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

by Rick Perlstein

  On April 20, Washingtonians who had been waiting for an official endorsement of Ford from John Connally, still Texas’s most towering political figure, were shocked when the former treasury secretary, who knew a political dead fish when he saw one, stabbed the President of the United States in the back. He would endorse neither man, and hinted he might launch a third-party run. Reagan took the gloves off. Ford had signed a bill that included a provision to allow U.S. companies to crack the embargo against the Republic of Vietnam, and opened the door to diplomatic recognition—Reagan’s opening to reintroduce the Vietnam MIA card. No matter that a delegation led by the conservative Mississippi Democrat Gillespie “Sonny” Montgomery, chairman of the House Select Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia, had traveled to Vietnam and concluded that the notion of MIAs still in Vietnam was a myth, manufactured by the Chinese to keep their rival from diplomatic recognition by the United States. Reagan remained adamant. “If there is to be any recognition,” he boomed on April 20 in a shopping center in Macon, Georgia, which voted on May 4 along with Indiana, “let it be discussed only after they have kept their pledge to give a full accounting of our men still listed as missing in action.” He also charged that Ford’s “attorney general is promoting a seven-point measure which is gun control and will take guns away from law-abiding citizens.”

  The next day’s Evans and Novak column spied in Reagan’s rhetoric a new electoral strategy: since Texas was an “open” primary state, where citizens could choose to vote in either party’s primary, Reagan was pushing hard on the sort of cultural resentments that once drove Democrats to George Wallace. He put on a TV commercial written by Arthur Finkelstein starring a Fort Worth voter named Rollie Millirons, who said, “I’ve always been a Democrat. As much as I hate to admit it, George Wallace can’t be nominated. So for the first time in my life I’m gonna vote in the Republican primary. I’m gonna vote for Ronald Reagan.” Flyers featured a drawing of an elephant—“I’m for Reagan!”—and a donkey—“Me too!” Evans and Novak made a sartorial observation from a Reagan rally to suggest that it was working: “The remarkable gathering of over 3,000 lacked the sleek, chic look of Texas Republicans and seemed much more like a typical Wallace rally—women in house dresses, sport-shirted men, lots of American flags. If the virtual collapse of Wallace’s candidacy is sending right-wing populist Democrats across party lines to Reagan, President Ford is in deepening trouble here.”

  More conservative movement money came in: a total of $778,000 from a mailing in North Carolina, $110,000 in “independent expenditures” from the ACU’s Conservative Victory Fund, $24,000 from a former high school government teacher for ads that instructed Democrats to “call your local newspaper” to learn how they could register as Republicans to vote for Reagan; so many calls swamped the Waco News-Tribune that the paper ran instructions on its front page to ease the strain on its switchboard. And Ronald Reagan was now defining the political playing field. Ford intensified his language against Hanoi: “Under no circumstances do we contemplate recognizing North Vietnam.” His press secretary was forced to defend the president against charges that he was manipulating Congress to stall a new campaign finance bill to renew matching funds, in order to “starve out” Reagan. As Pat Buchanan wrote, “The liberal wing of the Republican Party is a spectator now. It lacked the numbers to advance its own candidate, or the will to save its own champion, the Vice President. The civil war in the GOP is between conservatives—militant and moderate.”

  THE SORTS OF STORIES THAT made the suspicious circles nod smugly crowded the news. For instance, from San Diego, the story of a mentally retarded Marine private beaten by other recruits for some forty-five minutes on the orders of their drill sergeant as the victim cried, “God, make them stop”—until he was finally silenced by his death. And, from the small town of Grangeville, Idaho, the city council that considered a proposal to outlaw the wearing of handguns within city limits after a posse of armed citizens confronted the county prosecutor demanding his resignation. Thirty of them, armed to the teeth, visited the council chamber as the measure was being debated. One said the Second Amendment right was “just like any other muscle in your body. If you don’t exercise it regularly it goes away. I only exercised my inalienable right. I’m glad I did it because I can see that this right is in danger.” They then presented a letter announcing, “We will resist with all lawful means your tyrannical act which attempts to abrogate the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. . . . If anyone should be disarmed it should be the government, not us.” Retailers testified that the gun-toters were scaring off their customers. To no avail: the ordinance failed.

  Time featured the nation’s “Porno Plague,” an “open, aggressive, $2-billion-a-year, crime-ridden growth enterprise,” flourishing now that “most of the traditional barriers to porn are now down,” and reported a demonstration of 1,200 marchers, including two hundred schoolchildren, in front of “Show World,” the sexual supermarket on New York’s Forty-second Street that introduced live sex shows, a forty-four-second peep for only a quarter. And in Boston, the ongoing busing crisis—and the anger of white construction workers over affirmative action—once again turned violent. Early in April, one hundred fifty antibusing youth confronted a black man in a three-piece suit, attorney Theodore Landsmark, executive director of the association of black contractors agitating for more city contracts, with the most convenient weapon they could get their hands on: a large American flag, with which one of them appeared to run Landsmark through as if with a spear. The mayor, stunned, watched the scene from his office up above. The picture of the attack appeared the next day on the front page of the Boston Globe.

