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

by Rick Perlstein

  Reaganites had not seen the problem coming. Clarke Reed was believed by Reagan’s strategists to be a solid conservative. Mississippi was the most conservative state in the union. So the matter was thought settled: Mississippi would go for Reagan. “Don’t worry about Clarke,” went David Keene’s refrain, every time a concerned Reaganite asked him what resources they were pouring into Mississippi. And indeed Ford might not have contested the state at all, were the race not so precariously close. But Reed turned out to be worth worrying about. His conservatism and his Southern patriotism appeared to be diluted by his lust to be a national Republican power broker—the guy national reporters called up for quotes. (He gave good quote, his Delta drawl dipping into the argot of a Greenwich Village hipster. Of a fellow political operative: “Man, this cat is good.” Of Ford attacking Reagan on the campaign trail: “It turns me off bad.”)

  The Ford team played to Reed’s vanity—calls from Dick Cheney, from Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, from Bill Simon, from Barry Goldwater; that invitation to sit next to the queen of England at a state dinner. They thought he might be easy to shake. For though Reed thought himself a master of Byzantine political power plays, they believed he would be easy to manipulate. He tried to hold his cards close to his chest, bluffing a strong hand—even while, behind his back, Ford operatives called his delegation one by one on the phone and worked an old political trick: “I’ve got thirty votes committed to the president, and we just need yours to put him over. Yours will be the thirty-first. You can give the president the nomination.” In that way they won what they thought were commitments from twenty-seven of the sixty Mississippians who would be traveling to Kansas City. The conservative in charge of Reagan’s operation in Mississippi, whose name was Billy Mounger, was outraged, claiming Reed must be running some sort of con. “You can’t trust Clarke Reed,” the administrative assistant to Representative Trent Lott, a Reagan backer, had told Reagan’s campaign managers back in January. “He’s a slippery, no-good son of a bitch.” But Reed himself was just as livid to learn that his delegates, still supposed to be uncommitted, were declaring willy-nilly for Ford.

  It was a mess. It came to a head at a final delegate caucus in Jackson on Sunday, July 25, just as the contest was becoming so close that the courting of undecided delegates entered you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up territory. A delegate from Oakville, Missouri, named Marlene Zinzel told the press what it had been like when the phone rang at the beauty parlor while she was having her hair set, and it was the President of the United States on the other end: “I could not believe it. I can hardly remember it. He told me he could win over Carter. He asked me if I would consider him and I said that I would.” A Rochester, New York, delegate told the press, “I hope they’re sending Air Force One for me because I won’t settle for anything else.” A New York delegate named Vito Battista told David Broder he would have been warmer for Ford had he been served Italian food in the White House. Ford won over an uncommitted delegate from Cherokee County, South Carolina, after his complaint about the cancellation of his small business loan earned him a personal letter of concern from the president and an hour-long phone call from the commerce secretary. Another uncommitted delegate was reported to have offered his vote if Reagan would arrange for $250,000 in new business for his law firm.

  And in Jackson, Harry Dent of South Carolina made the argument for Ford at Mississippi’s delegate caucus. Dent was the White House’s Southern liaison and as Strom Thurmond’s top political deputy the man most responsible for ensuring Nixon’s nomination in 1968. Dent was a Southern patriot—of the new, Republican breed. In the small Southern town that produced him, his great-uncle John “the Baptist” Prickett edited the newspaper. One upon a time, back in the days when South Carolina didn’t celebrate Independence Day because it was a “Yankee holiday,” an outraged reader called Prickett a “Republican S.O.B.” Prickett, who of course like every other white man in the Palmetto State was a Democrat, laid him flat with a punch. The baffled reader, upon recovering, asked what was the matter with calling him an S.O.B. “But you called me a Republican S.O.B.,” Prickett answered.

