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

by Rick Perlstein

  Then, the Reagan presidential boomlet would be put paid to once and for all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  * * *

  New Right

  FOCUSING ON THE GLITTERING PERSONALITIES, pundits little noticed the right-wing insurgency bubbling barely beneath the surface—what conservatives referred to, like civil rights activists from the 1960s, as “the movement.”

  Activists in the “pro-life” cause (James Wolcott of the Village Voice helpfully explained that the unfamiliar term referred to those fighting against abortion) had been thick on the ground at CPAC. A month before that convention, what Christianity Today called “an unexpectedly large turnout” of twenty-five thousand braved the winter chill for the second annual “March for Life,” commemorating the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. The previous year’s march had drawn only what the AP had estimated as “hundreds.” The flagship evangelical magazine, tending toward sympathy with the pro-lifers, indelicately declared, “No longer can they be dismissed as a group of cold-hearted Catholics simply following orders from the Pope.” A Catholic senator, James Buckley, and an evangelical one, Mark Hatfield, introduced a resolution the week of the Roe anniversary to extend “the right of life—to all human beings including their unborn offspring.” Shortly after, Buckley was joined by the very conservative Southern Baptist, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, to propose the same language as part of a constitutional amendment banning abortion.

  Another Catholic-evangelical pairing took place in Washington on March 19. Some 2,500 antibusing activists from fourteen states led by Louise Day Hicks, and a massive contingent bused from Kanawha County, West Virginia, marched from the Washington Monument to the Capitol. One of the fundamentalist preachers who’d led the West Virginia fight, Avis Hill, said, “This is the first time the two big struggles, against busing and dirty textbooks, have stood side by side. This is the beginning of a political rebellion. . . . If they can break us in our mountain home, they can break us in the farm towns of Jefferson County. If they can break us in the streets of South Boston, they can break us anywhere.” Hicks’s colleague Raymond Flynn said “the premises are the same . . . the intrusion of the federal government into what was ordinarily considered a local responsibility.” Orated Hicks, “We can never be lambs.” The previous day, representatives of both movements met with officials from the White House Domestic Council, who assured them “that President Ford recognizes their protests as an important issue.”

  Then, on April 7, the bishop for the diocese of the four counties surrounding San Diego, representing some 512,000 Catholics, an activist in the city’s nonsectarian Pro-Life League, announced priests would refuse Holy Communion to any Catholic who “admits publicly” to membership in the National Organization for Women or any other group advocating abortion: “The issue at stake is not only what we do to unborn children but what we do to ourselves by permitting them to be killed.” He called abortion a “serious moral crime” that “ignores God and his love.” NOW proclaimed this year’s Mother’s Day a “Mother’s Day of Outrage”—in response, it said, to the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s “attempt to undermine the right of women to control their own bodies.” The president of Catholics for Free Choice and the Southern California coordinator for NOW’s Human Reproduction Task Force, Jan Gleeson, recently returned from Southeast Asia as an Operation Babylift volunteer, clarified the feminist group’s position: “It opposes compulsory pregnancy and reaffirms a woman’s right to privacy to control her own body as basic to her spiritual, economic, and social well-being.”

  “Permitting unborn children to be killed” and “ignoring God and his love,” versus “compulsory pregnancy” and “basic spiritual, economic, and social well-being”: a showdown loomed between irreconcilables, the passions resembling those in a seventeenth-century European religious war.

