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

by Rick Perlstein

  When Wallace won the Florida primary in 1972, front-runner Edmund Muskie said it “reveal[ed] to a greater extent than I had imagined some of the worst instincts of which human beings are capable.” Then the assassination attempt at the Laurel, Maryland, shopping center—the crack, crack, crack, crack, crack by a madman from Milwaukee imagining that a grand heroic act might finally win him the attention of pretty girls. Then the bedside vigils, tense moments near death, operation after operation (he still won primaries in Maryland and Michigan, both states in which white suburban voters were terrified that some federal judge might soon force their children to go to school with black kids); his pallid, ghostly appearance behind a specially designed podium at the Democratic convention in Miami Beach, a less frightening Wallace, a more domesticated Wallace—a Wallace, many of his listeners realized that day, whom maybe they could learn to live with.

  More and more Northern Democrats began taking a new look at the former outcast, wondering whether the story he was telling might be adapted to their purpose as well—a rehabilitation that began in earnest with a joint appearance by Wallace and Ted Kennedy at a fairground in Decatur, Alabama, on July 4, 1973, for a “Spirit of America” rally, one DNC chairman Robert Strauss described as a “love fest.” It was a story, people now began to reason, that was not really about race, or at least not only about race: his exhortations against “pointy-headed bureaucrats who couldn’t park their bicycle straight” and “the pseudo-intellectual government, where a select, elite group have written guidelines in bureaus and court decisions, have spoken from some pulpits, some college campuses, some newspaper offices, looking down their noses at the average man on the street,” just might speak best to the ruddy small-d democratic faith that honored the best in America.

  Wallace himself began talking about the bad old days as if it had all been some massive misunderstanding: “I was for segregation because it was the law,” he said in a 1974 interview. “Well, it’s not the law anymore.” That year his gubernatorial campaign courted black voters. (“Sure, I look like a white man. But my heart is as black as anyone’s here,” he said in an infamous stumble, which could hardly disturb any of his supporters: it only proved he wasn’t a “pseudo-intellectual.”) By the middle of 1975 there was talk that he might well capture the Democratic nomination. And that violence around the edges—his talk, in 1968, about how a protester who lay down in front of his limousine wouldn’t live to see another day (that one always got thunderous applause); or, eight years later, the time a Peanut Brigadier at a hardware store in Okaloosa County in the Dixified Florida panhandle was told, “Young lady, you shouldn’t be here. This is Wallace Country and you might be in danger”—well, maybe that could be ignored too. “Every one of them is talking about the things that I talked about in ’72, aren’t they?” George Wallace asked Elizabeth Drew. “I was talking about welfare; I was talking about foreign aid; I was talking about national defense; I was talking about tax reform,” he explained. “I wanted to show that people of my region were in the mainstream of American political thought.” More and more, it seemed he was right.

  Memories, however, were long; when he spoke to the Arkansas legislature, for example (he said that “the people of Arkansas and Alabama speak the language the great majority wanted to hear politicians speak for so long”), the black members boycotted the chamber. Tom Wicker had compared the new rapprochement between Wallace and the liberals to the one that ended Reconstruction in 1876, when President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South and “the nation entered a 75-year period in which it tacitly permitted lily-white politics and social institutions in a quarter of the states.” Long memories—indeed some going back to 1876 and before—were precisely what created the space that Jimmy Carter so ably filled: all the ruddy democratic faith and Southern gentility, with none of the snarling, slave plantation, fascist overtones. Like the time when a little lady from the Peanut Brigade showed up in the Okaloosa hardware store. Smiling, in a sweet soft Southern voice, she replied to the man warning about her safety because this was “Wallace country” that if he were a Wallace man in Carter country, he wouldn’t be in danger at all.

  The Alabaman grasped it best himself. “All of them done stole my water,” he carped to a Washington Post reporter. “They’re drinking out of my dipper.” He’d already won. Which was why he would lose. Jimmy Carter certainly thought so. When he walked into a café and was told, “There ain’t no need coming in here, this is Wallace Country,” he replied with that famous wide grin: “OK, good deal, wouldn’t want it to be unanimous.”

