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

by Rick Perlstein

  News was that the world as we know it might be ending, but that was an evergreen 1970s story; the latest twist was the suggestion by a deputy director of the National Agricultural Laboratory that global food supplies would soon be so scarce it was high time for folks to develop a taste for “locusts, termites, and other insects.” “As the population explosion continues,” Dean F. Gamble told the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “it may be impossible to continue to ignore these unexploited food resources.” That article ran, in one newspaper, next to two pieces on developments in the latest financial scandal: multinational corporations including Exxon, Lockheed, Gulf, Northrop, and United Brands had admitted to funneling huge amounts of cash to foreign officials in exchange for their nations’ business. The oil company Tenneco admitted to making payments “that may have been illegal to candidates and local officials in at least ten states.” In Japan, a right-wing lobbyist was alleged to have been paid $7 million to promote sales of one company’s aircraft; the same company was said to have bribed Italian cabinet ministers to get them to buy its F-104s and Hercules C-130s. The Financial Times of London complained about the bribery complaints: “Without it, business simply would not get done!”

  Then there was Patty Hearst’s trial for armed robbery—and the outbreak of terrorism that ensued.

  The trial had opened January 15 in San Francisco with jury selection, the nation once more riveted by the bizarre tale (it had been impossible to find jurors who weren’t familiar with the case). The argument for the defense, led by celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey, was “brainwashing”: Bailey endeavored to convince these twelve citizens, including a retired Air Force colonel, an airline stewardess, a housewife, and a self-employed potter, that Patty, a woman living a “most ordinary life,” had been so abused by her captors, so terrified that her safety was linked to theirs, that, his psychiatric witnesses would demonstrate, they had drained her of her free will, rendering her a virtual child—a “prisoner of war for twenty months,” just like the Korean War POWs whom Chinese mind-control experts had convinced to defect from the United States. (This was now popularly known as the “Stockholm syndrome,” after a 1973 case in which a hostage in a robbery at the Sveriges Kreditbank in Sweden had an affair with one of her captors and proclaimed all of them “very nice.”) The prosecution said it was absurd to call a woman a victim who had posed with the machine gun with which she helped rob a bank, who had avidly proclaimed herself a revolutionary even after her arrest, who had taken one of the gang members for a lover. Time called it “The Battle over Patty’s Brain,” and interviewed the nation’s beloved, heroic experts on the psychological effects of captivity—Vietnam War POWs—to pass judgment. They were withering: “If you were weak and really screwed up beforehand, you might go over,” said a retired Air Force colonel held captive for seven and a half years.

  It was announced that Patty would testify on February 13, and that she would reiterate her defense lawyer’s horrifying story: her kidnapping by an armed gang; her confinement, blindfolded, in a narrow closet, which the supposed revolutionary hero Field Marshal Cinque would visit in order to sexually assault her. And then, in anticipation of that testimony, on February 12, a terrorist’s time bomb went off at the famous Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, causing $1 million in damage to priceless art and just missing fifty-three visitors touring the mansion, which was now a state park. There would be many more bombings, a group called the New World Liberation Front soon promised—unless a quarter of a million dollars was put into a defense fund for two of Patty’s former Symbionese Liberation Army comrades who were still proud revolutionaries.

  The bombing was meant to intimidate a traitor to the revolution. The revolutionaries were dead serious. In direct examination by F. Lee Bailey, Hearst explained why she had never tried to escape: because she had been convinced the FBI would assassinate her, then blame it on the SLA to make them unpalatable to the masses. Bailey asked her why, after one of her comrades had been apprehended for shoplifting at a sporting goods store, she had opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle. Because, she said, she had been told how under “codes of war,” she herself would be killed if she had not.

  The next week, on February 18, as the Peanut Brigade made their second, homestretch trip to New Hampshire amid mounds of snow twenty feet high, the prosecution team, led by a Nixon appointee and former Young Republicans president, began cross-examination with a surprise tactic: inquiring about the defendant’s pre-capture reading list. Black revolutionary George Jackson’s Blood in My Eye. A novel by a black feminist, Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (she admitted it “impressed” her). One book on the Wobblies, another on guerrilla movements in Latin America; sociologist G. William Domhoff’s Who Rules America? “So in essence,” a prosecuting attorney asked, “you were—would it be a fair statement to say—quite interested in revolution, social change?”

