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

by Rick Perlstein

  Since the Depression: a new household phrase.

  It felt as if America did not even own itself. “Will Araby Bankrupt the World?” the January 25 Saturday Review cover asked. Rumor was that Saudis had bought up all the real estate in Beverly Hills. Arabs had bought us, yes, but they also hated us: in one page-turner selling out at airport book stores, Black Sunday, Palestinians had no trouble recruiting one of those sturdy patriotic heroes of 1973, a Vietnam prisoner of war, his brain too addled by torture to resist, to pilot an explosives-laden blimp into the Super Bowl; in another, The Gargoyle Conspiracy, Arabs assassinate the secretary of state. (Time noted jocularly that the Arab-bashing thrillers might someday no longer be published, if the Arabs bought all the publishing companies.) Meanwhile, the real-life secretary of state, in a Christmastime interview in BusinessWeek, hinted that a military strike to seize Middle East oil fields outright might be imminent. Then he left for a hat-in-hand tour of Arab capitals, as if making amends.

  Gerald Ford, in his January 15 State of the Union address, was hardly more comforting: “I must say to you that the state of our Union is not good,” he said. No president had ever told the citizenry anything like that.

  But Ronald Reagan as the answer? His preferred solution to the crisis—turning management of the economy even more over to private interests—didn’t sound right even to the conservative City of London gentlemen who edited the Economist. They opined that much of the blame for capitalism’s tests lay with “a concentration of money into the hands of a few big banks, even more than these giants know what to do with.”

  In any event, with Ford tacking to the right, it was hard to see what room Reagan might have to maneuver. “FORD LAUDED BY WALL STREET ON INFLATION,” read a headline about his speech to securities analysts who “generally applauded what they saw as President Ford’s renewed determination to tackle inflation, rather than recession, as the nation’s chief economic problem.” He gave speeches in which he said things like “We face a critical choice. . . . Shall we slide headlong into an economy whose vital decisions are made by politicians while the private sector dries up and shrivels away?” The major economic idea in his State of the Union message was a tax rebate of around one hundred dollars for the average American, which was just the sort of thing a President Reagan would be likely to propose.

  “President Reagan”—that inconceivable phrase. Ronald Reagan, who was still defending Richard Nixon, and who said two weeks before Gerald Ford’s pardon that “the punishment of resignation is more than adequate for the crime.”

  Ronald Reagan, who told CBS “I hope to devote my time to hitting the sawdust trail and preaching the gospel of free enterprise”—“the gospel,” like this was revealed truth or something.

  This in a country where the most talked-about new bipartisan legislative proposal was soon to be Jacob Javits and Hubert Humphrey’s “Balanced Growth and Economic Planning Act,” which attempted to grow the country out of stagflation by setting up an Office of National Economic Planning to govern such heretofore unregulated parts of the economy as factory production, and which would submit six-year plans to Congress every twenty-four months. This might once have sounded like something out of the Soviet Union. But now—why not? One of Ford’s aides, who would go on to become vice chairman of Goldman Sachs, thought Ford should co-opt the idea as his own, as “a highly constructive presidential initiative.” Intellectuals devoured the arguments of sociologist Daniel Bell, in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, “that, today, we in America are moving away from a society based on a private-enterprise market system toward one in which the most important economic decisions will be made at the political level, in terms of consciously defined ‘goals’ and priorities.’ . . . A turn to non-capitalist modes of social thought . . . is the long-run historical tendency in Western society.”

  Indeed the general public agreed. Free enterprise as “gospel”? When Gallup asked voters whether wage and price controls should be put back into effect—the most proximate example of the kind of thing Bell was talking about—66 percent said yes. When they asked how to deal with inflation, only 12 percent gave Reagan’s answer: cut government spending. Only 6 percent of the public said that when unions asked for too much money it caused higher prices—Reagan’s other favorite economic claim.

