And yet somehow in Ronald Reagan’s hands this became a social policy miracle of loaves-and-fishes proportions. On the radio in the middle of 1975 he claimed that “in the 35 counties where it was tried, 25 percent more welfare recipients moved off welfare into jobs than in the state’s other 23 counties.” Why the statistical discrepancy? Because, he said, “thousands who refused to report were automatically dropped from the welfare rolls and not heard from again”—which didn’t explain why there were more welfare case in counties with the program than those without. In fact, what he said made no sense at all.
Governing is not a hero’s profession. It is a profession of compromises. Those pesky bureaucrats, always getting in the way with their infernal statistics; those issues whose incommensurate complexities don’t allow for Manichaean interpretation; the watchdogs of the press pointing out the contradictions. On the radio, though, when he was telling stories, no such compromises were necessary. Issues could be made to be Manichaean. The statistics were his to superintend. Now the only thing he was accountable for was rhetoric. Gerald Ford, however, enjoyed no such luxury.
RELUCTANTLY, AFTER CLAIMING AROUND THANKSGIVING that “our country is not in an economic crisis,” the president finally admitted it was. “I’ve got bad news,” he said in his State of the Union address, “and I don’t expect much, if any applause.” His proposal that night for $16 billion in temporary individual and corporate taxes cuts, which he thought of as a pragmatic reversal from his previous call for a tax hike, was dismissed as halfhearted by Democrats in Congress, who responded with a bill cutting taxes permanently by $22.9 billion. His right-wing Treasury secretary William Simon counseled a veto. Another economic advisor, Alan Greenspan, pointed out that a veto would represent Ford’s second reversal on basic questions of fiscal policy in only a few months. The press found out about the internal dispute. Successful presidencies manage to contain such palace politics. But regarding the Ford White House, Robert Novak later reflected, “More than any other president, struggles for power were leaked to reporters.” This one was resolved in favor of Greenspan—with the president vowing to kill all new spending programs that might add to the deficit. At which he was damned again, this time by the left.
That was nothing compared with the blows from his right. Young Americans for Freedom, calling the tax cut “not enough,” announced a mobilization for taxpayers to staple tea bags to their tax returns. Reagan, on the radio in February, said the $52 billion deficit written into Ford’s new budget proposal “abandoned his pledge of a balanced budget . . . made little more than four months ago” and required “borrowing on a scale too colossal to comprehend,” and also said that the debate in Washington now was not on “whether the federal government must learn to live within its means, but how profligate and irresponsible a government can be without either debauching the currency, squeezing business and consumers out of the money market, and heading toward . . . literal bankruptcy.”
And nothing compared to the abuse he now got from the press. The New Republic’s John Osborne wrote prior to the State of the Union address, “Gerald Ford is an awfully nice man who isn’t up to the presidency.” Tom Brokaw of NBC interviewed the president afterward and asked him “a question that isn’t easy to phrase, so I will just bore straight ahead with it. As you know, I’m certain, because I have been told that you have commented on this before, but it has been speculated on in print not only in Washington but elsewhere and it crops up in conversations from time to time in this town” (perhaps he was thinking of Lyndon Johnson’s oft-repeated bon mot: that Jerry Ford couldn’t fart and chew gum at the same time): “the question of whether or not you are intellectually up to the job of being president.”
Ford responded by pointing to his college grades—so reporters clamored for the White House to provide his transcripts. Suspicious times, these. Two dozen Republican conservatives soon announced they wouldn’t back a primary challenger to the president—“at this time.” Though Charles Percy, the liberal Republican senator from Illinois, was making explorations.
In March Ford signed the tax bill, including a $29.2 billion tax cut inserted by the Democrats, calling it the most difficult decision in his life—and had to admit on TV that “the tax cuts in the bill I have just signed and other changes will bring the estimated fiscal year 1976 deficit up to approximately $60 billion,” perhaps $100 billion if the “new spending actions which committees of the Congress were already seriously considering” were allowed to prevail.
Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. Reflected a historian, “In what became a familiar pattern, Ford’s efforts to unite the country around what he considered reasonable proposals succeeded chiefly in enraging and emboldening his political adversaries. . . . Each time Ford charged course, he looked less like a shrewd pragmatist or a man with the courage to change his mind than a confused flip-flopper.” Ronald Reagan would have just blithely denied that he had changed course.
GOVERNING IN A WORLD GONE Mad:
On January 24, crazed Puerto Rican nationalists bombed a historic tavern in Manhattan’s financial district where George Washington had delivered his farewell address to his troops; the Weather Underground staged near-simultaneous blasts at the State Department in Washington, D.C., and an Army induction center in the Oakland federal building. Its communiqué blamed President Ford’s request for $522 million in military aid to help South Vietnam stave off a Communist takeover. For his part, Ronald Reagan blamed the terror spree on the dissolving over the past few years of the House Committee on Internal Security, the successor to HUAC; the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department; and the Subversive Activities Control Board—actions taken by Congress, he said, in response to the “howls of complaint from a smorgasbord of Communist sympathizers” like Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, “who has backed causes such as the National Peace Action Committee, which was one of those identified as a Trotskyite front by the very House committee that’s being abolished.”
In February a slasher roamed the streets of Los Angeles, randomly slitting the throats of victims (but only, curiously, on Wednesdays and weekends). Two radical economists at the Institute of Policy Studies pegged the probability of a 1930s-style depression at 60 percent by 1978, thanks to multinational corporations “beyond the reach of traditional government controls.”
On, say, March 15, to take a random day, you could open a paper like the Milwaukee Journal and survey a cabinet of horrors just by flipping the pages: a Purdue University coed kidnapped by an assistant professor and held for three weeks “in an apparent experiment to brainwash her into falling in love”; thousands fleeing their riverbank homes after tornadoes across Arkansas and Florida and South Carolina; a former governor of Oklahoma convicted of bribery and extortion; the assassination by police in Saigon (where our embassy still supported hundreds of diplomatic personnel) of a French journalist who had criticized the South Vietnamese government; Rabbi Korff raising money for a cash-strapped Richard Nixon (“He has not been accustomed to economizing”); fresh leads in Pennsylvania in the twelfth month of the manhunt for Patty Hearst and her associates; a hijacking in Ethiopia; a fourteen-year-old from Brooklyn who showed up at a bus station in Omaha, Nebraska, carrying a note reading, “To whom it may concern, I’m Michael’s grandmother, and am sending Michael to Boys Town because I don’t want him to be here in this awful crime city”; another kidnapped millionaire scion in Italy; a knife-wielding purse-snatcher menacing old women on the streets of Milwaukee—he was only seventeen.
Horrors, of course, drench the news in any decade. By the middle of the 1970s, however, the perception of the density of horrors was so much worse. For instance, the BBC’s Alistair Cooke gave a speech as a guest of the House of Representatives in which he declared that “crime and violence in the cities has become greater than at any time since the fifteenth century.”
IN WASHINGTON, THE PARANOIA AND dread infecting the nation were finding their institutional expression in the Sen
ate and House investigations of the FBI and CIA. The New York Times predicted on February 8 a “Year of Intelligence”—“a thorough and potentially far-reaching review of United States intelligence practices and requirements.” Speaking before a friendly House subcommittee on February 20, CIA director William E. Colby begged Congress to move forward in a “sober and responsible manner,” said that overmuch criticism “placed American intelligence in danger,” and worried that the outcry “raised the question whether secret intelligence operations can be conducted by the United States.” Then he acknowledged one of those secret intelligence operations, recently revealed in the news: that among the dissidents on whom the CIA had kept files were four members of Congress who had the temerity to attend antiwar demonstrations.
That was over, he insisted: members of Congress were “not under surveillance.” But he added: “active surveillance.”
