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

by Rick Perlstein

  [26] The anxieties over what two authors called “America’s epidemic of sudden personality change” found expression in popular culture via The Exorcist, in which a twelve-year-old little girl was possessed by the devil, then, in the last reel, was restored to normalcy—which turned out to look a lot like America before the sixties happened.

  [27] Americans longed to be anywhere but the 1970s; a wave of nostalgia ensued. The film American Graffiti (slogan: “Where were you in ’62?”) became a surprise hit. An oral biography of Harry Truman (“One’s blood congeals at the thought of how far we have gone since those days,” its author wrote) became a bestseller. Bette Midler scored a hit with the 1941 Andrews Sisters song “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.”

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  [30] Halloween was especially frightening in 1973. After General Augusto Pinochet staged a coup in Chile (aided, it was later learned, by the CIA), Senator Ted Kennedy predicted that if Nixon defied the courts and refused to turn over the tapes, “It would be Chile . . . without the bloodshed.” After a surprise Arab attack on Israel, OPEC embargoed oil to the United States when Nixon sent weapons to save the Jewish state. The military was placed on higher alert—but Henry Kissinger then had to deny the alert was a hoax to distract attention from Watergate.

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  [32] The occult went mainstream. One Los Angeles bank advertised a presentation on “ESP, hypnosis, bio-feedback, shape energy, plant sensitivity . . . and the comet Kohoutek” alongside classes on income-tax preparation.

  [33] As major cities banned outdoor Christmas illumination to save electricity, a popular paperback, Predictions for 1974, provided a map of the dreads of a nation. Predictions included a 1929-style stock market collapse, locusts, floods “like the plagues of Egypt,” and rising sea levels “inundating all coastal areas.”

  [34] The public’s longing for nostalgic release was a quiet weapon in Ronald Reagan’s political arsenal when discussions began, following Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation in the wake of a corruption investigation, about who might replace the wounded Richard Nixon. Here he is “roasted” in a fall 1973 episode of The Dean Martin Comedy Hour. The televised roasts were new that year, a kind of family reunion for all the beloved warhorses of the old Hollywood.

  [35] For instance, an NBC News report from Iowa on Reagan’s presidential prospects featured a photograph from his days as a radio sportscaster, and depicted him enrapturing a political crowd with a tale about broadcasting a Cubs game according to a telegraphed play-by-play.

  [36] Sports nostalgia was preferable to sports reality—where, in 1974, Henry Aaron (seen here in an on-field celebration with Georgia’s ambitious governor, Jimmy Carter) was receiving hate mail like “Dear Jungle Bunny, You may beat Ruth’s record but there will always be one babe. Go back to the jungles.” Note sparse crowd at Municipal Stadium in Atlanta, which proved indifferent to the hero in their midst.

  [37] As Watergate reached its endgame, Reagan’s aides worried that their boss was sabotaging his presidential chances by refusing to distance himself from Nixon. He remained one of Nixon’s few defenders, along with the Reverend Moon, the Jesuit priest and White House aide John McLaughlin (who said Nixon’s taping system was “honorable” and that the president’s profanity had “no moral meaning”), and Baruch Korff, a rabbi from Massachusetts (and “apologist for rampant immorality,” said the president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations) whose “Citizens Committee for Fairness to the Presidency” raised $30,000 in three days for ads like these.

  [38] The star of the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings was the first-term Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan, introduced to the nation live on TV: “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution—the subversion—the destruction—of the Constitution.”

  [39] Nine days later, the president announced his resignation effective noon the next day, and he took off from the White House lawn and ceded the presidency to the vice president, Gerald Ford.

  [40] The new president took office promising “In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end. My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over”—and also the words recorded on this pin (above). At first the media could not get enough of this kind man and his easygoing family. At his first state dinner he danced joyously to “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” with his wife, Betty, the candid former professional dancer who in her first interview as First Lady revealed she saw a psychiatrist.

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  [43] The honeymoon ended early. On his thirty-first day in office, Ford, citing the need for national unity, and quoting Scripture and Abraham Lincoln, announced a “full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon.” His approval ratings plummeted. The slate was not to be wiped clean of a nation’s dreads and divisions—as seen by the suspicion generated when Nixon’s doctor claimed he was too sick to testify in the cover-up trials of his aides (“How Sick Is Nixon?”), and paranoia-drenched films like, from the left, The Parallax View and, from the right, Death Wish.

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  [45] The school year began violently. In Kanawha County, West Virginia, an emerging new right, led by the new Washington think tank the Heritage Foundation, joined a movement to protest “secular humanist” textbooks that escalated to the dynamiting of the school-board building.

  [46] In Boston, scene of this rally, a federal judge’s desegregation order led to running battles between South Boston toughs and the police.

