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

by Rick Perlstein

  Ford decided a change was in order: he would be nice now—“presidential.” Why vote for him? “Because,” he answered his own question for the Economic Club of Detroit, “I’ve done a good job. Because I’ve turned a lot of things around and we’re going in the right direction. Because I want a mandate from Michigan and the American people to finish the job.” (Reagan told the same group of wealthy executives that “the automobile and the men and women who make it are under constant attack from . . . elitists, some of whom feel guilty because Americans have built such a prosperous nation, and some of whom seem obsessed with the need to substitute government control in place of individual decision making.”) But Ford also did something nasty: when the new campaign finance bill that would free up frozen matching funds finally hit his desk on May 5, he waited five days to sign it.

  The two candidates split the voting on May 11. Ford won West Virginia. Maybe his kowtowing to the antitextbook militants in 1974 had helped. Reagan won Nebraska—despite radio commercials by Barry Goldwater for Gerald Ford in which the conservative hero said, “I know Ronald Reagan’s public statements concerning the Panama Canal contained gross factual errors. . . . He has clearly represented himself in an irresponsible manner on an issue which could affect the nation’s security.” Polls had put Ford way ahead just weeks earlier. As for Goldwater, he soon was fielding messages so angry that he told his friend Sally Quinn of the Washington Post, “I didn’t realize Western Union would send telegrams like that.”

  Ford waited several more days to appoint commissioners to the newly reconstituted FEC who could sign off on releasing matching funds, at a time when the Reagan campaign was $1.2 million in debt. His campaign began putting pressure on Reagan through the press to release his tax return; Reagan refused. That led to more press reports about how his investment in that cattle tax shelter in 1970 helped him pay no state income tax, and a New York Times report that he probably hadn’t paid federal tax that year either. (The campaign responded that he had paid “at least” several hundred dollars.) And Ford directed the governor of Michigan, William Milliken, to get nasty on the campaign’s behalf. Milliken promptly said Michigan was where “box office diplomacy [and] the celluloid candidacy of Ronald Reagan would be exposed.”

  It was desperation—as were his Reaganward policy feints: putting off signing a nuclear treaty with the Soviet Union years in the making; ordering his attorney general to find an “appropriate” dispute through which to challenge busing in the Supreme Court. It was hard to stay nice when your twenty-seven-year political career might be nearing the precipice, and your stressed-out advisors were attacking each other in the press in increasingly rancorous terms.

  Soon, on the stump, the candidate of calm started losing his cool, too.

  Ford had embarked upon an old-fashioned whistle-stop tour through the Wolverine State. On Saturday, May 15, he boasted from the platform on the train’s caboose of the improved economy. “Yeah?” a heckler responded. “You blew it.”

  Grumpy old Ford: “We blew it in the right direction, young man, and if you’d go out and look for a job you’d find out.”

  Ford’s boorish reply was seized upon by Carter at a mall in the Michigan town of Livonia: “Twelve and a half percent of the people in the workforce in Michigan are unemployed and for the President to insinuate that anybody in this country can find [a job] shows he’s been in Washington too long . . . and shows he’s been out of touch with what’s going on in this country.” Carter gave it to Reagan, too, for “refusing to let people know that . . . he paid zero taxes on a very large income.” He ignored his Democratic rivals. He was “absolutely” sure, he told reporters, he’d win the nomination.

  Hubris. He was shocked to be beaten in Maryland 49 to 37 percent by Jerry Brown. He edged out Udall in Michigan by a nose. Energized stop-Carter forces jammed the phone lines of Congressman Paul Simon of Illinois, thought to be the one brokering a convention usurpation on behalf of Humphrey. Touts also pressed Ted Kennedy for his response. “There are some who will not believe until someone else is nominated,” wrote Elizabeth Drew, “that Kennedy will not run.”

  Meanwhile, Gerald Ford was safe, for now: he won Maryland 58 to 42 and Michigan 65 to 43. The Republican race, cliché-minded reporters now wrote, was a “seesaw battle.”

  ALL EYES WERE ON JERRY Brown. It was time for a new insurgent—an antipolitician for those for whom Jimmy Carter had never been nearly antipolitical enough. For folks who thought Carter too rigid on the issues. Weird, weird Jerry Brown.

