the place. The party’s pollster, Robert Teeter, explained that a majority of Americans considered Republicans “untrustworthy and incompetent.” But here was a lesson Democrats would have all too much occasion to contemplate in the years ahead: to claim the mantle of purity is always a risky business. It just gives voters an excuse to be disillusioned once your ordinary humanity is exposed. How long did the new Congress’s reputation for purity last? Two months, possibly. That was when a Maryland senator surveyed his constituents: “Do you have confidence in the ability of Congress to deal with today’s problems?” They answered “no” by a margin of two to one. Commented a Baltimore couple: “We don’t have enough confidence—or trust—in our congressmen to let them take out the garbage.”

  AMERICA STILL SEEMED ENTIRELY ROTTEN; no wave of bright-eyed reformers could change that. On Christmas morning a twenty-five-year-old model in Queens was beaten to death in her apartment, her neighbors ignoring the screams—in the same redbrick building where Kitty Genovese had lived. (Genovese had become a household name in 1964 after the New York Times reported that thirty-eight witnesses did nothing while she was knifed to death.) The new movie packing theaters was The Godfather: Part II. In a pivotal scene, a senator from Nevada wakes up from an alcoholic haze to see an unconscious prostitute—at which a consigliere assures the panicked politician that in exchange for his protecting the mobsters’ criminality, no one need know that he murdered a hooker. In another, the heads of major American corporations sit around a table with mobsters, and President Batista of Cuba at the head; then a coven of mobsters conspires to divide Cuba as if divvying up a cake. “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel,” one says, and talks about putting a friendly president in the White House.

  A banner headline in the December 22 edition of the New York Times read: “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.” The article, by Seymour Hersh, reported that the spy agency had collected intelligence files on at least ten thousand American citizens in direct violation of its 1947 charter stipulating that it was allowed to work only outside the United States. The article also documented “dozens of other illegal activities by members of the C.I.A. in the United States, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping, and the surreptitious inspection of mail.” The jump took up nearly an entire inside page, with its tone of Orwellian menace suggested by the caption describing an image hovering above a photo of the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters: “The agency’s emblem symbolizes vigilance, directed to all points of the compass.”

  That long national nightmare that was supposed to be over: perhaps it was only beginning.

  The Times ran thirty-two stories over the next two and a half weeks on a scandal that appeared to reach far deeper into “the system” than Watergate itself, reaching through the tenure of that supposed innocent, John F. Kennedy, all the way back to placid old Dwight D. Eisenhower. President Ford, caught unawares on the way to a ski vacation in Vail, Colorado, frantically backfilled to contain the damage. On January 5 he named a panel to be chaired by Vice President Rockefeller to investigate the allegations—like the panel in The Parallax View, you might say. One member, Douglas Dillon, a defense establishment überinsider and Rockefeller Foundation board member, had been privy himself to CIA secrets while serving under presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Another, General Lyman Lemnitzer, had as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deleted questions on the U-2 spy plane program for a 1962 House hearing. (According to one concerned congressman, it was “like the attempt of the totalitarian government described in George Orwell’s book 1984 to rewrite history to suit the viewpoint of the government”; the congressman’s name was Gerald Ford.) Another member, Lane Kirkland, was a top officer in the AFL-CIO, an organization so cooperative with hard-line Cold Warriors that its critics on the left dubbed it the “AFL-CIA.” Rockefeller himself had been a member of Richard Nixon’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the tiny top-secret civilian review panel that signed off on all covert activities. That meant that any genuine exposé of CIA abuses by this Rockefeller commission would . . . expose members of the Rockefeller commission. “Having the CIA investigated by such a group,” the Times editorialized, “is like having the Mafia audited by its own accountants.”

  On January 19 came news of the publication in Britain of a shocking book-length exposé from an exiled former CIA agent, Philip Agee, called Inside the Company: A CIA Diary. That same day, the Washington Post confirmed rumors that J. Edgar Hoover had compiled files on the personal lives of congressmen—and, one week later, that the FBI had bugged Martin Luther King at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. By February the new Congress planted its flag on the Sam Ervin model: both houses voted select committees to investigate both the FBI and the CIA—which, pace the injunction in Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution that “[n]o money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time,” had never had its budget reviewed by Congress, save for a tiny cadre of insiders who were given the tiniest little peek. One of them, John Stennis (Gerald Ford had been another), explained in 1971 how that system worked: “You make up your mind that you are going to have an intelligence agency and protect it as such, and shut your eyes some and take what is coming.”

