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

by Rick Perlstein

  He was fighting for his political life against Ronald Reagan. More and more, he sounded like Ronald Reagan.

  And in New Hampshire, his campaign strategists had arrived at a deviously brilliant strategy: that Reagan the antitax crusader was going to raise their taxes.

  New Hampshire was a haven of antitax absolutists. It had no state income tax and no state sales tax—and all gubernatorial candidates had to sign a pledge never to propose if they wanted to live to see another political day. That was courtesy of William Loeb, publisher of the only newspaper with a statewide reach, the Manchester Union-Leader, a Reagan booster and passionate foe of the man he called in his front-page editorials “Jerry the Jerk.”

  Reagan had spent December at his ranch, resting and, his campaign staff said, “studying the issues.” He arrived in the Granite State on January 2 with a clever gimmick borrowed from Richard Nixon’s campaign in 1968: “citizens’ press conferences,” which let ordinary voters question the candidate, thus giving the appearance of post-Watergate transparency, while at the same time excluding experienced reporters from pressing him, thus actually limiting it. Handicappers were giving Reagan an edge to win the February 24 primary in the most conservative state in the union outside the South. The citizens, however, did not cooperate—once the Ford staffers sprang their clever trap.

  It came of Reagan’s ignored speech to the Chicago Executives Club back in September, in which he argued that “a systematic transfer of authority and resources to the states” would save the federal government $90 billion. Campaign chiefs Bo Callaway and Stuart Spencer circulated a memo to reporters pointing out that for states to administer such programs they’d need to fund such administration, too. The memo included a column criticizing the speech by, of all people, Pat Buchanan. And it laid out back-of-the-envelope calculations that in a place like New Hampshire this would require $13 million in new revenue—and itemized how many libraries, fire trucks, sidewalks, and police equipment would have to be scrapped to raise the funds. Barring, of course—as Spencer said in a press conference in the state capital just prior to the landing of Reagan’s chartered 727—“the specter of new and higher taxes as the price of Reagan’s folly.” Soon that was all anyone in New Hampshire wanted to discuss.

  “The people of New Hampshire, I understand, are worried that I have some devious plot to impose the sales or income tax on them,” Reagan immediately was forced to respond before the Moultonborough, New Hampshire, Lions Club. “Believe me, I have no such intention and I don’t think there is any danger that New Hampshire is getting one.” Lyn Nofziger said, “We’re not backing away from the concept at all. We think this is a good Republican approach.” Another key spokesman, Governor Meldrim Thomson, promptly contradicted that: “I think that’s probably a program which he will be thinking of taking a second thought on.”

  The Associated Press: “In three days of campaigning in New Hampshire . . . Reagan was bombarded at each stop with questions on his plan to cut the federal budget by turning over responsibility for most federal welfare and social service programs to the states. . . . Reagan has avoided saying specifically how the states would be expected to fund the programs.” An editorial from the Nashua Telegraph: “The man who wants Republicans in New Hampshire to turn their backs on President Ford ought to answer specifically the welter of questions his $90 billion panacea has provoked. . . . [A] scheme that would require Congress to rewrite or undo 40 years of laws and that would require each of the state governments to cope with the trauma of writing new laws and enacting new or increased taxes . . . never will be simple—10,000 press agents shouting to the contrary notwithstanding.” They pointed to his promise that nothing in the plan required new state taxes, and savaged his campaign’s signature gimmick. “Since Mr. Reagan is protected in his ‘citizen press conferences’ from follow-up questions, that supposedly settles that. That settles nothing. We don’t give a hoot about Mr. Reagan’s sweet intentions; we want to know about the bitter consequences of his scheme.” Bo Callaway got a nice pop in the media saying Reagan wanted to “throw old people in the snow”; Mary McGrory pivoted off that to write, “It could be that the people of New Hampshire are as flinty as their reputation and would endorse the idea of throwing old people out in the snow and be glad that Ronald Reagan had made cold-heartedness respectable.” And so at that, after eleven days of floundering that resulted in the national press deploying Reagan’s words to insult the electorate of New Hampshire itself, he took it all back: “I guess I made a mistake in the speech I made in Chicago last September,” he said in Illinois, which was voting next after Florida, and claimed he had devised a technical fix that preserved the heart of the proposal while cushioning states from the financial consequences; how it would do this, though, he could not quite explain. At that his Illinois communications director reversed the reversal and said, “I think he’s sorry he ever alluded to the $90 billion figure at all.”

