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

by Rick Perlstein

  In July he gave a press conference in which he used a memorable phrase: rogue elephant. He said there was a “very real possibility” that the Central Intelligence Agency conceived and attempted assassinations on its own, without the knowledge of anyone outside the agency—that the CIA “may have been behaving like a rogue elephant on a rampage.” It proved a comforting notion to an establishment longing for innocence. It was abetted by the intelligence community’s very manner of operation—the layers of plausible denial baked into the CIA cake. On the first day of the public hearings in September, for instance, Senator Mondale had suggested that “things are occurring in deliberate contravention and disregard of official orders.” But he quickly grew exasperated asking low-level agents just who had approved their actions, and hearing in response: “Well, I don’t know—you’ll have to ask someone higher up.” The same pattern repeated itself up and up and up the chain of command. “[T]hey all said the same thing,” he later reflected; “none of them knew who had authorized anything. The process was clearly designed for fog—to hide responsibility and prevent anyone from ever being called to account.” He compared affixing ultimate responsibility to nailing Jell-O to a wall. Very soon, however, he arrived at the famous conclusion President Harry Truman displayed on his desk: The Buck Stops Here. With the Presidents of the United States. And, in any event, by October 30, when Henry Kissinger testified, surely to protect his own skin, that every covert action undertaken by the American intelligence community was personally approved by the president, the “rogue elephant” theory would have seemed to be largely refuted.

  But that didn’t keep Senator Church from writing in his November 20 assassination report, “Even after our long investigation, it is unclear whether the conflicting and inconclusive state of the evidence is due to the system of plausible denial or whether there were, in fact, serious shortcomings in the system of authorization”—this despite his own report reaching, to take one example, a “reasonable inference” that President Eisenhower had authorized the coup against President Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1960.

  And so, for those few scattered Americans seriously following the intelligence investigations, a fundamental and fundamentally disturbing question lingered: Were our presidents lawless and wicked? Or just bumbling nobodies, Gerald Fords, every last one of them—dumb, ignorant pawns of secret police agencies?

  To ask the question was to stare into an abyss. So Senator Church papered over the abyss.

  He appended a three-paragraph epilogue to the committee report—and found it so important he read it aloud to reporters: “The committee does not believe that the acts which it has examined represent the real American character. . . . They do not reflect the ideals which have given the people of this country and of the world hope for a better, fuller, fairer life. We regard the assassination plots as aberrations.” (He did not note that the “aberrations” spanned two decades and four presidential administrations.) “The United States,” he continued, “must not adopt the tactics of the enemy.” He concluded, “Despite our distaste for what we have seen, we have great faith in this country. The story is sad, but this country has the strength to hear the story and to learn from it. We must remain a people who confront our mistakes and resolve not to repeat them. If we do not, we will decline, but if we do, our future will be worthy of the best of our past.”

  The Washington Post singled out that epilogue for applause: “To believe otherwise is to assault the basic process of consensus and correction by which a democratic society must proceed.” The Milwaukee Journal ran it on the front page, under the headline “MORAL FOR U.S.” As instructive was the number of newspapers that ran nothing at all about the Church Committee assassination report on their front pages. Like the Tri-City Herald of Dubuque, Iowa, and environs, where it was trumped by news of butter prices, the political progress of the Communist Party in Portugal, a government effort to regulate unsafe Christmas lights, and the question of whether the Ford campaign would get equal time when stations showed Ronald Reagan movies—as well as the story “Blind Bow Hunter Bags Deer.”

  Mary McGrory, downplaying Church’s pulling of punches, and contradicting her colleagues on the Post editorial page, wrote in a column titled “Sen. Church’s Topic: The Nation’s Soul” that “if this country is ready to face the facts about itself Church could become our next president.”

  Or, if the nation’s soul tended otherwise, the presidency might go to someone who preferred stories of patriotic reassurance.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  * * *

  “Has the Gallup Poll Gone Bananas?”

  RONALD REAGAN HAD ALWAYS SAID, when asked if he was running for president, that a man does not seek the office; the office seeks him. A rescuer, after all, does not ask to rescue. He must be summoned.

  When Ronald Reagan flew on commercial flights he always sat in the first row. That way he could greet passengers as they boarded. One day he was flying between Los Angeles and San Francisco. A woman threw his arms around him and said, “Oh, Governor, you’ve got to run for president!”

  “Well,” he said, turning to Michael Deaver, dead serious, “I guess I’d better do it.”

  Yes: he had been summoned. That was early in 1975. He had likely been running in his mind ever since. On November 20, one week before Thanksgiving Thursday, and the day the seal of the United States Senate was affixed to the conclusion that America’s secret spy agency plotted the murder of leaders of sovereign states, he made it official.

