Another fledgling ideological force founded by Weyrich got its eighty thousand dollars in seed funding from a rich scion of the old Mellon banking clan. The American Legislative Exchange Council had been a rather sleepy alliance of right-leaning state legislators; its tax status was “501(c)3”—which is to say, a charitable organization whose value as a tax write-off for donors relied on its not getting involved in direct political participation. Of a sudden, its executive director, an Illinois Republican activist named Juanita Barnett, found her group the beneficiary of Richard Mellon Scaife, a Pittsburgh billionaire who’d donated $1 million to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign and whose plaything was the newspaper of a little Pennsylvania town, the Greensburg Tribune-Review. Once, when he’d heard one of his reporters celebrating the resignation of Spiro Agnew, he had him fired on the spot. His political ambitions were bigger now. When Barnett asked Weyrich what could possibly make her shell of an organization worth eighty thousand dollars, he responded, basically, that it was worth that much precisely because it was a shell of an organization: “Juanita, ALEC is the only state legislative organization in the country—of our persuasion—which has a 501(c)3. If they took ALEC to Washington and did a good job, they . . . could go back to Scaife and get Scaife to set up a political Action Committee to finance state legislative campaign races.” In other words, ALEC could be a “nonpolitical” Trojan horse for right-wing political activity. It worked: dismissing the meddlesome Juanita Barnett, they set up shop both in Washington and in the rent-free office of a conservative Illinois state representative, whose phone lines they illegally made use of, and began writing model bills for state legislatures, unnoticed by the press until 1978.
Meanwhile, battles were raging for and against the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex,” ran its apparently anodyne text. The majority of the public supported the idea; respectable moderate Republican women being its main base of support, the Republicans had endorsed it in every one of their party platforms since 1944 and President Eisenhower had asked a joint session of Congress to approve it in 1958. Congress did so, finally, in 1972—at which the movement to achieve the constitutional requirement of approval in two-thirds of state legislatures, thirty-eight to be precise, took off like a rocket, with thirty ratifications by the end 1973.
Then, the progress became like molasses.
Only four more states voted passage by that spring. One reason was a frantic right-wing movement that sprang nearly fully formed from the brow of a single, brilliant, indefatigable middle-aged woman from suburban Alton, Illinois. Phyllis Schlafly had been an accomplished conservative activist since not long after she received her master of business administration degree from Harvard University in 1945. In becoming so accomplished, she mastered a dubious mode of public presentation later adopted to great effect by leaders such as Louise Day Hicks in South Boston and Alice Moore in Kanawha County: just an innocent housewife, went her story, going about her business raising a family like any other, when her sudden shocked discovery of alien impositions on home and hearth by left-wing conspiracists forced her out of her kitchen and into the spotlight as a reluctant warrior for decency. Brochures for Schlafly’s 1952 congressional run, in fact, depicted her cooking breakfast in an apron—a housewife identity belied by the fact that she was running for Congress, and held a master’s degree from Harvard, but she never let the contradiction detain her. Instead she leveraged it to become perhaps the most effective organizer the right had ever known.
Her signature issue, running for Congress and afterward, had been anti-Communism; her newsletter, the Phyllis Schlafly Report, launched in 1967 after the respectable moderate women who so doted on the ERA defeated her for president of the National Federation of Republican Women, bristled with McCarthyite accusations of Communist infiltration in high places. She was riveted by the arcana of geopolitics and nuclear doctrine (here, she obsessively claimed that the strategic preference of Robert McNamara for missiles over bombers was actually a stealth plot to disarm the United States) and was obsessed with the anti-American wickedness of the United Nations; when she thought about the ERA at all, she later said, she considered it “something between innocuous and mildly helpful.”
That was then. Now, from the vantage of her brand-new organization the Eagle Forum (because “the eagle is almost the only creature that keeps one mate for a lifetime”), she was convinced that the Equal Rights Amendment was the worst outrage the liberals had yet conceived. She set to work convincing the rest of the world.
The ERA, she argued, would “take away the right of young women to be exempt from the draft.” It would “invalidate the state laws that make it the obligation of the husband to support his wife financially.” It would “wipe out the right to receive Social Security benefits based on her husband’s earnings.” It would legalize—nay, encourage—homosexual marriages and adoptions. It would “remake our laws, revise the marriage contract, restructure society, remold our children to conform to liberal values instead of God’s values, and replace the image of woman as virtue and mother with the image of prostitute, swinger, and lesbian.” It would require the Catholic Church “to admit women to the priesthood and to abandon its single-sex schools . . . or else lose its tax exempt status.”
An Illinois state representative who joined the crusade rumbled, “Put it on the heads of your children and your grandchildren and watch and witness the decline of the United States of America, a great country that was founded on the principle of family units. In Colorado, where they have ERA, men want to marry horses. Homosexuals marry homosexuals there. This is what you’re talking about with ERA.” And, in a charge that seemed to galvanize conservative imaginations most of all, critics insisted it would legally ban the institution of separate restrooms for men and women. As one terrified Florida woman told her state senator, “I do not want to share a public restroom with black or white hippie males.”
