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

by Rick Perlstein

  The luridness was only beginning. Though at least with Exner the claim could be reasonably made that a matter of public interest was at stake. Then came Fiddle and Faddle:

  “When Judith Campbell Exner said last week that she had ‘a close personal’ relationship with Jack Kennedy she was only confirming what had long been a matter of open and widespread speculation.” Speculate no more, said Time magazine in the issue that appeared on newsstands the day before Christmas. There was the time the thirty-fifth president startled the British prime minister and foreign minister by confiding that “if he went too long without a woman, he suffered severe headaches.” Jayne Mansfield claimed an affair with Kennedy lasting three years and “[t]here is little doubt that Marilyn Monroe also had a sexual relationship with the President” (they met—the claim was sourced to a Hollywood gossip writer—at the Carlyle Hotel, the Beverly Hills Hotel, Peter Lawford’s house in Santa Monica, the White House, “and even in the Kennedy private plane, the Caroline”). There were also airline stewardesses. And, during the 1960 Democratic National Convention, after claiming he was off to meet with his father, there was a “diplomat’s wife he had known for some time.” And a “smashing brunette” sent over as a gift by a newsman (“I got your message—both of them”). The woman who suffered the interruption of “[t]wo top foreign affairs advisers with a batch of secret cables.” (“Never bothering to close the door, Kennedy cooled down, read the dispatches, and made his decision before he returned to his friend.”) And last but not least, “two women who displayed few secretarial skills but worked on his staff” and were described by British dramatist Jonathan Miller as looking “like unused tennis balls—they had the fuzz still on them” and were “assigned quarters near the President and were code-named ‘Fiddle’ and ‘Faddle’ by the Secret Service.”

  Then there were the tales Time repeated from a book by the former White House kennel keeper—“impossible to verify”—that “Jack would sometimes lounge naked around the White House swimming pool when Jackie was away, and women would arrive, undress, and join him,” and that once “Jackie allegedly found a woman’s undergarment tucked into a pillow slip. She is supposed to have said calmly to Jack: ‘Would you please shop around and see who these belong to? They’re not my size.’ ” A reader wrote in that the article showed how it was “possible to assassinate someone twice.”

  ON DECEMBER 21, IN VIENNA, Six Militants from the “Arm of the Arab Revolution” group forced their way into a meeting of OPEC leaders, issued a communiqué demanding a “total liberation war” against Israel, took sixty hostages, and killed three, before, the next day, releasing their surviving charges in Tripoli. Now, it appeared, the people by whose command flowed the lifeblood of entire global economy, petroleum, were at the mercy of a terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal.” The next week, in New York, terrorists took advantage of peak holiday travel to explode a bomb, equivalent to twenty-five sticks of dynamite, that they had hidden in a coin locker—collapsing the floor and ceiling, hurling shrapnel from the metal lockers that pierced through flesh and left body parts scattered throughout the main baggage claim area at La Guardia Airport. Fourteen people were killed. No one ever claimed responsibility. No perpetrator was ever found. “Terrorism,” FBI director Clarence Kelley said, “is, indeed, the ultimate evil in our society. And no one can consider himself immune from terrorist acts.” Most shockingly of all, “some otherwise law-abiding people provide moral and material support to terrorists, apparently for idealistic reasons”—like the people who had gladly kept Patty Hearst, whose trial was set to begin in two weeks, from justice in her fourteen months on the lam.

  La Guardia was the eighty-ninth bombing in the United States attributable to terrorist activity in 1975, compared with forty-five in 1974 and twenty-four in 1973. What would 1976 bring?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  * * *

  Negatives Are Positives

  AT CHRISTMASTIME IN 1897, AN eight-year-old girl from New York wrote to a newspaper editor, “Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. . . . Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus.” The editor responded for the ages: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

  At Christmastime in 1975, two girls asked the same question of a columnist, Alan MacLeese, at the Flint Journal in Michigan. He wrote back, “No, Gretchen and Stacy, there is no such man.”

  America was trying to celebrate. It really was. At the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, 1976 was rung in with Guy Lombardo’s orchestra leading a sing-along of “Happy Birthday, America”; in Philadelphia, it was rung in with the midnight ride of the Liberty Bell from Independence Hall to a large building where it would welcome tourists all during the nation’s Bicentennial year; the next morning, in Pasadena, California, Kate Smith offered her famous rendition of “God Bless America” as grand marshal of the Rose Bowl Parade. But streetside revelers who opened their copies of the Los Angeles Times during a lull in the proceedings could read the offering that morning of columnist Robert J. Donovan: “The inescapable commentary of fading 1975 and its several predecessors is that, combined, they are sending the country into bicentennial 1976 in such a state of disillusion and moral confusion that no one is sure how best to celebrate the nation’s 200th birthday.”

