Anthony Lewis advanced the theory, marveling at his own cynicism, that the leak of CIA involvement had come straight from the top—that the Oval Office hoped Congress would react by cutting off aid, allowing the administration to ask the red-baiting question “Who lost Angola?” in an election year. He pointed out that government officials had been admitting “it made no difference to us which nationalist faction won the internal struggle” (“What the hell is Angola?” asked one senator), and yet we intervened in favor of one faction. “What the world sees as self-inflicted wounds may look to the authors like a way of electing Gerald Ford and keeping Henry Kissinger in office,” he wrote, by running against “a Democratic Congress that he can imply is soft on Communism, loose with secrets, and ready to retreat from American greatness. That line is especially useful for competing with Ronald Reagan.”
Why not? Ford was once more ensnared in the embarrassments of governance, and, politically, at the worst possible time. He returned from a state visit to China, which could not endear him to conservatives but didn’t impress the sophisticates, either. (“C’mon Hank, you can tell me!” an Oliphant cartoon syndicated by the Washington Star was captioned. “What were all those secret discussions about?”) Congress moved to extend his temporary tax cut, but not, as he had demanded, alongside accompanying spending cuts to pay for it. He vetoed the bill and the House was not able to override it, but the Times called it a defeat for him nonetheless, because “public displeasure about the quality of political leadership will probably be reinforced.” Congress adjourned “leaving Mr. Ford the solitary embarrassment of signing legislation that does not give him what he wants”—and which conservatives judged as yet one more liberal sellout. Meanwhile the FEC ruled that Ford’s travels paid for by the Republican National Committee were party building, not campaigning, so they need not be counted against his spending limit. A conference of Southern Republicans opened in Houston. Ford decided not to show up—he showed up instead in news pictures falling on his ass while skiing in Vail—and reinforced the snub by sending in his stead Nelson Rockefeller, who insulted the participants: “You got me out, you sons of bitches,” he reportedly said; “now get off your asses and help the President.” Reagan appeared in Houston and, unsurprisingly, raised the roof.
THAT SUNDAY’S 60 MINUTES, THE CBS “Newsmagazine” that had helped induct millions of middle Americans into the ranks of the suspicious circles with its hard-hitting investigative journalism, and had become that fall the first news show to vault to the top of the network ratings after it moved to a new time slot at 7 P.M. on Sundays, featured a Ralph Nader–style exposé of a factory in Virginia owned by a company called Allied Chemical. Its product, a pesticide called Kepone, was alleged to cause brain damage in its workers. Heartbreakingly, the camera lingered on one tremulous victim who, for an excruciating forty-five seconds, tried and failed to drive in a bolt with a screwdriver. Then 60 Minutes’ new reporter, former White House correspondent Dan Rather, moved in for what would become his trademark on 60 Minutes (though the style was already familiar to viewers who remembered when the young newsman stood up at a televised news conference in March 1974 in Houston and embarrassed Richard Nixon with the toughest question of his presidency). In the office of the company’s director of agricultural research, a man named William Moore, Rather pulled out a sheaf of books—“studies sponsored by Allied Chemical”:
“Are you familiar with these materials? This—”
“No.”
“Never seen those?”
“Never seen them.”
“Right in the summary, very top: ‘The characteristic effect of this compound is the development of DDT-like tremors, the severity of which depends upon dosage level and duration of exposure.’ Quote, unquote—from the first sentence of the summary. You don’t know about this?”
“No, no.”
But Mr. Moore, Rather revealed, was the author of that very study.
The suspicious circles were still thrusting. There came next, however, another, very different sort of segment the producers of 60 Minutes favored: the fluffy celebrity profile. The subject, however, was a politician—one who, in contrast to the story just told, used to say things on the radio like “Right now business is regulated in America by government more than it is in any other country in the world.” And that the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s goal seemed to be to “make a worker completely safe by taking away his job.” And who in speeches to business conventions spoke of the nation’s preeminent consumer advocate as “Little Sir Ralph who has become a folk hero taking whacks at you with his wooden sword,” his minions “attempting to take from you the prerogatives of management without accepting any of the responsibilities that drive you on occasion to a Miltown.” (Miltown was a popular tranquilizer; Nancy Reagan took it.)
