It was around then, with a man they considered a weirdo unquestionably ahead in the Democratic race, that this cozy little D.C. village of friends began to talk up one of their own: former senator, former vice president, former three-time presidential candidate, and onetime nominee Hubert Horatio Humphrey. Surely he could be nominated without having to enter him in all these meddlesome primaries—just like in 1968. If “old Hubert” was picked, one of his friends explained, possibly not quite joking, “most people at the Federal City Club wouldn’t have to change a name on their rolodexes.” It was widely presumed the AFL-CIO was planning to endorse him and was just holding out for the right signal from him. He certainly seemed interested; the day after the North Carolina primary he sat with reporters for an on-the-record conversation for an hour—and made a veiled swipe at Carter: “Running against Washington won’t be a winner in November,” he said. “It’s essentially an attack on the federal programs, and that’s an attack on the poor, the blacks, the minorities and the cities. It’s a disguised new form of racism, a disguised new form of conservatism.”
Humphrey was the grand old man of Democratic politics. But the old man’s very intimacy with the tragedies and triumphs of Democratic presidencies past was precisely what made him disgusting to the bright-eyed tribunes of antipolitics—like the Village Voice’s James Wolcott, who wrote, “As far as I’m concerned, any party which again—again!—selects Hubert Vietnam Humphrey to carry its banner deserves the fiery fate which befalls a zeppelin piloted by George C. Scott,” star recently of The Hindenburg.
The possibility that the old standby might any day answer the Democratic Establishment’s draft threw a spanner in the works of every other candidate’s strategy. So it was that Carter, the day before the Illinois primary, made a pilgrimage to the nation’s capital to pay obeisance to that Establishment, at a dinner with Clark Clifford, the mandarin who in 1973 had decorously suggested Richard Nixon resign the presidency in favor of a bipartisan “government of national unity”; Katharine Graham, the publisher of her family’s newspaper the Washington Post; and Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, Humphrey’s biggest booster in the Senate. Carter also gave a second extended interview to Elizabeth Drew. The first time, he had been short and snappish. This time he was solicitous and welcoming.
Then he jetted off to New York—the better to be surrounded by network cameras as he took in the news of his victory in Illinois.
HE HAD GOOD REASON TO start making nicer with the press: the reporters were on to him. The new narrative was no longer “Jimmy Who?” It was: Jimmy the Hustler, who had mastered the old bunkum artist’s motto that if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. Elizabeth Drew’s interview with George Wallace (“He talks about spending all that time on his kneeeeees”) ran in the New Yorker. The New York Times Magazine ran Joseph Lelyveld’s profile of Jerry Rafshoon, in which the adman promoted himself as the man behind the curtain, prompting the wizard, through the long months of 1975, to speak not from the heart, but purely on the basis of audience response. (“We used to say that’s a C performance or that’s a B performance or that’s an A performance,” Rafshoon recalled of the candidate who was supposed never to be performing at all. “We knew instinctively in our minds what made an A and what made a B.”)
If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. If you can project humility brashly, you’ve got it made. People wanted to believe.
He now had two new opponents. On March 12, California governor Jerry Brown said he soon would enter the presidential race. Carter, traveling in California, responded by announcing he would enter every primary in the nation, no matter who contested him. On March 18, Frank Church finally announced his presidential campaign. He did so just as his work investigating the CIA returned to the news, when Richard Nixon released his answers to a set of questions from the Church Committee over his administration’s role in overthrowing Salvador Allende in Chile. Nixon wrote, newspapers reported, that whatever he might or might not have done, he was only continuing Kennedy’s and Johnson’s policies, and concluded, “I realize it is in vogue to rail against covert activities and clandestine operations,” but “the pendulum has swung too far.” Church responded in his pious way, acknowledging that his committee had indeed uncovered abuses by Johnson and Kennedy in South America, but that the resulting lesson was not that “illegal actions were justified,” but that “once government officials start believing they have the power to act secretly and outside the law we have started down a long slippery slope which culminates in Watergate.”