  That Sunday women and men in NOW buttons picketed all day in front of St. Joseph’s Cathedral in downtown San Diego. At the lovely missionary-style parish of St. Brigid (patron saint, ironically, of children whose parents are not married), thirty-five were denied the sacrament at the communion rail, others intercepted as they made their way down the aisle. Fifty “pro-choice” members of Women in Law, a feminist student group at the Catholic University of San Diego, picketed at Immaculate Chapel. In one intimate moment captured in the New York Times, a priest asked a would-be communicant if she believed in abortion. She replied, “I believe in the law of our land,” and was refused a wafer. Bishop Maher returned from an overseas trip that had included a stop in Saudi Arabia, where he had conferred with Muslim religious leaders, and gave a press conference in which he called his opponents’ position “pagan.” He pointed to a stack of supportive messages and predicted his decision would spread nationwide. Messages to the Los Angeles Times, taking up the entire letters section, were radically divided: “NOW should perhaps establish its own religion with Herod as their God” and “At last there is someone strong enough to protect the needless slaying of innocent life,” versus “It is clear that the Catholic hierarchy is getting desperate in its frantic efforts to pass a ‘compulsory pregnancy’ amendment to the U.S. Constitution” and “NOW is dedicated to the liberation of the human spirit. . . . Is it this freedom of choice-by-conscience that the bishop can’t abide?”

  In the midst of the controversy Ronald Reagan recorded a broadcast describing his agonies in signing the nation’s most liberal abortion law, in 1967. That process had been a debacle. “Faced with an abundance of contradictory and absolutist advice,” and polls showing that 72 percent of Californians and 59 percent of California Catholics wanted a liberalized abortion law, a Reagan biographer wrote, “Reagan behaved as if lost at sea.” At a news conference two hours before the bill had passed, he complained that its provision granting doctors the right to cite mental health grounds as a medical necessity would make it too easy for abortions to be obtained; then, after signing it into law, he claimed he hadn’t even been aware such a mental health “loophole” had existed. On radio, in 1975, he recalled discovering “that neither medicine, law, or theology had ever really found a common ground on the subject. Some believed an unborn child was no more than a growth on the female body and she should be able to remove it as she would her appendix. Others felt a human life existed from the moment a fertilized egg was implanted in the womb.”

  Now, however, decrying abortion was a marker of belonging in the conservative tribe. And suddenly, he devised a way to realize it had been simple all along: that “there is a quite common acceptance in medical circles that the cell—let’s call it the egg—once it has been fertilized is on its way as a human being with individual physical traits and physical characteristics already determined.”

  And yet he insisted the law he signed in 1967 had been just fine, because “[i]n our Judeo-Christian religion, we recognize the right to take life in defense of our own. Therefore an abortion is justified when it is done in self-defense. My belief is that a woman has the right to protect her own life and health against even her own unborn child. I believe also that just as she has the right to defend herself against rape she should not be made to bear a child resulting from that violation of her person and therefore abortion is an act of self-defense.”

  No matter that none of that bore any relation to the 1967 law, whose mental health loophole had nothing to do with defense of a mother’s life. What was telling about the broadcast was its very existence. The fact that he felt compelled to attempt such gyrations spoke to how important the issue had become. And it spoke, perhaps more than any other sign, to the fact that he was serious about running for president—even more than his public visit to the Annenberg estate in February. Or the trip he made to London in April, when he said the Soviets remained “a serious threat to safeguarding our way of life” and “either we continue the concept that man is a unique human being capable of determining his own destiny, with dignity and God-given inalienable rights, or we admit we are faceless ciphers in a Godless collectivist a
nt heap.” Pravda, amused, had reported of the speech that “a dinosaur from the ‘cold war’ times, by the name of Ronald Reagan, has resurrected and made himself known through bellicose roaring.”

  He might or might not be aiming at the presidency. But in either case, not everyone was taking him seriously. In the White House, for example, word was that he was considered little more than a joke. The conservative movement wasn’t taken seriously, either—even as it grew and grew.