Colby refused to turn over details on his agency budget, customarily hidden within the budgets of the State and Defense departments; he refused to release the CIA’s fifty-page report on Seymour Hersh’s December 22 exposé; he pleaded that though “there may have been occasions when CIA may have exceeded its proper bounds,” any “missteps by CIA were few and far between, have been corrected, and in no way justify the outcry which has been raised.”
Eight days later Daniel Schorr, CBS’s curmudgeonly attack-dog investigative reporter, broke this news: “President Ford reportedly warned associates that if current investigations go too far, they could uncover several assassinations of foreign officials in which the CIA was involved.”
The details, Schorr said, were “closely held.” But the best estimates were that three or more such operations took place in the late 1950s or early 1960s. He concluded with a sardonic fillip: “Colby is on the record saying, ‘I think that family skeletons are best left where they are—in the closet.’ He apparently had some literal skeletons in mind.”
The claim had taken a labyrinthine course to revelation. It came out of a meeting between President Ford and a group from the New York Times—seven top editors and columnists, and publisher Arthur Sulzberger—before the State of the Union. Ford got to work explaining away the embarrassment of offering a tax cut months after proposing a tax increase. Managing editor Abe Rosenthal changed the subject to the Rockefeller Commission, pushing a politer version of the Times editors’ objection that no real investigation should ever have been entrusted to such a crew of establishment mandarins. Ford came back saying that he had chosen the members precisely for their “responsibility”—because when he became president he had learned things about the CIA to “blacken the name of every President back to Truman,” and for the investigators to handle it irresponsibly would “ruin the U.S. image around the world.”
Tom Wicker later wrote about what happened next: “At some point in this monologue, Ford had used the word ‘assassinations,’ and this clearly seemed to be the dark secret in mind.” Wicker hadn’t been entirely shocked, remembering a sojourn at the LBJ Ranch in January 1964 when Johnson, the new president, as if processing a psychological burden, recalled to a group of reporters his shock upon learning of the CIA’s complicity in the coup-murders of Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. But 1964, Wicker reflected, had been a “different world.” “Then it had not occurred to me that we should print such things; when my colleague Doug Kiker of the New York Times and Phil Potter of the Baltimore Sun and I later made notes—which I still have—of Johnson’s conversation, we carefully entered a cryptic note (‘Trujillo and Diem’) for that part of it, lest the notes fall into irresponsible hands.” Now, however, eleven years later, a reckoning was at hand, and the group had to make an ethical decision on the fly, at a time when the grounds for judgment were shifting beneath their feet. Should they publish?
The group racked their brains over whether the entire session had been demarcated by Ron Nessen, the president’s press secretary, as “off the record.” Wicker, recalling that Ford had specified at one or two points that they were off the record—but not at this point—offered that he might have leaked out the information on purpose, at least as an investigatory lead. Columnist Wicker was by then a dean of Washington’s suspicious circles: author of column after column during the past several years, on Vietnam, on Watergate, on all manner of official abuses, exposing lies, blasting the cult of executive secrecy that enabled the lies, decrying the very longing for national innocence that let hypocritical presidents hiding beneath the cover of “national security” get away with all manner of unpatriotic perfidies in the first place—and seeing suspicion vindicated nearly every time. “By 1975,” he remembered, “I thought it intolerable that American government should sponsor such criminal and indefensible acts as political assassinations, and I saw no reason why the New York Times should protect Ford against his own disclosures. . . . If the people had a right to know anything, surely they had a right to know murder was being done in their name.” His bosses, however, more reticent, asked Nessen whether the remarks had been intended to be off the record. Nessen, aghast, said that of course they had been off the record. At that, Sulzberger scotched further inquiry. The frustrated Timesmen who disagreed leaked word of the debate, which was how word got back to Schorr—who managed to secure an interview with Director Colby.
“Are you people involved in assassinations?” asked Schorr, as coolly as possible.
“Not anymore,” replied Colby, explaining that planning assassinations had been banned since 1973.