  In Jackson, Dent made an argument that played to the old familiar wounded Southern regional pride. Dent had been with Thurmond when he made the historic switch from Democrat to Republican to back Barry Goldwater in 1964 after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. After Nixon won the nomination in 1968, Dent ran Nixon’s “Thurmond Speaks for Nixon-Agnew” committee to keep Southerners from voting for George Wallace. Then he went to work in the White House, given the job of assuring Dixie power brokers that Nixon wouldn’t do anything to disturb the “Southern way of life.” He stayed in the job under Ford. Now he said the same thing in 1976 for Ford that he’d said in 1968 for Nixon, when a late-inning candidacy by Ronald Reagan had threatened Nixon’s hold on that convention’s Southern delegation. The argument was that a president who owed his victory to the South would eat out of Southerners’ hands.

  “Now my good friend Clarke is probably a little peeved with us because we’ve been down here trying to lobby you good folks,” he said, oozing South Carolina charm.

  “But I told Clarke that you can’t dress sixty beautiful women up in bikinis and put them on Broadway and not expect Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan to turn their heads and look at ’em. . . .

  “Friends, we’re looking at you. My goodness, you’re in the catbird seat if I’ve ever seen it. You know it took the whole South to do that in ’68 in the convention. Now it’s coming down just to Mississippi. Mississippi’s got a chance to strike a real blow for the South.”

  He drove home the argument retailing a Redneck Chic of his own—with a hint of anti-Semitic code. New York’s Republican state chairman, a Rockefeller protégé and Ford partisan, was Richard “Rosie” Rosenbaum. “It’s a question of whether Clarke’s gonna be the kingmaker or Rosie Rosenbaum’s gonna be the kingmaker,” Dent drawled. “That is, New York or Mississippi. Don’t let us down, friends. I’m not talking about Ford. I’m talking about the South. I’m in this thing because I’m for the South, and I feel what’s good for the South is good for the country and good for the Republican Party.”

  Dent almost, but not quite, prevailed. The meeting adjourned still uncommitted, delegates and alternates from each side shrieking at one another about sellouts and quislings and dirty deals, with neither campaign having any idea whether the thirty-one votes it needed would ever be forthcoming.

  And so Reagan’s John Sears finally decided on another strategy for the uncommitted-delegate quest: a Hail Mary pass.

  ELIZABETH DREW WAS ABLE TO connect by phone with a very busy Clarke Reed, who claimed his delegation was now leaning toward Reagan, but that “the only way we could abandon our neutrality up until the convention is if we had certain commitments. What Ford needs now is to show that he’s going to pick a running mate that will be compatible with his philosophy. The split ticket is a nightmare and a horror. With the so-called balanced ticket between a liberal and a conservative, you vote for a conservative and if he dies you get a liberal.”

  It hardly would have occurred to him to make the same public demand to Ronald Reagan, whose public pronunciations on the idea of picking a liberal running mate were quite as strong as Reed’s own: “I don’t believe in the old tradition of picking someone at the opposite end of the political spectrum because he can get some votes that you can’t get himself,” Reagan would say, “because that’s being false with the people who vote for you and your philosophy.” Then came John Sears’s surprise.

  Sears had brilliantly stewarded Ronald Reagan’s run from near impossibility to a dead heat. But when Robert Novak interviewed him in the middle of July, the columnist observed that it looked like he was now at the end of the road: Novak didn’t see any math that let Reagan win. Sears responded by hinting that he had an ace hidden away in an unexpected place: the three big Northeastern states—New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—where Reagan had claimed only 33 of 324 dele
gates so far.

  Sears had that trademark saying: politics is motion. When your campaign sets the terms of the debate, you are winning. When your opponent has to catch up with one of your moves, he is losing. What Sears had decided, without consulting the candidate at all, was that he could put this race back into motion by picking a liberal running mate for Reagan from a Northeastern state—and force Gerald Ford to respond.

