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

by Rick Perlstein

  And on the first of April, VIVA held a grand ball at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel hosted by Governor Reagan. Lorne Greene, who played the frontier patriarch on TV’s Bonanza, introduced the distinguished personages on the dais, including John Wayne and astronaut Buzz Aldrin. All wore POW bracelets. Singer Martha Raye, a veteran of USO tours, was escorted by a Green Beret, and wore a green beret, too. Pat O’Brien, who costarred as Knute Rockne with Ronald Reagan in Knute Rockne, All-American, announced the color guard, and led the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The president of Pepperdine University quoted Kipling.

  Lorne Greene gestured for silence. The guests of honor marched forth in grand procession, two by two with their consorts, as the band struck up the anthem “Stout-Hearted Men”: “Start me with men who are stout-hearted men, and soon I’ll give you ten thousand more.”

  The man held longest in Hanoi finally took the stage. “Let it loose!” Greene commanded. The crowd rose as one. Their ovation lasted eight minutes.

  The evening’s host took to the podium. Governor Reagan’s final peroration was addressed to the men: “You gave America back its soul. God bless a country that can produce men like you.” He soon would sign a bill exempting them from state taxes on their earnings while they were in captivity—which could run, with combat pay and family allowances and retroactive promotions, to a lump sum, in 2010 figures, amounting to half a million dollars per POW. “It Won’t Be Enough,” read a headline in the Los Angeles Sentinel.

  Then Reagan flew east—“back on the sawdust trail,” he told the cloud of reporters who had started following him everywhere, because it looked like he might be running for president. To an ecstatic reception at a luncheon of Young Republicans in Washington, he said this business about the Watergate bugging caper was not relevant to their party’s future: the presidential election of 1972 was “the most clear-cut choice in the last forty years,” a “head-on confrontation between two opposing philosophies that have polarized this nation.” Conservatism won, and would continue to win, he said—a curious argument given that the candidate who won had proposed programs of such dubiously conservative provenance as wage and price controls, a guaranteed minimum income, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

  Reagan traveled to New Orleans, where he extolled the virtues of free enterprise, cajoled his partisan audience to elect more Republicans to lesser offices, boasted of his recent welfare reform in California, and plugged his new tax limitation proposal. Then he brought up the stout-hearted men—and nearly couldn’t continue. He apologized afterward to reporters backstage: “I guess I’m going to have to quit talking about those fellows. I can’t do it without choking up.”

  The reporters followed up a bit rabidly—asking whether he wrote his own speeches; about the recent appearance on TV of the last movie he made, The Killers, the only one in which he played a villain (“I wish they would stop showing it”); about whether he was running for president. (They always asked that; he always demurred, insisting, “The office seeks the man.”)

  Next, in Atlanta, he called Watergate a partisan witch hunt. The president already had his own Justice Department prosecuting the burglars, he said—“What more can you ask?”

  He struck reporters as foolishly blithe. One of the Watergate burglars had just told the nation that the White House had pressured him to lie, in a cover-up he suspected went straight to the Oval Office, and that “members of my family have expressed fear for my life if I disclose the facts in this matter.” Barry Goldwater said, “It’s beginning to be like Teapot Dome.” Republican officials reported fund-raising was near a standstill.

  Only Reagan was calm. “This man has just been elected,” he had reassured the anxious Young Republicans in Washington. Republicans possessed a “2-to-1 majority philosophically.” Watergate did not matter—except if the liberals obsessively pursuing what he privately called the president’s “lynching” were allowed to let it matter. At his weekly press conference in Sacramento, he called the president “a truthful man.” In Atlanta he praised Nixon for refusing to allow his aides to testify before the Senate investigating committee. A reporter promptly pointed out that, no, the president had recently reversed course and ordered his aides to cooperate. Blithely indifferent to the contradiction, Reagan said he supported that, too, then promptly dismissed the whole matter with a quip. Democrats were in hysterics about someone bugging their office? “It seems to me that they should have been happy that somebody was willing to listen to them.” Then he excused himself to meet with twenty-five top party contributors.

