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

by Rick Perlstein

  More prosaically, you could buy Bicentennial garbage cans, a Bicentennial “commemorative LP” with the story of the nation’s founding as read by radio host Paul Harvey (“Ideal gift for every occasion in ’76! . . . HAND LETTERING • HANDSOME ILLUSTRATIONS • QUALITY PAPER • ELEGANT GOLD EMBOSSING”); phony Bicentennial parchments with a scriptural affirmation of God’s hand in America’s future (2 Chronicles 7:14: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land”); Bicentennial medallions; Bicentennial whoopee cushions, garbage cans, toilet seats—even, thanks to one intrepid entrepreneur, a Bicentennial casket. “News accounts pointed out that cheap Bicentennial trinkets were often made in overseas factories,” a historian noticed—even the ones from the companies that kicked back a fee to the official Bicentennial Commission, and so got to feature the official logo on their product. Among those who probably didn’t go through the trouble were the guy who opened a Bicentennial massage parlor, the “Uncle Sam’s” chain of discos (they had a drink called the Firecracker), and the car dealership in San Jose that sponsored a man who was attempting to break the record for “pole sitting,” and who planned to descend on July 4.

  And all to celebrate—what? Our glorious cities? A May 18 headline in the Los Angeles Times: “TWO SLAIN GUARDING CHURCH.” The article was about how at the ornate Our Lady of Guadalupe, in a neighborhood of intensifying drug- and gang-related violence, a mother of three who’d joined a nightly anti-vandalism patrol and a forty-three-year-old maintenance worker were shot down by gang members. Government by the people, of the people, and for the people? “CLOSED SESSION ROMANCE ON THE HILL: REP. WAYNE HAYS’ $14,000-A-YEAR CLERK SAYS SHE’S HIS MISTRESS,” read the Washington Post lead headline on May 23. Hays, sixty-four, who’d married another secretary back in Ohio five weeks earlier, was that creepy chair of the House Buildings and Grounds Committee—“the meanest man in Congress”—who survived the threat of losing his chairmanship in 1975 by engineering a congressional pay raise. The twenty-seven-year-old in question, Elizabeth Ray, pictured on the front page of the Post in a low-cut swimsuit, was quoted as saying, “I can’t type, I can’t file, I can’t even answer the phone. . . . Supposedly, I’m on the oversight committee. But I call it the Out of Sight Committee.” In Washington, people talked of hardly anything else. Betty Ford, candid as ever, said that since Hays was not married at the time of the affair he should not be judged harshly.

  Would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins went off on mistress hunts. One unfortunate victim was a congressman, Allan T. Howe, who showed up in a Salt Lake City police blotter for soliciting a prostitute, then withdrew from his reelection run even though there wasn’t any evidence he was guilty. Wrote Tom Wicker, “If Howe’s case had occurred anytime except at the height of the Wayne Hays scandal, the Utah congressman would have been front page news nowhere outside the Deseret News.” As it was, he became more evidence of the thoroughgoing rot in the political class. In 1970, there had been sixty-three indictments of officeholders by federal grand juries. In 1976, there were 337.

  THE CHURCH COMMITTEE BEGAN RELEASING supplementary reports, which for some reason now caught the attention of the evening news, forcing replies from the directors of the CIA and FBI—the latter, Clarence Kelley, finally acknowledging abuses by his predecessor J. Edgar Hoover, such as the attempt to make Martin Luther King commit suicide. Then came the voting in Oregon on May 25. The Democrats’ results were a surprise. Carter did not win, nor Brown; Frank Church did. He also won the same day in his home state, Idaho (where Carter, bringing his all-things-to-all-people shtick to a new low, told voters he felt a deep kinship with them because he too raised a crop that grew underground). “I hope here in Oregon,” Church had said in an appeal for votes, “that those Democrats who have been supporting Jackson and Humphrey and Udall will unite together behind my candidacy.” He argued, “I just don’t believe that the White House is the proper place for on-the-job training.” He denounced “the politics of style.” And since he was the only candidate saying such things, he monopolized the votes of those who agreed. He now was three-for-three—a contender.