  Columnist Colman McCarthy’s year-in-review piece in the Washington Post announced, “We live in a time of collapse with expressions of hope . . . no brighter than Albert Camus’ belief: ‘The important thing is not to be cured but to live with one’s ailments.’ ”

  It wasn’t the 1920s anymore. Ronald Reagan?

  As it happened, there was a new biography out of Reagan’s favorite author of boys’ books, Horatio Alger. It advertised on its back cover its central Woodward-and-Bernstein-like investigatory find, an 1866 letter from the members of Alger’s Unitarian congregation: “Horatio Alger. Jr., who has officiated as our minister for about 15 months past has recently been charged with gross immorality and a most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys. . . .”

  These were suspicious times. Heroes were what you were supposed to throw from pedestals. And yet here was gee-whiz, aw-shucks Ronald Reagan, acting like nothing had changed. Who when CBS inquired about his presidential ambitions demurred, like a Boy Scout, as always: “Anyone who is approached by his fellow citizens and is called to duty would have to give it serious consideration.” But his fellow Republicans weren’t interested; according to Gallup, 16 percent wanted him as their nominee—the same number as wanted to go back to Barry Goldwater.

  Ronald Reagan. Who, now that he had ceded the governor’s chair to Jerry Brown, was launching a new enterprise: a daily five-minute radio homily that his representatives claimed would soon be running on more than three hundred stations around the country.

  LATE IN REAGAN’S SECOND TERM in Sacramento, after he announced he wouldn’t run for a third, two top gubernatorial aides with backgrounds in public relations, Peter Hannaford (introspective, bespectacled, brainy) and Michael Deaver (intense, practical, a tough negotiator), created a firm that made launching Ronald Reagan’s postgubernatorial career 60 percent of its business. What next, when he left Sacramento in January 1975? They entertained, then discarded, the notion of some sort of academic position at Pepperdine, the conservative Disciples of Christ university outside Malibu; likewise a job “as nominal head of a national organization, particularly one already known” (a conservative one like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the Freedoms Foundation, perhaps “even groups such as the Red Cross”), which might “provide ‘instant’ access and legitimacy for his opinions on a variety of topics.” Maybe PBS specials documenting his visits to college campuses; or an offer, conceptualized by a magnate in the dehydrated onion and garlic industry named J. H. Hume, to be funded by the right-wing oil heir Richard Mellon Scaife, to take up a “Distinguished Public Affairs Fellowship” from the Hoover Institution at Stanford, with the aim of crafting an “opus magnus [sic] in the form of a book of essays on solutions to national and international problems.”

  That idea, too, went nowhere. A proposed condition of the Hoover fellowship was the hope that “he would restrict his speaking engagements and traveling insofar as possible to allow time for his own studies,” which apparently did not entice. Another part of the offer that may have not have appealed to them was the stipend for the proposed half-time job: $25,000. One major goal for Deaver & Hannaford was to establish the governor as a viable presidential contender. Another was to make him a rich man. Memos larded with estimates of income and expenses flew around: speaking engagements estimated at an average fee of $5,000 per (soon he would be spending twelve to fourteen days a month on the road); freelance pieces under the governor’s byline (“In addition to exploring interview opportunities [e.g. PLAYBOY] we should target for sales of six RR articles to major magazines at an average sale of $1,000”); ta
lks with superagent Irving “Swifty” Lazar about a book deal with Knopf—for a “total estimated income” anticipated in one planning document at “Net: $134,440 . . . plus income from consulting, board memberships, personal investments, State retirement fund” (his actual earnings in 1975 were reportedly close to $800,000).

  Like any corporate enterprise, the project had to be capitalized, and like any ambitious political enterprise—it was both—it needed to establish a reliable list of potential future supporters. Plans were laid for a direct mail campaign, the one stone to kill two birds: “To keep the nation following the conservative mandate of 1972 and to warn of the alternative—a neo-Socialist planned economy—we must speak out across America,” ran the proposed pitch over Reagan’s printed signature, to go out to the conservative mailing lists. “This takes time and money. I’m willing to invest the time, but I’m not a Rockefeller or a Kennedy, and I need your help to pay the costs.”

