So had he now changed his mind? Not at all, he replied in Miami: it “would be naive and foolish to simply disarm the citizen.” Reagan was not trimming his sails to win support. That was one reason he inspired so much support.
That, and his passionately creative visions of innocence. As at his next stop, in North Carolina, which held a crucial primary on March 23.
In this Southern state he chose to launch into a homily on racial reconciliation: “When the first bombs were dropped on Pearl Harbor there was great segregation in the military forces,” he explained. “In World War II, this was corrected.” This was news to the more historically minded reporters, who knew the armed forces had integrated only under an executive order from Harry Truman, in 1948, three years after the war ended—and that segregation ended in the rest of society only after concerted protest and civil disobedience. In the press conference that followed he was asked whether he had approved of Martin Luther King’s civil disobedience tactics.
No, he responded: “There can never be any justification for breaking the law.”
Someone followed up: then how could blacks have ever gained their civil rights in places like North Carolina?
That pressed a button, activating a core component of the man’s amour propre: “I am just incapable of prejudice,” as he had said in 1966 during his debut on Meet the Press, and many times since. Raised by a Protestant mother who married his Catholic father in an anti-Catholic age; having played side by side with black boys; having been raised in a church that preached racial brotherhood, his mother having taken in released prisoners, black and white, to convalesce in the family sewing room—how could he be racist? He just disliked civil rights laws. He’d said the 1964 act outlawing discrimination in public accommodations was “a bad piece of legislation,” an unwarranted intrusion of federal power into the lives of individuals.
He had many stories about his racial enlightenment. There was the time he wanted to see The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s pro–Ku Klux Klan blockbuster. “My brother and I were the only kids not to see it,” he would say, reciting his father’s words: “The Klan’s the Klan, and a sheet’s a sheet, and any man who wears one over his head is a bum. And I want no more words on the subject.” And the time his father was working as a traveling salesman and the desk clerk at the only hotel in a small town proudly informed him that the place didn’t serve Jews; Jack announced they wouldn’t be serving this Catholic, either, and slept a winter’s night in his car. There was the time when a visiting team could find no hotel to stay in, for the team had two black players, who were welcomed into the Reagan home instead. It was precisely such magnanimous gestures on the part of individual whites that could solve any lingering racial problem; and, since Americans were magnanimous, it would solve the problem.
“There must be no lack of equal opportunity, no inequality before the law,” he said in the televised opening speech of his 1966 gubernatorial campaign. But: “There is a limit to what can be accomplished by laws and regulations, and I seriously question whether anything additional is needed in that line.” That year, in Washington, a new civil rights law banning housing discrimination was being debated; in Chicago, marching through the city’s white bungalow belt in favor of the principle, Martin Luther King was jeered by swastika-wielding protesters, and knives and rocks were thrown at his head. That did not change his mind. The next year Reagan, returning to his alma mater to dedicate a new library, asked Eureka students rhetorically, “Are the problems of the urban ghetto the result of selfishness on our part, of indifference to suffering?” The answer to him seemed plain: “No people in all the history of mankind have shaped so wisely its material circumstances.” Speaking again at Eureka in 1973 he marveled at those who claimed America was still marred by racism: hadn’t Los Angeles just elected a Negro mayor? In 1968, when a black questioner asked him why she never saw blacks at Republican events, he politely but forcefully replied that it wasn’t Republicans who were racist but the supposedly liberal Democrats, “a party that had betrayed them. . . . The Negro has delivered himself to those who have no other intention than to create a Federal plantation and ignore him.” The Washington Post reported, “Reagan handled the situation so smoothly that some of the newsmen aboard his chartered 727 suggested, half-seriously, that the Reagan organization had set up the incident.” It was part of his liturgy of absolution.
He had not always handled such questions so smoothly. He almost never lost his temper in public. He did once, however, during his 1966 gubernatorial primary campaign. A delegate at the National Negro Republican Assembly in Santa Monica said, “It grieves me when a leading Republican candidate says the Civil Rights Act is a bad piece of legislation.” Reagan then shocked the assembly by slamming down his note cards and shouting, “I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature. Don’t anyone ever imply I lack integrity. I will not stand silent and let anyone imply that—in this or any other group.” He slammed his fist into his palm, muttered something, and walked out of the room.
He knew better than to blow up again. Now he just told the stories. In Charlotte on the second day of his presidential campaign the story he told was about “where I think the first change began. . . . I have often stated publicly that the great tragedy was then that we didn’t even know that we had a racial problem. It wasn’t even recognized. But our generation, and I take great pride in this, were the ones who first of all recognized and then began doing something about it.”
Reportorial ears pricked up: this was going to be something.
“I have called attention to the fact that when I was a sports announcer, broadcasting major-league baseball, most Americans had forgotten that at the time the opening lines of the official baseball guide read, ‘Baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,’ and in organized baseball no one but Caucasians were allowed. Well, there were many of us when I was broadcasting, sportswriters, sportscasters, myself included, [who] began editorializing about what a ridiculous thing this was and why it should be changed. And one day it was changed.”
