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

by Rick Perlstein

  “Underlying all this is a new spirit of nihilism, a radical disbelief in any rational, objective basis for ethical norms or for orderly political change.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  * * *

  The Nation’s Soul

  PRESIDENT FORD’S APPROVAL RATING WAS 46 percent. The New York Times reported on October 5 that his presidential campaign “has encountered some serious internal difficulties, and a new political director has been brought in to get things on track” (and that “Gov. Ronald Reagan of California, who is not yet an announced candidate, is ahead in terms of organization in several of the most important states”). The next day Ford spoke on TV from the Oval Office. He announced “a crossroads in our history”: “whether we shall continue in the direction of recent years—the path toward bigger government, higher taxes, and higher inflation—or whether we shall now take a new direction, bringing to a halt the enormous growth of government, restoring our prosperity, and allowing each of you a greater voice in your own future.” The nation’s economic problems “bear a label: ‘Made in Washington, D.C.’ ”—where “America’s vitality and prosperity have been drained away. It is here that one big spending program after another has been piled on the federal pyramid, taking a larger share of your personal income and creating record budget deficits and inflation.” He then proposed a permanent $28 billion income tax cut, the biggest in history, to “get the government off your back and out of your pocket,” and a cap of $395 billion in spending in the coming year—“a cut of $28 billion below what we will spend if we just stand still and let the train run over us.”

  It just sounded like another fiscal swerve, given his previous admission that the tax bill he had reluctantly signed in March would balloon the deficit by as much as $100 million. Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.

  Two days later, the fiscal focus returned to New York City. Treasury secretary Simon testified before a Senate panel that the damage from a bond default would be “negligible.” Of the bailout package Congress was discussing, Simon urged “that the financial terms of assistance be so punitive, the overall experience so painful, that no city, no political subdivision, would ever be tempted to go down the same road again.” The New York Post’s headline was SIMON ON U.S. AID: MAKE CITY SUFFER. A paper in far-off Atlanta said, SIMON THROWS NEW YORK TO THE WOLVES.

  Felix Rohatyn, working so hard just maintaining a day-to-day cash flow for the city that he ignored a fire drill in his office building, responded that if the city defaulted, “we’d probably have to bring the troops home from Germany to keep order.” Governor Carey told the same congressional committee the choice was between “federal money and federal troops.” He asked for $5 billion in loan guarantees to avoid “the most costly mistake in the history of this nation,” an “economic Pearl Harbor.” Unmoved, Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, a Republican liberal, responded that if the state needed more money it should just increase taxes.

  Ronald Reagan responded, too. He wrote in his newspaper column that “Carey’s comments reflect New York parochialism. . . . Tell an audience in Ohio or Texas (or almost anywhere else outside of New York) that you don’t think the federal government should be in a rush to bail out New York, and they erupt with wild applause.” (He neglected to note that most of his audiences on his speaking tours were either business groups or conservative Republicans. To one of them, he said, “I include in my prayers every day that the federal government will not bail out New York.”) He ticked off the grounds for disgust: “too-powerful union leaders and news media, timid elected officials, wild spending, dirty streets, pornography, and a general decline in civility.” He added, with Simon, that if aid came it should have “so many strings attached that a generation may pass before any New York City politician gets up the nerve to tell his constituents that the moon is really made of green cheese.”

  That was turning out to be the winning argument. The next week Time put on its cover a caricature of Abe Beame holding a beggar’s cup. It quoted Simon’s predecessor, Arthur Burns, as saying that in the event of a bailout, “self-reliance in our country, which has been diminishing, will be dealt another blow. . . . The free enterprise system involves a certain degree of risk, and we should let that risk be taken and the consequences as well.” As if the city were a poorly managed haberdashery, and its economic ruin bore no consequences at all for the rest of the country.