But 60 Minutes didn’t get into any of that. Instead, after a title card that presented the handsome sixty-four-year-old in a white cowboy hat cocked just so, a jeep rumbled from over the horizon, out of the mountains and into the pale prairie light, filmed heroically from below just the way John Ford shot John Wayne, as Mike Wallace’s pleasant voice-over intoned:
“Mr. Right. That’s how Nancy Reagan feels about her husband. Apparently it’s also about how millions of Republicans feel about Nancy Reagan’s husband. For the Gallup poll released just two days ago has him leading the President for the Republican nomination by a full eight points. . . . But while the pundits and the pollsters have been turning Reagan inside out, 60 Minutes elected to spend some time with Ronald and Nancy Reagan at home in California.”
It had always been Ronald Reagan’s remarkable gift—ever aware of the gaze of others, reflecting on it, adjusting himself to it, inviting it—to model himself in his mind’s eye according to how he presented himself physically to others, adjusting himself to be seen as he wished others to see him, almost as if he were the one guiding the cameras that captured his image. Now, as Gerald Ford stumbled, it was how his team managed to reintroduce him to the nation, on the nation’s top-rated news show: as an avuncular cowboy naturalist—just folks.
Reagan, from the driver’s seat: “Well, we’re coming now to what’s called Bald Mountain, matter of fact it’s on the map.”
Wallace, sitting beside him: “Here you are in your six hundred, seven hundred acres at the top of the most beautiful part of California, horses, family. What in the world would persuade you? You’ve got it made.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve worked hard, you’ve saved money, you’ve got a family.”
“I don’t know, someone said life begins when you begin to serve. Maybe if there’s a feeling that you can be of service, then you feel you have to do it.”
He was now a rich man, Mike Wallace explained, “but none of his possessions mean as much to him”—the ex-governor in the Western garb was pictured calling to a horse—“as the ranch he bought last year. ‘Rancho Cielo,’ he calls it. Ranch of Heaven. One senses this is something he and Nancy had yearned for.”
(Not quite; Nancy didn’t care for any ranch. And at that, when he rode horses he hadn’t previously dressed like a cowboy; he rode English style, wearing jodhpurs and boots.)
“Mrs. Reagan, do I understand you met this fellow because you were a subscriber to the Daily Worker?”
“There wasn’t, but there was a Nancy Davis who was—”
She relayed a version of the dubious story of how they met, interrupted by a bark—“That’s our dog Wallace. Hates the Communists just like his mommy and daddy!” Then came a scene from the one movie where they acted together, Hellcats of the Navy, two lovebirds walking off into the sunset—and then that cut away to the same shot, only in real life.
Ronnie: “For all the years we’ve been married it’s been we, not you and I. It would be inconceivable to me to go my way without her.”
Nancy in red sweater and silver-and-turquoise belt, testifying to her husband’s cruel victimization at the hands of the press
:
“Whenever anyone would say something about Ronnie that I thought was unkind, cruel, or unjust, untrue, I’d go in and I’d take a long bath and carry out imaginary conversations in which—I—was—just—marvelous. I’d say all those things you’d hope you’d have a chance to say, and nobody could talk back to you, and I was tremendous! And by the time I was done with the bath, I was OK!”
(That week, People magazine featured a “Chinese face reader” expounding on people in the news, including Nancy, “a poised patrician-born”—the article said—“size 6 who often makes best-dressed lists”: “Look at the indirect focus of her eyes; they do not match her expression. She doesn’t care about what others feel and may not be open about her own feelings. Perhaps she is fearful she will be found out. . . . She is a vital person and will remain active into old age. But she is out for herself.”)
Wallace read aloud from a new book called The Power Lovers, on political marriages: “ ‘Why, my joy is being Mrs. Ronald Reagan.’ ” (Wallace sounded smug, Nancy looked like she was about to sigh in frustration—this again . . .) “ ‘My life began with Ronnie’—and people chuckle.”
Unembarrassed, she replied, “Well, they chuckle. But—it did.” She smiled defiantly, eyebrows raised.
