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

by Rick Perlstein

  Clarke Reed told a reporter, “I’ve had it. I’ve said I’m ready to jump, but I’m trying to keep my people in mind.”

  Governor Meldrim Thomson of New Hampshire said that Reagan had “abandoned the conservative cause and scuttled his own political principles,” and that he would not make his planned seconding speech at the convention, so as not to “assist in selling this opportunistic team to the Republican delegates.” And that he’d prefer “someone like Jesse Helms.” George Will called it “slapstick.” The New Yorker noted that only a week earlier Reagan been deriding Carter’s pick of Walter Mondale as too liberal even though Mondale had a 93 percent rating from the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education—but Schweiker’s was 100 percent, and he had received labor’s eighth-biggest political donation in 1974. CBS News ran a clip of Reagan saying, “I don’t believe in the old tradition of picking someone at the opposite end of the political spectrum.” The newscast next featured an outraged conservative who said that “the reason Reagan chose Schweiker was because Mondale was already taken.”

  But still, it worked, after a fashion. CBS’s previous plan for that evening’s newscast was for Walter Cronkite to announce that Ford had clinched the nomination. That might have ended things then and there. The Schweiker pick really had rescued Reagan. The question was how long the rescue would last.

  HARRY DENT LEARNED THE NEWS from Dick Cheney. He promptly released a statement calling it the “most colossal political boner of the century.” Then he sent to Reagan delegates a memo on Schweiker’s record in voting for things like a bill to break up the oil companies. Keene made a breakneck canvass of the Northeastern states, and found no leakage from Ford to Reagan whatsoever. Ford’s man James Baker was worried that they’d lose perhaps four votes in Pennsylvania—but was optimistic that the pick would firm up the support of other delegates whose loyalty to Ford they’d feared had been weak.

  The next day John Connally—who conservatives like Pat Buchanan had thought would be the perfect running mate for Reagan—stood in the White House driveway and proclaimed his endorsement of Ford. (Ford dodged on whether he thought Connally would make a good vice president.) Important conservatives—Jesse Helms, Governor Edwards of South Carolina, the editors of Human Events (finding “not a scintilla of evidence” that Reagan had “yielded to liberalism or relinquished any conservative principles”), Young Americans for Freedom, even John Ashbrook—swallowed their doubts and said they still were for Reagan. Utah’s twenty Reagan delegates announced themselves “pacified,” too. But the man everyone was watching was the mercurial Mississippian Clarke Reed—and he now announced his “personal endorsement” of Ford.

  “This kind of vice president,” Reed said, was “too big a price to pay for the nomination.” The Ford people at first presumed that this meant they had Mississippi, and perhaps the nomination, wrapped up. They found they had another thing coming. Reed had so squandered the trust of his delegates that he couldn’t bring them along: too many loved Reagan too much. Ford made ready to travel to Jackson, his campaign announcing he was considering a “large and growing list” of at least a dozen running mates, though he would name only one—Connally. Two days later the White House announced the president would send out 4,518 letters to delegates, alternate delegates, RNC members, and Republican congressmen, senators, and governors asking them to list their preferred running mates, in order of preference.

  Schweiker claimed he’d persuaded six Pennsylvania delegates to switch from Ford to Reagan and moved “in excess of thirteen” Ford delegates into the uncommitted ranks—though he declined to name a single one. The Keystone State’s delegation caravanned to Washington to be wooed, first in the Senate caucus room by Schweiker, then in the White House by Ford. Elizabeth Drew took the political temperature of the caucus room: “If there is a Reagan supporter in the room, I can’t find him.” One of Schweiker’s best political friends told Drew how aghast he was that Schweiker hadn’t consulted a single political ally before making his decision. Another told her, “I was absolutely stunned.” The state’s senior senator, Minority Leader Hugh Scott, opened the meeting reading Schweiker’s letter of resignation as a delegate; he couldn’t very well serve, given that his vote was pledged to Gerald Ford. Then his junior colleague entered.

