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

by Rick Perlstein

  New York still faced fiscal catastrophe, Felix Rohatyn’s Municipal Assistance Corporation having failed to cajole private capital markets into coughing up more loans. Mayor Beame laid off more than eight thousand teachers and school paraprofessionals—and the strike that resulted kept 1,075,000 innocent children from the classroom. Corrections officers briefly blocked the bridges to the jail on Rikers Island; citizens occupied firehouses to keep them from closing. On September 4 the state legislature convened to consider emergency measures. An editorial in that morning’s Wall Street Journal said the “fiscal agony of New York City has gone so far that the only hope for a responsible and reasonably straightforward resolution is a voluntary bankruptcy.” Republicans emboldened by the editorial forced through an Emergency Financial Control Act, which on September 9 all but transformed government in the world’s greatest city into an adjunct of a seven-person budget oversight board appointed by largely rural legislators in Albany. It was like what Ronald Reagan now said on the radio. Officials in both parties were talking about siting their national conventions in the city. Reagan said it might be a good idea: “It could be very educational. . . . New York is an example of what can happen to this entire country if we don’t re-chart our course.” He was especially offended by the fact that at its public colleges—whose 1,400 professors were also then on strike, with the president of their union beginning to serve a five-month sentence for contempt of court—“not one student, regardless of means, pays a penny in tuition.”

  The seventh special session of the United Nations General Assembly opened, also in New York. The theme was global economic development. The UN was founded as a majority-European body, but now 70 percent of its membership consisted of Third World states. Those states, emboldened by the success of OPEC’s Arab members in unilaterally turning themselves into geostrategic powerhouses by leveraging a commodity that nature happened to have gifted them beneath their sands, had begun playing the natural resource game themselves. Lowly Jamaica, for example, had begun telling America precisely how high it had to jump to access Jamaican bauxite, essential for the manufacture of aluminum. Now these countries’ prime ministers and presidents were in Manhattan bearing just such demands, proposing a sweeping reconstruction of the balance of power between have and have-not nations in the institutions of trade. And Daniel Patrick Moynihan, appointed America’s UN representative right after insisting it was “time that American spokesmen came to be feared,” presented the American response. Which was, pretty much, that the Third World nations would get exactly what they wished—a package of reforms designed to make sure such countries’ export programs continued to prosper whatever the fluctuations in demand for their commodities, an effective transfer of billions of dollars of value from the First World to the Third. The Ford administration appeared to have little choice: “at least 75 percent of the holdings of U.S. raw materials located in Third World Nations,” according to one estimate, “had been nationalized.” Treasury secretary Simon, livid, said of the proposed package, “We are in danger of compromising our basic commitment to the free enterprise system.” The Wall Street Journal compared such deals to handing over to feckless “international bureaucracies” the power to “balance Mayor Beame’s budget.”

  IN THE SECOND WEEK OF September, the Associated Press reported that telegrams and letters to the White House were running two to one against Betty Ford. A Democratic congressman from Ohio gave a speech on the House floor decrying the fact that twenty-four millionaires paid no federal income tax. And first-in-the-nation New Hampshire treated observers to a sort of referendum on the pressing political question of the moment: moderate Republicanism versus conservative Republicanism, President Gerald Rudolph Ford against Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan.

  A bizarre set of circumstances had followed a near tie in the 1974 election to replace a retiring conservative Republican senator from Hampshire: Republican Louis Wyman appeared to be ahead by 355 votes on election night, then Democrat John Durkin demanded a recount that put him ahead by ten votes; the Republican got a second recount that gave him the edge by two votes. Seven months of legal wrangling followed until a new election was called for September 16. President Ford seized on Wyman’s campaign as an opportunity. Having defiantly proclaimed following Squeaky Fromme’s folly in Sacramento that “no circumstances will preclude me from contacting the American people as I travel from one state to another,” he embarked upon an eleven-hour tour of fourteen towns across the lower tier of the state, stopping at several points along the way to make speeches as he perched on the presidential limousine’s running board, plunging impromptu into crowds for handshaking sessions, the only evident concession to security a snugger-fitting shirt and two clips from some sort of device above either side of his belt, which reporters guessed must be fastening a bulletproof vest.

  It was, the New York Times’ James Reston wrote, perfectly absurd: “the old crowd-pushing, hand-shaking, good-guy technique is no answer to inflation, unemployment, and the other concerns of the nation, and it is obviously dangerous. For we are living in a troubled and maybe even a demented age.” Something else, he wrote in the same column, was also absurd: the political calculation that suggested the necessity of all this campaign-style glad-handing. “The notion that Ronald Reagan can get the Republican presidential nomination,” he said, “is patently ridiculous unless you suspect the Republicans of suicidal tendencies.”

