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

by Rick Perlstein

  It echoed something he’d said in early 1975 at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the one that had rung with calls for a third party with Reagan at its head—“Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which could make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all the issues troubling the people?” That got a massive ovation. And since that no-pale-pastels platform was more his, some said, than Ford’s, it sounded like some kind of declaration of victory—a declaration that it was he, and his minions, who had delivered the nation this newly revitalized Republican Party.

  He said it revealed “to the American people the difference between this platform and the platform of the opposing party, which is nothing but a revamp, and a reissue, and a running of a late, late show of the thing that we’ve been hearing from them for the last forty years.” And his audience once more exploded.

  Then he launched into a story. It was lovely—amazing, really. Even more amazing given all the evidence that he was apparently spinning this all out on the fly:

  I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our Tricentennial.

  It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and issues of the day. And I said I could do so. Riding down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific on one side and the Santa Ynez Mountains on the other, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day.

  Then, as I tried to write—let your own minds turn to that task: you’re going to write for people a hundred years from now who know all about us, we know nothing about them; we don’t know what kind of a world they’ll be living in.

  And suddenly I thought to myself as I wrote of the problems: they’ll be the domestic problems of which the President spoke here tonight; the challenges confronting us—the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democrat rule in this country; the invasion of private rights; the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy. These are our challenges that we must meet.

  And then again there is that challenge of which he spoke, that we live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction—

  One of the network broadcasts cut to a shot from the floor, and a man with his mouth hanging a little bit open, as if in religious awe. The gathering at long last was all silent—a congregation, like Madison Square Garden when Daddy King preached.

  —nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive in each other’s country and destroy, virtually, the civilized world we live in. And suddenly it dawned on me—

  (A woman clasping her hands, as if in prayer. A young blond woman, arms folded, looking soulfully down to the ground, another looking up, as if scanning the sky.)

  —those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge.

  His words took on a cadence like the Gettysburg Address (“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here. . . .”):

  Whether they had the freedom that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.

  Will they look back with appreciation and say, thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now a hundred years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction? And if we fail, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read it.

  (A line of delegates holding hands, gauzy-eyed, like people in church.)

  This is our challenge. And this is why we are here in this hall tonight. Better than we’ve ever done before, we’ve got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we’ve ever been, but we carry the message they’ve been waiting for.

  We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago was true: there is no substitute for victory.

  Then began an enormous ovation. “Mr. President,” he started saying—then stopped. Some thought he was about to address nice things directly to Mr. President; others that he was about to make clear that “there is no substitute for victory” had been intended, aggressively, toward Mr. President. In any event he knew to leave well enough alone. Delegates were standing on their chairs, waving Reagan placards, openly weeping. Nobody noticed anyone weeping when Gerald Ford spoke.

  The two men faced each other, clasped hands—you could just overhear Ford saying, “Great job”—then they faced the audience, arms raised together. Reagan worked the line of dignitaries behind him—Nelson Rockefeller reached for Reagan’s hand and said a single word: “Beautiful”—as the band struck up a brassy “The Victors,” as if this were Gerald Ford’s moment, which it most decidedly was not. A camera cut to two women holding a yellow hand-lettered sign—maybe hand-lettered during the speech: MR PRESIDENT USA NEEDS REAGAN SEC OF STATE. And of fists pumping enthusiastically beneath blue FORD AND DOLE signs, the official ones provided for delegates beneath their chairs. Another improvised banner: THANKS GOV & NANCY REAGAN. Reporters scrawling: Elizabeth Drew wrote that Reagan spoke “more effectively than I ever before heard him speak.” She spoke for the consensus of reporters—awed at how Reagan could pull together such inspiring remarks on the fly.

  Posterity, for the most part, chose to record just how spontaneous those remarks were. A historian who published a book on Reagan’s 1976 campaign and gave an entire chapter to the time-capsule speech, for instance, recorded that “Reagan was utterly content to watch the proceedings with Nancy, sign a few autographs, and savor the rousing reception he had received earlier. . . . [A] very intoxicated RNC aide had come to Reagan’s skybox and asked Mike Deaver to please ask Reagan once again to reconsider the invitation to speak to the convention. But the aide was summarily dismissed.” Then Reagan changed his mind at the last minute, and decided to speak.

  It made for a very good story.

  VIC GOLD, THE POLITICAL PUBLIC relations expert, a sardonic debunker, the guy who knew all the backstage magicians and lived to expose their bags of tricks, wrote in a book he published the next year, PR as in President, about the meeting that took place between Reagan and Ford the Monday evening of the convention, where the governor accepted the president’s invitation to speak to the convention that Thursday night. Which is to say the speech was never spontaneous at all. “Carruthers’ problem”—Bill Carruthers, the Ford campaign’s stage-management wizard—“was where to fit the Reagan speech into his closing night ceremonies.”

