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

by Rick Perlstein

  “I want that man arrested!” Rosenbaum yelled as Bischoff attempted unsuccessfully to scuttle down an aisle ahead of the Secret Service agents, who apprehended him for questioning beneath the stands. “He ripped my phone out. That’s what Reagan people are like.”

  Rockefeller held up the severed phone for the cameras, sweat breaking through his dress shirt. He then gave the sign back to a Reagan delegate—after ripping it in half.

  The American flag on the stage fell over.

  New York and North Carolina delegates, whose standards were next to one another on the floor, issued catcalls at one another, waving fists, making threats.

  Dole, at the podium, was livid. He admonished the crowd, then America’s richest man directly like he was a naughty schoolboy: “Ladies and gentlemen—Mr. Vice President!—ladies and gentlemen, delegates, please take your seats.” “The usual aplomb of the Vice President of the United States,” Ray Barnhart sneered, standing next to a microphone, ready to announce a hundred Texas votes for 16-C. When Rockefeller exited the floor, Secret Service agents had to surround him. New York delegates chanted angrily; “We want a phone! We want a phone!”

  Just about the only person who was calm through the entire thing was Ronald Reagan. He watched it on television in his hotel suite, dissolving in laughter. Then, he saw a televised image of himself on television watching it on television—that doesn’t look good—and his smile disappeared.

  A PANIC SHOT THROUGH THE Ford skybox: Jim Baker handed Harry Dent a copy of the Birmingham News with the headline, “Ford Would Write Off the Cotton South,” which was apparently circulating through the Mississippi delegation they thought they’d sewn up.

  This was the sort of lightning-fast development that made conventions really interesting—that historians wrote about decades later, like when a mysterious “voice from the sewers” in Chicago in 1940 cried, “We want Roosevelt! We want Roosevelt!” and started the demonstration that stilled political doubts about whether Franklin Roosevelt should be nominated for an unprecedented third term. Mississippi Reagan partisans Pickering and Mounger brandished the paper, demanding a new caucus to dissolve the unit rule, which might just pry lose enough votes for Reagan to go over the top on 16-C, with the votes of thirty-one of sixty delegates plus alternates. But media hound Clarke Reed, the only one who could call a poll of the caucus, was detained in an interview with NBC, and Harry Dent, thinking fast, and moving fast—a close convention was about not only commanding time but mastering space—was able to dash up to where Mississippi’s thirty alternates were, those ambitious young professionals recruited by Reed who ended up being overwhelmingly for Ford, and told them not to budge from their seats. Ford quickly got on the horn and claimed to Reed that he’d be campaigning long and hard in Jimmy Carter’s home region. Harry Dent managed to spin the call for a poll of the caucus as such a dastardly dirty trick, that one of the last uncommitted Mississippi delegates unpinned a Ford badge from Dent’s lapel and—“That does it!”—pinned it on his own.

  So the last 16-C fire was doused—at the price of a pledge that the Republican Party would remain enthralled by the “Cotton South.”

  Debate time expired. The Idaho chairman was recognized and called for the vote. It was alphabetical, Ford having tried and failed in a rules challenge to get states called randomly. That was because Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, and Colorado were all Reagan-heavy states. And that meant the suspense continued, as Reagan rocketed ahead.

  But the alphabet only forestalled the inevitable. “For the benefit of the cameras,” the Texas Monthly’s man wrote, Barnhart and his deputies keeping track of the 16-C roll call tally sheets “manage tight, cheerless smiles.” Texas was called—“one hundred principled votes for ‘aye’!”—and the faces beneath silly Reagan hats rallied briefly; then conservative Wyoming, which surprised everyone by giving eight of its seventeen votes for Ford. (Dick Cheney, Ford’s chief of staff and de facto campaign manager, had invited his home-state delegation to the state dinner for Queen Elizabeth.) Florida, which had abstained, voted thirty-eight to twenty-eight for the president’s position, and that put the vote over the top.

