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

by Rick Perlstein

  A map of the dreads of a nation—just when, as the autumn leaves began to fall, America’s imagined safe distance from the chaos abroad crumbled, and the sort of things that seemed once to happen only in banana republics visited us here at home.

  OCTOBER WAS RUNG IN WITH biblical prophecies from an assistant secretary of the interior. “With anything less than the best of luck,” Stephen Wakefield announced, “we shall probably face shortages of heating oil, propane, and diesel fuel this winter. . . . I am talking about men without jobs, homes without heat, children without schools.”

  In Los Angeles the Department of Water and Power predicted a 35 percent energy shortage by April. This forecast came the day after the president’s Cost of Living Council set a new ceiling on the price of domestic crude; the major oil companies responded by raising the prices they charged their affiliate service stations by about a penny a gallon. In San Francisco three thousand service stations shut down for three days in protest: street corners become ghost towns in the beautiful City by the Bay.

  Warnings that such things might soon come to pass had been frequent that summer. They were ignored. No one trusted government warnings. No one trusted much of anything. On October 2, a committee choosing an Episcopalian bishop used slips of paper rather than voting aloud: “With Watergate,” a bishop explained, “our committee was so concerned that our meeting place might be bugged that we never mentioned any of the candidates’ names.”

  That same week Vice President Spiro Agnew spoke before the annual conclave of the National Federation of Republican Women in Los Angeles. He proclaimed his innocence, promising, “I will not resign if indicted.”

  Two weeks later, on October 10, he resigned, after being indicted.

  He had pleaded nolo contendere—“the full equivalent to a guilty plea,” the judge explained—to a single reduced charge of income tax evasion. He received a three-year suspended sentence and a ten-thousand-dollar fine, less than what the prosecution said he owed the IRS in taxes for his graft, and less than what he had taken in an envelope from a single Maryland building contractor. Pursuant to his deal with prosecutors, he resigned effective immediately. Then he gave a speech blaming his fall on the “new post-Watergate morality”—referring to the sins of the prosecutors, not his own.

  There followed the usual liberal protestations that this was just to be expected from the “law-and-order” hustlers in Richard Nixon’s employ, and the usual right-wing ones that since Agnew was a conservative the Establishment hated, he had to have been framed. More interesting, however, was a new note: scales falling from eyes. In Palm Springs, where Agnew golfed with Sinatra, a wealthy resident explained how Agnew had “commanded our respect and trust as no one in government has for so many years.” With “the Watergate incident, we would not believe the news media and closed our eyes to the truth.” Now, however, he realized “it would be catastrophic if all the politicians in Washington were thoroughly investigated. For, we may not have a government.”

  Agnew’s plea deal opened the floodgates of a corrosive cynicism. The president had refused to entertain the idea of amnesty for draft resisters; but Agnew had been afforded amnesty all but automatically. So Gordon Strachan, the young Haldeman aide who earned laughs for warning young idealists away from Washington, had been proved wrong; as one Los Angeles Times letter writer put it: young people should go into public service. Then they would have “the privilege of committing felonies.” An inmate wrote from Los Angeles County Jail: “My horrendous crime of plain drunk has drawn me 120 days”; if only his crime was political he’d be free to walk the streets. Another wrote that the sixty days he got for breaking a window during a strike was “a clear reminder that, as Thrasymachus says in Plato’s Republic, justice is whatever those in power say it is, and whatever is to their advantage.” Someone nominated the “Theme from Shaft” as the new national anthem.

  On October 14 the New York Times reported a poll demonstrating a 12 percentage point increase in public cynicism regarding government. Two professors reported on their annual canvass of graduate students entering the University of Michigan’s Institute for Public Policy Studies. A year earlier, 12 percent had agreed that “often those who enter politics think more about their own welfare or that of their party than about the welfare of the citizens.” This year the figure had jumped to 94 percent.

