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

by Rick Perlstein

  Besides, he knew something that Chuck Percy, ABC News, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and even the President of the United States did not know: a new conservative-movement political machine was humming just beneath the Establishment’s radar in North Carolina, ready to rewire what people thought they knew about how American politics worked.

  THE CULTURAL CONDITIONS FOR A conservative electoral upsurge that March were propitious. The POWs were back in the news: on the fourth, Admiral James Stockdale became the seventh captive awarded the Medal of Honor (those seven were nearly 3 percent of the war’s total recipients)—and the first in the history of the award to win it for a suicide attempt. The citation read, “He deliberately inflicted a near-mortal wound to his person in order to convince his captors of his willingness to give up his life rather than capitulate.” That instantiated the Reaganite narrative that these stout-hearted men all but single-handedly proved the nobility of America’s resistance to Communism in Vietnam—that “we walked out of Hanoi as winners.” (Perhaps sensitive to the political implications, President Ford folded a campaign slogan into his East Room presentation of the medal to Stockdale and three other Vietnam vets: “As we celebrate our Bicentennial Year, we take satisfaction in our power to preserve peace through strength.”)

  Bicentennial observations were becoming ubiquitous that unexpectedly balmy spring: the Freedom Train, rolling through burg after burg with its display cases of American Revolutionary artifacts and technological marvels, and also a “Freedom Wagon Train” that covered twenty miles a day and stopped each night in a different “Bicentennial town” for a performance by the Penn State University Show Troupe. There were Bicentennial quarters, Bicentennial flags—and, each night on CBS, a “Bicentennial minute,” in which a different celebrity backed by sonorous brass and snapping snares, narrated the heroic self-sacrifices of America’s original patriots, ending with a version of Walter Cronkite’s famous sign-off, “And that’s the way it was,” adding, “two hundred years ago today.”

  Patriotism: a splendid spur to nostalgic right-wing reveries—as was, that March, the continuing wave of terrorism that accompanied Patty Hearst’s trial. Two days after the Florida primary, part of a defective bomb exploded at a Hearst family retreat near Redding, California; the New World Liberation Front claimed responsibility. Three days later the Chicago Tribune published the first in a horrifying series, “WEATHER UNDERGROUND HAS ‘BLUEPRINT FOR TERROR,’ ” claiming to have evidence that it all was part of a coordinated conspiracy that would only grow:

  SAN FRANCISCO—Members of the radical Weather Underground have masterminded a wave of violence throughout the country by secretly organizing small bands of terrorists operating under a variety of names, the Chicago Tribune has learned. This previously undisclosed blueprint for terror has been pieced together in the last two weeks by federal investigators and police in San Francisco, where the Patricia Hearst trial has focused new attention on these far-flung radical activities. . . .

  The picture emerged from a detailed study of thousands of internal documents seized here in raids in recent weeks and from inside knowledge provided by at least two admitted terrorists who have turned informants. . . .

  Investigators noted that the emergence of the Weather group as the rallying force in the underground world of terrorism fits into a program espoused by the group five years ago. The program was adopted from a similar one used by South American guerillas and calls for a cadre of nine persons to fan out across the country and organize other nine-person cells. These cells would operate under different names, and eventually send their members out to form new cells. The process would continue until a national network of terrorists was built. “Bombings in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and the San Francisco Bay area during the past year is evidence that these cells are in existence,” one investigator said.

  The next day the Associated Press reported that the FBI and Secret Service were investigating the testimony of an undercover informant that a “commando-style assassination team” from the San Francisco Bay area was planning attempts on Reagan’s and Ford’s lives at the Republican convention in Kansas City, “designed to throw the convention into complete chaos.” The Chicago Tribune’s report contributed this detail: “From the intelligence we have been able to gather, the terror groups want to move their emphasis from bombings to other violent acts in the urban guerrilla handbook, like assassinations and kidnappings.”