A powerful nerve had been touched. Phyllis Schlafly was adept at touching nerves. She would claim later that it was her husband, a lawyer, who first helped her appreciate the dangers the ERA foretold. That may or may not be true. But, as with that devastatingly effective husband-and-wife team in the textbook movement who insisted that the media refer to them as the “Mel Gablers,” the notion that the antifeminist activist served at the instigation, and pleasure, of the man of the house nicely served the story of the traditional family under siege she was so effectively able to tell: that the barnstorming housewife activist left the home only to preserve the home; that traditional bourgeois hierarchies actually preserved liberties and it was the “liberals” who subverted them. It all seemed so maddeningly illogical to her feminist adversaries that they could never contain their rage when they were around her (“I’d like to burn you at the stake!” fumed NOW founder Betty Friedan at a 1973 debate)—which only, of course, helped her cause some more. By the spring of 1975, however, it all sounded logical enough to the burgeoning armies of the right. For instance, to the antibusing activists of Boston. On April 9, they took over a pro-ERA meeting a Faneuil Hall sponsored by the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women. Elaine Noble, the first openly lesbian state legislator, took the podium; ROAR women drowned her out with the chant “We like men! We like men!”
A genteel feminist lectured ROAR’s Pixie Palladino: “You are our guest, and if you don’t behave, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“No!” Pixie snarled back at the alien imposition, plainly from Brahmin Wellesley or some such. “You’re our guests, this is our City Hall. No bunch of ladies from the suburbs is going to kick the women of Boston out of their own City Hall.”
Spring, 1975: a conservative coming-out. Southern evangelical Protestants and orthodox Catholics, both traditionally Democratic, fighting shoulder to shoulder to protect the “unborn”; an aggressive, expanding “New Right” of conservative p
oliticians, making a run at the very legitimacy of the Republican Party; sophisticated former liberals, “neoconservatives,” adding their voice in all the right cosmopolitan precincts; parents agitating against the liberal bureaucrats who were deforming their children with busing and coed bathrooms and secular humanist hokum—a coalition.
IT WAS ONE THAT, HOWEVER, the New York Times found easy to dismiss. That summer the newspaper of record did a feature article about textbook fights fanning out nationwide like brooms in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice story. It quoted an education publisher: “This thing has spread since the West Virginia outbreak to the point that there is not an educational publisher who has not made at least one minor revision in the face of pressure.” But not to fear, the Times assured its liberal-minded readers: “The protesters constitute only a few thousand of the millions of parents with children in the nation’s public schools”; the organizations coordinating the protest “include the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan . . . and the Heritage Foundation.” Yoking the mainstream conservative group that was becoming a constant presence on Capitol Hill to the frightening fringe that burned crosses in the woods made it hard to see this sort of thing as the leading wedge of anything serious at all.
What the Times missed was the political undercurrent. This was supposed to be a skeptical age. But the longing for the conservative innocence Ronald Reagan was selling was strong, for those with eyes to see, in all sorts of quarters. Three panels, in the House and the Senate and under the auspices of Vice President Rockefeller, were hard at work behind closed doors investigating epic abuses of public trust by the nation’s intelligence agencies. Lillian Hellman, the left-wing playwright, lectured Columbia University graduates in a commencement speech reprinted in the New York Times: “You who are graduating today, far more than those who graduated in the sixties, have very possibly lived through the most shocking period in American history . . . you know that government agencies—the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and God knows what yet hasn’t come to light—have spied on innocent people who did nothing more than express their democratic right to say what they thought. You have read that the CIA has not only had a hand in upsetting foreign governments it did not like, it has very possibly been involved in murder, or plots to murder. Murder. We didn’t think of ourselves that way once upon a time.”
In turn, Rockefeller commission member Ronald Reagan granted absolution on the radio: “Isn’t it time to ask if we aren’t threatened more by the people the FBI and CIA are watching than we are by the FBI and the CIA?” A House member explained that really, no one cared. “This is not the Watergate investigation. Nobody ever talks to me about it on home trips, and I hear very little about it here.”
Cultural undercurrents pointed toward this right-leaning longing for innocence, too. In April, twenty-five red-white-and-blue train cars pulled out of Cameron Station in Alexandria, Virginia, set to streak through all forty-eight continental states in 1976, the bicentennial year for the signing of the Declaration of the Independence. Display cases on the side of some of the Freedom Train’s cars featured artifacts of American politics; other cars were entirely encased in transparent material—mobile museum vitrines, displaying the glories of God’s chosen nation: a lunar rover, the first horseless carriage to win a transcontinental race, the first typewriter, a Polaroid camera. And a replica of the Liberty Bell, twice the size of the original, donated by the American Legion. Every cent was paid by corporate contributions, General Motors, Kraftco, and Prudential Life Insurance contributing $1 million each. Reagan lionized its private sponsorship as a “miracle in this day of government organized, planned, and managed activity. . . . Where else but in America could this happen? Come to think of it, how many places are left in the world where there is that much freedom to celebrate?”