  Let some cry havoc. Just this sort of performance of blitheness in the face of what others called chaos was fundamental to who Ronald Reagan was. It was fundamental to why he made so many others feel so good. Which was fundamental to what he was to become, and the way he changed the world.

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  Stories

  PEOPLE TOLD STORIES ABOUT RONALD Reagan—legends of a man who was larger than life.

  Stories about the day of his birth, in 1911. A snowstorm had made the roads of Tampico, Illinois, nearly impassable just as his tiny mother began a long and difficult labor. Of a mother’s agony, a child was born. The doctor told her she would never bear another. The blustering Irish Catholic father swept in: “For such a little bit of a Dutchman,” he cried, “he makes a hell of a lot of noise, doesn’t he!” The mother replied, “I think he’s perfectly wonderful. Ronald Wilson Reagan.”

  There are other versions of the story, too—and they clash with the first. In one, after saying he “looks like a fat little Dutchman,” Jack Reagan adds, “But who knows, he might grow up to be president someday.” In another, Ronald Reagan was given the nickname “Dutch” not when he was an infant, and not by his father, but after he and his older brother, Neil, were marched off to the barber after growing their hair defiantly long. Neil ended up with a style Ronald said made him look like the cartoon character Moon Mullins; his lifelong nickname became “Moon.” Neil snapped back that his little brother’s made him look “Dutch.” And then there is someone who claimed to know the Reagans when they were young, who did not recall Ronald ever being referred to as “Dutch” at all. Which may, or may not, square with the story as Ronald Reagan set it down in his memoir An American Life, in which he named himself: “I never thought ‘Ronald’ was rugged enough for a young red-blooded American boy and as soon as I could, I asked people to call me ‘Dutch.’ ” It’s hard to make stories about Ronald Reagan match up. Even, or perhaps especially, the stories Ronald Reagan told about himself—which are where most of the stories originated.

  Stories about his first memory: a hot summer day in Galesburg, Illinois, a train depot, an ice wagon, two mischievous boys scurrying beneath a freight train to liberate some refreshing shards of ice—and a blast of steam as the train chuffs to life and nearly finishes them off. An American Life adds the fillip: “Our mother, who had come out on the porch in time to see the escapade, met us in the middle of the park and inflicted the appropriate punishment.” However, as president he once offered another “first memory” to admirers in Chicago, where he lived when he was four: Jack rushed in with the news of the tragedy of the capsizing of the SS Eastland in the Chicago River, killing more than 840, and sought to impress on his two boys the epochal nature of the event by fetching them downtown to view the scene.

  The family lived in an apartment in Chicago for a year, after his father received an exceptionally promising department store job; it was one of more than a dozen rented homes in which Ronald Reagan would spend his childhood. In his first memoir, 1965’s Where’s the Rest of Me, he remembered teeming Chicago sidewalks lit by coin-operated gaslights; clanging horse-drawn fire trucks trailing clouds of steam (thus his first ambition, to be a firefighter); a beer truck that Neil tried to grab hold of that ran him over with its steel-rimmed wheels (the leg healed without complications, goes the story: a miracle). There was the time their mother was off on an endless e
rrand, their father nowhere to be found. The boys wandered off from their apartment to find them, but not before blowing out what they thought were oil lamps. Since the lights they had blown out were fueled by gas, not oil, his parents returned to a house full of deadly methane. Meanwhile the boys crossed the University of Chicago’s Midway—terra incognita—and got lost. A friendly drunk came upon them and returned them home. “Jack clobbered us,” the story ends.

  The family soon moved to a tiny town called Galesburg, where the tales are of a “Huck Finn–Tom Sawyer” idyll: swimming in clear-bottomed creeks and treacherous canals (Dutch was always the best swimmer), meadows to roam, caves to explore, trees to climb. Over-the-river-and-through-the-woods holidays at his mother’s people’s farm in the country. A magical vacant lot crawling with emerald-green snakes. Chaotic neighborhood football scrums: no real field, no yard lines, no goal, just a mob of excited youngsters chasing a lopsided ball one of the richer kids was able to buy. A story that was etched in strikingly specific detail: The five-year-old lay on the floor with the evening paper. Jack asked him what he was doing, and the little boy said he was reading. His skeptical father asked him to prove it; the little boy recited the details of an explosion in Jersey City, New Jersey, in which German saboteurs blew up an ammunition depot. He remembered, “The next thing I knew he was flying out the door and from the porch inviting all our neighbors to come over and hear his five-year old son read”—and he also remembered that these formative experiences as a news consumer produced in him “an uneasy feeling of a world outside my own.”