  The nation gorged on such images: New Yorkers as greedy hedonists (the Economist: “Rich, chic, thriftless, insufferably superior, overeducated”); New York as a nest of iniquity, New York as open sewer, New York as a heroin addict. (If you have a daughter who’s a junkie, said Ron Nessen, who seemed to take particular glee in abusing the city, “you don’t just give her $100 a day to support her habit. You make her go cold turkey.”) An article in Texas Monthly, reviewing a “balance sheet of fiscal sins too numerous to detail,” included this Reaganite embellishment: “Welfare recipients in the Waldorf.” New Yorkers even heaped abuse on themselves. New York, the magazine the hip set preferred, didn’t target the Sunbelt rubes at Texas Monthly for mockery. Instead, it reran Texas Monthly’s article without comment. And one of its staff contributors, Ken Auletta, wrote of how when William F. Buckley Jr., in his quixotic campaign for mayor in 1965, warned “New York must discontinue its present borrowing policies and learn to live within its income before it goes bankrupt . . . one would have thought Buckley had proposed to drop the atom bomb on Israel.” But Auletta said Buckley was right: “We have conducted a noble experiment in local socialism and income redistribution, one clear result of which has been to redistribute much of our tax base and many jobs out of the city.”

  New York had been considered a house organ for the rich, chic, thriftless, insufferably superior, overeducated liberals. Now here it was embracing neoconservatism. Another ideological watershed had been quietly passed. Meanwhile, another ideological watershed had not been passed. The distinguished editor of Congressional Quarterly wrote how, despite warnings that the new, overwhelmingly Democratic Congress would be a puppet of the labor movement, liberalism there was hard to find. The House failed to override Ford’s veto on a public jobs bill the AFL-CIO desperately wanted and the Senate killed a $9 billion bill for economic relief introduced by the liberal Walter Mondale despite a massive lobbying effort by labor. Labor now could count on only thirty votes in the upper body, where it used to have at least thirty-eight. “The freshman Democrat today is likely to be an upper-income type,” a labor lobbyist said. “I think a lot of them are more concerned with inflation than with unemployment.” Both parties were now leaning more to the right. Gary Hart had said his Watergate Babies were “not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys.” Apparently, he was right.

  REAGAN HAD MADE HIS OWN contribution to the fiscal debate on September 26 in a speech to the Chicago Executives Club, called “Let the People Rule.” He began by quoting Jefferson: “A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned: This is the sum of good government.” Reagan said that it was the expansion of government at all levels to 37 percent of gross national product that “has created all our economic problems.” He then argued that “nothing less than a systematic transfer of authority and resources to the states,” including welfare, education, housing programs, food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid—“a program of creative federalism for America’s third century”—would “reduce the outlay of the federal government by more than $90 billion. . . . With such a savings, it would be possible to balance the federal budget, make an initial $5 billion payment on national debt, and cut the federal personal income tax burden of every American by an average of twenty-three percent.”

  No one paid much attention. No one paid much attention, either, when Reagan said almost precisely the same thing to the New York Conservative Party a few weeks later; o
r to the simultaneous announcement that his daily radio show was moving to the Mutual Network, which might beam it over 1,300 stations instead of its current 310; or to the news that Reagan would announce around Thanksgiving that he would become a formal candidate for the White House. Gallup was reporting that Ford was 23 points ahead of him among Republicans. Gallup had also recently discovered that, presented with the option of “Candidate A,” who “says we should cut government spending on social programs and try harder to balance the U.S. budget,” or “Candidate B,” who “says the government should spend more money to create employment and spur public buying,” Mr. B won by 46 to 42 percent (though A won by 46 to 38 in the South). Some old friends called Reagan in California to warn that he was at risk “of becoming the Harold Stassen of 1976.” (Stassen, who became known as the “boy wonder” of politics when he was elected governor of Minnesota in 1939, had run for the Republican presidential nomination six times since, each run more ineffectual than the last.)

