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

by Rick Perlstein

  Maybe so. Strategists on both sides had been agonizing over whether to lobby Mississippi to dissolve its unit rule. First the president’s man James Baker decided a split vote would advantage Ford; then he changed his mind and decided to go for the all-or-nothing bloc. “How many other Clarke Reeds might there be out there,” a historian later imagined him thinking, “telling him one thing and doing another?”

  The two sides agreed that the crucial delegates would gather for a 3 P.M. caucus at their hotel, to vote first on the unit rule, and then on 16-C. The media assembled, noses veritably pressed behind one of those banquet room sliding doors. A limousine pulled up. John Connally, a true larger-than-life personage—Texas Monthly’s reporter said you could feel the force of his handshakes ten feet away; “your digits are empathetically crushed”—stepped out. Ford’s trial balloon of him as a running mate had deflated when nine Ford delegates from Maine threatened to abstain on the first ballot if the Watergate-tainted Texan’s name was put forward. “From my point of view John Connally represents the power politics of the Sixties,” said Maine congressman William Cohen, one of the impeachers on the Judiciary Committee. “I think it’s an era that has gone by.” He pointed to an infamous March 23, 1971, Nixon tape—Connally had briefed the president about exactly what dairy lobbyists were demanding in exchange for a political donation—as something “the American people would no longer tolerate.” Garry Wills, though, had a great riff in his newspaper column: “He is the only candidate,” he said, referencing Connally’s miraculous acquittal in that milk-bribery case, “who can prove he is not a crook—after all, the jury said he was not.” And the man himself never seemed to recognize there was anything to be ashamed of. Texas Monthly’s reporter said, “He looks like a man who is confidently awaiting a time when the presidency itself will be conferred by natural selection.”

  Upon his arrival at Mississippi’s motel, Connally was pulled into the room of Haley Barbour. Connally emerged, but not into the caucus to ply the delegates for Ford as expected; Charlie Pickering, the Reagan man pretending to be uncommitted, observed that and showed no emotion; Dent, observing Pickering, was heard by a reporter saying with apparent elation to Connally, “Governor, that means we got the vote.” There were four or more layers of possible poker bluffs to decipher here—whether Connally was sent away because his presence would hurt Ford, because Mississippians had grown resentful at heavy-handed White House tactics, or whether Connally was sent away to make it appear his presence would hurt Ford, because Barbour was for Reagan; whether Pickering was showing a poker face; whether Dent was sincerely expressing his confidence or making it appear to a powerful man that he was confident—and, beneath all the intrigue, who knew?

  Harry Dent entered the conference room, apparently to make the case for Ford.

  Reagan showed up and entered the conference room.

  Haley Barbour left the room. “They voted?” Dent asked him. “How did they vote?”

  They had voted to keep the unit rule and, by three votes with one abstention, to vote their delegation as a bloc against 16-C—for, by inference, Gerald Ford. The word flashed across Kansas City that it just might be over, and the stampede to Ford could begin. Coincidentally, CBS News reported that for the first time since it had begun counting, Ford was over the top with 1,132 “firm or committed” delegates. The Reaganites at the Ramada streamed to the hotel pool, where they had hoped to enjoy a victory party. The cases of beer had been sent over with the compliments of conservative benefactor Joseph Coors. They flipped them open and drowned their sorrows before the evening’s full-convention debates and votes over the platform and the rules.

  IT WASN’T OVER, NOT NECESSARILY. By the same Monday deadline that the feminist abortion supporters had also been racing to meet, the Reagan campaign filed its anti-Kissinger minority report, a plank to be tacked on to the platform’s existing language and titled “Morality in Foreign Policy.” It began—

  “The goal of Republican foreign policy is the achievement of liberty under law and a just and lasting peace in the world. The principles by which we act to achieve peace and to protect the interests of the United States must merit the restored confidence of our people. We recognize and commend that great beacon of human courage and morality, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for his compelling message that we must face the world with no illusions about the nature of tyranny. Ours will be a foreign policy that keeps this in mind.”