  Landsmark appeared at a press conference with his entire face crisscrossed by white bandages, excoriating city officials, like school committee member Louise Day Hicks, who “incite and encourage” racist violence. In the Globe the president of the South Boston High School and Home Association, James M. Kelly, said that the attack was “retaliation” for “black crime.” Two Saturdays later, on April 24, liberal religious leaders, the mayor, and senators Brooke and Kennedy led a “Procession Against Violence” of about fifty thousand people through the city—though few blacks and fewer antibusing whites showed up. “Teach us, O God, that the voice of violence speaks not for democracy but for the devil of fascism,” a rabbi prayed. The march was followed by bomb threats and stone throwing.

  But, simultaneously with all that, came another development that helped define the political playing field. Call it patriotism chic—another edge for Ronald Reagan. It was a journeyman outfielder for the Chicago Cubs who came to the rescue, the afternoon after that Boston violence. Some knucklehead ran onto dead center of the playing field at Dodger Stadium with his eleven-year-old son, set down an American flag, doused it with lighter fluid, and struggled to strike a match. All of a sudden the center fielder dashed into the frame, swooped down and grabbed up the flag, and deposited it safely in the dugout as police arrested the intruders. RICK MONDAY . . . YOU MADE A GREAT PLAY, the scoreboard spelled out when he came to bat in the next half inning.

  UPI sent out a feature by its sports editor:

  “Rick Monday isn’t one of those super-patriots. He’s just an ordinary guy. Ordinary in the sense he doesn’t get up on a soapbox making speeches but still appreciates all the opportunities this country offers over so many others.

  “The action he took when he saw the flag about to be burned may signal the beginning of some kind of turnaround in the general pattern of our behavior.

  “Maybe we’re getting back to that point where it once was fashionable for everyone to respect not only his country and his flag but also himself, and if it turns out that somebody like Rick Monday had to be the one to show the way then I say hooray for him. . . .

  “In that regard, I seem to be noticing an increasing number of people, including some like Muhammad Ali who were critical of this country in the past, suddenly rediscovering many of its advantages. These ad
vantages were here all the time but somehow were overlooked in all the babble and confusion.”

  The accompanying photograph showed Monday accepting a peck on the cheek from “Miss Illinois Teenager” Mary Lou Valkenberg during Rick Monday Day ceremonies at Wrigley Field. “I’d like to thank the American public, which typifies what the American flag means,” he said, the echo booming like in the climactic scene of Pride of the Yankees. “God bless America!” More such ceremonies followed. America had a new national hero, who said into one of the microphones stuck in his face, “If you’re going to burn the flag, don’t do it around me. I’ve been to too many veterans’ hospitals and seen too many broken bodies of guys who tried to protect it.”

  THE PRESIDENT LANDED IN TEXAS on Tuesday, four days before the May 4 primary, bearing signs reminding voters who had the power to deliver the pork: PRESIDENT FORD, ’76. His secretary of state, however, landed in Africa—hat in hand. Part of his agenda for his unprecedented two-week trip to the continent was to represent the United States at a conclave between First World and Third World nations, the latter still swaggering after the 1973 Arab oil embargo—and the American colossus’s humiliation in Vietnam. Kissinger hoped to put a finger in the dike against developing nations’ radical schemes to form cartels intended to advantage sellers over buyers of crucial commodities like bauxite. A political cartoon mocked the notion of mighty Henry Kissinger as humble supplicant. He wore safari gear and a pith helmet. He shook the hand of a handsome, dark-skinned potentate in a suit, who greeted him, “Dr. Kissinger, I presume.” The political timing was terrible. Texas cowboys didn’t care for secretaries of state on safari.

  Another goal was to unveil a new diplomatic stance toward the landlocked southern African nation named after the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes—a country ruled by whites who were outnumbered by native blacks by a factor of twenty-three. “Time is running out for Rhodesia’s white rulers,” Kissinger said as he stepped off his silver-and-blue jet. “The future of Africa must be shaped by Africans.” On April 28 he announced as official U.S. policy “unrelenting U.S. opposition” and “massive discouragement” toward anything standing in the way of a peaceful transfer of power to the black majority. Warning that violent civil war was imminent between the white government and black militants who’d been waging a guerrilla war against it since the country ceased being a British colony in 1965, he advised Americans to leave the country for their own safety. He also said the administration would work for repeal of the “Byrd Amendment,” a law that directed the State Department to ignore a United Nations embargo against the purchase of Rhodesia’s number-one export, chromium—a crucial ingredient in the manufacture of stainless steel.

  The next day, back in the United States, as Hubert Humphrey decided not to enter the New Jersey primary and a bomb blast injured twenty-two at a courthouse in Boston and police weighed the seriousness of further threats against two state office buildings, the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, the Statler Hilton hotel, several banks, and the police precinct investigating the courthouse blast, the Reagan team spied in Henry Kissinger’s African peregrinations another opportunity for an offensive. “Rhodesia, primarily, and South Africa, secondarily,” UPI explained, “are favorite causes of right-wing Republicans and major U.S. industrial firms.” The generous interpretation of this was that conservatives pragmatically judged these maligned but pro-Western nations as important strategic bulwarks against the spread of Communism. (The world’s only other exporter of chromium happened to be the Soviet Union.) The ungenerous interpretation was that they thought black Africans lacked the capacity to govern themselves. Leave it to the silver-tongued Reagan to devise a rhetoric that made holding off on black rule sound humanitarian, an anti- rather than a pro-imperialist imperative.