  He explained, in an article on Reagan’s taxes, why he did not claim deductions on his own return: “It doesn’t turn me on.”

  An interviewer asked him why he didn’t talk about his gubernatorial accomplishments before audiences: “That’s not part of my process.”

  He said, “My attitude is that you want to liberate people to find themselves and find space to live and explore life.”

  And: “I don’t have answers. I have questions.”

  “It’s a commitment to a process that will have to be filled in.”

  “Just to stay where we are may take some pretty profound changes.”

  Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. was the son of a very conventional, Irish Catholic, ward-heeler style of Democratic politician, Pat Brown, who rode to glory by doing what all successful Democratic politicians did during the postwar economic boom: he built. A $1.99 billion aqueduct system to deliver water to Southern California. A thousand more miles of freeways. Seven new public university campuses. He built the ladder upon which California’s middle class had climbed. Then he was undone by the shocking challenge of Ronald Reagan in 1966. His fourth child, born in 1938, observed his father’s political fall from a rather odd place: a Jesuit seminary, where he spent three and a half years, one of them entirely silent. He had since identified with the fashionable religion of Zen Buddhism.

  When Junior became governor, in 1975, he did not build. He cut spending for education. He stopped providing free briefcases for state bureaucrats. He lobbied against his own pay raise. He gave janitors the exact same pay raise as judges. His state-of-the-state address lasted seven minutes. Like the young Colorado governor Richard Lamm, elected for fighting Denver’s Winter Olympics bid, or Mayor Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, who made a campaign promise not to build new highways or homes, Jerry Brown fetishized limits—much to traditional liberals’ chagrin. “He was Pat Brown’s son, and everyone figured that Jerry Brown’s election meant that the faucets would start flowing again,” a prominent Democratic pol related to a journalist. “Well, everyone was wrong.” Liberal groups and unions bitterly joked about wanting their campaign donations back. Was he even a liberal? Answered Jerry Brown, “I am not restrained by the metaphors and mythologies associated with the term.”

  It made him stunningly popular. By the end of 1975, only 7 percent of the state’s residents rated his performance as “poor.”

  He had come up through the civil rights and antiwar movements, the first politician of national stature to do so. He served as a member of the University of California Board of Regents, then as state attorney general, and was the basis for the character played by Robert Redford in the 1972 movie The Candidate. (“What do we do now?” the Candidate asks at the end of the picture, blankly, after he wins.) He won the governor’s mansion at the youthful age of thirty-six—well, actually, he bypassed the new governor’s mansion, which had been built for Reagan by his friends for $8.4 million in 2013 dollars, in favor of a modest bachelor apartment, where he slept on a mattress on the floor and kept a copy of Aristotle on the coffee table. He ate in health food restaurants. He refused the gubernatorial chauffeured limousine—he drove himself in a 1967 Plymouth sedan. He quoted Small Is Beautiful, and the radical social philosopher and designer Buckminster Fuller: “We are on a very small Spaceship Earth, and we’ve got to respect the limits.” He did things like appointing antiwar POW Edison Miller to the Orange County Board of Supervisors; Miller was the one who’d turned his
back on his fellow marines upon his return to Camp Pendleton. (“I will try my best to have every veteran in the state of Oklahoma vote against Jerry Brown for anything,” responded another POW, who headed the Naval ROTC at the University of Oklahoma. “I will take off my uniform to do that.”) One of his handpicked candidates to be a presidential convention delegate was Elaine Brown, a Black Panther leader. Mike Royko called him “Governor Moonbeam.” Doonesbury once featured a character who traveled to California to work for him. But before he got there, he had to brush up on the governor’s California-speak. He asked an expert how one might translate a passage of Wordsworth: “The Crescent-moon, the Star of Love / Glories of evening, as ye there are seen / With but a span of sky between— / Speak one of you, my doubts remove, / Which is the attendant Page and which the Queen?” The answer: “OH, WOW, LOOK AT THE MOON.”

  California loved him. Now the nation would meet him.