  —and that couldn’t have been a more frontal attack against the president who had so conspicuously refused to meet with Solzhenitsyn during his summer 1975 visit to the United States. It continued, “Ours will be a foreign policy which recognizes that in international negotiations we must make no undue concessions; that in pursuing détente we must not grant unilateral favors with only the hope of getting future favors in return.”

  —and that could almost have been a transcription of one of Ronald Reagan’s 1975 radio broadcasts. It excoriated the Helsinki Accords (which “take from those who do not have freedom the hope of one day gaining it”) and eviscerated “secret agreements, hidden from our people,” which not only referenced the Panama Canal negotiations but harked back to the most macabre horror of right-wing folklore: the 1945 negotiations at Yalta in which an enfeebled Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Soviet agent Alger Hiss supposedly whispering advice into his ear, sold out Eastern Europe to the Reds. It concluded, more in the sonorities of a manifesto than in the half-loaf bureaucratese of a conventional party platform, “Honestly, openly, and with firm conviction, we shall go forward as a united people to forge a lasting peace in the world based on our deep belief in the rights of man, the rule of law, and guidance by the hand of God.”

  It wasn’t as bad as it could be—Sears had seen to that—so it “wasn’t an outright sock in the jaw.” Thirty conservative leaders had signed their names to a text that explicitly mentioned Panama and Taiwan but those references mysteriously disappeared by the time it was filed with the convention secretary. Nonetheless, Ford was furious. Henry Kissinger, his political mentor Nelson Rockefeller, and his acolyte Brent Scowcroft were even more furious. Giving in to Jesse Helms on, say, gun control (“We support the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. We oppose federal registration of firearms. Mandatory sentences for crimes committed with a lethal weapon are the only effective solution to this problem”), even though Ford wanted regulation of Saturday night specials, was one thing. Telling the commander in chief how to deal with the Soviets was another.

  And so, two showdowns between Ford and Reagan on the Tuesday night schedule of the shoot-out in Kansas City. First 16-C. And then “Morality in Foreign Policy.”

  THE TV SHOW BEGAN WITH a keynote speech by John Connally. It was Churchillian, patriotic—and full of confident proclamations that America’s problems were all the fault of the Democratic Party he’d belonged to just two years before: “through its absolute domination of the Congress, which has relentlessly stoked the fires of inflation” and “built the federal bureaucracy ever larger and larger and directed the agents of that bureaucracy to penetrate ever deeper and deeper into the conduct of all of this nation’s private affairs and personal lives,” it “has unleashed upon the American people the curse and abomination of government which today careens about, so clearly out of effective control,” and dared “seek to elect a veto-proof Congress.”

  He concluded: “I would hope that when the record of our service is finally written . . . up to the very end we resisted with every fiber of our being the oppressive hand of an all-powerful central and dominating government” (strange: as treasury secretary he’d been the architect of the biggest increase in government power since World War II, Nixon’s wage and price controls); “and up to that very end we had an abiding faith in an Almighty God and that there is more good than evil in man.” And, thus fired up, Reagan partisans began another braying demonstration.

  “Viva!”

  “Olé!”

  “Viva!”

  “Olé!�
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  Texas Monthly: “ ‘Aren’t these conventions fun?’ a delegate named Donald Turman from Victoria asks me. ‘I feel like it’s a small guy who doesn’t make a lot of money against the establishment rich. That’s the way I look at it, man’ ”—he shifted focus, standing on his chair: ‘Hooooooooo-WOOOOOOOO!’—then turned back to his interviewer: ‘Wheee! It sure wears you out, though.’ ”

  Robert Dole, on the podium: “Ladies and gentlemen, we would like to take the official photograph of the convention.”

  He thumped his gavel, to no avail.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, would you please take your seats”—he surveyed the dizzy madness before him—“or take anybody’s seat. Thank you very much. We are about to take an official photograph. In 1972 that was the most exciting part of our convention! So if you will please take your seats. Thank you very much.”

  Nothing.

  “Will the delegates and alternates in the balcony and on the floor please be seated? Thank you very much. Your special attention is needed at this time. Will the delegates and alternates please be seated? Will our guests in the balcony please let us proceed?”

