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

by Rick Perlstein

  The man of the hour took the podium; another roar. He told a favorite joke, about how the government was like a baby (“an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other”). He laid into his opponent, who “has spent most of his adult life as a member of the Washington establishment”—“Eleventh Commandment” be damned. He said he would create a budget surplus—then turn the money back over to the people. “It’s never been done!” he quoted a government official as having told him. “Wellll, they’ve never had an actor up there before!”—and the audience roared. (Nancy, “who has perfected the adoring gaze,” looked up at him—adoringly.) He offered a favorite homily about federal waste—a supposed sociology study backed by $249,000 in federal money “to find out it’s better to be young, rich, and healthy than old, poor, and sick.” He spoke of all the things he’d done for education and health as California governor, “and he sounds almost like a disciple of the Great Society,” Drew said. Then, both speaker and audience indifferent to the contradiction, he said government “does its best for us when it does nothing.” The crowd went wild.

  Then it was foreign policy time, and the crowd was launched into the stratosphere.

  “I don’t believe the United States can afford to give up something that belongs to us because we’ve been threatened with trouble from a dictator. . . .

  “Détente has become a one-way street.” (When, an Agence France-Presse reporter asked plaintively, “has zees become a dirty French word?”)

  He said, “It’s time to give the schools back to the states and the local districts, where they belong.”

  An aide nudged Elizabeth Drew and told her to be ready for what was about to happen next: the biggest applause line of every single speech:

  “And who knows? If we can get Washington out of the classroom, maybe we can get God back in.”

  At that, the New Yorker’s political correspondent apologized to her readers for having told them only months earlier that running for president was something Reagan the radio personality was doing only to burnish his marketing potential. This was a “real challenge to the President. . . . This year has taught us not to underestimate him.”

  WHERE IT DID NOT UNDERESTIMATE him, the Eastern Establishment Press insulted him.

  May 31, the Washington Post, from Los Angeles, reported: “Reagan, who last week received the Father of the Year award in a ceremony here, will miss the high school graduation of his 17-year-old son, Ronald Prescott, in order to campaign in Ohio.” The next day it corrected this: “The Washington Post incorrectly reported the campaign schedule of Ronald Reagan in yesterday’s paper. Reagan will attend the high school graduation of his son this Friday and also attended a Los Angeles Republican dinner before leaving Saturday to campaign in Ohio.” Perhaps to mitigate the damage to his family-friendly image, a spot was filmed for the California primary with daughter Maureen, sitting on the floor with a family scrapbook.

  President Ford had some new commercials of his own. He had recently retained the Madison Avenue wizard who for Ty-D-Bol launched the little man sailing across a toilet tank, for Wisk invented “ring around the collar,” and who bid to make Schaefer the brew of preference for alcoholics—“Schaefer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one.” To that august body of work he now added an imperishable ad for the Leader of the Free World:

  “Ellie! Are you working for President Ford?”

  “Only about twenty-six hours a day!”

  (The two friends pass a supermarket.)

  “Notice anything about these fruit prices lately?”

  “Well, they don’t seem to be going up the way they used to.”

  “President Ford has cut inflation in half.”

  “In half? Wow!”

  (The New York Times, for the benefit of sophisticates who boasted of not owning a television set, helpfully explained that the line was delivered “in the astonished tones TV housewives use when they discover that their brand of paper towels doesn’t absorb water nearly so rapidly as a friend’s.”)

  “It’s just that I hate to think where we’d be without him.”

  Comes the male voice-over: “President Ford is leading us back to prosperity. Stay with him. He knows the way.”

  The Ford campaign also added this commercial, in heavy rotation in California. It sent Ronald Reagan ballistic:

  If you’ve been waiting for this presidential campaign to become a little clearer so that you can make a choice—it’s happened. Last Wednesday Ronald Reagan said he would send American troops to Rhodesia. Thursday he clarified that. He said they could be observers or advisors. What does he think happened in Vietnam? Or was Governor Reagan playing with words?

  When you vote on Tuesday remember—Governor Reagan couldn’t start a war. President Reagan could.