  Carter, meanwhile, won in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas—but those states had been virtually uncontested. He just wasn’t “closing,” as the salesmen say. Once more in Washington the stop-Carter forces—now known as “ABC,” or “Anyone But Carter,” after 1972’s version, ABM, “Anyone But McGovern”—stirred. “Holding for Hubert,” read buttons some Democratic politicians wore.

  ON MAY 21 RONALD REAGAN won roof-shaking acclaim from 3,500 at a Christian college in Chattanooga by proclaiming, “Never again should this country send its young men to die in a war unless the country is totally committed to winning it as quickly as possible.” But Tennessee was also home to the Tennessee Valley Authority, and when the press asked him in Nashville what he thought about the TVA, he responded with what he had learned from reading Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson under Lemuel Boulware’s tutelage in the 1950s—the same answer that cost Barry Goldwater the Volunteer State in 1964. He said, “I still believe in free enterprise, and the government doesn’t have any place in it.” Reporters pressed, asking him if that meant he would sell to private interests the extensive network of dams that had brought electricity to the impoverished rural masses. “We’d have to look at it,” he replied.

  Ford won Oregon. That was expected. Reagan won Arkansas, Nevada, and Idaho—and that was expected, too. The shock was in Tennessee, an open primary full of Wallace Democrats. But even conservatives loved the TVA in the Volunteer State. Which was why Ford won Tennessee—an astonishing boost. Despite this, as Elizabeth Drew noted, “That the race between the President and Ronald Reagan has got to this point” was in itself “astonishing.”

  The melodrama was only just beginning. Much more than the Democrats, Republicans picked many of their delegates in convention and caucuses. Winning these kinds of proceedings—a dark art that often involved manipulations of parliamentary procedure and backroom cajoling almost unto blackmail—had been a specialty for the generation of young conservatives who’d been protégés of a man named F. Clifton White. In the 1940s and 1950s, he had assembled within the Young Republicans National Federation a cabal that became known as the “Syndicate,” and made it the spine of the stealth organization that seized the Republican Party from the bottom up in the early 1960s to grab the nomination for Goldwater.

  Ironically, White himself was now working for Ford. His disciples, though, were hard at work for Reagan, plucking delegates one by one from the grip of Republican machines in states that pundits had believed were all but in the bag for the incumbent. On May 8, they won ten of seventeen delegates chosen in Wyoming’s GOP state convention and eighteen in Oklahoma. The next Saturday they won nine more in Louisiana. A scouting trip to Missouri by John Sears and David Keane revealed slim pickings for the Show Me State’s June 11 convention—but they dispatched Morton Blackwell and Don Devine, two former Young Republican hands and were now professional conservative activists, and who got to work organizing there. “There is a developing trend for people we had counted on in caucus states to move to an uncommitted posture,” one worried Ford official told the New York Times.

  Another worrisome trend for Ford: in states like New Jersey, with its sixty-seven delegates to be chosen in a June 8 primary, Reagan forces decided not to waste resources in the face of a liberal Republican establishment. So low-level Republican officials and just plain ordinary folks took matters into their own hands—the better to save civilization from the infidels. “A vote for Ford is a vote for Kissinger and I’m not going to let the Republican Party sell our country down the river or down the Panama Canal either,” a Mrs. Eleanor Day Wimill told the reporters who came calling on her little basement organization. This cadre was made up of small businessmen, retirees, housewives, and college students. Their l
eader was a phone installer. They had little money, only enthusiasm—and the lethargy of the Ford campaign. One Ford supporter in New Jersey, the former congressman Charles Sandman, said he preferred Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller, for his part, did not say no when asked if he might ever become a candidate. Instead he was vague: “I don’t see that scenario.” He added that Ford’s moves to the right were “very dangerous” for the general election.

