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

by Rick Perlstein

  Some scenes not captured by those bare words:

  A middle-aged man with glasses, wearing a Reagan boater, observed by Mary McGrory standing “precariously with a leg on each arm of his chair in the gallery, holding a huge flag in one hand and a Reagan poster in the other. For the entire, ear-splitting forty-four minutes, he kept his position.” (She reflected, “Nobody would have done that for Gerald Ford.”)

  The band, gamely trying to keep up with the crowd’s energy, playing “California, Here I Come” and “Dixie” (Reagan was favored over Ford in the Southern delegations by a ratio of four to one) and “The Pennsylvania Polka” for Richard Schweiker. And then “Dixie” again—this song always “inspiring fresh frenzies,” Texas Monthly observed.

  Those infernal blue plastic horns, four feet long, droning away. Whenever the energy started to flag, the Texans began to cry Viva! and California answered back Olé!

  Viva!

  Olé!

  Viva!

  Olé!

  Viva!

  Olé!

  Viva!

  Patti Davis was at home in Topanga, California, watching on TV, seeing “Ron, Michael, and Maureen in the box with my mother and Betsy Bloomingdale, their hairdresser Julius, and Jerry Zipkin,” a real estate heir whose 1995 obituary described him as “a celebrated fixture on the international social scene for almost half a century. . . . He traveled widely with many female friends, and lunched with one or more on most days of the week, usually at Le Cirque or Mortimer’s.” Patti read her mother’s face: “She knew my father had lost; she was angry, upset, and determined not to slink away unnoticed.”

  A young woman in one of the galleries waggling a hand-lettered sign, unceasingly, reading (sic) “CLARK REED IS ARNOLD BENEDICT.” The taunts against Reed from Southerners grew so vicious that he had to slink off the floor, fearing violence.

  Ford supporters in the balcony threw trash at the delegates from Texas.

  John Rhodes let the energy ride for twenty minutes. Anxious Ford deputies, fretting that the madness would knock the president’s nomination off prime time, cued the band to begin more rounds of “God Bless America” in a desperate attempt to cauterize the enthusiasm. Then, at thirty minutes, Rhodes began to glower. Reagan himself asked one of his staffers to make the demonstration stop. But his deputy answered back that there was nothing anyone could do to make it stop.

  And then Rhodes tried something that might.

  “Fellow delegates, I am about to introduce to you a very distinguished citizen from the state of North Carolina to second the nomination of the Honorable Ronald Reagan for President of the United States.”

  It still didn’t work. Rhodes continued his admonishments as Jesse Helms stood next to him at the podium. Rhodes handed the gavel to Helms; maybe that would prove he wasn’t trying to sabotage Reagan. The band quieted, the lights went down—and still: nothing. Helms finally spoke. (Evans and Novak’s review: “He seemed for a while to be nominating Alexander Solzhenitsyn.”) But the convention was still out of control. Then, Mary McGrory observed a little cruelly, “The unexpected appearance of a black woman, Gloria Toote of New York, as a seconder, quieted them down.” So did the nineteen seconding speeches for Gerald Ford, which began at twenty minutes before midnight. The candidate of boredom. The candidate of calm. He got 1,187 votes on the roll call to 1,070 for Reagan; West Virginia put him over the top at 1:25 A.M. When the chairman moved to make it unanimous, Ray Barnhart of Texas, the guy who’d called Betty Ford’s dance with Tony Orlando “bad taste,” fought his way to the floor microphone and shouted, “No! No! No! No! No!”

  A reporter made it down to Reagan headquarters, where staffers were packing boxes. A woman intoned into a pay phone: “Are you sure he wouldn’t take the vice presidency? Can’t we draft him? Are you sure?” Another told a friend, “This has been my life since October. I’d have done anything for him.”