  Gold noted:

  Carruthers and the other members of the President’s PR team envied the dramatic success that Bob Strauss and Jimmy Carter achieved following Carter’s acceptance speech at Madison Square Garden. The Democrats had first brought all elements of their party to the platform in an audiovisual smorgasbord of milling unity. Then followed “Daddy” King’s moving benediction, to bring the convention to a final ovation. Contrary to traditional PR wisdom which dictates, Never risk topping your candidate, King’s prayer-speech enhanced rather than detracted from Carter’s acceptance. Carruthers wanted a similar all-factions smorgasbord for his closing night platform, with network cameras focused on a Republican Party unified behind Jerry Ford. Carruthers’ solution was a stroke in unorthodox convention scheduling. He decided to cast Reagan as the “Daddy” King of the Republican convention.

  Gold also noted a nerve-racking glitch, one that spoke to how stealthily the plan went down: John Rhodes, not in on the secret, called for Reagan to come to the podium before Ford’s speech, during the demonstration that erupted at his entrance. Reagan stalled, telling an interviewer, “This isn’t my night. It’s the President’s nigh
t,” and managed to refuse. (Vic Gold: “Thank God, Carruthers is thinking, that at least we’ve got a losing candidate who knows how to follow a script.”)

  Ronald Reagan’s gift: If a camera was present, he was aware of it—aware, always, of the gaze of others, reflecting it, adjusting himself to it, inviting it. Modeling himself, in his mind’s eye, according to how he presented himself physically to others. Adjusting himself to be seen as he wished others to see him. Simultaneously maintaining an image as a VIP and an ordinary guy, always making others feel good in his presence—his most exquisitely cultivated skill. His wife, too: with iron political discipline, she preserved the secret forevermore. No one noticed Gold’s book; or if they did, they didn’t care. Teflon.

  Once, in 1966, when Reagan was running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, his opponent, George Christopher, the highly favored candidate of the party establishment, thought he’d devised a clinching campaign strategy. Reagan was harvesting voters by the bushelful going up and down the state decrying the student strikes to change the rules at Berkeley. But what about Reagan’s rank hypocrisy? So Christopher related Reagan’s days as “a student at Eureka College, Illinois . . . leading a student uprising against the rules of his own college.” And what of Reagan the stout anti-Communist? Pressed Christopher, “Did he jointly sponsor protest on U.S. atomic policies with the chairman of the Communist Party in Los Angeles”—indeed he had—“and how long did this association last?”

  A fat lot of good that did. Reagan flicked the charges away by huffing about how his candidate was breaking the California Republican Party’s unofficial “Eleventh Commandment,” Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican—which had been of course been promulgated by a party chairman who was secretly on the payroll of Reagan’s campaign.

  People want to believe. Ronald Reagan was able to make people believe.

  Though not enough, apparently. Theatrics might have gotten him this far. But this was the end of the road: he could not travel any further. There were still certain political facts of life no amount of political hocus-pocus could obscure. “At sixty-five years of age,” the New York Times noted, he was “too old to consider seriously another run at the Presidency.”

  [1] Four days following Richard Nixon’s triumphant reinauguration in 1973, he announced “peace with honor” in Vietnam. Shortly thereafter, the nightly news became a patriotic spectacle with the return of some 587 prisoners of war who had been held there in cruel conditions for as long as eight years.

  [2] Suspicious circles, however, pointed to the even crueler treatment meted out by our ally South Vietnam to its tens of thousands of prisoners—seen here in a replica of a cell in the U.S.-built prison camp of Con Son. Critics called “Operation Homecoming” a propaganda campaign designed to short-circuit reckoning with the war’s evils and a way to distract attention from America’s ideological divisions, including among the POWs themselves.

  [3] In the last years of his second term as governor of California, Reagan emerged as the national tribune of the conservative side of those divisions. (Here, he welcomes home Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Shattuck, wearing an American flag eye patch.) “I guess I’m going to have to quit talking about these fellows,” he said of the POWs. “I can’t do it without choking up.” In America’s season of moral confusion, this stout certainty made him a presidential prospect.

  [4] Growing up in a chaotic home with an itinerant alcoholic father—between the ages of six and ten “Dutch” Reagan attended a different school every year—a lonely, frightened boy transformed himself in the confident image of his heroes from adventure stories and sports. Above, Reagan as a boy in Dixon, Illinois, the small city where he found his confidence.

