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

by Rick Perlstein

  But it all sure sounded convincing coming from Reagan. As did his plea that the delivery of first-class mail should be turned over to private companies. And that the government should stop suing the phone company for monopoly: “When government pulls its hand out and lets the law of supply and demand work, that law works naturally,” he explained—which was why, he said, a long-distance call used to cost as much as sending 1,376 letters but now cost as much as sending twenty-five.

  The tax code should stop being absurd. (“We live in the only country in the world where it takes more sense to figure out your income tax than it does to earn the income.”) The politicians calling for gasoline rationing—they now included Melvin Laird, the conservative former Wisconsin congressman who had been Nixon’s defense secretary—“have little faith in you and your neighbors. They assume you and your neighbors won’t cut back unless a government dictate forces you to.” Public employees who went out on strike should be fired outright. And then there was the nightmare of living in a socialist country—like Sweden, “where workers resort to barter.” Or France, where “the telephone system is run by the post office.” He made them sound no less repressive than China, where it takes “a year to buy a wristwatch.” Or Finland, home of the formerly great composer Jean Sibelius. Reagan compared him to Mozart, who thrived artistically to the day he died, because he earned his living in a mercantile society, while the twentieth-century Finn never wrote another note once he was awarded a lifetime government pension.

  Some days he thundered forth on geopolitics: the foolishness of recognizing Red China; technical discussions of the SALT II arms control talks (“Now I know that I’ve thrown a lot of figures at you and they’re hard to absorb just hearing them at this one broadcast. You can get a copy by writing to the station”); the crucial strategic importance of the Gulf of Aden, with Somalia and South Yemen “both close to being satellites of the Soviet Union.” And to the United Nations’ refusal to call Hanoi on its “cruel game of cat and mouse” in denying knowledge of the “1,300 Americans missing in action”: he still rode that hobbyhorse, too. He cited “our government’s do-nothing approach to the problem,” and the Communists’ refusal to help “search for our missing men” unless the United States ponied up reconstruction money—

  Well here’s one American who’s not willing to agree to that kind of deal. It’s one thing for a victorious America, generous in victory, to help rebuild a defeated enemy to help strengthen the cause of peace. It’s another thing entirely to pay blackmail to a nation that still counts itself as our enemy, and whose word, as we have learned time and again, cannot be trusted. . . . If we have learned nothing else from the Vietnam debacle, we should have learned the Communists only understand strength, and always take advantage of weakness.

  Other days he attacked inflation, which was always and only caused by excess government spending (if the Congress would only slash spending, he said, neatly dodging the politics of Watergate and Vietnam, it could easily reverse the polls showing “public confidence in the institutions of government could hardly be lower”). The national debt: if it kept growing “you might need a wheelbarrow to cart your money to the grocery store before long.” It all fit together: “As spending for education increased, student test scores have declined,” he said in a late February broadcast. “Discipline has deteriorated. In field after field, generous federal spending has caused more problems than it has solved. What an irony! By refusing to cut spending we’ve contributed to a deterioration of the nation’s social fabric at the same time.”

  He was angry. His volume swelled. His incredulity reached a crescendo:

  “It’s almost as if we refuse to read the evidence of our senses! Bigger government is not more efficient government. Big government is weak government! Its only strength is its power to bring its weakness, uncertainty, and inefficiency to every corner of American life.

  “This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.”

  These were things all conservatives said, if not with the same eloquence and aplomb. Here was the thing that made him different: the gift for moral absolutism. Just like that USS Midway—not a death-dealing juggernaut but a cornucopia of Christian love. You had to be a liberal to disagree.

  He would ask “if you’re as fed up as I am with all the prophets of doom who have us living in a sick society, wrapped up in selfish materialism.” That was the fault of the liberal media—an institution exercising “both legislative and judicial powers to such an extent that some call them the ‘fourth branch of government’ . . . prosecutor, judge, and jury, all in one.” For instance, he spoke of “any number of stories tucked away in the middle pages of our daily papers, and even more that don’t get printed at all, about an America that’s all about us every day, a different America than the one that’s described by the doom-criers.” For an example, he offered “Rocky’s Story,” which he recorded at the beginning of February. It involved a construction worker traveling with his disabled son. The father discovered after boarding a plane that his wallet was missing. The stewardess began plying the aisles for donations. “The passengers were clapping and cheering.” They handed over $426. The dad, according to Reagan, then burst into tears: “I just forgot people were like that.”

  But they were like that. That was just the way Americans—normal Americans—did things.

  And yet dastardly liberals somehow insistently managed to push stories about how Americans did anything but. Stories implying that liberals were the only moral ones. That you and I—a favorite Reagan locution, an intimacy-building formulation borrowed directly from FDR’s fireside chats—should somehow feel ashamed. Luckily, here was Ronald Reagan, melting shame in the warmth of his reassurance. “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant,” he liked to say; “it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

  On the subject of the plain, simple desire of you and I for law and order, for instance. “In the last few years the phrase has become unfashionable. Those who have made it so began looking askance at anyone who used the words. Their arched eyebrows were a reaction to what they had determined was an expression of bigotry. If pressed for an explanation they would inform you that ‘law and order’ were ‘code words’ that really meant a call for racial discrimination.”

