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

by Rick Perlstein

  Sure, Ford could increase taxes or cut spending to rein in inflation—and throw maybe a million American out of work in an election year. Or he could goose the economy, perhaps by releasing funds for public works—but then inflation might skyrocket out of control. This new presidency was evolving a theme: damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.

  There is a story that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was once asked what book he wished every Soviet could own. He answered, “The Sears, Roebuck catalogue.” Indeed, since Roosevelt, Americans’ inflation-adjusted incomes had doubled. Manufacturing wages had tripled. The specter haunting social criticism had been what human beings would do with all the free time American prosperity was producing. No more. Poor Gerald Ford, saddled with the blame. It was around this time that the new issue of National Lampoon hit the newsstands with the president shoving an ice-cream cone three inches north of his mouth.

  POLITICIANS STARTED JOCKEYING FOR SPACE inside the president’s head before an economic speech scheduled for a joint session of Congress on October 7. Reagan sent him a telegram: “Dear Mr. President, I am concerned that the press reports indicate you will propose tax increases tomorrow in an effort to curb inflation. The 1972 election mandate was clear: no new taxes for four years, and reduce the size of the federal government. . . .” Congressman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, who had amassed nearly biblical powers chairing the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee for a record eighteen years, gave a Democratic version of the same argument, releasing a statement pronouncing himself “unalterably opposed to an income tax surcharge which places its heaviest burden on the lower and middle-income classes.”

  The lame-duck right-wing governor could be ignored—but not, traditionally, someone like Mills. Here was the way Washington worked: long-serving congressmen and senators, almost always from the South, where elections were not quite democratic and incumbents had about as much chance of losing as they did of sprouting wings (Mills had been a congressman since 1939), leveraged their seniority into chairmanships of the committees that powered Congress like an engine room on a ship. And, like those engine rooms, the work they did was hidden from view, in backroom “markup” sessions in which power brokers from both parties drafted world-changing legislation via bonds of trust sealed with toasts of bourbon and branch water. When done right, in the old-fashioned way, the bills arrived on the floor “clean”—not amendable—and were passed by unrecorded vote, by obedient junior members directed by equally powerful “whips.” Whips who left scars on those who dared disobey.

  Wilbur Mills was at the apex of that system; his committee was invariably described in newspapers as the “powerful Ways and Means Committee,” and he himself as “the most powerful man in Washington.” But maybe now Mills could be defied. He was facing his first serious primary challenger, who was hitting him hard on the main issue that mattered this campaign season, that he’d accepted dirty money during his short-lived 1972 presidential run—“Wilbur’s Watergate,” the New Republic called it.

  And then, in the same AP story announcing his displeasure with the surtax, came this: “Mills has been in seclusion since an incident early Monday when according to police his auto was stopped by police because it was traveling at a high speed with its lights off.”

  Washington insiders already knew it was quite more than that—and soon the rest of the world would know, too: that a not-so-young woman with Barbra Streisand curls by the name of Annabelle Battistella, Mills’s next-door neighbor, had dashed out of the car in a bruised, drunken panic and leaped in apparent embarrassment into Washington, D.C.’s lovely Tidal Basin. And that her professional name, when she danced at the Silver Slipper topless lounge, was “Fanne Foxe, the Argentine Firecracker.”

  Jerry Ford tucked his surtax proposal, limited to Americans with incomes over fifteen thousand dollars, at the very end of his speech to the joint session of Congress that afternoon. He didn’t like raising taxes; nor did he like the notion of liberals that all would be solved with $4 billion in new public works projects, nor their clamoring for new price controls. In fact, despite the honeymoon claims that this was a man beyond ideology, his economic conservatism was bone deep. As a congressman between 1970 and 1973 he followed the preferred course of Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal group, on only four votes. As president he chose as chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers free-market advacate Alan Greenspan—who was sworn in for the job standing next to his mentor, the hyper-free-market advocate Ayn Rand. And though Gerald Ford despised Ronald Reagan, when he went out to stump for Republican candidates later that month, you could hardly tell them apart: “We have to chop off these tentacles,” he would say. “And as each of these tentacles withers, we have to return the power and the revenues they have grasped back to the states and localities where they belong.”

