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

by Rick Perlstein

  There were also the movie advertisements; they hardly spoke to a nation at peace with itself. Two masterpieces of Hollywood’s new cinema of moral despair: Robert Altman’s California Split, about a freakish netherworld of compulsive gamblers, which the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert called an allegory of the “American nightmare”; and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, a neo-noir tailor-made for the age of John Mitchell, in which a private eye played by Jack Nicholson finds hidden behind sunny Southern California’s economic boom a depravity beyond all imagining, then accepts the rank futility of ever doing anything about it. Pornography ads: Flesh Gordon (in which Emperor Wang “the Perverted,” leader of the planet Porno, conquered Earth with his mighty Sex Ray); The Seduction of Lynn Carter (“She was violated, again and again, in crude and unspeakable ways . . . and she loved every minute of it”); Score (“hilariously hits the bulls eye of bi-sexual chic”); Craig from Frisco (in which, in an ad next to the one for Chinatown, the titular star addressed the reader directly: “I’m appearing in a very unique new all male cast movie at the Park Miller. Casting for me, Helmut, and our four friends took months of research.”).

  Then there were ads for two extraordinary films drunk with the paranoia that had defined the long national nightmare. One came from the right—and made critics write like editorialists. Playboy’s reviewer called its star a “folk-hero par excellence.” The magazine After Dark called it a “time bomb of a movie, exploding at just the right moment in the glare of truth.” Gene Shalit on the Today show called it “a rouser for everyone who wants safe cities.” The picture was called Death Wish, and it starred Charles Bronson as a New York City architect who used to be liberal, until his daughter was raped and his wife murdered. His son-in-law pronounces defeat: “There’s nothing we can do to stop it. Nothing but cut and run.” The architect, by contrast, learns to shoot a gun—in an Old West ghost town—so he can start mowing down muggers at point-blank range. He soon cuts the city’s murder rate in half, and wins a spot on the cover of Time.

  Liberal reviewers recorded their disgust: The Times’ Vincent Canby called it “a bird-brained movie to cheer the hearts of the far-right wing,” then, ten days later, branded Bronson a “circus bear.” Time called it “meretricious,” “brazen,” and “hysterical.” Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called it “fascist.” But in the real-life New York City, where the murder rate had doubled in ten years, and where a psychiatrist published a Times op-ed bragging about all the violence he had prevented by leveling a pistol that he kept “never far from my reach while I attend to patients in my mid-Manhattan office,” each vigilante act onscreen won ovations from grateful fans—sometimes standing ovations. It earned seven times its $3 million budget.

  The other paranoid melodrama was The Parallax View, named after the optical illusion in which reality is distorted by the angle from which it is viewed. It starred the handsome, diffident, long-haired Warren Beatty as a new figure in the annals of lone-wolf Hollywood heroes: not a cowboy, nor a private eye, but, of all things, a newspaper reporter—just like the guys who, banging on typewriters, whispering into phones, and making mysterious assignations in underground Washington parking garages, had become the heroes of Watergate. (Woodward and Bernstein’s book All the President’s Men was enjoying its seventh of twenty-one weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.) In selling the role, director Alan Pakula reportedly told Beatty, “If the picture works the audience will trust the person next to them a little less.” The tagline on its advertising posters: “As American as apple pie.”

  Beatty’s character watches a charismatic young senator speak at a Fourth of July event atop the Space Needle in Seattle: “Independence Day is very meaningful to me. I’ve been called too independent for my own good”—then shots ring out and the apparent shooter falls from the tower in a scuffle with security guards, and another mysterious figure slips away, unnoticed by anyone but our hero. A man who looks like Earl Warren sitting atop a Supreme Court–style bench announces the conclusion of a four-month official investigation proving the shooter acted alone, “motivated by a misguided sense of and a psychotic desire for wider recognition . . . no evidence of any conspiracy. No evidence whatsoever.” The official announces that these findings must end “irresponsible speculation” for good.