  And yet there was Ronald Reagan, making his own foray into New Hampshire on Louis Wyman’s behalf—and, a Washington Post columnist taking man-on-the-street soundings of Granite Staters’ opinions of the two men discovered, plainly winning by comparison with Ford. A high school teacher on the president: “I have no use for him when he keeps reaching into my pocket.” A factory worker: “I hate to turn my back on him, but he doesn’t seem to have our interests at heart. Why is he selling wheat to Russians?” An eighty-year-old woman: “I don’t believe in that kind of stuff and I never expected to hear it from a First Lady.” But the columnist noted, “The universal, high-octane contempt for all politicians somehow stops short of California’s former governor. He is perceived as a man of common sense who understands common people, especially New Hampshire retirees who turn purple as they talk of ‘all the money Congress voted itself before they sneaked off on vacation,’ ” and the “white-haired Republican woman” who told the columnist, “he ran that state pretty good, didn’t he? He got those people off welfare, didn’t he?”

  Other columnists reported inside dope. A sitting president was supposed to possess awesome powers to command the allegiance of sitting politicians. But Reagan had already won the state party chairman, its governor—and a crucial fence-sitting former governor, Hugh Gregg, who despised his lunatic far-right governor Meldrim Thomson but gave up on the president after his chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, snubbed him, never placing a promised phone call. “The Reagan people were more professional,” he said. Evans and Novak learned of a newfangled computer system Reaganites were using in their office that placed Reagan, according to a Republican who still was neutral, “about ten times” ahead of Ford in organization. They also noted that the president “rarely evoked applause” on his twenty stops. They quoted a “distinguished party leader” who said, “Ford had a chance to wrap up this state. He blew it. He absolutely blew it.”

  Perhaps an upset was conceivable. “Maybe Ford should run against Reagan,” a columnist for the Washington Star suggested; or maybe he shouldn’t be president at all, an editorial in the New York Times almost seemed to be saying: “The Ford Administration’s economic policies are failing. The economic recovery is sluggish and sputtering . . . inflation is again surging forward.” In contrast to the more conservative Star, and like its columnist Reston, it rued the role of his conservative challenger in nudging Ford to the right. Fifteen mayors had just begged the president to stave off New York’s default, to prevent the shock waves it would send across the entire municipal bond market. West German chancellor He
lmut Schmidt warned of the possibility of international economic collapse. “When a multi-billion dollar private corporation is skidding into bankruptcy, alarm arouses the Administration out of do-nothingness,” the Times opined of Ford’s nonresponse. “But when the nation’s largest city is in trouble, the Administration adopts the three blind mice as its policy-making model. Indeed, Mr. Ford seems to gloat over New York’s distress.” They blamed his “new Reaganism”—“budgetary restraint, trickle-down tax proposals, and a hopeful, expectant air”—and his “frenetic schedule.”

  The editorial was published on September 15. The previous day Ford had traveled to Dallas—speaking, of all places, at Love Field, from whence JFK was motorcading when he was shot in 1963. “The nation is not disintegrating,” he insisted, “it is going through a period of change.” He then (“protected,” the Associated Press reported, “by rigid security measures”) addressed “prophets of doom and gloom” who said criminals had captured the streets and “the President of the United States is no longer safe greeting citizens in the nation’s streets. . . . I’ve had it with that attitude. I did not take a secret oath of office to preside over the decline and fall of the United States of America.” The day before that, police had chased, but did not catch, a man with a gun in the very auditorium where Ford was to speak in St. Louis.

  Next he would head back to California, Reagan’s backyard—belying his remonstrances that these were not political appearances. First, though, on September 16, more than two weeks after its original deadline to submit its report, the Church Committee finally began its first televised hearing. “We will see today the dark side of those activities, where many Americans who were not even suspected of crime, were not only spied upon, but they were harassed, they were discredited, and at times endangered,” Church thoughtfully intoned in his opening statement—then, in a show carefully scripted for television, a jet-black dart gun was displayed, one designed to deliver a dose of poison derived from a shellfish toxin, untraceable in an autopsy, that could kill a man instantly from one hundred meters away.

  Church asked the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief William Colby: “Have you brought with you some of those devices which would enable the CIA to use this poison for—”

  Colby cut in—“indeed we have”—perhaps to head off the words that Church, angrily, uttered next:

  “—for killing people?”

  Murmurs. Pause. The gun was displayed by a CIA staffer. Church, joking: “Don’t point it at me!” Laughter. Barry Goldwater, the ranking committee Republican, picked it up, turned it over, and sighted intently down its barrel, providing the picture that showed up in all the papers the next day.

  Such chemical agents were supposed to be illegal. An unsigned memo to former director Richard Helms was introduced into evidence, however, written by the director of covert operations and recommending that if Helms wished “to continue this special capability” the unit could stockpile the poisons secretly at a private lab near Baltimore. The poison was indeed retained, and discerned in a vault in downtown Washington—but the committee discovered it would be nearly impossible to retrace the chain of responsibility, because the relevant files had all been destroyed. “I find your testimony rather astounding,” Senator Church told the head of the CIA’s science and technology branch. Colby, for his part, blamed “reckless insubordination.” “The best gloss you can give it,” suggested the Republican member from Maryland, Charles “Mac” Mathias, “is that there’s always somebody who didn’t get the word.” A less flattering gloss was suggested by Senator Walter Mondale, Democrat of Minnesota, who cited his “gnawing fear . . . that things are occurring in deliberate contravention and disregard of official orders.”