  “Wellll”—another favored Reaganism, a setup that signaled the debunking to come, frequently followed by “it may surprise you to learn” or “the answer may surprise you,” signposting some piece of information that would have been common knowledge were liberal gatekeepers not so skilled in their bamboozling ways—“this inference of bigotry is in itself bigoted. Not only does it impugn without proof the character of the person who uses an appropriate phrase to describe what is all too lacking today, but it casts a slur on an entire racial group”—black Americans, the overwhelming victims of crime, 74 percent of whom according to a “survey done in the nation’s capital” wanted tougher action against criminals, compared with 61 percent for whites.

  This was like the attempts to shame Americans into boycotting grapes, in support of a strike called by Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers against Gallo Wine. Reagan would know—“I led the first strike our union was ever forced to call. . . . I figured I ought to give this biographical note so there would be no question about my belief about the right of workers to organize, and to strike if necessary.” Next came a blizzard of statistics about how these supposedly noble striking martyrs in fact enjoyed fringe benefits “higher than for any other agricultural workers. . . . So enjoy! Have a grape.”

  Have a grape. Shaming was just was what liberals did. Don’t give in. It was liberals who actually were the selfish people. Their schemes pretended to advance democracy, but were actually a conspiracy to subvert it. Had you noticed, for instance, “in recent years, and without our paying attention”—our: that loaded word, the people are being victimized by some alien them—“it’s become easier and easier to become a registered voter?” That just made it “easi
er and easier for voting blocs to swing elections even though the bloc doesn’t represent a majority.”

  The inflation their profligate spending caused: was it not “the cruelest tax, hitting those hardest who can least afford it”?

  Those self-righteous environmentalists, “more concerned about nature than people”: “home heating is part of our environment, too!”

  Indeed liberals’ claim to be the ones who cared about poverty was a slur: “No right-thinking person questions our responsibility to lend our less fortunate neighbors a hand but we cannot ignore any longer the harm we are doing to the very people we are trying to help.” Harming the poor was what liberals did. For instance, he explained in a series in April, there was the “so-called ‘National Welfare Rights Organization’ ” (another favored trope: “the so-called ‘Watergate climate’ of last year”; the “so-called haves and have nots”; “so-called ‘blacklisting’ of people in Hollywood”). The NWRO’s true aim, he said, citing a spokeswoman, was expropriation and chaos: “Everyone in this country has a right to share the wealth. The money has gone into the pockets of the middle class, and if we don’t get our share, we’re going to disrupt this state, this country, and this capital.”

  This was a flagrant misquotation. What she had actually said was that “the money has gone into the pockets of the middle-class people and made their pockets that much fatter and we are still poor.” But no one was checking. It made people feel good. And, as Gerald Ford’s struggles governing an ungovernable nation compounded, it was working.

  THREE TIMES AT THE BEGINNING of March, Reagan was featured on the network news, in report about his political prospects. In the middle of the month he was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The King of Late Night asked the question on everyone’s mind: “There’s an election coming up, you’re out of politics, but you’re speaking, and as I say, you’re going around the country; um, can you envision a possibility, say in ’76, if the convention, say, was deadlocked—I’m giving you all the theories and so forth—and the conservatives took over—”

  Cut to Reagan, modestly grinning from ear to ear, as if incredulous at the prospect.

  “—and got control of the electoral process, and they couldn’t quite make a decision and they came you and said, ‘Governor Reagan’—”

  He was all but guffawing now, folding his arms, tucking in his chin, glancing over at old Ed McMahon, and just the easy charm of the physical demurral got warm laughs from the studio audience.

  “—we’re divided, would you like to go to the White House?”

  He responded, to peals of laughter, “Do you remember the answer I gave you about the CIA?”

  He continued, “Everyone should hope and pray the people there will do such a good job there won’t be any question of that.” It was an opening a seasoned interviewer could not but exploit: “Do you think they’re doing their job well?” Carson asked. Which was a question even a less skilled demurrer could not but knock out of the park. Reagan said he just wanted to see the president balance a budget. How do you do that? Johnny asked. Reagan answered with a favorite joke: “It’s like protecting your virtue. You have to say ‘no.’ ”

  And the preponderance of a studio audience who hadn’t ever considered they might be conservative, confronted with this charming man they were supposed to deplore, applauded and laughed in delight.

