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

by Rick Perlstein

  That happened with all his children, all the time: “I frequently had to remind him that I was his child,” Patti wrote. “[I]t seemed sometimes to slip his mind. Often I’d come into a room and he’d look up from his notecards as though he wasn’t sure who I was. Ron would race up to him, small and brimming with a child’s enthusiasm, and I’d see the same bewildered look in my father’s eyes.” It confused her when, shortly after her twelfth birthday, she saw his famous 1964 address for Barry Goldwater on TV, the one in which he intoned: “We must preserve for our children this, the last best hope on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” She thought, What about his children?

  Michael matriculated at Arizona State University, where he raised hell with a kid named Joe Bonanno Jr., son of the capo of the Bonanno crime family, on whom an FBI investigation was closing in. (At that, J. Edgar Hoover did another favor for Reagan, who was about to begin running for governor—Hoover hoped to enlist Governor Reagan’s aid in firing system president Clark Kerr. The FBI informed Reagan about his son’s association, even though that may have compromised the investigation of Joe Bonanno Sr.) Michael flunked out, began working as a fry cook, was fired, worked on the docks in Los Angeles, became a professional motorboat racer, got married—then his pregnant wife left him, and a district attorney told him he would be sent to jail unless he agreed to grant her a divorce and pay back child support. Patti, meanwhile, opened up to her father about how her mother had constantly beaten her when she was a child. “What the hell is it with you?” Patti remembers him responding. “Why do you make these things up about your mother? She is the most loving, caring person in the world, and you’ve caused her nothing but unhappiness.”

  She met a member of the rock band the Eagles, made love with him that very day in the open air, and told her mother she would be traveling with the band to Europe. The mother about whom so many sordid rumors once circulated snapped, “Well, you’re going to have a separate hotel room, aren’t you?”

  Not likely. Soon Patti moved into the rock star’s house, and her father, who used to wake up in bungalows at the Garden of Allah not knowing the name of the girl sleeping next to him, roared into the phone, “This is just immoral, what you’re doing. Living together without the benefit of marriage is a sin in the eyes of God. He tells us this in the Bible.” (He didn’t, the insolent daughter insisted. “The disciples wrote the Bible.” “No, they didn’t. God wrote it.” She thought this “the most aggravating aspect of discussing anything with my father. He has this ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless.”) They stopped speaking, though she did receive a letter that November: “I’m sorry you didn’t choose to come to the family meeting the other night when I told everyone I’d decided to run for President.” But she had never been informed of the meeting.

  In her memoir she remembered her parents’ odd behavior when John F. Kennedy died and tearful parents came to pick up tearful children from school: “I wished desperately for my mother’s face to soften, to crumble—to share in the anguish that was all around us. When the car doors closed around us and the sound of my crying was magnified by the small space we now shared, she turned to me and said, ‘All right, Patti. I think that’s enough now.’ ” That night, November 22, 1963, a dinner party with the Robert Taylors, Alfred Bloomingdales, and Holmes Tuttles went on as planned, convivially. The event apparently made so little impression on the future president that his candidacy announcement had originally been planned for November 22, 1975—until his savvy press secretary, Lyn Nofziger, pointed out that this was the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination. So they made it two days earlier instead.

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF NOVEMBER 19, Ronald Reagan called the White House.

  “Well, Mr. President,” he said, “I am going to make an announcement and I want to tell you about it ahead of time. I am going to run for President. I trust we can have a good contest, and I hope it won’t be divisive.”

  “I’m sorry you’re getting into this. I believe I’ve done a good job, and that I can be elected. Regardless of your good intentions, your bid is bound to be divisive.”

  “I don’t think it will harm the party.”

  “Well, I think it will,” the President of the United States responded—and hung up.

