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

by Rick Perlstein

  Mary McGrory, the liberal syndicated columnist, rushed out with a piece headlined in the Boston Globe “BETTY FORD’S VIEWS ON SEX FAIL TO STARTLE COUNTRY,” confidently pronouncing that the interview merely “indicated she is getting her information from the real world.” McGrory reported that by noon Monday the White House press office had fielded only three phone calls on the interview, two taking “[m]ild exception to Mrs. Ford’s allowing a total stranger with a microphone to ask her such a question about her 18-year-old daughter. A third objected to the answer.” CBS, she said, had received no complaining phone calls at all. And she said that the press office in Vail, Colorado, where the Fords were vacationing, got about a hundred telegrams and phone calls, evenly divided.

  She wrote too soon—and too wishfully. Ron Nessen said the president was laughing off the entire thing. Bo Callaway said it wasn’t “a major issue in Washington,” and that besides, people liked the first lady’s candor whether they agreed with her or not. For her part, Betty Ford said she’d probably “made a few votes” for her husband. Pulse-taking politicians, and not just conservatives, placed their bets otherwise. Henry Hyde, a Republican congressman from suburban Chicago, compared Betty Ford to Martha Mitchell—the alcoholic, mentally ill wife of the former attorney general who was Washington’s gold standard for embarrassing political spouses. A humor columnist, expressing the conventional wisdom, suggested the only thing for Betty to do was resign. (“The networks and women’s magazines . . . are making incredible offers to get the First Lady to sit down and openly discuss adultery, drinking, homosexuality and a proposed postal rate hike.”) The liberal Hugh Carey, taking a break from negotiations on how to rescue the Big Apple, offered that he wasn’t “old-fashioned,” but “I do believe in the lyrics of the song Frankie sang so well, ‘love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage.’ ”

  Of course Frank Sinatra had been known to honor that injunction in the breach, rather often. Which was the point McGrory had been making: morally sophisticated people understood that this was how the “real world” worked—nothing simple about it. For others, however, if there were no easy answers, there were simple answers. Plenty simple. A Baptist preacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, announced he would be delivering a sermon the following Sunday explaining how the first lady’s remarks were “directly contradictory to the teachings of the Bible.” Two thousand packed his pews to hear it. Equal Rights Amendment? It was just as Isaiah 3:1–4 prophesied, that “the Lord, the Lord of hosts, doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stay and the staff” if “mighty man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet” had his dominion taken from him. Abortion? Premarital sex? I Corinthians, 6:9–10: “Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind . . . shall inherit the kingdom of God.” Experimentation with marijuana? The prophet Hosea had something to say about that: “Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart.”

  Twelve North Carolina radio stations picked it up for broadcast. So many callers swamped the Northside Baptist Church’s switchboards for printed copies that Pastor Hudson published it as a pamphlet. Soon hundreds of thousands of copies circulated throughout the country.

  On August 25 the president stepped into the batter’s box to try to knock all the chatter away. Perhaps he had seen the polling from Albert Sindlinger, which Evans and Novak would publicize in their column the next week, finding that in interviews taken on August 24 his approval rating was down to 33.8 percent—whereas it had been 55.3 percent on August 10.

  “Betty meant we’re deeply concerned about the moral standards” in their family, went his first swing. A whiff.

  Strike two: “What Betty was trying to say was that in the closeness of our family we are deeply concerned about the moral standards of how a family is raised. Unfortunately, there has been a misunderstanding. . . .”

  One more try: “There are high moral standards in the family, give and take . . .”

  But for those drawing their conclusions from Isaiah 3: 1–4, “give and take” within the family and “high moral standards” were precisely opposed notions. So that only dug Gerald Ford deeper in the hole. And he didn’t do any better with Pastor Hudson’s mortal enemies—as feminists asked what business a husband, even a president, had speaking for his wife in the first place. The messages to the White House, finally tallied up, comprised 10,512 votes in support of the first lady—and 23,308 far more passionate ones opposed. “Your statement on ‘60 Minutes’ cost your husband my vote,” ran a typical one—and, said one from the South, “We think this error more serious than anything that President Nixon did.”