  PUBLICLY HE HAD KEPT HIS own counsel in all those intervening months; Ronald Reagan could be quite disciplined politically when he put his mind to it. It was spring before he told a meeting of supporters that he was disillusioned enough with Jerry Ford to run. The White House sent emissaries to hint that he might make a nice running mate for Ford, then offered him a job as commerce secretary; they failed to dissuade him. The conservatives pining for a third political party asked him to become their candidate; but any temptations Reagan felt in that directions were scotched when Holmes Tuttle, first among equals in his “kitchen cabinet” of wealthy backers, told him he wouldn’t see another penny if that was what he decided. Late in April, at Reagan’s home in Pacific Palisades, National Review publisher and third-party enthusiast William Rusher presented Reagan with a copy of his new book, The Making of the New Majority, and tried one more time:

  “The GOP won’t nominate you in 1976,” Rusher said.

  “Well, now, that remains to be seen,” Reagan responded.

  He was ready to fight for the Republican nomination. On the day of the fall of Saigon, columnist Robert Novak flew with him in a small private prop plane from a triumphant appearance in Mississippi to his next speech, in Florida, before a pharmaceutical convention (for the standard five-thousand-dollar fee). Something was different about Reagan, Novak decided. In their previous encounters it was almost as if the old trouper was reading from a script. Perhaps it was the frightening thunderstorm rattling the plane. But now he behaved entirely differently. He favored Novak with some of the jokes that his staff forbade him to tell in public, ones literally learned at his late mother’s knee. (Nelle Reagan was proud of her comic accents, and her son had studied well: “His Jewish dialect was hilarious,” Novak recollected.) He told tales out of school about Hollywood executives, about the dark years after his marriage broke up. (“I tried to go to bed with every starlet in Hollywood, and I damn near succeeded.”)

  Then, another triumph before the pharmaceutical executives. Then, a backroom conclave with Republican pols in Atlanta. Then, a speech to the students of Georgia Tech (he said the Democratic Congress had “blood on its hands” for losing Vietnam—an implicit thumb in the eye of a president who had just implored the nation to avoid “recrimination or assessments of blame”). Then he took on détente: “If the Communists get the prestige and material aid they need without having to change any of their own policies, the seeds of future conflict will be continually nourished, ready to spro
ut anew with little or no warning.” Novak promptly filed a column under his and his partner Rowland Evans’s byline to run May 2: “A determined eight-hour sleeper with regular daytime rest periods as governor”—a rarity among politicians, who are generally a manic lot—“Reagan steadily lost sleep thought interminable days of speaking and handshaking, aggravated by slow, small private planes. . . . Most startling to longtime Reagan watchers, he did not even complain. . . . Having convinced himself Mr. Ford is not up to the presidency, Reagan must also convince himself he could stand a frantic national campaign.”

  His aides lined up a national campaign organization, while the candidate who said he was running for nothing stockpiled income and national attention. They devised a strategy: primaries, not party caucuses—an outside game. And they devised an outsider’s rhetorical stance—but not too much of an outsider’s stance, lest anyone powerful become personally offended. It would be a run, not against Gerald Ford or even Congress or Democrats, but something grander, a post-Watergate crusade against “the ‘buddy system’ in Washington.”

  Writers visited his office in Los Angeles that summer; it featured a desk he brought over from the governor’s mansion and was crowded with toy elephants and political mementoes, such as a slab of concrete with a pair of shoes embedded therein (a gift from newsmen reminding him of the time he had said “my feet are in concrete” on the subject of state income tax withholding, and then had reversed himself). Family snapshots, pictures of Ronald Reagan with Dwight D. Eisenhower in golf togs, Ronald Reagan with the pope, Ronald Reagan with Billy Graham, lined the walls—but not, as one columnist noticed, any of Ronald Reagan with Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford. Books, too, including one sitting out on the desk: Lawrence Welk’s autobiography, Ah-One! Ah-Two!

  (A Reagan flack assured the columnist who recorded this “that the books in the room did not necessarily reflect Reagan’s reading tastes, that he was sent dozens of volumes by admirers.”)

  All evidence suggested an organization gearing up for a serious and sustained national campaign. And yet, as late as September, a memo crossed President Ford’s desk arguing that the governor was not going to run. The White House simply refused to gear up for a serious fight. Richard Nixon had just told Ford’s advisor Jerry Jones that Reagan was a “lightweight.” Internal political memorandums referred to the grassroots organization Reagan’s people were carefully cultivating around the country as “right-wing nuts.”

  In October, Reagan disappeared from the radio. In his place were greatest-hits reruns. (One was “The Superintendent’s Dilemma,” an allegory in verse about a forlorn educator rendered superfluous by power-mad bureaucrats. Another poem was “The Incredible Bread Machine,” a libertarian loaves-and-fishes miracle tale of a man who invents a cheaper way to manufacture bread, becomes wealthy by ending world hunger, then is punished out of existence by a vindictive state; later in the year it was made into a movie with an introduction by treasury secretary Simon.) Julie Nixon substituted as host one week. (She promoted “National Employ the Handicapped Week” and excoriated college students supposedly flocking onto the welfare rolls.) And on November 17 Reagan was on the covers of Newsweek (“Can He Stop Ford?”) and Time (“The Star Shakes Up the Party”). In Time’s article, a “former close adviser” was quoted: “I never ever saw him initiate an order on his own. . . . That’s what made Reagan so easy for us to program. . . . If he becomes President, it is a terribly important question—who’s running the country?”

  Then, the big day arrived.