  The night of November 19, Reagan took questions from an audience of one thousand New Hampshirites for almost an hour. He was asked about Charles Percy’s remark that he suffered from “simplistic thinking,” that a “Reagan nomination and the crushing defeat likely to follow could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American political life,” that he was “far out of the centrist stream,” and that if the president “wins the nomination by out-Reaganing Reagan, it will cost him the election.” Reagan answered, “You know, sometimes I think moderation should be taken in moderation.” That had the audience in stitches. Seventy-five percent of its members lined up for almost an hour to shake his hand. Jules Witcover saw him “taking not only the person’s hand in his, but his or her eyes with his own, holding the contact until the other person’s glance fell away.” He wrote, “Anyone who saw him at the Sheraton-Wayfarer Hotel in Bedford, New Hampshire, that night had to be convinced that Jerry Ford was going to have his hands full with Reagan.”

  The next morning, you could flip open your New York Times and read in Scotty Reston’s column, “The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken so seriously by the news media and particularly by the President. It makes a lot of news, but it doesn’t make much sense.”

  THE “AMUSING BUT FRIVOLOUS FANTASY” began with a speech, though one female admirer’s fantasy began before that, when she intercepted the candidate on the way to the podium for a quick encounter. “If only everybody could meet him one-on-one and see those incredibly blue eyes,” she reported. “No wonder he didn’t like to wear his glasses.”

  It was 9:30 A.M., at the National Press Club on Fourteenth and F, three blocks from the White House; he wore a purple plaid suit his staff abhorred and a pinstripe shirt and polka-dot tie and a folded white silk puffing up extravagantly out of his pocket—this had become his trademark back when he introduced General Electric Theater on TV. “I have called this press conference to announce that I am a candidate for the presidency and to ask for the support of all Americans who share my belief that our nation needs to embark on a new, constructive course,” he said. Perhaps with the previous night’s conversation with the president in mind, he added, “I believe my candidacy will be healthy for my nation and the party.”

  He didn’t refer to his opponent. That, the news reports would conveniently mention, honored his “11th Commandment”—Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican—coined by the chairman of the GOP in California in 1966, and loudly taken up by Reagan during his gubernatorial primary run that year against the liberal former mayor of San Francisco. It had been one of the most enduringly effective snow jobs in the history of electoral politics: the party chairman, an obstetrician from Orange County named Gaylord Parkinson, was simultaneously on the payroll of the Reagan campaign, which had arrived at the strategic calculation that a campaign focused on personalities would disadvantage Reagan.

  All three networks went live. Reagan took the high road of policy: “In just a few years, three vital measures of economic decay—unemployment, inflation, and interest rates—have more than doubled, at times reaching ten percent and even more. Government at all levels now absorbs more than forty-four percent of our personal income. It has become more intrusive, more meddlesome, and less effective.”

  Gerald Ford had been saying precisely the same things in his speeches—he had, after all, precisely six weeks earlier, flayed “the enormous growth of government” that was draining away America’s “vitality and prosperity” and that bore the label “Made in Washington.” But, well, there was an inconvenient fact: Ford had lived in W
ashington, D.C., since 1948, when he was elected to the first of his thirteen terms in Congress, making friends, making deals, making himself, Reagan now thundered like Professor Harold Hill, part of the problem, “right here in Washington, D.C. Our nation’s capital has become the seat of a buddy system that functions for its own benefit—increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker, who supports it with his taxes. Today, it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us our problems—the Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business and big labor. . . .

  “I don’t believe for one moment that four more years of business as usual in Washington is the answer to our problems, and I don’t believe the American people believe it, either.”

  Then there was foreign policy. A week earlier the president had received a memo from his pollster Robert Teeter: “ ‘Détente’ is a particularly unpopular idea with most Republican primary voters. . . . We ought to stop using the word whenever possible.” The president decided to oblige him—too late to keep Ronald Reagan from rubbing the dread seven letters in his face nonetheless: “A decade ago we had military superiority. Today we are in danger of being surpassed by a nation that has never made any effort to hide its hostility to everything we stand for. Through détente we have sought peace with our adversaries. We should continue to do so but must make it plain that we expect a stronger indication that they also seek a lasting peace with us.”