  [47] Reagan emerged as the conservative alternative to Ford—but first he had to become a conservative. That happened in Hollywood. He arrived in 1937 a “hemophiliac, bleeding heart liberal,” with the world as his oyster—landing a leading role in his very first picture, Love Is on the Air.

  [48] His career soon flatlined, then picked up again with the backing of columnist Louella Parsons, as he established an image in the fan magazines as a family man. (Here he is with wife Jane Wyman and their first child, Maureen.) But World War II set him back profoundly. He was stuck stateside making training films at “Fort Wacky” while other stars became heroes in the war, and younger, more fashionable actors like Van Johnson (who didn’t serve because of a car accident and was linked romantically to Jane Wyman) passed him by.

  [49] His wife passed him by, too. Once a mere “starlet,” she emerged after the war as a top dramatic player, to her husband’s consternation. Their marriage fell apart after she won a Best Actress Oscar for playing a deafmute rape victim. Reagan quipped bitterly, “Maybe I should name Johnny Belinda as a co-respondent” in their divorce suit.

  [50] He had by then found a more dependable outlet for his energies: politics. He served both as a liberal activist, joining several groups later named as Communist fronts, and as president of the Screen Actors Guild, where he effectively took the side of management in a bitter jurisdictional strike by technical workers. Reagan, whom the FBI had turned into an informant, insisted they were in league with Communists. (Here, testifying at the House Committee on un-American Activities’ hearings on alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood.)

  [51] As a performer he was suffering mostly humiliations: sharing a screen kiss with Shirley Temple in her first adult role; starring alongside a chimpanzee in Bedtime for Bonzo; and, when his agent Lew Wasserman couldn’t find him any film roles at all, in a corny Las Vegas revue that closed soon after it opened.

  [52] He was saved by a corporation in the market for a “good, upright kind of person.” Hosting the new General Electric Theater, part of his job was making publicity tours of their hundreds of production facilities scattered throughout the nation, where he learned important political skills.

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  [54] G.E.’s pioneering public relations and labor relations executive Lemuel Boulware influenced Reagan’s
shift to the right. Boulware had G.E. personnel study right-wing authors like Henry Hazlitt, from whom Reagan learned to think of big government programs, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, as impositions upon the public.

  [55] Another contributing factor was his second marriage, to Nancy Davis—thanks both to the influence of her stepfather, Dr. Loyal Davis, a prominent Chicago conservative, and of the Southern California industrialists and their wives with whom Nancy aggressively sought to socialize.

  [56] Soon, concurrent with his rightward traverse, Reagan became better known as a political spokesman than an actor—leading to his 1962 firing by G.E. and culminating in his run for California governor in 1966, which he announced on a TV show redolent of his introductions to G.E. Theater episodes. (He wielded a ketchup bottle to illustrate jobs lost due to, he asserted, foolish government policies.)

  [57] As Reagan’s gubernatorial term ended, 1975 dawned as the year of the “Watergate Babies,” new young members of Congress, many in their first political office, who snatched the People’s House from old men seen as symbols of its corrupt ossification—such as Wilbur Mills, who lost his seat after a scandal with the stripper Fanne Foxe, the “Argentinian Firecracker.”

  [58] At the dilapidated California statehouse (which warned visitors to enter at their own risk), Reagan turned over the reins to the Zen Buddhist Jerry Brown. But fresh faces were not able to restore trust in institutions at a time when, as a columnist put it, the best political outcome people expected was that described by Albert Camus: “not to be cured but to live with one’s ailments.”

  [59] In the spring came the Hieronymus Bosch images from South Vietnam, as the government America had supported fell to the Communists. Thousands of refugees clambered aboard ships built not to accommodate passengers at all; this craft, the Pioneer Commander, was commandeered by escaping South Vietnamese marines who massacred twenty-five civilians and forced the U.S. crew to barricade themselves in the cabin. The country upon which Americans had invested billions of dollars and some 58,000 soldiers’ lives was “tearing itself apart in a frenzy of self-destruction,” as one journalist described it, and Americans themselves could hardly escape safely, as this famous image of Americans climbing atop the roof of the CIA station chief’s residence to board an escape helicopter attests.

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  [61]Americans preferred the Madonna and Child images of “Operation Babylift,” the sentimental rescue of Vietnamese orphans. The Vietnamese themselves considered it the “abduction of children.” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, meanwhile, insisted “the United States must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power”—so two weeks after Saigon fell Ford had forces storm a beach off Cambodia, unleashing B-52 bombing sallies to “rescue” the crew of a captured merchant ship, who were actually already safe. That led to the deaths of forty-nine Americans, but the absurd operation was celebrated as a triumph by a nation longing for patriotic reassurance.

