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

by Rick Perlstein

  And there was another Southeast Asia mess: Cambodia. As late as 1970 Nixon’s excuse for dropping bombs on the neutral nation had been that it was necessary to protect the retreat of American ground forces from South Vietnam. But now it was April 1973, the boys were back home, and B-52s were still dropping 24,000 tons a month. Secretary of State William Rogers told Congress it “was justified because the continued presence of North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia threatened the right of self-determination in Vietnam.” That was surreal, considering that the Paris Peace Accords we had just signed allowed 145,000 North Vietnamese troops to garrison inside South Vietnam. Another excuse arose: Communist communications lines in the countryside had to be intercepted. So why, the suspicious circles asked, were bombs falling on the country’s most heavily populated areas?

  Another mess was domestic. As part of his plan to dismantle as much of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as he could, Nixon had hired a thirty-two-year-old right-wing activist named Howard Phillips, ostensibly to “run” the Office of Economic Opportunity—but actually to take the agency apart piece by piece. And on April 11, a federal judge ruled on what the Washington Post called “the most brazen usurpation of the powers of Congress and as crass an assault on its prerogatives as we can imagine”: that if the president let Howard Phillips continue to dismember OEO, he “would be clothing the President with a power entirely to control the legislation of Congress, and paralyze the administration of justice.”

  And then there was Watergate—of which Attorney General Richard Kleindienst had just testified before Congress, defending Richard Nixon’s novel doctrine of executive privilege in a way that drove senators insane.

  “The Congress has no power at all to command testimony from the executive departments?” asked Senator Edmund Muskie, the object of the worst Watergate dirty tricks during the 1972 presidential campaign season.

  Replied Kleindienst, “If the President of the United States so directs.”

  “Do we have the right to command you to testify against the will of the President?”

  “If the President directs me not to appear, I am not going to appear.”

  “Does that apply to every appointee of the Executive Branch?”

  “I’d have to say that is correct.” And if Congress did not like that, Kleindienst continued, it could “cut off our funds, abolish most of what we can do, or impeach the president.”

  Senator Ervin, startled, followed up: how could an impeachment take place if none of the president’s men could be compelled to supply facts? Kleindienst’s answer was chilling and strange: “You don’t need facts to impeach a president.”

  Republicans and Democrats both fumed that they had never heard senators addressed like that in their chamber. A Harvard constitutional law expert called Kleindienst’s claims “utterly ridiculous.” A Yale professor said they “can’t hold water.” Democratic senator Lawton Chiles of Florida said it sounded “so unreal that I wondered if it was really me—if I hadn’t parted from my senses.” The chair of the House Republican Conference, John Anderson of Illinois, said it “borders on contempt for the established law of the land.” A Pennsylvania Democrat called it “monarchical or totalitarian.”

  King Richard: just like Senator Ervin said. And now Ervin, with his investigatory committee already meeting in closed session, was in a position to do something about it, threatening subpoenas: “I don’t like the surgeon’s knife, but sometimes a cancer comes—a cancer that has to be eradicated the same way.”

  THE WATERGATE GRAND JURY RE-IMPANELED, supposedly in secret, but leaking like a sieve: that James McCord had testified that E. Howard Hunt’s wife (who had died in a plane crash the previous December with $10,000 in crisp hundred-dollar bills in her purse) was a conduit for bribes to the Watergate defendants; that John Mitchell had received the transcripts from the bugs at Democratic headquarters; that Mitchell, Dean, Colson, and Magruder were active participants in obstructing the Watergate investigation; that G. Gordon Liddy had made a detailed presentation in Attorney General Mitchell’s office, including charts, graphs, and a multimillion-dollar budget, about how the Nixon reelection campaign could spy on and sabotage Democratic presidential campaigns.

  John Mitchell was spotted at the White House—perhaps strategizing about how to handle the rumored indictment?

  On April 17, the president, looking haggard and tense, read three minutes’ worth of lawyerly words on TV from a sheaf of typescript in the White House briefing room. He claimed that a month earlier, on March 21, “as a result of serious charges which came to my attention,” he “began intensive new inquiries” into Watergate. He claimed “major developments . . . concerning which it would be improper to be more specific now, except to say that real progress has been made in finding the truth.” He expected “all government employees and especially White House staff employees” to cooperate “in this matter.” He concluded, “I condemn any attempts to cover up in this case, no matter who was involved.”

  Then he absented the room. Young Ronald Ziegler, his spokesman, took over. The former skipper on the “Jungle Cruise” attraction at Disneyland was pressed about all the contradictions between the president’s new statement and his previous ones.

  There was no contradiction, Ziegler said, because the previous ones had been based on “investigations prior to the president’s action.”

  The reporters kept pressing him, question after question after question. On the eighteenth query, he uttered the immortal words: “This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.”

