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

by Rick Perlstein

  At her booking, she was asked her occupation; she responded, “Urban guerrilla. Self-employed.” Led from the courtroom, she raised a fist through her handcuffs, smiling broadly. She asked her attorney to relay a message: “Tell everybody that I’m smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there.” In her mug shot she looked lovely and glamorous, like a silent-film star. Her mother, when informed of her daughter’s apprehension, begged authorities: “She was primarily a kidnap victim. She never went off on anything of her own free will. Please call it a rescue, not a capture.” Patty was photographed chatting cordially with her family, dandling a bouquet of yellow roses in her lap. “We laughed and hugged and kissed each other,” Mom related. “She said she wanted to come home.” The family’s lawyer said it had “been as though she lived in a fog, within which she was confused, still unable to distinguish between actuality and fantasy and in a perpetual state of terror.”

  It had to be said, though, that sixteen months was a long time to be in a fog.

  The old debate—Patty Hearst: terrorist or victim?—was revived. Perhaps Patty, like Regan in The Exorcist, had suffered some temporary derangement, her very will stolen from her by the demonic energies of the age—“brainwashing,” they called it—but now was ready to be returned to the bosom of her family, whole, like Regan at the end of the movie, like it was 1962 all over again. But that conclusion became harder to sustain when news of a jailhouse recording leaked in which Hearst told a childhood friend that she would never accept bail if it meant becoming “a prisoner in my parents’ home”—directly contracting the affidavit she had signed saying she disowned her allegiance to her kidnappers and her denunciation of her parents—and that she would soon release a statement proclaiming her “revolutionary feminist” goals. It became harder to sustain, too, when police announced they were checking the loaded .38-caliber pistol seized from Hearst’s purse, and another gun they’d found in her closet, to see whether they were connected to the murder of a jailed black radical suspected of squealing.

  When a Seattle grocery store was rocked by an explosion, a female caller told a TV station the blast was in retaliation for “the arrest of our SLA brothers and sisters in San Francisco.”

  In 1963, twice in 1968, Americans learned it was deranged lone assassins we had to be afraid of. Now the deranged assassins belonged to social movements. Crime and social movements seemed almost to merge. That very week a new movie came out in theaters, closely based on a true story, about two gay lovers who rob a bank in Brooklyn to pay for one of them to get a sex-change operation. Everything goes wrong (there is hardly any money in the bank; here was an allegory in itself); a hostage standoff ensues, then a media circus—then the massive crowd of bystanders that gathers in response begins cheering the bank robbers on, vilifying the cops. Criminals were being held up by an alienated populace as if they were some new sort of hero. Ronald Reagan, in his first gubernatorial campaign, said of the social chaos of the 1960s that the whole thing started “when the so-called ‘free speech’ advocates, who in truth have no appreciation for freedom, were allowed to assault and humiliate the symbol of law and order, a police car on the campus. And that was the moment when the ringleaders should have been taken by the scuff of the neck and thrown out of the university once and for all.” Now millions of Americans—Dog Day Afternoon was a big hit—were delighting in a picture that glamorized thousands of ordinary Americans casually mocking police authority in just the same way. Was Berkeley America now? Could Patty Hearst become a popular hero? The Chicago Sun-Times worried she just might: “We cannot help wondering to what extent the spirit of Tania lies dormant, awaiting arousal, in many of the nation’s young.”

  ON SEPTEMBER 21 CAME A report from Bob Woodward in the Washington Post that E. Howard Hunt, one of forty-three former Nixon administration officials eventually found guilty of Watergate-related crimes, had been ordered in 1971 by a “senior official” in the White House to assassinate columnist Jack Anderson—via a former CIA physician who would provide poison of “a variety that would leave no trace during a routine medical examination or autopsy.” On the twenty-second came another act of violence in retaliation for the arrest of Patty Hearst.