  A worse gloss than that was that things were occurring by official orders—not just in the retention of tiny amounts of deadly toxins, but in all those alleged CIA assassination attempts, too. William Safire, though, sounding as paranoid as any Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist, said not to count on Senator Church, a presidential aspirant, to look too hard: “Will candidate Church risk his Kennedy support by going after the whole story, or will he again shrink from full disclosure, as he did when the horrors of the Kennedy-CIA secret war on Cuba hove into view? . . . Will television news open up or cover up the [Kennedy] roots of the abuse of federal spying power?”

  This debate over responsibility for CIA abuses would haunt the investigations for months to come. It coursed, simultaneously, through popular culture. A new picture, Three Days of the Condor, hit screens; it starred Robert Redford as low-level CIA analyst who stumbles upon a high-level plot to seize Arabia’s oil fields for the United States—“no match,” the Times’ Vincent Canby concluded, “for stories that have appeared in your local newspaper.” Meanwhile, Church’s counterpart on the other side of the Capitol, Representative Otis Pike of New York—tapped to run the House’s select committee on intelligence after Lucien Nedzi resigned amid accusations of covering up his previous knowledge of CIA abuses—undertook an equally or even more aggressive inquiry of CIA perfidy. The committee’s first report discovered that the General Accounting Office hadn’t been allowed to audit the CIA since 1962, that GAO had no idea how much the agency took in or how it was spent, and that only six employees at the Office of Management and Budget, three of them former CIA employees, studied the foreign intelligence budget as a whole. Now, on September 11, they came out with a report alleging basic failures of the CIA in doing what it was supposed to do with all that secret money: deliver intelligence. The day before the 1973 Yom Kippur War broke out, the Pike Committee discovered, the agency had told the president to expect Middle East peace.

  A miniature constitutional crisis followed. The White House had tried to block release of that House report—unless, it demanded, four words revealing CIA “sources and methods” (apparently involving broken Egyptian codes) were stricken. Pike roared back. Ideologically moderate but characterologically irreverent, the Long Islander had a bit of the old Sam Ervin spirit in him: he wore flamboyant bow ties, and jealously guarded Congress’s prerogatives vis-à-vis the executive branch. The CIA “would simply prefer that we operated in a dictatorship where only one branch of the government has any power over secrecy,” he said. “I simply submit to you that that is not the way I read the Constitution of the United States.” His colleague Morgan F. Murphy of Illinois, another moderate Democrat, said, “I heard the same argument I heard in defense of President Nixon. He has a right to keep things secret, he has a right not to turn over tapes, and he has a right not to turn over documents. But I thought the Supreme Court settled that matter.” Their committee voted six to three to release the report, the four words intact, arguing that the very words in question revealed just the sort of CIA screw-ups it was the committee’s job to document. They defiantly subpoenaed more White House documents. The White House refused them. Then the president raised the stakes, sending a Justice Department official up to Capitol Hill to threaten that unless Pike promised not to release more classified information, the committee would get no more documents at all, no officials would testify on classified matters, and previously released classified documents would have to be returned—he was shutting down the investigation. On September 16, at an Oval Office press conference, Ford said that if a private citizen had released the “four words,” he would have gone to jail. The Times called it “the most serious Constitutional confrontation between the legislative and executive branch since the Watergate scandal.” For his part, Watergate-style, Otis Pike threatened to take the president to court.

  Two days later, Pike playfully hoisted the president with his own secrecy petard. A White House counsel named Rod Hill, who happened to be the husband of the president’s trade representative, left a notebook in Pike’s congressional office containing copies of letters marked “Secret Sensitive.” So Pike wrote Gerald Ford a letter—and introduced it into the Congressional Record: “It is my understanding,” he mocked, “that because of an alleged breach of
security you would like me to provide you with all secret documents in my possession. I have only one such document. It does in my judgment represent a grave breach of security and I am delighted to be able to present it to you and make a clean breast of the whole affair.” He suggested the president deploy the FBI to track down the culprit, and gave a hint as to his identity: “He is the husband of a member of your Cabinet.” In conclusion, he twisted the knife: “If he loses it again, it’s OK. I have a copy.”

  That morning, the New York Times had editorialized about “The Son of Watergate,” arguing that the administration was stonewalling on the CIA investigation: Ford’s “real concern,” they said, “seems to be to keep the House probers from delving as deeply as they should into the shadowland of intelligence activities.” And later that day, Patty Hearst—or “Tania,” if you preferred her nom de guerre—on the lam for sixteen months, was finally tracked down and arrested by the FBI, hiding in plain sight in a San Francisco apartment with another Symbionese Liberation Army member. What turned out to be most shocking about her flight from justice was how many otherwise law-abiding citizens had abetted it, apparently seeing shielding a bank robber as a protest against the evils of the American system—including, allegedly, the former athletic director of Oberlin College, who was a housemate of Bill Walton, the young basketball star who for his part had said, when offered $2.5 million to sign with the Portland Trailblazers, “I don’t believe in capitalism . . . wealth should be spread around.”