  GERALD FORD ANNOUNCED HIS RUNNING mate the next morning at the Century Ballroom of the Crown Center Hotel. “I’m really thrilled with the opportunity of having Bob Dole as my running mate,” he said. “Bob Dole will help to heal any divisiveness within the party.” Ford looked tired. Perhaps Dole would perk things up. He was a slasher. Time printed some examples of his arch wit. (After Nixon offered to campaign for him in 1974: “I haven’t invited him to stump for me, but I wouldn’t mind if Nixon flew over the state.”) And Dole was a conservative, which was why Gerald Ford chose him—so Ronald Reagan would sign off on him. Dole himself had half-expected to be picked by Reagan, and had even sent feelers to Lyn Nofziger regarding the job. He later described himself as having been “Schweikered.” Later, sources revealed that Ford had wanted Ruckelshaus. But Reagan didn’t want him—and that was that.

  They had met during the previous night at 1:30 A.M., the winner, by prearrangement, calling upon the loser. A stipulation of the Reagan camp was that Ford not ask him to run. He had sent a handwritten note to the California delegation: “There is no circumstance whatsoever under which I would accept the nomination for Vice President. That is absolutely final.” Claire Schweiker, the senator’s wife, had tearfully told him, “Oh, Governor, I’m so sorry.” Reagan embraced her: “Claire, you really shouldn’t be upset about the outcome because it wasn’t part of God’s plan.” He told his son Mike, “God chooses his own time.” Then he went to meet with Ford, who shared his short list with him, and Reagan spoke highly of Ford. Reagan emerged and told his son, “He didn’t ask me.” However, when Jim Baker was his White House chief of staff in 1982, Reagan told him that he would have taken the running mate spot if Ford had offered it. God might choose his own time, but Ronald Reagan always had a taste for being called to a rescue. And it’s always nice to be asked.

  The Reagans walked into a gathering of some two hundred staffers and supporters, he in a dark blue suit, she in white knit—“the entrance of royalty,” Elizabeth Drew thought. Most of his audience was crying. Billy Mounger said he’d never cried so hard in his life. Even Nancy was crying (embarrassed, she turned her back to the cameras). Reagan opened, as usual, with a joke: “Backstage politics is like looking at civilization with its pants down.” He acknowledged their tears: “Sure, there’s disappointment in what happened, but the cause—the cause goes on.”

  Reagan, too, was fighting back tears.

  “It’s just one battle in a long war, and it will go on as long as we all wage it. . . . The cause is still there.” He quoted his favorite English ballad, from Dryden: “Though I am wounded, I am not slain; I shall rise and fight again.” He promised he and Nancy “are not just going to go back and sit in a rocking chair and say, ‘That’s all for us’ ”—and neither should you: “Don’t give up on your ideals. Don’t get cynical. Look at yourself and realize all you were willing to do, and realize there are millions of Americans out there who feel as you do—who want it to be the shining city on the hill.”

  To his right, past the American flag, tears rolled down the cheek of a young man wearing a checked shirt. Reagan’s voice caught, and he turned away, blinking back tears; his speech was finished. He had mentioned neither Gerald Ford, the upcoming fall campaign, nor the need for Republican unity.

  A GIANT PAINTING OF GERALD Ford hung from the ceiling for the last session. A reporter thought it “depicted Ford’s smile as a primate’s sneer.” The roll call of the states yielded 1,921 votes for Bob Dole and 338 for others, including Reagan, William F. Buckley, John Sears, William Simon, Reagan’s young conservative staffer David Keene—and forty-one for Jesse Helms, whose name was officially placed in nomination by Bob Bauman. The move recalled a signal moment in conservative history. Barry Goldwater’s name had been placed in nomination in 1960, allowing the Arizonan to give a speech refusing the honor, making a call to arms, and offering a promissory note—“Let’s grow up, conservatives. If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get back to work”—that was redeemed four years later in 1964. Bauman cited it: “Barry Goldwater stood at
the rostrum in Chicago, and I, as a young member of the staff from the Maryland delegation, heard him tell me, ‘Grow up conservative.’ ” Bauman continued, “We have grown up. The fight here was between two groups of conservatives. And the conservatives will win this year in November.”

  This wasn’t a bad argument, given the convention just past, which had ratified a pro-life, anti-détente, pro-gun, antibusing, pro-school-prayer platform, and had created the conditions that made nominating a liberal vice presidential candidate politically impossible. And now it was a convention in which Senator Jesse Helms had a prime-time televised speaking spot, and he was milking it for all it was worth:

  What we do here . . . can be the prelude to a sort of spiritual rebirth across this land. The American people believe in God, and now is the time for us to show it.