  THE MOST IMPORTANT RESPONSE TO Betty Ford’s interview was surely the one that appeared on the front page of the only statewide paper in the home of the nation’s first presidential primary, scheduled for February 24, 1976. William Loeb of the Manchester Union Leader published one of his trademark front-page editorials. Titled “A DISGRACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE,” it opined, “The immorality of Mrs. Ford’s remarks is almost exceeded by their utter stupidity. . . . President Ford showed his own lack of guts by saying he had long ago given up commenting on Mrs. Ford’s radio interviews. What kind of husband is that? As President of the United States, he should be the moral leader of the nation. . . . It is up to him to take a moral stand. He should repudiate what Mrs. Ford said.”

  He did not. Nor did he criticize his son Jack, who had indeed smoked marijuana: “I can disagree with what some of our children do,” Ford said at a news conference, “but as long as they are honest with us and at least give us an opportunity to express our views, I don’t think I should go any further.” Jack himself wondered what all the fuss was about: “Everyone in our family is grown up,” he said. “We’re not under our folks’ care any more.”

  Such family issues felt increasingly political. So when Nancy Reagan seemed to weigh in on the first lady’s interview, it felt like a battle line was being drawn. It came at an address to a Republican women’s club in the tony Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. She said it was the first prepared speech she had ever given. She never mentioned Betty Ford by name, but there wasn’t much doubt where she was aiming. “The young people on college campuses and elsewhere are told that to be cool and ‘with it,’ they should have no ‘hang-ups’ about sex and premarital living arrangements,” she said. “Under the new morality, if they get together for a while and it doesn’t work out, they ‘split,’ as they say. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Nothing, that is, but the most enriching human experience: the commitment to another human being.”

  She continued by referencing the latest policy debates over abortion: whether tax money should pay for abortions under Medicaid, and whether underage girls should be able to have abortions without telling their parents. There was no mistaking where Nancy Reagan stood: “our welfare programs making abortions available to under-aged girls regardless of their families’ financial situation and without informing the family” were an abomination. Her spokeswoman insisted there were no political implications in her remarks. The ladies of Grosse Point seemed to disagree: “We all came away thinking she would be very worthy of being the First Lady in the White House,” one told a reporter.

  Maybe she would get the chance. The Ford presidential campaign effort suddenly seemed to be a shambles. Ford interrupted his Vail vacation with political swings into Midwestern and Western states where he vacillated between defending détente and echoing Ronald Reagan. When Reagan’s supporters complained about Ford’s expenses being paid for by the Republican National Committee, the RNC responded that his travel expenses represented “party building” by the Republicans’ “titular leader”—at which a Friends of Ronald Reagan official scouringly questioned whether “Ford is even the titular leader of his party,” adding that the Republican treasury “should not become a vehicle for any single candidate in contest for the party’s nomination, regardless of any office he may hold.”

 
; “Any office he may hold”: his perch in the Oval Office was not exactly intimidating the opposition.

  Southern Republican state chairmen met in a beach town in North Carolina late in August. Ford campaign lieutenants swooped down on the meeting, lobbying aggressively for loyalty to the president. They heard a mass chorus in return: if the president wanted to dull the Reagan charge, he should drop Nelson Rockefeller from the ticket. Rockefeller then headed South to mend political fences—to “prove to them I don’t have horns,” he said. In Mobile, Alabama, and Columbia, South Carolina, hat in hand, he all but apologized for the nearly sixteen years of his gubernatorial terms making New York one of the freest-spending states in the union. It didn’t work. ‘That’s all we talked about, replacing Rockefeller,” Mississippi chairman Clarke Reed told reporters—and claimed that at least half of his colleagues preferred Reagan, not Ford, as the party’s 1976 presidential nominee.

