On May 12 a rusty merchant ship called the Mayaguez was captured somewhere off the coast of Cambodia, near the island of Koh Tang, having strayed, the new Khmer Rouge government claimed, out of international waters and into its territory. Cambodia being a nation in chaos, communications were sketchy, negotiations difficult. But once upon a time, such dilemmas were not beyond the wit of American officials—for instance in the tiny South American nation of Ecuador, which had seized twenty-three U.S. ships in disputed waters over the previous two decades. Our government had just paid fines to release them, and that had been that.
But South America was not Southeast Asia, and Southeast Asia was the region that had just robbed America of its manhood.
At a National Security Council meeting, the president’s most trusted aide, Bob Hartmann, advised, “We should not think of what is the right thing to do, but what the public perceives.” Kissinger said it was time to “draw the line.” At a meeting the next night, when no one yet knew where the ship’s thirty-nine crewmen were or whether they were in actual jeopardy, Kissinger averred, “I think we should seize the island, seize the ship, and hit the mainland . . . people should have the impression that we are potentially trigger happy.” The secretary of state had been steeled—armored by nostalgia for a time when U.S. force was an unmitigated good. He had just returned from Independence, Missouri, after visiting with Bess Truman, marinated in all the old Truman legends—not least the one about the thirty-third president’s uncomplicated, unapologetic defenses of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Give ’em hell, Henry!’ ” a neighbor of the Trumans shouted Kissinger’s way.
Back in Washington, at an NSC meeting, someone asked about the new War Powers Act: should Congress be consulted? Ford responded that he would order the strike and deal with the legal implications later.
A Marine landing party stormed the beaches of Koh Tang, as though it were Iwo Jima in 1945—and, meeting heavy resistance, lost fifteen men and eight helicopters. American forces found and boarded the Mayaguez; it was abandoned. A Navy pilot spotted white flags waving from a fishing boat—the crew, safe and sound, ready for rescue.
But the White House was not ready to declare victory yet.
“Tell them to bomb the mainland,” Kissinger said. “Let’s look ferocious.” So they did, with B-52s. And by the time it was over, there were forty-nine American military deaths, eighty-two total casualties, eight helicopters destroyed. Thirty hostages “rescued”—though it had never been established that it was the Cambodians’ intention to keep them. “They were so nice, really kind,” a crew member told reporters. “They fed us first and everything. I hope everybody gets hijacked by them.” He should have hoped nobody got rescued by Ford. Later, when documents on the mission were declassified, it emerged that when Ford ordered the bombings, he hadn’t known where the men were, and that they might well have ended up as victims of it.
No matter. It had been a Happy Days sort of invasion: nostalgic splendor, armed force as cultural platitude. Conservatives loved it. “It was wonderful,” Barry Goldwater said. “It shows we’ve still got balls in this country.” Columnist Jeffrey Hart wrote that the “details are irrelevant. It proved that the U.S. government is not paralyzed, and that, in particular, President Ford is capable of acting decisively and with broad support.”
But then, most of America loved it, too. Reflected a historian, “The recapture of a single ship was thus said to outweigh and offset the consequences and significance of the defeat of a national government whose independence we had helped to establish and whose integrity we had supported through nearly twenty years of diplomatic, economic, and military aid and for whose sake we had fought a long and costly war.” And unlike kerfuffles over abortion and the teaching of Eskimo myths to fifth graders, the putative military triumph made the cover of every newsmagazine. Newsweek, the most liberal, called it “a daring show of nerve and steel.” Time’s cover pictured the president looking resolute, and exulted, “Ford Draws the Line.” His approval rating shot up 11 points—the president was finally back up to 50 percent. He started getting standing ovations on his travels. The conservative columnist John Chamberlain predicted that would be it for the Reagan-for-president boom. So did Evans and Novak. Presidential aides put word out to pundits “that Mr. Ford nailed down the Republicans nomination the night he called out the Marines.”
And then, for poor old Gerald Ford, it was back to the burdens of governing.