  Three years later, Beatty bangs out a story his crusty old editor has no intention of publishing, warning that his “creative irresponsibility” would destroy him. Disgusted, Beatty returns to his noirish rooming house, where he’s visited by a frightened young woman who presents him with newspaper pictures of the scene at the Space Needle: “Since the assassination six of these people in these pictures have been killed in an accident.”

  Beatty was in one of the pictures, too—so when would they come after him?

  Just like Death Wish, The Parallax View was ripped straight from the headlines—though this time from the headlines in the underground press, where Kennedy conspiracy theories thrived. The Warren Commission (which happened to include Gerald Ford), impaneled by President Johnson to investigate the assassination, was a Rush to Judgment; that 1966 book by the left-wing lawyer Mark Lane spent six months on the New York Times bestseller list after being rejected by fifteen publishers. In 1964, the year of the Warren Report’s publication, the Gallup poll found that 75 percent of Americans, the highest proportion yet recorded, trusted the government “to do what is right most of the time.” Of course that was also the same year, Americans now knew, that Lyndon Johnson got his blank check to make war in Vietnam by lying about what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, then won his landslide reelection by promising he wouldn’t send American boys thousands of miles away to do what Asian boys ought to do for themselves. Soon an irregular cadre of citizen investigators began working to prove the Warren Report was a “sleazy and insulting fantasy.” And by 1974, when 62 percent distrusted their government to do the right thing most of the time, their conclusions were becoming mainstream. Coretta Scott King, for example, in an interview that spring in the women’s magazine McCall’s, said that the “same kind of people who were paid to do the dirty work in Watergate were paid to do the dirty work in the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations.”

  Parallax hit all the tenets of the “assassination community” catechism: that mendacious elites exploited a nation’s longing to trust in order to better control them (the hero cries, “Everyone was looking for an explanation! Every time you turned around someone was knocking off one of the best men in the country!”); that accessories to conspiracy were everywhere (“Face it,” a coroner tells him in claiming his informant’s death was obviously a suicide, “some people wanna die”); and that the powers that be got away with killing our truth-telling president by making the assassination look like the work of some miserable loner—a “patsy,” as Lee Harvey Oswald himself had put it.

  Another key tenet embodied in The Parallax View extended far beyond the conspiracists: that America, before Nixon, before Johnson, had had a truth-telling president—a president who had been innocent. In pictures like Klute (1971, also directed by Pakula), Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974), and Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975), production designers used a certain visual shorthand to signify that characters whom liberal audiences might prejudge as reactionary—because they were working class, because they were Southerners, because they were cops—were meant to be perceived sympathetically: a picture of Jack and/or Robert Kennedy on their wall. “Kennedy” meant comfort, truth, trust, the calm before the storm. The collection of sentimental reminiscences by Kennedy family retainers, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for five months; the memoirs of eighty-two-year-old family matriarch Rose stayed there for six months. And the sentiment extended all the way down to schoolchildren. That spring, a kindergarten teacher in Long Beach, California, wrote in the Los Angeles Times about a lesson she was giving about presidents. One of the four-year-olds boldly pronounced, “The real Presid
ent lies!” The teacher, taken aback, asked the child to elaborate. He responded, “There used to be a President who didn’t lie, but he’s dead!”

  Among the assassinologists it was widely believed Kennedy had signed his own death warrant with a 1963 American University commencement address announcing unilateral suspension of all atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and proclaiming that Americans had had “more than enough” of “war and hate and oppression”: to the powers that be, that meant he had to go, and a patsy had to be readied to take the fall. Similarly, in the final reel of The Parallax View, depicted in quick-cut scenes of Hitchcockian vertiginous intensity, the reporter-hero infiltrates the shadowy corporation responsible for the assassinations by posing as one of those pathetic loners, is hired by it as a security guard, and is posted in the rafters at a campaign rally of another bold truth-telling politician. A professional sniper cuts down the target, drops his high-powered rifle, and steals away—at which point, as the authorities rush in to arrest the patsy, Beatty, Parallax agents cut him down, just like Jack Ruby did to Oswald. The last scene was identical to first, that same Earl Warren figure sternly pronouncing, “Although certain that this will do nothing to discourage the conspiracy peddlers, there is no evidence of conspiracy in the assassination. . . . There will be no questions.”