  Horse-pickers paid more attention to “Big John” Connally, the former JFK naval secretary and LBJ confidant who had switched to the Republican Party during his tenure as Nixon’s treasury secretary. Nixon had hoped Connally would succeed him as president. He was one of those perennial Washington power players upon whose prospects Georgetown’s villagers never tired of speculating—even now that he had been only narrowly acquitted for his role in the milk industry’s bribery scandal. He had announced the formation of an outfit, Vital Issues for America, that would sponsor an extensive speaking tour. Opportunistically predicting a “horse race” between Ford and Reagan in the primaries, he said he even might just run as a favorite son in Texas. And his recent trial? “As a matter a fact,” he told reporters, “it helped me. The jury said, ‘Not guilty.’ How does that hurt you?”

  On the Republican left, Senator Mac Mathias grumbled from the podium of the National Press Club that “President Ford’s fascination with a very real threat on his right is limiting debate among Republicans.” He said he might run in a primary or two, as well—because a conservative nominee would render Republicans “the Whigs of 1976.” There was talk, too, that the Senate’s “Wednesday Club,” a weekly whiskey-klatch of liberal Republicans, would seek to counter the party’s Reagan-driven drift to the right by sponsoring a run by one of their fellow travelers, with speculation centering on Howard Baker, who was considered especially electable.

  So now Washington’s gossipmongers were off to the races speculating about a potential quadruple-barrel challenge to poor Gerald Ford—when they weren’t mocking Ford’s latest ridiculous physical mishap: a collision on October 14 between the presidential limousine and the car of a teenager in Hartford, Connecticut, who complained that he was the one who had the right of way (local police had neglected to block off the intersection). Or when they weren’t reciting routines from a hilarious new TV variety program, NBC’s Saturday Night—soon renamed Saturday Night Live—whose standout new talent, a young comedian whose unlikely name was the same as that of a Washington suburb, opened the first episode’s mock newscast, “Weekend Update,” on October 11, date-lined Washington:

  “At a press conference Thursday night, President Ford blew his nose. Alert Secret Service agents seized his handkerchief and wrestled it to the ground.

  “And yesterday, in Washington, President Ford bumped his head three times getting into his helicopter. The CIA immediately denied reports that it had deliberately lowered the top of the doorway.

  “And Ford was on the campaign trail announcing in Detroit that he has written his own campaign slogan. The slogan? ‘If he’s so dumb, how come he’s president?’ ”

  Chevy Chase’s next joke: “The Post Office announced today that it is going to issue a stamp commemorating prostitution in the United States. It’s a ten-cent stamp, but if you lick it, it’s a quarter.” The conservative medium whose three networks usually converged in a safe middlebrow banality had never seen irreverence like this.

  The second week, Chase, who considered Ford a cruel man who “never gave a shit about people,” was if anything crueler: “President Ford’s regular weekly accident took place this week in Hartford, Connecticut, where Ford’s Lincoln was hit by a Buick. Alert Secret Service agents seized the Buick and wrestled it to the ground. No one was injured in the accident, but when the President got out to see what had happened, he tore his jacket sleeve on the car bumper, bumped his head, and stuck his thumb in his eye. Alert Secret Service agents immediately seized the thumb and wrestled it to the ground. . . . Concerning the collision, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison says he will immediately launch an investigation into the ‘second car theory.’ ” The studio audience applauded boisterously.

  The next week, Weekend Update’s “top story” was the president’s stubborn cold: “White House physicians say that, after a mild cold of that sort, it will take the President a few days to recover his motor skills fully, citing the period after his last cold when he tied his shoe to his hair blower and inadvertently pardoned Richard Nixon.”

  Then he turned to another joke: the former governor of California. “Starting a speaking tour this week . . . Reagan spoke out against marijuana, abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, busing, and gun control legislation. When asked what he was for, Reagan replied, quote, ‘hair dye.’ ”

  Although the nation’s new jester did not find Ronald Reagan nearly as pathetic as the hapless Leader of the Free World. Chase ended the segment “quoting” Reagan as saying that, like the Democratic right-wing populist former governor of Georgia, George Wallace, who had been crippled in a 1972 assassination attempt and was also angling his way toward a presidential announcement, he would be campaigning in a wheelchair: “It’s not for the sympathy I would get. It just makes the race more fair.”