On May 22, the papers reported America was depending more on foreign oil than it was before the 1973 Arab oil embargo. On May 27, sitting at the presidential desk, he went on TV to address the issue. One by one, he ripped sheets from the calendar:
“Now, what did the Congress do in February about energy? Congress did nothing. . . .
“What did the Congress do in March? What did the Congress do in April about energy? Congress did nothing. . . .
“So what has the Congress done in May about energy? Congress did nothing and went home for a 10-day recess. . . .”
But what could Gerald Ford do about energy? The statesmanlike thing, he insisted: increase prices on purpose. He suggested a new one-dollar-per-barrel fee on foreign crude oil—which might or might not achieve its goal of discouraging consumption of imported fuel, but certainly would make fuel more expensive. He got into the strange technicalities of “old” and “new” domestic oil—the latter subject to price controls, the former not, a complex regulatory workaround left over from the Nixon administration, which had ended up having the perverse effect of creating additional incentives for refiners to import—and explained how he would “decontrol” the new stuff by August. Critics said that this would not just make fuel more expensive but add a new inflationary force to the economy as a whole—which the administration acknowledged was true. Without explanation, he asked for “a windfall profits tax with a plowback provision”—whatever, viewers at home had to be asking themselves, that meant. And there was still the looming threat of another Mideast embargo, which Henry Kissinger was desperately trying to forestall in an international energy conference in Paris. “Indeed,” Time wrote after the speech, “the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries may hike world prices by as much as $2 per barrel in September—a move that would give the American economy a vicious double jolt if Congress and the President let all U.S. price controls die a month earlier.”
So much more easy to be Ronald Reagan. Just get rid of all the regulations, he had told Newsweek in March. “Then you have competition and the marketplace takes care of itself.” As he put it on the radio around the time of Ford’s speech, excess government spending was the sole cause of inflation: “It’s time for us all to realize that government is not the answer to our economic problems. Government is the problem.” The messy wages of governance, meanwhile, with all its damned-if-you-do-or-don’t dead ends, were solely his rival Gerald Ford’s to enjoy.
Four days after his energy speech, Ford landed in Europe for a series of state visits and a meeting with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt on the supremely delicate question of Middle East peace. A rainy morning, a sleepless night, his arthritic football knee acting up and one hand occupied with an enormous umbrella and the other steadying his wife, who was wearing a jaunty angled Barbara Stanwyck–style hat, they strode down the stairs after Air Force One pulled up on a runway in Austria; presently, he thumped down and collapsed in a heap a step above the tarmac. “Thank you for your gracious welcome to Salzburg—and I am sorry that I tumbled in,” he joked. Eight hours later, descending a carpeted stairway at the sixteenth-century former residence of Salzburg’s archbishops, he tumbled again, this time beside Sadat—who quickly took his arms and helped him down the remaining twenty steps. Six weeks later, the headline from Kincheloe Air Force Base in Michigan read “SLIPS AGAIN”: this time, he fell while walking up the stairs to Air Force One.
Slips Again: an indelible image to replace the one of the conqueror of Koh Tang Island. His approval rating was b
ack to 45 percent by summer—a summer, once more, of suffusing dread.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
* * *
Weimar Summer
IN THE SUMMER OF 1975, Just like the winter of 1974, patrons were waiting in interminable lines to see a scary movie. But this time, unlike those for The Exorcist, the lines didn’t come to the studio as a surprise. The spur driving people to stand in them wasn’t word of mouth but a more novel medium of cinematic promotion: TV commercials—which exploited a masterful score by the composer John Williams, and its creepingly propulsive, suspense-laden riff: Dah-tum. Dah-tum. Dahtum dahtum dahtumdahtumdahtum . . . And they weren’t stretching around urban blocks. The lines were inside air-conditioned suburban shopping malls, which hosted a new sort of theater with half a dozen screens or more, called “multiplexes.”