  Nope. The two sides were shouting chants at each other, the Reagan forces blowing long plastic horns they’d brought with them, and which the New York Times thought sounded “uncannily reminiscent of the ululations of Arab women.” Some had cowbells. Reagan operatives with green baseball caps and earphones and walkie-talkies were spotted, coordinating the din. Dole tried again: “I remember in 1972 in Miami, when I was chairman of the Republican Party, the most exciting event was taking the official photograph. But I can see from this audience and from the enthusiasm here that you may have other things in mind. . . . If all of the alternates and delegates would look toward the CBS anchor booth on the right, and if you can refrain from moving or speaking for thirty seconds, you may set a record and you may also receive a photograph. . . .”

  And, finally, they did: one more 1970s family picture of forced grins occluding seething resentment and rage; or maybe they didn’t. The Official Report of the Proceedings of the Thirty-First Republican National Convention did not include an official photograph of the floor.

  IT WAS TIME; THE MOMENT had come. (“We are about to proceed with very historic business,” implored Senator Dole, once more begging the delegates to return to their seats. “I wouldn’t want you to miss this.”) A delegate from Missouri, U.S. representative Thomas B. Curtis, introduced the 16-C amendment for the Reagan campaign. He read out its dry, legalistic language (“No delegate or alternate to the convention shall be bound by any commitment of any kind, public or private, to support any presidential candidate who does not file such a declaration. . . .”), and suddenly the din rose again. “I would only ask that you listen to me for about thirty seconds,” Bob Dole cried—but this was not to be. Betty Ford entered the building, and the Ford supporters went wild.

  Then, moments later, Nancy Reagan entered. The band struck up “California, Here I Come.” She made her way up to the family box, a glass aerie at the far end of the hall more than two hundred feet from the stage, and the cacophony grew and grew—bigger than Betty’s. Nancy was winning.

  Then the first lady pulled a virtual ace from her evening gown sleeve.

  A certain song was sounding in the background, courtesy of the house band: “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” the best-selling record of 1973. Its singer was the vaguely Latino, mustachioed Tony Orlando, who starred every Wednesday night on CBS on his own slightly racy variety show (beginning the next month it would open with a five-minute monologue by George Carlin)—a Ford supporter. Presently Orlando himself appeared, and pulled Betty into the aisle, and they delighted (about half) the crowd with a spirited dance.

  Time called it “The Contest of the Queens”: “a battle in red and aqua, a regal contest between the strikingly handsome, radiantly smiling wives of the Presidential candidates at either end of the convention hall.” Time interviewed Betty, whom it declared the winner, and who insulted Ronald Reagan: “He is a good speaker, he comes across well on TV—after all, that was his trade. . . . Jerry Ford is not fluff; he knows the meat-and-potatoes part.” Betty insulted Nancy Reagan, too: “I just think that when Nancy met Ronnie, that was it as far as her own life was concerned. She just fell apart at the seams.” And she gave her political analysis: “Personally, I think it should have been uncontested. Jerry has done such a good job in the past two years. The fight is very bad, very bad for the parties; it has built up animosities.” Indeed. Time also interviewed Nancy, who gave as good as she got: “It was just Ron and a handful of staff against the tremendous power of the other side.” (“Though her smoothly modulated voice never wavered, her hurt came through.”) “I’ve never known the White House to be used by either party the way it was in this campaign. The White House stands for something. I don’t think it should be concerned about uncommitted delegates.” And, in fine family form, she denied she’d even noticed the Tuesday night fuss: “I’m nearsighted. I couldn’t see the other end of the hall.”