And indeed, he had called attention to that, in 1967, in a televised debate with Robert Kennedy, when he told the same story about baseball. In the interim, if anyone had bothered to point out to him that there was no line in the official baseball guide asserting that “baseball is a game for Caucasian gentlemen,” or had pointed out to him that he stopped broadcasting baseball in 1937 and the sport wasn’t integrated until 1947, the intervention clearly didn’t take. He was still telling the story in the White House nine years later.
The next question was a routine one—and so was his answer. Someone asked what he thought about Senator Percy’s claim that Reagan’s lack of moderation would tank the Republican Party. A non sequitur quip followed: “If you’re lying on the operating table and the man is standing there with a scalpel in his hand”—smile—“I’d like to know he has more than a moderately successful record.” That introduced a list of statistics: that he’d hired more minorities than any previous governor; reduced the population of mental hospitals from 26,500 to 7,000 “by adequately funding county mental health clinics”; cut welfare rolls by 400,000 while “boosting aid to the genuinely needy.” Punch line: “Maybe Senator Percy will tell me what is immoderate about those things that we did.”
Then he was off to raise the roof at his next campaign speech.
On the plane back to Los Angeles he acknowledged what had become by then a cliché: “There’s no question Goldwater tried to tell us some things that maybe eleven years ago we weren’t ready to hear. We still were wrapped in the New Deal syndrome of believing that government could do all of these things for us. I insist Barry Goldwater never was defeated on the basis of his philosophy. The opposition, aided and abetted by Republican opponents in the primaries—which makes me so strong in my Eleventh Commandment belief—created a straw man, and what the people really voted against was a false image of a dangerous radical.”
The New York Times disagreed,
but then, it would. Columnist William Shannon, surveying Pat Buchanan’s new book, Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories (published, as it happened, by Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Company), that Sunday in the book review section, said George Wallace’s primary victories “may have been only protest votes of transient import. . . . Senator Goldwater, after all, was crushed at the polls when he presented the Conservative message straightforwardly.”
RONALD REAGAN WAS NOT SENATOR Goldwater—a hypothesis, as it happened, that one now could scrutinize scientifically.
The Federal Communications Commission had ruled that showing Reagan’s movies on TV triggered the equal-time provision—the Ford campaign would get an equivalent amount of free screen time for balance. It happened just as the new Federal Election Commission ruled that the RNC could pay for Gerald Ford’s travels, but not Ronald Reagan’s: advantage Ford. Chevy Chase had a bonanza that weekend. First he parodied Ford’s reversal on a New York City bailout. (Chase mocked Ford: “Let me be clear. . . . As President, I will change my mind whenever I want.” Then he answered a glass of water instead of the red phone.) Chase next aimed at the Church Committee’s report on the assassination of foreign leaders. (“Commented Ford upon reading the report, quote, ‘Boy, I’m sure glad I’m not foreign.’ ”) Then, on the FCC decision, a groaner about how the wheelchair-bound George Wallace would get to show a minute of Ironsides for each minute of a Ronald Reagan flick. But Reagan’s line on the subject was funnier than Chevy Chase. “Somebody must have goofed,” he said, “because I’ve made some movies that, if they put them on television, I’d demand equal time.”
Another outcome of the equal-time rule was that Barry Goldwater filled in for Reagan on his radio show. He said the same sorts of things Reagan did—ponderously, technically, and charmlessly.
On the campaign plane, Jules Witcover asked Reagan point-blank how he could possibly succeed when his positions on things like Social Security were the same ones that caused the 1964 nominee to be cut down at the knees. Reagan returned, “The funny thing is in the speech I made about him which was so well-received, I said some of the same things.” He then described, with a refreshingly rare frankness, how he accomplished this—how his rhetoric succeeded where Goldwater’s did not.
“I’ve always believed that you say the qualifier first. If you say, ‘Now, let’s make it plain: the first priority must be that no one who is depending on that for their non-earning years should have it taken away from him, or have it endangered. It is endangered today by the shape that it is in.’ So you then can go on and say, ‘Now, the program is out of balance. Down the line someplace, can come a very great tragedy of finding the cupboard is bare. Before that happens, let’s fix Social Security.’ ”
Or, on the subject of welfare: “ ‘Now, I am not suggesting that we stop welfare tomorrow. So, having qualified with that, let me say, I just have faith in the American people that, if through some set of circumstances welfare disappeared tomorrow, no one would miss a meal. The people in this country, in every community all over, would get together and form emergency committees, and take up the slack. Those are the kind of people they are.’ ”
Maybe they were. Maybe they weren’t. Be that as it may, Americans seemed to like to hear it. In a Gallup poll taken the day his first tour ended, Reagan had gone from trailing Gerald Ford by 23 points among Republicans to a 40 to 32 percent lead, an unprecedented one-month jump. Independent voters said they preferred the former actor over the president by 27 percent to 25. “Ronald Reagan more popular than the President? Has the Gallup Poll gone bananas?” the Pittsburgh News’ political columnist wondered. “Are the Republicans once again prepared to self-destruct by nominating another Barry Goldwater? . . . And have those 11,324 Democratic presidential candidates trained their sights on the wrong man?”