  [5] Reagan (first row, left) with brother Neil (far right), father Jack (middle row, left), and mother Nelle (last row, second from left), whom Reagan said bore “a sense of optimism that ran as deep as the cosmos.” From the age of ten on, it’s all but impossible to find a photograph in which Ronald Reagan does not appear aware of the camera.

  [6] It was around the time F. Scott Fitzgerald defined “personality” as “an unbroken series of successful gestures.” The personality developed by the young Ronald Reagan—on stages from the YMCA boys band to a beachside lifeguard stand to college athletics to a regional radio station in Iowa—radiated blithe optimism in the face of what others called chaos. It was what made some so eager to follow him—and others to judge him a shallow fraud. (Above: Reagan at the job he worked during high school; next page: the college footballer.)

  [7]

  [8] Richard Nixon’s second term took a sharp downward turn as the issue of alleged criminality in the White House, largely ignored by the press during the 1972 election, took center stage—as symbolized by an awkward appearance of country star Merle Haggard at the White House. “Do you know whether he’s the first ex-convict to perform in the White House?” a reader asked a Chicago Tribune columnist.

  [9] Soon, Senate Watergate hearings led by North Carolina’s colorful Sam Ervin (third from right, conferring with, from right, Senator Edward Gurney [R.-Fla.], Democratic counsel Sam Dash, unidentified female aide, Republican counsel Fred Thompson, and Senator Howard Baker [R.-Tenn.]) were revealing, live on TV, mafia-like behavior in Nixon’s White House.

  [10] TV viewers were riveted. Senators were shocked, meanwhile, by the defiance of the Nixon administration, which claimed that the novel constitutional doctrine of “executive privilege” kept the president from letting any of his aides testify before Congress on Watergate. Toward summer, Watergate came to dominate popular culture.

  [11]

  [12]

  [13] In spring, meat prices nearly doubled. After the president’s consumer advisor Virginia Knauer lectured that “liver, kidney, brains, and heart can be made into gourmet meals with seasoning, imagination, and more cooking time,” the mail in response, according to a press report, was “unprintable.”

  [14] The earth seemed in rebellion: millions of tons of raw sewage dumped into the Pacific in Southern California, volcanoes erupting in Iceland, birds dying off mysteriously, thousands of dead fish washing up periodically on Midwestern beaches.

  [15] Devastating energy shortages developed months before the October 1973 OPEC oil embargo quadrupled the price of a barrel of crude. “The Roman Empire crumbled from within,” wrote a Chicagoan in the Tribune. “Isn’t that what is happening to us?”

  [16] The president tried to heal the nation’s blues by showcasing the POWs at the biggest dinner party in White House history. But the reputation of the POWs as patriotic, family-friendly tribunes had already attenuated with news of the civil war among them in the camps, a rash of suicides, and a wave of divorces. One newly divorced POW even brought Playboy magazine’s Miss January as his date.

  [17]

  [18] Sexual mores were shifting radically even among the suburban middle class, which was reading books like Loving Free, whose authors dropped their pseudonyms when it turned out none of their elementary school–age children’s friends in suburban Milwaukee cared that their parents had written a sex manual.

  [19] Among the forty-three Nixon officials found guilty of Watergate-related crimes were John Erlichman...

  [20] ...and John Mitchell, both seen testifying before the Ervin Committee.

  [21] John Dean, the president’s White House counsel, had been given the job of coordinating the Watergate cover-up. Under limited immunity, he testified that the president’s every public statement about the scandal had contained lies. Prior to his intensely anticipated appearance, he viewed himself on his only previous TV interview and noticed his eyes twitched. So he dug up an old pair of glasses to wear—the look for which he would become forever known.

  [22] It was Dean’s word against the president’s—until Nixon’s personal aid Alexander Butterfield shocked the world when he revealed that Nixon kept a taped record of every word uttered in the Oval Office. Special prosecutor Archibald Cox, the bow-tied Harv
ard professor argued before Watergate Judge John J. Sirica, whose courtroom became a D.C. tourist attraction, to make the tapes public.

  [23] The showdown reached its dramatic high point when Nixon fired Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre, which critics decried as akin to a fascist coup. It reached its nadir when the White House revealed an eighteen and a half minute gap in the recording of a key meeting. Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods claimed she had accidentally erased it—but when she tried to show how, she actually revealed that was impossible.

  [24] Civilization continued its collapse. Mild-mannered heiress Patricia Hearst was kidnapped by a murderous far-left terrorist gang—then she announced she was joining them to fight for “the freedom of all oppressed people.”

  [25] Young people were abandoning promising lives to join weird religious cults, such as the one that followed the bizarre self-proclaimed messiah the Reverend Sun Myung Moon or (above) the Hare Krishnas. Parents hired “deprogrammers” to kidnap their children and reverse their “brainwashing.”