  That conservatism helped explain why he fell in love with an idea from economics columnist Sylvia Porter. She said that “consumers now are as eager to help combat inflation as we were eager to help fight Nazism.” Wisconsin’s Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, gave the notion a bipartisan tinge with similar language at the inflation summit.

  What if inflation could be fought by individual citizen action? What if Ford could jawbone the nation out of its price funk?

  His economics speech began with a banquet of bland policy proposals (“for the long range we must work harder on coal gasification”). He had been stumbling. Then the fun began. “My fellow Americans,” he said, “ten days ago I asked you to get things started by making a list of ten things to fight inflation and exchange your list with neighbors, and to send me a copy.”

  He warmed to his subject.

  “I have personally read scores of the thousands of letters received at the White House, and incidentally, I have made my economic experts read some of them too.” They “showed me that a great deal of patriotic determination and unanimity already exists in this great land”: cut kitchen waste by 5 percent, carpool, take the bus, ride bikes, walk; “share everything you can and a little bit more.” He smiled folksily: “We can share burdens as we can share blessings.”

  The Nixon administration had suggested similar things during the food price explosion of the spring of 1973 (“liver, kidney, brains, and heart can be made into gourmet meals with seasoning, imagination, and more cooking time”). Nixon himself said them in his energy crisis speech in the fall (“How many times have you gone along the highway or the freeway, whatever the case may be . . . cars with only one individual in that car?”). They hadn’t worked then. But, then, Richard Nixon hadn’t had a nifty little prop.

  The White House had approached a Madison Avenue advertising agency, which came up with the slogan: Whip Inflation Now. WIN. Forty-two minutes into the address, Ford explained how “a very simple enlistment form” would appear in the next day’s newspapers. At that, the president pointed out in his lapel, next to his red-white-and-blue tie, the snazzy little button designed by the same guy who invented the yellow “smiley face.”

  “It bears the single word: WIN. I think that tells it all. I call upon every American to join in this massive mobilization and stick with it until we do win as a nation and a people.”

  He took the pin off and held it to the cameras. He got a standing ovation.

  He promised to share more of the American people’s suggestions the next week before the Future Farmers of America in Kansas City. In the interim came an earnest outpouring. He happily relayed examples in Kansas:

  “Mrs. Laird Barber of Morris, Minnesota, wants to know if a national program can be organized to collect cans, glass, newspapers. . . . James Kincaid, of Belleville, Illinois, suggests a new type of government anti-inflation bond. . . . The Tennants report they do not use credit cards. They put something in their credit union each week and buy a government bond every month. . . . Robert Stewart writes from Waverly, Tennessee, that he has a heart condition, unfortunately, and draws a pension of only $251.27 a month. This allows him just two meal
s a day. . . . He asks me, and again I quote: ‘Can we cut our government spending except for national defense?’ . . . I think his example is a good one for all of us to observe. . . . From Hillsboro, Oregon, the Stevens family writes they are fixing up their bikes to do family errands.”

  Many of the ideas came from children. “Clean up your plate before you get up from the table”; “trash inventories”; dig school playgrounds up for “WIN vegetable gardens”; get your haircut at home. “Bob Cantrell, a 14-year-old in Pasadena, California, gave up his stereo to save energy.”

  WIN was a hit, for now. Golf legend Tom Watson wore his WIN button on the golf course: “It’s not a joke. I put it on because I believe in it.” (Governor George Wallace put one on, too, though his was a joke: “[It stands] for Wallace in November, doesn’t it?” he said.) Capitalists did what capitalists do: soon came the WIN gardening tools, WIN paperweights, WIN mugs, pens, watches, hot plates. Meredith Willson, composer of The Music Man, wrote a WIN march, and the Marine and Navy bands added it to their repertoires. Two hundred thousand Americans sent in their WIN enlistment forms. Now that the campaign season was upon us, a reeling Republican Party had something to sell: collective obligation, in the key of homespun earnestness.

