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

by Rick Perlstein

  Reagan responded in a broadcast with a cleverly pragmatic argument against the very logical presumptions of détente: because “the Soviets have very little in the way of technology,” and “it’s unlikely we’d wish to become dependent on them for raw materials when many other sources are available,” tough conditions like Jackson-Vanik were in fact the best route to improved relations—and, as a bonus, won the moral argument. “The more we focus on internal Soviet repression, and increase our demands in that area, the greater the chance that over the years Soviet society will lose its cruelty and secrecy.” He made a similar argument that week with regard to granting diplomatic recognition to Red China: it was part of the détente pattern of an “unending series of one sided concessions,” when in “the long run no concession is more important than a relaxation of China’s brutal relationship toward its own people.”

  When Reagan made such arguments on the radio, he sounded uncharacteristically rushed, awkward, outside his zone of comfort. By late April, however, when he spoke to a Republican conclave in Mississippi, the reticence was gone—and the crowd went wild. He continued on to a pharmaceutical industry convention in Boca Raton (for his standard fee: five thousand dollars), to Atlanta for private meetings with Republican politicians, to a lecture on the Georgia Tech campus in which he barked that in refusing to vote through the $720 million aid request for the South Vietnamese military, this Congress had acted “more irresponsibly than any Congress now in our history,” and had “blood on their hands.” He got a standing ovation—and admitted to a reporter that, yes, these were just the sort of “recriminations” the president had asked Americans to avoid regarding Vietnam. One of his travel companions was columnist Robert Novak—who promptly wrote on May 6 that Reagan, “an enthusiastic détentist so long as Nixon was President,” was working so hard he could only be in training for a presidential run.

  His martial barks also grew steadily more aggressive that summer. He quoted approvingly the former defense official under Lyndon Johnson, and architect of the Vietnam War, Eugene V. Rostow (who “could be described as liberal but reasonable”), as saying that despite détente-like efforts in American foreign policy since Franklin Roosevelt’s time, “There has been no improvement in our relations with the Soviet Union, save in the realms of public relations and wishful thinking,” and that the Soviet Union was more dangerous than ever. He added, quoting Senator Jesse Helms, another count to his bill of indictment against détente: the threat to America’s “lease in perpetuity” of the Panama Canal, regarding which, “[t]hough he hasn’t said anything about it publicly, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is rumored to be seriously considering plans to make a deal with the Panamanians to mollify” officials there who wanted us to give up the canal. The first step, he reported, had already begun: plans to turn over control of police, fire, and postal services in the Canal Zone to the host government, meaning, he said, Americans could have “all their mail monitored” by the head of Panama’s G2 intelligence service, “Lieutenant Colonel”—he paused, struggling with the unfamiliar name—“Manuel Noriega, a man not unfriendly to the Cuban Communists and one very influential in the current Panamanian regime. . . . One can and is forced to ask: Why?

  “This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.”

  RUSSIA’S SUNKEN-EYED, BEARDED PROPHET ARRIVED on these shores just in time for the 199th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Solzhenitsyn asked for an Oval Office meeting. To Ford, the correct response seemed simple enough. The recent humiliations of his negotiating partners in the ongoing SALT II talks needed salving. And it wasn’t as if gulags were operational now, after all. In less than a month Ford was set to meet with the Soviets during a historic thirty-five-nation summit in Finland—the kind of bold international move that had always sent Richard Nixon’s political fortunes into the stratosphere. But an increasingly aggressive cadre of hard-line White House aides—angry, for example, at a recent deal Ford had completed to sell the Soviets wheat on generous terms—argued otherwise. One wrote, “Our refusal to see Solzhenitsyn will come to symbolize a Munich-like deafness in this period.” Another, Richard Cheney, wrote a lengthy political memo to his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s chief of staff: “I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate for the American people and for the world that détente . . . does not imply also our approval of their way of life or their authoritarian government.” Insulting Solzhenitsyn, Cheney concluded, would hurt “the President’s capacity to deal with the right-wing in America.”