  She admitted that, yes, “I was interested in social changes.”

  The judge, in a controversial decision, had allowed a text she had narrated about her confinement—the “Tania Diaries,” as they become known—into evidence. It included statements like “I believe that the term ‘brainwashing’ has meaning only when one is referring to the process which begins in the school system and is continued via the controlled media. . . . Like someone said in a letter to the Berkeley Barb, I’ve been brainwashed for twenty years, but it only took the SLA six weeks to straighten her out.” The prosecutors grilled her about that—and pointed out, for instance, that though she had given a detailed description of the SLA apartment, she had never mentioned any closet. They asked about the year she had spent on the lam; on that particular subject, she took the Fifth Amendment forty-two times.

  The next week the defense and the prosecution both called expert psychiatric witnesses. One of the defense’s witnesses cited the Air Force’s “survival, evasion, resistance, and evasion” (SERE) training, which caused such controversy when it had been revealed in the press in 1973: mock POW exercises in which, the psychiatrist explained, formerly tough trainees frequently developed “an uncommon terrible fear . . . out of all proportion to what the reality of their situation was,” and henceforth became as obedient as children—comparing that to Hearst’s reasons for not trying to escape and her desperate need for her captors’ approval. (“Did I do right?” she’d asked in the speeding getaway van after she’d opened her semiautomatic on civilians, he pointed out.) He referred to the dissociation suffered by Nazi concentration camp survivors, who couldn’t even remember the cruel things they’d done to survive, and the case of Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty, who while under confinement by Communists in Hungary was tortured until he confessed to absurd crimes like planning a third world war.

  The defense psychiatrists, in other words, offered up what was essentially a left-wing view of the self—as plastic, protean, moldable—and of human beings as the product of their environment, not quite responsible for their individual decisions and acts.

  A prosecution psychiatrist, conversely, said Hearst had been an antiestablishment hellion all along—telling a nun to “go to hell,” described by her boyfriend as possessing an “[u]nparalleled . . . capacity for sarcasm.” Another said: “I think this was all in her. In a sense she was a member of the SLA in spirit, without knowing it, for a long, long time.” They argued that she was one of them: not Patty Hearst, girl-victim, but “Tania,” under the revolutionary nom de guerre she had chosen. Or at least a left-wing sympathizer. And wasn’t that evidence enough?

  This was a right-wing view, a Reaganite conception: good guys and bad guys. And that was the view that was generally being embraced in the court of public opinion—where, if the Patty Hearst trial was taking shape as a proxy war on the meaning of the 1960s and what it had done to our children, the prosecution was winning. The Arizona Republic (motto: “Where the Spirit of the Lord Is, There Is Liberty”) editorialized that in the world according F. Lee Bailey, “Any felon could claim that psycholog
ical conditions in his home during childhood spawned criminal acts. A thief could claim that his family’s pressure on him to acquire more belongings promoted stealing. The possibilities would be endless.” The Detroit Free Press said an acquittal would rationalize any criminality committed by “the poor, or mistreated, or culturally deprived.” The Baltimore Sun claimed the very “concept of responsibility that forms the core of criminal law was at stake,” and a student wrote a letter to the Denver Post saying the stakes were even higher: if Patty went free, “It would show others that the United States is getting weaker while the underworld parties are getting stronger.”

  Expect more Patty Hearsts, the argument seemed to go: unless the nation got with the way Ronald Reagan saw the world.