  He concluded with a sparkle in his eye. “We, as a people, aren’t happy if we are not moving forward,” he said. “We must offer progress instead of stagnation, truth instead of promises, hope and faith instead of defeatism and despair. Then, I am sure, the people will make those decisions which will restore confidence in our way of life and release that energy that is the American people.”

  Then he took reporters’ questions. He was asked about the FBI’s investigation of Martin Luther King, reported in that morning’s papers. He said he had not read the morning papers.

  GERALD FORD MUST HAVE BEEN bereft. He had given all his adult life to his party. Loyalty—“unbending, undying, unthinking loyalty to the Republican Party,” Richard Reeves labeled it—had been his calling card: voting with President Nixon at the second-highest rate of all members of Congress; announcing, after a select, secret briefing on Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, that Nixon had not been “false or deceptive” in claiming he’d never violated that country’s neutrality; helping scotch Wright Patman’s Watergate inquiry in the House. “Team player” was his highest term of praise. And now, here was his reward: another member of his team was charging into battle against him. Punishing him for doing what he’d been called against his inclination (he had hoped, in 1974, to retire) to do: govern.

  Screw the eleventh commandment. Came a statement from his campaign organization, the “President Ford Committee”: “Despite how well Ronald Reagan does or does not do in the early primaries, the simple political fact is that he cannot defeat any candidate the Democrats put up. Reagan’s constituency is much too narrow, even within the Republican Party. . . . While not unmindful of his ability, he does not have the critical national and international experience that President Ford has gained through 25 years of public service. . . . We want a united party going into the General Election. Any motion against unity is counter-productive and damaging to our prospects next November.”

  In the West Wing the chatter was about how Reagan had embarrassed himself. Ron Nessen’s memo on the press coverage cited stuff like, “The trouble with Reagan, of course, is that his positions on the major issues are cunningly phrased nonsense” (the liberal Chicago Daily News); and “The Reagan challenge to Mr. Ford comes from the right, the radical right, which cherishes notions that often are too simple, too negative, and too risky . . . if Mr. Ford falters or swings too far right, we would welcome the candidacies of others speaking for the Republican mainstream” (the Baltimore Sun); and “His image is largely that of the role-playing actor . . . ill-equipped for the real world beyond the footlights” (from conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick, who misspelled “Regan’s” name). A staffer who actually attended the Press Club, however—Ford’s close personal aide Jerry Jones—concluded that “we are in for a real battle.” He thought Reagan “had his answers down pat” and “handled the questioners with a sense of candor, humor, and calm.” Ford’s savvy young director of communications, David Gergen, was pretty impressed with him, too.

  REAGAN HIT THE ROAD. THE method devised by the pros in the campaign organization—christened “Citizens for Reagan,” a name drawn from Reagan’s 1966 campaign theme of running as a “citizen politician”—aped Nixon’s in 1968: a very small number of events, timed for maximal exposure on each night’s evening news, the applause lines in each speech carefully indicated in text handouts dispensed to reporters each morning. A striking number of his campaign staff bore the Watergate taint: Lyn Nofziger, his longtime Sacramento press aide, who’d been responsible for the Nixon White House’s project to harass the Long Island paper Newsday after it ran an investigation of Nixon’s buddy Bebe Rebozo; Roger Stone, CREEP national youth director, who’d posted a fake check to the Manchester Union Leader to try to frame a rival of Nixon’s in 1972 for ties to revolutionary socialists; Kenneth Reitz, who in 1973 lost his job supervising congressional campaigns for the Republican National Committee when it was discovered he’d helped spy on Edmund Muskie for the Committee to Re-elect the President, and was now Reagan’s coordinator for the California primary. But no one seemed to notice.

  The first stop was Miami. The site was a Ramada Inn, near the airport (a Nixon campaign trick: that way the national TV reporters could ship their tape to New York in time for the evenings newscasts), in a ballroom not unlike the one in which Bobby Kennedy was speaking seven years earlier just before he was shot.