  Reagan’s forces grew arrogant. At a rally in Ohio a helicopter trailed the banner, “REAGAN FOR PRESIDENT, FORD FOR VICE PRESIDENT.” The candidate began speaking of a “probable” first-ballot win. For his part Ford spoke more and more about his admiration of Harry Truman—who’d declined to run for reelection in 1952 rather than face a humiliating loss. “Some observers,” the New York Times reported, “said they sensed that Mr. Ford’s emotion might bespeak an awareness that his Presidency could be of a brief duration.” The president zoomed ahead by about a hundred convention votes the last week in May when 119 of 154 New York delegates officially pledged for Ford. But no one knew what would happen to all those delegates nationwide that Ford thought had pledged for him, but which now seemed so very, very soft. The answer might come on June 8—when contests in California, Ohio, and New Jersey would select a third of the delegates needed to nominate.

  IT WAS THE SAME ON the Democratic side—where Jimmy Carter was struggling, and straddling, to close the sale. Elizabeth Drew did further damage to his “sincerity” image by deconstructing the calculation behind it: “The small-town, rural image was debated long and hard. The prevailing feeling was that although most people didn’t have anything similar in their own lives, it had appealing overtones of roots, stability, things to which even people in cities would be drawn. . . . The decision to situate the Carter campaign headquarters in Atlanta instead of Washington, another much debated one, was based not just on logistics—the fact that Carter and his staff lived in Atlanta, the availability of volunteers—but also on image . . . of being not-of-Washington. . . . Even the role of the peanut”—the campaign’s charming symbol—“was discussed. Some argued that it should be played down, because it might seem a little corny. But then it was found that the peanut had a sort of humble quality, and this became convenient to a campaign in which, as an aide put it, smiling, ‘humility was not our long suit.’ ”

  Straddling was his long suit. In San Francisco he said he both supported biblical teachings against homosexuality (he mentioned Leviticus 20:13, which reads, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death, their blood shall be upon them”) and would sign a bill protecting gay rights. He said, “I will pick my Cabinet on the basis of merit, not politics,” and that others were “horse-trading for the highest office of the world—I’ve not done that.” Yet he also began embracing an idea he had heretofore rejected, the Kennedy-Corman universal heath insurance bill, beloved of the labor leaders he was courting. He said both that he would never give up control of the Panama Canal and that he would renegotiate the treaty (but Panamanians made America giving up control of the canal their condition for negotiating).

  But the deconstructions were not having an effect. Carter spoke to the Ohio AFL-CIO convention in Cincinnati and said his was “the one campaign that speaks to and for the average hardworking, taxpaying American.” He said, “My critics don’t want to stop Carter. They want to stop the reforms I’m committed to. They want to stop the people of this country from regaining control of their government. They want to preserve the status quo, to preserve politics as usual, to maintain at all costs their own entrenched, unresponsive, bankrupt, irresponsible, political power.” Then he quoted Bob Dylan. The next day a CBS/New York Times poll showed he was the only Democratic contender running ahead of President Ford.

  He spoke to the California state legislature (a sign by the door warned visitors to enter at their own risk because the building was not structurally sound), saying, “If I had to sum up in one word what this campaign is all about, that word would be ‘faith.’ ” A cover article appeared in Rolling Stone by the magazine’s drug-addled gonzo literary superhero Hunter S. Thompson; it was more than fifteen thousand words long. He wrote that “on the 200th anniversary of what used to be called ‘The American Dream,’ we are going to have our noses rubbed, day after day—on the tube and in the headlines—in this mess we have made for ourselves”—but that Jimmy Carter just might point the way out. Thompson wrote of a 1974 Law Day speech by Carter in Georgia he happened to stumble into, and called it “the heaviest and most eloquent thing I have ever heard from the mouth of a politician.” The article was called “Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith.” People yearned to believe.

