Broken marriages were everywhere now—especially in California, where Ronald Reagan, in 1970, had signed the nation’s most liberal “no-fault” divorce law. Its most avid lobbyists had been not libertines but lawyers, sick of a system that required one-half of every miserably incompatible couple to invent some trumped-up offense upon which to “sue” the partner, making attorneys a party to fraud. Since a stringent honesty in family matters was now seen as a necessity for social health, thirteen other states followed by 1973. A divorce deluge followed. “The Broken Family,” the cover of the March 12, 1973, Newsweek read—the same issue where, on the letters page, readers responded to the Newsweek cover two weeks earlier featuring POW “Lt. Comdr. Paul Galanti and Wife,” he in dress khakis and she in Jackie Kennedy white gloves, “the most wonderful cover I have ever seen on any magazine!” according to one letter writer. “It is they who are whole and the rest of us are the ones who are fragmented,” wrote another.
Then, flipping the pages further, readers learned that at the current rate, four out of ten couples who married in 1973 would end their union in divorce.
In Newsweek, an Atlanta marriage counselor wondered what the point of matrimony was in the first place: “People get married because they have a fantasy of exclusive possession that duplicates the parent-child relationship.” In a book published the next year, The Courage to Divorce, Susan Gettleman and Janet Markowitz argued that divorced women “almost without exception look and feel better than ever before,” and that their children would gain “greater insight and freedom as adults.” But a juvenile court judge quoted in Newsweek worried about the increasing number of couples in which neither wanted custody of the children. “It’s a critical problem,” he said. “We are having a wholesale abdication of parental responsibility.”
Upon one thing, however, all the experts could agree: nowadays, as one said, “getting divorced is not much different from taking a bath.” It’s Not the End of the World, insisted the title of a novel for preteen girls by an author named Judy Blume. The plot begins with a young adolescent, whose parents are getting divorced, rhapsodizing about a story she has seen on television about two separated parents whose little boy was kidnapped, then found by the FBI: “The mother and father were so glad to see him they decided to make up and everyone lived happily ever after. It was a nice show.” She hatches a similar scheme to reunite her parents. She then learns to accept her parents’ separation by reading a volume titled The Boys and Girls Book About Divorce. This was an actual book, by a faculty member at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, reviewed glowingly in Time magazine. It confidently asserted, in a line quoted in the novel, “Fathers who live close by but do not visit and fathers who live far away and hardly ever call or write either do not love their children at all, or they love them very little.” Her story ended with an epiphany: “I’m through fooling myself.” The cover tagline read, “A novel about love and real life.”
“Real life”: even kids were expected to join the suspicious circles now.
That summer, in the small town of Pekin, Illinois, a local physician started an advice column. He wrote in his inaugural article, “I would not give ‘the pill’ to a teenage girl just because she asked for it”—yet he added that it went without saying that he might if the circumstances were right. Advice to teenagers used to be different. A decade earlier Pat Boone sold several hundred thousand copies of Between You, Me, and the Gatepost dispensing wisdom like “KISSING is something that belongs to the One-And-Only, that one you hope to love some day . . . and you’d better start right now taking care of yourself for that ONE.”
The previous year a divorced father in the ABC TV movie That Certain Summer explained his “homosexual lifestyle” to his fourteen-year-old son. The sitcom Maude featured an arc of episodes concerning abortion. The ancient Anglo-Saxonism fuck was introduced for the first time into the Oxford English Dictionary. Johnny Carson was no longer required to have his Tonight Show monologues prescreened by network censors. In January 1973 the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, made “abortion on demand”—in the words of its vociferous detractors, who were not many, were not well organized, and were most of them Catholic—legal in all fifty states. In 1969, 68 percent of respondents had told Gallup that premarital sex was wrong; only 48 percent said so now.
“ ‘Masters and Johnson’ are two names you’ll be hearing a lot about, and their book Human Sexual Response,” bushy-mustached Gene Shalit had explained in the February Today show roundup for the returning POWs; in the book, the married scholars concluded from observations of humans coupling in their laboratory that during sex any woman could have, and should demand, an orgasm. Later, Masters and Johnson and their imitators opened clinics in which husbands and wives received hands-on instruction on how to proceed. The aim of their work, they explained in an interview that summer in the Los Angeles Times, was to disassociate sex from sin; sexual pleasure, they said, was simply “natural.”