  In Cleveland, the Plain Dealer editorialized that “1975 was at least something of an improvement over 1974,” though whether 1976 might be an improvement over that was “a mystery.” Under the dark penumbra of Watergate; the revelations about that womanizer and would-be assassin of Castro, John F. Kennedy (who according to the new book The Search for JFK had been a terrible naval commander to boot, who did not “save his crew” after a Japanese warship rammed his PT boat, instead his negligence having been responsible for the sinking itself); the wave of bombings and kidnappings in America and around the world—and who was to say, the Plain Dealer mused, that mad terrorists might not soon have nukes—“as the New Year arrives it sometimes seems as if modern government is helpless.” The Census Bureau came out with a new report on marriage: it was on the way out, with the number of people between 25 and 34 years old who had never been married increasing by half since 1970. One-parent families were skyrocketing too, from 1.6 to 7.2 million. The journalist Elizabeth Drew, in her weekly “Journal” column in the New Yorker, wrote, of the nation’s two-hundredth birthday, “we don’t seem to know how to celebrate it. There is a vague feeling that the merchandisers have already made off with the occasion, and that the orators will bore us to death . . . there is also an uneasiness about celebrating. Our history began so grandly, and it doesn’t seem so grand anymore.”

  Her catalogue of horrors included Watergate, of course. (“We had had a kind of faith that we would never elect a really bad man as President.”) And inflation. And the “threat of widespread food shortages; the continuing energy problem; the threatening scarcity of other natural resources.” And the “continuing social and economic plight of the country’s black people; the crisis of the cities; the increasing number of ecological problems.” And “the excesses, at home and abroad, of our secret intelligence-gathering agencies.” She also interviewed Senator Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois, who added capitalism itself to the list of society’s failures: “The institutions of free enterprise,” he told the New Yorker, “are not equal to the realities of the new era: cartels, fixed prices, commodity shortages.”

  A PRESS RELEASE ANNOUNCED ONE celebration: “One hundred years ago, an enterprising and forward-looking New York publisher, Mrs. Charles F. Deihm, had an idea, to create a depository of materials gathered at the time of the United States Centennial celebration that could be unveiled 100 years later.” The unveiling took place in January in a lobby of the U.S. Capitol. “Happy birthday, America!” Congress-woman Lindy Boggs cried from the ceremonial dais; members of Congress’s Joint Committee on Arrangements for the Commemoration of the Bicentennial sat arrayed beside her. The House and Senate chaplains said prayers; Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, represe
nting Vice President Rockefeller, president of the Senate, presented the official Bicentennial flag—it featured a red-white-and-blue star with modishly rounded corners—to House Speaker Carl Albert and said there were already eight thousand of them flying around the country. Carl Albert said, “We meet today under very inspiring circumstances.”

  And thereupon, with fanfare, the double doors to the elegant black-lacquered safe, reposing patiently in a Capitol storeroom lo these last hundred years, fanned open. But these ended up opening only to another set of locked doors, so all they could access was a written message: “It is the wish of Mrs. Deihm that this safe may remain closed until July 4, 1976.”

  Crushingly appropriate, that anticlimax. It seemed like nothing worked in America anymore. People’s lives were not working; the previous November, Ann Landers received a letter from a young couple who asked the columnist to poll her readership to ask if having a child would be worth it—“Were the rewards enough to make up for the grief?” The letters poured in, and on January 23, she tallied up the score: 70 percent told her no. Wrote a forty-year-old with young twins, “I was an attractive, fulfilled career woman before I had these kids. Now I’m an overly exhausted nervous wreck.” Said a seventy-year-old mother of five, “Not one of our children has given us any pleasure. God knows we did our best, but we were failures as parents, and they are failures as people.”

  Failures as people: millions of Americans felt that this description fit them to a T. Seeking a solution, any solution, they eagerly forked over their cash to any huckster who promised release, the quicker and more effortlessly the better: therapies like “bioenergetics” (“The Revolutionary Therapy That Uses the Language of the Body to Heal the Problems of the Mind”); Primal Scream (which held that when patients shrieked in a therapist’s office, childhood trauma could be reexperienced, then released; John Lennon and James Earl Jones were fans); or Transcendental Meditation, which promised that deliverance could come if you merely closed your eyes and chanted a mantra (the “TM” organization sold personal mantras, each supposedly “unique,” to hundreds of thousands of devotees). Or “religions” like the Church Universal and Triumphant, or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, or “Scientology”—this last one invented by a science fiction writer, reportedly on a bet. Devotees paid cash to be “audited” by practitioners who claimed the power—if, naturally, you paid for enough sessions—to remove “trauma patterns” accreted over the 75 million years that had passed since Xenu, tyrant of the Galactic Confederacy, deposited billions of people on earth next to volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs inside those volcanos, thus scattering harming “body thetans” to attach to the souls of the living, which once unlatched allowed practitioners to cross the “bridge to total freedom” and “unlimited creativity.” Another religion, the story had it, promised “perfect knowledge”—though its adherents’ public meeting was held up several hours because none of them knew how to run the movie projector. Gallup reported that six million Americans had tried TM, five million had twisted themselves into yoga poses, and two million had sampled some sort of Oriental religion.