  Carter traveled to Los Angeles to speak at the dedication of a new wing of Martin Luther King Hospital in Watts. He launched into a preacherly rhythm:

  I see an America poised not only on the brink of a new century but at the dawn of a new era of honest, compassionate, responsive government.

  I see an American government that has turned away from scandals and corruption and official cynicism and finally become as decent as its people.

  I see an America with a tax system that does not steal from the poor and give to the rich.

  I see an America with a job for every man and woman who can work, and a decent standard of living for those who cannot.

  I see an America in which my child and your child and every child receives an education second to none in the world.

  I see an American government that does not spy on its citizens or harass its citizens, but respects your dignity and your privacy and your right to be let alone.

  I see an American foreign policy that is firm and consistent and generous, and that once again is a beacon for the hopes of the world. . . .

  I see an America in which Martin Luther King’s dream is our national dream.

  I see an American on the move again, united, its wounds healed, its head high, a diverse and vital nation, moving into its third century with confidence and competence and compassion, an America that lives up the majesty of its Constitution and the simple decency of its people.

  This is the America that I see and that I am committed to as I run for President.

  I ask for your help.

  You will always have mine.

  The speech was titled “The Power of Love.” The campaign bought five minutes on all three networks to run a commercial based on its themes. The New York Times’ Charles Mohr called it “one of the most moving speeches on the racial dilemma heard in a long time,” and reported, “An almost physical wave of love seemed to pass from the black listeners to Mr. Carter”—“ethnic purity” be damned.

  That was June 1. On June 4, the Associated Press revealed that only 20 percent of Carter’s backers knew his positions on the issues. But they yearned to believe.

  The next day, Hubert Humphrey said he was still considering accepting a convention draft, and would make his ultimate decision on June 18. Frank Church was surging—then, when he was on the bus to his next event in Ohio, he received news that the Teton Dam, whose construction he had controversially backed, had been breached. He told the press that “a wall of water fifteen feet high is heading toward Idaho Falls,” and broke off his campaign. Governor Brown might be a fascinating fellow—but no: it was simply too late. Mathematically, it was now unlikely Carter would fall below the majority threshold a draft would require. Mayor Daley said that if Carter won Ohio he would be the nominee. Carter began speaking of his nomination campaign in the past tense: “I think a lot of people have become more aware of the presence of peanuts in the country this year. I think that the image of a peanut, which is a crop that I grow, being kind of small and insignificant but cumulatively being very important to the American people, is one that fairly accurately mirrors the kind of campaign that we’ve run.” For its June 8 issue the National Enquirer dug up a quote about a 1969 incident in which he’d said, “One thing
’s for sure, I’ll never make fun of people who say they’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky. If I become President, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists.”

  As goes the National Enquirer, so goes the nation?

  ELIZABETH DREW VISITED A TYPICAL Reagan campaign rally the Sunday before the Ohio, New Jersey, and California elections, in a high school auditorium in “one of the more conservative sections of the conservative city”—Cincinnati, her hometown. Ford would almost certainly win a landslide in New Jersey. Reagan would almost certainly win a landslide in California. What happened in Ohio, the classic presidential bellwether state—where Reagan’s campaign had set a modest expectation of ten of ninety-seven delegates up for grabs—might just determine whether the Republicans would see their first brokered convention since 1948.

  The auditorium was draped in red, white, and blue. (“Ford’s decor usually consists of blue-and-white President Ford banners.”) The star entered; the crowd erupted. A supporting cast warmed them up as the man of the hour stood by at the ready: Ken Curtis, the man who played Festus in Gunsmoke (“I am speaking up for Governor Reagan because I am a concerned American”); the Hollywood superstar introduced as “General Jimmy Stewart,” who, in his best aw-shucks Mr. Smith tones, spoke of Reagan’s ability to reach all sorts of people—“I know in the acting racket this is one of the things you’re supposed to be able to do. . . . There are all sort of tricks.” Ronald Reagan, though, was for real.