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

by Rick Perlstein

  The Georgians returned home, and sent their own handwritten notes: to those they had met (“I liked your cute dog”; “I hope your boy is feeling better”), and those they had not (“Tim and Judy, Jimmy Carter did a great job straightening out Georgia,” ran suggested language in the Jimmy Carter Presidential Campaign—New Hampshire Campaign Manual binder, in the section marked “Postcard Plan”; “I think he could do the same thing in Washington. I hope you’ll support him on February 24”)—six thousand letters in all.

  Meanwhile, in the same way as with Reagan, now that Carter was plainly a serious contender the suspicious circles were taking a very hard look—and finding some very hard facts. In the Village Voice on February 9, the radical press critic Alexander Cockburn, in “The Truth About Jimmy Carter,” tore apart his image as a post-Wallace racial reconciliationist. Cockburn printed a letter to a Southern woman, Mrs. Lena Dempsey, from the previous summer, in which Carter averred, “I have never had anything but the highest praise for Governor Wallace.” And: “I think that you will find that Senator Jackson”—whose campaign strategy was to pick off Wallace’s supporters by aping his antibusing stand—“and I are in close agreement on most issues.” As to why he didn’t support Wallace’s presidential bid in 1972 as she wished, he told Mrs. Dempsey, “There are times when two men working toward the same end can accomplish more. I think you will find Governor Wallace understands this”—cynical stuff from a candidate whose commercials had him earnestly intoning, “I’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never avoid a controversial issue. . . . Watch television, listen to the radio. If I ever do any of those things, don’t support me.”

  “Jimmy Carter’s Pathetic Lies,” which appeared a few days later in the March issue of Harper’s, was considerably harsher.

  There, journalist Steve Brill quoted the Georgia state archivist as saying the governor’s staff “only sent me the speeches they wanted me to include”—not including, for example, a tribute delivered in 1970 for “George Wallace Appreciation Day” in Red Level, Georgia. In the piece, 1970 was a key year, the year of which Patrick Anderson gushed in the New York Times Magazine that Carter had run as a “pro–civil rights” candidate, even if “many conservatives seemingly chose to disbelieve him.” They disbelieved him, Brill established, because Carter’s campaign was fundamentally dishonest on the subject. A leaflet had circulated then, showing his opponent Carl Sanders getting champagne dumped on him by two black members of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team, of which Sanders was part owner. Carter denied any knowledge of the item. But Brill quoted a public relations man who worked for Carter’s adman, Jerry Rafshoon, one of his closest friends and advisors: “We distributed the leaflet. It was prepared by Bill Pope, who was then Carter’s press secretary. It was part of an operation we called ‘the stink tank.’ ” He also reported that the Carter campaign financed and produced the radio commercials of a third candidate, a black lawyer, to dilute Sanders’s support among blacks. And that his claim to have opened day-care centers for the retarded staffed by welfare mothers was bogus. (“There is no program,” the deputy director of the state mental health division said. “No one has been taken off welfare and put in any mental health job.”) He debunked Carter’s claim to have produced a $116 million surplus in the budget (the state auditor told Brill the surplus had been $91 million when Carter came into office and $43 million when he left) and quoted Carter as deriding détente, like Ronald Reagan, and as supporting the death penalty, opposing the New York City bailout, and calling for the abolition of the corporate income tax.

  Brill then cited the civil rights hero and Georgia state senator Julian Bond: “Jimmy Carter wouldn’t be my first choice for president or even my fifth. The reason he gets such good press is that whenever the rest of the country thinks of Georgia, they think of Lester Maddox.” Brill quoted the prominent New York liberal William vanden Heuvel, a confidant of the late Bobby Kennedy, who touted Carter as “someone who has stood with us on the right side in every fight that’s been important to us over the last two decades.” He quoted that in order to record his incredulity: why were so many liberals embracing Carter as though he was one of them?