  But a crop of unusual young Democratic candidates had a more salable post-Watergate product: suspicion, and redemption of that suspicion through a narrative of catharsis.

  THE DAY AFTER FORD SPOKE in Kansas City, he spoke at a judiciary subcommittee witness table, live on TV. The first president to testify before Congress since George Washington, coming so soon after Richard Nixon had so adamantly refused to do so, it was meant at once to display his openness, to empty out suspicions from the pardon—to end the national nightmare, again. Instead, he was set upon by a fusillade of paranoia.

  Elizabeth Holtzman of New York, who had breathed fire at the Nixon impeachment hearings, treated the President of the United States like a criminal defendant. Ford had claimed in his opening statement that the subject of a pardon had never once been “raised by the former president or anyone representing him.” Holtzman, after complaining that the short time allotted for grilling him was inadequate to examine the country’s “dark suspicions,” began listing those suspicions—though she barely got into the first one before the president interrupted:

  “I want to assure you, the Congress, and the American people that there was no deal, period, under no circumstances.”

  He pounded the table. But he did acknowledge that he’d met with Alexander Haig before the resignation to discuss the various possible scenarios. Which only amplified suspicions more.

  A Democrat asked how a high school teacher could explain to students how the pardon accorded with the principle of equal justice under law. A Republican, Edward Hutchinson, begged for the harassment to cease: “All reasonable questions,” he said, “have been laid to rest.” Washington Post columnist William Raspberry responded, “There is no way that last Thursday’s namby-pamby session . . . could have eased anyone’s doubts.”

  In other news from the paranoia front, the vice-president-designate Nelson Rockefeller fended off the most stringent confirmation process in the history of the republic, practically a Watergate-scale hearing in itself, over distrust that the billions in business interests he controlled would be put into a truly blind trust. Spokesmen for the disgraced former president, meanwhile, insisted Nixon couldn’t testify in the Watergate cover-up trial beginning in Washington because of another outbreak of phlebitis. How convenient. A suspicious Newsweek cover asked, “How Sick Is Nixon?”

  Sorry, Representative Hutchinson: the powers that be being perfectly rotten, the questions were only beginning.

  “Establishment institutions in America are in deep trouble,” pollster Lou Harris said in his September 30 newspaper column. Incumbent Republicans were bearing the brunt. Hutchinson, whose Michigan district had been represented by a Democrat for precisely two years since 1884, faced the run of his political life. As did all his Republican Judiciary Committee colleagues. Wiley Mayne of Iowa, a congressman who sometimes had supported Nixon and sometimes had not, woke up to find his opponent braying that he’d acted “more like a defense lawyer for Nixon than like a representative of the people.” Mayne’s opponent promised to determine his votes in Congress through plebiscites taken in town halls in the district—and rocketed ahead in the polls. In New Jersey, where two-thirds of voters disapproved of the pardon, Charles Sandman, the congressman whose anti-impeachment ranting had reminded Teddy White of Joe McCarthy, desperately implored voters to accept that since he had switched his vote on articles of impeachment at the last minute, nothing he said before that should count.

  A New Jersey lawmaker estimated that Republican candidates had gained 20,000 automatic votes when Nixon resigned—then lost 10,000 when he was pardoned. A Gallup poll said generic Democratic candidates beat generic Republicans by a margin of 54 to 35. The ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the 93rd Congress was already 235 to 182, and the Democratic National Committee was targeting an eye-popping one hundred seats more for turnover.

