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

by Rick Perlstein

  Then, when it became Governor Reagan’s job to superintend the university upon his inauguration in 1967, he wrangled control of the Board of Regents in order to have Clark Kerr fired, wrested from the nine campus chancellors their final authority to appoint faculty, and instituted tuition for the first time in the system’s history. It was not the business of the state, he said, “to subsidize intellectual curiosity”—the intellectual curiosity of students whom he sometimes labeled “brats,” “freaks,” and “cowardly fascists,” but whose “academic freedom” he insisted he himself guarded as zealously as a crusading knight. Except, however, when he did not: “Academic freedom does not include attacks on other faculty members or on the administration of the university,” the former student striker once scowled on TV, “or seeking to incite incidents on other campuses.” When one of the founders of the New Left group Students for a Democratic Society was recruited to the faculty at the campus in Santa Barbara, Reagan said that was like hiring an arsonist to work at a fireworks factory.

  It made him a national political star. Of the sixty-seven times Reagan was featured on the three network newscasts between 1967 and 1970, more than half concerned his stance on campus militancy. For instance, in the fall of 1968, a Berkeley faculty member recruited Black Panther Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver as guest lecturer for Social Analysis 139X—Dehumanization and Regeneration in the American Social Order. Reagan said if it happened he would investigate the school from “top to bottom”—for “if Eldridge Cleaver is allowed to teach our children, they may come home one night and slit our throats.” Cleaver taught anyway, proclaiming in one lecture, “Ronald Reagan is a punk, a sissy, and a coward, and I challenge him to a duel to the death or until he says Uncle Eldridge. I give him a choice of weapons—a gun, a knife, a baseball bat, or marshmallows.”

  After the Reagan-controlled Board of Regents rebuked Cleaver, a 1,500-student march culminated in the holding of a dean hostage. Reagan, on ABC, scowled: “The calls and the letters make it pretty clear that the people have reached the end of the line, and I don’t blame them.” When school opened the next semester, San Francisco State College students demanding a new ethnic studies program blockaded campus buildings. Reagan answered with soldiers bearing fixed bayonets. Tear gas flew back and forth, and bonfires illuminated the streets. On NBC Reagan said that the “small group of criminal anarchist and latter-day fascists” whom he held responsible—those who “seek to close down the campuses, our universities, and even our high schools,” a goal which was “not in any way to be confused with the traditional and generally acceptable activities of students who always seek change through proper and constructive channels”—would soon receive their comeuppance: “Those who want to get an education and those who want to teach should be protected at the point of a bayonet if necessary.”

  The next month, the same movement surfaced at Berkeley. He visited the campus for an inspection; a throng started chanting “Fuck Reagan”; the governor responded with an outstretched middle finger. Students shattered the glass door of the building where he was meeting.

  It was then that a CBS reporter confronted him with an apparently irrefutable argument: every time he escalated such deployments, conflict only escalated. Reagan responded with the logic of Frank Merriwell at Yale: he was rescuing damsels in distress. “When you see a coed, a girl trying to make her way to class, and she is pushed around, and physically abused for trying to go through the picket line and go to class,” he said, “this girl is entitled to have the forces of law and order to defend her right to go to class.”

  The reporter stood silent, incredulous. He had no idea what this strange man was talking about. Though this strange man, it had to be said, was then enjoying the highest approval ratings of his term.

  Later that spring, when Berkeley students forcefully seized a spit of vacant campus land and declared it a “People’s Park,” Reagan dispatched not just National Guard troops but a Sikorsky helicopter that spewed tear gas at students cornered into a crowded campus square. A student was shot observing events from a rooftop. Reagan said, “The police didn’t kill the young man. He was killed by the first college administrator who said some time ago it was all right to break the laws in the name of dissent.” His address at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco defending the military deployment—he was beating back, he said, “a revolutionary movement involving a tiny minority of faculty and students finding concealment and shelter in an entire college generation. . . . Stand firm and the university can dispose of this revolution within the week”—made all three networks.