  Two years later, and Monmouth, Illinois, the family’s next little town: the awful flu epidemic of 1918, quarantined neighborhoods, shuttered churches, masked townspeople, wreaths with black ribbons guarding doorways. His mother almost died. “The house grew quiet,” he recalled, “and I sat watching for the guy with the black bag, and when he came down Jack went outside with him and I waited with a lurking terror for him to come back. . . . I went to bed and woke up with a weight digging at the pit of my stomach until one day Jack said ‘she’s going to be all right,’ and his face looked like the sun was out.” Then came the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918—Armistice Day. Glorious parades where “the streets suddenly filled up with people, bonfires were lighted, and grown-ups and children paraded down the street signing and carrying torches in the air.” Then Ronald Reagan came down with bronchial pneumonia—he was so close to death, he says, the entire neighborhood came by to keep vigil. One boy brought him a collection of lead soldiers to play with: “the sun shone through the window,” he recalled, “and I felt like a king with an army of 500.”

  Many stories index an unmistakable loneliness. In one, wandering on his own, he discovered in an unused hayloft a collection of artfully preserved birds’ nests and eggs and glass-encased butterflies. He began scampering up trees, collecting eggs, punching tiny holes in both ends and blowing out the inside. The story ends in a family communion: his father scavenged an old display case from the shoe store where he worked, then hauled it up to the hayloft, his boy’s new playpen. Reagan, too, found kindly old benefactors: a childless couple who lent the boy the use of their overstuffed gargoyle of a parlor chair, from whence he contemplated a “mystic atmosphere” of fragrant leather tomes and shawls and antimacassars and glass globes encasing exotic birds and flowers, and read all the latest grown-up magazines. “Aunt Emma and Uncle Jim” kept a jewelry shop next door to his father’s shoe store; their basement seduced him with its clanging and ticking and shining treasures. They gave him cookies and chocolate and a ten-cent weekly allowance.

  THE STORIES HE TOLD TELL a story in themselves. They frequently feature great, melodramatic traumas: the sinking of a great ship, a saboteur’s explosion, a near explosion in the family flat. Almost always, they end in some sort of redemption—even if redemption is a paternal “licking,” justly administered. Even those stories from the cruel winter of 1918 resolve into glorious celestial images: “the sun shone through the window”; “his face looked like the sun was out”—as if his mother’s almost dying and himself almost dying were the best things that could have happened to him.

  When he was ten the family moved to Dixon, Illinois—the river town where, though the family lived in five separate rented houses there, he finally began to feel at home. Dixon stories fixate about how he was the smallest kid in his age group—which sets the stage for his redemptions. Ice-skating on the frozen Rock River, he would turn his too-big overcoat, handed down from his big brother, into a sail, letting the wind carry his tiny body for miles. Playing football as a kid, “a scrawny, undersized, underweight nuisance,” he frequently found himself on the bottom of a “mass of writhing, shouting bodies.” That “gave me my first taste of claustrophobia. I got frightened to the point of hysteria.” He taught himself to “time my charges so that I was in one of the upper layers of bodies.” Toughened up, “I had a collection of the largest purplish bruises possible. More than once, I must have been a walking coagulation. . . . Those were the happiest times of my life.”

  Panic attacks, a mass of scar tissue: the happiest time of his life.

  A downtown merchant displayed mannequins wearing the uniforms of the high school football team the Dixon Dukes, whom Dutch watched practice every day. “Filling one of those purple and white jerseys became the noblest and most glamorous goal in my life.” He was too small to make the team. But that, too, was opportunity for redemption. He was spurred to take his first job, digging foundations for houses, which, he said, was the way he built up enough muscle to finally win a place on the squad.