  HE DID NOT HAVE HIS family by his side. That was a political decision. Adult children—his adopted son, Michael, just married the previous week, was thirty-two; daughter Maureen was thirty-four; Patti was twenty-three; Ron was seventeen—would only point up that in February, Ronald Reagan would be eligible for Social Security. The presence of Maureen and Michael—identified, invariably, as “the adopted son and the daughter of Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman”—would remind voters that he would be the first president who had been divorced. Reagan was supposed to be the embodiment of wholesome family values; the Fords were supposed to be the embodiment of 1970s moral dissolution. Best not to complicate things.

  Jack Ford, twenty-three, had just admitted publicly that he had smoked marijuana, and his brother Steve, nineteen, who had just changed his major from range science to animal science at the University of Utah, told reporters, “Right now, I’m against legalizing marijuana, although sometimes I’m for it and sometimes I’m against it.” It made for a contrast to Patti Davis—she changed her name to her mother’s in college so as to avoid any association with her father, then dropped out—who smoked marijuana, too. In fact the vociferously antidrug governor’s daughter did rather more than that: when she had asked her parents to pay for psychotherapy, they refused, so she starting buying the stuff by the pound and selling it to pay for the treatment herself. She certainly never publicly talked about drugs, however. “I had been taught to keep secrets, to keep our image intact for the world,” she wrote in a memoir. “Under our family’s definition of ‘loyalty,’ the public should never see that under a carefully preserved surface was a group of people who knew how to inflict wounds, and then convincingly say those wounds never existed.”

  Maureen Reagan described the lesson of her upbringing as “Be nice to people, but don’t tell them anything, because your parents make good copy.” However, like her mother, Jane Wyman, who displayed her marriage’s dirty laundry in newspapers, she honored the principle in the breach. Nine days before her father’s candidacy was announced she told reporters, “I am the most vociferous of all his detractors in our family regarding his candidacy. It is for reasons all personal and very selfish. They come after eight years of having to make phone calls to arrange appointments to speak to my own father.” Compare the Fords. As son Steve explained to reporters: “Everyone in our family is grown up. We’re not under our folks’ care anymore.” They did what they wanted, unashamed to tell the world, and with their parents’ implicit blessing, too. It was hard to imagine them having to make an appointment to speak to Dad.

  Contrast that to the family of the family-values candidate: four kids, seven marriages, zero college degrees, several expulsions from boarding school, two contemplated suicide attempts. Once, Patti had been studying at Northwestern when her father intervened to have a black man arrested with whom she liked to share friendly banter. She was so humiliated she considered suicide—she “touched the blade to my wrist and felt how easy it would be.” After she transferred to USC, her young brother showed up once on her doorstep, a sixteen-year-old runaway, sick of his mother hassling him to cut his hair and spying on him using the house’s intercoms (she used them as a dedicated surveillance system: better living, electrically). The last straw had been when she searched his room (she found, naturally, a bag of marijuana). Patti soon returned him back home. She feared her mother was about to report her to the authorities for kidnapping. Once, her father asked an acquaintance, referring to this daughter of his, “Do you think a child can be born evil?”

  Their memoirs are filled with images of abandonment, distance, cruelty, dispossession, silence. “I spent so much time alone during my early high school years,” wrote Maureen of the prep schools she shuttled between, one all the way across the country, “that I began to wonder if I would ever fit in anywhere.” Michael, adopted by Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan in 1945, was sexually abused by a camp counselor when he was seven and lived every day in fear that the nude photos his victimizer took would surface, or that the world would learn that he was a “bastard.” He was afraid to tell his parents about it. Patti put forward outright horror stories. Her mother would scream at her in public as passersby stared, and one time locked her in a sweltering car. She beat Patti almost daily, and her father refused to believe it—though Patti said once there had been a witness: Holmes Tuttle, his political benefactor, whose only response, after pulling Nancy off her daughter, was to have said, “Don’t ever do that in fron
t of me again.” Nancy also popped pills, blaming Patti, whose physician grandfather once handed her a thick manila folder. “This is a medical report on your mother,” he said. “Her condition is very serious. Emotions can kill someone, you know. And if you don’t start behaving, we could lose her.”

  When her half brother Michael was fourteen and she was seven, he came to live, on weekends when he wasn’t in boarding school, in their Pacific Palisades house, so perfect and pristine that Patti feared to play in it. He had to sleep on the couch. He was thrilled when construction finally began, more than a year later, on a new room—“the symbol of my acceptance in the family,” he thought, until he learned it was for little Ron’s live-in nurse instead, and he was to sleep on the nurse’s old daybed in the playroom.

  It was around then, in 1960, after dropping out of college, that Maureen began living with a married police officer twelve years her senior. (Her father confirmed this when he asked the FBI, as a favor, to investigate.) In 1961 she married the cop, who beat her; in 1962, they divorced. The next year, at Michael’s high school graduation the commencement speaker was his father. Afterward Reagan made the rounds of students for introductions. He stopped before one, stuck out his hand: “My name is Ronald Reagan. What’s yours?” His son, anxious every day of his life about whether his adoptive father truly accepted him, took off his mortarboard and responded, “Remember me? I’m your son Mike.”