The Democratic race turned south. North Carolina voted on the twenty-third; South Carolina held Democratic precinct caucuses throughout the month. In these states Carter campaigned like Wallace always did—with a country band, which performed “Dixie.” That provided the excuse for reporters to pummel him on the inconsistencies in his claim never to have courted Wallace as a political ally in that now-infamous little room off the governor’s office in Atlanta. He responded testily: “I didn’t care whether he came into Georgia to campaign or not. I never promised him anything.” They homed in on his vagueness on the issues—which Carter then turned around, martyrlike, as an unfair attack on him by the Yankee Establishment press: “I don’t feel intimidated. I won’t be pressured into making rash statements.” Interviewers also asked him about a campaign photograph that seemed to play up his resemblance to John F. Kennedy. His handlers claimed never to have noticed such a resemblance at all.
He won North Carolina with 53.6 percent to Wallace’s 34.75 percent. Also-rans were dropping like flies: Sargent Shriver suspended his campaign on the twenty-second; Fred Harris’s telephones were cut off on the twenty-fourth. The assaults affected the Carter juggernaut hardly a whit.
THE HEADLINE IN THE MILWAUKEE Sentinel’s first edition on April 7 was “CARTER UPSET BY UDALL”—followed, in the next edition, after a nail-biting few hours, a headline in the final edition reading “CARTER EDGES OUT UDALL.” (When it started looking close, Carter shrewdly made sure aides ran out and got a first edition showing Udall had won, so he could hold it up for photographers just in case it turned out Udall hadn’t.) Ford won in Wisconsin by a healthy 11 percentage points because Reagan had canceled his appearances there to prepare for a national TV address. The speech’s drafters were adding another count in the anti-détente indictment: as reported by Evans and Novak, Henry Kissinger’s close aide Helmut Sonnenfeldt had told a London meeting of U.S. ambassadors that “it must be our policy to strive for an evolution that makes the relationship between the Eastern Europeans and the Soviet Union an organic one,” and that an “inorganic, unnatural relationship [that tries to divide Russia and Eastern Europe] is a far greater danger to world peace than the conflict between East and West”—a doctrine, Reagan thundered, “that slaves should accept their fate.”
Meanwhile, evidence mounted that the victory on January 20, 1977, might be Pyrrhic—that whoever the next president was, he’d be remembered by history as the captain of a capsizing ship.
Patty Hearst was convicted of armed robbery on Monday, March 21; the Winston-Salem Journal worried about a proliferation of an “ever-growing number of Patricia-Hearst-like personalities in this country,” due to the decline in “the transmission of ethics from generation to generation.”
Was the end of the line coming for America’s world dominance? Henry Kissinger apparently thought so. Boomed Reagan in that nationally televised foreign policy speech: “Now we must ask if someone is giving away our own freedom.” Which someone? Guess who. “Dr. Kissinger is quoted as saying that he thinks of the United States as Athens and the Soviet Union as Sparta. ‘The day of the United States is past and today is the day of the Soviet Union.’ And he added, ‘My job as Secretary of State is to negotiate the most acceptable second-best position possible.”
Reagan didn’t cite a source. But a campaign spokesman confirmed it came from a new memoir by Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt, who was running for the Senate as a Democrat from Virginia.
Kissinger’s top aide, Lawrence Eagleburger, replied, “He did not say that. It is pure invention and totally irresponsible.” Another spokesman said the words were “completely contrary to United States foreign policy”; the White House released a ten-page point-by-point refutation. But plenty of people had heard Kissinger say similar things before. Reagan said, “I will stand by everything I said.” A historian later discovered a memo in which Zumwalt transcribed a call he received on March 26 in which an unidentified voice told him, “You should know that on at least two occasions recently Kissinger has said to [Soviet ambassador Anatoly] Dobrynin ‘an accident should happen to Admiral Zumwalt.’ ”
Here was one of the nation’s most distinguished retired military officers, convinced he was being set up for a hit by the secretary of state: all kinds of Americans were paranoid these days. Readers that month were snapping up Irving Wallace’s new thriller The R Document, which had already been sold to the movies. It was set on the eve of the ratification of the Thirty-fifth Amendment, which suspended the Bill of Rights during an epidemic of violent crime and served as cover for the evil FBI director’s plan to assassinate the president and set up concentration camps. Nature continued her revenge: on April 17 at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium a swarm of five thousand to ten thousand bees hovered over the on-deck circle, then took up residence in the San Francisco Giants’ dugout, forcing a thirty-five-minute delay of the game. That was followed soon after by a panic over African clawed frogs—exotic pets imported from South Africa, which bred beyond control and took over the waterways around Riverside, California, exterminating the native fish population. Then came the killer bees, once more: after they swarmed a bus driver in Rio de Janeiro, running him off the road and into another bus, the House passed a bill regulating the importation of honeybee semen into the United States.