  The dance routine had been choreographed, of course—planned for the moment of maximal political import, the 16-C debate. Bill Carruthers, the Ford campaign’s audiovisual coordinator (or as NBC called him, Ford’s “cosmetic advance man”; he’d been in charge of things in the previous administration like making sure Nixon didn’t look “jowly”), and George Murphy, the former senator and movie musical song-and-dance man, came up with the idea after the first lady’s humiliation the previous night; the band was to treat Nancy’s arrival as its cue to launch into “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.” Vic Gold of the Washingtonian, whose sources within the world of political public relations were unmatched, explained how “the media was measuring crowd enthusiasm for the wives in gauging crowd enthusiasm for Ford-Reagan delegate strength.” So “Carruthers and Murphy called in show business reinforcements.” They did their job well. Newsweek was among the outlets who described the Orlando gambol as “spontaneous.” Knowing his side had been licked, Ray Barnhart, the chief delegate from Texas—who’d led the stampede of the previous evening’s Gerald Ford hotel-lobby cocktail party—told reporters, “I thought it was in very bad taste.”

  REPRESENTATIVE CURTIS HAD TO READ through the amendment again; no one could possibly have heard it the first time around. He finished and yielded the microphone to a testy Bob Dole: “I would ask that the aisles be cleared! . . . Will the sergeant at arms please cooperate, or will the media please cooperate? . . . All those in the aisle on my right, all those in the aisle on my left, we want to get on with this very important business. . . . The delegates have a right to be heard. . . . Would the sergeant at arms please clear the aisles? We will have order before we proceed!” He rapped his gavel like a demonic woodpecker.

  There was next to be a half hour of debate over 16-C. The two sides alternated speeches of two minutes, each choosing ordinary delegates to deliver its message. The Reagan side spoke against type in the civic abstractions of reformers like Common Cause: “a binding, moral commitment to the principles of openness, full disclosure, and complete trust in the American people”; “tell us who is on the team before asking us to join it”; “Haven’t we had enough backroom decisions for the vice presidency?” Ford delegates spoke of “the political mistake of naming Senator Schweiker” and “desperation and blatant political opportunism” and the “wedge of division in our party” it would produce. Passions were absurdly high. A Reagan precinct worker from California finished up to such barking enthusiasm that Dole appeared to be scared: “Those on both sides have a right to be heard. . . . Everyone who walks up here is nervous to begin with. Don’t frighten us any more.” Sherry Martschink, the delegate from South Carolina who became a national celebrity for her quips about former dentist Governor James Edwards, began a labored metaphor about changing the rules in the middle of a game of checkers, and was vociferously booed. A Ford delegate from Arkansas said that because 16-C would exclude Reagan from vice pre
sidential consideration, it “disenfranchises me and disenfranchises you”—and the Reaganite outburst that followed the ugly word disenfranchise was so unceasing that Dole said he worried 16-C’s deadline for naming a running mate would come (at nine the next morning) before the roll call on it concluded—

  He paused, looking out at a commotion on the floor.

  “Will the sergeant at arms please try to clear the aisle on the right one more time, and will the delegates from New York please be seated?”

  He conferred with someone.

  “There is something wrong with the telephone. They can’t hear the phone ringing.”

  They couldn’t hear the telephone connected to the Ford command trailer because it had been ripped out of the floor.

  The vice president of the United States had spotted a Mormon preacher from Utah who’d invaded the space of the New York delegation and was bearing a “Reagan Country” sign. “With an adolescent grin on his face,” said Texas Monthly, Rockefeller snatched the offending sign from the minister’s hands.

  Conservatives recognized that adolescent grin. It was the same simpering expression Rockefeller had worn in 1964, speaking from the convention podium in San Francisco about the “radical well-financed minority” taking over the Republican Party—when he was booed, and the crowd started chanting “We want Barry!” He simpered arrogantly then, too, muttering, “That’s right, that’s right”—relishing the opportunity to display just how uncivil the right-wing opposition truly was. However, this time the incivility started with him. It proceeded to escalate. The Utah Reagan leader, Douglas Bischoff, chased after Rockefeller to retrieve his placard. He and New York GOP chairman Rosie Rosenbaum scuffled. Rockefeller claimed to have overheard someone say “if he didn’t get that sign back he was going to rip out the phone”—and, presently, the white phone connecting the New York delegation to the Ford command trailer in the parking lot was indeed ripped out while the chairman held the receiver to his ear, surrounded by a crush of reporters attempting to overhear him.