  Disarray: precisely why this attack was so clever. It neutralized Reagan’s biggest strength—his reputation as a tax cutter—and engaged his biggest weakness: explaining complicated ideas on the fly, setting up a story line that Reagan was lazy and stupid and couldn’t lead without guidance from unseen hands. A poll of Republican state chairmen found 90 percent of the respondents worried about the “Reagan problem,” that he had “simplistic approaches,” “no depth in federal government administration,” and “no experience in foreign affairs.”

  THE REAGAN CAMPAIGN WAS A chicken with its head cut off, but Ford had problems of his own. He had won the conservative New Hampshire senator Norris Cotton to his side, a Pyrrhic victory: Cotton told the press that he preferred Reagan’s ideology, and that Ford had “a bad organization.” A Supreme Court decision validated California’s unique “winner-take-all” primary system, which meant whichever candidate won 51 percent or more when the Golden State voted in June—Ronald Reagan, almost certainly—would harvest 167 delegates out of the 1,130 needed to nominate. On January 24 the columnist George Will reported that Mac Mathias, “a member of the GOP’s embattled Corregidor Garrison of liberals,” bored with “what he calls ‘the Ford-Reagan monologue,’ ” was still thinking of making the race. President Ford swooped down upon New Hampshire in Air Force One to dazzle the locals, but, as Reagan’s twenty-eight-year-old campaign aide David Keene observed to a reporter, kidding on the square, “Every time Ford flies out for another speech, we gain two percent in the polls.”

  Then there was the headache of managing the foreign policy of a global power during a political campaign, a damned-if-he-did-damned-if-he-didn’t conundrum if there ever was one.

  On January 15 it was announced that Henry Kissinger would soon jet off to Moscow to resume the next Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (“SALT II”), one week after the Harris poll found that Americans, by 44 to 25 percent, preferred Reagan’s hard line on the Soviets over détente, and nine days before Evans and Novak commented that the new, conservative secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, still had enough muscle with the White House to kill SALT II altogether. “We must not face a future in which we can no longer help our friends, such as Angola, even in limited and carefully controlled ways,” Ford had said in the State of the Union address, something executives in less suspicious times, when presidents managed foreign policy on their own, would never need mention. But now Congress was debating whether to permanently kill aid to the MPLA, our faction in the African nation’s civil war. Kissinger told Ford, “We’re living in a nihilistic nightmare.”

  Another thing Ford made sure to touch upon in his State of the Union address was “[t]he crippling of our foreign intelligence services,” which he claimed “increases the danger of American involvement in direct armed conflict. Our adversaries are encouraged to attempt new adventures . . . the United States stands blindfolded and hobbled.”

  In case rhetoric wasn’t enough to do the trick, nor the public ceremonies surrounding the death of the CIA’s Richard Welch, the day after the State of the
Union message, and two days after the Times’ article “Revamping the CIA: Easier Said Than Done,” another opportunity presented itself to discredit Congress’s intelligence investigations and hobble serious CIA reform once and for all. Daniel Schorr of CBS began reporting choice bits from a leaked copy of the final report of Otis Pike’s House Select Committee on Intelligence, which report was scheduled for publication at the end of January. So did the New York Times: stuff like how an Italian neofascist general got paid $800,000 for services rendered to the CIA, stuff which had nothing to do with violating national security but everything to do with exposing agency incompetence and immorality. Be that as it may. Following so close on Philip Agee’s call to out CIA agents and the death of Richard Welch, the very fact of “unauthorized leaks” provided the opening. Ron Nessen said they raised “serious questions about how classified material can be handled by Congress when national security is at stake.” The CIA said genial, bow-tied Otis Pike might soon be responsible for the blood of more dead CIA agents. An intimidated liberal Democratic congressman begged Pike to find out who had passed on copies to the press. Pike replied, “What do you recommend, precisely? Lie detector tests to members of Congress?”