  And hundreds of thousands of Americans in eleven cities had plunked down $250 for the privilege being screamed at as “assholes.”

  “est”—Erhard Seminars Training, named after the only-in-America hustler who invented it, Werner Erhard, originally Jack Rosenberg, a former used-car and encyclopedia salesman who had tried and failed to join the Marines (this was not incidental) at the age of seventeen, and experienced a spiritual rebirth one morning while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge (“I realized that I knew nothing. . . . In the next instant—after I realized that I knew nothing—I realized that I knew everything”)—promised “to transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself,” all that in just sixty hours, courtesy of a for-profit corporation whose president had been general manager of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of California and a former member of the Harvard Business School faculty.

  A journalist decided to go through the process and write a book about it. He described showing up at 9 A.M. with 239 others at a Howard Johnson’s conference room in Boston for the first of four all-day sessions over two successive weekends, and at the start being forced to leave his watch at the door. He sat down in a hard-backed chair—the organizers made sure these chairs were uncomfortable—and heard the rules he would have to agree to in order to stay. They were read out in a mechanical drone: no food or drink (the meal break came at nine at night); no talking; no taking notes, chewing gum, reading, sitting next to someone you knew, or making any trips to the bathroom (the bathroom break came after twelve hours); don’t discuss what happens in est training with anyone other than est graduates. Over those sixty hours everything would be controlled, right down to how acolytes were to hold the microphone. (“Stand up. Extend your arms. Now make a fist with your left hand around your right thumb. Now with your left thumb extended outward . . .”)

  “Keep your ass in the room . . . follow the instructions, and take what you get. . . . The reasons why our lives don’t work, the reason why you’re assholes, is that you don’t keep your agreements! . . . You assholes keep your agreements with me and your lives will work. Is everybody clear on that now?”

  The trainer invited questions. The acolytes, careful to extend their left thumbs outward, asked some. A woman said she’d been studying Buddhism for seven years, and that if she believed in anything, it was the Buddha. . . .

  “Buddha is dogshit until you experience being the Buddha!”

  (He added, “You women would be a lot happier if you realized that you get paid to clean the house and cook dinner.”)

  He asked who thought they knew why their arms moved when they raised their hands.

  “The muscles contract,” someone returned.

  “They do, huh? What makes them contract?”

  “They receive stimulus from the brain,” someone offered.

  “Wait a minute,” proposed the trainer, who went only by the name “Brendan.” “How do you know you have a brain?”

  There was a pause, and someone named Richard, confident he’d figured out the game, stood up and answered, “Because that’s the way we came into the universe.”

  “What universe?! You people don’t know anything, do you? Do you?”

  Richard returned to his seat.

  A man with “Steve” written on his name tag raised his hand: “I don’t see any blacks. I don’t see any Chicanos. I don’t see—”

  “Brendan” cut him off: “My answer to you, Steve, is that anyone can take this training. And you know something, Steve? You’re the one who hates niggers.”

  A pert young woman objected: “It’s not necessary to use that kind of language.”

  He imitated her, mocking: “Oh, it isn’t necessary to use that kind of language. I got that, Mary, so you can wipe that sexy little smile off your face.” He addressed his congregation: “I want you to notice Mary’s act: press her buttons and she smiles.” He addressed her: “You’ve been smiling all your life, Mary, and where has it gotten you? Right here!”

  Mary whimpered; Brendan responded.

  “Press another button and Mary starts to cry. Press another button and she screws. . . . Mary, you ain’t nothin’ but a little China doll. Do you get that? Thank you, Mary, you can sit down. . . .

  “I was only using Mary as an example. There isn’t one person in here that I couldn’t manipulate as easily as I manipulated Mary.”

  He snarled, “It ain’t gonna get no better in here. It’s going to get a lot worse, and if you have any notions about not keeping your agreements, remember that you haven’t got what you came here for, and I do. I’ve already got your two hundred and fifty bucks. It’s going to get so bad in here that the only thing that’s going to keep you in your seats is your money. Is that clear?”

  On the second day cam
e the “truth process.” Laying his charges down on the floor, the trainer, after a guided meditation leading them to the painful emotions and problems they were there to try to resolve, would command them to “take our fingers off the repress button,” and the journalist described the moans and groans that followed as “like listening to a secret sound track of Dante’s Inferno— as if someone had plugged an audio hookup into the purgatorial paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.” (The staff kept bright silver barf bags on hand, just in case.) Next came the “danger process,” though he was not allowed to write about that—perhaps because it sounded legally actionable: a participant was ordered to the stage to stand straight as a ramrod, then one of a special team of “confronters” stood nose to nose with the frightened trainee, staring menacingly into his eyes, as another shouted insults; a separate team of “body catchers” caught these trainees when their legs invariably gave out from the strain. Then, at the conclusion of the second day, all would lie on the floor again, this time to imagine each was terrified of everyone else, then that they were all terrified of everyone and everything in the world; and more Hieronymus Bosch screaming ensued.