  The record of what he had actually said about Rhodesia, in a press conference at the Sacramento Press Club, was vague. Reagan called the ad a “smear” and an “absolute distortion of the facts.” “The words poured out of him in angry, snapping tones,” said the New York Times. It raised the vituperation between the two men to the proverbial fever pitch. On Face the Nation the Sunday before the three big primaries, Ford said Reagan’s opposition to the Panama negotiations could lead to “guerrilla war,” and pointed Republicans to “the tragedy of 1964” should Reagan be nominated. Reagan all but called his opponent a liar: “Leadership today, I believe, calls for going to the American people and telling them the truth.” Ford sent his wife out to be interviewed by columnist Helen Thomas—who learned that “Betty Ford feels almost as strongly against forced busing as her husband.” Reagan said he might not vote for Ford if the latter ended up the nominee. John Wayne introduced Reagan in Newport Beach, California—and, asked by NBC why he was supporting him, answered, “Because Jerry Ford is too fucking dumb to be president.”

  Next, as if on cue, it sounded like Jerry Ford was impersonating Chevy Chase instead of the other way around.

  WASHINGTON (AP)—Six-foot-tall President Ford may have to get a helicopter with a higher doorway.

  He lightly bumped his head again Sunday as he was getting aboard on the South Lawn for the start of a campaign trip to New Jersey and Ohio.

  The incident happened as the President was trying to turn and wave good-bye.

  Then he motorcaded through the Buckeye State. In Middletown, where they made stainless steel, he announced he was limiting imports of the stuff. In Dayton, he announced he was ordering $36 million in new construction at the city’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Gary Trudeau in Doonesbury, for his part, presented a bemused Democratic candidate: “I believe that Mr. Ford has reacted desperately to the Reagan challenge. Especially in the use of the patronage prerogatives of his office!” “Governor, are you referring to Nebraska’s new submarine base?”

  IT WORKED IN OHIO, WHERE Ford prevailed 55 to 45, with Reagan picking up only six delegates. But in California the Reagan landslide was even greater than expected, 65 to 35. Stu Spencer speculated that Ford’s Rhodesia commercial had backfired, costing the president 8 points. The Republican race was still on.

  On election night Reagan’s adopted and biological children appeared onstage together for the first time, on a set made up to look like a train to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City. Wrote Michael Reagan in his memoir, “I was so proud to be on that stage with my father that I didn’t want the moment to end. If only some of the love those people had for Dad would somehow find its way to me, my problems would be solved. Please love me too, I thought.”

  Jerry Brown (a rare childless bachelor in politics) won a landslide in California, too. “Every state I’ve gone into, Jimmy Carter’s lost,” Jerry Brown said. “So I will go forward. . . . The Democratic contest is still on.” It wasn’t. Carter had 1,514 delegates, nine more than he needed to be nominated on the first ballot. Brown added, “The American people have begun to question what Carter is saying, if he’s saying anything at all.�
� They hadn’t. Gallup’s postprimary poll found voters favoring him over Ford 53 to 39 and over Reagan 58 to 35.

  Insider Washington was a different story. George McGovern called Jimmy Carter “a dangerous man.” Bob Shrum called him “not human.” Joseph Kraft called him “a pig in a poke” and Evans and Novak noticed his “streak of vindictiveness” and “implacable hostility to any opposition.” But outside Washington, the people had spoken. They yearned to believe. And so the leaders followed. Hubert Humphrey took himself out of the race. George Wallace said, “He’s entitled to the nomination. . . . We’ve got to overlook many things. He’ll make a fine candidate.” Mayor Daley said that “the ballgame is over.” Scoop Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, and Lloyd Bentsen all announced their support. The nominee-apparent announced a speaking tour staking out his foreign policy, finally—having said all spring that he would offer specifics on world affairs only after he had won.