  Gerald Ford found his bulletproof vest too warm and confining, even on the cool, crisp San Francisco day when he spoke before two thousand Republicans who paid twenty-five dollars apiece for a fundraiser for the California party. In his speech he attacked Otis Pike by name, promising not to compromise “our intelligence sources and the higher national secrets.” (Ronald Reagan, a cosponsor of the event, didn’t show, the press reported, as “aides are concerned the joint appearances with Ford might undercut his White House challenge.”) Ford did accede, before leaving an interview in the St. Francis Hotel on Knob Hill, to the Secret Service’s strenuous request not to wade into the crowd of three thousand lining Powell Street. He just waved to them instead.

  He was but a step from his limousine when a squat, homely woman drew a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and steadied her right wrist like she knew what she was doing.

  A single shot ricocheted, grazing a cabdriver. The president crouched down on the floor of his limousine, Secret Service agents and chief of staff Don Rumsfeld shielding his body. A quick-thinking Marine veteran seized the gun before another shot could be fired. Police officers knocked down the assailant, and once more the surreal facts issued forth, if anything more bizarre now than the last time.

  Forty-five-year-old Sara Jane Moore had been a suburban country-club mother and certified public accountant when she pulled up stakes after her fifth divorce and alighted on the doorstep of “People in Need,” the makeshift charity set up to fulfill the SLA’s demand to distribute free groceries to California’s poor, the ones upon whom Ronald Reagan had wished botulism. She elbowed her way in as its bookkeeper. “God has sent me,” she told the staff. Thereupon, she tried to insinuate herself within the Bay Area’s thriving insurrectionist underground. Time, in its next issue, profiled that gothic demimonde of at least half a dozen gangs dedicated to “armed struggle against the state,” responsible for at least fifty bombings in California so far in 1975, with names like the Tribal Thumb Collective, the New World Liberation Front (responsible for bombings of General Motors, Pacific Gas and Electric, and ITT), the Red Guerrilla Family (they’d bombed an FBI office and PG&E)—and the Weather Underground, whose most infamous fugitive, the ravishing Bernardine Dohrn, was quoted in Time’s article as having exulted over the murders by the Manson Family: “Not only did they kill those pigs, they shoved a fork in Tate’s stomach and then sat down and ate dinner.” (“For the next several days,” Time quoted a former member as saying, “we all went around giving a sign of three fingers extended. It was to symbolize the fork.”) The gangs lived “underground,” Time explained, many of them collecting food stamps and welfare under phony names, and “their time is largely spent shoplifting food and other necessities, stealing purses, cashing forged checks, searching for new hideouts and plotting.” Though they numbered only a few hundred people, they relied on thousands of aboveground sympathizers, with whom they might rendezvous in coffeehouses, bars, or parking lots—or at the spit of land known to Berkeley locals as “Ho Chi Minh Park.”

  Moore, a radical groupie, had apparently hoped to establish herself as one of their liaisons. Again and again, she was spurned. She was too weird even for them.

  She became an FBI and police informant. Then she told radicals she was an FBI informant, isolating herself still further. As she kicked around San Francisco and Berkeley, yet more lonely and deranged, increasingly obsessed with Patty Hearst, law enforcement still kept her on as a police informant—even as, forty-eight hours before the shooting, she apparently implored police to stop her from doing something she said would horrify them. Then she did it.

  Two assassination attempts in nineteen days. Once more the president asserted he wouldn’t stop mingling with the public. At le
ast one television network, ABC, took on the policy of prewiring massively expensive live satellite feed setups in every Podunk stop on every presidential itinerary. Treasury secretary Simon testified that the president got some sixteen death threats a day—and that a former mental patient offered a federal undercover agent twenty-five thousand dollars to kill the president. A twenty-two-year-old Michigan man was arrested after telling a police officer he “would kill the president because his mother said he wouldn’t do it.” Gallup ran a poll asking citizens whether Ford should expose himself to crowds. A near majority, 44 percent, said he should stay in the White House (and, by 67 to 27 percent, respondents said that all firearms should be registered).