  Which running mate? It almost didn’t matter. The thing was to get the press to report that the race was back on. It was the only way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

  Sears explained the selection process to a reporter after it was all over. “We took all the Republican senators and governors,” he said, “and that didn’t take very long. When you ruled out those who were too old, in our party you didn’t have too much left.” In Senator Paul Laxalt’s accounting the process sounded even more limited: “So we sort of backed into the situation. When you looked at the people who realistically fit into that slot, it was damned thin. Schweiker’s name kept popping up.”

  Richard Schweiker—not to be confused with Lowell Weicker—was the forty-year-old son of a tiling contractor from Norristown, Pennsylvania, who joined the family business after college, getting involved in Republican politics on the side. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1960, representing a Republican district that included the swanky Philadelphia Main Line, after defeating a conservative primary opponent. His issues included civil rights, expanding Social Security, and establishing federal rent subsidies for the poor. In 1968 he defeated an incumbent to rise to the Senate, where he became a leading Republican critic of the Vietnam War and opposed Nixon’s nomination of two conservative Southerners to the Supreme Court. He won an 89 percent rating from the lefties at Americans for Democratic Action. He had shaggy hair, longish for a senator, and sideburns. He was best known recently—though not all that well known—for his service on the Church Committee, where he called the CIA a “shadow government.”

  Schweiker was also obsessed with flushing out what he called “the failures of the U.S. intelligence establishment in their investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination, and their coverup to the Warren commission”—an obsession he shared with much of the American left. Though he harbored a few ideological idiosyncrasies (he sponsored a bill to bring Bible reading back into public schools; he hated abortion—he was Catholic—and he opposed mandatory busing; he was against gun control), he was by most measures a liberal, even an “ultraliberal,” as Evans and Novak pegged him. He was also a Ford supporter. In February he had charged Richard Nixon with attempting to sabotage Ford’s election by traveling to China just before the New Hampshire primary, and just two months earlier he had proudly endorsed a resolution adopted by eighty-nine of Pennsylvania’s ninety-eight-member delegation—the convention’s third largest—supporting Ford’s renomination.

  Reagan had sent Sears forth to find a running mate with only the following instructions: someone who would help unite the party, someone he could trust and work with, someone whose ethical record wouldn’t embarrass him, and someone who wasn’t a member of the “Washington buddy system.” Schweiker, Sears decided, was close enough.

  Sears called the senator on July 16 and set up a meeting. There Schweiker learned he was the campaign’s first choice—which didn’t shock him as much as learning that the plan was to announce the pick long before the convention opened, on August 16. This was an unprecedented notion—the heart of Sears’s motion-making surprise. The idea was to back Ford into a political corner by forcing him to announce his own pick, perchance to shake loose some conservative delegates if Ford picked a liberal, and some liberal delegates if he picked a conservative. (The presumption was that Reagan’s delegates were too loyal to budge, no matter what.) Schweiker was also surprised to learn that Reagan didn’t even know about this meeting. “They explained,” Jules Witcover wrote, “that while the last word would be Reagan’s, ‘they had every reason to believe he would accept it,’ having requested their recommendation.”

  Schweiker told them he would think about it. That took only a day. On the twenty-third, Sears unveiled the pick to his boss, gingerly: he first made the case to Reagan for a liberal, in the abstract, mentioning the name of the particular liberal only after a half hour. “There is a fellow in the Senate with a pretty liberal voting record,” he said, “but he’s against gun control, he’s a big man in the Captive Nations movement, and he’s against abortion, and basically on all the emotional issues he’s got a pretty defendable record. And he’s absolutely clean.” Robert Novak later wrote that he was almost certain Reagan had never heard of Dick Schweiker before. And it didn’t seem to detain him that picking Schweiker went back on his every pledge not to pick an ideologically balanced ticket. “Reagan’s first question,” Witcover reported in his book about the 1976 election, which came out the next year, “was not about any aspect of the political strategy, or about what kind of man or political creature Dick Schweiker was, but instead, ‘Do you think he’d do it?’ ”

  Yes, Sears answered, he would. “Reagan seemed pleased.”