  That same week dealt a body blow to Ford’s best political bulwark against charges that he was selling out to the Soviets. His hard-line defense secretary, James Schlesinger, had begun making more and more belligerent statements: that “another Korean War” was possible unless America bulked up its post-Vietnam defense posture in Asia; that “Americans must toss off tender sensibilities and set our stomachs,” because “the United States might have to make a decision to become the first to introduce atomic weapons.” The syndicated columnist Clayton Fritchey pointed out that his tough talk “gives the President some protection from the right wing of his party,” and that it was “obvious that the course he is pursuing has the passive, if not the active, approval of the White House.” But almost immediately after this column was published, a Pentagon leak revealed that Schlesinger believed his boss had given away the farm in Helsinki.

  So much for a coordinated strategy to hold off the right on the foreign policy front.

  THE PRESIDENT LEFT FOR A series of political stops on the West Coast. Perhaps the words of three liberal Republican senators who had visited him in the White House—Charles Percy of Illinois, Clifford Case of New Jersey, and Jacob Javits of New York—rang in his ears: they said his attempts to mollify conservatives by aping Reagan on the evils of activist government would be disastrous for the party. If so, he ignored them—telling a fund-raising luncheon in Seattle, “Help me free the free enterprise system.” In Portland, Oregon, he attended a “youth Bicentennial rally.” He was well received at both. He boarded Air Force One for a stop on Reagan’s home turf: Sacramento. To a Chamber of Commerce breakfast, then to the California legislature, he dared venture boasts about the continued success of détente, noting “an important breakthrough we have just made in defusing the time bomb that has been ticking away ominously in the Middle East”: Kissinger had just secured a preliminary peace accord between Egypt and Israel. That was well received, too. He reported that 50 percent of Miss Universe contestants, asked on a questionnaire who was “the greatest person in the world today,” answered “Henry Kissinger.” The audience rocked with appreciative laughter.

  He returned to his hotel, then, shortly before 10 A.M. he strode forth for an address to the state legislature at the capitol, across the street. Skies were clear; a small crowd outside the hotel cheered him on; the sun finally seemed to be shining on Gerald Ford. Crowds lined the restraining ropes snaking through the verdant grounds. The president began shaking hands, confident and smiling.

  A blank-faced woman dressed in a dramatic flowing red gown and a bizarre red turban drew a .45-caliber Army Colt automatic from a leg holster.

  The leader of the free world flinched, paled; a Secret Service officer grabbed the gun with one hand and this tiny, mousy woman with the other.

  She started screaming. “It didn’t go off!” she said as she was led away, first in surprise and dismay, then in an apparent attempt at self-exculpation. “Don’t worry. It didn’t go off, fellows. It didn’t go off!”—as if that technicality might free her. She then acted as if the political analysis she confidently shouted into the crowd—which crowd, since it had all happened so fast, hardly realized an assassination had been attempted at all—might explain it all away: “This country is a mess! The man is not your president!”

  The president, grimly determined, agents shielding him in every direction, continued on to the capitol building and calmly delivered his speech—which focused, ironically, on “the truly alarming increase in violent crime throughout this country.” Meanwhile, journalists got to work identifying the strange small woman in the red turban. Her name, they learned, was Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, and her guru was none other than Charles Manson.

  Americans had retained a death-haunted fascination with this wicked Svengali who somehow insinuated himself inside the minds of a makeshift tribe of young men and women, most from ordinary middle-class suburban backgrounds, and by 1969 turned them into a gang of remorseless killers who fondly hoped their cold-blooded murders of Sharon Tate, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, and their friends in the Hollywood Hills would foment a national race war. The previous spring, the paperback rights to prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s bestseller about the case, Helter Skelter, sold for an astounding $771,000. Now the lurid fascination was kindled anew.

