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

by Rick Perlstein

  Before any delegate got to that point he’d already been well massaged on the phone—an intricate strategic operation that involved consulting an elaborate binder, updated daily, in which each delegate’s ideology, employment, spouse’s name and children’s names and ages, hobbies, what issues the delegate cared about (“upset about federal regulation of independent dairy producers,” read the entry for a delegate named Charles N. Dodd, which also noted that he should be addressed as “Chuck”), religion . . . and, most crucially, the names of the Republican officials most likely to hold sway over his loyalties. Constant follow-up babysitting calls—What do you need? What do you want?—came next, exquisitely calculated to stop just shy of feeling like pressure.

  Reagan, lacking a state dining room or Marine helicopter, did the same work in hotel suites, deploying his own special secret weapon: charm. Whenever Ford or Reagan moved a single delegate—after a conclave with Reagan at the Penn-Harris Motor Inn in Harrisburg, a twenty-one-year-old college student and former Ford-leaner named James Stein “emerged from the meeting . . . to announce that he was now ‘unleaned’ ”—it was news in the Washington Post or the New York Times.

  The final round of state conventions had come the weekend of July 9. On July 6, Reagan had rented a half hour on ABC. His speech projected the confidence of a general-election candidate. Mentioning neither Ford nor Kissinger, he called for a “New Coalition” of Republicans and right-leaning Democrats and Independents. He thrust a dagger at Jimmy Carter: “You can’t get to the heart of an issue by being vague about it. I’m not asking you to help me because I say, ‘Trust me, don’t ask questions, and everything will be fine.’ I ask you to trust yourself. Trust your own knowledge of what’s happening in America.” (Then, aiming at the Catholic swing vote, he repeated one of his favorite quotations—from Pope Pius XII: “The American people have a genius for great and unselfish deeds. Into the hands of America, God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind.”)

  One thousand one hundred thirty delegates were needed for the nomination. The New York Times said Ford had 1,067 committed to him and Reagan had 1,043. On Friday Ford pulled in twelve in Nebraska, four went for Reagan, and two emerged uncommitted. The president gave a surprise press conference in which he said his earlier statements that Reagan was not qualified to be president should be considered “political license” and that now “I exclude nobody.” (The Times: “FORD NOW FINDS REAGAN QUALIFIED TO BE PRESIDENT.”) On July 10 Evans and Novak reported, “President Ford’s fractious campaign is lurching toward his increasingly probable nomination in an atmosphere contaminated by recriminations, backstabbing, and personal power plays which have brought the campaign to the brink of anarchy.” Then that night Reagan emerged with fifteen of sixteen at-large delegates from Colorado. It had been ugly: the pro-Ford convention chairman slashed his hand across his throat to have Reagan’s microphone cut after he exceeded a supposed ten-minute time limit; then the president’s son Jack was allowed to go on for sixteen minutes.

  The Washington Post said the score was now Ford 1,052, Reagan 995.

  ALL EYES TURNED SOUTH—FIRST TO Plains, Georgia, population six hundred, where another sort of joyous summer political festival was under way. At the tiny town’s quaint little railroad depot, which Carter folks had shrewdly turned into his symbolic national campaign headquarters, Fritz and his pal Jimmy gave an impromptu press conference filled with humor and good cheer. The Georgian was challenged by a reporter who wondered if the Minnesotan was willing to undergo a grueling campaign, having given up on the idea in 1974. Carter responded earnestly, “There is no doubt in my mind that he would be willing”—and then a reporter interrupted by recalling Mondale’s quip upon quitting that he didn’t want to “spend the rest of my life in Holiday Inns.” Carter looked over at his running mate, smiled, and handed him the microphone. Mondale, after pausing with fine comic timing: “I’ve checked and found they’ve all been redecorated. They’re marvelous places to stay and I’ve thought it over and that’s where I’d like to be.”