  A column was syndicated, with Hannaford, Pat Buchanan, and a young aide named Jeff Bell as ghostwriters, to be called “Viewpoint”; there was a full schedule of speeches, including, in April, one before the Pilgrim Society in London. (“RONALD REAGAN: A Program for the Future,” a Deaver & Hannaford strategy memo dated November 4, 1974, noted at heading “I. Political Goals,” subparagraph C: “Enhance foreign affairs credibility”). Possibly a syndicated radio program—though surely a more fertile field was television, for which a glamorous and lucrative proposal was on the table: a twice-weekly commentary spot on Walter Cronkite’s marquee newscast.

  Michael Deaver salivated at that one. Not the governor. As was frequently the case with his executive style, he was indifferent to details of his PR men’s execution, showing up at the Deaver & Hannaford office only a couple of days a week—but he could be forcefully specific on things that mattered to him. Like that office’s location: fifteen minutes from his Pacific Palisades home, he insisted, and fifteen minutes from the airport. And like the idea of a regular TV spot. “People will tire of me on television,” he said. “They won’t tire of me on the radio.”

  That Reagan constant: aware, always, of the gaze of others; reflecting on it, adjusting himself to it, inviting it; modeling himself, in his mind’s eye, according to how he presented himself to others; adjusting himself to be perceived as he wished others to perceive him. Radio it would be. The first two stations to pick him up in syndication were WOC in Davenport and WHO in Des Moines—the stations, forty-two years earlier, where he had made his broadcasting debut.

  “If you’re under the impression that federal food stamps are only available to the elderly and the poor, you’re in for a surprise. I’ll be right back.”

  “Why is the Consumer Protection Agency bill like a basket of kittens? It’s more than a riddle. It’s a fact of life. I’ll be right back.”

  “If you’re charged with breaking the law, you’re innocent until proven guilty. If you’re charged with breaking some bureaucrat’s regulation, it’s the other way around. I’ll be right back.”

  “If you’re not familiar with the term ‘boondoggle,’ consider the fact that our federal government recently underwrote the cost of a study dealing with Polish bisexual frogs. If that doesn’t give you a hint, stand by. I’ll be right back.”

  Thus opened his first week’s broadcasting efforts. After a commercial break, Reagan would satisfy the curiosity he’d stirred two minutes before with a simple, folksy story about a fundamentally sound, decent citizenry set upon by a government gone mad.

  If you’ve had the experience of standing in the checkout line in the supermarket next to a strapping young fella with a big basket of groceries who pays for them in food stamps, and you’re worrying how long you’ll be able to find the cash to feed your family, and you’ve paid your taxes, you’ve probably worried about the food stamp program and how it works.

  Not well, he went on to explain, telling the story of a father who made one hundred thousand dollars a year but whose college student son got food stamps in California, and another about a young woman in California who “took just enough college courses to avoid the food stamp work requirement who was studying to be a witch.”

  When you were young did you ever have the experience of trying to carry a basket of kittens? One would pop its head up and try to crawl up over the side of the basket and while you were trying to push him back down another would pop up on the other side of the basket, and it seemed there were more heads than you had hands?

  That was what you needed to know about the Consumer Protection Agency bill, an innocuous-sounding law (despised, Reagan didn’t say, by business lobbyists) that would create “a big new federal government bureaucracy that would have the power to supersede all other government agencies plus the power to take records and trade secrets from businesses and industries and make them public,” which was “as big a threat to our free economy as anything that’s been proposed.” When senators filibustered, then defeated cloture three times, “in an unprecedented break with tradition they tried a fourth time and failed. But don’t start a celebration. Like that basket of kittens, this one will pop again soon, maybe with a new title or maybe even as an amendment to some necessary piece of legislation that everyone supports.”