  FIRST, ON MARCH 6, CAME Massachusetts—where ads in the Boston papers featured photographs of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson and the big, blunt pronouncement, “I AM AGAINST BUSING.” Massachusetts was where Jackson chose to make his stand. Like Wallace, he thought Jimmy Carter was a meretricious phony. Like Wallace, he was determined to crush him.

  Scoop Jackson was one of those politicians who seemed to have been around forever. A four-term senator from Washington State, and before that a seven-term representative, he’d been mentioned for the vice presidency in 1960; then Kennedy made him chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In 1970 he won reelection with 84 percent of the vote, more than any other Northern senator received—and, there being few senators who didn’t look in the mirror and imagine a presidential prospect staring back at him, he naturally made a bid for the 1972 nomination, as the voice for those Democrats, as he put it, who didn’t want “to make abortion, gay liberation, and the legalization of marijuana the primary issues of the country.” He failed badly, accomplishing little save spreading poison against the eventual nominee George McGovern. But he was back in the headlines in 1973, calling energy executives before his Senate committee, browbeating them as profiteers, calling for the nationalization of their companies, accusing Nixon of caring more about their profits than the price of gasoline at the pump. It was the sort of muscular old economic populism that Gary Hart was talking about when he derided those who “clung to the Roosevelt model long after it had ceased to relate to reality.”

  Yes, Scoop Jackson was boring: a “black hole of charisma,” one political journalist called him, and during one dreary summer in Washington the humorist Mark Russell joked it was “so boring that the kids sit around in circles and get high on Scoop Jackson speeches.”

  Since then, though, he’d had speech coaching, he’d had surgery to perk up his drooping eyelids, he cut out starches, he grew out his hair a little bit. His handlers tried to recruit Warren Beatty to support the campaign. His economic populism was, well, popular. And in a Democratic Party whose younger lights were racing to the left on lifestyle issues, a square like him filled a rather large niche. Besides, asked Richard Reeves at the end of 1973 in a New York magazine cover story called “The Dawn of an Old Era: The Inevitability of Scoop Jackson,” if not Scoop in 1976, who else?

  It didn’t look so inevitable now. But maybe if he could make something happen in Massachusetts, he could become the default for the increasing number of Democrats who thought that weird Carter guy was a creep.

  One of his old-fashioned notions was that, “détente” notwithstanding, the Soviet Union was as dangerously threatening as ever. (One of Daniel Schorr’s biggest scoops from the Pike Report was the revelation that Jackson secretly helped the CIA evade the investigation.) But that didn’t play in the one state that George McGovern won. That left busing—and in Boston, buses were still rolling under police escort. Boston’s Hyde Park High closed because of racial violence in January; a hundred kids threw bottles and rocks and set fires and smashed police-cruiser windshields near the Bunker Hill Monument in February. Scoop Jackson loudly insisted that neither his proposed constitutional amendment to stop busing, nor antibusing protest itself, had anything to do with racial animus. “I think the people of this state aren’t racist,” he said at his opening campaign event in Beantown. “They’re good, decent Americans. The people of Massachusetts resent that
if you’re opposed to forced busing, you’re labeled a racist.” He also insisted he wasn’t campaigning to take votes away from George Wallace—who was not bothering to be polite about it. The Alabaman just traipsed through South Boston in 1976, announcing, “They said busing, and I said no.” A columnist who watched him say it at Lithuanian Hall reported what happened next: “Cries of ‘up, up’ erupted. . . . They leaped to their feet, shaking their fists, some of them. George Wallace leaned back and drank in the pandemonium. He could have taken them anywhere he wanted.”

  Jackson gained an inside track in Massachusetts by striking hard and smart against Jimmy Carter’s arrogance, which had grown overwhelming. At Faneuil Hall, during a week when his face was on the cover of Time and Newsweek, Carter promised that all the criticism being aimed at him by the other candidates wouldn’t hurt him. “But I’m afraid it might hurt this country.” Carter’s team had decided to throw all they had into Massachusetts, extending their ad buys on Boston TV stations from the New Hampshire campaign through the Massachusetts voting a week later. A twenty-nine-year-old on the Carter team named Greg Schneiders wrote a memo warning that if the campaign peaked that early it would only give any “stop Carter” movement among an angry Washington, D.C., establishment more time to gel. He proved to be a lone voice. Everyone else was convinced that three wins in a row, in the farm belt, a New England state, and then one of the biggest industrial states in the country—and then, the next week, in the Southern state of Florida—would all put the finishing touches on the race.