  ON MOTHER’S DAY EIGHT HUNDRED protesters dressed in black with red armbands, and carrying signs showing coat hangers dripping in blood, picketed before the Vatican embassy in Washington. The evangelical and Catholic members of Long Beach Voice for the Unborn suspended their twenty-fourth consecutive Sunday picketing the abortionists at Long Beach Memorial Hospital to take up the hospital’s invitation to discuss the problem of unwanted pregnancy. The hoped-for meeting of the minds never took off. One eighty-seven-year-old member lambasted the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the vote; her daughter, agreeing, lambasted the would-be twenty-seventh, the ERA, which she said would establish a federal police force to require women to work outside the home. In San Diego, Anaheim, and Los Angeles, Catholic NOW members staged ceremonies reversing the traditional bell, book, and candle excommunication rite (in Anaheim the “book” was the Constitution and the “bell” was a replica of the Liberty Bell). “At the end,” a member of Catholics for the Right to Choose explained, “they snuff out the candle to signify spiritual death. We light the candle to signify life.”

  Dramatic stuff—though there was no coverage of it on network TV. And new polling by Lou Harris found 54 percent in favor of abortion, at least in the first three months of pregnancy (compared with 38 percent opposed). Pundits didn’t find much to say about it, either. The change was registering instead at the level of society’s tectonic plates—at the core of America’s religious identity.

  A certain sort of bland religiosity had expanded enormously in the 1950s. The typical American pursued a faith experience, the sociologist Will Herberg wrote in his influential 1955 book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, “that reassures him about the existential rightness of everything American, his nation, his culture, and himself.” President Eisenhower said, “A system of government like ours makes no sense unless founded on a firm faith in religion—and I don’t care what it is.” Blandness was supposed to be a good thing; it attenuated cultural conflict, smoothed edges, made a diverse nation united and strong.

  The denominations expanding the most, in fact, were the blandest of all—the “mainline” ones: Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, the United Church of Christ (a merger of old Congregationalist denominations), and especially the Episcopalian Church, once mocked as the “Republican Party at Prayer,” back when Republicanism was understood as the province of stolid moderation—nothing like the people on display that year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the ones describing abortion as a holocaust and reduced to frenzies of rage at any mention of that bland man Gerald Rudolph Ford. Who was, of course, an Episcopalian.

  When church growth plateaued in the 1960s, the conclusion was immediately drawn: congregants fled pews because churches were no longer “relevant.” Relevant: a very sixties word. It meant that churches did not resemble the world outside their walls—a changing world, a dynamic world, a world of shifting values and softening mores, a tolerant world, a liberal world. The churchmen who rose in denominational counsels were the ones who were leaders in liberal, even radical causes. William Sloane Coffin, since 1958 the chaplain at Yale, went on trial for counseling draft resistance in 1967. Portions of the legal defense of Angela Davis, the Afroed American Communist on trial in 1972 for allegedly providing the weapons to black militants who assassinated a judge, were paid for by the United Presbyterian Church of North America. The Catholic Church’s Vatican II reforms of the early 1960s brought in their wake by the late 1960s priests who did not just deliver the liturgy in English instead of Latin, facing the congregation rather than the altar, but did so strumming guitars. Others went further: Lutherans in 1970, reform Jews in 1972, and Episcopalians in 1974 started ordaining women as clergy. “EPISCOPAL LEADERSHIP LISTENS TO ITS MEMBERS; HEADQUARTERS ADMITS CREDIBILITY GAP,” read a 1973 headline in the Los Angeles Times—the same year Episcopalians recognized civil divorce. In 1975 they rewrote the Book of Common Prayer, one of the literary monuments of Western civilization. One of the changes was a passage endorsing nonmarital sex.

  It didn’t work. Between 1965 and 1975 all the old gains in membership were reversed: Lutherans by 5 percent, United Methodists by 10 percent, Presbyterians by 7 percent . . . and, most of all, the Episcopalians, who lost 16.7 percent of their membership. One of the auguries in the pulp paperback Predictions for 1974 was that the Catholic Church would become more liberal “but will continue to lose supporters at a tremendous rate.” That one, unlike the prediction that a submarine and a UFO would collide off the Aleutian Islands, turned out to be true.