  Children were cynical, too: whereas kids used to collect images of sports heroes they now hoarded “Wacky Packages,” a twelve-year-old middle finger collectively extended at consumer capitalism. The product had bombed when the Topps Chewing Gum company tried it out in 1967. Now, though, the time was ripe. “Cap’n Crunch” became “Cap’n Crud.” “Ultra Bright” was “Ultra Blight.” “Post Alphabits” became “Pest Awful Bits” (“FREE 24 Vol. Set Encyclopedia Britannica in Every Box!”). “Rice A Phony.” “Blunder Bread.” They were subversive in form, too, not just content: not cards, but stickers—the adolescent equivalent of subway graffiti. A fifth-grade teacher told New York magazine it had taken half a day to pry them off desks at the end of the school year.

  New York also noted the increasingly political turn of Mad magazine—2.4 million copies sold a month, and no ads or branded merchandising: kids’ one redoubt of purity in a cruddy, overcommercialized world. In one recent gag, the “Corporate Ecologist of the Year” explained how his company was spending million of dollars responding to pollution: “on advertising—to clean up the corporate image.” “Starchie Bunker” got a visit from an “old World War II buddy,” Adolf Hitler, then CBS gave Hitler a spin-off sitcom. New York’s distinguished political correspondent Richard Reeves wrote that Mad was turning his son into a smart-ass. It did him proud: “The kid can spot the sham piling up all around him.” Another parent told Reeves, “I think it made her secure in being skeptical. . . . It’s really a shortcut to a kind of sanity-preserving sophistication.” Mad’s publisher chimed in: “We all need some cynicism.” Reeves asked a seven-year-old what Wacky Packages’ appeal was. He said, “I think they’re bringing out the truth.”

  The brat named the spirit of the age. Everything was fraudulent. America making the world safe for democracy? CBS Radio now reported from Chile on suspicions that the United States had instigated the coup there. The anchor clarified: “Actually, no evidence has yet been uncovered that Washington had any direct responsibility for the events in Santiago”—though such was the national atmosphere of suspicion that they reported on the rumor anyway.

  JUST TWO DAYS AFTER AGNEW’S resignation the White House honored the new Twenty-fifth Amendment of Sam Ervin’s favorite document, which sharpened the rules for presidential succession, and nominated a new vice president: Gerald Ford, the House minority leader. Nixon called it “a new beginning for America.” The Washington Post’s cartoonist found the choice so unlikely he depicted the new veep as a stunned game show winner—“wait, that’s not all—a complete set of Secret Service Men, plus three years, expenses paid in the second highest office in the land!” The Chicago Daily News’ Mike Royko said it was like something out of a Woody Allen script—So you want to become vice president?

  “First, find safe district and keep getting elected.”

  “Don’t die, so you can pile up a lot of seniority.”

  “Stay in the mainstream of your party, even when it does something dumb.”

  And finally: “Don’t make enemies.”

  Conservatives had wanted Reagan, and he seemed like a contender. But Reagan had made enemies. Nixon needed someone anodyne, who could quickly get confirmed by Congress, and Ford was a man of Congress—thirteen terms representing little Grand Rapids, Michigan, since his first election in 1948, which had also been his last competitive election. Apparently because he was mediocre, Ford was the one—the proverbial heartbeat away.

  Or maybe an impeachment away. It had long been a Washington joke: the oafish Spiro Agnew was Nixon’s “impeachment insurance.” Nixon had joked about it himself in the Oval Office: “What the hell, you k
now. People say impeach the President. Well, then they get Agnew!” Now the insurance policy had expired. William Rusher, publisher of National Review and not a bad political operative himself, wrote, “We’ve demonstrated we can replace a Vice President, so I expect we could replace a President.” Nixon named Ford on the same day the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the president “is not above the law’s command” and would have to turn over the seven tapes Judge Sirica had asked for, unless he appealed to the Supreme Court, which the judge gave the president until October 19 to do.

  The only question then was what he would do if the Supreme Court ruled against him. Which was an ominous question indeed. J. Anthony Lukas of the New York Times called it a potential “constitutional apocalypse.”

  On August 7 Sirica had demanded from the president’s representatives an explanation as to why they refused to follow a court order. Nixon’s lawyer Charles Alan Wright responded with a crystalline argument wrapped in the highest possible principle: the demand to X-ray the innards of Oval Office deliberation was “a serious threat to the nature of the presidency as it was created by the Constitution, as it has been sustained for 184 years, and as it exists today,” and would alter “the total structure of the government.” In an oral argument he raised the specter of judicial anarchy: there were more than four hundred federal district judges in the United States, each with a lifetime appointment. Could America maintain a democracy once each and every one of them was allowed to compel presidents to cough up private papers?

