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

by Rick Perlstein

  For those who came back the next weekend—most did; they had invested $250, after all—there came a tedious lecture, which went on as long as ten hours, in which the trainer expounded (“I’ll tell you everything I know about life”) on the est theory of the mind as a perfectly plastic machine that could manifest anything it deemed true and obliterate anything that it deemed false, because nothing, really, was real:

  “The opposite of reality is the experience of illusion. And what happens when we look at our experience and tell the truth about it? It disappears. . . . So when you experience the truth, you know it’s nothing but an illusion!”

  A skeptic asked, “So how did all this stuff get here?” He was answered, “It never did.” Naturally.

  Amid delighted laughter and shrieks of epiphany, the trainer—this one was named “Rod”—asked for a show of hands of those who had “gotten it.” Those who did not raise their hands were confronted one more time: “I don’t get it,” one might say. “Good,” he would hear in return. “There’s nothing to get. So you get it.” At which he might decide, triumphantly—he had paid $250 for this, after all—“I get it! So ‘getting it’ is whatever you get,” and, yes, the trainer would literally respond like this: “If that’s what you got.”

  The journalist, whose name was Robert Hargrove, concluded, “The est training is a process in which you are literally driven right out of your mind, and there is nothing you can do about it except resist.” And boy, was he grateful. “Most would be able to walk out of that same room the following weekend and be able to say, ‘I am the cause of my own experience’ and mean it. . . . They have spent their whole lives playing the victim, but somehow in the process of the training, that attitude and the darkness that was in their faces would disappear.” He wrote that he “realized that in my whole life I’ve never before seen people for what they are.” And that he now enjoyed experiencing “a semipermanent state of meditation in which I began to notice more things” and in which he became “more conscious in more and more areas of my life . . . accompanied by the physical sensation that someone was lifting an enormous rock off the top of my head.” And that “the value my wife and I got out of it would have made it a knockdown bargain at twice the price.” Even the Howard Johnson’s cigarette-burned and coffee-stained rug transfixed him: “How many saints and sadhus had attained enlightenment on a snowcapped mountain or a river bank or in a coconut grove and had become so attached to the ‘spirit of the place’ that they forgot that the experience was within them?” As Hargrove wrote in the preface to est: Making Life Work—one of at least five books from major paperback houses extolling est that year—est: Four Days to Make Your Life Work; The est Experience; est: the Movement and the Man; The Book of est (except, oops, “this is a book, and the est experience cannot result from reading any book”)—“est was like a laser; it took all the light in the rainbow and condensed it into a single beam.” Because, “At the moment that you ‘get’ the training, you know what the self really is.”

  But how did it work? Don’t ask, Hargrove insisted. The attempt would forge but one more illusion. “It’s like a photograph of an ice-cream cone. If you try to describe its flavor in terms of the form, data, or processes with which it is made, it is not likely that you will be understood. The only way to experience the satisfaction of eating an ice cream cone is to eat one.”

  Some derided est as a crypto-fascist cult of personality. Others thought it was a CIA front designed to drain Americans of their will to make political change, by convincing them that social problems were all in their heads. But est’s evangelists included, in addition to John Denver and Jerry Rubin, such respectable figures as Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, and Watergate’s John Dean. Not everyone among the 100,000 who had already taken est (there was a waiting list of 12,000) agreed that it helped them. But as two social scientists discovered when they researched a book published two years later, called Snapping, on America’s “epidemic of sudden personality change,” it was hard to find anyone who would say est hadn’t helped him. For as all good con men knew, no one wants to admit to having been conned.

  They found one person harmed by the program who was willing to talk, a middle-aged, college-educated divorcée desperate for meaning now that her kids had grown—a description she shared with Sara Jane Moore, whose preferred route to redemption had led her to the attempted assassination of Gerald Ford. The woman they interviewed tried TM and saw “glimpses of what it would be like to live on a different level”—until that rosy glow faded, and she discovered “encounter groups” and learned for the first time “what it was like to be close with another woman”—until that wore off and she tried est, which she almost abandoned after the first weekend produced shooting pains in her legs: “If I hadn’t paid two hundred dollars I wouldn’t have gone back.” After the second weekend, though, she believed herself to have been cured of her arthritis, and was left in a state of ecstasy that lasted the week—until she suffered a dissociative breakdown, her first experience of mental illness in her life, then a manic episode in which, first, she couldn’t stop dancing, and then began babbling in a made-up language until she ended up in a mental hospital for the first of two stints. The first scientific study of est confirmed that several such cases had presented themselves to hospital psychiatric wards. When Snapping’s authors found her she was “was still anxious—and still searching. . . . ‘I’ve been experiencing some discomfort and tension in my body and I’ve been waking up with feelings of anger,’ ” she said. But she would not give up. Next she was going to try acupuncture.

  Maybe, just maybe, that would work. Or maybe it would not. Maybe she could read one of the offerings from the Psychology Today Book Club: How to Be Your Own Best Friend; How to Be Awake and Alive; The You That Could Be; You Are Not Alone; Creative Coping; Getting It Together; New Mind, New Body. A blunt fact of the Bicentennial year: this bottomless supply of Americans for whom the basic institutions of society had failed so badly that they longed to become different people entirely. Which made it a hell of a time for a nationwide birthday party.