  The process, which was supposed to take an hour or so at most on the schedule, was over. The convention rules were adopted unanimously. There were a few more desultory speeches, and then the meeting moved to the question of the platform—at more than an hour past midnight Central Standard Time.

  “THE FIRST ABORTION DEBATE AT a national political convention started at 1:15 a.m.,” the feminist Republican activist Tanya Melich later recounted. “Just as the Ford campaign wished.” What kind of citizen would be moved to warm feelings about Republicans—or the Republican whose position on abortion was that it should be left to the states—by language like “Are we in this nation to follow the path of Nazi Germany and consign people to death because they are too expensive to let them live?”

  That was Representative Robert Bauman of Maryland. Another pro-lifer during the twelve minutes allotted to debate complained of the feminists’ proposed language, “It gives the husband no say-so.” Another, the Republican whip in the California state assembly, called the fetus a “pre-born baby” (novel language), claimed “at eight to nine weeks, the baby can squint, swallow, and clench its fist”—you could almost picture the cute little guy in his crib—and quoted Albert Schweitzer: “Evil consists in destroying life, doing it injury, and hindering its development.”

  Their side, Melich recollected, arguing for an amendment committing the party to neutrality, spoke “in jackhammer spurts.” Hers, she lamented, was “civilized and tentative and deadly dull.” She agonized: “All that work to get to this? Were the moderates, as our critics said, constitutionally unable to be passionate about anything?”

  Millicent Fenwick tried to get recognition to call a roll-call vote on the question; the feminists wanted their adversaries on the record on national television. But that could be politically embarrassing for the president. The rules allowed a roll call by written request, which Fenwick sought recognition to present. But Arizona congressman John Rhodes, who had spelled Dole as chairman, said time had expired, and wouldn’t call on her. “A phalanx of people surrounded him,” Melich wrote, “and several strong-armed men blocked our page from giving him Fenwick’s note.” Rhodes called a voice vote; Melich thought she heard her side’s “ayes” as having been overwhelming. Not the chair, though. The language of the platform draft would stand: It called for “public dialogue on abortion”—but also endorsed a “constitutional amendment to restore protection of the right to life for unborn children.”

  However, that was a development of interest mostly to history. Once more the abortion fight got little coverage. Either outcome of it would have had no bearing on the question that mattered most: who would the Republicans nominate? And despite the 16-C outcome, the Reagan camp nurtured hope for the big prize. Their “Morality in Foreign Policy” plank was up for debate next. Gerald Ford would surely never allow his darling Henry Kissinger to be humiliated like this. And that, surely, would be their dagger. That was obvious enough when no one in Kansas City spotted “Henry the K” at any of the glamorous cocktail parties upon which the nation’s most unlikely sex symbol so doted. He was under “political house arrest,” people said. Ford knew how politically toxic Kissinger remained for the vast majority of Republicans, so he was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t: Lose the debate for a Reaganite plank, and surely many delegates would stampede for Reagan in tomorrow’s nomination roll call. Win the debate—well, even then, that would just show how committed to détente’s sellout of America the accidental president truly was.

  This could get interesting. The people who’d managed to stick around through these early A.M. hours, on TV and in Kemper Arena, were at least guaranteed one more good fight.

  But in the Ford skybox, the chief of staff was making an aggressive argument.

  Richard Bruce Cheney of Casper, Wyoming, had begun his Washingto
n career in 1969 at the age of twenty-eight interning in the office of moderate congressman William Steiger from Wisconsin, having dropped out of a doctoral program in political science at the university in Madison. In the Nixon White House he apprenticed himself to another moderate, Donald Rumsfeld, who headed Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity; Cheney then followed Rumsfeld to the Ford White House, first as chief of staff, then (after Rumsfeld engineered the “Halloween Massacre”) as secretary of defense. Cheney’s defining passion in Ford’s White House was his rage at Congress’s Watergate-era reassertion of power against the executive branch and the national security state. One of his ideas had been to been to appoint Robert Bork, the former acting attorney general who’d fired Archibald Cox, as the new CIA director (“a strong team player,” Rumsfeld called him). Another was to burglarize Seymour Hersh’s apartment for his exposés on the CIA. He’d also been the most aggressive advocate for a White House meeting with Solzhenitsyn. Like his mentor Rumsfeld he was a masterful bureaucratic infighter, which was how, after taking Rumsfeld’s place as chief of staff in the Halloween Massacre, he had managed to also insinuate himself now, in effect, as Ford’s campaign manager. From that perch he argued to the candidate that the platforms didn’t mean anything; he should just swallow the “Morality in Foreign Policy” plank because if he fought it the nomination might slip out of his grasp.