America went orgasm crazy—a development, it turned out, quite salubrious to the publishing industry. Dr. David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask was only the first pedagogical bestseller of many. (Its areas of instruction included something called “69”: “She feels the insistent throbbing of the organ against her lips and experiences a slightly salty taste, as well as the characteristic but not unpleasant odor of the sudoriferous glands of the area. . . . By simultaneous cunnilingus and fellatio every possible sense is brought to a fever pitch and a mutual orgasm occurs rapidly.”) Other volumes littering the bedside tables of suburban couples: The Sensuous Woman, by “J.” (it was parodied in newsweekly ads for the Japanese automobile manufacturer Datsun: “The Sensuous Car, by ‘D.’ ”), “the first how-to book for the female who yearns to be all woman.” My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, which consisted of the answers its author, Nancy Friday, had received from an advertisement she took out reading “FEMALE SEXUAL FANTASIES wanted by serious female researcher. Anonymity guaranteed.” Chapter titles included “Insatiability,” “Pain and Masochism, or, ‘Ouch, Don’t Stop!’ ” and “The Zoo.”
Couples flocked to films like Deep Throat (it made $25 million showing in seventy-three cities, despite or perhaps because of the criminal court judge in New York City who proclaimed its four episodes of cunnilingus and seven of fellatio—he counted—a “feast of carrion and squalor”), and Behind the Green Door, which began its run as the highest-grossing sex film ever at a gala Manhattan premiere, the social event of the season (the projectionist showed the reels out of order; no one noticed). The cover of a book called Loving Free advertised, “For the first time a real couple tells how they broke through their inhibitions to develop sexual excitement and joy in marriage.” Not to learn to do so, men discovered, was to risk being drummed clear out of the marital bed, perhaps via a no-fault divorce. The authors had first published Loving Free anonymously, the preface explained, “because of the effect this frankness might have on the lives of their children” (“Making love standing up kills your arches!” . . . “Now that we’ve mentioned vibrators . . .”). Then they changed their minds, surprised to learn that none of their children’s friends cared—the younger generation had already relieved itself of its sexual innocence by sneaking copies of Loving Free from the nooks that parents believed were perfect hiding places. The authors undertook a publicity tour, beginning in their conservative hometown, Milwaukee.
For some POWs it was agonizing. Women, sex, the family: who could have imagined such verities could change? The POW who chopped down the hometown billboard reading HANOI RELEASE JOHN NASMYTH and appeared on Sonny & Cher published an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times: he claimed to have been neither surprised nor disconcerted by the long-haired men, the new slang, the short skirts (“indeed, I hoped the mini wasn’t just a fad”), but said he was flummoxed by “women’s lib,” which he described by telling the story of revisiting his old favorite cocktail lounge one Friday a
fternoon. “The couple at the next table were having a heated discussion which ended abruptly when the woman shouted an obscenity and commanded, ‘Buster, get out of my life.’ The red-faced dude left and the attractive, though somewhat foul-mouthed, young lady turned to me. . . . almost without pausing for breath, she said, ‘You look like a nice guy. Want to come over to my apartment for a little while?’
“ ‘I’ve got a date in an hour,’ I said.
“ ‘Hell, that’s plenty of time.’ ”
Captain Nasmyth was out of step. Researchers at the Kinsey Institute had carried out a massive new survey in 1972, learning that four-fifths of men surveyed—and no less than 100 percent of women—thought the idea of the woman initiating sex was just fine. They also found that 75 percent of men and even more women thought schools should teach sexual education, and that only 8 percent abjured masturbation, 85 percent approved of cunnilingus, and only 5 percent of men over the age of twenty-four were virgins. But not all POWs were out of step. Many were glad to join the revolution.