  It spoke to another of Carter’s political gifts: being all things to all people. The New York Times recorded him in colloquy with a voter who wanted to know if he was a liberal, a conservative, or a centrist. He replied, “I don’t like to categorize, I don’t see myself as liberal or conservative or the like. I’m a farmer, you know. Now, you ask most farmers whether they are liberal or conservative, and they often say conservative. The same with businessmen. And I’m a businessman, too.”

  (He added, just in case he’d offended someone, “But that isn’t to say all businessmen and farmers are conservative.”)

  It played off a favorite riff of his. As he wrote in his campaign autobiography, “I am a Southerner and an American. I am a farmer, an engineer, a father and husband, a Christian, a politician and former governor, a planner, a businessman, a nuclear physicist, a Naval officer, a canoeist, and, among other things, a lover of Bob Dylan’s songs and Dylan Thomas’s poetry.” But that all wasn’t quite true, either: he was a warehouseman for other farmers, not really a farmer himself; not a nuclear physicist but a former member of Admiral Hyman Rickover’s nuclear submarine corps who’d done a little bit of graduate work in engineering. In that autobiography he referred to what Northerners called the “Civil War” as the “War Between the States,” a term that pandered to Southerners; asked by a young woman who his running mate might be, he replied, “I won’t give you a name, but I’ll tell you the qualities she’ll have.” To a group of schoolgirls who asked for his position on the Equal Rights Amendment, he said, through what would soon become his famous megawatt grin: “I can answer that in three words. I’m for it.” The girls cheered; the candidate, complimented by a sympathetic reporter for his liberality, frowned and said: “Half those people probably oppose the ERA.”

  The anticynical cynic. And, as Steve Brill had documented, someone who got away with lies.

  The consensus was that it couldn’t last long. “He’s trapped now that he’s up front,” observed the New Hampshire house’s majority leader, chairman of the flailing Birch Bayh campaign. “He can’t have it both ways if he wants to win. He’s got to start answering the tough ones.” But he did not. And still he kept winning recruits—among voters, and just as important, among the reporters who watched him do it with awe. He was all things to them, too.

  Patrick Anderson, the Times writer, watched Carter give his standard speech to a Kiwanis meeting. Carter observed how Americans were “deeply wounded” by Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, recession. Then he would ask two questions: Could government be made to work again? And could it become a source of pride again? He answered them with the story of the time his towering naval commander, Admiral Rick-over, interviewed him for the job as a nuclear submariner. The great man asked the young man if he had always done his best at the Naval Academy.

  “I wanted to say yes. But I thought of all the times I’d read a novel or listened to classical records when I should have been studying. So I had to say, ‘No sir, I didn’t.’ ” The commander, the candidate told the Kiwanis crowd, answered him with a bark: “Why not the best?”

  Wrote Anderson: “That, Carter concluded—and by then the room was hushed—was the question America must ask itself in 1976: Why not the best? . . . It was corny and self-serving, but it worked. The Kiwanians leaped to their feet, applauding. I too was moved. Perhaps all of us, cynical novelists and Kiwanians alike, sometimes wish we had always been our best. Carter had touched his audience not with ‘issues’ but by tapping into emotions that were universal.”

  They yearned to believe. Reporters yearned to believe, too—like another Village Voice writer, the acerbic critic James Wolcott, who fell for Carter while watching him hang out in Atlanta with Bob Dylan’s former backing group, the Band. (“Carter’s association with Rickover quickly surfaced in all early campaign conversa
tions with what he considered the ‘conservative’ press,” Spiro Agnew’s former press secretary, Vic Gold, now a columnist for the Washingtonian, soon observed. “Whenever, however, talking to younger, non-Establishment members of the media, he spoke of his admiration for Bob Dylan, Gregg Allman.”) Wolcott tried on a hipper-than-thou cynicism at the top of his copy—“The media are ready to accept Carter’s emergence as the presidential symbol of Southern enlightenment”—then dropped it, embarrassed by his own knowing New York ways. Carter had told the story, a familiar one, of the little room next to the governor’s executive office where he would repair to pray during difficult moments. “I spent more time on my knees as a governor than all the rest of my life,” Wolcott recorded Carter saying, then wrote, “I started to laugh, then looked around at the faces beaming approval and bit my lip.” Manhattan rock-and-roll hipsters, too, yearned to believe. Wolcott concluded, referring to the club where a new genre called “punk rock” was just then emerging from the Bowery grime, “Could a CBGB neo-classicist like myself conceivably vote for Jimmy Carter? A tentative 10-4.”