  Cheney’s arguments, in other words, were tactical, though Cheney’s goals, surely, were also ideological. If Rumsfeld had moved right only gradually (under Nixon he’d recommended unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam), his student Cheney had been a right-winger all along. He loved the plank in itself.

  Ford yielded to Cheney’s argument. They called no witnesses in opposition to the Reagan amendment. Voice vote; the ayes had it. Which was how, by the time weary delegates were finally able to go to bed, in addition to becoming the first American party to go on the record against abortion they were now the first to revile détente. Jim Lake, Reagan’s press secretary, later reflected that they should have made its language stronger—“an outright sock in the jaw.” James Baker said that would have been the right play: make it two words, “fire Kissinger,” and the football just might have been tipped.

  IT DID NOT. WEDNESDAY, A day for headlines like “Event Degenerates to Chaos” (the Milwaukee Sentinel), and also for faits accomplis. Grassroots Reagan activists refused to believe it. One group tried to drum up an eleventh-hour firing of John Sears in favor of Lyn Nofziger. After what their Boswell called “a tearful locker room scene . . . that lasted until 4 A.M.,” a cohort of Texans made a pilgrimage to the governor’s suite in order to ask him to dump Schweiker. One of the emissaries reported, “Governor Reagan came out and before we could even get started, he shut us down real quick. ‘If you could . . . guarantee me the nomination, I still wouldn’t do it.’ And that made us all feel really small for even attempting it.” Wall Street Journal writer Jude Wanniski plied Peter Hannaford with his “Two Santa Clauses” theory—that if a Republican president radically lowered taxes, economic growth would somehow magically skyrocket, and Democrats who opposed lowering taxes would become villains and be voted out of office—and said that Jack Kemp, the New York congressman and former pro football player whom he’d turned into a supporter of the idea, would switch from Ford to Reagan if the Californian backed massive tax cuts, too. Hannaford looked at Wanniski as if he was crazy, and walked away.

  And there was one fait not yet accompli, thanks to the failure of 16-C: who would be Gerald Ford’s running mate? That morning the New York Times reported the speculation was down to William Ruckelshaus and Howard Baker, two names to remove the sting from Jimmy Carter’s “Nixon-Ford administration” thrusts. Then word emerged that Baker’s wife, Joy, had been hospitalized for alcoholism, and this, according to the prejudices of the day, removed him from consideration. Touts were still floating the names of liberals, but one of them, William Warren Scranton, had taken over the stop-Goldwater baton from Nelson Rockefeller and was just about equally despised. Pick wrong, and angry conservatives could abandon Ford in droves for the general election; he wasn’t going to take chances. His deputies were negotiating with their all-but-vanquished foes about a postnomination meeting between the two principals.

  The Texas Monthly’s reporter headed up in the hills behind the war memorial, where it was said the hippies were camping. He found “kids skinny dipping in the fountains and running naked in the grass. Teenage girls are guzzling bottles of Coronado wine and singing ‘Cocaine don’t make me lazy.’ ” He approached a fellow, who, too wary to talk, suggested he introduce himself to “Marijuana Mike, who is something of a leader. . . . Marijuana Mike has only one tooth, a long festering stalactite occasionally visible in the cave-like darkness of his empty mouth.” Mike told the reporter—after a detour for a joint—“We are now on the grounds some four hundred non-delegates to the un-convention for the election of Nobody.”

  The reporter looked around: five or six tents, clusters gathered around cooking fires, “thirty non-delegates at most.”

