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

by Rick Perlstein

  It was, however, splendid for flushing out angry anti-Establishment right-wing voters in a Southern state for a presidential primary.

  When Gerald Ford announced, late in 1975, that his campaign chairman in the state would be the moderate governor, James Holshouser—Helms’s one rival for primacy in North Carolina Republican politics—Helms decided to turn his mighty machine to defeating the president. Ellis confronted John Sears—whom he respected for his expertise, and despised for his indifference to conservative ideology—and demanded complete control of the Reagan campaign, right down to the candidate’s schedule, as the condition for Jesse Helms’s help. Sears gave in. (Why not? Sears might have reasoned. He hadn’t drawn a paycheck since February.) Helms’s cast of characters would eventually become household names, at least among political junkies. Nobody had heard of them then. A twenty-two-year-old, born in Havana, named Alex Castellanos. A young Jewish conservative named Arthur Finkelstein, who’d engineered James Buckley’s Senate win on the New York Conservative Party line in 1970. And Ellis himself—one of the most influential strategists in American electoral politics. Quietly, he’d been engineering efforts to get Democrats to reregister as Republicans to vote against the liberal turncoat Gerald Ford, and get young people to register for the first time, but that would become evident only later.

  The Dixie boys opened up the thinking of what had turned into a stodgy campaign, for instance on the matter of the original source of their candidate’s celebrity. Citizens for Reagan had polls indicating that foregrounding Reagan’s Hollywood past didn’t hurt him—it helped him. But Sears had directed the campaign to avoid any intimation of Hollywood glamour. Instead he commissioned a series of commercials that were deliberately unglamorous: poorly lit, poorly photographed footage of the candidate at citizen press conferences, in the cinema verité style then fashionable among politicians hoping to prove their antipolitical cred. But then, most politicians hoping to prove their anti-Establishment cred weren’t Ronald Reagan. Antipolitics wasn’t the only thing popular that spring: so was Reagan-style nostalgia. James Brolin and Jill Clayburgh were in theaters reenacting one of classic Hollywood’s most storied romances in Gable and Lombard (Lombard was killed in a plane crash while publicizing World War II Liberty Bonds); F. Scott Fitzgerald’s inside-Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon was in production at Paramount. Ellis ash-canned the cinema verité—and brought in Jimmy Stewart, who’d just finished an old-fashioned Western with John Wayne, The Shootist, to stump beside Reagan each and every day in the campaign’s final week. Paul Laxalt, the original Senate booster of Reagan’s presidential campaign, persuaded him to toss his note cards and trust his instincts instead. (“What kind of foreign policy is it when a little tinhorn dictator in Panama says he is going to start guerrilla warfare against us unless we give him the Panama Canal?”) Reagan told Nancy that going a whole day speaking without his notes made him feel alive. Laxalt thought he looked like a little kid: he was flying.

  The candidate had an idea: another bit, as it were, of nostalgia—one of those five-, fifteen-, or thirty-minute, look-at-the-camera-and-talk speeches that had been the staple of political TV until they were superseded by the slick thirty-second spot. He had been begging his campaign managers to do one—like what he had done in 1964 for Barry Goldwater, the one David Broder called “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.” The answer always came back: “Gov, that stuff worked for you back in 1964, but this is different.” Years later, Lyn Nofziger had to laugh: “Everybody wants to do something their own way with Ronald Reagan. And the best way is just to let him talk. Nobody ever figures it out. Each time, you have to go through this whole hassle.”

  Ellis loved the idea of a just-the-issues conservative appeal. This time the hassle involved Sears, who apparently emerged from his idleness to put his foot down against the ridiculous idea. Reagan’s chief of staff Mike Deaver and press secretary Nofziger pressed him to give it a shot (perhaps they pointed out it might raise enough money to pay Sears’s back salary). They had the film in hand—a thirty-minute shoot they’d done for the homestretch in Florida after a TV station donated the time to both candidates. They would only have to edit out the palm trees.

  And that is indeed what they did.