Early in May, the Columbia University Board of Trustees, which oversaw the selection of Pulitzer Prizes, snubbed its advisory board’s selection of Seymour Hersh’s blockbuster CIA exposé. Its other selections were anodyne; the trustees “seemed to go out of their way,” Time observed, “to find relatively noncontroversial subjects.” The press, newly emboldened after taking down a president, was supposed to be the headquarters of the new suspicious circles—The New Muckrakers, according to the title of a book by the Washington Post’s Leonard Downie Jr. Its back cover boomed out: “There is a new kind of American reporter. He does more than record news. He makes history.” The book quoted Downie’s colleague Bob Woodward: “It’s almost a perverse pleasure. I like going out and finding something that is going wrong.” But it felt to some as though there had been enough of all that.
As a historian later reflected, Hersh’s “early determination to carry the Watergate mentality into the post-Watergate era made his colleagues uncomfortable and even angry”—even, or especially, at the Washington Post, which seemed to be shrinking back from its reputation for making history, as if in guilt. The Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham, told the Magazine Publishers Association that reporters were becoming “too much a party to events. . . . To see a conspiracy and cover-up in everything is as myopic as to believe that no conspiracies or coverups exist.” Its editor Ben Bradlee worried that “these tendencies to develop a social, messianic role for the media, when added to the already feverish drive for the sensationalist story and the scoop, [will] lead to further dispositions that should concern us.” And the Post’s intelligence beat reporter immediately hit his Times counterpart’s CIA scoops for a “dearth of hard facts”—even though, in subsequent months, every one of its claims had been vindicated and more. Late in March, Leslie Gelb of the Times reflected in the New Republic on the reasons for the rest of the media’s reluctance to pick up on the CIA story: a history of coziness between the press and the clandestine service “going back to the days of the OSS”; a culture of “long established social relationships”; and even more significantly, a discomfort that the “Stain of Watergate” was “spreading out to the past, to the pre-Nixon years, and to the future. The dream of being able to make Nixon vanish and keep everything else was coming into jeopardy.”
And indeed, shortly after that was written, every major media outlet in the nation acceded to a CIA request not to report a story about a failed CIA project to pay $350 million to Howard Hughes to manufacture a salvage vehicle, the Glomar Explorer, for a sunken Soviet submarine. And when the maverick syndicated investigative reporter Jack Anderson did finally report the debacle, most outlets reframed it as a heroic triumph—“The Great Submarine Snatch,” reported Time, taking the opportunity to editorialize that the congressional intelligence investigations could irreparably harm future such missions. When CIA director William Colby came calling, Esquire’s William Greider complained, a supposedly “adversarial” press “rolled over on its back to have its tummy rubbed.”
A bereft nation had just lost its first war; change was everywhere; and, quietly, Americans were hugging any excuse not to change. The federal government announced a commitment to replace America’s outdated, irrational weights and measures—pounds, inches, quart, the “English” system, which even the English didn’t use anymore—with the international “metric” standard—kilograms, meters, liters. A leader of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers predicted, “There will be massive resistance”—as if some liberal bureaucrat were forcing his kid to be bused to a black school, or learn about Eskimo cannibalism: “What we have here is engineers and scientists trying to make important social and economic change.” The June issue of Texas Monthly, the magazine for the Lone Star State’s hip young professionals, reported in one article on the graduates of the Class of ’75, for whom “the romanticism of the Sixties seems to have lost most of its charm, leaving in its place a rush to security.” They were returning “to beer and fraternities and sororities. . . . There is also some recognition and perhaps even a dose of respect for, yes, Dad and Mom”—for economic reasons if nothing else: their parents’ generation “by and large managed to find and hold j
obs.” Another article tracked “The New Woman: Returning to Submission.” She appeared on the cover, smiling and neatly coiffed, enfolded within a ball and chain. “Will the new trend in male-female roles be the old trends—dominant man, submissive wife, obedient kids?”
January had seen the debut of a TV version of American Graffiti: a slapstick sitcom about high school kids in 1950s Milwaukee hanging out at the diner, listening to doo-wop music, zooming around in hot rods (Pottsie: “How about seat belts?” Ralph: “What are seat belts?” “It’s safety. Pilots wear them. I read about ’em in Popular Mechanics”)—and, unlike those bothersome real-life teenagers in 1975, not having sex. In the pilot the protagonist, baby-faced, red-haired Richie Cunningham (the same actor who starred as little Opie on The Andy Griffith Show) fretted over a date he had coming up. She had a “reputation”: “I’ve just never dated a girl who’s gone out with a sailor before.” Not to worry: they end up playing chess. The show, called, unsubtly, Happy Days, was an enormous hit. It was especially popular among children.
THEN, THREE WEEKS AFTER THE fall of Saigon, came the saga of the USS Mayaguez. A month earlier, Henry Kissinger was quoted as saying that “the United States must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.” Now he and the president would have their chance.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 64