  Time magazine helpfully catalogued what statements were now “inoperative”:

  The White House’s claim that what had happened at the Watergate on June 17, 1972, was merely “a third-rate burglary attempt”; the claim of Attorney General Kleindienst on August 28, 1972, of “the most extensive, thorough, and comprehensive investigation since the assassination of President Kennedy”; the president’s reassurances the next day that his counsel John Dean had carried out an investigation on his behalf, such that he could now “say categorically . . . that no one in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident”; his statement the next day that while “overzealous people in campaigns do things that are wrong,” “what really hurts is if you try to cover it up,” and that he himself wanted the guilty to be prosecuted “as soon as possible”; his campaign manager’s October 16 avowal that the Washington Post had “maliciously sought to give the appearance of a direct connection between the White House and the Watergate, a charge which the Post knows—and a half-dozen investigations have found—to be false”; three days later, the promise of the campaign’s deputy director Jeb Magruder that “when this is all over, you’ll know that there were only seven people who knew about the Watergate, and they are the seven who were indicted by the grand jury”; then the president’s statement that he had “absolute and total confidence” in John Dean’s 1972 investigation; and John Mitchell’s statement on March 29 that claims he had known about the burglary beforehand were “slanderous and false.”

  All, apparently, inoperative.

  The president went into seclusion for the next thirteen days. On the fifth day a Gallup poll was released. It found that 41 percent of Americans believed Richard Nixon knew about the bugging plans before they were carried out. The next issue of Time summarized the state of knowledge: that the June 1972 burglary “has been revealed as clearly part of a far broader campaign of political espionage designed to give Nixon an unfair, illegal—and unnecessary—advantage in his reelection drive. It was financed with secret campaign funds, contributed in cash by anonymous donors and never fully accounted for, in violation of the law. Then, after the arrests in the Watergate break-in, the same funds were used to persuade most of them to plead guilty and keep quiet about any higher involvement.” Time concluded that the “scandal was rapidly emerging as probably the most pervasive instance of top-level misconduct in history.” A high official at 1600 Pennsy
lvania Avenue reported the mood in the West Wing: “It’s like the last days in a Berlin bunker in 1945. They’re all sitting there waiting for the bombs to drop.”

  Word was there would be another presidential announcement, this one the evening before May Day. Perhaps the bombs would drop then.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  “A Whale of a Good Cheerleader”

  IT SEEMED THAT BY APRIL 30 Richard Nixon had no choice but to say something about Watergate: six Republican senators said they would not run for reelection unless he did. Young men who last month bestrode Washington like colossi were hiring lawyers under threat of indictment, leaking accusations against colleagues, writing messages on legal pads rather than speaking them aloud—who knew whether their offices, too, were bugged?

  New outrages compounded daily. John Mitchell contradicted his own previous sworn testimony. Deputy campaign manager Jeb Stuart Magruder told investigators he had passed transcripts from Democratic National Committee phone bugs to the Oval Office. Chief of staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman and domestic affairs counselor John Ehrlichman, the president’s two closest advisors, had hired criminal representation. A young staffer named Kenneth Reitz had quit his job running the 1974 congressional campaigns after it was revealed he’d run a spy shop within the Youth Division of the Committee to Re-elect the President. Pat Gray resigned from the FBI altogether after the shocking admission that he had mishandled Watergate evidence from the safe of E. Howard Hunt, which ended up in an FBI “burn bag”—containers in which sensitive materials were destroyed. The evidence, allegedly, included forged cables meant to frame John F. Kennedy for the assassination of South Vietnam’s president Ngo Dinh Diem; a spy dossier on Ted Kennedy; and a memo on Hunt’s meetings with a lobbyist linked to bribes paid to Nixon by International Telephone & Telegraph. Reporters unearthed a new private treasury of $600,000 to finance dirty tricks—like the thousands of copies of the Washington Post the White House bought, then shredded, to fake votes in a poll on whether or not the president was doing the right thing in Vietnam. “I don’t know why any citizen should ever again believe anything a government official says,” one White House staffer told Time.

  Then, the staggering news at the Los Angeles trial of Daniel Ellsberg, the defense intellectual who leaked the Pentagon Papers, that on September 3, 1971, Hunt and Liddy had overseen a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The burglars spoke “Cuban-style Spanish.” They worked for a unit of the White House, America now learned, referred to internally as the “Plumbers.”

  A newsweekly quoted a White House staffer: “Don’t let your incredulity factor get too high—there’s more to come.” A distinguished British journalist published an op-ed in the Times calling the United States a “banana republic.” Theodore White announced he was extending his deadline for Making of the President 1972; he needed to add a new chapter on Watergate. It grew harder to entertain the notion that the president had simply been above it all.