  It was working. All of it was working. So Carter kept burbling Sunday school bromides, dropping Dylan references, biblical references, Rickover references, Reinhold Niebuhr references (the political editor of the Atlanta Journal said of his former governor, “He’ll quote some obscure philosopher you never heard of quicker than a cat can scratch”)—and, above all, straddling issues. On amnesty for draft evaders. (The journalist Martin Schram wrote of his position, “It is not an answer; it is an art form—carefully constructed so as to diffuse the emotions of the subject and come up with something for everyone. The shorthand of it is that he starts out by saying he is against amnesty, but he winds up saying he is for pardon. And he tells interviewers, when asked, that he thinks there is a difference, even though Webster’s defines ‘amnesty’ as a ‘general pardon.’ ” Schram quoted that answer. It went on for well over a hundred words—with lots and lots of ellipses.) Some sort of straddle on desegregation (it was wonderful; but “forced busing” was wrong). And on Angola, where on February 9 Soviet- and Cuban-backed forces took Huambo, formerly New Lisbon, capital of the forces backed by the United States. Mo Udall, point-blank, said, “President Ford and Secretary Kissinger want another Vietnam in Angola.” Carter, all over the place, said that he was against military intervention “except in a clear-cut case of national defense,” but that he didn’t know what to do about Angola because the administration was keeping so much secret: nothing to offend anybody in that.

  Udall was one of four liberals running seriously in New Hampshire. No wonder left field was so crowded: Warren Miller of the University of Michigan, one of the country’s top political scientists, proclaimed the scientific conclusion: “Both parties would be wise to move their ideological centers of gravity in a liberal, left-of-center direction,” given the emergence of a massive young “new left” coalition sure to soon form a more dominant force than the New Deal coalition Roosevelt crafted in the 1930s. And so there was Bayh (asked about Angola, he paused sadly, looked down, and said, “I don’t know why we never learn,” and mused about whether we had been “on the wrong side” in places like Vietnam). Sargent Shriver, former director of the War on Poverty and the Peace Corps, the husband of Kennedy’s sister Eunice, tried, earnestly and ineffectually, to steal Carter’s march (“decent and honest and truthful and fair—that represents what the American people are”). Fred Harris, a portly, booming populist whose motto was “The Issue Is Privilege,” and who said the trouble with the War on Poverty was “that you can’t really do something about poverty unless you’re going to do something about the distribution of wealth and power.” Milton Shapp, the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania and the only announced candidate not to qualify for matching funds, who handicappers thought was gunning for the vice presidential spot.

  The talk everywhere was of drafting Hubert Humphrey, an old familiar name, as prophylactic against the anxieties of a new, unfamiliar time; people still talked up Ted Kennedy despite his repeated avowals, going back two years, that he wouldn’t run. George Wallace was concentrating on Florida; Scoop Jackson, who was talked up as a front-runner through much of 1975, and whose distinct calling cards were his Wallace-like loathing of busing and his Reagan-like passion for taking on the Soviets, had decided to give New Hampshire a pass, too.

  That left only one candidate chasing through the snow to monopolize the devotion of every New Hampshire Democrat who was not in the market for a liberal. And guess which candidate was ahead?

  IT WAS DAMNED HARD WORK. Udall’s schedule for a single day late in January included twenty-three events in seven cities in two states, from six in the morning to nine fifteen at night. Walter Mondale, the Minnesota senator who distinguished himself on the Church Committee, asked why he’d dropped consideration of a bid way back in 1974, had said, “I found I did not have the overwhelming desire to be president which is essential to the kind of campaign that is required. . . . For one thing, I have no desire to spend the next two years sleeping in a different Holiday Inn every night.” At least eight men at this point, Republican and Democrat, apparently still did have that overwhelming desire. The question, however, was how many, beyond the cadres of reporters who did it for a living, even cared.

