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

by Rick Perlstein

  It continued, “A clear pattern is emerging; these turnouts now do not seem accidental but appear to be the result of skillful organization by extreme right wing political groups in the Reagan camp.” (How right-wing? One questioner at a presidential rally asked, “Do you plan to continue to lead this country to full socialism?”) They were “operating almost invisibly through direct mail and voter turnout efforts conducted by . . . a loose coalition of right-wing political committees set up by or in conjunction with Richard Vigurie’s [sic] political direct mail firm. Others have been funded either by a wealthy sponsor (Joe Coors) or by a special interest group like the NRA. . . . They have been raising money for many years, and have extensive mailing lists made up of people interested in these issues.”

  The memo named some of the groups: George Wallace’s old American Independence Party (“Vigurie [sic] conducted the Wallace fund raising operation and owns this mailing list”), the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the National Right to Work Committee, the American Medical Association’s PAC, the NRA, the ACU, the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, the Heritage Foundation. It noted, “Many of the members of these groups are not loyal Republicans or Democrats. They are alienated from both parties because neither takes a sympathetic view toward their issues. Particularly those groups controlled by Vigurie [sic] hold a ‘rule or ruin’ attitude toward the GOP.” It named frightening stakes for Gerald Ford: “Being well funded, they can afford to conduct independent advertising campaigns on behalf of Reagan. Such expenditures are not chargeable to Reagan’s campaign”—meaning effectively that Reagan could still earn matching funds even if his supporters spent an infinite amount of money, whatever caps were designated by the campaign finance law.

  And it adumbrated their brave new political methodology: “They can target an effective direct mail campaign based on response to fund raising mail using outrageous literature designed to motivate people interested in a right-wing cause. . . . In a state where the GOP vote is traditionally small such an effort can be devastating. In caucus states where few people attend the county caucuses such an effort can control the state conventions.”

  It was striking that the scales fell from Republican establishment eyes only then—that in the middle of 1976 a top staffer in an incumbent president’s campaign didn’t even know how to spell “Richard Viguerie.” But the Reagan hands still flying commercial instead of charter, who hadn’t been sure they would win Texas at all, were a little taken aback by their right-wing infrastructure’s sudden full flowering in the field of presidential politics, too. It had been sudden, this brave new political world coming into bloom, this bastard child of the 1974 Campaign Finance Reform Act. Five hundred and sixteen political action committees were registered with the FEC in 1974; by the end of 1976 there were 1,116 Though not all, of course, were conservative, the most aggressive ones were: Paul Weyrich’s Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress raised $1.7 million in 1976. All told that year “New Right” PACs—excluding preexisting conservative groups, who’d raised but $250,000 for congressional races in 1972—raised $5.6 million.

  The memo concluded, with the key words underlined: “We are in real danger of being out-organized by a small number of highly motivated right wing nuts.”

  But they were also in danger of being outmotivated by voters who were not that nutty at all. William Safire published a smart postmortem on Texas. He pointed out that Henry Kissinger’s speeches for Ford in Dallas “gave a boost to the Reagan forces”—as did his attack on Reagan from overseas.

  In words that applied to Jimmy Carter’s successes, too, he said, “The campaign centers on who can best appeal to our pride rather than our guilt. Who can assert America’s moral strength and affirm our greatness?” Not Henry Kissinger: “In Texas, relinquishing the Panama Canal was a vivid symbol of the ‘one-way street’ to national decline, and this cannot be dismissed as mere cowboy kookies.” It was not what the pundits had seen coming, Reagan’s “kind of pushy patriotism, by jingo, a reaction to Vietnam-Watergate that the self-flagellators did not expect.” But Gerald Ford had better pay attention, the Florida paper advised him: stop condescending to Reagan. “Instead, make the case for what you’re doing to regenerate our national will. You can’t shuck your diplomatic tamale now—that would be a sign of weakness—but you can start making your own case.”