  Another conservative strand came from New York, where “pro-life” activists took advantage of the federal campaign finance law to make sure television viewers in every last primary state knew that abortion was the most hideous sort of cold-blooded murder, through free TV commercials for a “Human Life” constitutional amendment. The trick, pulled together by the New York State Right to Life Party, was to invent a dummy presidential campaign. The candidate, named Ellen McCormack, was a Long Island housewife who wrote a column syndicated to Catholic newspapers called “Who Speaks for the Unborn?” All that these activists needed to do to haul in $100,000 in matching funds for her was to raise at least $5,000 in each of twenty states by February 1976, and prove “viability” by getting her name on some primary ballots. They got her listed in fifteen states—and were certified by the FEC as passing the funding threshold on February 18. The National Abortion Rights Action League filed suit against the scheme on technical grounds—some newspaper ads soliciting funds didn’t say anything about a presidential campaign, just “YOU CAN FIGHT ABORTION and SAVE BABIES’ LIVES by helping sponsor PRO-LIFE TV ADS”—and lost. The commercials went on the air during the game show Name That Tune. A loophole in the campaign finance law meant that every taxpayer in the United States had become a de facto antiabortion activist.

  In the Tar Heel State, a barely noticed right-wing infrastructure worked to bring those waters to a primary-day boil. A columnist chasing Reagan up and down the Florida Gulf Coast had asked Lyn Nofziger if this was the end of the road. The rumpled, cynical, fast-talking, hard-drinking press secretary looked uncharacteristically sincere: “Wait ’til North Carolina.”

  WHAT WAS ABOUT TO HAPPEN in North Carolina was in part a result of that loophole in the new campaign finance law: the fact that independent groups could spend money without limit to help a political campaign, even a political campaign that accepted federal matching funds, so long as they did not coordinate their activities with that campaign. This would apply to an independent group like, say, the American Conservative Union. The ACU’s chairman since 1971 was a perfervid ideological warrior named M. Stanton Evans. He was a Joseph McCarthy devotee, was the author of Young Americans for Freedom’s 1960 manifesto the “Sharon Statement,” and had only recently retired at the ripe old age of forty as editor of the Indianapolis News. Evans prevailed upon the ACU’s board to commit huge resources to the presidential race. The ACU had begun, tentatively, with Illinois. It was in North Carolina that the organization went, as the poker players say, all in. It spent tens of thousands of dollars on newspaper and radio ads alone. Read in Evans’s mellifluous voice, the radio ads presented a bill of indictment: “Gerald Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller. . . .” It ran almost a thousand times.

  And it came partly from the work of a senator unlike any other the world’s greatest deliberate body had ever seen—the first pure electoral product of America’s nascent new right.

  Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. was born in the typical Southern small town of Monroe, North Carolina, in 1921, the year a progressive new governor took office in the South’s most liberal state promising a “war for righteousness with the reactionary and unprogressive forces of our state.” Helms’s father—“Mr. Jesse”—was both the town’s police chief and its fire chief. His family was made up of Baptist teetotalers—who didn’t just hate liquor, the joke went, but hated the farmer who grew the corn that made the liquor. When he became a politician he liked to invoke his fondest childhood memory in speeches: “The honks and shrieks of the town band . . . the chilled lemo
nade—a nickel a glass . . . horses . . . prancing and snorting . . . both of the town’s highly polished fire engines with a multitude of ecstatic youngsters perched atop them; the town’s single police car—three sirens in a row in a sort of discordant symphony. . . . In the burning noontime sun, men and women—and little boys and girls, too—stood reverently as a prayer of thanksgiving was offered for the liberty and freedom which were God’s gift to America. Nobody doubted it.” He was describing the town’s annual Independence Day parade—in a time, now, when everybody seemed to doubt it.