  The next morning, a Friday, the two men were ushered together into a room in Reagan’s house in Pacific Palisades. Schweiker had to be coached before going in not to call him “Ree-gan.” Ray-gan’s first big question to him was whether he would support his positions on the campaign trail and in the White House. Schweiker responded, “As long as I’m on the plane on the takeoff, I’ll be the first one out defending it after the crash.” He set only one condition: that he be allowed to say his piece on any policy disagreements, after which he promised to fall into line whether he agreed with Reagan or not. Reagan was pleased to hear it. Three and a half hours into their conversation came the word: “I’ve made a decision, senator, and I’d like you to be my running mate”—and then they talked for two and a half hours more.

  So why would Ronald Reagan pick as a running mate a veritable stranger whose ideology by Reagan’s own words rendered him “false with the people who vote for” him? Surely because he wanted to win, and John Sears, who had gotten him this far, had told him this was what it would take to get there. But: then he had to rationalize this to himself—as a moral act, as a noble act, as an act consistent with what Ronald Reagan would do. And how did Ronald Reagan manage to do that? The same way he rationalized everything that did not accord with the world as he preferred it exist: he cast himself as hero. He told Schweiker at one point in their conversation, “I have a strong feeling that I’m looking at myself some years ago.”

  He would convert Richard Schweiker from liberal to conservative. After all, he had converted so many others. It was his gift; it was his grace. Everything would work out in the end, gloriously.

  SUNDAY NIGHT. REAGAN CALLED HIS most important supporters. Jesse Helms got the call at 9:05: he made a note of it, he later told Robert Novak, “to record for posterity the exact time I received the shock of my life.” David Keene called some lesser lights, like Governor Jim Edwards of South Carolina, whom he asked to come to Washington the next day, without telling him what he wanted to talk about. Edwards showed up with bells on. Then he was told about Dick Schweiker—and, according to Keene, “sort of looked at his watch and said, ‘Well, if I hurry I think I can get back to South Carolina.’ ”

  Reagan gave the press conference in California: “Since I now feel that the people and the delegates have a right to know in advance of the convention who a nominee’s vice presidential choice would be, I am today departing from tradition and announcing my selection.” He described the man who had just said he would follow any position Reagan wanted, no matter if he disagreed, as “a man of independent thought and action.” He described a man who’d been in Congress for more than fifteen years as not “a captive of what I call the ‘Washington buddy system.’ ” Then he claimed they shared the “same basic values.” He rushed off without taking questions.

  Schweiker, who was listed in a binder at Ford h
eadquarters as a “C”—committed Ford delegate—then appeared in a Senate caucus room crowded with cameras, trailed by John Sears, his well-scrubbed family, and a grimly loyal Jesse Helms (“You won’t believe how really conservative he is,” Reagan told him). He announced that his new boss “in one fell swoop has united the Republican Party for November by bringing together the conservative and moderate wings of our party. It instantly gives our party across-the-board appeal.” He conceded his selection would “blow the minds of some people.” He claimed that “up until now” the Ford campaign probably had the delegate edge (this contradicted what the man behind him, Sears, had been telling the media)—but not anymore. He took questions. Concerning his position on the Panama Canal, he hemmed and hawed—then finally admitted he had no position on the Panama Canal at all. He also said, “We make no apologies. We think it’s the only way to win in November.”

  The reviews rolled in.

  Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus said Reagan had just “betrayed the trust of those who look to him for leadership.”

  Congressman John Ashbrook of Ohio, who had run a quixotic campaign from the right against Richard Nixon in New Hampshire in 1972, publicly called it “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.” (Privately he had told the Reagan aide who called him with the news, “Reagan can plumb fuck himself,” then hung up.)

  Steve Symms of Idaho, who had braved Republican cloakroom taunts as one of the few Reagan delegates in the House, said, “I thought it was a practical joke.” Days later, he said, “I’m still sick.”