  [62] Newsweek’s fantastical cover, which resembled Soviet propaganda.

  [63] America’s political culture was moving rightward, much more than the pundits noticed. President Ford suffered politically for not seeing the towering Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn when he visited in July. Solzhenitsyn spoke instead to thunderous applause from 2,500 at an AFL-CIO testimonial dinner, arguing that America should stay in Vietnam. Young Americans for Freedom protested high taxes, despite the fact that President Ford had cut them. The Equal Rights Amendment–supported by Gerald and Betty, opposed by Ronald and Nancy–needed ratification from only four more states to join the Constitution. But in November of 1975 anti-ERA forces won shocking upsets in New Jersey and New York, where the successful campaigners dubbed it the “Common Toilet” law.

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  [66] A New York Times columnist reflected in October, “There are fleeting moments when the public scene recalls the Weimar republic of 1932–33.” There was the opening of televised hearings by the Church and Pike Committees investigating the FBI and the CIA. Church had already established that the CIA had a hand in attempting to assassinate foreign leaders. Here, he displays a dart gun designed to kill from 100 meters using a toxin—untraceable in any autopsy—that was legally supposed to have been destroyed but was not because the CIA director of covert operations wished “to continue this special capability.”

  [67] September saw two assassination attempts against Gerald Ford, one by a follower of Charles Manson, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, here being led away crying she shouldn’t be arrested because “the gun didn’t go off,” and another by a housewife sympathizer of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Patty Hearst was caught, and the Chicago Sun-Times editorialized, “We cannot help wondering to what extent the spirit of Tania lies dormant, awaiting arousal, in many of the nation’s young.” Here, the Secret Service surround Reagan with their bodies after an apparent attempt on his life by a twenty-year-old who had demanded Squeaky Fromme be freed.

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  [69] New York was nearly broke. President Ford refused a federal bailout. Garbage workers struck, promising to turn New York into “Stink City.” In some neighborhoods, citizens made bonfires of the trash that piled up in the street. Ford’s right-wing treasury secretary later wrote in a bestselling book that this was the “terrifying dress rehearsal of the state that lies ahead for this country if it continues to be guided by the same philosophy of government”—liberalism.

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  [71] Gerald Ford, a former football star and an expert skier, was America’s most physically accomplished president. But after he slipped down the steps of the presidential plane on a 1975 visit to Salzburg—the first of a series of mishaps that included bumping his head on the door of his helicopter, a limousine collision with a teenager’s Buick, and a televised tumble on the ski slopes at Vail—the president’s supposedly uncontrollable body, mocked every weekend on Saturday Night Live, served as a stand-in for a body politic out of control. Not the most promising image to take into a primary fight against the graceful Ronald Reagan—who, after his first tour of New Hampshire, shocked pundits by pulling ahead of Ford in the polls.

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  [73] On the Democratic side, Jimmy Carter, the determinately homespun, even hokey, candidate of “anti-politics”—his symbol was the humble peanut; his signature line, “I am not a lawyer . . . I’m not from Washington . . . I’ve never been part of the federal government,” brought down the house; his beer-swillin’, gas-station-owning brother Billy (above, left) became a sort of national mascot; his campaign headquarters was this modest train depot in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, pop. 600—was nominated at the convention in New York. “I hate to get corny at this late date in a cynical life,” columnist Mike Royko wrote, “but the arrival of Jimmy Carter at the affectionate, emotional bedlam of Madison Square Garden . . . was one very memorable experience.”

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  [75] Ronald Reagan left for the Republican convention—the “Shootout at Kansas City”—with a decent chance he might win.

  [76] The close convention was bedlam. Betty Ford had become reviled among Reagan fans after a 60 Minutes interview in which she praised Roe v. Wade, the ERA, compared smoking marijuana to “trying your first cigarette,” and said if her daughter was having an affair, she would only want to know whether the fellow was “nice or not.” In her own 60 Minutes profile, Nancy Reagan supported the death penalty, reviled marijuana, and said of abortion, “I can’t get over the point of it being that you’re killing somebody.” They went to war for the public’s affections in Kansas City in what Time called “The Battle of the Queens”—much to the consternation of convention chairman Bob Dole, whose job it was to shut down the hooting and hollering that broke out any time either of them appeared in the convention hall. Here, Betty dances “the Bump” at a reception at the convention with popular singer Tony Orlando.

  [77] And then after Ronald Reagan lost, he won. Called up to th
e podium for an apparently spontaneous address after Ford’s acceptance speech, he spoke of a time capsule that might foretell whether humanity had been able to avoid a nuclear Armageddon, drinking in the crowd’s spellbound, almost religious awe. The New Yorker’s correspondent called it his greatest speech in a career of great speeches—though noting elegiacally, “This is probably the end of Reagan’s political career.”