  And at that, a disciplined candidate grew sloppy.

  The day before the New Hampshire primary, he was asked at a televised League of Women Voters forum for details about how he would change the tax code, which he liked to call a “disgrace.” For instance, would he end the home mortgage interest deduction? Yes, Carter answered, that “would be among those I would like to do away with.”

  The other candidates attacked—none more aggressively than Jackson. He put up TV commercials saying this inexperienced outsider who understood nothing about the federal government had proposed an idea that meant “American homeowners will have to pay $6 billion more in taxes.” He told reporters, “He’d better do some homework before he comes up with fuzzy ideas.”

  The old politics had struck back. Jackson upset the Massachusetts field with 23 percent of the vote. The liberal Udall came in second with 18, and Wallace came in third with 17 (though he scored 68 and 61 percent respectively in South Boston’s two wards). Jimmy Carter, with 14 percent, finished fourth; none of the other liberals—Harris, Shriver, Shapp, and Bayh (who announced he was suspending his campaign)—got more than 10 percent. Commentators started talking about a “Jackson juggernaut”—and wondered whether last year’s invincible newcomer wasn’t just a flash in the pan and all those acres of newsprint spent anatomizing and extolling “antipolitics” and the “revolt against Washington” weren’t so much useless bird-cage liner now that the longest-serving legislator in the race, the unashamed champion of big-government federal programs, the Cold Warrior, had prevailed. Maybe, just maybe, nothing in the Democratic Party had truly changed. Certainly the victor thought so: “We put together the grand old coalition that elected Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson”—ignoring the fact of the plain anti–civil rights undertone of his appeal.

  JIMMY CARTER DIDN’T IGNORE IT. He let his bitterness show: “If I have to win by appealing to an emotional, negative issue, that has connotations of racism, I don’t want to win that kind of race.” Reporters asked him if he was calling Scoop Jackson a racist, and he flipped out: “I didn’t say Senator Jackson was a racist.” Thereafter, though, he upped the ante, saying in Florida the week before the balloting, “To build a campaign in a state like Massachusetts on an issue that’s already divided the people, already created disharmony, sometimes even bloodshed, which is obviously a very emotional issue which has racial connotations, this is a wrong thing.” His campaign, in fact, had been startled to learn that in the black Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, he had come in first. They actually couldn’t quite believe their good fortune. A smart campaigner, he adapted, pressing an unexpected advantage: ducking into Illinois, which voted on March 16, and which he was now building up as “my most important state in the nation,” and speaking at the Monument of Faith Evangelistic Church in a converted synagogue on Chicago’s black South Side:

  “We worked in the same fields, we fished in the same creek bed, went swimming in the same swimming hole, played with the same steel rails, homemade toys. We got on the train, me and my black playmates, we didn’t sit together. My black playmates—I couldn’t understand why—went to the back.”

  Taking on the slow, rhythmic cadences of a preacher, he spoke of unveiling Martin Luther King’s portrait in the state capitol in 1974 alongside his widow, Coretta Scott King, and his father Martin Luther “Daddy” King, “and we sang together ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ” He said, “You don’t see any rich people in prison,” and spoke of Jack Kennedy, who offered solidarity to Coretta when her husband was in an Atlanta jail: “We all feel like we’re outsiders.” His listeners’ attentions was riveted. Then in Rockford he told a press conference that he thought détente was splendid—but “I would be very much tougher in the future in our negotiations with the Soviet Union.” At a UAW hall, he spoke of “my intimate relationship with the working people of this country” and said “I know what it means to work for a living.” In a president “I think we need somebody who understands what it means to work.” Those were the populist Fred Harris’s lines—although Harris would soon no longer deliver them: within three weeks, Harris’s campaign’s telephones were cut off. Maybe being all things to all people could work.