  But Ford wasn’t thinking much about that. He was still dismissing the possibility of a Reagan presidential run. He considered the Russian dissident a “horse’s ass.” And he didn’t like being backed into a corner.

  So: no meeting with Solzhenitsyn. But his decision—the details of which were embarrassingly exposed on the Senate floor by Jesse Helms, who reported the Nobelist’s anguish that the American people could not realize that World War III was already over and that America had already lost—brought on a firestorm that blindsided him. He tried to reverse himself: a call was placed to invite the Russian to the White House with two hours’ notice; Solzhenitsyn loudly and publicly refused. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.

  On July 13 the AFL-CIO held a moving testimonial dinner for the dissident, who told the 2,500 guests, “The Communist ideology is to destroy your society.” He said, “The principal argument for the advocates of détente is well known: all of this must be done to avoid a nuclear war. . . . Why should there be a nuclear war if for the last thirty years they have been breaking off as much of the West as they wanted—piece by piece, county after country, and the process keeps going on?” He said the United States should still have troops in Southeast Asia, fighting Communism. Twenty-five hundred eager listeners seemed to agree.

  On July 15, the day after Gerald Ford’s sixty-second birthday, Ronald Reagan’s syndicated column named the president in print for the very first time. He noted that Ron Nessen’s latest in a series of constantly shifting rationales for the snubbing of Solzhenitsyn was that presidential meetings must have “substance.” “For substance,” Reagan stabbed back, “the President has met recently with the Strawberry Queen of West Virginia and the Maid of Cotton.”

  Détente’s symbolic apex was supposed to take place two days later, high up in outer space: the docking between a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft and an American Apollo craft. Technically speaking, it came off without a hitch. The hitches were all political. Jewish Defense League protesters burned a cardboard rocket outside the Soviet mission to the United Nations, chanting, “Dump détente, dump Kissinger, let my people go!” Détente, an all but uncontroversial proposition the day before yesterday, was now politically toxic. So Ford decided to slow talks with Panama over the future disposition of the canal, and to postpone plans to establish formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China until after the 1976 presidential elections.

  REPUBLICAN COUNCILS WERE OBSESSED WITH the poll showing that only 18 percent of the public identified with the Grand Old Party. Informally, there had been talks about whether to change its tainted name. Another public relations idea was a joke book, Republican Humor. Every Republican congressman would be asked to contribute. “Probably some of them won’t have anything funny to offer,” a staffer observed. What the Grand Old Party settled on instead was three half-hour fund-raising TV specials featuring “everyday Republicans who want to tell why they have stuck with the GOP.” The series, coordinated with accompanying lapel buttons for the party faithful to wear to work the next day, was titled Republicans Are People Too! The second installment ran on July 1, up against M*A*S*H on CBS and a Tuesday Movie of the Week on ABC about a talk radio host who baited a listener into committing suicide. The GOP show’s theme, more cheerful, was “Republicans are people who care.” It cost $124,000 to produce. It brought in $5,515. The announced third episode never ran.

  On July 8, at the height of the Solzhenitsyn debate, the presiden
t sat before reporters in the Oval Office and formally announced, “I am a candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 1976,” promising to “finish the job I have begun.” He announced the “outstanding Americans on whose integrity both my supporters and all others can depend” who would be running his campaign, including the computer magnate David Packard as finance chair, 1964 Goldwater co–campaign manager Dean Burch as head of campaign planning, and Howard “Bo” Callaway, a conservative former Georgia congressman who had been Richard Nixon’s secretary of the army, as campaign manager.

  Then, on July 16, readers perusing page nineteen of the New York Times could learn of a press conference the previous day in a Washington hotel basement from the new “Friends of Ronald Reagan,” whose chairman, Nevada senator Paul Laxalt, explained, “The purpose of this committee is to build an organization and raise the money necessary to conduct a viable and effective campaign once Governor Reagan decides to become an active candidate.” Laxalt said he hoped that would happen, because even though “all of us, Democrats and Republicans alike, must give him our support lest others in the world receive the impression that America is too weak or immobile to act,” the president was a failure. “Mr. Ford’s efforts to cope with these problems on a day-to-day basis provide little relief for the vast majority of Americans who yearn for a leader who can communicate a realistic perspective on America’s future.”