A public-policy discussion:
“The death penalty?” “I’m in favor of the death penalty.” (Why?) “Because I think it saves lives. I think people are alive today because of the death penalty.” She smiled.
“Abortion?” “I, I can’t get over the point of it being that you’re killing somebody.” She still was smiling. “I can’t get beyond that.”
“Marijuana. Marijuana seems to be a fact of life,” Nancy said softly, ruefully—“unfortunately.” “You would obviously not legalize it.” “No, I would not be in favor of legalizing it.” “We were talking to Maureen, your stepdaughter, and we asked if she could imagine Ronnie and Nancy Reagan sitting there of a summer’s night or whenever smoking a joint together.” Nancy laughed heartily. “That,” Wallace said, “was her reaction to it.”
The candidate was lobbed a few softballs: “Governor, some people call you a button-pusher. They’re scared to have you in the White House. You wanted to win in Vietnam, you’re against détente and the Chinese. You’re a hard-liner. You frighten some people.” Soothingly, he responded, now in a tan sport coat and shirt and brown tie, with redwoods wallpaper in the background: “Welllll, let me explain. I’m not a hard-liner. Anyone in my generation who’s lived through four wars and been part of one of them can’t be for anything but peace.” And: “The greatest immorality is to ask young men to fight or die for my country if it’s not a cause we are willing to win.”
Some light political chitchat: George Wallace. Ted Kennedy. Hubert Humphrey, being talked up by pundits as the Democrats’ best ’76 hope. “Can you beat him?” “Well, I’d sure give it a good country try!”
The “sour” public mood, “corruption at the top . . . pursuit of hedonism, rising crime rates, a lower faith in many of our institutions. How come?” Easy: “When you take away from people any sense of responsibility, or any feeling that they have any part in the decisions, or any part in the control, then people do begin to drift and go their own way, I suppose. What’s happened to our people is that they have a feeling that government is beyond them, that they cannot influence it.”
“Tell me the last time we had a leader we had a good deal of faith in.”
“Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He took his case to the people. When the New Deal started he was faced with a Congress that wouldn’t go along. He went over their heads with the fireside chats. . . . And he enlightened the people. . . . The greatest leader is not one who does the greatest things. He is the one who gets the people to do the greatest things. And that’s what is lacking now.”
At home with the Ronald Reagans, as poor Gerald Ford governed and stumbled, stumbled and governed.
“I don’t think the system has failed, or that the system has failed us. But I think a great many people have failed the system.” Cut back to that jeep for one more ride into the sunset. The ticking 60 Minutes clock. As, the next day, one more nail was driven into Camelot’s coffin, and the Church Committee finally generated a story that riveted the nation.
ON MONDAY A PRETTY FORTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD named Judith Campbell Exner, her tanned face obscured behind large saucer-shaped sunglasses, stepped up to press conference microphones in San Diego: “My relationship with Jack Kennedy was of a close, personal nature and did not involve conspiratorial shenanigans of any kind,” she said. “We never discussed politics or international affairs. To me, he was Jack Kennedy and not the President.”
And why were political or international affairs relevant to the discussion? Because, it turned out, Exner, described on newswires as “a comely brunette woman with a hazy past,” also had a “relationship” with the two mobsters who had helped the CIA try to assassinate Fidel Castro—but those, too, she avowed, were “of a personal nature and were no way related to or affected by my relationship with Jack Kennedy, nor did I discuss either of them with the other.”