  Reagan spoke about the assassination attempts on his radio show with typically aphoristic sharpness: “Someone tries to kill the President and the only thing we can suggest is locking up the President.” And why, he asked, weren’t such lunatics under surveillance or in jail or asylums? Ignoring the fact that police-spy Moore already was under surveillance—and the way his own budget cuts as governor emptied California’s mental wards—he blamed “some members of the media, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Congress . . . hostile to the keeping of files on American citizens even where there’s evidence indicating possible danger.” He once more rattled off all the McCarthy-era spy bureaucracies liberals had recklessly done away with. He blamed the Church and Pike committees, too, and his own Rockefeller Commission: “What we need is more intelligence gathering and less anti-intelligence hysteria.”

  Proximately, the week of the second assassination attempt, that hysteria could be taken to refer to Otis Pike taking on Henry Kissinger for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents, and for ordering his aides not to testify, concerning another intelligence goof-up: the CIA’s failure to predict Turkey’s destabilizing invasion of Cyprus in 1974. (After CIA director Colby ruled that Pike could have the paperwork anyway, so much of it was redacted the committee voted 10 to 3 to cite Colby for contempt of Congress.) Or to the next phase of Church’s televised hearings, on the 1970 “Huston Plan” recommending White House lawbreaking. One of the witnesses was James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence. A senator put it straight to him: “You were specifically asked about shellfish poisons and shellfish toxins. You said, ‘It’s inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.’ Is that an accurate quote or not an accurate quote?” Angleton answered in the most cynical possible way, pulling TV viewers straight into the intelligence world’s ugly, extraconstitutional hall of mirrors: “Well if it’s accurate, it shouldn’t have been said.”

  Such death-haunted times. On the front pages the CIA news did battle for attention with stories of the pretrial maneuvering of lawyers for Patty Hearst and Sara Jane Moore. In the offices of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, visitors, letters, and phone calls flooded in: a woman reporting that the CIA, knowing she had the goods on it, gave her a forced hysterectomy when she was on the operating table for another procedure, to warn her to shut up (she bravely offered the committee her testimony nonetheless); another who said she was ill from the X-rays the CIA had been beaming into her home; a woman who reported telling her lawyer her telephone was bugged, upon which “CIA and FBI agents broke into my home and put me in a straight jacket and took me into this little room at a hospital where they tore off all my clothes and squirted me with cold water.” Senator Church’s press secretary found himself in a bit of a quandary concerning which lunatics’ letters to ignore, and which to pass along to higher-ups; after all, what if someone had called and said, “Tell your senator I have solid evidence that the CIA had a plan to paint Fidel Castro’s shoes with a special shoe polish that would make his beard fall out.” For, after all, the CIA had actually entertained just such a plan. And he remembered how haughtily he had dismissed the University of Idaho student who swore up and down that the Nixon reelection campaign had hatched a scheme to capture protest leaders at the 1972 Republican convention and hold them prisoner on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean. . . .

  Paranoia ran riot—paranoia, seen as a road to redemption. On college campuses, just about any lecturer with a bold new theory about the conspiracists behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Mark Lane, author of Rush to Judgement; Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who’d spent years in the late 1960s trying to convince the world the fatal shots could not have come from a single gunman inside the Texas School Book Depository) could draw a standing-room-only crowd—especially if he was implicating the American government itself. The folks who called themselves the “assassination research community” knew from labs they assembled in their garages that the photograph with Lee Harvey Oswald holding the murder weapon in his backyard was fake, and from measurements they took on family trips to Dealey Plaza in Dallas that there could not possibly have been a single shooter. They knew, too, this: that if they simply could expose the lies of the powerful who covered up the veritable regicide, they could bring redemption to a fallen land.

  Their worldview had been introduced to the masses back in March, when an enterprisingly frenetic TV host named Geraldo Rivera showed a purloined copy of the live home movie footage of the shooting taken by Dallas dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder. “That’s heavy,” the long-haired, thick-mustachioed Rivera pronounced as the audience gasped. His guest pointed out a barely detectable snap of the president’s head back and to the left in what knowing “assassinologists” referred to as Frame Z-313—“thus proving,” Rivera intoned as if affirming that two plus two equaled four, “that there must have been a marksman firing from somewhere in front of the motorcade, probably at the ‘grassy knoll.’ ” The public was further energized by the murder of Sam Giancana in June—obviously by the CIA, seeking to shut him up. (“They’re going to pin the crucification on us next,” an agency officer complained.)