  Schweiker looked shell-shocked. He had entered the political big leagues now. But he hadn’t counted the costs. “He stands in a corner on the right, like a schoolboy who has been bad, and reads a statement,” Drew reported. She found it “more like a confession,” or “an apologia,” than a political appeal: he spoke of “trials and tribulations,” “shocks and tremors,” and then, apologetically, said he’d made the choice because it was “probably the only way that the Republican Party could be reunited, not become extinct.” The audience applauded only politely. The Associated Press reported, “Three delegates who had said they were uncommitted now say they are for Ford.”

  Schweiker recovered in a visit to West Virginia, earning a standing ovation and winning over an uncommitted delegate.

  The AP’s tally was 1,104 to 1,023, with 132 uncommitted—and Mississippi still up in the air. “Anyone who tells you he knows who the Republican nominee will be in Kansas City is really dancing in the dark,” one columnist wrote. “The contest, despite claims from both the Ford and Reagan camps, is still unsettled.”

  HALF THE NATION’S COAL MINERS were out in a wildcat strike across six states. More than $100 million in tax loopholes had been secretly slipped into a tax reform bill with nary a hearing or vote, including a tax credit to the Mobil Oil Corporation specifically forbidden by a law the president had signed the previous year. Ted Kennedy complained. Robert Dole huffed back, “You have impugned the integrity of the committee and some of us don’t like it!”

  Secret Service agents shot to death a thirty-year-old taxi driver and decorated Vietnam veteran named Chester F. Plummer after he scaled the White House fence bearing a three-foot length of pipe, making it sixty feet onto the Executive Mansion’s grounds while the president was reading in his private quarters. (“He was just a quiet guy,” the detective investigating for the District of Columbia police reported after interviews with friends, family, neighbors. “He never made threats.”) It was the fifth incursion onto the White House lawn during Ford’s presidency.

  The Associated Press wire brought news of a raid by the Boston vice squad of a new “Freedom Expression Church,” which served free beer and screened the movie Deep Throat and whose slogan announced, “Ask and you shall receive whatever you desire. Free.” (“I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” the pastor said. “We’re just a group of people helping other people.”) Two young women sitting in an Oldsmobile in the Bronx were set upon by a man who would turn out to be named David Berkowitz, who shot both with a .44-caliber pistol, killing one.

  Twenty-six children and their bus driver simply vanished in Chowchilla, California; for twenty-four hours, the only thing found was an empty bus. (It turned out to be a mass kidnaping: a ransom note demanding $5 million turned up, then the victims escaped, then three bored rich kids were caught and arrested for the crime. “None of the three showed any reaction when attorneys entered not-guilty pleas,” the news reported.) Ninety-four cadets were expelled in the West Point cheating scandal. Jimmy Carter raised eyebrows in his first general election campaign tour, to New Hampshire, for two reasons: first, for not waiting for the traditional Democratic presidential kickoff Labor Day rally in Cadillac Square in Detroit—was this a snub to the AFL-CIO?—and second, for referring to the “Nixon-Ford administration”—an opening-round low blow, pundits said.

  Robert Vesco, the crooked financier who became infamous during Watergate for delivering suitcases containing hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to the Nixon campaign, renounced his U.S. citizenship and turned up in Italy.

  Ford’s choice of a new White House science advisor revived the controversy over “Man: A Course of Study,” because H. Guyford Stever had been head of the
National Science Foundation, whose grants to the MACOS curriculum Representative Conlan now called a “new height in science porno literature.” CIA documents were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request concerning the agency’s history of experimentation with drugs from 1953 to 1967, as part of the program code-named “MKULTRA”; a 1953 memo revealed that the CIA was considering getting enough LSD to produce 100 million experimental doses; a 1963 report said the research was “considered by many authorities in medicine and related fields to be professionally unethical”—leading to the inspiring conclusion, “Public disclosure of some aspects of MKULTRA activity could induce serious adverse reaction in U.S. public opinion.” A January 1975 “Memorandum for the Record,” signed simply “CIA Officer,” said, “Over my stated objection, the MKULTRA files were destroyed by order of the Director, Central Intelligence—Mr. Helms—shortly before his departure from office.”