  It all went by fast, in a time before the casually suspicious could whip out laptop computers and google whether what he said was actually true—as, very often, it was not. Take the case of the Polish bisexual frogs: more than a year earlier, after an Idaho congressman introduced the “scandal” on the House floor, a columnist for an obscure little newspaper in Boca Raton, Florida, learned the research in question was of potential promise for understanding of how hybrids might improve the efficiency of agriculture—and had not been funded by American taxpayers at all.

  It was hard to see what such tidy fabulism could accomplish politically. In his second week on the air, for instance, Reagan claimed that worries about high unemployment amounted to “a case of mass hysteria,” an “artificially induced depression psychology,” and were all the fault of how the Bureau of Labor Statistics incorporated into the unemployment numbers bored housewives looking for part-time work in households “where poppa’s holding down a steady job,” and fourteen-year-olds who wanted paper routes. But if the BLS started counting properly, he boldly proclaimed, the unemployment rate would be only 1 percent.

  Two hundred thousand people had just been laid off in the automobile industry. Who was Ronald Reagan going to convince?

  Sixty-six percent of the public surveyed had recently told Gallup they did not want to reduce spending for “social programs such as health, education, and welfare programs.” RNC focus group research concluded, “The first thing that comes to people’s mind about the Republican Party is that it’s the party of big business.”

  And yet here was Ronald Reagan, blithely acting as if a mass electorate, incensed that “trade secrets from businesses and industries” would be made public, might rise as one against consumer protection and somehow turn the Republican Party into a fighting force in a nation that had just voted two to one for Democrats.

  But then his, after all, was the zeal of the convert. He had left Iowa in 1937 a “hemophiliac, bleeding heart liberal.” Then Hollywood, and a long, slow conversion. Let us pause to consider how it happened, and what that transformation might have meant for the future of the nation.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  Star

  IN 1935 RONALD REAGAN PREVAILED upon his radio employers to pay his travel expenses to a sumptuous resort off the coast of Orange County, California, Catalina Island, where the Chicago Cubs trained each February: the perfect opportunity, he convinced the boss, to store up a season’s worth of color to fill in between the Cubs’ telegraphed plays. In 1937, he made the trip for a third time, this time with an ulterior motive. Joy Hodges, a house vocalist at the station, had won a contract at RKO Studios; Hugh Hipple, a colleague from his previous station in Davenport, signed with Universal (Hollywood rechrist
ened him as “Hugh Marlowe”); then WHO’s country band, the Oklahoma Outlaws, was signed to appear in a Gene Autry singing cowboy picture.

  Joy Hodges had showed up in Des Moines for a personal appearance and sat down with Dutch for an interview.

  He asked, “Well, Miss Hodges, how does it feel to be a movie star?”

  He was wearing his riding breeches. She thought he looked very handsome. Though he couldn’t be quite sure how she looked. He never wore his glasses when he wished to impress.

  She answered, “Well, Mr. Reagan, you may know one day.”

  That February, before checking in with the Cubs at Catalina, he checked into a hotel at Hollywood and Vine. His first stop was Republic Pictures, where the Oklahoma Outlaws were filming their cowboy picture. The Western mythos had always fascinated him: Monmouth, Illinois, where his family moved when he was six, boosted itself as the hometown of Sheriff Wyatt Earp; in Dixon a beloved teacher regaled her class with tales of her adventures as a waitress at the Harvey House restaurants at railway depots in remote frontier outposts; at the movie house he whiled away hours in awe at “the marvelous flickering antics of Tom Mix and William S. Hart as they foiled robbers and villains and escorted beautiful girls to safety, waving back from their horses”—his kind of guys. Republic, however, was not his kind of studio. The white linen suit he had carefully picked out for the trip wilted in the heat, a casting director handed him a stack of old scripts—cut-rate formula Westerns, Saturday serials, B pictures shown at the bottom half of double bills—and invited him to pick a scene for an audition the following week. His aspirations were higher than that. He never returned.