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

by Rick Perlstein

  “What did he say to you when you said that?”

  “He said, ‘You may have to.’ ”

  Sloan was directed to meet with the appointment secretary to the President of the United States, Dwight Chapin, a man in close contact with the president in the Oval Office every single day of the week. Chapin told him it was time for him to take a vacation. “He suggested that the important thing is that the president be protected.”

  He met later that same afternoon with Bob Haldeman, once more outlining his ethical concerns, which the chief of staff did not quite comprehend. “I believe he interpreted my being there as personal fear and he indicated to me that I had a special relationship with the White House, if I needed help getting a lawyer, he would be glad to do that.”

  Two weeks after that, Magruder took him to a bar and told him that he should tell federal investigators that the amount he gave G. Gordon Liddy was not $80,000, but $40,000. He refused. “Their reaction was incensed.”

  “Did they suggest you might take a little trip?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He got a phone call later that evening from another top campaign official, Fred LaRue, who “impressed on me the urgency of departure, to the extent of suggesting that I had a reservation on, I believe, a 6 A.M. flight at Dulles. He urged me to take a room at the Dulles Marriott that evening and to leave my home immediately.”

  Conveniently timed vacations, it seemed, were as common a currency at the Committee to Re-elect the President as trunks stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. Conveniently timed vacations; and also, it seemed, mafia-style threats. After Sloan returned, Fred LaRue told him to take the Fifth Amendment with the grand jury “to stay in the good graces of the campaign organization.”

  That same day, California liberal Republican congressman Paul McCloskey, who was known as “Pete,” demanded an impeachment inquiry. A fascinating figure, he was a decorated Marine-turned-peace-crusader who’d mounted a quixotic presidential primary campaign against Nixon in New Hampshire in 1972 and wrote a book called Truth and Untruth: Political Deceit in America. He spoke on the floor for only six minutes before being silenced by a parliamentary trick by Earl F. Landgrebe of Indiana, a far-right congressman best known for his efforts to smuggle Bibles into the Soviet Union.

  The next morning the New York Times printed a leak of Tom Charles Huston’s 1970 security plan—which had included within its text a warning that the break-ins it was recommending to the president were “clearly illegal.”

  SLOAN WAS FOLLOWED BY ANOTHER fresh-faced young president’s man, Herbert Porter, the campaign scheduler. He described the same sorts of furtive meetings with Jeb Stuart Magruder, but whereas Sloan had responded with fits of conscience, Porter had cooperated. All this pricked the ears of Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, one of the seven-member panel’s three Republicans. Baker’s 1966 ascension to the Senate in Democratic Tennessee had been in no small part due to his personal friend Vice President Nixon’s campaigning on his behalf. The White House had hoped for him as an ally, but he never felt quite comfortable in the role. Instead he kept on turning the hearings’ sessions to incredulous inquisitions about how the White House had managed to become such an ethical sewer. Time called him “The Man Who Keeps Asking Why.” He was young, handsome, and eloquent (he soon won a place on Women’s Wear Daily’s “stud list” alongside Robert Redford and Mick Jagger), and these interventions became an evening news staple.

  “Did you ever have any qualms about what you were doing? I am probing into your state of mind, Mr. Porter.”

  “I understand. I think the thought crossed my mind, senator, that I really could not see what effect it had on reelecting a President of the United States. On the other hand, in all fairness, I was not the one to stand up in a meeting and say this should be stopped, either, so I do not—I mean there is space in between. I kind of drifted along.”

  Drifted along.

  “At any time, did you ever think of saying, ‘I do not think this is quite right, this is not quite the way it ought to be?’ Did you ever think of that?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What did you do about it?

  “I did not do anything. . . . In all honesty, probably because of the fear of group pressure that would ensue, of not being a team player.”

  “What caused you to abdicate your own conscience and disapproval, if you did disapprove, of the practices or dirty tricks operation?”

  “Well, Senator Baker, my loyalty to this man, Richard Nixon . . . I felt as if I had known this man all my life—not personally, perhaps, but in spirit. I was appealed to on this basis.”

