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

by Rick Perlstein

  Frazer saw in Dutch a natural leader, “endowed with a curious, keen, and retentive mind.” He also admired Reagan’s “very unusual mother,” who “had that rare ability to make the ideal and fine seem quite practical to others,” and noticed Dutch revealing the same talent. Frazer, who soon became the latest in a series of Reagan’s surrogate fathers, also noticed another emerging trait: the intensity of his longing to be someone else. “He wanted to live the character. He didn’t just want to parrot the lines.”

  Then summer, and his next season at the lifeguard stand. “You know why I had so much fun at it?” he said in one of his first big Hollywood fan magazine features. “It was like a stage. A lot of people had to look at me.” He brought his windup Victrola to work and imitated the play-by-play calls of exciting recent sports matches, recalled with photographic memory. The lifeguard stand was also his director’s chair. When he wanted to clear the water before closing time to leave for a date, he’d wait until no one was looking—always aware of others’ gaze—and skip a rock across the water: “Oh, that’s just an old river rat,” he would say loudly, and watch the swimmers clear out. When action was lulled he might demonstrate one of his famous swan dives, or offer comic relief by waddling like a chimp. He took a shine to a local beauty, and when she spurned him, he landed the pretty daughter of the new preacher instead. (There’s a photograph of him in his dashing lifeguard singlet, goofing with Margaret “Mugs” Cleaver, his hand resting dangerously low on her hip.)

  Then, a thrashing in the distance—and lo, there was Dutch, flinging off his glasses, making another save.

  He later expressed resentment of swimmers who downgraded his heroics, particularly the strapping young farm boys who “rarely encounter water deeper than an irrigation canal and would invariably underestimate the river’s power.” He recalled them saying, “Y’know, I was just fine out there—didn’t really need your help.” “I’d just nod,” he reported himself responding, “and keeping carving my notch.’ ” (The hero must always be modest.)

  He crafted a sort of prose poem on his own heroics for his high school annual. “Meditations of a Lifeguard” is a token of how effortlessly his mind swirled fiction and fantasy into soul-satisfying confections with himself at the center of the world. He sets the scene—“A mob of water-seeking humans intent on giving the beach guard something to worry about”—then grants the lifeguard-narrator the power to author reality itself: he is the one who “paints the ether a hazy blue, by the use of lurid, vivid, flaming adjectives.” He offers a taxonomy of the lesser beings in his charge: a “big hippopotamus with a sandwich in each hand, and some firewater tanked away”; a “ ‘frail and forty’ maiden”; boys distractedly enacting adventure stories. He saves them, one by one—and concludes with the effortless wooing of a passing lovely: “She speaks and the sound of her voice is like balm to a wounded soul, the worried expression fades in the glow of a joyous realization, the birdies strike up in chorus, and somewhere celestial music plays the haunting strains recognizable as ‘The End of a Perfect Day.’ ”

  A perfect day: it revolved around himself, the rescuer, surrounded by those just waiting to be rescued, a grateful public he could superintend with perfect command.

  His rescues became a staple in the Telegraph: the daring nighttime save in which Dutch arrived just in the nick of time after “[o]ne of the members of the party who was said to have attempted to rescue him was forced to abandon the attempt when he too was in danger of being taken down”; the arrogant stranger who was “warned repeatedly against entering deep water and responded by cursing the guard. He sank in the deep water and after a struggle Reagan succeeded in rescuing him.” The accounts, however, read as suspiciously tidy to at least one historian, who wonders whether Reagan didn’t also have a hand in drafting them. Some in his community were suspicious, too—how convenient that people always managed to almost drown themselves whenever young Reagan was around, and how annoying that he never seemed to shut up about it. His senior yearbook featured a comic dialogue on the subject:

  “Drowning Youth—Don’t rescue me. I want to die.

  “Dutch Reagan—Well, you’ll have to postpone that: I want a medal.”

  Football, however, not swimming, was the Golden Age’s sacred sport. The year Reagan entered high school, Grantland Rice enumerated the qualities it inculcated: “Condition, courage, stamina, loyalty, service, team play, fortitude, and skill. There has been no finer game yet devised for the youth of any country.” It was also Ronald Reagan’s favorite sport. When he was president, he called it “a kind of clean hatred,” a downright necessary invention: “the last thing left in civilization where two men can literally fling themselves bodily at one another in combat and not be at war.” He described spending countless afternoons looking out on the high school playing field from an earthen ledge in his family’s yard, “watching and hearing the clash of padded bodies butting up against one another and dreaming of the day when I could put on a uniform and join the combat.” When that day came, he was so tiny the coach could hardly find a practice uniform for him—and he couldn’t make the team.

  What would a boy in an adventure story do?

  Pull himself up by his own bootstraps—for anything was possible for he who was born under the sign of grace, grace that will always eventually reveal itself in the fullness of time, whatever temporarily degraded accident of circumstance into which he finds himself thrown. Degraded circumstance, after all, is the superior crucible for the shaping of heroes. That was the summer he took the job digging foundations for houses. “It was midseason of that third year when it happened,” as he spun the tale. “I found myself learning plays at guard among my heroes. All week long I figured it was being used to discipline or scare the regular guard into more effort. I can never describe the feeling on the following Saturday when I heard the coach in that impressive pre-game locker room hush come to right guard in the starting lineup. His next word was ‘Reagan.’