  BICENTENNIAL NEWS: ON JUNE 1 in New York, hundreds of glassy-eyed Moonies, after knocking on doors for weeks, plastering the Bronx with slick posters in which their True Father raised his arm in a distinctly Hitlerian salute, managed to help half-fill Yankee Stadium for a five-hour “Bicentennial God Bless America” rally. Outside, a pamphlet war raged: Jews for Jesus and “Jews for Judaism”; feuding Evangelical denominations; Hare Krishna and the followers of Guru Ji; National Citizens Engaged in Reuniting Families Inc. (A member of that anticult group said of Moon’s Unification Church, “They took our children, and we want to get them back.” Another parent of a Moonie, however, disagreed. She told a reporter she was glad her twenty-six-year-old daughter had finally found something “genuine.”) Inside the ballpark high winds scattered red, white, and blue balloons and after a summer squall nearly ripped down the giant REV. SUN MYUNG MOON, PRINCIPLE SPEAKER banner that hung between the upper and lower decks. Fireworks and a marching band ushered Rev. Moon to an outfield podium. He had just bought the forty-one-floor New Yorker Hotel, across the street from Madison Square Garden, as the church’s “World Mission Center” and faced a $1.8 million lawsuit for holding a nineteen-year-old in involuntary servitude and violating federal labor laws for his unpaid army of evangelists. He held forth in Korean as his chief deputy, Bo Hi Pak, a former colonel in the South Korean army, cried out in simultaneous translation:

  There are critics who say, “Why is Reverend Moon so involved in America’s Bicentennial? It is none of his business.” Ladies and gentlemen, if there is illness in your home, do you not need a doctor from outside? If your home catches on fire, do you not need firefighters from outside? God has sent me to America in the role of a doctor, in the role of a firefighter.

  (Moonies applauded in creepy unison. Others booed and streamed for the exits.)

  In the 1950s America seemed to be the hope of the world. The symbol of America was the city of New York. Today, however, the world has lost faith in America, and New York has become a jungle of immorality and depravity, a city transformed under the attack of evil.

  (His point was conveniently illustrated by marauding bands of teenagers, exploding firecrackers, throwing smoke bombs, and hurtling refuse from the upper deck.)

  In Boston that same week, someone set fire to the gift shop of the tourist replica of the ship from the Boston Tea Party; two days later, a bomb rocked Plymouth Rock. An anonymous call to the papers from something called the “Defense League” said the attacks were responses to Attorney General Levi’s decision not to intervene in Supreme Court appeals of Judge Garrity’s desegregation decision, and that more bombs would follow unless forced busing was immediately stopped.

  Boston had lost the competition to be seat of the nation’s Bicentennial festivities to Philadelphia, whose mayor, Frank Rizzo, faced a corruption-driven recall drive and was described by a writer in the Catholic magazine Commonweal as a “racist whose very existence should be a national embarrassment.” Rizzo told the hometown Inquirer that the city had become “a target for attempts at disruption and violence by a substantial coalition of leftist radicals” who intend “to come here in the thousands” to disrupt “the rights of the majority who are going here to enjoy themselves with their family.” He asked for fifteen thousand federal troops.

  A Washington, D.C., police official testified to the Senate internal security subcommittee, “A variety of groups, most of them basically Marxist-Leninist and some openly terrorist, have discussed plans to disrupt the Bicentennial . . . commanded by the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, a support organization for the Weather Underground.”

  At West Point, the entire junior class was barred from summer break as a result of the cheating investigation. In Phoenix, on June 2, a forty-seven-year-old investigative reporter for the Arizona Republic, a father of seven, was murdered while pursuing a tip in a corporate corruption investigation when he turned the key in his car’s ignition and a bomb planted in the floorboard exploded. In Miami, on June 4, $3 million in smuggled cocaine was found on Colombia’s 203-foot three-masted entrant in the festive “Tall Ships” race to Newport, Rhode Island (“COCAINE FOUND ON BICENTENNIAL SHIP”). The United Nations World Food Council, meeting in Rome, released a report predicting a “world food disaster by 1985.”

  America’s incoming ambassador to Lebanon, Francis E. Meloy Jr., on his way to present his credentials to the country’s president, was kidnapped with one of the embassy’s economic counselors by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine while crossing the division between Beirut’s Christian and Muslim sectors. Their bullet-riddled bodies were found on a beach shortly thereafter. Meloy was the second U.S. ambassador to be killed by terrorists in the line of duty during Gerald Ford’s tenure, after Rodger Paul Davies in Cyprus.