What times. What a country. One entrant on the nonfiction side of the New York Times bestseller list was called Winning Through Intimidation. It fought it out for the top spot with a book that made the fly-on-the-Oval-Office-wall case that Nixon had come closer to meltdown in August 1974 than even the most paranoid dared imagine.
The most melodramatic scene in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s The Final Days became a subject for a classic Saturday Night Live sketch: Henry Kissinger (played by John Belushi) visits a sozzled Nixon (Dan Aykroyd) in the Lincoln sitting room, whining self-pityingly, “Will history treat me more kindly than my contemporaries?” He breaks into sobs, begging Kissinger to get down on his knees and join him in prayer. Aykroyd: “Don’t you want to pray, you Christ killer?” Belushi: “I don’t vant to get into zat again, Mr. President. Excuse me, I’ve got to go warn the Strategic Air Command to ignore all presidential orders.” That referenced two of the book’s other mind-blowing revelations: that Kissinger found Nixon a raging anti-Semite, and that Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger ordered military commanders to ignore Nixon’s orders as the presidency slipped through his fingers. Still another was that Kissinger considered Nixon ragingly stupid: “Don’t ever write anything more complicated than a Reader’s Digest article for Nixon,” he supposedly instructed his aides.
It also depicted a president on the verge of suicide. “You fellows in your business,” he was depicted telling Alexander Haig, “you have a way of handling problems like this. Somebody leaves a pistol in the drawer. I don’t have a pistol”—“as if,” Woodward and Bernstein wrote, “he were half asking to be given one.” Haig was reported to have passed on orders to keep the president away from pills. His son-in-law Edward Cox said Nixon stalked the White House halls at night, “talking to pictures of former Presidents.” (Aykroyd to a painting of Kennedy: “Having sex with women within these very walls! That never happened when Dick Nixon was in the White House!” Another of the book’s revelations was that Pat and Dick hadn’t had sex in fourteen years.) Showing up at noon meetings so drunk that treasury secretary Simon thought he was acting like a “windup doll.” Pat spending all day in bed, drunk (he’d promised her in 1962, after all, that he’d never run for office again).
The book was a sensation, outselling All the President’s Men two to one. The initial printing of two hundred thousand was the largest in Simon & Schuster’s history but proved to be not nearly large enough: one bookstore reported selling a hundred copies a day. In the popular culture, it became known, simply, as “the Book.” The paperback rights sold for a record $1.55 million.
It was also ferociously controversial—as Woodward and Bernstein knew it would be. They had kept the manuscript under lock and key. The authors broke journalistic precedent by not naming sources or including any footnotes for the reported dialogue, and many of the principals denied having said the words attributed to them. The book also reported the supposed inner thoughts of the characters. Ford’s former press secretary Jerry terHorst called it “fictionalized journalism.” Typical letters to the editor to Newsweek, which ran prepublication excerpts: “I am completely repulsed. . . . They are gossipy little men,” and, “You two can be compared to Judas as you sold the heart and soul of a man for a few pieces of silver. May God forgive you for the sorrow you have caused Mr. Nixon and his family.” The affair might well have damaged its authors’ reputations irrevocably—were those authors not enjoying the roseate glow that accompanied the debut of the actual fictionalization of their journalism on the silver screen, starring Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein.