  Marijuana Mike told him that if enough people voted for “Nobody” the election would deadlock, throwing it into the Electoral College. The reporter asked him what good that would do: “ ‘Oh, man.’ He turns away in disgust and mutters something about a kangaroo and a carcinogenic civilization.”

  The dregs of the 1960s: nothing much for worried Republican matrons to fear.

  The nominating convention session began. Signs: ROCKY DON’T STEAL THIS SIGN; SEND FORD TO HELSINKI, SEND REAGAN TO WASHINGTON; PRESIDENT REAGAN ’77. The Texans added kazoos to their arsenals. “I’m very, very hopeful,” an alternate from Fort Worth said. “I’m just hoping for Reagan to pull it out.” A delegate told the Texas Monthly reporter, against all evident reality, “It’s going to be close.” Another alternate, from Waco, told the reporter, like one of the hippies up in the hills, “Right now, right now I just feel there’s an inherent goodness and goodwill in the world.”

  The first speaker, Governor Arch Moore of West Virginia, finished—and the chairman had to complain, “May we have order, please? There will be time for tooting of horns and other noisemakers later on, but this is not the time. We have important business to conduct.”

  The next speaker, a Michigan congressman—then the chairman: “Ladies and gentlemen, will you please take your seats? Time for demonstrations has not yet arrived. We still have business to perform.”

  Not likely. The next speaker, Jacob Javits, was among the figures most hated by the right. This time the interruption began almost immediately, drowning him out. The band had taken to playing “God Bless America” between speakers, sheer patriotic reverence having some effect in goading the noisy and noisome conservatives to surcease. This time the musicians had to start the song during Javits’s oration—and it didn’t have any effect. A Sousa march: nothing. So the Ford family was cued for an entrance, to the strains of the University of Michigan fight song, “The Victors.” “One way to overcome noise,” Jules Witcover explained, “is with more noise.” But the impromptu Reagan demonstrators were proving unstoppable. So the band threw them a bone, pealing forth with “California, Here I Come”—as with overtired children, maybe one last spurt of hyperactivity would work.

  Nope. One more “God Bless America,” but hundreds of razzing kazoos swarmed over the song. This noise to no political purpose was starting to scare people: 1964 again.

  Another Sousa march, another “Victors.” Nancy entered, to another “California, Here I Come,” as Javits tried to break through, with liberal bromides about “human vicissitudes and human catastrophes” and how “headlines don’t cry the tears of individual hurt and individual need” and “real people with real problems.”

  Two more rounds of “God Bless America.” Fans of the incumbent waved their arms, crying “Ford! Ford! Ford!” Elizabeth Drew of the New Yorker struggled with herself, dropping objectivity, outing herself—“we”—as a partisan, an enemy of passion i
tself: “We tend to think this is OK because we think Ford is OK, safe. But what are the real distinctions among political emotions? Some of the most menacing political figures in the history of the world have used stadiums and bands to whip up their followers.”

  John Rhodes had had it, too, hurling the ultimate insult: “May we please quit acting like a Democratic convention?” At which, finally, business proceeded. A ceremonial roll call, then Paul Laxalt took the microphone, a year and a month after unveiling “Friends of Ronald Reagan” to a nonplused crowd of skeptical journalists at the National Press Club (an event that had made only page nineteen of the New York Times), to place into nomination “the finest Republican candidate that has hit a Republican convention in recent years: Ronald Reagan!”

  EVERY FOUR YEARS THE PARTIES publish a bound volume of the official proceedings of their national conventions, with every utterance made from the podium transcribed. Dreary, somnolent volumes that convey only the most austere sense of what these silly, cacophonous fiestas are actually like; exclamation points never make it into these records, and only the barest indications are offered about anything that happens that isn’t what someone says into the microphone on the stage. In Official Report of the Proceedings of the Thirty-First Republican National Convention Held in Kansas City, Missouri, August 16, 17, 18, 19, 1976, for example, after Laxalt’s speech for Reagan, the following words appeared, in parentheses: “(A great demonstration followed this speech, lasting approximately thirty minutes.)”