  One reviewer—Elizabeth Drew—found it “rather poor. Reagan jumped from subject to subject, just as he had in his early speeches, when he shuffled his four-by-six cards; he talked too fast about too many things, from energy to Social Security to the Panama Canal.” But New Yorker writers did not have a vote in North Carolina Republican primaries. The ones who did have votes responded to the message that Gerald Ford was surreptitiously giving away the might of God’s chosen nation, for free, to a Marxist tinhorn dictator in Panama—just like Franklin Roosevelt had given away Eastern Europe at Yalta—like people hearing the Holy Word.

  The money started pouring in—literally too fast to count. Instead the campaign in Washington established a line of revolving credit with a bank that let them estimate the take by weighing the dozens of bags of cash and checks lying around. Meanwhile, underneath the radar, the gears in Ellis’s machine continued to clank. A flyer akin to the one Helms scissored in 1950 depicting the opponent’s wife dancing with a black man suddenly began appearing: it reprinted an article in which Ford said the black Republican senator from Massachusetts, Edward Brooke, “should be considered” for the vice presidency. (Reagan got to have it both ways on that one, loudly denouncing it to the press while benefiting from the race-baiting, too.) Meanwhile, all year, an enthusiastic young Congressional Club staffer had been visiting county courthouses to forage through whatever back rooms and attics held the lists of Republican primary records. He pulled together a roll of eighty thousand names, an accomplishment never attempted before—almost half the number of votes cast and about eighty thousand more names than the Ford organization had—to receive literature and get-out-the-vote phone calls.

  Meanwhile the President of the United States coasted. One of his only two days in the state in the month of March even entered the crowded annals of Gerald Ford humor: a rousing speech to a Future Homemakers of America convention concluding, “I say—and it is with emphasis and conviction—that homemaking is good for America. I say that homemaking is not out of date and I reject strongly such accusations.”

  The president had read the Reagan campaign’s reviews in the papers—

  William F. Buckley’s column, Monday, March 22: “Ronald Reagan, it would appear, has lost his fight for the presidential nomination.”

  James J. Kirkpatrick, Tuesday, March 23: “His role in the ’76 campaign is just about played out.”

  —so why strain himself?

  And on that very Tuesday, one of those balmy, sunny days that always favor incumbents over insurgents, North Carolina voted.

  The Reagan gang was in La Crosse, Wisconsin, where the vote was to take place in two weeks. ABC’s Frank Reynolds asked two listless handlers who were going through the motions, working for a nearly dead compaign, if they’d heard the results. They hadn’t. Why pay attention to another defeat?

  “Well, I have, and your man is winning.”

  They were gobsmacked. They hadn’t quite believed it would work. The idled regular campaign had all but packed it in. Now, they learned they’d beaten the president of the United States by 52.4 to 46 percent—the first time a sitting president had been defeated in a primary in which he had actively campaigned.

  Ronald Reagan, too, had been born again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  * * *

  “Always Shuck the Tamale”

  “BORN AGAIN.” THE PHRASE WAS a new one in the lexicon that political season. It was the title of a new memoir by former prisoner 23226 at Maxwell Federal Prison camp. “In one sense, I had lost everything,” Chuck Colson wrote. “But in another sense I had found everything, all that really matters: a personal relat
ionship with the living God. My life had been dramatically transformed by Jesus Christ.” Then there was Jimmy Carter. Desolate after his loss in the 1966 governor’s race, the story ran, he took a walk in the woods with his sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, the one who operated a faith-healing ministry. “I had a personal spiritual experience that is difficult to explain to people who have never had such an experience,” he said in an Associated Press article that appeared in May; he accepted Christ as his personal savior, and that day his life began anew. He explained, “Many of the newsmen who asked about this have never had this experience. Some of them are downright cynical about it. I think it worries some of them.” The article was called “Carter’s Convictions Mystify News Media.”

  Those convictions had only recently been relatively private. They first surfaced on the campaign trail during a small fund-raiser in a home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, when he told donors, “I recognized for the first time that I lacked something very precious—a complete commitment to Christ, a presence of the Holy Spirit in my life in a more profound and personal way. And since then I’ve had an inner peace and inner conviction and assurance that transformed my life for the better.” He assured them, “I don’t think I’m ordained by God to be President.” He added that the “only prayer that I’ve ever had concerning the election is that I do the right thing. And if I win or lose, my religious faith won’t be shaken.” He elaborated the next day at a press conference: “It was not a profound stroke of miracle. It wasn’t a voice of God from heaven. It was not anything of that kind. It wasn’t mysterious. It might have been the same kind of experience as millions of people have who do become Christians in a deeply personal way.”