  MAYBE IT WOULD BE EASIER to celebrate, some silent political force seemed to dictate, if people could only forget what they had learned about their nation over the past two years. Like what they had learned about the CIA. So it was that the first big news story of 1976 did not concern the excesses of secret intelligence. It concerned the alleged excesses of those seeking to contain such intelligence.

  Inside the Company: CIA Diary, the memoir of spy-turned-radical Philip Agee, had come out in the United States in July despite government attempts to suppress it. In the book a twelve-year veteran of the agency working South and Central America chronicled his growing realization “that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the C.I.A. and the institutions it supports”—as when he was ordered to fabricate out of whole cloth a report “establishing” Communist infiltration of the Uruguayan government. He turned the document over to a police chief, then heard screams of torture coming from the next room, from one of the supposed infiltrators he’d named in his report—the dawn of his apostasy. At the end of the story he explained that he “wrote it as a contribution to socialist revolution.” A handy appendix revealed the CIA’s hand in as many front groups as he could recollect, complete with proper names; an analyst thus concluded in the agency’s classified review of the book that he was the CIA’s “first real defector in the classic sense of the word.”

  By the end of 1975, from his hideout in Communist Cuba, Agee had joined a movement. Anti-CIA activists, including the novelist Norman Mailer, published a magazine, counterspy, and Agee wrote in the winter issue, “The most effective and important systematic effort to counter the CIA that can be undertaken right now [is] the identification, exposure, and neutralization of its people working abroad.” One of the people Agee’s article thus identified was Richard Welch, whom he fingered as the station chief in Lima, Peru.

>   By then, however, Welch was not the station chief in Lima. He was the station chief in Athens—where, two days before Christmas, he was ambushed and assassinated by masked men outside his home.

  Agee’s article was apparently merely coincidental to the attack—and in Athens, Welch’s cover had already, independently, been blown (as, in fact, it had been in Lima), not least because he lived in a house whose CIA identity was a matter of public knowledge (an Athens newspaper had already identified him as the station chief along with publishing his address and phone number). The work being done by the House and Senate select committees on intelligence had even less to do with it. No matter. Just as Richard Nixon had exploited the POWs—“to restore the military to its proper position”—a complex story was cynically distorted into a crystalline patriotic allegory. Immediately, presidential press secretary Ron Nessen insinuated that the intelligence committees’ carelessness was responsible for the tragedy. The plane bearing Welch’s coffin was timed to touch down at Andrews Air Force Base for live coverage on the morning news, and was greeted by an Air Force honor guard. (Just like Nixon used to do, President Ford had the plane circle for fifteen minutes to get the timing just right.) Time had already eulogized Welch as a “scholar, wit, athlete, spy”—a regular James Bond.

  “Never before,” Daniel Schorr announced on the CBS news on December 30, “had a fallen secret agent come home as such a public hero,” and it was only the beginning. Over the protests of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Welch’s burial broke military protocol by taking place at Arlington Cemetery, starring more honor guards, dozens of flags, the flower of the American defense establishment, and the very same horse-drawn caisson used for the interment of President Kennedy. President Ford escorted the veiled widow at the funeral. Conservative senators demanded congressional investigations; Frank Church’s conservative Idaho colleague James McClure toured the state to lecture Church’s constituents, saying that such murders were just what happened when liberals get control of congressional investigations. Hundreds of telegrams and letters—some consisting of the single word “Murderer!”—flooded across his transom from angry citizens alert to the administration’s insinuations that it all must have been the congressional investigators’ fault. A supposedly adversarial press piled on, too, especially the Washington Post. In 1974 it brought down a president; now it ran thirteen stories in the week after Welch’s death following the administration line, and an editorial labeling the death “[t]he entirely predictable result of the disclosure tactics chosen by certain American critics of the agency.” Wrote the Post’s admirably independent ombudsman, Charles Seib, “The press was used to publicize what in its broad effect was an attack on itself.”

  Church, thrown on the defensive, called for criminal sanctions against those who identified secret agents. And it all happened just as the committees were drawing up their final reports and recommendations regarding intelligence reform—terrified, now, that further disclosure of any secret would discredit the entirety of their work.

  That was no accident. It was an orchestrated campaign—one taking advantage, not of the committees’ recklessness (in fact they were remarkably free from leaks) but of their very deliberateness, the months of quiet investigation and backroom executive sessions that provided an opening for White House propaganda to utterly blindside these earnest tribunes of reform. A high-ranking CIA official named David Atlee Phillips, who had specialized in propaganda, quit the agency to organize retirees into an apparently independent lobby. Though they were in the shadowlands of espionage, nothing could be so straightforward. They actually worked in harness with a president who used words like “crippling” and “dismantling” in his every reference to the intelligence investigations. And by the time the White House began all but dancing on Richard Welch’s grave, Phillips’s six-hundred-member Association of Retired Intelligence Officers was ready to wave the bloody shirt on the president’s behalf—in speeches, letters to the editor, and canned op-eds from a forty-eight-page guide, all pressing the message that the expansion of the suspicious circles into the sacred precincts of intelligence was putting the nation’s heroes in danger. Hardly three weeks after Welch’s death, the momentum for reining in the intelligence community was at all but a standstill—just as planned. “REVAMPING THE CIA: EASIER SAID THAN DONE,” as the New York Times headlined on January 18. And so, after one more turn of the screw, it would turn out to be.