  On the newsstands, the cover of the March 24 Newsweek featured his face, which the article described as “all crinkly and fluttery-eyed when anybody suggests that there might be anything more to his circuit ride than that.” It also said he had “become, at least for a season, the most kinetic single presence in American political life . . . and a long shot challenger to Ford, inside their common party or out, for the Presidency of the United States.” It quoted a California conservative as being “disgusted with him for not making the commitment. He’s our man, but he just won’t come on in.” It reported the ecstasy he raised at the closing banquet of that winter’s second annual Conservative Political Action Conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. The meeting had been dominated by third-party talk among activists, with Ronald Reagan and George Wallace as their dream ticket. They pointed out that the same late 1974 poll that had found only 18 percent of Americans willing to call themselves Republicans discovered 61 percent thought of themselves as conservatives. Reagan had been introduced, to an immediate standing ovation, by the third-party movement’s most prominent mover and shaker, National Review publisher William Rusher, as “the next President of the United States.” He spoke, and raised the roof again: “You can call it mysticism if you want to, but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.” And he addressed Bill Rusher’s pet idea—only to shoot it down: “Is it a third party that we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which could make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all the issues troubling the people?”

  Newsweek quoted a moderate Republican who saw him deliver those same lines on the mashed potato circuit in Illinois. It “went over like gangbusters with our crowd,” he said. “I don’t even like his philosophy, but I sure liked what he said about the party having one.”

  He had continued, at CPAC, saying, “Americans are hungry to feel once again a mission of greatness.” The disappointed true believers who cornered him in corridors to insist that he be the one to lead that mission received in return the same witty gas as Johnny Carson had. “I got the impression,” columnist Vic Gold, Spiro Agnew’s former press secretary, reported, “that if the fabled Martian visitor had suddenly pancaked his flying saucer into the meeting hall, popped up and demanded, ‘Take me to your leader!’ Ronald Reagan would have ducked out the back door.” “He’s too Hollywood,” a California editor pooh-poohed to Newsweek’s reporter. “He’s waiting for someone to come into his dressing room and tell him he’s on.”

  Reagan or no, third party or not, the message a blind-sided political press came away from in that CPAC conclave was the astonishing depths of revulsion against Ford. Jesse Helms said, “Too often the president’s program is so bad that even Republicans have difficulty supporting it”—and proposed a platform convention peopled only by conservatives, independent of the ideologically corrupt Republicans, to draft a “second Declaration of Independence.” Another speech cited the deficits projected for Ford’s next budget. “The shocked reaction,” recorded James Wolcott of the Village Voice, “suggested billions of charred babies.” CPAC participants had scorned Ford for not controlling his wife, who had declared in her first press conference as first lady that she supported abortion rights, and was now quietly lobbying on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment. (“Betty Ford’s problem,” said one woman at CPAC, “is that she’s taken Eleanor Roosevelt instead of Pat Nixon for the model of what a First Lady is supposed to be.”) Robert Bauman, the conservative congressman from Maryland, listed other betrayals: “amnesty for draft dodgers and deserters . . . relentless pushing of détente . . . the elevation to the high office of Vice President of the single most unacceptable nominee one might contemplate—Nelson Rockefeller!” That got a roar second only to the one granted to Reagan.

  It all came as a surprise to the pundits. Here was the most conservative president, in many respects, since Harding: a man who had wanted in 1964 to be Barry Goldwater’s running mate, and who had been point man in the 1970 effort to impeach the Supreme Court’s most liberal justice, William O. Douglas, allegedly for financial regularities but from Ford’s rhetoric seemed more for refusing to rule against pornographers, and for being published in a magazine, Evergreen Review, that also published arty nudes (Ford called it “hard-core pornography”). No credit for that on the right, apparently; instead, pundits saw conservative activists behaving as if the ordinary act of governing, which is to say compromising, was off
ensive in and of itself—almost as if they were policing the membership in a tribe. Alongside a flattering profile was a panel by the Los Angeles Times’ political cartoonist depicting one pachyderm asking another, “Where do elephants go to die?” Why, “Ronald Reagan’s ranch,” of course. The imperative incessantly invoked when nonconservative Republicans gathered was “broadening the party.” But, News-week’s startled correspondent reflected, “the right’s idea of broadening the party . . . is purifying it.” Reagan said so himself: he found in the “almost two-thirds of the citizens who refused to participate” in last year’s congressional elections a longing for conservative principles. “And if there are those who cannot subscribe to these principles,” he wound up—that was the line that got him his most thunderous ovation—“then let them go their way.”

  A curious position to take for an alleged aspirant to lead a party commanding the loyalties of only 18 percent of the electorate.

  Certainly the White House could not take this seriously. It hadn’t bothered to send a representative to the CPAC. The president received a delegation of eight conservative senators led by Senator James A. McClure of Idaho, leaving them with a noncommittal promise to “maintain communication.” Congressional moderates drafted what Newsweek called “a blood oath of loyalty to the President and party”; within three days they had the signatures of 113 of 145 GOP congressman and 31 of 38 senators. Ford, who had just hired two joke writers, shortly afterward let loose a zinger: Reagan wasn’t too old to be president. His hair was just turning “prematurely orange.” Presidential confidant Robert Hartmann assured the media, “Before the leaves fall, we’re going to be getting spending bills down here that will have to be vetoed. . . . When he fires about ten bills back, and he’s perceived as Horatio at the bridge fighting back against the big spenders, some of the conservatives will moderate their criticism of him.”