  “A DISENCHANTED ELECTORATE MAY STAY HOME IN DROVES,” the New York Times’ Christopher Lydon reported early in February: “In ivory towers and the back rooms of numerous campaign headquarters, distrust and disillusionment are found to be the essential attributes of the American citizenry in this Bicentennial year.” He quoted one pollster, Peter Hart, who said that “the only majority we find is a cynical majority,” and another who said that only 36 percent who voted in 1974 thought their votes “made a difference.” Candidates like Carter, of course, built this insight into their very campaign plans. But Lydon quipped, “A practical question about such strategies is whether voters are alienated now from ‘alienation campaigns.’ ” Fred Dutton, advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern, noted how “people talk about ‘somebody catching fire’ in the primaries, but I say it will be a very small firecracker”—a nice Bicentennial image. “If people could have their way, they’d leave the presidency vacant for four years.” Walter Dean Burnham, then of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained why: “The gap between beliefs and actions, between traditional values and the way the system is organized, keeps growing. All the major components of society are in crisis.”

  As the newsmagazines began collecting portraits of the candidates for possible New Hampshire covers, evidence for that insight abounded. One Bicentennial letter to the editor: “Having been born and raised in Milwaukee, I have always been proud to call it my home. Now—after having been mugged, having had my home burglarized . . . I leave Milwaukee with no regrets.” Another, from the Baltimore Sun: “Women cannot walk the streets in broad daylight or at night without the absolute fear of rape.” From small-town Portsmouth, Ohio: “The people aren’t safe anymore, which is what our own city is getting like. It isn’t safe to walk the streets in broad daylight anymore.” Three of General Electric’s most experienced nuclear engineers quit publicly on February 2, proclaiming that atomic power—“a technological monster, and it is not clear who, if anyone, is in control,” one called it in his resignation letter—ought to be banned. A few weeks later a plant safety coordinator at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission quit, saying his recommendations had been ignored and his bosses were evading their responsibility “by not telling the public and power licensing boards all the facts we know.” In New York, an opportunistic B-movie distributor purchased an unreleased horror movie called The Slaughter, added an unrelated scene purporting to show the movie’s director murdering two female crew members, and retitled it Snuff. Feminist protesters, ignoring the film critics who spotted a poorly produced hoax, claimed “the bodies of the two women were found sometime after the film was made.” For who knew what nihilistic dep
ravities weren’t possible in this day and age?

  More barbarities: The right-wing radio and TV evangelist Billy James Hargis denied true reports (the product of a “godless, left-wing pagan press”) that he’d engaged in bisexual affairs with students at his American Christian College. The latest scandal from the days of Camelot pealed forth—that JFK had allegedly smoked pot with a prostitute. (According to a story in the National Enquirer, “at first JFK didn’t seem to feel anything but then he began to laugh and told her: ‘We’re having a White House conference on narcotics here in two weeks.’ ” Two joints later, he told her, “No more, suppose the Russians did something now?”) Although at that, it might not be long before prostitution was not illegal at all: in Philadelphia, 266 delegates to the American Bar Association’s convention came within two votes of recommending the removal of all criminal penalties for exchanging sex for money.

  New York magazine ran the first-person account of an officer in New York’s 41st Police Precinct in the Bronx, the most violent in the city—“Fort Apache,” the cops called it, a wasteland of buildings burned out by their owners for the insurance money, of junkies, of decent families barely holding on to their sanity. One thug fells another using, of all things, a bow and arrow—and then, when he’s arrested, the perp’s friends and family attack the precinct house with a hail of bricks. The cops have to barricade themselves inside. On another day a citizen stumbles through the front door shouting for help: “They threw my son off the roof. He’s stuck between two buildings.”