  Just about simultaneously, on the cover of New York magazine, Richard Reeves published “Carter’s Secret: Understanding America’s Spiritual Crisis.” He quoted a New Republic columnist: “My impression is that audiences yearn to believe Jimmy Carter. They’re looking for something. It is his manner and tone.” Carter attributed some of his power to pull in voters to his experience pulling in souls: after his born-again experience, Reeves reported, Carter traveled to New York City as a Baptist missionary. He wrote, “No doubt Jimmy Carter knows what he is doing when he refers constantly and reverently to ‘my daddy’ and ‘my mamma.’ ” Reeves concluded that maybe this “highly sophisticated 51-year-old man sounding like the thinking man’s Billy Sunday” understood “something the rest of us don’t.” Observed New York magazine’s editors in a preface, “What liberals perceive as a political crisis in the country may in fact be a crisis of the spirit . . . and Jimmy Carter has figured that out.”

  Other scribes started investigating. The Washington Post’s Myra MacPherson looked into the beliefs of his sister. Her column, headlined “Devout ‘Minister’ Healing the Wounds of the ‘Inner Child’ ”—note the distancing quotation marks—described what Ruth Stapleton Carter called her “ministry of inner healing,” in which she “takes her patients back to their childhood then conducts them on a trip of faith and imagination, traveling through their troubled childhood, but this time traveling with Jesus.” She reported Ruth’s recollection of the dialogue on Jimmy’s walk in the woods with her: “You and I are both Baptists, but what is it that you have and that I haven’t got?” he was supposed to have asked, and she replied, “Jimmy, through my hurt and pain it finally got so bad off I had to forget everything I was. What it amounts to in religious terms is total commitment. I belong to Jesus. Everything I am.” She then said she guided her brother through a mental inventory of what he had to be willing to give up if he wished for a total commitment to Christ: money, friends, family—even political ambition. She said he then “put his face in his hands and cried like a baby.”

  The candidate denied that particular detail, and others. And in pious North Carolina, where he hoped to finish off George Wallace once and for all, he began telling the story on his own. He would say, like a convert to Werner Erhard’s est, “I didn’t get any sense of accomplishment when I achieved success and I felt like my religious beliefs were shallow and just a matter of self-pride.” But now that he was born again, he felt otherwise.

  To these hard-bitten ink-stained wretches—those from the North, who wrote about evangelical faith, a historian observed, “as if it were as alien to American culture as a Balinese cockfight,” and those from the South, who’d seen all too many hustling piety-peddlers who, as they used to say about old Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, “ran around the woods with his Bible in one hand and his pecker in another”—this all was just a little bit much. To intellectual sophisticates, it was like a visitation from another planet. Perhaps they had read a widely reported recent study by the religious historian James Hitchcock, who predicted that soon American society would have an “unbelieving popular majority.” “Christians must accept being a definite minority for the time being,” Hitchcock told a reporter.

  The scholar was well wide of the mark. That February, two thousand delegates packed the combined convention of the National Religious Broadcasters and the National Association of Evangelicals. For the first time, a president addressed them—“The faith of our Fathers is living still in America today,” Gerald Ford said—and so did the Christian conservative congressman John Conlan, wrapped up in a knock-down, drag-out primary for Senate in Arizona, where he campaigned against fellow conservative Sam Steiger by asking voters if they wanted “a Jew from New York telling Arizona what to do.” Conlan said his goal as a politician was to make this a “Christian nation.” In a profile of Chuck Colson in the New York Times Magazine, Garry Wills reported estimates that the evangelical movement encompassed some 67 million Americans—40 million of voting age, or about a quarter of the electorate. No wonder President Ford, one of whose public liaisons in the White House, Ted Mars, proclaimed, “We believe our nation must come back to God or else,” stopped by the evangelicals’ convention to say hello.