  Still, Laxalt would not guarantee Reagan would run. Though he said that if Reagan did, he gave four-to-ten odds he would win.

  The Times, plainly, disagreed. “A number of Republican professionals,” they noted, “said today that the first list of Reagan sponsors reflected some loss of support in recent months, as Mr. Ford’s political stock gained and Mr. Reagan remained undecided.” Reagan’s old radio mentor Congressman H. R. “Charlie” Gross was there, and a former Kentucky governor—but not longtime backers like David Packard, Ford’s finance chair; or oilman Henry Salvatori; or California Republican chairman Paul Haerle, Reagan’s former appointments secretary, whom the governor had personally elevated to his new job, but who now announced his support for the president. “It is the tradition of our party to support the incumbent,” Haerle said in a UPI profile of Reagan that came out that same morning. “I don’t happen think anyone, Ronald Reagan, or Jesus Christ reincarnated running against an incumbent who is doing a good job would be a good idea.”

  A good job: faint praise. But then again, Paul Laxalt said exactly the same thing during his press conference, in the question-and-answer session: “We’re not saying President Ford is not doing a good job. But Governor Reagan could do a better job.”

  There was none of Reagan’s rip-roaring anti-détente language of recent weeks, no excoriation of Henry Kissinger, no talk of wicked federal bureaucrats traducing liberty-loving citizens—just vague palaver about how voters “want a change in the direction of government.” The whole spectacle, in fact, was anticlimactic. It didn’t feel very Reagan-like at all. It left conservative supporters confused. The ones not in the Washington loop wondered who the stocky thirty-five-year-old Ivy League–looking fellow with the flat, round face and imperturbable smile was, constantly by Laxalt’s side. The conservatives in the Washington loop, however, who knew this longtime Nixon political operative, John Sears, reacted to his presence in two ways. First, they didn’t worry: if an operative as serious as John Sears was on board, this meant it was a real presidential campaign. Second, they worried: they knew him as a man inordinately proud of his conviction that ideological combat played no necessary role in presidential campaigns. So how could he be running Ronald Reagan’s?

  The next week the first polling of Republicans on a Reagan-Ford head-to-head matchup came out. Gallup had it as 41 to 20 percent for the president, whose approval rating was a mere 52 percent. Harris had it as 40 to 17 percent. Though given the mess of pottage that was a Republican presidential nomination, did it really matter? The same day as Paul Laxalt’s press conference, Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver announced his candidacy, making himself one of at least a dozen Democrats lining up for a nomination fight in which victory felt like a golden ticket to the White House. For its June monthly digest, Gallup ranked thirty-four people being talked up for the Democratic nomination according to their name recognition, with Ted Kennedy in the lead with 90 percent and George Wallace second with 88. Frank Church, who’d imagined his ongoing CIA investigation as his golden ticket to the front ranks, was in twenty-third place with 24 percent. That put him one spot above the former governor of Georgia; only 23 percent of Democrats were able to recognize the name “Jimmy Carter.”

  THE PRESIDENT LEFT FOR TEN days overseas in late July. The Times sent him off with the headline “Ford Sees 35-Nation Charter as a Gauge on Rights in East Europe”—an index of the new political sensitivity to human rights. The legally nonbinding document to be discussed and perhaps signed in Helsinki would establish that the current boundaries of the nations of Eastern Europe were “inviolable by force”—what the Soviet Union wanted—in exchange for human rights concessions like letting families reunify across national borders—what America wanted. That would mark the first time, Ford was proud to say, that the Communist states that had refused to endorse the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights acknowledged human rights as a legitimate concern of diplomacy. All that in exchange for a mere formal admission that the map of Europe that had existed since World War II was, well, the map of Europe that had existed since World War II: something for nothing, was Ford’s triumphant interpretation of what America got out of the Helsinki Accords.