  Not anymore. Between 1947 and 1974 some four hundred bills had been introduced to improve congressional oversight of intelligence agencies. All had come a cropper. But it took just two hours of debate for the Senate to pass this one, by a vote of 82–4; the world was different now. “In this year—so soon after Watergate—we cannot leave in doubt the operations and activities of agencies involved in such sensitive and secret endeavors,” conservative Democrat Walter Huddleston of Kentucky said. Republicans were if anything harsher. Howard Baker, who had earlier tried and failed to charter an investigation on the CIA’s role in Watergate, articulated a “shuddering fear” that the CIA was out of control. The Pennsylvania liberal Republican Richard Schweiker called it a “shadow government.” Even Barry Goldwater, the security establishment’s best friend, acceded to its investigation: “If surgery is required, let it be performed only after the most careful diagnosis.” The suspicious circles, it seemed, were in the saddle.

  THUS ARRIVED AN UNLIKELY DEVELOPMENT: chasing spooks became a political opportunity. Frank Church, the liberal Democratic senator from Idaho, a longtime critic of the CIA (“I will do whatever I can, as one senator,” he had said years earlier, “to bring about a full-scale congressional investigation of the CIA”) and scourge of the Vietnam War (“a monstrous immorality”)—and a presidential hopeful—maneuvered himself into the chairmanship of the new Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. And for one of the members of the new Rockefeller commission, CBS reported, “the assignment could help keep presidential hopes alive.”

  That would be Governor Ronald Reagan, a surprise pick that had Washington insiders wondering if President Ford—approval rating: 42 percent—was more worried about a nomination challenge than anyone had previously thought. The New York Times did not approve. Reagan, it reported in a February article that read like an editorial, had “missed three of the four weekly meetings of the Presidential commission investigating the Central Intelligence Agency.” He “reportedly told President Ford when he was asked to join the panel that his speaking engagements might conflict with the meetings.” His secretary promised Reagan would “catch up by reading the transcripts of the missed sessions”—though
, “according to the commission staff, Mr. Reagan has not yet visited the commission headquarters, where hundreds of pages of transcripts are kept in locked files.” Instead, “During January, he gave seven ‘major addresses’ to such groups as the International Safari Club, in Los Vegas.”

  Who could take seriously a lightweight like that? Though CBS still spied a possible opening for a Reagan presidential bid: “If the economy overwhelms President Ford.” Portents hinted at just that. In fact, that news was getting downright apocalyptic.

  In December economists announced that the nation was officially in a recession. By January the projected annual growth rate was negative 5 percent. A Harris poll found only 11 percent of the country thought Ford was “keeping the economy healthy.” Even the Godfather of Soul got into the act: “People! People! Got to get over, before we get under,” growled James Brown in a new hit that was number four on the R&B charts: “There ain’t no funky jobs to be found. Taxes going up . . . now I drink from a paper cup. Gettin’ bad!”

  On the heels of a Pentagon move to eliminate 11,600 civilian jobs at military bases, the auto industry announced 40,000 layoffs. Ford Motors cut production schedules at eleven of its twenty North American assembly plants and most of its forty-five manufacturing plants. Chrysler laid off almost 11,000 white-collar workers. American Motors idled 7,000 workers in one plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, alone. In New Hampshire, a textile mill that had been in business since 1823 was scheduled to shutter. Maryland’s largest private employer, the four-mile-long Sparrows Point steel complex, began laying off thousands; 100,000 steel workers lost their jobs nationwide between the previous summer and the upcoming fall; in December 1974—Christmastime—185,000 blue-collar workers found themselves without work. Businesses and consumers preferred products made elsewhere: foreign car sales were up 20 percent, American cars down almost 13. The Economist said, “Capitalism is being tested everywhere. Many people believe it is dying.” It called the closing of 150 investment banks and securities dealers in the United States in recent weeks “some of the worst failures since the Great Depression.” The National Association of Home Builders called the slump in its industry “far and away the worst since the Depression.”