  THE LIBERALS FOR WHOM THE hearings were a new religious rite settled in pleasantly for the long haul. A twenty-three-year-old in Cincinnati found himself perversely glad he was laid up the entire summer with a back injury; it let him sit home and watch every day on TV. A kid in Worthington, Ohio, began taking a transistor radio with him everywhere he went. A boy subbing on a friend’s Washington Post paper route was late delivering the papers every day because he read the whole front section on somebody’s porch before starting his day. An eleven-year-old who couldn’t get enough of it wrote a fan letter to Sam Ervin, and two months later was thrilled to find a giant box filled with the entire transcript of the hearings on his parents’ porch. A ten-year-old from Hawaii traveled with his grandma and mother and sister on his first visit to the mainland, including Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, his grandparents’ home in Kansas, and Yellowstone, watching the PBS reruns at Howard Johnson’s motels every night before bed. He later became the forty-fourth president of the United States.

  Liberals wrote sanctimonious letters to editors. A Washington Post reader wrote regarding those frustrated at the preemption of daytime TV that they’d better pay attention or “you might find ‘The Dating Game’ preempted again in 1984.” A man from Chicago mocked Nixon’s supporters, who said, “Whatever he did, he did it for the good of his country.” Another leader, he thrusted, had followers who said the same thing. “His name was Adolf Hitler.”

  Two hundred of them packed the House gallery on June 12 when New York City’s Bella Abzug, who had introduced a resolution for Nixon’s impeachment on her first day as a new congresswoman in 1971, and Berkeley’s Ron Dellums, a self-described socialist, held the lower chamber’s first impeachment hearing. Abzug mocked the pundits who implored the president to put the matter to a rest by telling the “whole truth”: “clearly if telling the ‘whole truth’ would exonerate the President [he] would have done so long ago.” They were voices in the congressional wilderness. Joseph Alsop wrote that no more than fifty members had any interest in impeachment, and approvingly quoted “one of the House’s most influential Democrats” about John Dean: “You’d have to be crazy to want to impeach the President of the United States on the evidence of a man like that.”

  ON JUNE 12, HERB PORTER testified once more, about how he set up fake demonstrations and organized the infiltration of Democratic campaigns, how he delivered memos stolen from Edmund Muskie’s presidential campaign to John Mitchell. Then it was Maurice Stans’s turn to answer why $1.777 million in mostly corporate donations had been given in cash in the frantic moments before the April 7 donation disclosure deadline. Why had records for these cash receipts and disbursements been destroyed? And why was not Stans’s dear old friend the president informed of this most unusual manner of handling campaign accounts?

  “They were destroyed,” Stans said, “because there was no requirement they be kept, and insofar as contributors were concerned we wanted to respect the anonymity that they had sought and that they were entitled to under the law—”

  Ervin: “Were they destroyed before or after the break-in?”

  “They were destroyed after the break-in and I would insist, Mr. Chairman, that there is no relevance between the two.”

  “You swear, you are stating upon your oath that there is no connection between the destruction of the records and the break-in of the Watergate
or any fear that the press or the public might find out from these records what the truth was about these matters?”

  There was, Stans insisted, absolutely none.

  So why do it?

  “Very simply, for the reason—”

  “It’s too simple for me to understand, really.”

  Stans tried again, offering that it was so every candidate and charity in town wouldn’t be harassing the contributors for donations—which didn’t make sense. The question wasn’t why the campaign had kept contributions from the public; it was why it hadn’t even kept a record for itself. Stans replied that there was nothing illegal in doing so. At that, Sam Ervin stuck in the shiv: “Mr. Stans, do you not think that men who have been honored by the American people as you have ought to have their course of action guided by ethical principles which are superior to the minimum requirements of criminal law?”