  In Florida Carter bid for a key part of Jackson’s constituency. He put on a yarmulke and spoke at synagogues and at Jewish centers in Miami, trumpeting a colloquy he’d enjoyed in Israel with Golda Meir. It wasn’t quite as effective. He looked, Martin Schram wrote, like “Jimmy, chief of the Mouseketeers,” and sounded like “grits at a seder.” He did better recruiting many of the leaders of the country’s most liberal unions—the UAW, the Machinists, the Communications Workers—playing to their eagerness to head off Wallace’s dark appeal to their members. Co-opting Wallace’s old slogan, Carter said to working-class audiences, “Let’s not send them a message. Let’s send them a president.”

  Jackson set up squads to prowl the condominiums that house Jewish retirees, and campaigned with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the near neoconservative who’d resigned from his position at the United Nations (“a sad day for America,” Jackson’s statement had noted), eager to help save the Democratic Party from itself: “Look at what American liberalism has done!” Moynihan cried to a friend. “It’s pushed Boston so far that it’s voting for George Wallace! John Kennedy’s city!” Mo Udall trumpeted his second-place Massachusetts finish, saying that it anointed him as the leading “progressive”—“progressive centrist,” actually. Reporters asked if that was different from being a “liberal.” He said it most certainly was—but how, exactly, he was not able to explain. Then he admitted it was mostly an exercise in public relations—“People relate better to ‘progressive.’ ‘Liberal’ is equated in some places with too much spending, softness on welfare and on crime, and some of the social issues such as abortion and amnesty”—which didn’t help; two weeks later, he was still being asked to explain. “I haven’t changed a single program,” he complained in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. “Progressive is an honorable label and I’ve been using it lately.” He was now the field’s front-runner in semantics. “My campaign began to lose momentum,” he wrote in Too Funny to Be President, “and soon we were bogged down like a dinosaur in a tar pit.”

  The talk around Washington was that Frank Church would soon enter, and maybe California governor Jerry Brown, too. They had read the tea leaves in the latest polls, which now suggested that on March 9 in Florida, the old politics—George Wallace’s politics, Scoop Jackson’s
politics—would in fact get crushed.

  Primary night in Florida. Some two dozen Carter relatives gathered at a hotel in Atlanta, cameras everywhere. Peanut Brigadiers who’d fanned out for a “Battle of Jacksonville,” where they made 70,000 voter contacts and passed out 100,000 pieces of literature in a city with a large proportion of the voters undecided between Wallace and Carter, chewed fingernails. No one, actually, could quite predict anything in a state where some 200,000 new voters had moved in since 1972. The candidate certainly still seemed testy: “Do you want to stop talking so I can give you my answer or do you want to go ahead and ask a second question as well?” he snapped at one reporter. “I’ll be glad to repeat myself again—or else you can play your tape back to yourself,” he yowled at another.

  He needn’t worry: Carter, 35 percent. Wallace, 32 percent. Jackson, 22 percent.

  Jimmy Carter had been born again. He was the front-runner once more.

  ON THE REPUBLICAN SIDE, A new development. Ronald Reagan had been reticent about taking the fight to Gerald Ford on foreign policy; his campaign manager, John Sears, had been whispering in his ear that too much criticism of détente could only offend the Republican establishment and cripple him in the general election. His standard speech of thirty-five minutes had thirty seconds on the subject, calling détente a “one-way street,” or saying the only thing it availed America was “the right to sell Pepsi-Cola in Siberia.” It always won a thunderclap of applause. His opening speech had but a line on the subject. (“A decade ago we had military superiority. Today we are in danger of being surpassed by a nation that has never made any effort to hide its hostility to everything we stand for.”) He even, the night before the New Hampshire primary, wondered in a befuddled tone whether Congress hadn’t done the right thing by banning aid for Angola, for all he knew, given the “mystery” surrounding the issue. Perhaps it was a patriotic thing. How did it serve the battle for civilization against the forces of evil to too harshly second-guess a commander in chief?