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

by Rick Perlstein

  Ronald Reagan divided the world into good guys and bad guys. Richard Nixon and his team were good guys. So they could not have done evil at all.

  Time ran a digest on which prospects to replace Nixon in 1977 were “up” and which were “down.” John Connally, the tough former Texas governor, JFK and LBJ intimate, and Nixon treasury secretary, was looking good—he had magnanimously chosen Nixon’s difficult week to officially announce he was switching to the Republican Party. The dashing Illinois senator Charles Percy was in great shape after introducing a Senate resolution for an independent Watergate prosecutor. Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York was in good shape for his remoteness from the scandal. Ronald Reagan, however, who “put his foot in his mouth by saying that the Watergate conspirators were not ‘criminals at heart,’ ” was down, down, down. He had just announced that he would not be running for reelection next year, which was interpreted as a move to position himself for a presidential run. Excusing Watergate sure seemed a funny way to begin.

  THE NOTION OF REAGAN RUNNING for president had been in the air for years. In 1968 he made a surprise last-minute entrance into the nomination fight at the Republican National Convention in Miami—and with heavy initial support from Southern delegates—had come shockingly close to the prize. He had emerged as the hottest politician in the country. For a new issue had arisen in the second half of the 1960s, and Ronald Reagan owned it.

  The issue was campus militancy. When he first starting running for governor in 1966, advisors armed with the most sophisticated public opinion research that money could buy told him not to touch it. The last thing they wanted for the candidate who costarred beside a chimp in the film Bedtime for Bonzo only fifteen years earlier was for him to associate himself with anti-intellectualism by attacking higher education. In fact, they wanted him to announce his candidacy standing beside two Nobel laureates. What’s more, they explained, the student uprising in Berkeley didn’t even show up in their polling as a public concern.

  He told his experts to go climb a tree. “Look,” he lectured them, “I don’t care if I’m in the mountains, the desert, the biggest cities of the state, the first question is: ‘What are you going to do about Berkeley?’ And each time the question itself would get applause.’ ”

  Ronald Reagan knew audiences. It was a key element of his political genius. One of the things at which brilliant politicians are better than mediocre ones is smelling new public concerns over the horizon before they are picked up by polls—before the public even knows to call them “issues” at all. “This is how it became an issue,” he told interviewers later. “You knew that this was the number one thing on the people’s minds.”

  Berkeley: late in 1964 a police car had rolled onto the middle of the University of California’s flagship campus to dislodge a student signing up students for the Mississippi civil rights movement. Thousands gathered around the police car, trapping it, and turning it into a makeshift dais for inspiring, idealistic oratory. The “Free Speech Movement” began, and it soon became the seedbed for a nationwide antiwar movement of unprecedented breadth and intensity. In fashionable circles, the youthful energy represented by the rise of civic activism among college students was judged a tonic. Even aging Republicans got in on the act. “I think the people of your age have a function right now,” Dwight D. Eisenhower told the 1966 graduates at Kansas State University. “My generation and even those who are younger have grown pessimistic and lethargic. You people can do much for your elders.” NBC’s David Brinkley praised “a new generation of students who demand to find their own way in a society filled with social crisis.”

  Reagan, on the other hand, quipped, “I’d like to harness their youthful energy with a strap.” And said he wished Congress would declare war in Vietnam, so “the anti-Vietnam demonstrations and the act of burning draft cards would be treasonable”—which is to say, punishable by death. (His own opinion on ending the war, expressed in October 1965, was “It’s silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.”)

  Excoriating student protest came naturally to him. College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination—Frank Merriwell and all that—but it was also where he learned once and for all that heroes were not just for storybooks. “As far as I’m concerned everything good that has happened to me—everything—started on this campus,” he put it at a 1980 campaign appearance at his alma mater, Eureka College, decked out in a vintage football jersey in the school colors of maroon and gold.

  Eureka: “Sounds like the name of a college in a movie,” a Hollywood columnist wrote in a 1949 profile. Dutch became aware of the little campus operated by the Disciples of Christ when his hometown hero Garland Waggoner became a football star there. He said that upon his first visit to its few modest redbrick, ivy-covered buildings, he “wanted to get into that school so badly it hurt when I thought about it.” Getting there and staying there had been no easy thing: rural America was in an agricultural depression even before the Great Crash of 1929. Then the Depression put Jack Reagan’s Fashion Boot Shop out of business. Overselling his football prowess, downplaying his B average, Reagan talked his way into a $180 athletic scholarship, paying the rest of his way washing dishes, lifeguarding, and coaching the swim team he himself helped establish. (He had never swum in a real pool before.) That made quite a contrast to the entitled brats tearing down Berkeley. Part of what made Berkeley such a powerful issue for traditionally Democratic voters was class resentment—something Ronald Reagan understood in his bones.