  His April 28 trip to Maryland to campaign was his first travel outside California since he’d been elected a year and a half earlier. As he toured a waste management facility, he turned to reporters: “What is the inner meaning of this? Why are we here? What are we doing?” He toured a Westinghouse plant, shook hands, told a worker, “I hope you’ll vote for me.” The reply: “I will.” A double take: “You will? But you don’t know anything about me.” A reporter asked him who his favorite political philosopher was. He answered, “Thomas Hooker.” Another inquired who Thomas Hooker was. The answer: “I’m just being facetious. He’s the only obscure name I could remember from political science class.” His TV commercials had him antipolitically saying that a president “comes in the morning, leaves at night. . . . He is just a human being like everybody else. There’s no magic, there’s no genius.”

  Nevertheless, beneath his blathering political anti-blather many of his views turned out to be shockingly conventional, and he had always been strikingly shrewd about the uses of power. Shaking hands while running for governor, he’d say, “Hello, I’m Jerry Brown. I’m Pat Brown’s son, and I’m running for governor. I hope you’ll vote for me.” He boasted in speeches of a bill he was about to sign providing for stricter safety regulations for the construction of nuclear plants—but took no position on a proposition on California ballots that year to limit such construction. He said he wouldn’t cut the defense budget.

  He was also disarmingly honest—quite the calling card, in 1976.

  In both parties May 25 would be a crucial test; Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon; and Tennessee, Arkansas, and Kentucky, two sort-of regional primaries. In Oregon, Elizabeth Drew sat down for a conversation with Jerry Brown, although, she wrote, “One does not hold a conversation with Brown—one holds a symposium with him.” She asked him about his attraction to Zen Buddhism. He replied, “I pick things up from a variety of sources. Zen stresses living in the moment. So do the Jesuits, so does monastic living—living in the present moment, don’t worry about tomorrow. Divine Providence will take care of it. Be in the present moment. Age quod agis—that’s a Jesuit motto. Do whatever you’re doing. That could be Zen as well as Jesuit.” He was asked how “living for the moment” squared with the task of planning the governing of the nation’s largest state. He replied by describing his philosophy as “creative non-action”: “Many possibilities can be in your mind. You try to think ahead, but you can’t recognize the multiplicity of possibilities. You can’t control events and you can’t predict them.”

  Wow. Look at the moon.

  She came away convinced Brown was running for president because he was bored with being governor. (He was easily bored; he once called being governor “a pain in the ass.”) She recorded him, on the campaign trail, making fun of political conventions and political language (which, of course, he had grown up with), and even making fun of the voters to their faces: “As Bend goes . . . so goes Oregon, and so goes the country,” he goofed in front of an audience in . . . Bend. (Not Carter. He’d added to his usual litany—that he’d been a farmer, an engineer, and a businessman—that he had “substantial timber holdings,” timber, of course, being a major export of Oregon.)

  In Bend, Brown was applauded uproariously for pointing up the bill he had signed two days earlier to give a 10 percent tax deduction to homeowners who installed solar panels, and his measure to reduce the amount of water that toilets use when they flush, and for cutting the highway department from 16,000 to 13,500 employees.

  His audience also liked this:

  “We have fiscal limits, we have ecological limits, we even have human limits . . . too much over-promising, too much overselling . . . the human species is not going to make it unless we can figure out another way. . . . How long is it going to take before we blow this whole planet up?”

  AND OREGON LOVED IT. HE was so in demand, and so willing to hold symposia with voters, that he started showing up hours late for appearances. Voters just patiently waited for him to arrive, then stood listening, rapt. (Drew reflected, “It is a cool night in Coos Bay, and the crowd is paying close attention to this young man who tells it that the world may blow up.”) Doonesbury soon depicted his fans offering the following campaign chant: “Hey, ho! Go with the flow!” And imagined this dialogue:

  “But if you admit to not having the answer to any of the problems facing the nation, why should anyone vote of your for President?”

  “I believe I am the best qualified to wing it.”