  The press corps cooed at eight-year-old Amy and her cute cat, Misty Malarky Ying Yang. The reporters challenged the Secret Service to a softball game. The Democratic nominee pitched for each team; Ralph Nader, the scourge of corporate America, umpired, wearing a suit and tie despite the stifling heat. A boom sounded in the distance. Secret Service agents rushed to the source: the gas station owned by Jimmy’s little brother Billy, where a spark from a vending machine had set off a three-thousand-gallon oil truck. How refreshing it must have been to witness an explosion not caused by the New World Liberation Front or the Red Guerrilla Family or the Weather Underground. It took but ten minutes for the tiny Plains fire department to contain the blaze; afterward, Billy handed out free beer. A reporter asked what his first thought had been when he heard the blast. He answered, “What was in that damn cash register. Saturday is a big day.”

  Billy—“Cast Iron,” according to the family nickname, for the stomach that seemed to withstand any abuse, especially from the beers he poured down his gullet one after the other after the other—was a star attraction. Reporters flocked to his Amoco station—one of only two places in town to buy beer. He had run for alderman, the story went, won, and made his first political act voting himself a liquor license; the only other filling station in town was owned by teetotalers. (“Billy gets the drinkers and the Williams boys get the Baptists,” Mayor A. L. Blanton explained.) There Billy held court on a wooden crate, chewing the fat with good ol’ boys, just like he did even when the likes of Clark Clifford weren’t blowing through town. He told reporters, “I got a mamma who joined the Peace Corps and went to India when she was sixty-eight. I got one sister who’s a holy-roller preacher. I got another sister who wears a helmet and rides a motorcycle. And I got a brother who thinks he’s going to be president. So that makes me the only sane person in the family.”

  He told Mike Royko how he’d liked New York (seventy-four Carter relatives attended the convention: Dogpatch at Madison Square Garden). “I went to this big party that Rollin’ Stone magazine threw, and there were all kinds of celebrities there, I guess. They took my picture and the Washington Post put it in the paper. I told the editor I’m gonna sue him. He put me in the society page instead of where I belong. Haw! I belong in the police news. . . . Anyway, I met this nice fella and he took me to lunch today. Turns out he’s president of the Atlantic Richfield Oil Company.”

  The Billy Carter fad was of a piece with a new facet of the national mood. People called it “Redneck Chic.” The Allman Brothers and Billy Carter. The hard-stompin’ boogie of ZZ Top, whose Worldwide Texas Tour opened that spring and packed auditoriums and stadiums across the country for the next eighteen months, and included onstage some 260 speakers, 130 lights, a longhorn steer, a bison, two vultures, a veritable garden of cacti, and two very live rattlesnakes. And citizens band radios—especially citizens band radios: “that Japanese toy, the trucker’s joy,” as the country song put it.

  Millions of Americans who did not own eighteen-wheelers and who did not have to evade the highway patrol were snapping up CBs, participating vicariously in the culture of America’s new cowboys, the over-the-road independent truckers celebrated in the hit country song “Convoy” (five million copies sold, and soon to be a major motion picture). Time magazine ran a feature on CBs in May (“Jimmy’s Breakthrough” was on the cover) and its users’ “cryptic, demotic jargon,” which “threatens to outdate any dictionary of American slang within months”: “double-nickel” (the national speed limit of 55 mph), “smokey bears” (cops), “Tricky Dick’s” (San Clemente, California). Snoopy had a CB radio. So did Betty Ford. Her handle was “First Momma.” “People in our kind of society, torn from our roots, want to relate,” the Columbia University sociologist Amitai Etzioni explained. “With a CB, you can have a personal contact with the turn of a dial.”

  That was what Plains was about, too—and the way Georgia, the state where Jimmy Carter’s predecessor
became governor by running black customers off his restaurant’s property with a pistol, had suddenly become cool. Looking in on Jimmy’s hometown, America could partake of a sort of Dixie Disneyland. The news shows couldn’t get enough of it: all the elements in the Democrats’ once-fractious coalition ambling along its sunbaked streets—or street, really; Plains pretty much had only one, where every other store, Mondale later remembered, was “a Carter worm shop or a Carter peanut warehouse.” This, in between appointments to supplicate the potential next Leader of the Free World for a cabinet post or brief him on the situation in the Middle East—or, in the case of Ralph Nader, recommend he read the antibusiness tracts Taming the Giant Corporation and America, Inc. to understand the corporate establishment resistance he would be up against.