  In 1971, it turned out, Fromme, then twenty-two years old, had been sentenced to ninety days in jail for attempting, by lacing a hamburger with LSD, to keep a witness from testifying in the Tate murder trial. An interview surfaced that she had given in July 1975: “If Nixon’s reality wearing a new Ford face continues to run the country against the law, our homes will be bloodier than the Tate-LaBianca houses and My Lai put together.” The Associated Press tracked down her best friend, Sandra Good, “who still bears a deep X scar carved in her forehead in devotion to Manson.” Good and Fromme cohabited celibately “as self-avowed ‘nuns,’ ” it was explained. “She’s a very, very gentle girl,” Good insisted. “That’s why all this monstrousness out there hurts her.” The “monstrousness,” she explained, included “Charlie being locked up, sitting in a cell for five years.” (Fromme’s trial attorney explained that her goal had been to win Manson a new trial.) And, too, the despoliation of the environment: “Every day,” Good said, “we wake up and think, ‘How many whales did they kill today?’ ” She then patiently explained that she and Fromme were members of “a wave of assassins,” the “International Peoples’ Court of Retribution,” “made up of several thousand people throughout the world who love the earth, the children, and their own lives. They have been silently watching executives and chairmen of boards—and their wives—of companies and industries that in any way harm the air, water, earth, and wildlife.” Soon after, one of the seventy-five people Good said they’d marked for assassination, a Dow Chemical executive, said that weeks earlier he’d received a threatening phone call from a woman identifying herself as a member of the Charles Manson family.

  At her arraignment, Fromme stood up, addressed the judge despite a warning that she might prejudice her chance for a fair trial, and proclaimed, “I want you to order the corps of government engineers to buy up the parks. . . . You have jurisdiction over the redwood trees. The important part is the redwood trees. . . . The gun is pointed, your honor.” (She cheerfully addressed the judge as she was led from the courtroom: “I hope I wasn’t rude.” He assured her she was not.) Another character was introduced in the news: one Harold Eugene Boro, sixty-six, the owner of the gun, a quiet grandfather, divorced for thirty years, who relatives said “never was interested in women or anything,” but who nonetheless had become Fromme and Good’s “sugar daddy.” As for Good, she stood outside their apartment and told reporters that their International Tribunal now marked three thousand people for execution, “if they didn’t stop harming the environment and projecting distorted sex images into the media”—though their wives would be “hacked to death” first.

  MORE DISTURBANCES.

  School was in session—or, in a bewildering array of places around the country, was not in session. Every Chicago sc
hool and most New York schools were empty. So were schools in ten separate communities in Rhode Island and thirty-one in Pennsylvania, and in Berkeley and San Jose, California; Wilmington, Delaware; Milan and Brecksville, Ohio; Hoboken, New Jersey; and Lynn and New Bedford, Massachusetts. One municipality that avoided America’s unprecedented wave of teacher strikes, however, was Boston. There classes went on as scheduled the first Tuesday after Labor Day—as two hundred young demonstrators in the Charlestown section greeted the second year of court-ordered desegregation by barricading themselves off at the corner of Bunker Hill and Concord streets and stoning police cars.

  Gays were on the march—so proclaimed the September 8 cover of Time, from which peered a uniformed Air Force officer named Leonard Matlovich declaring, “I am a homosexual.” “Similarly jolting,” they observed, “have been public announcements of their homosexuality by a variety of people who could be anybody’s neighbors.” Redbook, the ladies’ magazine, and syndicated advice columnist Abigail Van Buren said you should have nothing to fear. Redbook quoted her response to two worried parents: “Why do you assume that her sexual preference will necessarily ‘ruin’ her life?”

  But the account that ensued in Time—“perhaps the most obvious aspect of the male gay subculture is its promiscuity,” a “sexual marketplace” of “quick, anonymous and furtive sex in men’s rooms of public parks,” “prostitutes who are teen-age or younger . . . greatly in demand, particularly by older married men” (a guide to the nation’s underage brothels, Where the Boys Are, had sold 70,000 copies), and the “orgy rooms” of proliferating bathhouse clubs (one chain had branches in thirty-two cities, like McDonald’s)—made it hard for even the most liberal-minded readers to find much tolerance in their hearts for the new developments, or sympathy for a political movement making “headway by using the model of the black civil rights struggle.” A psychoanalyst got the last word: “ ‘Anything goes’ is a legitimate attitude for consenting adults . . . but for a culture to declare it as a credo is to miss entirely the stake all of us have in the harmony between the sexes and in the family as the irreplaceable necessity of society. This is a society that is increasingly denying its impotence by calling it ‘tolerance,’ preaching resignation and naming all this ‘progress.’ ”