CIVILIZATION CONTINUED ITS COLLAPSE.
Tom Wicker complained that “no one in Congress or the executive branch has even begun to face” the philosophical and institutional consequences of the Church Committee’s and Pike Committee’s revelations. Pike tried to cite Henry Kissinger for contempt of Congress and was blocked at every turn. A citation, he complained in an open letter to colleagues, would not “cause the earth to tremble nor the sun to stop in its tracks. No one is seeking to place Mr. Kissinger in jail, and the worst that can happen to him is that he might have to provide the documents subpoenaed to Congress”—and if that be “McCarthyism,” “then the State Department has arrogated unto itself total non-accountability.” His conservative Democratic colleague George Mahon of Texas promptly posted a letter of apology to the White House “for the continual confrontation between Congress and the executive branch” that was “tearing our country apart.”
Meg Greenfield in Newsweek wondered why, even as the Church Committee’s assassination report if anything exceeded all fears, “the bomb proved something of a dud.” She decided it was “the anesthetizing effect of years of revelation and shock. . . . Washington, by virtue of a seemingly unending flow of such disclosures in the past couple of years, has managed to perform a . . . nationwide lobotomy of the public.” On December 8, the Times’ editorialists all but absolved the preceding president of Watergate: “By the time Richard Nixon became President, the practiced seaminess had become so entrenched that the deception of Watergate flowed with alarming naturalness.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the op-ed page, William Safire, in a column headlined “Orchestrating Outrage,” concluded, “History will show the Nixon Administration not as the one that invented abuse of power, but the one that gloriously if unwittingly served the cause of individual liberty by the clumsy way it tried to continue the abuses of Kennedy and Johnson.”
Like clockwork a new outrage emerged to be ignored. Back at the end of April, as Saigon fell, NBC’s David Brinkley had editorialized in his stern grandfatherly way that “now, for the first time since Hitler invaded Poland, there is no war anywhere in the world. . . . Since Hitler it has become a major industry, with huge amounts of the people’s money being spent to pay for wars already fought, paying either in money or inflation or both, and spent on hiring armies and buying hardware for some war that may come, or be contrived. Numerous national leaders, including some of ours, have turned to the military in times of stress in the hopes of quick and spectacular solutions. Well, now, after several spectacular failures, people might hope their politicians will be less quick to reach for their guns.” Not so fast, Mr. Brinkley: hardly eight months later the CIA director confirmed that the agency was aiding one of three sides in a complex civil war in the oil-rich African nation of Angola.
The political context was fraught. The previous summer, Congress voted to withdraw arms aid to Turkey, following its invasion of Cyprus, the first real test of the War Powers Act of 1974 forbidding military action without congressional authorization. Simultaneously, a “Carnation Revolution” broke out in Portugal, overthrowing the fascist Portuguese dictatorship (it began with a bloodless coup by military officers and ended in a popular uprising in which grateful citizens stuck carnations into the barrels of government soldiers’ guns; Reagan called it the work of “leftist street hoodlums”). Portugal promptly divested itself of its colonies, including Angola, where, that December, Soviet-backed guerrillas were on the verge of seizing power. That was the final straw, for the American right, against Gerald Ford and his timorous doctrine of détente. William Rusher’s column predicted the arrival of thousands of Soviet-equipped Cubans, “spearheading and stiffening a drive by local Communist forces to take over all of Angola. . . . If they succeed, Communism will have reached the eastern shore of the Atlantic on a front nearly a thousand miles long.” He concluded, “That rumble you hear isn’t dominoes falling. It’s the roof caving in.” James J. Kilpatrick wrote that a land “almost as large as Britain, France, and Spain combined” would be within a month “for all practical purposes . . . a virtual satellite of the Soviet Union.” He concluded, “It might have been possible for the Central Intel
ligence Agency to avert this calamity—but the CIA has been crippled by a moralizing Senate.”
Not so crippled, it turned out. The CIA was already funneling arms and advice to a faction called UNITA, whose cynical and ideologically flexible leader, Jonas Savimbi, had only recently called himself a Maoist, but now declared himself an acolyte of American-style capitalism. Outgoing CIA director Colby defended the decision before the House Intelligence Committee: “If you see the Soviet Union deliberately trying to expand its power, is it more prudent for the United States to take some modest action or do nothing?” He also reminded the committee that this was legal because paramilitary operations were eliminated from the War Powers Act. Senator Dick Clark, a liberal Democrat from Iowa, pointed out that such “modest” CIA action was exactly how the Vietnam debacle began. And the Church Committee had just released its final report on U.S actions in Chile, concluding, “Eight million dollars was spent, covertly, in the three years between 1970 and the military coup in September 1973, with over three million dollars expended in fiscal 1972 alone.” Clark introduced legislation to cut off military aid and covert action in Angola. His colleague Clifford Case of New Jersey, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, complained, “I don’t think we can just pull out of Angola”—which is what the Foreign Relations Committee had said about Vietnam, too.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 77