  That was Sam Ervin all over. A fat old Southerner who looked like one of the bad guys from In the Heat of the Night, he was, once upon a time, the go-to strategist for anti–civil rights filibusters. He had opposed Medicare and called the feminists pushing the Equal Rights Amendment “blame fools.” Now he was a liberal hero. Ballantine published a mass-market paperback of Quotations from Chairman Sam, featuring thirteen pages of photographs. In September he recorded an album of his favorite stories, right in the parlor of the modest little house where he’d been living with his wife for fifty years, in the same little town where he’d been born, where he began “reading law” in his dad’s one-room office by the county courthouse when he was fifteen, like he was Abraham Lincoln or something. At the hearings he banged a rainbow-hued gavel carved for him by a local Cherokee Indian. “Just a country lawyer,” he called himself—again and again and again.

  He was, of course, much more than that: the law school from which he had graduated, with honors, was Harvard, and he had been a legislator since 1925—taking a break only to serve on North Carolina’s supreme court. Critics quickly tired of the country-dumb act. The Chicago Tribune’s cartoonist drew him as a talking doll: “Pull mah string and watch me do mah thing!” They mocked his pretensions to impartiality and moral seriousness: to him, wrote a Cincinnati man, “all witnesses are guilty, all witnesses are covering up, and all witnesses are liars. It’s become an inquisition, not a hearing.” A Los Angeles Times reader from Thousand Oaks said he “resembles my grandfather a whole lot, and my grandpa is a fine old chap, if I may say so.” What he was not, however, was a suitable judge of presidents: “This man has become a national folk hero, and for what? For clobbering the President? For twitching his eyebrows and quoting the Bible?”

  CONSERVATIVES HAD THEIR OWN HERO on the committee to cheer, liberals a villain to hiss: Senator Edward Gurney of Florida, who like Howard Baker became in 1967 the first Republican senator in his state since Reconstruction—but who, unlike Baker, showed abject loyalty to Nixon, who had helped both win their elections in 1966. He dismissed Watergate as “one of those political wing-dings that happen every political year,” and said that the very investigation he was a part of was having a “catastrophic effect on the institution of the presidency.”

  Ervin and Gurney butted heads when Maurice Stans took the stand. Ervin kept needling Stans about a payment of $50,000 from the Committee to Re-elect the President to Maryland Republicans to pad the take on an undersubscribed dinner in honor of Vice President Agnew. “They wanted it to look more successful than it apparently was,” Ervin forced Stans to finally admit.

  Ervin didn’t let up: “Yes. In other words, they wanted to practice a deception on the general public as to the amount of honor that was paid to the Vice President.”

  “Mr. Chairman, I am not sure this is the first time that has happened in American politics.”

  “You know, there has been murder and larceny in every generation, but that hasn’t made murder meritorious or larceny legal. . . .”

  At that, Edward Gurney finally interjected like a defense attorney: “Mr. Chairman! I for one have not appreciated the harassment of this witness by the chairman!”

  He did not prevail in his attempt to save Maury Stans, who was taking it upon himself to defend the poor millionaires whose names were being dragged through the mud for the patriotic act of donating to Dick Nixon. “It is very unfair,” he whined in an unfortunately aristocratic accent. “Somebody has got to speak up for these people.” Ray Kroc, for example, the McDonald’s hamburger magnate: he hadn’t been interested at all in influencing the minimum wage law, nor the decisions of the president’s price commission concerning the cost of beef. Stans offered himself as another example. “I volunteered or was drafted, whatever the case may be, because I believed in my president. You know by now from what you have heard, but I know you cannot feel, the abuse to which I have been subjected because of the associations I fell into. All I ask, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, is that when you publish your report you give me back my good name.”

  That was not very likely. “Maurice Stans, President Nixon’s top political fundraiser,” a wire report on his appearance began, “was grilled Wednesday by an incredulous panel of Democratic senators as he testified about his ignorance of the financial dealings involved in the Watergate scandal.”

  And then, directly below that, in at least one Midwestern paper: “The Senate Watergate committee has secret sworn testimony indicating that Maurice Stans was told by John Mitchell the full story of the bugging of Democratic Party headquarters a week after the break-in, it was learned Wednesday.”

  Mafia stuff. And it seemed to go to the top. The nineteenth witness, Jeb Stuart Magruder, testified beginning June 14, under “use immunity,” a recent innovation in the criminal law (ironically written by a young White House counsel named John Dean) that stipulated a witness could not be convicted on evidence introduced in the testimony for which he received immunity. Magruder copped to everything he knew. The schemes to infiltrate the Democratic presidential campaigns. The infamous meeting in the attorney general’s office in which G. Gordon Liddy unveiled “professionally done” full-color charts outlining “Operation Gemstone,” his million-dollar plan to, among other things, kidnap and spirit Democratic conventioneers “to a place like Mexico” to “be returned to this country at the end of the convention,” and to outfit a yacht anchored just off the convention site with surveillance equipment and hookers to “obtain information from them.” (Senator Ervin: “I am going to ask the audience to please refrain from laughter or any kind of demonstration.”) John Mitchell’s receipt of the Watergate bug transcripts (the attorney general’s only response: this material was “not worth the money . . . paid for it”). And Magruder’s work covering up the crime: destroying incriminating evidence; devising the lies about how much money Liddy received and for what; scapegoating Liddy as the operation’s architect; and perjuring himself before the grand jury and suborning Hugh Sloan to do the same.

  Then, the questions from the panelist. The Man Who Keeps Asking Why homed in on how indifferent, even casual, the conspirators seemed about lawbreaking on behalf the chief constitutional officer of the United States. “I knew you were going to get into this line of questioning,” Magruder said, then launched into what sounded like a prepared speech. He spoke of his days attending Williams College, the tony liberal arts school on the Eastern Seaboard, and taking a course in ethics from its chaplain, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin. (“Remember,” he used to tell his students, “even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat.”) Magruder flashed forward to his work in the White House, as the Vietnam War raged. The antiwar movement was calling the president a warmonger, even a war criminal. But the president, he said, “was trying very diligently to settle the war issue, and we were all against the war—I think this is a primary issue!” He took on a strident tone. “We saw continual violations of the law done by men like William Sloane Coffin!”

  It was a very Nixonian moment. Rev. Coffin was precisely the sort of elite WASP liberal against which Nixo
nites had been defining themselves since Nixon beat Jerry Voorhis for Congress in California in 1946: a scion of New York wealth; a Skull and Bones member recruited by the son of Connecticut senator Prescott Bush; a CIA agent back when that organization was basically a gentlemen’s club, who went on to become a minister who occupied one distinguished pulpit after another advocating left-wing social crusades—including, starting in 1967, draft resistance, for which he went on trial.

  “Now he tells me my ethics are bad, and yet he was indicted for criminal charges”—

  The camera cut to Senator Ervin, looking shocked.

  —“and I believe as firmly as they did that the President was correct in this issue. So consequently—and let me just say, when these subjects came up, and I knew that they were illegal and I’m sure that the others did—we had become somewhat inured in using some activities in helping us in accomplishing this in this cause, in what we thought was a legitimate cause.”

  The response was intense and immediate—a cynosure of the debate over Watergate. Bill Moyers, the former preacher who had been Lyndon Johnson’s aide, now a pundit with PBS, pointed out, “Coffin’s higher law was God. What was Magruder’s? Well, it was clearly Nixon. And I think therein lay the seeds to the entire problem.” Rev. Coffin was reached for comment: “Jesus and Jimmy Hoffa broke the law,” he said, “but there’s a world of difference between what they did. Whatever we did, we did in the open to oppose an illegal war in Vietnam. What he and the others did they did behind closed doors.” The New York Times op-ed page extended Rev. Coffin its welcome; on that page he recollected, “I used to say to him, ‘You’re a nice guy, Jeb, but not yet a good man. You have a lot of charm but little inner strength. And if you don’t stand for something you’re apt to fall for anything.’ ” Magruder was, he said, a very 1950s kind of fellow—“agreeing his way through life.” He argued that the 1960s had given America the gift of skepticism, that people no longer need to agree their way through life to succeed—and that through Magruder “we have the opportunity to learn . . . the ancient lesson that to do evil in this world you don’t have to be evil.”