  College to him meant something specific—an arena of knights-errant and blushing damsels; contests of manly derring-do; and, yes, even intellectual exploration. (Disdain for learning was one of the things that made the foppish Brown of Harvard so contemptible.) Immediately, he pledged a fraternity. (He never seemed more apoplectic during the Berkeley crisis than when he announced he had learned a left-wing professor was biased against boys wearing fraternity caps.) He scored a room in the fraternity house’s converted attic with a panoramic view of his new proving ground. (Henceforth whenever he moved into a new home it was almost always one with a panoramic view; life was more dramatic that way). And soon an opportunity to cast himself as Frank Merriwell arrived—when, three months into his freshman year, nearly the entire student body went on strike to demand the resignation of the school’s unpopular president.

  No one either then or now—no attentive eyewitnesses, no diligent historians, no reporters who covered the exciting events for the Chicago Tribune, not the Associated Press, not even the New York Times—has ever been able to come up with a coherent explanation of precisely why the strike happened. Some blamed flapper-besotted students frustrated with President Bert Wilson’s refusal to lift a ban against dancing. Another theory held the opposite: the instigators were moralists annoyed at Wilson’s indifference to campus dissipation. Or that, following a trip to New York, he tried to force fancy new administrative theories on the college, which alienated his colleagues. Others note a professional rivalry with a popular professor who had been passed over for Wilson’s job (and who, according to some accounts, orchestrated the entire affair from behind the scenes, from fanning fears of staff cuts to spreading rumors that Wilson’s daughter was a sex fiend). Or maybe it was just that students were bored.

  A fog of crosscutting motives and narratives, a complexity that defies storybook simplicity: that is usually the way history happens.

  But not, however, in the mind of Ronald Reagan.

  He made the strike the centerpiece of his 1965 memoir, writing just as Berkeley was becoming an epicenter for the national campus revolt. In Reagan’s morality tale, President Bert Wilson, Scrooge-like, had decided to impose “such a drastic cutback academically that many juniors and seniors would have been cut off without the courses needed for graduation in their chosen majors”—“cutting the heart out of the college.” Wilson
then rammed the plan through the board of trustees “[w]ithout a thought of consulting students or faculty,” who both responded “with a roar of fury.”

  But not, Reagan insisted, with too much fury: students responded with “no riotous burning in effigy but a serious, well-planned program, engineered from the ground up by students but with the full support and approval of almost every professor on the campus.” (“I get a bit smug when I contrast that college strike to some of the . . . fevered picketing of these more modern times,” he later told a correspondent; the contrast was surely in his mind when an effigy at Berkeley bearing a sign reading REDUCE REAGAN BY 10% was hung the first month of his governorship by students protesting his budget cuts.)

  In his telling, students then devised a counterplan that reorganized the university according to all of President Wilson’s stated aims, which Wilson then rejected. So they raised up a petition to present to the board of directors, demanding his resignation. “The board met on the last Saturday before Thanksgiving vacation,” Reagan wrote—a dirty trick, by which they might sign off on the president’s foul deed before the students had a chance to fight it, the cuts presented as a fait accompli when they helplessly returned from vacation.

  Then . . .

  Every great adventure story needs a suspenseful turning point—a moment of high drama upon which everything stands or falls. And in the imagination of Ronald Reagan, nothing heightens drama better than a football game.

  “The football team met Illinois College that afternoon,” he wrote. But the crowd, he said, was distracted. He presents a striking visual image: “In the second half, newsboys hit the stands with extras headlining the fact that our petition to the board had been denied. Looking back from the bench was like looking at a card stunt”—that stadium ritual where spectators hold up coordinated color cards to trace out images. “Everyone was hidden by a newspaper.” Afterward no one left for Thanksgiving. “We all remained on campus, waiting until midnight for the summit to break up.” The college bell tolled; “as prearranged as Paul Revere’s ride,” the school chapel filled with students and faculty.

  Dramatically, just in the nick of time, evil was foiled

  Enters our star—a lowly freshman, just like his favorite Yale hero: “it was my turn to come off the bench. It had been decided that the motion for putting our plan into effect should be presented by a freshman.” He took the stage. He gave a brilliant speech. “When I came to actually present the motion there was no need for parliamentary procedure: they came to their feet with a roar—even the faculty members present voted by acclamation. It was heady wine. Hell, with two more lines I could have had them riding through ‘every Middlesex village and farm’—without horses yet.’ . . . In the end it was our policy of polite resistance that brought victory. After a week, the new president resigned.” And so they received “an education in human nature and the rights of man to universal education that nothing could erase from our psyches. . . . The four classes on campus became the most tightly knit groups ever to graduate from Eureka. . . . Campus spirit bloomed. A remarkably close bond to the faculty developed.”

  HERE IS THE PROBLEM: MANY of these events are matters of record—which contradicts Reagan’s story at almost every point. The showdown meeting took place on a Tuesday, for instance, not a football Saturday. Nobody else remembered Ronald Reagan saving the day; he appears in no contemporary newspaper account. “You know, I read that part of his autobiography on Eureka College,” a classmate told a writer decades later, “and I wondered whether he and I went to the same school. This thing is pretty dreamy.”

  But it is true he did emerge shortly after the strike as an incipient Big Man on Campus. Maybe he was being honored for his ability after the event to present the fog of bureaucratic war as a simple morality tale to a confused student body, giving students the clarity they needed to bind themselves together in the wake of an acrimonious conflict. We do, after all, tell stories in order to live.