  The American people are worried about the forces in our society that seem to be tearing down the moral fabric of our nation, particularly as it is centered around the family, and they see government as threatening the moral order, and they are concerned about the secularization of education as though God didn’t matter in the classroom. They are worried about the textbooks and the federal government’s manipulation of the curriculum.

  In other words, our platform, the one we adopted here this week, speaks to the concerns of the American people. . . . It is our covenant, it is our pledge, and we must live up to it.”

  The New Right had arrived. This wasn’t Gerald Ford’s show.

  Cary Grant gave a tribute to Betty (“What is a party without remarkable women?”), who got the kind of ovation her husband never could. (“Thank you. And, Mr. Grant, I accept your nomination. After all, what woman could turn down Mr. Cary Grant?”) A film showed the president looking presidential. (One shot had his back to the camera just like a famous image of JFK.) Ronald and Nancy Reagan stepped up to their skybox to hear Ford’s acceptance speech and to receive one more uncontrollable demonstration. It had been a matter of resentment for the Reagan family that they were stuck behind glass, way up in the rafters, afraid it would make them look regal. Leave it to Dutch to figure out a way to make it a stage. He stood on his seat, so that his shoulders were above the top of the partition, and waved down to the crowd from up there. Elizabeth Drew recorded that the sound once more “[f]eeds on itself and grows, and then, after a while, the band plays ‘God Bless America’ and Ronald Reagan . . . and his wife stand and join the audience in singing the song that is intended to silence the cheers for him.” Edwin Newman on NBC said that “were it not for Irving Berlin, this convention might go on forever.” John Chancellor said, “This is not a late-night movie, it only seems like one. The plot involves an accidental President who fought for his life in a very hard campaign against a former movie actor. The President is a kind of plodder.”

  For the plodder’s acceptance speech, made in an old-fashioned banker’s three-piece suit, the podium was switched out for one bearing the presidential seal:

  “I am honored by your nomination, and I accept it with pride, with gratitude, and with a total will to win a great victory for the American people. We concede not a single state. . . . We concede not a single vote. . . . America is at peace. . . . This nation is sound; this nation is secure; this nation is on the march to full economic recovery and a better quality of life for all Americans.”

  He challenged Jimmy Carter to debate—this was newsworthy; there hadn’t been a presidential debate since the first one, between Nixon and Kennedy in 1960—and the crowd cheered him: “We want Ford! We want Ford!”

  He said, “After the scrimmages of the past few months, it really feels good to have Ron Reagan on the same side of the line.” (Reagan waved, then clasped both hands above his head.)

  Ford turned to the subject of August 9, 1974, when “I placed my hand on the Bible, which Betty held, and took the same constitutional oath that was administered to George Washington. I had faith in our people, our institutions, and in myself. ‘My fellow Americans,’ I said, ‘our long national nightmare is over.’ It was an hour in our history that troubled our minds and tore at our hearts. Anger and hatred had risen to dangerous levels, dividing friends and families. The polarization of our political order had aroused unworthy passions of reprisal and revenge. Our governmental system was closer to stalemate than at any time since Abraham Lincoln took the same oath of office. Our economy was in the throes of runaway inflation, taking us headlong into the worst recession since Franklin D. Roosevelt took the same oath.”

  He spoke, then, of a marble fireplace in the White House carved with a prayer written by John Adams. “It concludes, ‘May none but honest and wise men rule under this roof.’ Since I have resided in that historic house, I have tried to live by that prayer.”

  The president was able to boast of genuine recovery: inflation cut in half, payrolls and profits and production and purchases up. “This year more men and women have jobs than ever before in the history of the United States.” He boasted, that, after “a decade of Congresses had shortchanged our global defenses”—Democratic Congresses, he need not say—“and threatened our strategic posture . . . [t]he whole world watched and wondered where America was going. Did we in our domestic turmoil have the will, the stamina, and the unity to stand up for freedom?”

  Take that, Ronald Reagan: America did. “Look at the record since August, two years ago. Today America is at peace and seeks peace for all nations. . . . The world now respects America’s policy of peace through strength. The United States is again the confident leader of the free world.”