  The picture was fascinating, and might well have been a hit six months earlier. It did very little business now. Paranoia was out of fashion. The country had a president who didn’t lie. Did anyone really imagine that outside the small and suspicious circles any real interest attached to the old forms of the executive-distrust question?

  “THE COMMUTER AT 514 CROWN View Drive in Alexandria, Va., awoke shortly before 6 A.M. and, in baby blue summer pajamas, boiled water for his tea, cut the melon, and toasted the English muffin,” began the Associated Press dispatch.

  “Still in his pajamas, he popped his head out the front door looking for the morning paper. Not there yet.

  “Thirty minutes later, he popped out again. Still no paper. The Washington Post, which had never charmed the 37th President of the United States, was now getting off on the wrong foot with the 38th.”

  Finally, an eager nation learned, Shelley Deming, fourteen, apologizing that the circulation man was late, delivered a newspaper to the Leader of the Free World and the new president traveled to the White House for his first day on the job. He met with his cabinet, “which until midday Friday was Richard Nixon’s cabinet”; the chair where he used to sit in as vice president, and which he would now have to fill by appointment, was empty. He chatted easily with reporters who “no longer felt like uninvited guests who had to be watched near the silver. . . .

  “It was a new day at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, zip code 20050. A new, new day.”

  No more parallax views. Just a balding, square-jawed, honest, straightforwardly pleasant man for a nation that could be honestly, straightforwardly pleasant once more—a man who smoked a pipe, like one of those kindly old dads in a 1950s television situation comedy. A pure pragmatist, they said, with no ideology to divide the nation. Indeed, it was reported, he took pleasure from compromise, hating no one (except, the profiles said, his biological father, who beat his mother, then abandoned the family; that was why his mother changed her son’s name to Gerald Ford Jr., after her second husband, from Leslie King Jr., his original name). “A Ford, not a Lincoln,” as he had charmingly described himself upon acceding to the vice presidency, winning a standing ovation in the Capitol Rotunda: “My addresses will never be as eloquent as Mr. Lincoln’s. But I will do my very best to equal his brevity and plain speaking.”

  That business about the English muffin became the joyous keynote—a national talisman of normalcy restored. A New Yorker cartoon had a sleepy wife lecturing her irate husband: “The President of the United States of America makes his own breakfast.” Which was appropriate, because the new first lady, née Betty Bloomer, was something of a feminist—and Jerry Ford was self-possessed enough not to feel unmanned by the fact. “We have carefully worked out the art of gentle compromise,” she said in her first-day profile, in which, unlike Pat Nixon, who revealed a bitter, shrewish side when she revealed herself at all, Betty played as easygoing and funny. The former model and professional modern dancer gently mocked her husband’s impatience. (“She whips out one of her husband’s favorite T-shirts”—did Richard Nixon even own a T-shirt?—one reading, “Old Fords Never Die. They Just Move Faster.”) She described, with breathtaking openness, how she solved a severe chronic pain problem: mild tranquilizers, and “therapy of tell-it-like-it-is conversations” with a psychiatrist. “A psychiatrist,” she explained gently, “is nothing more than a sounding board, someone to talk to. I voiced a lot of entrenched feelings that were locked inside. But even more important, I got an honest reaction.”

  This was extraordinary. America had been a nation of shamefaced secrecy in so many of its intimate domestic affairs. The 1970s were when that began to change. Betty Ford was that transformation’s Joan of Arc. “Free Spirit in the White House,” read the cover of Newsweek for a profile of her the next year.