Jaws marked the beginning of an end—the end of a risky, radical period in American moviemaking in which considerable faith was placed in what one critic called “unknown filmmakers and unclassifiable screenplays.” Movies made for grown-ups, movies that aspired to art. Now, though, America was inching to the right, so was Hollywood: after thirty years of disarray brought on by the Paramount Decree, the collapse of the old factory system of movie production, studios had been tinkering with formulas for manufacturing blockbusters. This latest hit was the movie version of a wildly popular book, like Love Story, like The Godfather, like The Exorcist. And in contrast to the timid way Warners booked The Exorcist (fearing a religious picture wouldn’t sell; this was supposed to be a skeptical age), Jaws opened on hundreds of screens at once, so viewers would know in advance that it was supposed to be an “event.”
All the same, this was still the entertainment business. And, in the months and weeks before its June 20 debut, the old Hollywood truism about how it was impossible to predict the success of a new production haunted the director, the producer, the actors: Nobody knows nothing and anything. Richard Dreyfuss, the young star, thought the great white shark would be a white elephant, and said so on TV. He was wrong.
June 20, opening day, and the opening shot: beautiful young Chrissie stripping down to her bikini, daring her boyfriend to join her for a playful moonlight dip at a bucolic beachside resort called “Amity.” Soothing seaside sounds. A beautiful body, filmed from underneath. Dah-tum. Dah-dum. Dahtum dahtum dahtumdahtumdahtum . . .
Screams.
The invisible force, pulling her to her death from below as she prays to God . . .
Just like in The Exorcist, terrified audience members shrieked, vomited, jumped from their seats, ran from the theater. The ones who stayed, enraptured, came back to see it again and again.
Jaws became the first movie to gross $100 million. A second ad campaign that fall implored, “SEE IT AGAIN (with your eyes open).” By which point the merchandising had taken over: toys, T-shirts, posters, a ride at the Universal Studios theme park—sharks, sharks, sharks, everywhere.
Remember Aristotle, explaining why it is pleasing to be horrified in its theater: he said that tragedy has “pain as its mother,” and that displaying that pain, containing it within the safe confines of a theater, in order to thereby reduce it, allowed viewers to “settle down as if they have attained healing”—catharsis, in Greek: cleansing, purification, purgation.
So what fears was it that Jaws purged? What were the pains that were its mother?
Early in the movie, the police chief attempted to shut down the beach; the mayor refused to let him: here was that all too familiar venality of the institutions of authority, too greedy or selfish or incompetent to protect the public, interested only in protecting their prerogatives and power. The picture was shot in the summer of 1974, under the sign of the last days of Watergate—“We used to have these wonderful ‘impeach Nixon’ parties,” Dreyfuss remembered—and on a location across Martha’s Vineyard from the Chappaquiddick bridge where, some said, a Kennedy got away with manslaughter of a beautiful young girl or worse. As it came out, the New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis collated the latest opinion poll statistics: in ten years the proportion of people who distrusted the government had risen from 22 to 62 percent; the proportion who believed that there were “quite a few” crooks in government had risen from 29 to 45 percent; and 68 percent thought the country’s leaders had “consistently lied to the American people—the figure had been 38 percent in 1972.
The film sent out an odd trio to hunt down the shark: in addition to the earnest, thoughtful sheriff there were a mildly hippieish young oceanographer, devoted to cutting-edge technology, and an oddball professional shark hunter, a steely Navy veteran of World War II, from back when America won wars, who relied on intuition, not technology, and harbored Ahab-like tendencies. They agreed about nothing, shared nothing but their rickety vessel (which broke down), distrusted each other and everything else—kind of like America these days. So how could they possibly pull together to vanquish the savage foe?
And then there was the nature of that foe: it was invisible, like dread. Then suddenly it crashed to the surface, savaging helpless innocents, unaware they even had had anything to fear—until the new fear was everywhere, consuming everything.
Which was how it felt to be an American now.