  Yes: “Two years ago people’s confidence in their highest officials, to whom they had overwhelmingly entrusted power, had twice been shattered. Losing faith in the word of their elected leaders, Americans lost some of their own faith in themselves.” And this: “From the start my administration has been open, candid, forthright.” Even this Republican audience wasn’t buying that, however; it got the least noise of any of his applause lines. They liked this: “Whether in the nation’s capital or the state capital or city hall, private morality and public trust must go together.” And they liked this implicit dig at his Democratic opponent, he of the jack-o’-lantern grin—“My record is one of specifics, not smiles”—even more.

  Ford said, nodding at détente, “We will build a safer and saner world through patient negotiations and dependable arms agreements which reduce the danger of conflict and horror of thermonuclear war. While I am President, we will not return to a collision course that could reduce civilization to ashes.”

  He concluded: “I have no fear for the future of this great country.” And he invoked the words of Lincoln: “As we go forward together, I promise you once more what I promised before: to uphold the Constitution, to do what is right as God gives me to see the right, and to do the very best I can for America. God help me, I won’t let you down.”

  And the reviews said it was just about the best speech he’d ever given.

  Jerry and Betty, arm in arm, acknowledged the cheers. Rockefeller and Robert and Elizabeth Dole, too, though more awkwardly. The band boomed “Marching Along Together.”

  Then Ford surprised the gathering.

  By one account, Reagan was busy signing autographs in the mezzanine when an aide told him that Ford was beckoning him to the rostrum. The fact that few saw it coming was vouchsafed by the fact that Michael and Maureen Reagan had already left Kemper Arena and returned to the Alameda Plaza Hotel for another planned family dinner; Lyn Nofziger hadn’t bothered to go to the arena that night at all. Gerald Ford looked skyward, waved his arm in an ingathering gesture, and asked for “my good friend, Ron Reagan, to come down and bring Nancy.” (A wire reporter called that “a friendship that was one day old.” Reagan had told the New York Times in an interview that morning that Ford had won only because of manipulation in “the machine states,” blamed “party bossism,” and said, “There’s no place in America for some of the things we saw happen to us.”)

  Reagan responded with an embarras
sed grin. He pursed his lips, stood, and blew a little kiss as Nancy raised her left hand in acknowledgment. He smiled shyly, reluctance written in every gesture. The “We want Reagan!” chants were, if possible, louder than any that had come before. Again and again, he lowered his palms as a signal for his adorers to sit down, or raised a finger to his lips in a Shhhh, but the chant became “Speech! Speech!” Michael Reagan said the din “seemed to last an hour. The pianist must have played ‘California, Here I Come’ a dozen times.” ABC’s Frank Reynolds, who’d grown close to the Reagans covering the campaign, was in tears.

  Next, one of the party’s most universally respected old men, Bryce Harlow, a White House hand going back to Eisenhower, took the podium from Ford to beg for Reagan’s presence. Clearly now there was no way he could refuse. Nancy Reagan recollected for a documentary camera that Reagan’s words to her when he finally made his way out of the box were “I haven’t the foggiest idea of what I’m going to say!” Which is to say, it was a surprise to everyone, an improvisation, this spectacle of Ford granting Reagan this opportunity to speak. Elizabeth Drew reported in authoritative tones: “The President’s aides were reluctant to have him do so, in order to make sure that Reagan did not cause the President to suffer by contrast.” And as Mr. and Mrs. Reagan finally completed the long odyssey from skybox to stage, the cheers indeed seemed so much louder than the ones that had come before for Ford.

  Reagan took his place behind the speaker’s stand with the presidential seal affixed; now his face was all radiance, the president behind him, Betty in yellow to his left, and Nancy in a white sweater-dress trimmed in black, gazing adoringly up at him.

  And after the polite pleasantries (“Ladies and gentlemen—I am going to say ‘fellow Republicans’ here, but those of you who are watching from a distance, all of those millions of Democrats and independents who I know are looking for a cause around which to rally and which I believe we can give them . . .”), he bragged about the party platform: “There are cynics who say that a party platform is something that no one bothers to read and it doesn’t often amount to much. Whether it is different this time than it has ever been before, I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors with no pastel shades.”