  “I had a good day—particularly on defense—and there I was at last, and for the rest of the season, a ‘regular.’ ” (Reagan’s youngest son recalls his father once telling him, “It’s funny, whenever I think of playing football back then, it’s always a gray, cloudy day”—more melodramatic that way.)

  Sport, that manly testing ground of character—where, “R.R. ’28” wrote in another prose poem in his senior high school annual, “all the soul is laid bare.” This particular piece began with a reference from Scripture: “To every man comes Gethsemane!” Gethsemane was the garden where Jesus prayed alongside his disciples for the courage to face his greatest test, crucifixion; where Christ taught that though the spirit was willing, the flesh might be weak. Such tests could also come, Dutch Reagan insisted, “on the level sward in the shadow of a deserted grandstand.” He told the story of a high school football star, “a storybook type, tall, good looking, and very popular,” who selfishly stopped trying after his team stopped winning games. In one contest he faked an injury rather than come back for the second half and “risk his brilliant reputation by being flopped for losses.” The team lost a game it should have won. And so, on the sixth day, he revisited the scene of his shame. “An early harvest moon made ghostly figures of the milky mist tendrils that hung over the deserted gridiron like spirits of long dead heroes.” Those spirits were “pointing ghostly scornful fingers at him. The quitter cringed before the visions his tortured mind brought up.” He “saw for the first time how cheap he really was. Great sobs shook him and he writhed before the pitiless conscience that drove him on in his agony of self-punishment.”

  Then, from temporarily degraded circumstances, redemption: “his sobs ceased and he stood up, his face to the sky, and the ghosts of honored warriors urged him and drew him from the low shadows. A love and loyalty took the place of egoism. His hand strayed to the purple monogram he wore”—purple and white were the Dixon school colors—“and as he looked at the curving track, at the level field, he realized he loved them.
” The next game, his team once again behind at the half, our hero “rose and spoke.” (Christ has died. Christ has risen.) “In three minutes the team trotted out to warm up, and eleven boys were wiping tears from their eyes as the quitter took his place by the full-back.”

  The tale closely resembled something by Grantland Rice—whom the author honors in the story’s final line, quoting Rice’s most famous poem: “It matters not that you won or lost, but how you played the game.” Like the Galloping Ghost, Red Grange, our hero soared “in a ground-gaining stride that made the coach want to recite poetry”; “he sailed, and as he side-stepped a man . . . his bird-like flight changed to a ripping, tearing smash.” He scored two touchdowns and was borne off the field on his teammates’ shoulders.

  In the story, for a brief and unbearable moment, the hero is racked by a complex moral ambivalence (ordinary mortals, after all, sometimes selfishly take time off when they’re having a tough day). Then his soul is restored to coherence by the plain act of deciding simple grace resides within reach of his own simple decision—just as R.R. ’28 says you’re supposed to in another of his yearbook texts, a poem titled “Life”: “I wonder what it’s all about, and why / We suffer so, when little things go wrong? / We make our life a struggle, / When life should be a song.” It revealed his personal liturgy of willed self-confidence. He had become a virtuoso of self-confidence, a maestro at staging ways to display his self-confidence. The performances gave him an outward glow. People began to follow him, envy him: they doubted, hesitated, feared; he did not. He graduated from high school transformed: thirty notches carved in his lifeguard log; beau of the town’s prettiest girl (he won her away from the quarterback); dashing leading man; yearbook art director (perhaps it was he who came up with the idea to give the book a Hollywood theme, listing the editorial staff as “PRODUCERS”); fashion trendsetter (among the school year’s highlights, the Dixonian includes December 19: “Derbies appear. Ronald Reagan enters with corduroy and high cuts”; in his picture he sports an ascot where the rest of the seniors wear long ties); vice president of the new Hi-Y club (chartered “to create, maintain, and extend throughout the school and community, the highest standards of Christian character”); “Heap Big Chief” of the junior-senior banquet (it featured an Indian theme); senior class president. “Life is just one grand sweet song, so start the music,” he published as his yearbook quote.

  “He always left people with a way of saying ‘God bless you,’ ” a classmate recalled, “that made them feel—just maybe—he had an inside track.” Some began seeing him as a figure of destiny.

  IN RONALD REAGAN’S CHAOTIC CHILDHOOD the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears. He pushes doubt and confusion from the forefront of his consciousness with the furious energy of a boy who fears that if he does not do so he might somehow be consumed.

  The strategy can backfire, however, when the boy becomes a man and must finally face the austere everyday ambivalence and incoherence of the adult world. The long-delayed realization that one’s fantasies do not actually map reality can leave behind a wrecked grown-up more alienated, helpless, and terrified than he ever was before. Which is why most people, with greater or lesser degrees of success, simply grow out of it.