“I’ve been visiting friends in Los Angeles,” Mormon POW Jay Jensen said early on after his release, “and most everybody is divorced.” He was astonished, but not for long. “I feel that I have spent six years in hell and that I have been resurrected and I’m going to start a new life,” he decided, before choosing a new mate of his own using a “Prospective Wife Analysis Chart.” He then squired her on an extended honeymoon, made up of the free vacations a grateful nation had given him for his sacrifice. Another POW blew his stack when he saw the way his seventeen-year-old son dressed. “Well, six months later, I had red pants, a white shirt, and a blue jacket.”
Then there was Captain Galand Kramer of Tulsa, Oklahoma, last seen on the news holding up his hand-lettered scrawl GOD BLESS AMERICA & NIXON and gingerly trying on a pair of bell-bottoms at the PX. He soon found himself divorced by a woman’s liberationist who explained to the New York Times, “I could either exist or live. Life has too many facets to dwell on one.” So Galand Kramer decided to live as well. On the Freedom Birds the men had passed around stacks of Playboy magazines, gifts from the Clark Air Base medical officers. That was where he met Miss January 1973, she of the diaphanously backlit amber halo of hair, glistening lips, extravagant eyelashes, and green glass beads playing peekaboo with her ample left breast—and also a patch of pubic hair, an innovation Playboy had introduced one year earlier to compete with raunchier upstart Penthouse, to the delight of the surprised POWs.
And now Miss January was Captain Kramer’s girl.
Gay Talese, the legendary New York journalist, was writing a book on how the sexual revolution had come about. He was a nice Catholic boy who was a sophomore in college the first time he masturbated. Talese began his research in 1971 by canvassing the “massage parlors” of Manhattan, where one could order up a “girl” from a photo album, then disappear with her into a back room.
“Do you want anything special?” said the girl to the journalist.
“Can we have sex?”
“I don’t do that. I don’t French, either. I only give locals.”
“Locals?”
“Hand jobs.”
“Okay. I’ll have a local.”
He enjoyed himself so much, the married Talese wrote in the book that ensued, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, that he spent “the remainder of that year and into 1972” visiting massage parlors so often that he became “socially acquainted not only with the masseuses but also the young managers and owners.”
Richard Nixon’s most frequent Oval Office rants had long since consisted of perorations of how the sickening sexual excesses of liberal elites were bringing Western civilization to its knees (his recent obsession was the simultaneous appearance of Last Tango in Paris on the covers of Time and Newsweek). In moral matters, Gay Talese seemed more in touch with the electorate than the president. Nixon had tried sweeping America’s moral confusion under a red-and-yellow tent. He was met with citizens wondering in letters to the editor why the president had to insult “families of those killed in Vietnam” just “to get an audience responsive to his views and ego needs.” One wrote, “How many spectacular extravaganzas has he held for the permanently injured Vietnam veterans who go through living death each day in the veterans hospitals throughout this land?” A new Gallup poll had his approval rating 23 points lower than it had been only three months earlier. The suspicious circles were expanding.
JUDGE SIRICA’S COURTROOM BECAME A stop on Washington tourist itineraries. And new Watergate stories popped up every day: about rich backers who had appointed the president’s “Western” and “Southern” White Houses—in San Clemente, California, and Key Biscayne, Florida—with guesthouses, swimming pools, and elaborate gazebos, and built him a little bowling alley beneath the north portico of the White House. But Nixon had also spent hundreds of thousands from public funds to improve the properties—first the White House said only $39,525 had been spent on “Casa Pacifica,” then $354,252, a figure ultimately revised to $1.8 million, but only for “security purposes.” (“Nixon is absolutely right,” a liberal wrote the Detroit News in response to a Nixon economic speech. “He told us that we are the best-housed people on earth . . . he is the first President in our history with three houses.”)
G. Bradford Cook, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, resigned after being on the job for less than three months, caught up in the emerging scandal involving financier Robert L. Vesco that would lead to the indictment of, among others, Nixon fund-raiser Maurice Stans and Attorney General John Mitchell. Elliot Richardson, the new attorney general designate, one of few Nixon hands still held to be above reproach, was accused of hiding his knowledge of John Ehrlichman’s responsibility for ordering the Ellsberg break-in.