The story of the gangsters’ moll and the president had begun with an oblique footnote on 129 of the Church Committee assassination report: “Evidence before the committee indicates that a close friend of President Kennedy had frequent contact with the President from the end of 1960 through mid 1962. FBI reports and testimony indicate that the President’s friend was also a close friend of John Roselli and Sam Giancana and saw them often during this same period. . . . White House telephone logs show seventy instances of phone contact between the White House and the President’s friend whose testimony confirms frequent phone contact with the President himself. Both the President’s friend and Roselli testified that the friend did not know about either the assassination operation or the wire tap case. Giancana was killed before he was available for questioning.” That the “close friend” may have been a close friend emerged from a staff leak published by two reporters from the Scripps-Howard chain a month earlier. Then, three days before Exner’s press conference, New York Times columnist William Safire, charging a cover-up by a Church Committee “plumbers’ operation,” introduced J. Edgar Hoover into the question. He had, Safire reported, met with JFK one March day in 1962, immediately before the Exner-Kennedy calls stopped—which raised what Safire called “substantive questions,” such as “Did the Mafia figures encourage the girl’s White House relationship, and if so, to what end?” And “Why did Mr. Hoover check with the CIA and then tell a Las Vegas sheriff to stop prosecuting Giancana for wiretapping an unfaithful girlfriend—right after his luncheon showdown with President Kennedy.” And whether “the Mafia, by silencing Giancana forever, has clamped down the lid from its end.” And whether Hoover had used this leverage to blackmail the Kennedys into wiretapping Martin Luther King.
Or whether the secret of JFK’s assassination lurked beneath: “Too many coincidences . . . When the President winds up murdered by a supporter of Castro, target of the aborted CIA assassination plot, the matter is worth a thorough public examination.”
Exner said she called her press conference to close off just such “lurid speculation.” Not likely. A reporter delicately asked if she had ever met Kennedy’s wife; Exner replied that she hadn’t. A less decorous newsman came straight out with it: “Did you ever go to bed with John Fitzgerald Kennedy?” Exner responded, “That’s in the personal arena”—her lawyer adding that he had her full testimony, transcribed and documented, stored in a secure area, “to be released at a proper time and in a proper manner.”
Once more Kennedy family retainers popped out of the woodwork to proclaim incredulity. “I think there’s a campaign to give it to the Kennedys,” said JFK’s personal secretary Kenny O’Donnell, who claimed that there were “no secret passages” in the presidential appointment book he kept, and that “there is not much in his life after 1957 that I didn’t know about.” “Even Jacqueline Kennedy didn’t have lunch twe
nty times with the President,” he added of claims of sixteen to twenty White House visits by Exner—perhaps revealing more than he intended. Senator Church called claims that his committee had covered up the story for partisan reasons “preposterous”—details irrelevant to the investigation had been withheld by unanimous agreement of committee senators, and if there had been evidence that the president’s liaison had been brokered by the mafia, “we would have included it in the report.” Exner wouldn’t name the friend who introduced her to Kennedy and then to Giancana, though speculation centered on Frank Sinatra, who came out with an eleven-word statement to the press: “Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent.”
Safire assiduously fueled the fire. Richard Nixon had been last seen in public print running from a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who stalked him at the eighteenth hole at his retreat in San Clemente for a two-part profile (“Nixon Believes His Memoirs Will Vindicate Him”) depicting a pale, pathetic man pocked with liver spots, begging Rabbi Korff to raise funds to keep him solvent, and playing golf for eight hours straight every day except when an errant shot frustrated him and he quit after seven. Only in the columns of the former PR flack Safire was he still a great man—or at least, no less great than his Democratic forebears, who were actually much, much worse. It had been Safire’s project since joining the Times. Like J. J. Hunsecker, the scabrous scribe played by Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success, in his op-ed page essays he took advantage of a columnists’ license to introduce literary techniques that would have gotten a reporter fired had he tried them in the news pages—insinuating questions, dubious “coincidences,” morbid speculation, guilt by association, character assassination—to establish, as he put it on December 8, “the greatest cover-up of all . . . the suppression of truth about Democratic precedents to Watergate, on the grounds that it might ameliorate the hatred being focused on Richard Nixon.” On December 22, in his first column after the Exner press conference, he trumpeted “murder and attempted murder at the highest level that spans fifteen years”: Castro, Kennedy, and now Sam Giancana, “who presumably encouraged one of his girls to nourish a White House–Mafia liaison . . . the dead body of Sam Giancana lies across Frank Church’s path to the Presidency.” For these ambitions, Safire claimed, Church had closed the books on a murder most foul, threatening perjury and warning of lie detector tests to staffers who wouldn’t get with the program. But. “Senator Church cannot slam the lid of Pandora’s box back down now that he has glimpsed the evil that lurks therein.”
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 78