  A good thing he was scrawny, or he would never have acquired the character it took to be strong.

  Everything always works out in the end, gloriously.

  Why?

  “WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES,” A wise woman named Joan Didion once said, “in order to live.” It is how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just to carry on. And in the life of the young Ronald Wilson Reagan, there was more than the usual ration of chaos to organize. One biographer recites the catalogue: “Between the ages of six and ten he attended a different school every year. . . . As a baby he lived in his first house for four months and his second for eight. He lived in five different places in Dixon, four different ones in Tampico, two in Galesburg—all rented. Sometimes they subleased to pay their own rent.” Another biographer reasonably points out, “At any given spot, he could have easily forgotten his address.”

  Much later, Ronald Reagan had an explanation—a story—that let him find comfort in the itinerancy: that his father, uneducated but street-smart, a natural-born salesman “endowed with the gift of blarney and the charm of a leprechaun,” was searching out upward mobility for his family. It was a token of his Americanism, even a sort of cowboy heroism: “Like a lot of Americans whose roots were on the nineteenth-century frontier, he was restless, always ready to pull up stakes and move on in search of a better life for himself and his family.”

  In fact most of Jack Reagan’s moves were lateral—and few if any, evidence suggests, were voluntary. Jack Reagan was an alcoholic. When the family left Chicago, it was after an arrest for public drunkenness. “Details of the incident are unknown,” Jack’s grandson Ron Reagan discovered, “but it resulted in his losing his new job.” With the passage of Prohibition five years later, it wasn’t just public drunkenness that might result in arrest; possessing alcohol was a federal crime. Jack Reagan would nonetheless disappear for days at a time, apparently going back to Chicago—where deaths due to alcohol increased by 200 percent in the first three years of the Volstead Act, and “psychosis has supplanted the old delirium tremens,” the Associated Press reported, owing to the proliferation of unfermented liquor cut with fuel oil. Jack’s older brother was committed to the Dixon State Hospital for the Feeble Minded for just such alcoholic psychosis in 1920.

  Jack Reagan was also something of a dandy, specializing in the somewhat disreputable trade of selling
women’s shoes (what kind of man handled women’s feet for a living?). He was glad-handing and blarneyful (“Jesus walked barefoot, but then he didn’t have to deal with our Illinois winters, now did he?” “I’m glad you chose that pair, they can walk to church and dance a jig on the way home”), and claimed expertise in the made-up science of “proctipedics”—which he learned from a correspondence course advertised in the newspapers. His wife, however, was a teetotaler—a pillar of the Disciples of Christ church in every town in which they alighted. Her calling card was her devotion to fixing others, as she wrote in a sonnet she presented to her adult Sunday school class:

  To higher, nobler things my mind is bent

  Thus giving of my strength, which God has lent.

  I strive some needy souls’ unrest to soothe

  Lest they the path of righteousness shall lose

  Through fault of mine, my Maker to present.

  If I should fail to show them of their need,

  How could I hope to meet Him, face to face.

  Needy souls were everywhere. Nelle Reagan considered it her duty to rescue each and every one of them. She was forever leaving the family hearth to pray with the families of sick children, to visit tuberculosis patients (though the disease, communicable through the air, took both Jack’s parents within a week of each other when Jack was sick). She visited the local jail, entertaining prisoners with dramatic readings and hymns, accompanying herself on banjo or mandolin, preaching from the Bible, feeding them apples and cookies while bringing a modest lunch of soda crackers for herself. She developed a reputation for literal miracles. “Many of us,” a contemporary recalled, “believed Nelle Reagan had the gift to heal. . . . It was the way she prayed, down on her knees, eyes raised up and speaking like she knew God personally, like she had had lots of dealings with him before.” One local mother went to church to pray for her four-year-old daughter after doctors pronounced her case hopeless. Christians must accept death, the pastor told her. Mrs. Reagan, though, spent the afternoon with the family praying for a miracle. Moments later, the mother testified, “the abscess burst. . . . the next morning the doctor said, ‘I don’t need to lance this.’ God had heard Nelle Reagan’s prayer and answered it.”