  Especially after what happened right after Texas. Speaking to ten thousand in the coliseum at Fort Wayne, Indiana, the president desperately waved the recent words of Barry Goldwater in the air: the 1964 nominee said he supported Ford on Panama “and I think Reagan would too if he knew more about it.” He said in a TV interview that “Governor Reagan has taken many, too many simplistic statements and indicated in one way or another he might take a rash action.”

  Then, on Tuesday, May 4, Indiana, Georgia, and Alabama went to the polls—and gave the rash Reagan 51, 68, and 71 percent respectively. In Indiana Reagan had scored a last-minute 10-point turnaround. The delegate count was now reportedly 381 to 372 for Reagan. The AP’s political commentator Walter Mears wrote, “Reagan’s victories put the President’s political future in jeopardy.” Evans and Novak wrote that it “opens the distinct possibility that Gerald R. Ford may not win the Republican nomination.” Rogers Morton, asked how he planned to respond, answered with a gaffe: “I’m not going to rearrange the furniture on the Titanic!”

  The next week was Nebraska. Barry Goldwater wrote a letter of advice to Ford: “You are the President. Do not stupe [sic] to arguing with another candidate.” Another candidate, he suggested, for whom he had hearty contempt: “Reagan’s trick, as you know is to have a whole handful of cards and he shuffles out whatever comes out to be ten minutes of speaking.” (So Ford’s speeches, the 1964 nominee suggested, should be equally “punchy.”) He also betrayed contempt for Reagan’s supporters—Goldwater supporters, once upon a time: “You are not going to get the Reagan vote. These are the same people who got me the nomination and they will never swerve.” Instead he should concentrate on “middle America. They have never had it so good”—though who knows where Goldwater got that argument. The latest unemployment rate was 9 percent.

  But Reagan won Nebraska 51 to 49. Which was even worse for Ford than a mere loss. This was Reagan’s first victory in a state that did not allow Democrats to vote for Republicans—destroying Ford’s argument that Reagan’s victories were owed only to Wallace Democrats crossing over to vote Republican. Counting a Ford win that same day in West Virginia, the score over the first eleven days including the “May Day Massacre” was 282 delegates for Ronald Reagan, and 27 for the President of the United States.

  He showed up in caricature on the cover of that week’s Time wearing a “WIN” button and a schoolboy’s goofy helicopter beanie. The issue included an interview with Reagan, who went after the Democrats’ Georgian heir apparent like it was a general election—though a Republican general election candidate hadn’t sounded like this since Barry Goldwater in 1964: “He’s for the Humphrey-Hawkins bill”—Senator Humphrey and Watts Congressman Augustus F. Hawkins’s legislation to require the Federal Reserve to implement monetary policy with full employment (defined originally as a 2 percent unemployment rate) as its target—and if 2 percent or less unemployment did not result, for the government to directly provide jobs.

  “If ever there was a design for fascism, that’s it. Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini’s success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say, ‘But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time.’ The Humphrey-Hawkins bill calls for the same kind of planned economy, and that would mark the end of the free marketplace in this country.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  * * *

  They Yearned to Believe

  THE CHURCH COMMITTEE’S FINAL REPORT had been released the morning of the Pennsylvania primary, April 27, full of stunning revelations about the CIA and FBI dressed in short, sharp
prose: “unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths”; “many Americans and domestic groups have been subjected to investigation who were not suspected of criminal activity”; “the intelligence agencies have regularly collected information about personal and political activities irrelevant to any legitimate government interest.” But even that was not biting enough for three Democratic members, Phil Hart, Walter Mondale, and Gary Hart, who called the report “diluted,” its “most important implications either lost or obscured in vague language.”