  The newly confident conservative foreign policy coalition most strenuously disagreed. The Wall Street Journal called it the “new Yalta,” the most stinging fighting words a conservative could hurl—Yalta was the site in 1945 where Franklin Roosevelt had supposedly sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviets. Scoop Jackson called it “formal capitulation to Soviet tyranny.” Ronald Reagan said, “I am against it, and I think all Americans should be against it.” Conservatives also proved unmollified by what happened next: a triumphant tour by Ford of Eastern Europe, throngs cheering an American president wherever he went in what conservatives called the “Captive Nations.” In Belgrade, he was even honored with a reception at the city hall—where he landed a blow at the spendthrift liberals running New York by sanctimoniously teaching the Communists a lesson about capitalism: “They don’t know how to handle money. All they know how to do is spend it.” Came back an aide at New York City Hall, “People in White Houses shouldn’t throw stones. At least the City of New York has a balanced budget.” He then suggested, “Perhaps Mayor Beame should begin serious talks with the Communist bloc. That appears to be the fastest way to get aid in Washington.”

  Liberals hated Ford: wasn’t that just more reason not to fear a political attack from his right?

  The news features on the first anniversary of his presidency flushed out still more professions of hatred for him from liberals. Hubert Humphrey took the occasion to call him “a seventeenth-century physician bleeding his patient in an attempt to cure him.” Ralph Nader said he was a “smiling man who makes cruel decisions.” That week, Ford surely placated some Southern conservatives when he signed a bill restoring citizenship to General Robert E. Lee.

  And maybe some conservatives might have been impressed—if, five days after his return from Europe, he hadn’t leaped from the right-wing frying pan right into the right-wing fire, courtesy of his freethinking spouse.

  THE INTERVIEW WITH CBS NEWSMAN Morley Safer broadcast on 60 Minutes on the second Sunday in August wasn’t long in turning hot. The first lady volunteered the advice her shrink had been giving her: she was “not taking any time out for Betty.” The subject of feminism came up. “I’m not the type that’s going to burn my bra,” she said, but “nothing could be greater” than passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Roe v. Wade was a “great, great decision.” Safer wondered if she thought her kids had tried marijuana.
Almost certainly, she answered; these days it was like trying “your first beer or your first cigarette.” She also said she thought that the fact that more young people were “living together” wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; perhaps it meant the divorce rate would drop.

  Safer followed up: “What if Susan Ford came to you and said, ‘Mother, I’m having an affair’?”

  The first daughter, who that May had held her senior prom in the East Room of the White House, was eighteen years old. The first lady answered, “I wouldn’t be surprised. I think she’s a perfectly normal human being, like all girls.” She explained, however, that she would certainly want to meet the young man to see whether he was “nice or not,” and judge whether it was “a worthwhile encounter.” (In actual fact Susan Ford had an old-fashioned steady boyfriend who reported in an interview with Ladies’ Home Journal that Susan opposed women’s liberation: “I don’t think she’ll be a professional woman or anything. I don’t think she’ll do anything spectacular. She’ll be the average mother on the block, always doing a lot for the neighborhood kids. . . . A job is all right if they can do an equal job, but I don’t think they can.”)

  Mrs. Ford had brought up her work with a psychiatrist in her first interview as first lady—and, the following month, indicated that she was a proponent of legal abortion. Back then, White House political handlers rushed her to a maternity ward at a big hospital to be photographed with an adorable babe in arms. This fire would not be so easily contained. It erupted just as another interview, in the women’s magazine McCall’s, was published. In this article, Americans learned that the Fords spurned the White House tradition of separate bedrooms, and Mrs. Ford volunteered that reporters asked her just about everything, except how often she and the leader of the free world had sex. “And if they asked me that I would have told them, ‘As often as possible.’ ” (On 60 Minutes she elaborated: “I have perfect faith in my husband. But I’m always glad to see him enjoy a pretty girl. And when he stops looking, then I’m going to begin to worry. . . . And he doesn’t have time for outside entertainment. Because I keep him busy.”)