  FORD SOON FACED A NEW set of intelligence controversies. First Frank Church turned his hearings to political abuses by the Internal Revenue Service (among the thousands of dangerous extremists who allegedly had been politically singled out for audits were Joseph Alsop, James Brown, Nobel Prize–winning scientist Linus Pauling, and two United States senators). Then, hard upon new reports that the CIA had recruited Christian missionaries in defiance of an Eisenhower-era directive outlawing the practice, he revealed to Americans that Big Brother had also been opening their mail—more than 215,000 pieces in New York City alone between 1953 and 1973, including one, in 1968, from presidential candidate Richard Nixon to his speechwriter Ray Price.

  Richard Helms, called back from Iran to testify, admitted it all was illegal. He then reintroduced Americans to a concept from the Watergate days: “plausible deniability.” Conceding that he had signed a report in 1970 to Richard Nixon announcing such practices were to be discontinued, he admitted they had continued nonetheless, without the president’s knowledge. “Because,” he explained, “you’ve got to protect the President from the dirty stuff.”

  Over on the House side of the Capitol, feisty Bella Abzug of New York, eyeing a run against Senator James Buckley in 1976, publicized two government surveillance projects, code-named “SHAMROCK” and “MINARET,” run by a government bureau that was so secret most Americans didn’t even know it existed. “With a reputed budget of some $1.2 billion and a manpower roster far greater than the CIA,” the Associated Press explained, the National Security Agency had been “established in 1952 with a charter that is still classified as top secret.” (Its initials, the joke went, stood for “No Such Agency.”) It had also, Abzug revealed, been monitoring both the phone calls and the telegrams of American citizens for decades. President Ford had persuaded Church not to hold hearings on the matter. Abzug proceeded on her own. At first, when she subpoenaed the private-sector executives responsible for going along with the programs, the White House tried to prevent their testimony by claiming that each participating private company was “an agent of the United States.” When they did appear, they admitted their companies had voluntarily been turning over records and cables to the governme
nt at the end of every single day for more than forty years. The NSA said the programs had been discontinued. Abzug claimed they still survived, but under different names. At that, Church changed his mind: the contempt for the law here was so flagrant, he decided, he would initiate NSA hearings, too.

  Conservative members of his committee issued defiant shrieks: “People’s right to know should be subordinated to the people’s right to be secure,” said Senator John Tower. It would “adversely affect our intelligence-gathering capability,” said Barry Goldwater. Church replied that this didn’t matter if the government was breaking the law. He called the NSA’s director to testify before Congress for the first time in history. Appearing in uniform, Lieutenant General Lew Allen Jr. obediently disclosed that his agency’s spying on Americans was far vaster than what had even been revealed to the Rockefeller Commission. He admitted that it was, technically, illegal, and had been carried out without specific approval from any president. But he declined to explain how it worked. He added that thanks to such surveillance, “We are aware that a major terrorist attack in the United States was prevented.” He refused to give further details on that, either—as if daring the senators to object.

  THE PRESIDENT COULD COMFORT HIMSELF with the thought that few were paying attention. Back in August, Rockefeller Commission member Ronald Reagan had informed his listeners, “My own reaction after months of testimony and discussion during the investigation of the CIA is ‘much ado about—if not nothing, at least very little’ ”: just “instances of some wrongdoing with regard to keyhole peeking,” long since corrected by the agency itself. He claimed his commission’s most important finding—that more Soviet spies than ever were living and working in America—had been buried. Instead “the media seized upon whatever misdeeds we found and played them up, possibly to confirm the earlier charges and possibly because they thought they made for exciting drama.”