  The following year, as bomb scares swept the nation following the conviction of seven New Left activists for conspiring to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, UC Santa Barbara students burned down a Bank of America branch. Marx-minded student leaders welcomed such incidents as “heightening the contradictions”—a necessary precursor to the longed-for revolution. Reagan barked back, four days before the shootings at Kent State: “If it’s to be a bloodbath, let it be now. No more appeasement.”

  Hard to know how a politician could bounce back from that in an election year. Or so said his detractors. Instead, he won reelection overwhelmingly. Life profiled him that fall as “The Hottest Candidate in Either Party,” noting, however, that Reagan had “failed almost completely to keep his campaign promises of 1966—the cost of higher education and welfare has risen hideously, California campuses have remained battlegrounds, and his ‘tax reform’ has been turned down in the legislature.” Life’s quotation marks signified skepticism about how a tax plan that delivered most benefit to upper incomes counted as reform at all. And yet, even more than in 1966, he attracted thousands of Democrats who’d never imagined voting for a Republican before in their lives. “His most effective campaigners,” Life explained, “have been those college-based Reagan haters who rioted over People’s Park in Berkeley and set fire to the Bank of America’s branch in Isla Vista last spring.”

  A fat lot of good that would do him in 1973, went conventional wisdom, now that the Paris peace settlement had put Reagan’s most effective campaigners out of business. A political cartoon told the story: an archaic-looking hippie, like something from another age, held up his picket sign with a peace symbol in one hand and a placard reading UNEMPLOYED in the other. Reagan couldn’t even count on the loyalty of Republican conservatives, either: their hearts belonged, as their bumper stickers proclaimed, to “Spiro of ’76.” And there was this: Vice President Spiro Agnew would be fifty-six at convention time. John Connally would be fifty-nine. Chuck Percy would be fifty-six—and Reagan, at sixty-five, would be eligible for Social Security. “Around the mouth and neck,” George Will of National Review wrote, “he looks like an old man.”

  Ronald Reagan’s closest political advisors had been meeting for weekly breakfasts, racking their brains on how to move him into the front ranks of presidential contenders. The plan they arrived at was announced the week after the end of the Vietnam War. Bad accounting and an improving economy had left California with a nearly $1 billion budget surplus. Reagan said he intended to “return the money to taxpayers”—novel language at the time. His method would be unprecedented: the state’s first ballot initiative sponsored by a sitting governor. The state made a tactical decision the pundits called ill-advised: to put it on the ballot for November 1973, instead of in 1974. It set off an apparently impossible scramble to get six hundred thousand signatures by June to get it on the ballot. The plan baffled the pundits. George McGovern had made middle-class tax relief a centerpiece of his presidential campaign only a few months earlier; that, obviously, had gone nowhere. The details of the plan devised by four right-wing Reagan advisors—economist Milton Friedman, Martin Anderson, a lawyer named Anthony Kennedy, and Chief of Staff Edwin Meese—were confusing. The aim was to put a ceiling on state taxes and spending. But it seemed to bestow most of its favors on those who were already well-off—and what sort of political sense did a giveaway
to the rich make for Ronald Reagan? sneered the Los Angeles Times in a May 16 article about allegations that state employees were gathering signatures while on the job. It pointed out revelations that the governor had paid no state income tax in 1970, because of “so-called business losses,” and noted his decision to lift a moratorium on offshore drilling in effect since a disastrous 1969 Santa Barbara Channel oil spill. The Democratic state assembly leader Bob Moretti pounced, calling the proposal “economic war on the interests of people in California.”

  Reagan had a response for that: he was defending an innocent maiden called “the taxpayer” against a devouring beast called “government.” He asked, “Are we automatically destined to tax and spend, spend and tax indefinitely, until the people have nothing left of their earnings for themselves? Have we abandoned or forgotten the interests and well-being of the taxpayer whose toil makes government possible in the first place? Or is he to become a pawn in a deadly game of government monopoly whose only purpose is to serve the confiscatory appetites of runaway government spending?”