  Another establishment—that of the Democratic Party—swallowed hard when New York magazine reported that month that Charles Kirbo, one of Carter’s right-hand men, had once asked, “Who’s this fella Califano? He called me and said he wants to help.” Joseph Califano, one of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s closest White House aides, former general counsel to the Democratic National Committee, was one of the most powerful Democratic attorneys in Washington. Who are these bozos who want to run our town and don’t even know who Joseph Califano is? In Plains, though, that fence was mended when Carter named Califano his “special adviser on family matters.” He also went hard against Jerry Ford, in a press conference, on the steps of Plains High School, following the Senate’s passage of a new special prosecutor bill: “Had I been president,” he said, “I would not have pardoned President Nixon until after the trial had been completed in order to let all the facts relating to his crimes be known.”

  Then he started traveling. On July 22 he lunched with business leaders at “21” in Manhattan. (Billy Carter had dined there during the convention; denied entrance because he wasn’t wearing a tie, he borrowed the one the maître d’ was wearing.) “One week after he attacked the ‘political and economic elite’ in his acceptance speech,” Elizabeth Drew reported, he “told the businessmen that he would not come up with his tax-reform proposals until he had been in office a year . . . and he was negative or opaque about changing certain existing tax benefits for business.” It made for quite a contrast to his rhetoric on the Democratic primary trail, during which he promised on each and every stop to completely overhaul a tax system he called “a disgrace to the human race.” Ten-four on that, good buddy.

  THE WASHINGTON POST RAN A big front-page banner headline on July 19: “REAGAN CAMP: AIR OF RESIGNATION.” It began, “Ronald Reagan has returned to his ranch from the last Republican state convention, with some of his top aides and supporters acknowledging privately that he may have reached the end of the Presidential political trail.” The reporter, Lou Cannon, who’d been building trust with Reagan since he covered him from the beginning of his first term in Sacramento, found the Californian “subdued.” Reagan told him, “I think my candidacy has been worthwhile.” Cannon called these “the words of a seemingly defeated candidate who was going back to his ranch content, believing that he had done his best even if that best proved not to be quite enough for victory.”

  The Post also reported the day’s estimated delegate tally: 1,093 for Ford and 1,030 for Reagan, with 136 uncommitted. But Time had it much closer, 1,104 to 1,090. And the Post soon climbed down from its claim after Senator Laxalt railed at the capital’s paper of record like a reanimated political ghost of Ron Ziegler: “What we are seeing on the part of the Washington Post . . . is an effort to psych out Ronald Reagan’s delegates, potential delegates, and supporters. It won’t work. They are not about to be fooled into forfeiting that chance by liberals in the media who are fearful that Reagan will win.” The next Post headline was “REAGAN CAMP CLAIMS ENOUGH DELEGATES TO WIN.” But Ford strategists claimed sixteen new delegates had moved to their camp, with Ford announcing from the North Lawn of the White House, “We’re getting very close right now to the magic number.” Reagan forces then announced six more delegates, and said the new ones Ford was claiming had been counted in his column already. There were now more delegates being counted by both sides than would be present at the convention; the psychological gamesmanship had become absurd.

  WHAT MATTERED MOST NOW WAS Mississippi, where it appeared some sixty souls would have it in their power to decide the fate of their party.

  The Mississippi delegation would have thirty votes in Kansas City but sixty voters—thirty regular delegates and thirty alternates, each of their choices counting for one-half of a vote. But it was yet more complicated. The rules of the Mississippi Republican Party stipulated that it voted at the conventions as a bloc: either thirty votes for Reagan, or thirty votes for Ford. The requirement that the choice of a majority of a delegation would control the vote of the entire delegation was called a “unit rule.” Unit rules were supposed to be illegal under the bylaws of the national party. But the Magnolia State had traditionally been allowed an exception. Meanwhile, Mississippi’s bylaws also allowed the unit rule to be set aside if a majority of the delegates and alternates chose to do so. A complicated business. But Republicanism in Mississippi was a complicated thing.