  Members of the American Legion, returning home from a huge convention in Philadelphia, began developing pneumonia and fevers upwards of 107 degrees; by the first week in August the media began reporting that twenty-two victims had died and 131 were in the hospital, an extraordinary mortality rate; no lab tests could identify the cause. The notion of a devastating epidemic that could strike without warning and kill thousands was very much in the air. There had been the false “pantosomatitis” of the previous year. Then, in February 1976, just to show that not all such fears turn out to be hoaxes, the H1NI virus—“swine flu”— killed an army recruit at Fort Dix, its first victim since 1919 (when it killed more Americans than died on the World War I battlefields). By March, two dozen top scientists met with the president to discuss the unprecedented immunization of every single American man, woman, and child. The Centers for Disease Control sent twenty epidemiologists across the country to study the medical records, around the clock, of at least ten thousand Legionnaires who might have been exposed to the mystery Philadelphia illness, or could have imported it into the city. “What it’s going to do,” the head of the Pennsylvania virology lab undertaking some of the work said on the news, eyes cast nervously to one side, “God only knows.”

  No, President Ford: the nation had not been healed.

  Ford landed in Jackson on July 30 for a five-hour meeting with Mississippi delegates. He emerged telling reporters, “They had a lot of good hard questions, but I think I answered them all.” He couldn’t say, though, if he changed any minds. Ron Nessen said that the team already had enough delegates to win on the first ballot, but that the president “wants to go into the convention not with just a bare majority.” Reagan would speak to the delegates on August 4. Schweiker went to South Carolina “to show them I don’t have horns”—and said that he would support Reagan positions, including antilabor positions, that he disagreed with a few weeks earlier because “I am now changing constituencies.”

  Schweiker’s and Reagan’s plane landed in Mississippi, though another politician’s did not. The twin-engine plane containing Jerry Litton, a millionaire Democratic congressman from Missouri, and his entire family crashed en route to the victory party in Kansas City for his just-won Senate nomination while the teletypes were still clicking away with election returns; the four Littons and two others were killed. Hard to be a politician—all those bumpy flights on small planes. Hard to be a politician—explaining yourself when you had hardly a leg to stand on.

  Schweiker told the delegates that, yes, he had indeed once supported Ted Kennedy’s national health-care bill and the Humphrey-Hawkins full-employment bill, but no longer—because, he said, according to an arch Elizabeth Drew, “Ronald Reagan had told him about this wonderful thing called free enterprise which could deal with those problems.” He said he knew and respected the South, having gone to Georgia Military Academy. “My father and grandfather were Baptists. . . . And I do not grow peanuts!”

  Mississippians were not moved. Reagan spoke to each delegate personally to shoot down a rumor that he would accept a spot on Gerald Ford’s ticket. They were not all that moved by that, either. It was no longer a big deal to get a meeting with a presidential candidate. Looking uncharacteristically fidgety in a cream-colored summer suit at the press conference, Reagan claimed that “he [Schweiker] and I are identical in our views on national defense, on détente—we even agree on the Panama Canal.” (He craned his neck, as if to see if anyone out there was buying it.) “I don’t think I went opposite to compatibility with my philosophy!”

  The running mates made a last-ditch visit to Philadelphia. They emerged, emitting undignified whines: Reagan said his Pennsylvania delegates had been subjected to “a horrendous amount of heavy-handed pressure to renege.” (But, oops, the Washington Post interviewed two of those Pennsylvania delegates formerly for Reagan who said that there had been no pressure.) Schweiker said the only reason Reagan fans in the delegation weren’t making commitments was that “they don’t want to be pressured like ping-pong balls.” He claimed that thirty Pennsylvania Ford delegates would soon switch to them. The state party chairman, once a dear friend of his, responded, “He has lost credibility with people who think most highly of him.”