  His opponents scratched their heads at that, too. If Sacramento housed such profligate spenders, why did the state budget have a surplus in the first place? If confiscatory taxes were the aim, why were there no tax increases on the table in the legislature?

  Be that as it may, Ronald Reagan was back on the national news once more.

  A CBS reporter addressed the camera from the front porch of a clearly gobsmacked housewife, her luxurious home surrounded by perhaps two dozen newsmen and camera operators: “No, it wasn’t the Fuller Brush Man making the rounds in Los Angeles this morning. . . .”

  “Hello, how are you, it’s Ronald Reagan!”

  “What a surprise! Wonderful!”

  The reporter broke in: “Reagan’s problem is that the California legislature has refused to buy his plan for cutting taxes, so the governor was out ringing doorbells getting signatures to bypass the legislature. . . .”

  “All right! I’ll sign!”

  Then next door: “Hello, Mrs. Marshman.”

  Mrs. Marshman literally swooned: the advantage of a matinée idol in politics.

  “Reagan wants to roll back California’s present personal income tax and ease the future tax bite with a constitutional ceiling on state spending. But his critics are already charging that the stakes are more personal, that the California tax reduction is simply Reagan’s first move in an all-out campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Bill Walker, CBS News, Los Angeles.”

  Nationally, however, the electorate’s attention was elsewhere.

  NIGHTCLUB COMICS, LAPEL BUTTONS, AND bumper stickers told the story: “Four more years? Maybe ten to twenty.” “Don’t Blame Me. I voted for McGovern.” “Free the Watergate 500.” Nixon’s approval ratings plunged below 50 percent for the first time. Ministers frantically rewrote their Sunday sermons on “Watergate morality” to keep up with cascading revelations: the indictments of John Mitchell and campaign fund-raiser and former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans; news that the judge in the Ellsberg case had been offered the FBI directorship as a bribe; White House ties to the forged Diem cables—and the imminent debut of live coverage on May 17 on all three networks and PBS of Senator Ervin’s Watergate hearings.

  Yet here was Ronald Reagan on May 15 releasing a statement to reporters awaiting his appearance at his regular press conference: “Now that the Watergate controversy is under federal investigation, and is before a grand jury, the courts, and the Senate, I will make no further statement regarding any of the individuals involved.” Because, he said, they were “none of my business.” And not much of theirs, either—for Watergate was being “blown out of proportion.”

  The reporters were astonished. There was something comical about this genial ostrich standing before them, peddling fairy tales in a time when serious moral reckoning with the failings of America’s governing institutions was entering the national political conversation as never before.

  What they did not recognize was that maybe he was onto something. The previous year, when that entrepreneur in New York announced he would be republishing Frank Merriwell novels as “the country’s guide and measuring stick as national singularity is restored,” the national media mocked him. Things proved different that spring when a major paperback publisher brought out a long-buried Horatio Alger novel called Silas Snobden’s Office Boy. The New York Times featured it in not one but two decidedly nonpatronizing articles: one found its invitation to an “Eden before Eve” “filled with startling relevances”; the other said, “If it has never been your good fortune to experience pure innocence, then reading an Alger novel is as good a substitute as you will find.” A seller’s market in innocence was emerging. What the jacket copy advertised as a “LOST TREASURE CHEST OF CHARM AND NOSTALGIA” was just the thing “to rouse the memories of the old, the wonder of the young, the ire of the cynics, and the conscience of post-Watergate America.” The Los Angeles Times welcomed, at long last, a novel with “no subtle characterizations, no crises of identity, no dark nights of the soul, no whining about fate.” Publishers Weekly pronounced it “a delight.”