  In February the freshman made his first appearance in the school paper’s gossip column: “Dutch Reagan’s debut as cheer leader in the Normal cage”—that is, at the basketball auditorium at Illinois State Normal University—“was very much in his favor . . . He was full of spirit and the Normal rooters followed him almost perfectly.” He began playing the lead in school plays; the word that reappears in reviews is “presence.” He also began wearing dark horn-rimmed glasses, like Harold Lloyd’s in The Freshman, eagerly stitching himself into the elaborate rituals of 1920s varsity life—“ ‘E’ Tribe”; a seventy-fifth anniversary pageant set in the “Forest Primeval”; pep rallies, in whose defense he wrote an impassioned jeremiad, signed “Dutch Reagan,” imagining sports as savior of his school’s floundering Depression-era fortunes:

  “Eureka Spirit”—it is advertised and upheld as something superior to that of other schools. But is it? . . . Let’s live basketball and Eureka till Mac’s Red Devils take Illinois College in the last game of the season. It’s our year in at least three major sports. Now let’s get a freshman class in here of over one hundred and let’s go home and wake up the Christian churches to the fact that this is their school and they owe it their support. “Let’s get in there and pitch”!

  In sports where he wasn’t skilled enough for conference competition, he found other ways to make himself indispensable. For instance, a classmate remembered him as the basketball team’s regular yell leader—“one of the best we’ve ever had. He turned that crowd upside down . . . a whale of a good cheerleader.” He became the football team’s tackling dummy: “Although ‘Dutch’ failed to get much competition this season he has the determination and fight to finally win out, if he sticks to football throughout his college career,” his sophomore yearbook read. “He never gives up when the odds are against him.” Maybe he wrote that; he was on the yearbook staff. Or maybe he didn’t: “He never quit,” Coach McKenzie—another new surrogate father—remembered. “Others did.” (He scored his only touchdown in a game at Illinois State Normal College, he told reporters in 1982—“lowering himself to the Oval Office floor, showing how he picked up an ISNU fumble, then lurched up to recreate a frantic romp to the end zone.”) His coach even figured into his story about why his grades weren’t impressive. Dutch claimed he flubbed them on purpose—a happy ending. “I was afraid if my grades were good I might end up an athletic teacher at some small school. I wanted more than [Coach] Mac had.”

  In his junior year he added the Booster Club, and displayed an interest in international politics: on March 22, 1931, a “lively discussion over world peace and the chances of another war” was led by “Ronald Reagan, better known as Dutch . . . and as the saying goes, ‘he needs no introduction.’ ” By the next school year he was senior class president.

  THERE WAS ONE COLLEGE DETAIL that only his classmates remembered; Reagan never spoke of it himself. They recalled how the Reagan brothers staged the school’s first homecoming dance—“the biggest thing seen here in years”—charging their classmates a premium to attend, and splitting the proceeds. Another recollection of a classmate that never found its way into Reagan’s self-representations: in 1932, he bet five of his fraternity brothers that within five years he would be making five thousand dollars a year. His girlfriend recalled that he told them if he didn’t make that much, “I’ll consider these four years here wasted.”

  The stories he chose to tell, tell a story in themselves, as do those he chose not to.

  “We had a special spirit at Eureka,” he wrote, “that bound us all together, much as a poverty-stricken family is bound”: tuition fees “made no pretense of covering the actual cost of an education,” and many students couldn’t pay the tuition anyway; the endowment was inadequate, so professors would “go for months without pay”; part of the endowment was a farm, from whose produce the school sometimes paid its debts. “Oh, it was a small town, a small school, with small doings. It was in a poor time without money, without ceremony, with pleasant thoughts of the past to balan
ce fears of the uncertain future. But it somehow provided the charm and enchantment which alone can make a memory of a school something to cherish.” In Ronald Reagan’s recollections of Eureka there could never be anything venal (except in the person of President Bert Wilson, because he was a villain).

  That made quite a contrast with the “multiversity”—as Chancellor Clark Kerr termed the sprawling campuses of the University of California system. Reagan traversed the state in 1966 offering an image yoking protesters who believed themselves the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers to that varsity culture of the 1920s: “I’m sorry they did away with paddles in fraternities.” He isolated the villains: Chancellor Kerr, for entertaining the students’ grievances, and Governor Pat Brown, ex officio member of the Board of Regents, for not having immediately taken the ringleaders “by the scruff of the neck and thrown them off campus—personally.” That would “put the rest of them back to work doing their homework.” When he was governor, Reagan said, the watchword would be “obey the rules or get out.” The tactics of what they called the “New Left,” he said, better resembled that of the “Old Right,” which his generation had fought so hard to defeat—the Nazi Party.

  Such perorations would get a rousing ovation every time. And that, even more than singling out alleged abuses of California’s welfare system by “able-bodied malingerers,” or his fulminations against the violation of economic liberty represented by the state’s new statute outlawing racial discrimination in housing, or high taxes and runaway government spending generally, was how he won his stunning upset victory.