All the President’s Men had its Washington premiere at the Kennedy Center before 1,100 people, where the all-star Hollywood-and-D.C. crowd had weathered the ferocious scramble for twenty-five-dollar tickets for the surreal experience of watching Howard Hunt and his Cubans commit burglary onscreen just down the street from where it actually happened. It provided a sort of synthesis of genres then dominating theaters: disaster movies, like George C. Scott’s The Hindenburg, which were actually otherwise frequently optimistic and heartening, with Americans from all walks of life pulling together to save the day; nostalgic romps (one of them, Midway, an unlikely hit, was about the days when America won its wars); and horrifying world-turned-upside-down depictions of America gone mad, like the new picture Taxi Driver, in which a deranged former marine plying his trade down Manhattan’s filth-strewn streets tries to assassinate a presidential candidate, in part to impress a preteen prostitute, in part to get back at a woman repulsed when he took her to a pornographic movie on a date (he somehow in all the confusion ends up celebrated as a national hero for saving the candidate’s life). On March 29, another such portrait of America gone mad, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, became only the second picture to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor in Lead Role, Actress in Lead Role, Director, and Screenplay) since It Happened One Night in 1934.
All the President’s Men was nostalgic in its way, too: it was basically a police procedural, in which the two indefatigable, mismatched detectives patiently assembled clues to a world in moral chaos, resolved into order against all the odds. In the last shot the bad guys were depicted as being squarely nailed dead to rights, as ever-more-definitive newspaper copy was clacked out on Woodward’s or Bernstein’s typewriter. It was a colossal hit—the vehicle by which millions of Americans finally figured out what Watergate had truly been about. The picture even made the cover of Time magazine.
Watergate was everywhere that presidential primary season, still. Book after book: Jimmy Breslin’s bestseller How the Good Guys Finally Won; Jeb Magruder’s and Chuck Colson’s memoirs and soon one from Margaret “Mo” Dean; Theodore White’s Breach of Faith. Texas Monthly began its ongoing series, “Heroes for Post-Watergate America.” Panasonic ran full-page magazine ads proposing, “How to make sure the candidate of your choice lives up to his word. . . . It’s easy. With Panasonic portable cassette tape recorders. All with built-in condenser microphones. So you can record your candidate, just about anywhere his promises take him.” A satirical faux documentary, The Faking of the President, debuted. It depicted R
on Ziegler dressed as a Nazi, Nixon stealing flowers from the grave of FDR’s terrier Fala to place beside Checkers’s headstone, and Nixon tearfully confessing. At its premiere in Salt Lake City, during a Mormon convention, the overflow crowd rioted twenty minutes into the screening, tearing up seats, breaking a glass showcase, and overturning a car and setting it on fire.
One place the ongoing fascination with Watergate couldn’t have been too popular was the White House. On March 21 the New York Times profiled Ford campaign headquarters. The article began with a young volunteer suggesting the office needed a paper shredder to reduce the volume of trash. “ ‘Oh, gee, I don’t think so,’ Peter F. Kaye, the campaign spokesman, remembers having replied, with an equanimity that hid a shuddering awareness of how inappropriate the recommendation was. The swift burial of the paper shredder idea was one illustration of an unwritten rule at Mr. Ford’s campaign headquarters: Don’t CREEP.” The previous week Ford campaign manager Bo Callaway had been placed on temporary leave, then left the campaign altogether, after the Denver Post and NBC carried a report charging him with using his position as secretary of the army to discuss with U.S. Forest Service representatives the expansion of a Colorado ski resort he partly owned. (Nothing came of the charges, but such was the culture of suspicion that the Ford campaign erred on the side of caution.) The next day brought Evans and Novak’s scoop on the “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine.” On April 6, as Wisconsin went to the polls, the president announced a cabinet-level committee investigating the overseas corporate bribery scandal. Three days later, backfilling the damage from the Sonnenfeldt revelations and Zumwalt’s quotes from Henry Kissinger, he opened his campaign for the May 1 primary showdown in Texas John Wayne–style, at the Alamo, pledging, “All of our courage, all of our skill in battle will profit us very, very little if we fail to maintain the unsurpassed military strength which this dangerous world demands of us.”
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 91