  Then there was the problem of precedent: no president, and no department of the government, had ever been held in contempt by either the courts or Congress for “refusing to produce information” that “the President has determined must be withheld in the public interest”—and the public interest, the president had determined, would be eviscerated unless every future president could “expect candid and frank advice from his underlings.” Thus the president was acting, Wright argued, to faithfully execute the laws—“ultimately to protect the right of the American people to informed and vigorous advice for their President.”

  Cue “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  Then cue ominous clouds. Wright ended with a passively aggressive hint: “Whether a decision adverse to the President could be enforced is a question.”

  On August 29, Judge Sirica handed down his first decision regarding the tapes, establishing what he thought was a middle ground—the president could turn them over for Sirica’s inspection; Sirica would vet them for privacy and national security concerns. He added a riposte to Wright’s menacing threat: “That the court has not the physical power to enforce its order to the President is immaterial to a resolution of the issue.” Then came an ominous rumble from San Clemente: the president was considering an appeal—but was also looking into “how otherwise to sustain” his legal position. At a September 5 press conference, asked what that meant, Nixon invoked President Lincoln—who “indicated several times during his Presidency that he would move in the national interest in a way that many thought was perhaps in violation of the law.” Then Nixon insisted it would not be appropriate to explain further what he meant, “until we go through the appellate procedure.”

  That procedure was now almost completed. There was only the Supreme Court to go. And if the president defied the highest court in the land, Ted Kennedy said on the floor of the Senate, “It would be Chile, really, without the bloodshed.” Pinochet, after all, knew enough to claim he was defending his nation’s constitution, too.

  But everyone knew that could not happen here.

  ON OCTOBER 14, AMERICANS LEARNED that the Middle East war was not so far away after all: an American airlift was on its way to Israel, which exceeded in a couple of weeks the amount of supplies ferried to Berlin in 1948 over eleven months.

  The decision had been made five days earlier. The State Department presumed Israel would regain its footing and quickly battle its way back to the status quo ante, and a peace process could begin. Instead, Israeli diplomats passed word to Henry Kissinger that Israel continued to suffer “staggering and totally unexpected” reverses—forty-nine downed warplanes, five hundred disabled tanks. The Soviet Union was resupplying Egypt and Syria by air. Prime Minister Golda Meir sent an emissary to the White House, who warned the president that if the other Arab nations smelled Israel’s panic they would unite militarily to end the Jewish state once and for all. The decision: load American cargo planes to the gills with the most modern tanks and planes in America’s arsenal—along with, Kissinger promised Israel’s ambassador, “assurances that you will have replacements.”

  Ronald Reagan helped make the decision. The California governor received regular security briefings from Kissinger; the White House, it turned out, was a little obsessed with Reagan. On one level it thought him a clown: A gossip item in June about John Ehrlichman’s empty family home, up for sale Great Falls, Virginia (one house hunter caused consternation when he picked up the phone line that still led directly to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue), revealed a poster of Reagan in a cowboy outfit in the house’s rec room, covered over with a “Nixon’s the One” sign. And in that 1971 Oval Office conversation about Reagan, Nixon worried, “With a Reagan in here, you could damn well almost get yourself in a nuclear war.” Kissinger agreed: “He has no judgment.” Be that as it may, Kissinger still solicited him for advice on the extraordinarily delicate matter of how to frame an Israeli resupply operation that if handled incorrectly could lead to a military confrontation with the Soviet Union. Reagan suggested: “Why don’t you say you will replace all the aircraft the Arabs claim they have shot down?”

  That was brilliant. Since the Arabs were wildly exaggerating their success, presenting them with a Hobson’s choice—saying nothing or facing international humiliation—was perfect. Reagan’s interpersonal intelligence was something to behold. Which was why the White House was obsessed with him in the first place. Kissinger found himself wishing he had Reagan on his State Department staff.