  Maybe. The report, drafted by an Ervin Committee veteran, was, for a government document, a literary masterpiece, and hard-hitting as hell. It opened with seventy pages savaging the Ford administration’s lack of cooperation with Congress’s work, and continued, more aggressively than Pike’s public hearings—which had been plenty aggressive themselves, far more so than Senator Church’s—by documenting the CIA’s wasteful spending (where it could figure out what it spent), its bald failures at prediction, its abuses of civil liberties, and its blanket indifference that any of this might pose a problem. The report singled out Henry Kissinger for his “passion for secrecy” and statements “at variance with facts”; it detailed a number of failed covert actions—not naming countries, but with plenty of identifying details to make things obvious enough for those who cared to infer. For instance, how the Nixon administration encouraged the Kurdish minority in Iraq to revolt, then abandoned these Kurds when the shah of Iran objected. “Even in the context of covert action,” it concluded concerning that one, “ours was a cynical exercise.”

  And something about all this seemed to spook cowed congressmen—who soon were voting to neuter themselves.

  The House Rules Committee approved, by nine votes to seven, a measure to suppress publication of the report unless President Ford approved its contents. The full House debated whether to accept or reject the recommendation. Those against argued that the “classification” system itself violated the canons of checks and balances that were supposed to be the foundation of the republic. A moderate Republican from Colorado pointed out that the executive branch was desperate to serve as judge and jury in the very case in which it was the plaintiff. The report definitively established that the CIA had committed “despicable, detestable acts,” but “we are being castigated by those who perpetrate the acts and classify them.” Pike made a demystifying point: that each of these things called “secrets,” hemmed around with such sacralizing foofaraw and talked about as if they were blatant instructions to our enemies on how to defeat us, “is a fact or opinion to which some bureaucrat has applied a rubber stamp.” A Democrat from suburban Chicago drove home the bottom line: “If we are not a coequal branch of this government, if we are not equal to the President and the Supreme Court, then let the CIA write this report; let the President write this report; and we ought to fold our tent and go home.”

  To no avail. On January 29, the full House, led by conservatives, voted by a ratio of two to one to suppress the very report it had authorized and which took a year of work and several hundred thousand dollars to produce.

  It all was too much for Daniel Schorr. He took his copy to his bosses at CBS: “We owe it to history to publish it,” he said. They disagreed. He went to a nonprofit organization called the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to see if it could find a publishing house that might be interested, with the proceeds perhaps going to its group. It could not. Finally the alternative weekly the Village Voice agreed to publish the report, in a massive special issue, and since the Reporters Committee now controlled the document, the Voice made a contribution to the group. This set off a fierce backlash among the polite guardians of journalistic decorum; the New York Times editorialized that by “making the report available for cash,” Daniel Schorr was guilty of “selling secrets.” On ABC, anchor Sam Donaldson said, “There are those that argue that in an open society like ours nothing should be concealed from the public. Depending on who espouses it, that position is either cynical, or naive.” He said “mature and rational citizens” understood this—but not, apparently, Daniel Schorr. Nor Schorr’s bosses at CBS News, who suspended him, though local affiliates begged CBS brass to fire him.

  The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into who leaked the document to Schorr, who never coughed up his source; the committee ended up spending $350,000, interviewing four hundred witnesses, and coming up with, yes, one leaker, Democratic congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin—but he had leaked it to the CIA, not the press, as a political favor. In desultory fashion, Congress went on to debate intelligence reform through spring. But the version it settled upon was the weakest possible: two standing House and Senate select committees to exercise the same sort of lukewarm oversight as preceded the investigations, with no reform of the CIA’s charter.