  One evangelical broadcaster, Oral Roberts, reached seven million viewers a week on 349 local and satellite stations. Another, Pat Robertson, had his own satellite network. A third, Jerry Falwell, proprietor of The Old-Time Gospel Hour, was touring around the country with a group of fresh-faced, dancing, singing youngsters for Bicentennial “I Love America” rallies. “There’s no question about it,” he’d say on TV. “This nation was intended to be a Christian nation by our founding fathers.” Reagan, for his part, was part of the flock of the muscular evangelical Donn Moomaw, a former football all-American at UCLA, who assured fellow evangelicals of his most famous parishioner’s “alive faith.”

  Christian popular culture exploded. Twenty thousand gathered in a pasture outside Disney World for a three-day rock-concert-style “Jesus ’76” rally starring Robertson, Conlan, Pat Boone, and Hal Lindsey, who swooped down to the stage from the sky in helicopters, like at Woodstock—then, in Mercer, Pennsylvania, the same show drew seventy thousand, more than half of whom camped out on the site. Christian couples devoured Beverly and Tim LaHaye’s The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love, which explained of the clitoris that God “placed it there for your enjoyment,” and excoriated the husband “who told his frustrated wife, ‘Nice girls aren’t supposed to climax.’ Today’s wife knows better.” The Los Angeles Times, that May, reported on a theological debate within the evangelical community over the inerrancy of the Bible as if it were a contest between the Rams and the Jets. Two wealthy Los Angeles men printed 2.5 million copies of the 1910 tract The Fundamentals and sent it, reportedly, to every pastor, evangelist, missionary, and church worker in the country. Ten other rich Christians pledged $25,000 each to launch a “Third Century Index”—a rating of congressmen on a 1–100 scale, like the ones published by the AFL-CIO and the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. Their spokesman, Rus Walton—a principal in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign—explained, ‘The vision is to rebuild the foundations of the Republic as it was when first founded—a ‘Christian Republic.’ ”

  The conversio
n of Reagan’s former archenemy Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther leader, to conservative Christianity would soon be in the papers. “I’d like to caution people that the simple things we’ve been taught from childhood in the end are the most profound,” Cleaver said. Enough ordinary Americans agreed that when two private citizens petitioned the Federal Communications Commission complaining of the way “back-to-the-Bible fundamentalism” was monopolizing the portions of the AM and FM bands reserved for educational programming, and a rumor ensued that the FCC sought to ban religious broadcasting, the federal agency was flooded with fifty thousand letters of complaint.

  I FOUND IT, the bumper stickers distributed by the Campus Crusade for Christ proclaimed. Jimmy Carter had found it, too. “I’m not afraid to see my life ended,” he told Bill Moyers on the latter’s PBS program later that spring. “I don’t have any fear at all of death. I feel like I’m doing the best I can, and if I get elected President, I’ll have a chance to magnify my own influence maybe in a beneficial way. If I don’t get elected President, I’ll go back to Plains.”

  Moyers asked: did he have any doubts about himself, about God, about life?

  “I can’t think of any.”

  IT SOUNDED GOOD TO VOTERS—THE sort flocking to est, to evangelicalism, to something, anything, to anchor a firm sense of meaning in their lives. The fact remained, though, that for the guardians of the permanent Washington establishment—who were, Reeves wrote, in a “small panic” over Carter, whom one of the Washington press corps, the Times’ James Reston, called “Wee Jimmy”—it was just one more thing that made James Earl Carter sound so weird.

  The people around him were weird, come to think of it—Hamilton Jordan, who almost always wore a denim jacket, and stuck with boots even when he had to wear a suit; Jody Powell, who looked like a boy; Charles Kirbo, to whom Carter was personally closest, and who a political correspondent for New York thought “sounds like a gorilla”; Jerry Rafshoon, who sat on desks and tables instead of chairs, and was quite the player in the ad game . . . in Atlanta, Georgia, where Carter had inscrutably chosen to base his campaign, surrounded by this tight little group. “How can he be nominated?” asked Ambassador Averell Harriman, the eighty-five-year-old emperor of the Georgetown cocktail circuit. “I don’t know him, and neither do any of my friends.” Another insider, a journalist, said, “Carter can’t be President. He doesn’t know his way around this city.”