  At that, the churches responded by struggling frenetically to become more relevant. And by 1975, things began getting ridiculous.

  That was the year a Palm Sunday “Circus Mass” was held at Holy Trinity in Washington, D.C.: clowns in baggy pants, midgets, an acrobat balanced atop a pole twenty feet above the altar. Later that April, at the First Unitarian Church in Fort Worth, Texas, Pastor William Nichols invited parishioner Diana King to the pulpit. She announced, “I would like to do a sermon using exotic dance, and members of the congregation could join me if they like.” She stripped down to only a G-string. Pastor Nichols later told reporters, “I haven’t had one complaint. I feel like exotic dancing is a part of life. It fit very well into our service. We are inheritors of the Victorian ethic which I don’t accept. She was expressing herself and I think she got that over to the congregation.” He also said no one had been aroused—but if anyone had been, that would have been okay, too: “I don’t consider the erotic aspect of the dance wrong. After all, that’s the way we were conceived.” For Mrs. King’s part, asked by a reporter “if she thought her nude dance sparked any feelings other than spiritual,” she responded, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘spiritual.’ I don’t dance to frustrate people. I create a fantasy. I like to turn people on. I really felt good . . . it’s affirming nature and love . . . you can’t separate body from mind.”

  It all became easy to mock. A cartoon in the February 28 issue of Christianity Today had Jesus rewriting “He that is without sin”: “To confront the moral challenge of the complexities and conflicts of our age will require that we resist the temptations of simple answers and resolve instead to be responsive to and responsible for a moral universe that is characterized by both continuity and open-endedness. . . .” John Updike came out that spring with a new novel, A Month of Sundays, in which a wayward minister was sent by his bishop to a rest home. It banned “[a]ll traditions, perhaps orthodox, sources of help for emotional and spiritual healing. But the bar opens at noon. . . . Today is Sunday. Though they try to hide this from us, I can count.”

  Not everyone mocked. Some, simply, left. They didn’t want their churches to be “relevant” to the world outside church walls. The reason they went to church in the first place was to escape the world outside church walls—a world that liberals had turned into a madhouse. It was like what Ronald Reagan had said on TV in 1964: “They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.” Those were the churches people were turning to now: the ones that didn’t doubt what was morally right.

  The Holy Roller Church of the Nazarene grew by 8 percent; the hard-core Seventh-Day Adventists grew by 36 percent; the Pentecostal Assemblies of God by 37 percent. The United Methodists suffered a financial crisis because members were no longer interested in sending money to its Board of Missions. They were sending donations, instead, to organizations like the Good News Movem
ent in Wilmore, Kentucky, a “forum for scriptural Christianity within the United Methodist Church,” attacking a “radically new secularized philosophy of mission” that sought social change rather than “bringing persons to salvation through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”

  Other such tectonic plates were shifting in Washington.

  That spring, a Kanawha-style controversy spread through conservative precincts nationwide. In 1964 the Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner began writing what was intended as a national social science curriculum for middle schoolers, with support from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Bruner reasoned that any subject could be taught in a serious way to children of any age, and that people learned best when “actively and thoughtfully operating on their experiences.” What he didn’t consider, not at all, was politics.

  By 1972 his curriculum, “Man: A Course of Study,” or MACOS, was being taught to 400,000 students in 1,700 schools. It sought, said its author, to fight “authoritarian attitudes” instilled by rote instruction. It would inculcate open-minded, scientific attitudes of discovery instead. Little social scientists would, for instance, discuss what made humans human by contrasting films of free-ranging baboons with ethnographic films depicting the traditional practices of the Netsilik Inuit—Eskimo—of the frigid arctic. Then they would be invited to grasp the anthropological concept of cultural relativity by comparing Netsilik cosmology and mythology with that they learned at their parents’ knee—“to leave their own specific culture to become critically aware of it and to understand culture as a generic human creation,” Bruner wrote.