Savage new invisible dangers seemed to lurk around every corner. A new kind of air pollution, sulfur dioxide, a pungent, colorless gas produced by combustion of sulfur-laden fuel oils that combines easily with water vapor and oxygen to form sulfuric acid—“acid rain,” supposed to be capable of corroding billboards and maybe even lungs. An official of the Texas Air Control Board said it was already so serious in Corpus Christi “that some hard decisions will have to be made about allowing any further industrial growth there at all.” “Killer bees”: “Millions of African killer bees with nasty tempers,” as UPI described them on June 15, five days before Jaws opened, “immune to any kind of geographical or whatever barrier . . . capable of nesting almost anyway . . . headed relentlessly toward the United States.” They were the product, allegedly, of a Brazilian beekeeper who in 1957 accidentally released a fierce apian strain brought from Africa, taking over Brazil’s native population, science-fiction-style, producing an annual death toll there of three hundred. In an experiment published in BioScience magazine, a one-inch by one-inch patch of leather jiggled on a string outside a hive of the “Africanized” bees was stung ninety-two times in five seconds, then the bees “chased the heavily protected experimenter for more than a thousand yards.” Then there was butadiene, a hazardous chemical regularly shipped by rail: “Once a car carrying butadiene is punctured, the least spark can cause it to ignite,” Texas Monthly reported. “That means the railroad tracks had better be in tip-top shape. They aren’t.”
Dah-tum. Dah-tum. Dahtum dahtum dahtumdahtumdahtum . . .
SIMULTANEOUSLY THAT SUMMER CAME THE news that a beloved symbol of America’s long-ago innocence turned out to be not so innocent after all.
It was Time, in its June 2 issue, citing “credible sources,” that first brought the news: that in 1961 John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, enraged at the failure at the Bay of Pigs invasion, “covertly ordered agencies of the U.S. government to find some sure means of deposing Fidel Castro, Cuba’s chief of state. Whether or not assassination attempts were authorized by the Kennedys is still unclear. . . . The CIA did work with two U.S. Mafia leaders, Sam ‘Sam the Cigar’ Giancana and John ‘Handsome John’ Roselli, in unsuccessful attempts to kill the Cuban leader.” Time then drilled down to the scoop’s strongest implication: “it tends to knock down the notion that the CIA was operating wildly beyond presidential control in scheming against foreign leaders.” It also tended to knock down the notion—“There used to be a President who didn’t lie, but he’s dead!” as the kindergartner in Long Beach, California, told his teacher the previous year—that once upon a time, America was different; before, that is, sordid old Richard Nixon came along. “The Vanishing American Hero,” as a U.S. News & World Report cover story put it that summer. Texas Mon
thly countered that fall with a corrective: “Heroes for Post-Watergate America.”
Kennedy family retainers rushed into print to defend the dead men’s honor. Historian and former Kennedy special assistant Arthur Schlesinger posted a letter to the New York Times on June 3 insisting such a thing simply was not possible: “Quite apart from all the other reasons, moral and prudential, that led John and Robert Kennedy to reject the idea of assassinating Castro, it must be remembered that both men were deeply concerned, almost obsessed, with the fate of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. Nothing would have doomed these prisoners more certainly than an American attempt to kill Castro.” The next day, in the same paper, William Safire published a column, titled “Nixon Never Did,” treating the accusation as settled fact, listing all the sins that rendered President Kennedy morally inferior to his former boss, Richard Nixon: “Nixon never ordered the murder of a fellow chief of state. . . . Nixon never used the FBI and CIA to spy on political opponents. . . . Nixon never lied to the people about his health just before an election.”
He concluded, “Of course we would know a great deal more about other things [Kennedy] did if Congress were to spend one-tenth the time and money investigating the previous Administrations that it expended on Nixon’s. But that is not to be.”
The White House panicked at the news. First, on June 6, Ron Nessen told the press that the Rockefeller Commission report, due the following week, would not discuss assassinations. One reporter, recalling promises of a complete and frank official reckoning, asked if Richard Nixon had been advising the administration on how to conduct a successful cover-up. For an hour, reporters mercilessly grilled him—until Nessen slammed shut his briefing book and stormed out of the press room. “No Time for Cover-Up,” read the New York Times’ editorial headline: Watergate language. Nessen came to hate the media so much he considered another line of work—though he had himself been an NBC correspondent only ten months earlier. The attorney general found it necessary to assure the nation that “no President may order assassinations”—reassuring, to the suspicious circles, in the same way Richard Nixon assuring the nation he was not a crook was reassuring.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 65