  There was another motivation for America doing what it could to help Israel win: petroleum. Nixon and Kissinger hoped the Arabs would realize that the only way to obtain their strategic objectives was by cooperating with the United States. But the petroleum industry interpreted the situation in the opposite way. Aramco, the consortium of international petroleum companies operating in the Middle East, had written to the president on October 12 warning that the resupply would provoke a cutback from Saudi Arabia. So did the British ambassador to the United States, who asked Henry Kissinger, “What will be your posture when the Arabs start screaming ‘oil’ at you?”

  “Defiance,” the secretary of state replied.

  Defiance, however, soon backfired, in the most terrifying way.

  Nixon had never taken seriously the idea that Arab states could or would use oil as a weapon. In fact, Nixon had never taken the oil problem seriously at all. “Concentrate on the big game,” he said to his treasury secretary, George Shultz, when warned about the geopolitical consequences of possible shortages the previous March; he called such worries “escapist.” West German chancellor Willy Brandt warned him two months later of the potential for an oil embargo. Nixon pooh-poohed him: There were “too many companies and nations fighting each other” for any embargo to work. Four weeks later it was French president Georges Pompidou’s turn to sound the alarm. Nixon told him to stop worrying about irrelevant Third World nations: “The five fingers,” he said—“a strong Europe, a strong U.S., Russia, China, and for the future, Japan”—were the world economy’s fist. “The rest do not matter.” National Security Council and State Department aides warned Kissinger, too. His response was downright hysterical: “Don’t talk to me about barrels of oil. They might as well [be] bottles of Coca-Cola. I don’t understand!”

  Men like these did not see that the world was shifting beneath their feet. The astonishing cheapness of energy, the unacknowledged linchpin of America’s extraordinary postwar growth, had
been a function of a one-time world glut in production—from 8.7 million barrels a day in 1948 to 42 million in 1972. In a globalizing world America’s share of those barrels, once 64 percent, was now 22 percent—even as Europe’s postwar demand had increased fifteenfold, Japan’s 137-fold. Regulatory bodies like the Texas Railroad Commission deliberately induced scarcity to keep prices up, even as environmental concerns introduced new bottlenecks in supply: a spectacular 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara scotched offshore drilling; auto emissions standards added about 300,000 barrels a day to U.S. demand; refineries became harder to build; environmentalists stymied a planned pipeline to move oil discovered in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. Cities converted their dirty coal-burning power plants to cleaner ones burning oil, further squeezing supply; new synthetic fabrics and petrochemicals compounded the addiction. In just the short window between 1970 and 1973, America’s oil imports, once all but nonexistent, doubled. Now 29 percent came from abroad—the lion’s share from Middle East nations that mostly despised the United States.

  Fifteen years earlier Nikita Khrushchev had called the divided city of Berlin “the testicles of the West,” which he need only squeeze to make the United States scream. Now that pressure point was oil. “We are in a position to dictate prices,” Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, informed the world in April, “and we are going to be very rich.”

  They were also, apparently, determined to dictate politics. “America’s continued support of Zionism against the Arabs makes it extremely difficult for us to continue to supply the United States with oil,” said Saudi Arabia’s king. Fortunate that the Middle East producers seemed such a sad-sack sort of crew. Yes, the Arabs had their oil cartel, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC. Together its eleven members produced more than 80 percent of the world’s exported oil. They had tried to coordinate a boycott during the 1967 war. It failed miserably—for all it took to disintegrate any boycott was for one nation to seize a quick financial windfall as the region’s only supplier of oil. The president was asked at his September 5 press conference about “threats from the Arab countries to use oil as a club to force a change in our Middle East policy”—and the pooh-poohing he’d privately given the likes of Shultz and Pompidou now was on the record: “Oil without a market,” he said, “as Mr. Mossadegh learned many, many years ago, does not do a country much good.” A mafia-style threat: Mohammad Mossadegh had been the left-wing president of Iran. When he’d expropriated British Petroleum’s oil fields in 1953, he found himself the victim of a CIA-sponsored coup. And also Economics 101: a state whose economy was based on oil couldn’t simply stop selling oil to the world’s richest country—unless it wanted to stop having an economy.