  He began with a question: “If the trumpet gives an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for battle?” Then he quoted Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, he said, after embarking “on a course that made bold use of the government to ease the pain of those times,” was “soon moved to sound a warning”: “We have built new instruments of public power in the hands of the people’s government . . . but in the hands of political puppets of an economic aristocracy, such power would provide shackles for the liberties of our people.” Reagan said, “Unfortunately, that warning went unheeded. Today, there is an economic aristocracy, born of government’s growing interference in our lives.” A rather brazen interpretation, given that the speech he quoted, FDR’s annual message to Congress in January 1936, had actually been referring to “financial and industrial groups” who in their “domination of government” and “entrenched greed” do “not want to return to that individualism of which they prate” but seek only “power for themselves, enslavement for the public.”

  The press, though, wouldn’t have much time to reflect on the contradictions. Reagan finished his speech and began shaking hands—and a twenty-year-old man pulled out what turned out to be a toy .45-caliber pistol and was wrestled to the ground by three Secret Service agents. He had already threatened the lives of the president, vice president, and Governor Reagan on the demand that “Squeaky” Fromme be freed.

  Reagan did not appear shaken. He never stopped smiling as he was led away. The Secret Service’s local special agent in charge, citing the already enormous Democratic presidential field—it included Indiana senator Birch Bayh, Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, South Carolina governor Terry Sanford, former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver, Arizona senator Morris Udall, Pennsylvania governor Milton Shapp, George Wallace, “and more candidates on the way”—predicted it “would only get worse.” It was almost now a rite of passage. “[I]f he didn’t feel like a candidate before,” a Reagan aide told CBS, “he does now.”

  On each day’s schedule was an extended press conference. At the one in Miami, he was asked how the incident would aff
ect his support for gun rights. He had entered that debate aggressively on the radio the previous summer. Barely four years earlier there had been all but a consensus that cheap handguns—“Saturday night specials”—had to be removed from city streets; when a bill was introduced in Congress in 1971 to ban them, the National Rifle Association announced, “We are for it 100 percent.” The 1972 Republican platform promised to “intensify efforts to prevent criminal access to all weapons, including special emphasis on cheap, readily-obtainable handguns.” But since then a civil war had broken out within both the NRA and the Republican Party. One faction within the NRA, formerly an anodyne organization for sportsmen, saw any attempt to restrict any gun as an expression of the Communist line; its adherents mailed glowing reports of vigilante heroics to the NRA magazine American Rifleman for its “Armed Citizen” column. The other faction, which controlled the national office in Washington, published a Fact Book on Firearms Control endorsing such “reasonable regulation” as “a waiting period between purchases and delivery,” strict record keeping for manufacturers and retailers, controls on “all machine guns,” and limits placed upon those “wishing to carry a concealed firearm.” But it was the former group that took control of the NRA’s new lobbying arm, the Institute for Legal Action. Its lobbyist, a fearsome former border control agent named Harlon Carter, called “the so-called Saturday night specials . . . a girl’s best friend. They’re small enough to fit into a woman’s purse or be at her bedside at home.” He boasted of killing the very anti–Saturday night special bill the NRA had been instrumental in introducing—and announced that henceforth, the organization would oppose any law aimed at “inanimate objects instead of the evildoer.”

  That was Ronald Reagan’s sort of language. In 1967 he had signed one of the nation’s strongest gun control laws, after armed Black Panthers stormed into the California legislature on a lobbying mission of their own. But in June 1975, as Gallup reported 67 percent of Americans favored “the registration of all firearms,” Ford’s attorney general, Edward Levi, proposed a new law tightening access to guns in high-crime urban areas, Reagan thundered on the radio: “Now that’s funny. It seems to me that the best way to deter murderers and thieves is to arm law-abiding folk and not to disarm them. . . . As news story after news story shows, if the victim is armed, he has a chance—a better chance by far than if he isn’t armed. Nobody knows in fact how many crimes are not committed because criminals know a certain store owner has a gun—and will use it.” He said the attorney general “should encourage homeowners and business people to purchase them and use them properly. . . . After all, guns don’t make criminals. It’s criminals who make use of guns. They’re the ones who should be punished—not the law-abiding citizen who seeks to defend himself.”