  For most of a century, by most white people south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the Republican Party was viewed as little more than the political wing of the Union army—the marauding band that looted plantations, burned fields from Atlanta to the sea, and turned freed slaves into an occupying political army. The ruling Bourbons in states like Mississippi—especially Mississippi—indoctrinated the white population, rich and poor, to believe that a strong Republican Party, if allowed to flourish in the South, would court “niggers” as its shock troops: a bloc vote to revive the “Black Republican” tyranny of the Reconstruction era. So it was that to vote Republican in the South, where the secret ballot hardly existed, was to risk violence at worst and social ostracization at best. Indeed, preventing a viable Republican Party was one of the purposes for which the Ku Klux Klan was formed.

  After Reconstruction, Southern Republican organizations were shells, “post office parties” that existed merely for the purpose of choosing delegations to Republican conventions. These Southern Republican delegations served a crucial ideological purpose within a Republican Party that prided itself on its racial tolerance, because the delegations were mostly African-American—“black and tan,” as they were known. The organizations weren’t real parties. For thirty-six years, indeed, Mississippi’s black Republican chairman didn’t even live in Mississippi.

  That ended abruptly in 1964, when a Democratic president from the South signed his landmark civil rights bill and the Republicans nominated a senator, Barry Goldwater, who opposed it. Mississippi voted 87 percent for Goldwater in 1964—only three months after FBI agents pulled the rotting corpses of three Northern civil rights workers—James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—out from beneath the earthen dam where they’d been buried by Klansmen with the cooperation of local law enforcement. The state’s all-white Democratic Party ran Mississippi as a racist terror-state—but after the national Democratic Party betrayed them, conservatives chose, as Barry Goldwater once put it, to “go hunting where the ducks are.” Republicans recruited segregationists to their side with the argument that their party shared the Southern view that the federal government was a tyranny. Mississippi’s Republican platform read, “We feel segregation of the races is absolutely essential to harmonious racial relations and the continued progress of both races in the State of Mississippi.”

  Desegregation, when it finally started coming, was a moderating influence. The Republican candidate for governor in 1967, Rubel Phillips, said he hoped blacks would “become productive citizens and be taken off the welfare rolls,” which counted as moderation when compared with incumbent John Bell Williams’s favorite quip on the stump: “N.A.A.C.P. stands for ‘Niggers, Apes, Alligators, Coons, and Possums.’ ” Governor Reagan made a campaign commercial for Phillips; his daughter Maureen campaigned for h
im across the state. He got only 29.7 percent of the vote, but in 1972, Mississippi sent two Republicans to the House of Representatives, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran. Soon the state party chairman, a dynamic, garrulous, and ambitious operative named Clarke Reed, was saying, “The race issue is dead. The GOP won’t rely on demagoguery to win elections . . . there are other issues that are more important.”

  By then Republicans in Washington, and conservatives in Mississippi be they Republican or Democrat (like the incumbent Senator James Eastland, whose reelection Nixon secretly backed in 1972), were fighting for exactly the same things, in the same way. Like keeping the federal tax exemptions for the private schools that sprang up, often housed in churches, in direct proportion to the federal government’s aggressiveness in enforcing Brown v. Board of Education. (There were 17 non-Catholic private schools in Mississippi in the 1963–64 school year and 155 in 1970, with each of their 42,000 students enjoying a $185 state subsidy that typically covered half or more of the tuition.) Or fighting busing with the supposedly color-blind rhetoric of “neighborhood schools” and “quality education”—which was exactly what Gerald Ford said when he talked about busing, too.

  That convergence, though, now had a political consequence, which threatened to cleave the Mississippi Republican Party in two.

  The state party had decided to try to build for its future by handing out alternate spots to up-and-coming young Mississippi professionals. They were the type of people least in touch with folk traditions of the Republican right—such as an instinctive revulsion regarding arrogant Northeasterners. They were also more distant from the political folk traditions of the Southland—the anguished martyr complexes, the obsession with not being disrespected by the Yankee swells. Unlike the ideological dead-enders, veterans of the Goldwater campaign, they didn’t see much difference between Reagan and Ford—and, other things being equal, they were more inclined to side with the establishment than with the insurgency as the best course for their own personal and professional advancement. The upshot was that the Mississippi convention delegation, the tipping point for the entire contest, was for all practical purposes tied between Reagan and Ford supporters.