  It was around then, three days after the Ervin hearings began broadcasting live, that the Democratic electoral analysts Richard Scammon and Benjamin Wattenberg asked in the Washington Post, “Does Watergate have coattails?” Possibly not, they concluded. According to the Harris Poll, by a margin of 73 to 15 percent, voters agreed, “Dirty campaign tactics exist among both the Republicans and Democrats. And the Nixon campaign people were no worse than the Democrats, except they got caught at it.” Maybe they were satisfied with what Nixon had told them two weeks earlier. Maybe they preferred ostrichlike innocence. The Senate hearings would tell.

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  Sam Ervin

  THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY SENATOR Sam Ervin had been a backbencher. Now, he was a household name.

  White-haired and jiggly-jowled, his long, bushy eyebrows as tangled as a line of Arabic script, with a forehead that all but broke out in spasms in the midst of his high-flown orations, he was almost a caricature of a Dixie courthouse pol. As a senator, he had had no particular accomplishments to his name, in part because his ideology was so idiosyncratic it was hard to imagine him pulling together any sort of legislative coalition. On the one hand, he was a conservative, even a reactionary: deriding federal school integration and the Civil Rights Act, mocking the Equal Rights Amendment (which he hated so much he put his franking privileges at anti-ERA crusader Phyllis Schlafly’s disposal), saying the Vietnam War ought to be ended by bombing North Vietnam until it was a parking lot. On the other, he made his first mark as a state legislator in the year of the Scopes Trial, 1925, by speaking out against a ban on the teaching of evolution. (“Monkeys in the jungle,” he quipped, “will be pleased to know that the North Carolina legislature has absolved them from any responsibility for humanity in general and for the North Carolina legislature in particular.”) As a justice on his state’s supreme court he sprung a black man convicted of raping a white woman by carrying out the radical act of actually reading the lower court transcript. (“Boss, we never get off death row,” the grateful defendant told him. “We on death row from the day we be here until the day we die.”) His maiden speech in the Senate denounced Joseph McCarthy. The majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, was impressed: “You don’t scare easily.” Sam Ervin most certainly did not.

  A simple thread, the senator always claimed, tied everything he believed together: plain devotion to the Constitution as it was written. A Time profile explained: “For more than a dozen years, he has chaired hearing after hearing on Constitutional rights and the erosion of the separation of power in all but empty committee rooms.” Now, Congress “has decided that it needs a constitutionalist—a man of great legal knowledge and judicial temperament—and in discovering that fact, it has discovered Sam Ervin.”

  Now the nation discovered him—in an opening statement that displayed the sor
t of hammy melodrama with which the American public would soon become so familiar: “If the many allegations made to this date are true, then the burglars . . . were in effect breaking into the home of every citizen of the United States.” So these proceedings would be “a test of whether the democratic process under which we operate in a nation that still is the last, best hope of man on earth in his eternal struggle to govern himself decently and effectively” could even survive.

  Ervin called the first man, though he looked practically like a boy, to the committee’s green witness table: Robert C. Odle, twenty-nine, former office manager of the Committee to Re-elect the President—which some newspapers had taken to calling by the onomatopoeic acronym “CREEP.” But what took place next, after all that hype, was a sleep-inducing anticlimax.

  Dreary Odle delved into an interminable explanation, as dry as dust, of how the committee apportioned and accounted for funds, using the example of briefcases purchased for every state chairman and vice chairman. The 550 spectators, including Daniel Ellsberg and actress Lee Remick, who had been lining up since 5 A.M. to ensure good seats in the overflowing hearing room, where Teapot Dome had been investigated fifty years before and Joseph McCarthy had terrorized witnesses thirty years after that, stifled yawns—as did Chairman Ervin, in a picture that went out over the UPI wires.

  A columnist said it was like “watching grass grow.” In New York City this soporific show ran on all six TV channels at once. In Chicago, the three network affiliates received more than two thousand phone calls from housewives angry at the preemption of their favorite game shows and soap operas. “The word of the day was ‘crap,’ as in, ‘Why are you showing that Watergate crap?’ ” the Tribune quoted a station employee. “I’ve never heard that word so many times in a single day.”