  The Time magazine on the newsstands when Ford spoke on Capitol Hill predicted a Democratic landslide. But it also stressed something else: the people who’d won this year’s Democratic nominations were an odd brand of Democrats. For many, this wasn’t the just the first time they’d run in a campaign, but the first time they had worked in a campaign. They campaigned, almost, on their contempt for the body they sought to join. “I am running for Congress because I believe the Congress must be reformed,” said thirty-four-year-old Tim Wirth of Colorado. And, like that fellow in Michigan, Vander Veen, they seemed almost militantly indifferent to partisanship. Thirty-six-year-old Gary Hart, running in Colorado for the Senate after managing George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, wrote an angry letter complaining that the article called him a liberal. “Traditional ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ slogans,” he wrote, “are simply not adequate to cope.”

  Their economic ideologies were not traditionally liberal, either. “The best way out” of the energy crisis, Hart said, was not the nationalization of the energy companies, which Democrats like Scoop Jackson were calling for. It “is to work together. There will be a lot more cooperative ventures between the environmentalists and the energy developers.” Snaking across Colorado’s switchback mountain roads for the past eighteen months, he preached that America had to accept austerity—pledging, like Tom Bradley getting elected mayor in Los Angeles by promising no more freeways, not to develop Colorado’s coal shale resources. “The party’s over, the day of having it all is gone. . . . We’re entering a period of history when conspicuous consumption and waste just must end.”

  Hart was the rock star of the 1974 Democratic candidates. He wore expensive cowboy boots with his silk suits. Not really a populist, he was, however, a reformer: his big campaign play was publishing the names of his opponent’s contributors and the amounts they gave. Evans and Novak said Hart’s “abandoning abrasive liberal ideology for a bland moderate facade” was actually subterfuge. Clearly they had not read the book he’d published the year before about the McGovern campaign, Right from the Start. “American liberalism,” he had written in it, was “near bankruptcy.” And George McGovern, while he brought into liberal politics the greatest organizers in a generation, “did not bring in a new generation of thinkers. He did not because it isn’t there.” Hart’s billboards read, “They had their turn. Now it’s our turn.” His outmaneuvered opponent, the once-popular two-term conservative incumbent Peter Dominick, said Hart seemed to be “trying to get to the right of Attila the Hun.”

  Hart seemed almost angrier at other Democrats than at Republicans. His stock speech, “The End of the New Deal,” argued that his party was hamstrung by the very ideology that was supposed to be its glory—that “if there is a problem, create an agency and throw money at the problem.” It included lines like “The ballyhooed War on Poverty succeeded only in raising the expectations,
but not the living conditions, of the poor.” That was false: the poverty rate was 17.3 percent when LBJ’s Economic Opportunity Act was passed in 1964 and 11.2 percent as Gary Hart spoke. But such claims did appeal to the preconceptions of people who Hart claimed must become the new base of the Democratic Party: those in the affluent suburbs, whose political power had been quietly expanding during the 1960s through redistricting and reapportionment. He called those who “clung to the Roosevelt model long after it had ceased to relate to reality,” who still thought the workers, farmers, and blacks of the New Deal coalition were where the votes were, “Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats.” He held them in open contempt.

  The legacy of 1972 that Hart was proud of was the commission reforming the presidential nomination process, which McGovern had chaired. By incinerating the role of unions and urban machines, “the party redeemed its promise of access to the Democratic process for those outside the established center” and “regenerated itself with new leadership and new ideas.” Like those of his own campaign, which he called “a contest Jefferson himself would welcome”—a purgation of a cynical old aristocracy, including a Democratic Party aristocracy.

  This new kind of Democrat was said to care more about “lifestyle issues” like conservation, which blue-collar labor types viewed with distrust. (Hart’s simpatico ticket mate for governor, Richard Lamm, came to prominence leading the movement to keep the 1976 Winter Olympics out of Denver, for the sake of the environment.) If anything, the new Democrats wanted smaller government. Michael Dukakis, the suburban Democrat running for governor in Massachusetts against a much more liberal Republican incumbent, was said by the UPI to want to “run the state like a bank.” Jerry Brown would quote small-government nostrums he read in the magazines Commentary and Public Interest—house organs of the ascendant neoconservative movement. Though he came to the same conclusions quoting a bible of the environmental movement: E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered (or, as the cover actually read, small is beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered).