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

by Rick Perlstein

  He was not even around Sunday when Mr. Ford fired Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger and Central Intelligence Agency Director William E. Colby. Instead, Rumsfeld took a rare day off and went to the Washington Redskins–Dallas Cowboys football game. . . .

  He also presumably made himself available for the vice presidential vacancy that was created by the withdrawal of Nelson Rockefeller from the 1976 ticket.

  There weren’t supposed to have been any “silent architects” in Gerald Ford’s ultratransparent White House. Nor any “Byzantine” battles for power. And yet here, on the front page of the Washington Post, the nation’s next secretary of defense, a man most people outside Washington wouldn’t recognize, whose qualifications to be defense secretary as Ford described them at his press conference (“a person who is experienced in the field of foreign policy and who served in the Department of Defense as a naval aviator”) sounded conspicuously thin, was depicted as the power behind the throne.

  Moderates were not placated: the piece also quoted highly placed sources who said that Kissinger was incensed by the changes. Another facet of the political mess was that rumors soon surfaced insisting that Rockefeller had not jumped but had been pushed. But even that didn’t placate the conservatives: “I am not appeased,” was Ronald Reagan’s response. Meanwhile, at his own press conference, Rockefeller was badgered by questions about whether he’d run for president in 1976.

  Time noted that though he sounded angry, Reagan “could only feel helped by President’s Ford’s clumsy handling of the Cabinet shake ups and his diminished credibility.” It cited a Gallup poll taken before the massacre that had Ford ahead among Republicans 58 to 36 percent—and an NBC poll taken afterward that gave it to Reagan, 44 to 43 percent.

  “MR. PRESIDENT,” FORD HAD BEEN ASKED in the East Room, “how worried are you about Ronald Reagan?” He answered that he was not. It was just about the only nakedly honest thing he said that night.

  Reagan, Ford told confidants, was a lightweight. Barry Goldwater himself told Ford’s staffers there was no way Reagan could win in big states. Ford could be cheered that his campaign had righted itself somewhat. His finance chairman had failed, yes; Bo Callaway was gaffe-prone; but the campaign had meanwhile poached two impressive technicians from the enemy camp: the pioneering political consultant Stuart Spencer, who had fashioned Reagan into a credible gubernatorial challenger in 1966, and F. Clifton White, an unsung conservative hero who had wired the insurgent movement that delivered the Republican nomination to Barry Goldwater in 1964.

  Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, an old adversary, was about to retire, so soon Ford would get to display the mighty power of his office by picking a lifetime replacement. Ford’s wife, it turned out, was not a liability. In fact it seemed to be just the opposite. A new Harris poll revealed that 64 percent supported and only 23 percent opposed what she said about her daughter’s theoretical affair. Seventy percent liked her views on the Equal Rights Amendment. All in all, Lou Harris wrote, “Betty Ford has become one of the most popular wives of a President to occupy the White House.” Whatever the wages of Halloween, Ford was confident; he was, after all, an incumbent president—still careening around the country for personal appearances even in the face of testimony from the Treasury secretary that he had faced 320 death threats in twenty days that fall alone.

  But in a suspicious age, as compared with the past, the advantages of incumbency broke differently.

  In October 1974, haunted by testimony from the Ervin Committee’s green table about suitcases filled with cash, negotiable securities, and checks laundered through Mexican banks, Congress passed, and Ford signed, amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act that had the potential to revolutionize the way elections were financed. Among these measures was a $1,000 limit on what any one individual could contribute to a campaign, a cap on primary spending and general election spending of $10 million for each major party’s presidential candidate, strict standards of campaign disclosure, and the public provision of up to $5 million in “matching funds” for any candidate for federal office who raised at least $5,000 in contributions of $250 or under in each of twenty states. It provided for a new agency, the Federal Election Commission, to adjudicate these and other rules. It all was one reason the Reagan political team was keeping its man from announcing an official candidacy until as late as possible before the New Hampshire primary, set for February 24: that way, the disgusted editorialists of the Boston Globe pointed out, Reagan could conduct “a national campaign, in the guise of operating a business, for almost a year before he announced,” evading “every reporting regulation for political organizations.”

  That didn’t prevent Friends of Ronald Reagan, the organization officially purporting not to be a presidential campaign, from now making an aggressive play for strict scrutiny of the president by the new FEC. The Republican National Committee was paying for the president’s travels, money that would be reimbursed by the new system’s matching funds. The Reagan exploratory committee said its not-candidate should get the same deal—because there was no reason to assume the president was actually even “the titular leader of his party.” The FEC announced it would rule on that challenge by the end of November.

  And then there was the Ford campaign organization’s other liability: the candidate himself.

  On November 7 he headed off to Massachusetts; there was a primary there March 2, and New Hampshire was just over the border. On the tarmac at Westover Air Force Base, he announced he would enter every primary in the nation. That caught his campaign strategists by horrified surprise, considering how Nixon’s pledge to campaign in every state doomed him in 1960: it took careful strategic targeting to win a marathon national election. He then tripped over a wheelchair. Or so it at least appeared to some. A Secret Service agent, conversely, presumed his lurch tarmac-ward had been effectuated by an excited little boy’s American flag, which the agent brutishly wrested from the kid’s hand; it looked like a scene from one of Chevy Chase’s Weekend Updates.

  Then, speaking before New England business leaders, Ford defensively addressed critics of his personnel shifts: “I want to be absolutely sure these domestic political potshots are not ‘heard ’round the world.’ . . . The temptation to political adversaries to take advantage of any apparent weakness, disunity, and decision could become irresistible. . . . Weakness invites war. . . . Without a clear consensus among the 214 million Americans . . . the ability of a President to carry out his constitutional duties would be dangerously diminished.” The Globe editorialized with distaste, “His confusion between his personal political fortunes and the well-being of the nation was disturbingly reminiscent of Richard Nixon.”

  It was a Friday—which meant Saturday Night Live was on the next night. This time, after a week’s hiatus, opening the show, Chevy Chase upped the satirical stakes by playing the president. Onscreen: the familiar presidential podium, a pitcher of water, two glasses. Chase entering, tuxedo-clad, to “Hail to the Chief,” bumping into the flag, dropping his papers, fumblingly scooping them up:

  “My fellow Americans, ladies and gentlemen, members of the press, and my immediate family. First, may I thank you all for being here. And I am in my immediate family.

  “First, may I thank you all for being here”—Absent-mindedly, the Nutty President repeated himself—“and I am in my immediate family.”

  He announced the show’s host: “Harvey” Cosell.

  He poured water into one of the glasses. Then drank from another, empty glass.

  One awkward pause, one pratfall, one head-banging fall to the podium (“Whoop! No problem! Okay! No problem! Sorry! No problem!”), and one more sip from the empty water glass later:

  “I know a fella who is going to enter the New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Florida, and every other primary! And I know he is going to win! And if he has any other competition, right up to the end of 1976—”

  (He thumped once more to the floor. “Uh-oh! No problem! No problem
!”)

  “And if I don’t win, I will continue to run, even if there are none! And now for my second announcement—”

  He made the announcement from the floor, after tripping over two folding chairs:

  “Live from New York! It’s Saturday night!”

  It wasn’t fair. Every public figure constantly on TV sometimes stumbles. It wasn’t the president’s fault that a car hit his limousine, or that it was raining that spring in Austria when he had been gentlemanly enough to concentrate on his wife’s safety instead of his own; or that he was hobbled from knee surgery in 1972. In fact, he was the most physically accomplished man to have ever held the office: a triple letterman in football, basketball, and track in high school; an all-American center on the gridiron at the University of Michigan, passing up offers to join the Green Bay Packers and Detroit Lions in order to go to law school; an expert skier whom far-younger Secret Service men had a hard time keeping up with at Vail (his excuse that “every skier takes a fall once in a while” didn’t help when, in December 1975, the TV cameras caught him collapsing in a heap). No one had thought to consider him clumsy when he acceded to the office the previous August. In fact, back then, the comedian Rich Little, who’d risen to stardom on the back of his Nixon impression, complained he was having a hard time finding anything funny to imitate about Gerald Ford at all. “The trouble is that the President is not visual: he has no distinct mannerisms.”

  Comedians didn’t worry about that now.

  Some new President Ford jokes:

  The only thing between Nelson Rockefeller and the presidency is a banana peel.

  Why won’t Ford help New York in the fiscal crisis? He was once trapped there for six hours on an escalator.

  Why won’t Ford be throwing out the first pitch on Opening Day? The Secret Service is worried he’ll be beaned in the head.

  Woody Allen, by way of Patty Hearst: “It’s possible it was all a result of my brainwashing but I was then brought into a room where President Gerald Ford shook my hand and asked me if I would follow him around the country and take a shot at him now and then, being careful to miss. He said it would give him a chance to act bravely and could serve as a distraction from genuine issues, which he felt unequipped to deal with.”

  And just in time for Chevy Chase’s onslaught that November, the first book about Ford as president came out. It was called A Ford, Not a Lincoln, and in it, Richard Reeves described him as “slow, plodding, pedestrian, unimaginative,” “inarticulate,” and “ignorant”—though you didn’t have to take Reeves’s word for it. He also quoted the president’s Grand Rapids pastor: “Gerald Ford is a normal, decent, God-fearing man, but you can say that about a lot of people.”

  THERE IS A MEDIEVAL POLITICAL maxim that “the king has two bodies.” A “body natural,” that is to say—the real one that he carts around day to day, like any ordinary mortal—and a “body politic”—his symbolic presence as head of state. A president also has two bodies. The symbolic one glows on the TV screen, emanating a two-hundred-year-old nation’s authority, of the safe, solid power of the free world, tangible evidence of the continued smooth functioning of a superpower. Now that America’s power seemed neither safe nor solid, however, the continuity of its institutions was no longer guaranteed, and the president’s two bodies collapsed one into the other—and his corporeal self was cast as a fourth member of the Three Stooges, to star in an allegory about a nation that no longer worked.

  The evidence accumulated apace. In Pennsylvania, on October 21, the state secretary of heath had announced the discovery of a mysterious new disease, “pantosomatitis,” said to be contagious, chronic, extremely painful, and fatal in 2.5 to 3 percent of cases; involving dozens of widely varying symptoms; and spreading up and down the East Coast. The news understandably transfixed the nation. Then, ten days later, the Associated Press reported that the researchers the physician claimed helped him make the discovery had never worked with him and that no medical publication or writer had been able to verify it actually existed.

  On October 23, Mike Royko wrote of meeting a lawyer at a party and asking him what kind of law he practiced: “ ‘I fix,’ he said,” and Royko wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly. “ ‘You fix cases?’ I asked. ‘Judges?’ He nodded. When he saw the look of surprise on my face he looked amused. And he said that if I quoted him by name, he would naturally deny it and sue the pants off me.” His new friend said he didn’t even know how to file a lawsuit or appear in a courtroom: “He has done nothing but fix.” Royko thought he’d seen it all in twenty years as a hard-drinking Chicago newsman. But this brazenness was a new one on him.

  It was an appropriate moment for Gallup, on October 30, to release its latest poll on public trust: Sixty-eight percent thought the country’s leaders “consistently lied to the American people”; in 1972 that figure had been but 38 percent. And Americans hadn’t even heard yet of the Halloween Massacre. Nor of the claim, in a story that broke four days later, that defense contractor Martin Marietta kept a hunting lodge where it plied Pentagon officials with prostitutes.

  That was nothing compared with the story that broke on November 19. In 1964, a little more than a month before Martin Luther King was set to travel to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, the FBI sent him a package of unspecified material meant to blackmail him, accompanied by an anonymous letter. A Church Committee counsel read it aloud at an open hearing: “You know you are a complete fraud a great liability to all of us negroes. The American public will know you for what you are, an evil abnormal beast. King, there is one thing left to do. You [know] what it is. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation . . . you have just 34 days.” Part of a seven-year FBI campaign of harassment against King, the letter was an attempt to spur the civil rights leader to suicide. Another letter that was entered into evidence, from deputy FBI director William C. Sullivan to J. Edgar Hoover and dated a little less than two years earlier, revealed the motive. It proposed “taking him completely off his pedestal.” “This can be done and will be done. Obviously, confusion will reign . . . the Negroes will be left without a national leader.”

  The news set off a flurry of morbid speculation. Royko, reflecting on a presumed kook who insisted the FBI had rubbed out Martin Luther King in 1968, remembered back when he could have dismissed that as ridiculous; now, “all I could say was, ‘I don’t know.’ ” Coretta Scott King, the great man’s widow, called for an investigation of just that charge, and even the New York Times observed that given the kind of things the Church Committee was turning up, “the very least once can wonder, considering the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s feelings about Dr. King, is whether he could have put his agency’s whole heart into the investigation of the assassination.” The Saginaw News editorialized that though such speculation was “chilling,” it was “hardly more chilling than testimony already a matter of record concerning alleged spy network involvement with organized crime in the field of international assassinations.”

  That fact was confirmed as far more than mere speculation on November 20, when the Church Committee, once more over strenuous White House objections, released a 346-page report titled Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. It established that the CIA had tried to off Fidel Castro eight times, had supplied weapons to the plotters against the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo (the plotters succeeded, though not with the CIA’s weapons), and had encouraged but not directly intervened in the assassinations of three more, including Ngo Diem Dinh in November 1963—the same South Vietnamese president whom America (and the CIA) had financed and backed for almost a decade prior. It also reported that the CIA helped a group that kidnapped a Chilean general who stood in the way of their attempt to overthrow Salvador Allende.

  That morning a spokesman for the Justice Department announced that it was weighing whether to bring criminal charges against those involved in the as
sassination plots the report described. That night, Daniel Schorr said on the CBS news, “It seems, according to this report, to be true (as ex-director Richard Helms has said) that the CIA never assassinated any foreign leaders. It seems also to be true that it wasn’t for want of trying.” Editorials the next morning called the revelations “shocking and disturbing,” “revolting,” “inexcusable by any standards of international morality and diplomatic expediency.” Moral government, insisted the New York Times, “is not the impractical dream of naive do-gooders. It is the only inherent strength of a self-governing nation.”

  But if that were so, it was hard to see how Church’s report might help heal the wound. In fact, it only compounded the nation’s enervated confusion, complicating a debate that had rumbled across the entire season of inquiry: Who, exactly, was supposed to be blamed? And if no one knew whom to blame, how could the crisis be fixed?

  Frank Church’s own contribution was not always helpful. Some derided him as a stuffy, pompous moralist, an orator above all—“Frank Sunday School,” they called him, or sometimes, even better, “Frank Cathedral.” When he was fourteen years old, in 1939, a letter he wrote urging isolationism was printed on the front page of a Boise newspaper. He then served with honor as an intelligence officer in World War II, earning a Bronze Star; then, at twenty-three, he survived what his doctors thought was fatal cancer. Nine years later, in 1956, “the boy wonder from Idaho” was elected to the Senate—where he displayed courage proper to someone who had cheated death.

  But not always. For he was also a senator, possessed of the bland passion for compromise then native to that tribe. And, at that, a presidential aspirant—possessed by the omnidirectional imperative to placate the myriad factions and personalities of that most fractured of political tribes, the Democratic Party. A successful Democratic presidential nominee also had to defer to the memory of that party’s beloved martyred Hero in Chief; all that certainly helped explain the certain curious willful resistance Church displayed in following his own evidence where it frequently led. He had imagined, when he took on this inquiry as his own, that it would help put the final nails in the coffin for the legacy of Richard M. Nixon. He hardly knew how to respond when so many of the most frightening discoveries pointed instead to the administration of John F. Kennedy—at whose 1960 convention he had delivered a striking keynote speech.