  Six fully rigged vessels collided with one another at the start of the Tall Ships race in Bermuda. And on the lighter side, Harry Reasoner gave an editorial on ABC News. With distaste, he noted the half-kidding remark of a friend that all these primaries were great for the moral health of America: “Several hundred of the best reporters in the country have been following the candidates around. This keeps them from other investigations, so if anything bad is going on, maybe at least we don’t know about it, which is nice for a change.” Happy birthday, America!

  FORD AND REAGAN BOTH DROPPED in on the Missouri Republican Party’s weekend convention. Thirty of the state’s delegates had already been chosen in balloting by congressional district, fifteen for Ford, twelve for Reagan, three uncommitted. Nineteen would be chosen here in Springfield. Most, the conventional wisdom had augured, would be going to Ford: the handsome young governor, Christopher “Kit” Bond, and his attorney general, John Danforth, had it wired. At the podium at the Shrine Mosque, both officials told the delegates they couldn’t be re-elected on a ticket headed by Ronald Reagan. Bond pointed out the new Gallup poll showing Ford as the better candidate against Carter.

  Then, on Friday June 11, the President of the United States all but put some 1,400 Missouri Republicans to sleep with his flat Midwestern drone. In the same spot on the next day, the former governor of California electrified them.

  And behind the scenes Morton Blackwell and Don Devine got to work.

  Ford forces had made a motion to de-credential Reagan delegates on technical grounds; that was a typical feint at contested political conventions. And frequently—for instance, at the Democratic conclave in Miami Beach that nominated George McGovern in 1972—a melodrama would ensue over the question of whether the rules should be interpreted to allow challenged delegates to vote on the disposition of their own case. This was a political tradition.

  In the Republican Party, however, there was another tradition: conservatives, practiced in the arts of martyrdom, half out of a sincere sense of cultural grievance and half in poker-style bluffing, whiningly accuse wicked “liberal” party grandees—“[t]he New York kingmakers’ establishment,” with their “America Last foreign policy,” as Phyllis Schlafly put it in her 1964 classic of the genre, A Choice, Not an Echo—of fraud an
d theft when challenged conservative delegates are not allowed to vote on their own case (or when challenged delegates are allowed to vote on their own case, if it is conservatives doing the challenging). And this time, such whining worked.

  Blackwell and Devine read out the bill of grievance at a news conference. “Thou Shalt Not Steal” signs they passed out dotted the floor, for the benefit of news cameras, during convention sessions They put together a mock “newsletter” decrying all manner of sins by Ford forces, taping their draft to the door of the Ford offices and threatening to release it to the papers the next day unless the Ford campaign buckled. Which, after a dramatic night of negotiations, they did. Reagan emerged with eighteen delegates—it would have been nineteen had the governor’s wife not broken out in tears at the podium, begging the delegates to let her husband participate in the convention in Kansas City.

  It was the first state convention after the primaries closed. The Reagan forces scored a coup—a “humiliating rebuff,” according to Evans and Novak. The Reagan forces had apparently worked those columnists over, too: they accused Fordites of trying “to frighten grass-roots conservative diehards into ignoring their hearts and following their appointed president.” The Washington Post published an estimate that Reagan was now but seventy-one delegates behind, 958 to 887, with 259 uncommitted or yet to be decided. “Our Next President (Pick One),” read the Time cover on newsstands that Monday. It quoted the Ford hand James A. Baker III, a Texas attorney who’d gotten into politics to help his friend George H. W. Bush, and whom Time called “Fred” Baker: “These Reagan people don’t care: they’re absolutely ruthless. Our people just aren’t used to this uncompromising hardball stuff.”

  And in a letter signed “Dutch” to his dear friend Lorraine Wagner, the former fan club president, Reagan wrote about how the Ford people had “shamelessly railroaded” delegates at the previous weekend’s conventions in Arkansas and Kansas. “Then came Missouri and we were ready. . . . It’s a battle now for each single delegate so we’ll go after the undecided or the shaky committed. If you know of any let us know.”