  But Ronald Reagan was not like the rest of us. He was, in this particular sense, a much, much stronger man. Perhaps it was that he worked out in the psychic gymnasium of boyhood fantasy with ten times the furious determination of an ordinary boy. Perhaps it was a more mysterious gift. However the outcome was achieved, it’s not a controversial point to make: at turning complexity and confusion and doubt into simplicity and stout-heartedness and certainty, Ronald Reagan’s power was simply awesome. As an athlete of the imagination, he was a Babe Ruth, a Jack Dempsey, a Red Grange.

  The real-world consequences of his chaotic upbringing hardly ever went away; he was presented with them constantly. And yet that awful reckoning the world forces upon those who retreat into fantasy, in order to deny complexity, never seemed to have forced itself upon him; his armor was just that strong. “There’s a wall around him,” as his wife Nancy put it. “He lets me come closer than anyone else, but there are times when even I feel that barrier.”

  It was the stories: the ones he told himself, the ones he told others, the ones born of heroic situations that he always was scanning the horizon to put himself at the center of, to prove to himself the world was always in actuality the way he preferred it to be. It was his greatest political skill. “Looking back my memory is very vivid”; “I shall always remember”; “fresh in my memory”: phrases like these saturate his recollections. They seem to do so in inverse proportion to the actual power of his recall. The gap between the one and the other was the measure of how he made himself, and others, feel good.

  And by 1973, beginning his seventh year as governor of California, with two years to go in his term, in the season of Operation Homecoming, he had hardly changed in his essential being. And he was thinking about running for president.

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  Let Them Eat Brains

  PRESIDENTS ARE ALWAYS ALSO STORYTELLERS, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn’t even really like people, had not been so bad at the duty—at least in the first four years of his presidency.

  At his inauguration he promised to “bring us together”; pundits swooned. A little more than nine months later he delivered one of the most politically successful addresses in the history of the presidency: the “Silent Majority” speech, which in a single evening increased the number of Americans who approved of his handling of the Vietnam War by 19 percentage points. In August 1971, at the lowest political ebb of his term, against a backdrop of some of the darkest economic portents since the Great Depression, he told a story about how he would protect the plain people from economic marauders menacing America from abroad, and sang out the dry economic details of Executive Order No. 11615, “Providing for the Stabilization of Prices, Rents, Wages, and Salaries,” like a celestial chorus: “Today we hear echoes of those voices preaching a gospel of doom and defeat. . . . I say let Americans reply: ‘Our best days lie ahead.’ ” A pollster said of the approval that followed, “I’ve never seen anything this unanimous, unless it was Pearl Harbor.”

  Storied diplomatic triumphs followed: the opening to China, agreements with the Soviet Union to beat nuclear missiles into plowshares, an apparent endgame in Vietnam at the Paris peace negotiations. A grateful nation granted him reelection against the Democrat George McGovern with forty-nine of fifty states and a record 61 percent of the vote, including millions who had never voted Republican before: Southern good ol’ boys, hard-hat-wearing union members, Jews.

  There had been speed bumps. On June 17, 1972, four Cuban burglars were caught breaking into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. One of their accomplices, James McCord, had headed security for the president’s reelection office. The Washington Post discovered that two accomplices—E. Howard Hunt, late of the CIA, and G. Gordon Liddy, of the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms—had worked in Nixon’s White House and reelection campaign, respectively. But the political damage was deftly neutralized. “I’m not going to comment from the White House on a third-rate burglary attempt,” the president’s spokesman, Ron Ziegler, said, even as Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post kept up a steady stream of scoops tying the conspirators to the Nixon reelection campaign, and reported that squads of dirty tricksters had circulated the country sabotaging the Democratic contenders’ campaigns. But the “third-rate burglary” explanation held. The Chicago Tribune did not run a front-page story on Watergate until late in August. A Watergate inquiry by the fiercely independent chairm
an of the House Banking and Currency Committee, Wright Patman of Texas, could not win enough votes to go forward. Before the 1972 election, Gallup asked the public, “Which candidate—Mr. Nixon or Mr. McGovern—do you think is more sincere, believable?” Nixon won, 59 percent to 20. “Now,” he wrote in his memoirs of his reelection landslide, “I planned to give expression to the more conservative values and beliefs of the New Majority throughout the country, and use my power to put some teeth into my New American Revolution.”

  In the weeks before his re-inauguration, during the Christmas season, no less, he had risked international opprobrium by carpet bombing North Vietnam for almost a fortnight. He weathered the political storm. He was weathering all the storms—and then, on January 27, 1973, he signed the Paris Peace Accords. The gross national product grew 8.7 percent in the first quarter. The Dow was high, unemployment low, inflation predicted to fall below the previous year’s 3.5 percent—and, his economists told him, with no worry about more inflation in the long term. At the news of advance work for a summit in June with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at Camp David, a twenty-three-year-old wrote to his hometown newspaper about how all his life it had been his “duty to hate two things: (1) Monday mornings and (2) Communists. I am no longer supposed to hate Communists, and now I fear that Monday mornings are in jeopardy. Is nothing sacred anymore?” In New York a group of supporters began researching a constitutional amendment to allow Nixon to serve a third term.