  And so he left his seclusion and, American flag peeking from behind his right shoulder, American flag pin ornamenting his lapel, a bust of Abraham Lincoln and a picture of his family beside him, explained how he was cleansing the rot.

  He began, as he always did, on a maudlin note: “I want to talk to you tonight”—pause—“from my heart.” He outlined the problem: several of his closest aides, including “some of my most trusted friends,” had been accused of illegal activity in the 1972 presidential election. “The inevitable result of these charges has been to raise serious questions about the integrity of the White House itself.”

  He claimed he himself had learned about the break-in: from news reports while “in Florida trying to get a few days’ rest after my visit to Moscow.” (A bid for pity: he had been working hard, making peace.) He said he had been appalled, ordering an internal investigation about whether members of his administration were involved, and “received repeated assurances that they were not.” And it was only because of those assurances from people he trusted, he said, that “I discounted stories in the press that appeared”—he emphasized the word—“to implicate members of my administration and other members of the campaign committee.”

  Then he elaborated on what he had claimed two weeks earlier: that on March 21 new information convinced him he had been deceived. He addressed the audience directly: “There had been an effort to conceal the facts both from the public—from you—and from me.” So he ordered a new investigation, reporting “directly to me, right here in this office.” Those not cooperating would be forced to resign.

  Then came the lead for the next day’s news stories: “Today, in one of the most difficult decisions of my presidency, I accepted the resignation of two of my closest associates in the White House, Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman—two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know.” Not, he hastened to assure his audience, out of any “implication whatever of personal wrongdoing on their part. . . . But in matters as sensitive as guarding the integrity of our democratic process, it is essential not only that rigorous legal and ethical standards be observed but also that the public—you—have total confidence that they are both being observed and enforced by those in authority and particularly by the President of the United States.”

  He also announced that he had let loose his attorney general, Richard Kleindienst—again, not because the individual had done anything wrong but because he was “a close personal and professional associate of some of those who are involved in the case”; and, in passing, that John Dean had resigned also. He explained nothing whatsoever about that.

  There came a sort of apology. Nixon had “decided, as the 1972 campaign approached, that the presidency come first and politics second.” So “the easiest course would be for me to blame those to whom I delegated the responsibility to run the campaign.” He shook his head histrionically: “But that would be a cowardly thing to do.”

  He, instead, would fight for the truth—but not let that distract him from pressing tasks like “reducing the danger of a nuclear war that would destroy civilization as we know it.”

  That introduced the Checkers-style sanctimony. He listed the goals he had written on Christmas Eve for his second term. They included “to make it possible for our children, and for our children’s children, to live in a world of peace.” And: “To make this country be more than ever a land of opportunity—of equal opportunity, full opportunity, for every American.” And to “establish a climate of decency and civility.”

  “There can be no whitewash at the White House,” he concluded, and asked for the nation’s prayers.

  And then he absented himself from the nation’s TV screens, left to the mercy of the reviews.

  THE MARQUEE EDITORIALISTS GRANTED NIXON the benefit of the doubt. The Associated Press found only two prominent critics of the speech, both Democratic governors: the left-wing John J. Gilligan of Ohio, and the Georgia moderate, Jimmy Carter. Be that as it may, just about every commentator and official of any significance united in a new consensus: Watergate was something historically awful—and the men responsible, whoever they turned out to be, were louts.

  Everyone, that is, except Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan of California.

  He offered his thoughts after greeting a group of high school visitors in his Sacramento reception room. Reporters asked him about speculation from Barry Goldwater that Reagan might be called to Washington to help reorganize the White House. “That’s very kind of the senator,” he answered in the third person, “but Ronald Reagan has got his hands full right here.” Then he minimized Watergate. It all was part of the usual “atmosphere of campaigning,” where pranks were just part of the game. “They did something that was stupid and foolish and was criminal”—then corrected himself: “It was illegal. Illegal is a better word than criminal because I think criminal has a different connotation.” He said, “The tragedy of this is that men who are not criminals at heart” had to suffer. It saddened him “that now there is going
to have to be punishment.”

  That Reagan thought the Watergate conspirators were not “criminals at heart” was the headline—“Political Spies Not ‘Criminals,’ ” as the Los Angeles Times put it—and a laugh line. NBC’s John Chancellor smirked, “Reagan, who talks a lot about ‘law and order,’ described the burglars as ‘well-meaning individuals committed to the reelection of the president.’ ” Tom Wicker used Reagan, “that exponent of law and order,” as Exhibit A in a sermon about what happens in a world run according to the Gospel of Richard Nixon, where good guys were always good no matter what they actually did, bad guys were always and everywhere ontologically evil, and no one will be safe until “ ‘we’ crack down on ‘them,’ occasionally adopting their tactics.”