  ON FEBRUARY 21, REAGAN ARRIVED in New Hampshire for one last visit, with the actors Lloyd Nolan and Jimmy Stewart in tow—and baffled and frustrated his managers by ordering his campaign plane to Illinois, where he made a nostalgic tour of his birthplace in Tampico, which housed an honorary Reagan for President national headquarters. (A New York Times reporter came up to Peter Hannaford: “Where’s the manger, upstairs or down?”) In the receiving line a local planted a wet kiss on his wife. (“He was hustled off by outraged aides while she searched for a Kleenex,” a historian recorded. “And that part of Illinois was declared terra non grata on future trips.” Reagan did not return until 1992.) The entourage made its way to the grammar school where he attended third grade, his classmates now reassembled for a photograph (“they all looked about twenty years older than Reagan”), then a big rally at Tampico High School (which he hadn’t attended). “Oh my, such memories here,” he said. “You could get bathed in a warm bath of nostalgia.”

  In front of his honorary national headquarters, he presented himself to the crowd balanced between two parked cars some thirty inches apart, one foot perched on each bumper, an extraordinarily graceful act, the long, lithe lines of his body stretched taut, the face of the aide behind him wrinkled with concern—but his own face radiating joy. Gerald Ford spent the days leading up to the balloting with far less grace. There was one of his campaign chairmen, Senator Norris Cotton, introducing a speech by Ronald Reagan, calling him “my kind of fellow.” Then the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon, monopolized the front pages by landing in China, a development Ford had been sufficiently desperate to prevent that he considered impounding the plane the Chinese sent out to fetch him, as payment for confiscated American property from the revolution; he decided against it for fear it would be discovered and draw him even closer to the disgraced president in the public mind. Senator Richard Schweiker from Pennsylvania, a strong Ford supporter, said Nixon had timed his trip deliberately, to sabotage Ford and open the field for his friend John Connally.

  On Election Day in New Hampshire, as a jury in San Francisco heard testimony that Patty Hearst had used marijuana and LSD, Ronald Reagan was in Illinois taking one more occasion to minimize Nixon’s alleged sins. Asked if he would offer Nixon a cabinet post, he said he wouldn’t be able to answer “until history itself . . . tells us more about the situation that saw his resignation . . . unless history gives us a different perspective on Watergate than the one we have now.” He then said the investigations of the CIA were “one of the most irresponsible things that a Congress of the United State has ever done.”

  At midnight on February 24, the Californian was 1,500 votes ahead—too close for the papers to declare a winner, which they were able to do only the next day: 49.4 percent for Ford. 48 percent for Reagan—a difference of 1,587 votes. And though Reagan’s chairman, Mel Thomson, had badly botched the expectations game with his prediction of a victory by 5 points, and though he leaked a poll that Evans and Novak reported that predicted him winning by 8, the very idea of coming within 1.5 percentage points of a president—Lyndon Johnson had won New Hampshire by 7.7 points over Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and was shocked enough to soon abdicate his reelection bid—was earth-shattering. Journalists watched “a senior White House official get wobbly from long swigs from a tumbler kept full of a dark amber liquid.” Might Gerald Ford become the first incumbent president to be denied his party’s nomination in a competitive race since Chester Alan Arthur in 1884? It now seemed like a possibility.

  Another thing that was not supposed to be possible in these modern times: “Carter should understand,” Vic Gold had written, “that no ex-Governor of Georgia can become a Presidential nominee, even if there weren’t a nonrecognition factor to overcome. No. He can’t because he is going up against a prejudice bigger than one John F. Kennedy faced in 1960. Much bigger, more complex: if Jesus Christ Himself returned to proclaim Roman Catholicism the Truth Faith, Christianity could survive; but if He spoke His parables in a Georgia accent, St. Patrick’s would convert to a mosque within a week.”

  Think again. Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law of a sainted Democratic martyr: 8.7 percent. Fred Harris, senator and former Democratic National Committee chairman: 11.4. Birch Bayh, Mo Udall, senators and onetime projected front-runners, 16.2 and 23.9 percent, respectively. “Jimmy Who?”: 29.4 percent, something like a landslide—although whether it was possible to count something as a landslide in this age of apathy was an open question. Only 32.5 percent of the Granite State’s voting population voted, way down from 1972 and 1968, despite hard-fought contests in both parties, the sort reporters called, on instinct, “closely watched.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  * * *

  Born Again

  GEORGE WALLACE WAS BESIDE HIMSELF.