  Reagan made the argument the day before the primary, in San Antonio, to three thousand, just outside the Alamo fortress. “We seem to be embarking on a policy of dictating to the people of southern Africa and running the risk of increased violence and bloodshed in an area already beset by tremendous antagonism and difficulties,” he said. His claim was that what Kissinger called a necessity to ratchet down civil war was in fact instigating civil war. “The people of Rhodesia—black and white—have never been our enemies. They fought with us in World War II against Hitler and in the Pacific. If they show a creative attitude that can lead to a peaceful settlement, ourselves and others should avoid rhetoric or actions that could trigger chaos or violence. They have special problems which require time to solve. We’re not going to cure the ills of the world overnight. The great issue of racial justice is as vital here at home as it is in Africa, and it would be well to make sure our own house is in order before we fly off to other lands to attempt to dictate policies to them.”

  We shall overcome.

  Then came a low blow. He said of Kissinger, “What is more incredible is his announcement that our citizens in Rhodesia will not be protected by the United States government and that U.S. citizens residing in Rhodesia will be advised to get out. This has to be a first—the United States government proclaiming officially that its citizens must go unprotected in a foreign land.”

  Then he was off to speak at the Houston Music Theater, also before three thousand people, who gave him two standing ovations, the first after he promised to “put God back in the classrooms,” the second after he pledged to “never allow American soldiers to die in a no-win war.”

  He had already said, in Georgia, of the Kissinger-Ford Rhodesia policy, “I’m afraid we are going to have a massacre.” Now Kissinger was livid. This was the real world he was dealing with: one of trade-offs, compromises, negotiation, intelligence assessments—such as the ones that, apparently, suggested the white government wasn’t long for this world, and that it was time to get on the side of the winners if America wanted to preserve a flow of cheap chrome for the future, and preserve stability in a newly vital strategic region. What the hell, Kissinger plainly thought, did Ronald Reagan know? (Or: what the hell did Kissinger’s old rival James Schlesinger, the right-wing former defense secretary now advising Reagan, know?) Ford gave Kissinger leave to vent spleen, on the record (previously, his attacks on Reagan had come through the media via an unnamed “senior American diplomat”). He did so on a plane to Monrovia, saying that Reagan’s warnings of a “massacre” were “totally irresponsible,” that “all states bordering Rhodesia have declared that the armed struggle has already started and as far as we can see, it has started. There is danger of outside intervention that would intensify it. I tried to develop a program that puts emphasis on negotiation and put a timetable on it as the only hope for avoiding massacre.”

  Not the kind of language conservative Texans liked to hear. President Ford, apparently, knew it. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. At a speech in Dallas on Thursday, April 29, he bragged he would win—despite the fact that the day before, his audience ignored him in Lubbock (until he introduced his supporter, Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry), and half his audience had walked out of his next speech, in Houston, before the scheduled Q&A. By April 30, however, the boasting was dropped—though the attacks picked up. “When it comes to the life and death decisions of our national security the decisions must be the right one. There are no retakes in the Oval Office.” (Reagan, asked by the Dallas Morning News what he would think if he was asked by Ford to be vice president, answered, “Welllll, maybe he would like to have a Vice President that makes retakes and who is irresponsible.”) The President Ford Committee was also spending four times more money than Citizens for Reagan, almost a stunning million dollars, to no avail; every time Reagan mentioned Panama, a historian noted, “voters would inundate Ford’s campaign offices with phone calls wanting to know why the President was giving it away.”

  The next night the president spoke at the White House Correspondents Dinner, where a president’s job was to let his hair down and tell jokes. Ford told his just as the polls closed in Texas: “I have a great many friends in Texas, b
ut we won’t know exactly how many for an hour.” “I totally agree with Reagan about Panama”—he put on a garish Panama hat—“I bought it, I paid for it, I own it, and I’m going to keep it.” And: “I learned two things in Texas: Never underestimate your opponent. And always shuck the tamale.”

  Then he learned how few friends he had in Texas. He lost, 33 to 66 percent. Reagan garnered all ninety-six of the state’s Republican delegates. That was almost 9 percent of what he needed for the nomination—the Republicans’ delegate formula happening to tilt toward the conservative South and Southwest. It was the worst election defeat ever suffered by a sitting president.

  THE FORD CAMPAIGN LEARNED SOMETHING else, something the staff should have figured out much earlier. Republican turnout in, for instance, El Paso, had doubled since the last election. An unsigned Ford campaign memo written shortly after the Texas landslide pondered the mystery: “The unexpected Reagan success in certain caucus states—New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado—seems puzzling. Turnout is very high, the people coming to vote or to the caucuses are unknown and have not been involved in the Republican political system before; they vote overwhelmingly for Reagan.”