  It never became any kind of campaign issue; in public opinion polls slightly more citizens disapproved than approved of the Pike and Church committees, and a majority feared they’d harmed national security. Pike gave an interview that spring to the New Republic. He told interviewer Oriana Fallaci, “It took this investigation to convince me that I had always been told lies, to make me realize that I was tired of being told lies.” And he explained why he thought the intelligence scandals hadn’t achieved the public concern of Watergate—why the “Year of Intelligence” had failed. “Oh, they think it is better not to know. There are too many things that embarrass Americans in that report. You see, this country went through an awful trauma with Watergate. But, even then, all they were asked to believe was that their President had been a bad person. In this new situation they are asked much more; they are asked to believe that their country has been evil. And nobody wants to believe that.” The CIA itself believed it had beaten the investigators: “Where is the legislation, the great piece of legislation, that was going to come out of the Church Committee hearings?” Richard Helms asked. “I haven’t seen it.” The radical journalist I. F. Stone even argued in the April 1, 1976, New York Review of Books that Helms and Company must have been the ones to leak the Pike Report to Daniel Schorr, the better to provoke the backlash against them. Schorr published a postmortem for the Year of Intelligence: “You peel off Watergate and you find the Plumbers and the Ellsberg break-in. Peel off the Plumbers and you find the 1970 Huston plan. . . . But what would you find if you peeled off another layer and had a close look at that secret world from which these things had been launched?”

  Alas, no one cared much. Otis Pike had hoped to ride his inquiry to the Senate. So much for that. Lucy, the psychiatrist from Peanuts, explained why: “It used to be that a person could live isolated from the world’s problems. Then it got to be that we all knew everything that was going on. The problem now is that we know everything about everything except what’s going on. That’s why you feel nervous. . . . Five cents, please!”

  SUSPICIOUS TIMES. OR MAYBE NOT. America couldn’t decide. Came the news on the last Wednesday in January that all major presidential candidates had released their medical records, the world apparently needing to know, for instance, about President Ford’s hemorrhoid surgery and Senator Church’s single testicle and Mo Udall’s glass eye (a Washington joke suggested a Church/Udall ticket with the slogan “Keep your eye on the ball”). The next day, the House voted 323 to 99 against allowing any
further money in the Defense Appropriations Bill to be spent in Angola. Ford replied, “They’ve lost their guts . . . and I think they’ll learn to regret [it].” The Times’ Anthony Lewis said his “phrasing had the delicacy of Joe McCarthy.” The day after that, the Supreme Court dialed back the major reforms the congressional culture of suspicion had wrought: the 1974 campaign finance law banning the buying off of political candidates. Giving money to a presidential candidate, the justices now said, was the same thing as speech.

  Buckley v. Valeo said that Congress could, if it wished, rewrite the law to enforce the $1,000 limit on individual contributions—but only for candidates voluntarily accepting matching funds (as both Reagan and Ford had done, receiving their first federal welfare checks, as it were, on January 2, Reagan for $100,000 and Ford for $342,422). Until Congress rewrote the law, no matching funds could be disbursed. One of the conservatives who welcomed the news—in addition to Senator James Buckley, the plaintiff in the suit—was Irving Kristol, the neoconservative columnist. Before the year was out he published an impassioned essay in the New York Times Magazine called “Post-Watergate Morality: Too Good for Our Own Good?: The Reforms Aimed at Solving Today’s Problems Are Likely to Constitute the Problems of Tomorrow,” arguing that the kind of suspicion that produced the new campaign finance law was ruining the country. “Let me emphasize—in our post-Watergate atmosphere I had better emphasize—that I personally think bribery is a bad thing,” he wrote. But the “spasmodic self-abuse” now in evidence, the “self-righteous moralism” and “vigilante-like passions with which the news media track down every sort of misdemeanor committed by officials,” could only have baleful unintended consequences. It was the most coherent intellectual case so far for the Reaganite idea that suspicious circles were a very bad thing.