  “That little room where he said he spent all his time on his knees—that’s where he made that little agreement with me that I wouldn’t run delegates against his precinct delegates in Georgia, and he said he would support me provided I got three hundred or more delegates, and we shook hands.” He was sitting with Elizabeth Drew, who did the best she could to capture his every Alabaman inflection for the New Yorker’s readers. From a bed next to his wheelchair, Wallace was waving a pile of yellowed news clippings dating back to 1972, ones he had preserved all these years, with that same smoldering resentment and righteous contempt that when unleashed from behind a podium made him one of the most powerful orators in the history of American politics.

  He read a quote from Carter, a month before the 1972 Democratic convention, saying he could support a Humphrey-Wallace ticket. “And now he says, ‘I never supported Wallace and I never would.’ ”

  He railed about how he got three hundred delegates, the number Carter set as a threshold for supporting him—then how Carter turned around and gave the nominating speech for Scoop Jackson instead. “Maybe someday he’d like to take a polygraph test on that.”

  She asked him if his losses were hard. “His voice was soft as he replied. ‘Oh, no, honey,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s that tough. After you’ve been shot five times and suffered the loss of walking, what’s a loss?’ He paused, and then he continued, ‘[N]ot being able to walk. But I’m living. I thought I was going to die as soon I was hit. So losing a campaign—my goodness, that’s not your life.’ ”

  Though Wallace probably could not pass a polygraph test on that. Politics, power, was what he lived for. Reporters wondered whether his handlers, who loved him like a brother, didn’t keep him campaigning in order to keep him alive. Wallace, after saying politics didn’t matter when you’ve almost met your maker, kept railing about Carter. He imitated Carter: “I will never lie to you; I will never misleeeeeeeed you.” He complained, “He can go out and shake hands and get on television. I can’t do that. He was my friend when I was popular. He said he was for me when he thought I’d die. . . . Those other fellows criticize me, but they didn’t use me.” He repeated himself: “He talks about spending all that time on his kneeeeees. Well, I’m going to church tomorrow, but I don’t go around talking about my religion.”

  She wrote, “Twice, he asked me to get him a glass of water. He apologized for asking for my help.”

  Drew got up
to leave. He bleated out after her: “He yuuuuused me when I was popular. Look out for phonies, honey.”

  THE INTERVIEW HAD COME AFTER a crucial primary showdown, in Florida. The liberals, making the same calculation, stayed out, overestimating Wallace, underestimating Carter, glad to watch one of them knock the other out in that curiously half-Southern state, and hoping for both of them to rough up the third contestant in the race, Scoop Jackson, who was bidding for a strong show of support from the faction that made up a lion’s share of the other half of Florida’s unusual electorate—transplanted Jewish retirees.

  But they were fighting another year’s battles. They did not grasp that Wallace was now just a political vestige, and a pathetic one at that. Reporter Martin Schram looked in on a Wallace rally in a Vero Beach high school gym, all the old accoutrements still in place: Billy Grammer and his Grand Ole Opry Band to warm up the crowd; the red-white-and-blue bunting (Carter’s campaign was done up all in green: fresh start, grass roots, the greening of America, love); the same focused rage, now aimed at his Georgia nemesis (“I’m tired of all this high-pocrisy. . . . I’m not the one who says, ‘I’m a Southerner but I’m a different kind of Southerner.’ What kind of Southerner does he mean? I think all Southerners are good”). The same raps on professors “totin’ briefcases around and writin’ things for one another,” against “rip-off artists on welfare,” and “[j]udges in the federal system” who “pay more attention to those who shoot you than those of you who got shot.” He said the other candidates were ganging up on him—that is, ganging up on you: “They just don’t like me stirring up the middle class so they can’t control you.”

  But this year, the red meat earned him more pity than rebel yells. “Poor fella,” a voter said when the candidate was wheeled behind the short, lead-reinforced lectern. “Look what it’s like for him now.”