  The speculation intensified late in August, when it was reported that the FBI had destroyed a letter that Oswald had delivered to the bureau’s headquarters in Dallas on November 10, 1963. The speculation was now all but universal. Nearly two-thirds of Americans believed some sort of Kennedy conspiracy theory. A Washington Post columnist drew the logical conclusion: “American society has gone buggy on conspiracy theories of late because so many nasty demonstrations of the real thing have turned up.” In October, Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania told a press conference that his intelligence subcommittee had come up with three “very significant leads” about the murder, suggesting that he might open hearings—that Kennedy was killed in a Communist plot, or by a “right-wing conspiracy in the United States,” or in a conspiracy by anti-Castro Cubans. Though he declined to speculate on these, he said, “I think the Warren Commission report is like a house of cards. It’s going to collapse.” In November, a new book by a respected journalist, Robert Sam Anson, They’ve Killed the President! The Search for JFK, proposed the assassination as a joint CIA-mafia project; the first printing was 250,000 copies. A former Los Angeles police official and part-time CIA employee, Hugh McDonald, claimed to have interviewed the real killer, a CIA assassin known as “Saul,” who used Oswald’s gunfire as cover for his own. Bumper stickers reading “Who Killed Kennedy?” proliferated.

  Conspiracies everywhere. Guns everywhere. Women with guns everywhere. Time quoted Bernardine Dohrn: “Women fighters are frightening apparitions to the enemy and an example for us.” One Midwestern paper agreed, calling the “Patty Hearst–Squeaky Fromme–Sara Moore spectacle” but the “latest volcano of nihilism” spewing forth in an America gone mad; a Baptist pastor wrote to the Washington Star complaining, “Now the clamor is to get rid of all guns. It is more logical to get rid of all women.” It haunted a nation’s dreams. At the Miss Universe pageant in Nicaragua, Miss USA pranced onstage in combat fatigues and an automatic rifle prop, simulating an armed robbery. She also said she was not a women’s liberationist because she was against “communal t
oilets.”

  The Federal Communications Commission, acceding to a well-organized clamor by Christian activists like the Reverend Donald Wildmon’s National Federation for Decency, had made that fall’s TV season the first to include a mandatory “family hour.” Happy Days enjoyed its breakthrough season in the ratings by bringing to the foreground a minor character who dressed like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause—only reassuringly domesticated, like a sweet-tempered uncle (when “Fonzie” said a line about how “cool” it was to have a library card, the National Library Association reported registration for cards went up 50 percent). An evangelical group announced the first “Continental Congress on the Family” for St. Louis in October, anticipating three thousand delegates, to “clarify the biblical principles for marriage and family life and . . . relate these to current spiritual and social problems.”

  It was hard, though, to imagine how these Augean stables might be cleaned. “In a rather short time we can expect to see Christians put in decision dilemmas in which their scriptural beliefs run strongly counter to the general will of the people,” one of the organizers reflected. In wicked Gotham, a rumor circulated about a new genre of pornography popular among a wealthy underground “select clientele”: “Snuff Porn—The Actress Is Actually Murdered,” reported the New York Post. New York Times columnist William Shannon wrote, “There are fleeting moments when the public scene recalls the Weimar republic of 1932–33. In this American phantasmagoria, an empty-faced girl in a scarlet cloak and a clown’s hat points a gun . . . the unemployed mill about . . . the largest city is about to go bankrupt . . . a feckless President, another wooden titan, drones stolidly . . . exorcists, astrologers, and strange oriental gurus wander through . . . the screens, large and small, pulsate with violence and pornography . . . the godfathers last tango with clockwork orange in deep throat . . . women in pants bawl lustily while anguished youths try to be gay . . . a motherly woman raises her gun and fires . . . screams . . .