More fake letter-writing campaign accusations. More revelations on scandals long thought buried: bribes from the dairy industry to the reelection campaign in exchange for favorable price support decisions; Howard Hunt sent to California to harass a lobbyist named Dita Beard who had information implicating CREEP for taking bribes from the conglomerate International Telephone & Telegraph, in exchange for the dismissal of an antitrust suit; American Airlines confessing to an illegal $75,000 cash donation to the reelection campaign at the personal insistence of presidential fund-raiser Herb Kalmbach. Revelations that Howard Hunt had been ordered to raid the apartment of the assassin of George Wallace to plant Democratic literature there. Accusations that Hunt “had a contract” from “low-level White House officials” to murder the president of Panama for not obeying American Bureau of Narcotics directives. And on and on.
A typical network newscast might have five or more Watergate segments. A New York Times “The Watergate Web” chart included sixty-four names. A May 28 Harris poll found 81 percent of Americans agreed that corruption in Washington was “serious”; only 27 percent said they respected the federal government. Plain-speaking Midwesterners feared fascism: “Don’t say ‘it can’t happen here.’ It can and it could,” a Chicago Tribune reader wrote. “General Haig, in full uniform, is Nixon’s chief assistant. (Alexander Haig had replaced Halde-man as White House chief of staff.) A former CIA man is Secretary of Defense.”
On Memorial Day, Senator Edmund Muskie stood at the grave of FDR and decried how “ ‘national security’ became the excuse for systematic deception”; in Milwaukee, Representative Clement J. Zablocki cited as his contribution to Memorial Day the unprecedented vote in his House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee authorizing by a tally of 8 to 1 a “War Powers” bill cutting off the president’s extralegal bombing in Cambodia within 120 days of passage. It was the first time in history a congressional panel had voted to undercut a military action the president insisted was necessary.
THE NEXT DAY FRONT-PAGE HEADLINES reported Colonel Theodore Guy had filed accusations of treason against eight fellow prisoners. A Peace Committee member countersued Colonel Guy for defamation, saying the hard-liners’ entire story of creating a military command under trying
circumstances had been a lie made up to salve their guilty consciences for cooperating with their captors.
The civil war within the POW community exploded into view at the worst possible time for the president. “A decision to go on trial could open up a Pandora’s box,” that Sunday’s Times Week in Review observed. There was “enough in that box for a renewed debate about a war that seemed at one point on the verge of slipping mercifully into history.” The next day a Canadian diplomat sent to observe what was supposed to be a cease-fire in Cambodia told the press he had spent his time dodging American bombs: “In fact, what we have been doing is observing a war.”
Next, a POW named Edward A. Brudno was found with his head in a plastic bag. In captivity, Brudno spent seven years composing an epic 127-verse ode to his wife. He came home, his rabbi told the media, to discover the “wife he had known in her youth and immaturity . . . had developed into a very strong person . . . he couldn’t stand it.” He was also despondent about America’s reconciliation with China: for hadn’t containing the Maoists’ imperial lust been one of the major reasons for his sacrifice in the first place? His suicide note, written in French, read, “There is no reason for my existence . . . my life is valueless.”
Still, the POWs were heroes: that was all the right cared to know. James J. Kilpatrick, editor of the conservative daily the Richmond News-Leader, who appeared weekly on CBS’s 60 Minutes holding down the right side of the weekly “Point/Counterpoint” debate segment, portrayed Brudno as a martyr to the Communists’ cunning perfidy: “The Pentagon tried, but the North Vietnamese won.” And on the day of Nixon’s POW gala, Ronald Reagan posted a friendly letter to his childhood minister in Dixon, Illinois. On Watergate, he said, “we are witness to a lynching . . . to watch the ‘night riders’ ignore the harm they are doing to our nation in these troubled times makes me a little sick.” So he was so very grateful for his beloved POWs. “These men without exception became stronger, kinder, gentler, and more sensitive men because of their experiences.” (Without exception.) “Many who had no particular faith before are deeply religious. Man after man told us very simply he lived to come home only because of faith in God. I try to think of them when I see the daily headlines.”
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 16