  Once more, not too many people cared. The New York Times was about the only paper to quote the part about “unsavory and vicious tactics.” None, apparently, quoted the report’s conclusion that “the Constitution has been violated in secret and the power of the executive branch has gone unchecked, unchallenged.” A quote from the former head of the FBI’s domestic surveillance division—“Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful, is it legal, is it ethical or moral?’ ”—went virtually unnoticed. The report also printed in full a once-top-secret 1954 document by World War II air ace General Jimmy Doolittle describing the CIA’s expanded mission: “long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered. We must . . . learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.” But the American people did not formally make the acquaintance of that philosophy, not in 1954, or 1976—for few if any papers quoted the Doolittle Report, either.

  As Otis Pike said, “they think it is better not to know.”

  Frank Church had finally entered the presidential race. “To those who say it’s too late,” he said in the tiny town of Idaho City (tinier than Plains, Georgia!), where he grew up, “I reply that it’s never too late—nor are the odds ever too great—to try. In that spirit the West was won, and in that spirit, I announce my candidacy for the Presidency of the United States.” But when he entered Nebraska’s May 11 primary it was easy for the media to dismiss him; newspapers and networks weren’t even sending reporters into the state, so sure were they of another Carter win.

  Carter won Texas and Indiana on May 4, both handily (in Indiana he got 68 percent), and made the covers of Time and Newsweek as the presumptive nominee. Washington sages started watching Old Man Daley, seeing if the Chicago mayor was ready to move in with an endorsement, the traditional sign that in the party of Jefferson and Jackson the fat lady had sung. He was not ready yet—though he did say the combo of Carter and Adlai Stevenson III, the senator his machine was responsible for electing, would make an “outstanding” ticket.

  Then, a bombshell. Carter had hired a brilliant young speechwriter named Bob Shrum. Nine days into his employment—and the day after the Pennsylvania primary—Shrum resigned. He made his resignation letter public. He said he’d joined the campaign because he thought Carter had “found the idiom to reach across the deep divisions of our time.” He said he quit because Carter was “manipulative and deceitful.” He gave examples: Of a plan to help coal miners suffering from black lung disease, Carter had allegedly said, “It would offend the operators. And why should I do this for Arnold Miller”—the head of the union—“if he won’t come and endorse me? . . . I don’t think the benefits should be automatic. They chose to be miners.” And of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, “I don’t want any more statements on the Middle East or Lebanon. Jackson has all the Jews anyway.” And though Carter pledged, on the campaign trail, a 5 to 7 percent cut in Pentagon spending, Shrum claimed he privately said he might favor “a substantial increase in the defense budget.”

  Shrum addressed Carter in his letter: “You say you wish to keep your options open. Within reason, that is understandable. But an election is the only option the people have. After carefully reflecting on what I have seen and heard here, I don’t know what you would do as president.” Shrum told Mary McGrory, one of those who warned he would never work in Washington again, “But he lies, and nobody will say it. I can’t excuse myself from saying something because I tell myself that it wouldn’t make any difference. Too many people did that during the Vietnam War.” Carter, wounded, responded, “I don’t feel inclined to comment on this young man’s statement.”

  But Carter added, he “obviously wrote the letter for the news media. . . . I’m not a liar and I don’t make statements in private contrary to those I make in public.”

  Which, however, was a lie. And contrary to what he said in private.

  Came the results from Nebraska: Frank Church, 38.4 percent; Jimmy Carter, 37.62 percent. Hardly mentioning his recent career as a scourge of the national security establishment, presenting himself, Elizabeth Drew observed, “as a good, safe, traditional Democrat, a responsible senator,” Church won by hitting a sweet spot: not too liberal, not too conservative—and not Jimmy Carter. That same day Carter barely won Connecticut, edging out the persistent Second Place Mo by little more than 2 points.

  Carter traveled once more in Washington. After long claiming his run had nothing to do with endorsements, he was now hunting endorsements—and got them: Senator Thomas Eagleton and a number of other prominent Missourians; eighteen House freshmen. He met with George Meany; he ducked into New York and reportedly won over former Jackson supporter Abe Beame of New York. The message was that it was time to get aboard the winning bandwagon before it was too late, though bandwagoneers came bearing demands of their own. “His health insurance speech,” like his recent embrace of the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill,” Elizabeth Drew wrote, “brought him into the orbit of the Democratic Party’s interest group politics. The speech was worked out in negotiations with the United Auto Workers.”