  But if his vision of the world was almost militantly old-fashioned, the things that made Jesse Helms Jesse Helms were resolutely, ruthlessly modern. He was a master of electronic media and electronic public relations techniques. A high school newspaperman who said in his senior yearbook that his life’s ambition was to be a columnist, he dropped out of tiny Wingate Junior College when he got a job reading proofs at the Raleigh News & Observer—then was recruited by the more conservative afternoon Raleigh Times as assistant city editor at the age of twenty. He discovered a passion for PR during wartime Navy basic training—and, when he was sent back to North Carolina as a recruiter, the joys of the radio microphone. By 1948 he was news director at a tiny but ambitious radio station, WRAL—where he put his editorial thumb on the scales for the U.S. Senate campaign of a McCarthyite reactionary named Willis Smith, who defeated the incumbent, the enlightened former president of the University of North Carolina, with the help, to take one example, of a handbill depicting the incumbent’s wife alone with a black man, looking a little bit as if they were dancing. The advertising manager of the News & Observer told a Helms biographer that he’d seen the WRAL news director scissoring several other people out of the picture.

  He went to Washington as Smith’s executive assistant—and then, tiring of that, took a job as spokesman and lobbyist for the North Carolina Bankers Association, which had the advantage of providing him with a platform for his political views, in a full-page column in monthly trade magazine he edited. Those views were ahead of their time. Other Dixie ideologues, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, were talking about keeping unelected Yankee judges away from their public schools. Helms, a devotee of the Austrian libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises, instead argued that if they did away with public schools altogether, “[p]olitical sociologists would forever be unable to dictate terms and procedures to the people of America regarding our schools. . . . Unless our Negro citizens submit more easily than we predict they will, North Carolina does not have the simple choice between segregated schools and integrated schools. Our only choice is between instead public schools and free-choice private schools.” His column, in the Tarheel Banker, was modestly titled “By Jesse Helms.”

  These views made him a Tarheel household name when, in 1960, WRAL got a license to open a TV station (slogan: “The miracle of America is the free enterprise system”) and Helms was made news director. At the end of every newscast, he recited one of his own editorials, which were rebroadcast every morning and on the radio over the seventy or so stations of his boss’s “Tobacco Network.” His broadcast demeanor was almost deliberately bland—akin to his owlish horn rims and shapeless, old-fashioned suits, like those of a small-town banker, bought off the rack at a conservative Raleigh haberdashery. Aides once advised him to spruce up his image. Wisely, he did not let them prevail. In 1972 the celebrity ran for the Senate. He always wore American flag and Mason pins on his lapel, and a POW bracelet around his wrist. His slogan was “Elect Jesse Helms—He’s one of us.” (His opponent, who had an ethnic name—Galifianakis, as in “McGovern-Galifianakis cut and run” policies in Vietnam, and “McGovern-Galifianakis welfare giveaways”—was not one of us.) In his campaign he pledged to “[r]esist with all the strength I can muster the destructive tactics of the Teddy Kennedys, the Hubert Humphreys, the Muskies and McGoverns—and all the rest of the wrecking crew now dominating the United States Senate.” He had in mind some destructive tactics of his own.

  He won, though Helms the supposed budget hawk went into debt to do it—which turned out to be a very good thing. To retire the debt, his political deputy Tom Ellis, a California native who had transferred from Dartmouth College to North Carolina and fell in love with the “Southern way of life” and Southern slash-and-burn politics—regarding which he had the zeal of the convert—turned to Richard Viguerie, the master of ideological direct mail and interlocking political committees. Thus Helms became the New Right hustlers’ second most useful name, behind Reagan’s, for signing fund-raising appeals. That created a set of debts, which were paid back to Helms in fund-raising and publicity favors, and these helped Ellis begin to build a direct mail empire of his own, on his boss’s behalf. Soon, Helms’s “Congressional Club” and its satellites dwarfed the budgets of North Carolina’s Republican and Democratic parties.

  It worked, to take an example from the 1980s, like this. All the names on the Congressional Club’s long mailing lists received a missive including a picture of a beautiful young family with two little girls, taken from their Christmas card. In the letter the senator recollected waiting for a flight in an airport in Alaska:

  “The three-year-old was sitting on her mother’s lap and the five-year-old was perched on the arm of the chair. The mother was reading a story. . . . I moved over and introduced myself.” He played, he said, a silly little game with them that he liked to play with his grandchildren. Then the family’s flight number—007—was called. That was the flight number, as all the readers would recognize, of a plane to Korea the Soviets accidentally shot down.