  SENATOR CHURCH HAD HOPED BY then to be otherwise occupied. It was the presidential primary season. This spook-chasing that he had hoped would become his royal road to front-runner status had proved interminable: his committee had missed the first deadline—September 1, 1975—before the public hearings had even begun; it now looked as though the final report would not be out before spring, and so he hadn’t been able to prepare a presidential campaign at all. Now he just hoped to enter sometime early in spring in a late-breaking swoop, win a few primaries, and present himself as the consensus rescuer should the convention in Kansas City descend into unmanageable rancor. That didn’t seem at all unlikely, given that by then there were nine Democratic candidates prowling New Hampshire, and eleven who on January 2 drew the first matching checks from the federal Treasury—but not a clear front-runner in the bunch.

  First, however, would come Iowa, a new historical development: it became important only in 1972, when George McGovern’s campaign realized that a victory in this small, unrepresentative state’s January precinct caucuses—an event merely preliminary to the state convention that actually selected delegates, 47 out of the convention total of 3,008—could be held up as a signal that their man was the season’s front-runner, giving them momentum going into the much more firmly established primary in the Granite State. And so now, the political sages watched the Hawkeye State like hawks—for instance, eight days before the January 19 precinct caucuses, when Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana won a straw poll in Sioux City with the help of the state’s established labor unions, which pundits said put him ahead.

  That, however, was pretty much the last that was heard of Birch Bayh in 1976. Which said a hell of a lot about 1976.

  On paper, no one looked better than Bayh. Young and handsome, but also experienced and accomplished, the blue-eyed forty-eight-year-old third-term liberal was elected to the Indiana house of representatives at age twenty-four and moved up to become the youngest speaker of the house in state history. In the U.S. Senate he became a star on the Judiciary Committee, where he shepherded two constitutional amendments to passage, a record (the twenty-fifth, establishing an orderly process of presidential succession, and the twenty-sixth, enfranchising eighteen-year-olds); passed a landmark law opening up interscholastic athletic competition to women; and won two straight historic fights against President Nixon’s attempts to put Southern segregationists on the Supreme Court (and thus raced to the top of Nixon’s Enemies List). He’d explored a presidential run in 1972, which seasoned him; since then he’d been laboring mightily on the Equal Rights Amendment, a measure enormously popular with the Democratic base.

  But he also lived in Washington. Which was Gomorrah. And worked in the United States Capitol—which was where mountebanks and blackguard lawyers held court.

  The last three elected presidents—JFK, LBJ, and Nixon—had all once been senators, and it had once been the conventional wisdom that the next several presidents were likely to be former senators, too. That was then. Now Birch Bayh was forced to make a virtue of necessity. His dimpled face, set plain against a stark bare backdrop, stared straight into the camera in his TV commercial:

  “To listen to the other candidates, none of them are politicians. Even the ones who’ve held public office say they’re not politicians. Well, I’m Birch Bayh—and I’m a politician. It took a good politician to stop Nixon’s plan to pack the Supreme Court. And it’s going to take a good politician to break up the big oil companies and get jobs for unemployed workers and hold food prices in line. The question isn’t whether you’re a politi
cian, but what kind of politician makes a good president.”

  Following the fashion, he promised “moral leadership.” His most prominent endorser—though traditional endorsements were unfashionable, too, this year—was Watergate prosecutor Archie Cox, who said, “Trust in government is not to be had for the asking, nor is it gained by the politics of image. It begins with the trust that those who govern repose in people. Only a man of character can restore that confidence. Only a man of openness and courage can bring us together.”

  Which was all well and good. But senators are forced to take stands, or are at least forced to appear to take stands—they leave paper trails. Bayh would have preferred to avoid one on, say, an ideological minefield like abortion. But as chairman of the Senate judiciary subcommittee on constitutional amendments, overseeing hearings the previous fall on the proposed “human life” amendment, he came under vituperative criticism from women’s groups who claimed he was giving more time to “pro-life” than “pro-choice” forces—like the four Catholic cardinals who, in one heavily publicized session, testified that abortions should be illegal even to save the life of the mother. “The life of a woman, they argued,” according to Hearst columnist Marianne Means, “is not as important as the life of a fetus, which might turn out to be a male.” After the subcommittee voted not to let the amendment proceed, pro-lifers—“There is no special interest lobby as well-organized, as single minded, or as vicious to its opponents as the anti-abortion activists,” Means wrote—accused the Catholic senator, who had never declared himself publicly one way or the other on the issue, of tanking it on purpose. He soon found himself barraged by seven thousand letters from angry constituents on both sides—this just on the eve of entering the race, which he did too late, given the new campaign finance laws limiting individual donors to one thousand dollars, advantaging those who’d been plugging away the longest.