Schorr asked who’d been the targets prior to then. Colby said, “I can’t talk about it.” Schorr named the United Nations secretary-general who perished in a 1961 plane crash: “Hammarskjöld?”
“Of course not.”
“Lumumba?”—the leftist liberator of the Congo, also killed in 1961.
“I can’t go down a list with you. Sorry.”
That, as all the Watergate buffs knew who’d read All the President’s Men (which was just then being knocked off the New York Times bestseller list in its thirty-fourth week by Dan Rather’s study of the Nixon White House, The Palace Guard), was a “non-denial denial.” Schorr’s producers gave him two minutes on the air to run with the story—a long segment for a piece without any visual component.
Although, at that, it had to be noted that the Washington Post had put Schorr’s scoop only on page three of the paper. The Times buried it on page thirty. Time magazine didn’t acknowledge it, and put off even mentioning the CIA probes until seventeen days later, a week after Vice President Rockefeller extended his commission’s April deadline so it could look into the alleged assassination plots. “We have entered the decade,” Time quoted Senator Church as saying, “that ends with 1984.” Time then asked him if the CIA’s alleged murders of foreign heads of state could ever be justified. “In the absence of war,” he responded, no government agency can be given license to murder. “The President is not a glorified Godfather.”
President Ford was soon to begin negotiations with Senator Church about what secret documents his committee would be allowed to access. Ford surely had reason to panic: would he choose the “instincts of openness and candor” to which he pledged his administration the previous August; or the deference to the Cold War cult of executive authority that had defined his thirteen congressional terms—especially now that he was the executive whose authority he would be protecting?
Presently, however, his executive attention was distracted by another intelligence consideration. “The Ford Administration, clearly taken unawares by the turn of events in Vietnam, concentrated yesterday on blaming Congress for the collapse of South Vietnamese resistance in nearly two-thirds of that country,” the Los Angeles Times reported on March 20. “Privately, intelligence specialists conceded that a major countrywide thrust by Hanoi was not expected this year.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
* * *
“Disease, Disease, Disease”
IT ALL HAPPENED SO SHOCKINGLY fast
. At the beginning of the year the North Vietnamese Communists captured the South Vietnamese province of Phuoc Long on the Cambodian border, seventy-five miles from Saigon. The media called it an isolated fight. But then, early in March, the Communists captured the Central Highlands city of Ban Me Thuot, and South Vietnam’s President Thieu began a slow, soiling surrender. First he gave up the northern provinces. Then the entire Central Highlands, cutting his country in two. Instead of the orderly retreat of a disciplined army, “there’s a complete lack of communication, a breakdown in the chain of command,” an American intelligence officer explained, describing the chaotic rout of this army to which Americans had pledged their lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor. “Colonels aren’t following orders. No one cares. It’s become every man for himself.”
The North Vietnamese politburo had planned the full-on offensive to win the war to take two years. Instead, it was taking a few months. One and a half million refugees poured south to coastal cities they were told were impregnable to the enemy—“from one end of a sinking ship to another,” wrote the New Yorker’s Jonathan Schell—endless columns of women and children, old men in conical hats, clogging dusty roads to the sea. Along these roads civilians were massacred—not by their ostensible enemy, but by South Vietnamese soldiers, driven by directionless rage. A country, Schell wrote, “tearing itself apart in a frenzy of self-destruction.”
Other refugees boarded literal ships—“crowding together,” NBC News reported, “without food, without water, starving, dying on the slow voyage south.” Children falling overboard, mothers diving after them; people being thrown overboard, by soldiers desperate to flee themselves—scorpions-in-bottle scrambles for scarce resources. Soldiers shed uniforms—but not weapons—and swam desperately for American ships meant to evacuate civilians. They commandeered boats, waging makeshift naval battles against other soldiers. One of these mariners turned out to be the region’s military commander, who fought his way to a rescue ship as his former soldiers crashed through the city, firing randomly at passersby.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 58