  Not accidentally, right-wing conspiracists like Helms insisted. The letter concluded, “It was difficult to express the shock and horror and anger that I felt, and still feel, about the Soviet Union’s wanton, deliberate, premeditated, callous, and cruel destruction of 269 innocent people—including those two little girls.” It demanded “a renewed understanding of Communist brutality.” Luckily, he was ready to help—if he could stay in Washington. “Can you help once more with a special significant contribution? Without your help, our work cannot continue. Jesse Helms.”

  Complaints flowed in, including one from the family, who had never authorized the use of their image or story. Helms and Ellis ignored them. More important was the money that arrived in a torrent. And that the message—Senator Helms stands up to the Communists—came through. Meanwhile, another message-building component of the Helms machine clanked along—on the floor of the Senate. Inspired by the tactics of a reactionary Democrat from Alabama named James Allen, the new senator, ninety-fifth in seniority, learned to offer numerous unrelated amendments to big bills that needed to pass, sometimes a dozen amendments or more, each requiring a certain amount of debate, to leverage one-man filibusters against ideas conservatives didn’t like—such as the federal juvenile delinquency program (he was the only senator to vote against it); antipollution devices in cars (he attracted two supporters for that); reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act; and, of course, legal abortion—“the human holocaust with no parallel in history,” he would say, noting several cities where there were supposedly more abortions than births, adding, “Washington, D.C., is one of them.”

  He sometimes introduced bills of his own—for instance, to strip the courts of the authority to rule on the constitutionality of school prayer. It didn’t matter how many times it failed, or by how many votes. A biographer wrote that each “was like another WRAL editorial, drawn up to make a point. . . . He was reaching out to a national constituency, to frustrated Americans among whom his hard-line tactics stood for courage and leadership rather than obstruction and obfuscation.” He liked to say, “I know nothing about being a politician.”

  Ironically, such tactics, and his status as a conservative hero second only to Reagan by 1976, would not have been possible without the institutional reforms put in place by the Watergate Babies, which were supposed to be liberal. As a Democratic colleague explained (though Helms hardly cons
idered liberals his “colleagues”), “The consequences of his being a pariah don’t matter as much as they used to. The leadership can’t discipline a senator as it once did. In the old days, you couldn’t get a vote if the leadership didn’t want to have one. Now it’s gone the other way. . . . People are coming to realize the only way to deal with him is not to afford him the usual courtesies, to recognize that he’s fighting trench warfare and they have to fight it in the same way. He and his people drag you down in the gutter to fight them . . . it’s wreaking havoc on the institution.”

  What Helms was doing in the Senate, and what Tom Ellis did with his banks of computers, fueled one another, upending every old model for building senatorial power—patiently, cordially, honoring the venerable maxim (beloved by gracious Southern solons like his senior Tarheel colleague Sam Ervin) “Fight today, friends tomorrow.” Instead, he was a McLuhanite politician: the medium was the message. Observed a frustrated Democratic senator, “with these interlocking political committees of his,” Helms “works not so much within the Senate as outside. Often the whole purpose of his programming a vote is politics, so then he can use it with a press release or by mailing off thousands of letters by pushing a button on a computer.” Organizing by building a mailing list favors a politics of melodrama, never the give-and-take between the myriad interests groups that make up partisan, let alone bipartisan, coalitions. It makes the political party a mere vehicle of convenience—indeed, Helms had been a registered Democrat until 1970, and had been one of the leading advocates for a third, conservative, party following Nixon’s resignation. As a fellow Republican put it, “It’s frustrating, often impossible to get serious business done. You might be working on a foreign aid bill or a change in the debt limit and all of a sudden you find you’re voting on school prayer or abortion. Helms is no respecter of the institution. He uses the Senate for his own ends, his own causes, and they are not the same as the goals of the country.”