  Carter responded to the bad news out of Nebraska while attending a party in Washington, D.C. Smiling grimly, he said, “I can’t win ’em all.” The farmer was wearing black tie, which pointed up a curious dynamic. An antipolitician is hardly an antipolitician once he starts winning and works to close the deal by sewing up the Establishment. People start saying things like what Birch Bayh said while endorsing him in Indiana on the eve of a landslide—oily things: “While I was an active candidate for the presidency I expressed concern about Governor Carter’s position on several important national issues. Subsequent personal conversations have convinced me that Governor Carter and I share a deep common concern on most issues facing our nation.” Soon such praising with faint damns started rolling in from the power-hungry—as in the following uninspiring endorsement from a congressional freshman: “The complete politician is someone who can be his own man and still have everybody like him. That’s the epitome of the politician. Carter appears to be his own man and still have all kinds of groups liking him.”

  At times like this the front-runner began to look like the same old scum on the pond. A new fresh breeze can then whip through the pines.

  JERRY BROWN STARTED CAMPAIGNING IN Maryland with the support of the Democratic machine (Governor Marvin Mandel there despised the Georgian front-runner). “Where is the real Jimmy Carter?” Brown asked. “There’s that smile, but who’s the person behind it?” Udall hit him on the same score in Michigan: Mo’s cartoon ads showed Carter as two-faced, and pointed out that in 1971, as governor in a conservative state, he’d called for withdrawal from Vietnam—but only because we weren’t doing enough there to win (Ronald Reagan’s position); the next year he urged Democratic governors not to make a political issue of Vietnam after he’d made it one himself as a hawk; and in 1975 Carter had supported Ford’s call for last-minute assistance to the Saigon government. “So who is Jimmy Carter? What does he really believe?”

  These two “M” states, Michigan and Maryland, were i
nteresting. George Wallace had won both in 1972, while still in the hospital after his assassination attempt. Michigan was one of those open primary states, where racial reactionaries in both parties might crowd to the polls for Ronald Reagan—as they had four years earlier for Wallace. In fact Reagan might win more of them than Wallace. From time to time since 1972, the New York Times had been checking in with a “typical” blue-collar Michigan voter named Dewey Burton and his family. Burton was typical in that he’d been an avid union man and Democratic voter in 1968, and a Wallace supporter in 1972—and he now supported Ronald Reagan. He liked him because he was like Wallace, just “without the shadow of racism behind him.” Reagan also benefited from the Nashville-style “Replacement Party” mood, as he himself noted: “The results of the last several primaries—in both parties—reveal a great desire on the part of the people for a change, an end to politics as usual.”

  What it all meant was that the state that returned Gerald Ford to Congress eight times since 1948 might reject Ford in its primary in 1976—at a stand-or-fall moment in his presidential campaign. Reported the Times, “The Nebraska defeat transforms Mr. Ford’s political condition from serious to critical. If he loses in Michigan next week, it may become terminal.” One former congressman and Ford delegate said that if he lost in Michigan, “The President should withdraw as a candidate.”

  The newspaper of record cited another “unfavorable omen for Mr. Ford”: Michigan was one of the few non-Southern or non-Western states left to select their delegates. Most of the upcoming primaries were in conservative states where Reagan could run up the score: places like Arizona, Tennessee, Louisiana, and his native California. The New York Times now reported that Reagan was ahead in the delegate count 476 to 333, with about 1,400 left to select (he was behind 40 to 54 percent in Gallup’s popularity poll, but political parties are not quite democracies). London bookies now gave Reagan seven-to-four odds to win—whereas they had been ten to one against Reagan but a month earlier. Commentators started using words like “crucial” and “critical” and “last chance” to describe the incumbent’s campaign.