  Meanwhile her husband modeled a new ethic of transparency in the White House. His press secretary, Jerry terHorst, chucked the menacing podium behind which Nixon blocked himself from the world and reversed the press room seating arrangement into something more like an encounter group, and sometimes had Ford give his news conferences in the White House Rose Garden. Introducing terHorst the first day of his term, Ford announced, “We will have a candid administration. I can’t change my nature after sixty-one years.” Soon so many Democrats had been invited to the White House that Art Buchwald joked that someone had mistaken an old Nixon Enemies List for the White House invitation list; a portrait of Harry Truman (Merle Miller’s Plain Speaking was enjoying its ninth month on the bestseller lists) joined Eisenhower’s and Lincoln’s in the Oval Office; and the fight song of the University of Michigan (Jerry had been a football star there) replaced “Hail to the Chief.” At the first state dinner, Jerry and Betty—who made no secret of how much they enjoyed sharing a bed—danced the night away to the Jim Croce hit “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” Newsweek, after an extraordinary inside-cover photo essay (“Putting Watergate Behind Us”) reprinting its thirty-eight covers on the subject, said, “The manner of his coming felt as cool and cleansing to a soiled capital as a fresh Lake Michigan Breeze.” Time all but hymned a new plain-speaking Midwestern messiah, “a chief executive who worked in his shirtsleeves, who said what he meant and meant what he said, who by his honesty and accessibility has swiftly exorcised the pinched ghosts of the Nixon era.” “Everywhere,” Hugh Sidey wrote, “there was a feeling that the American presidency was back in the possession of the people.”

  Dependable, solid, uncontroversial—just like the cars Ford built. Though at that, wasn’t it also the case that to partisans of Chevrolets, Fords were controversial indeed? And that Americans, being Americans, had always found things to passionately disagree about, to the point of violent rage—and that when American elites reached most insistently for talismans of national unity, it usually portended further civil wars?

  ECONOMIC CRISES OBSCURED BY WATERGATE shivered naked in the postresignation air. The New York Times listed them at the end of week two: “the worst inflation in the country’s peacetime history” (the Wholesale Price Index, newspapers reported the day Ford became president, rose a staggering 3.7 in July), “the highest interest rates in a century, the consequent severe slump in housing, sinking and utterly demoralized securities markets, a stagnant economy with large-scale unemployment in prospect, and a worsening international trade and payments position.”

  Actually, it was worse than worsening. In 1948 America had made up about a quarter of the world’s trade. Now it was less than 10 percent. In one year, 1970, the trade deficit with Japan, which manufactured cars at a rate of ten thousand a year in 1950 and now made more than a million, had risen from $3 billion to $8.5 billion. In 1971 America r
an its first trade deficit since 1893. As for inflation, Nixon’s price controls had been a thumb in the dike, whose end caused price hikes so overwhelming that newspaper editorialists called for a “Bureau of Shortages” to ration consumer goods. The economy was on the verge of recession—although in a poll a week after the inauguration, nearly half thought America was on the verge of a depression. By November, that proportion was 57 percent.

  The new president promptly declared inflation “Public Enemy Number One.” The markets didn’t care. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, half of what it was in 1972, fell 12 percent more in its next eleven trading sessions—though at Ford’s first news conference only five questions were on the economy and only three questions were on foreign policy. The others followed up on the insistent opening bark of the UPI’s Helen Thomas:

  “Do you agree with the Bar Association that the law applies equally to all men, or do you agree with Governor Rockefeller that former president Nixon should have immunity from prosecution? And would specifically, would you use your pardon authority, if necessary?”

  The media obsession with the notion of Richard Nixon going to jail hastened Ford’s determination to do something he believed would finally end the national nightmare once and for all. Things were still so very nasty. That week, former high-ranking Nixon officials leaked to the Chicago Sun-Times that Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, worried that Nixon’s evident “erratic behavior” during the Judiciary Committee hearings suggested he might launch a nuclear strike, “had kept a close watch during the last days of the Nixon administration to assure no orders were given to military units outside the chain of command.” Someone firebombed Patricia Nixon’s childhood home.

  A president’s resignation, noble speeches, and an open and transparent White House hadn’t been enough; more healing plainly was called for.