  But winning Oregon would be a challenge for Brown: his name wasn’t on the ballot. That became one of his jokes: look for the blank spot on the ballot. “That doesn’t represent my mind—it’s not blank. But it’s open. . . . There’s a certain amount of Zen emptiness.” His campaign storefronts bustled with volunteers—just like Jimmy Carter’s once had. Jimmy Carter, who no longer looked like an insurgent at all. The week before Oregon voted, the story dominating the coverage of Carter’s campaign was his response back in 1971 when William “Rusty” Calley had been convicted for mass murder at the Vietnam village of My Lai. Carter had declared “American Fighting Man’s Day” and recommended all Georgians drive with their headlights on to “honor the flag as Rusty had done.” Now he denied ever having said it: just another politician.

  NATIONWIDE, MORE CHAOS, MORE EMBARRASSMENT, more moral corrosion. An even worse cheating scandal was revealed at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the largest in its 174-year history. (The student body responded by voting to reduce the penalty for cheating.) A front-page report in the Philadelphia Inquirer stated, “An alarming amount of nuclear fuel has disappeared from the nation’s nuclear power plants—more than enough for terrorist fanatics to build atomic bombs capable of killing thousands. Embarrassed nuclear officials admit they don’t know how much is missing, or where it has gone. But angry experts told the Inquirer that enough plutonium and uranium has vanished to build an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons.” (An MIT physicist said, “America is sitting on a nuclear time bomb. The fuse is getting shorter all the time.” Paul Ehrlich was quoted: “Any determined person or group with some intelligence can build a bomb. . . . At one plant it was possible to enter a room containing raw material for bombs merely by pulling off flimsy metal louvers covering vent holes in a wall.”) A conference at the State University of New York in Brockport on cheating in sports concluded it was being engaged in “not only by individual athletes, but also by whole teams, by coaches, managers, owners, and even judges.”

  Sports was the subject of a popular Hollywood farce that came out on April 22. The plot of The Bad News Bears was a traditionally uplifting one—that familiar old Capraesque story about the sad sacks banding together and beating the swells through sheer democratic pluck. But it was conveyed with a crudeness unimaginable onscreen before Watergate. A drunken lout played by Walter Matthau is recruited to coach a Little League team. One player, a budding black nationalist, calls him “honky.” He recruits a tomboy with a vicious curveball, played by Tatum O’Neal, but he has to bribe her to lure her away from her lucrative hustle of sellin
g phony maps to the homes of the Hollywood stars. (“I know it says a buck twenty-five on the map but it’s really two dollars because of inflation.”) A teammate greets her: “Jews, spics, niggers, and now a girl?” Matthau teaches her how to throw illegal spitballs. A kid trips a base runner—no criticism from the coach; likewise when another surreptitiously hits a competitor in the genitals. O’Neal tries to recruit to the team a juvenile delinquent, who is preoccupied with his own hustle—air hockey, a dollar a game. She has to go on a date with him when she loses, inspiring the following dialogue:

  Matthau: “Eleven-year-old girls don’t go on dates!”

  O’Neill: “Blow it out your bunghole. I know an eleven-year-old girl who’s already on the pill.”

  These eleven-year-olds also swear like sailors, wear Budweiser shirts, and drink the beers their alcoholic coach hands out. The bad guy is a city councilman who cynically keeps pictures of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King on his office wall, the better to cover up his Nixon-like scams. The Bears make it to the championship, where Matthau advises a player to cheat. (“Get hit in the arm or the leg. Don’t make it obvious.”) He won’t take his girl pitcher out of the game even at the risk of injury to her arm. The last line of the picture, when the team wins second place, is “Hey Yankees—you can take your apology and your trophy and shove it up your ass!”

  And this was a kids’ movie.

  Another gag sent up something else unsavory: the nation’s birthday party. The Bears’ uniforms were sponsored by “Chico’s Bail Bonds”—slogan, “Let Freedom Ring”; logo, the Liberty Bell. Just like real life, where the Bicentennial was taking shape with all the class of a holiday mattress sale. The suspicious circles derided it as the “buycentennial.” The Bicentennial Wagon Train was sponsored by Holiday Inn, Mayflower Moving, and Gulf Oil. Each of CBS’s “Bicentennial Minutes” ended with a commercial for Shell Oil; as it happened, Bicentennial sponsors Gulf and Shell were both wrapped up in bribery scandals. All told, some 250 corporations sponsored official programs of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, whose chairman was a Hollywood producer, to the tune of $38.9 million.