  Reagan now claimed 1,140 delegates. Ford now claimed 1,135. That added up to 2,275 votes; only 2,258 delegates would be voting in Kansas City. Was Ford in the lead? Probably. But this thing was still up for grabs.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  * * *

  “Don’t Let Satan Have His Way—Stop the ERA”

  IT WAS A STUNNING POLITICAL achievement.

  Ever since early in 1973, when Ronald Reagan announced he wouldn’t be running for a third term as governor, features about his possible presidential run became a nice little evergreen assignment for political reporters; badgering potential presidential aspirants was just something political reporters were supposed to do, even if none of them took this particular one seriously. A Reagan nomination was akin to a second Goldwater nomination—suicide for a party already quite nearly on its deathbed.

  The low ebb had come in June 1974, when Rowland Evans and Robert Novak quoted those anguished, despairing Reagan hands in Sacramento who dearly wished to work someday under Reagan in the White House but feared that the day would never come unless Reagan made “a polite but clear break with President Nixon.” The political necessity seemed self-evident: at the time the columnists wrote, Richard Nixon’s approval rating was only 25 percent. But Reagan’s break with him never came.

  In fact, when Reagan deigned to discuss Watergate at all—which he frequently simply refused to do, insisting he didn’t find the issue particularly important—he continued to say precisely the opposite of what just about every other prominent politician said. During season after season of anxious soul-searching about what Watergate said about America, he answered that it said nothing at all—except that the nation harbored a whole lot of spoilsports who just didn’t understand what America was truly about. “Into the hands of America, God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind. . . .”

  It was the same way with Vietnam. Let the liberal editorialists at the New Republic write, when the fall of Saigon coincided with the two-hundredth anniversary of Lexington and Concord, “If the Bicentennial helps us focus on the contrast between our idealism and our crimes, so much the better.” Reagan blithely told another story: not that the Vietnam War revealed an America that suddenly knew sin, but that it helped reveal once more that America was a nation that redeemed everything it touched. It showed in his description of what he said was the work of the USS Midway that same spring. (“A tiny baby with double pneumonia was cured. People without clothes were given American clothing. . . .”) And when he so doted upon the returned POWs (“We walked out of Hanoi as winners.”)

  And so on, and so forth. Energy problems, economic problems, inflation: they revealed nothing essential about America, certainly nothing about what others chose to call its “decline”—though they said a lot, he insisted, about America’s federal government, which he spoke of almost as an imp
osition upon America. “It’s time for us all to realize that government is not the answer to our economic problems. Government is the problem,” he said in May 1975 in one of his syndicated radio broadcasts, this one on how “money spent by government doesn’t have the multiplier effect of money spent in the private sector. In fact government spending is a drag on the economy and slows economic recovery.”

  Though Gerald Ford liked to say that sort of thing, too.

  It puzzled his political contemporaries: why had the prediction that Reagan would have to distance himself from Richard Nixon and Watergate in order to thrive proved so wrong?

  And another puzzlement: how had the race between Reagan and Ford managed to get this far?

  A weary Ford campaign aide had recently told a reporter, “Reagan and Ford basically believe the same things.” And that was true. “[B]ut they project different styles.” And that was even more true. Gerald Ford shared something with the suspicious circles: he liked the idea of national modesty. He embodied modesty, was modesty: “A Ford, not a Lincoln,” as he’d said in introducing himself to the nation upon becoming vice president in 1973. When a political scientist interviewed his admirers, their favorite word for him was “solid”:

  “He’s solid, not hot air.”

  “He’s a solid citizen with the right instincts.”

  “Solid in character, not flashy or phony . . . consistent and predictable.”

  “He’s down-to-earth.”

  Ronald Reagan was not down-to-earth. Nor, he insisted, was the nation about which, and to which, he addressed his panegyrics. Instead, it was celestial.

  Here was what Evans and Novak had not understood. America had not yet become Reagan’s America. Not yet. Reagan’s America would embrace an almost official cult of optimism—the belief that America could do no wrong. Or, to put it another way, that if America did it, it was by definition not wrong. That would come later. But signs were already pointing in that direction.