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

by Rick Perlstein

  Now, not Nancy Reagan. David Keene once explained to the couple his plan to compromise to win some delegates at a state convention. He apologized for his lack of political aggressiveness: “We have to do it, though personally, I’d rather sail in and kick the shit out of ’em.” Nancy promptly reared up with gleaming eyes: “Now that is the kind of talk I like to hear.”

  Her husband meanwhile had said at a Concord, New Hampshire, press conference, after losing that primary, that he “couldn’t be more pleased” with the state results—why, if you counted the Democratic write-in votes (which didn’t count), it had been a virtual tie! And he pointed reporters to a hand-lettered sign on his chartered 727, which read “Air Force One—’77.” Everything always worked out in the end, gloriously

  His handlers, less optimistic, were dumbfounded by what had happened on election night in New Hampshire. Their whole strategy had been built on a quick win there, a quick win in Florida, a quick win in Illinois—and a quick concession from unelected, unloved President Ford. John Sears had a mantra: “Politics is motion.” Now they had none. In a predawn, booze-soaked meeting after New Hampshire’s election night, they contemplated their internal poll, which Meldrim Thomson had oafishly leaked to the media, showing Reagan going into the voting 8 points ahead—and a poll, which they prayed no one saw, showing that their previous lead in Florida had been wiped away. They prevailed upon their candidate: it was time to take the knife to their opponent at his most vulnerable point, and at Reagan’s strongest point. That was foreign policy. That was the dreaded doctrine of “détente.”

  They had a poll from January showing that 44 percent of all Americans preferred Reagan’s hard line on the Soviets, compared with 25 percent who liked Ford’s. (A majority agreed that Reagan “would be unafraid to stand up to the Russians, and that is right.”) They reminded him how cutting the president and the surrogates had been in the homestretch. They implored him: just make it about the State Department; you don’t have to mention Jerry Ford by name. Maybe they reminded him of a line he liked to drop in on the apparently obscure subject of the Panama Canal Zone.

  Negotiations to reform the 1904 treaty that turned the ten-mile-wide strip surrounding the canal into a nearly sovereign entity of the United States in perpetuity had been ongoing since the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. The treaty was an ugly thing, a relic of a more imperialist, less suspicious, age: it was a gift to the United States from the rebels who established the Republic of Panama by breaking away from the nation of Colombia with the aid of the gunboat USS Nashville and a convenient shutdown of the U.S.-owned Panamanian Railway, which kept Colombia’s army from Panama City. Then came the heroic work of building a modern eleventh wonder of the world—a tale, stripped of the military bullying and backhanded chicanery, told to generations of rapt American schoolboys in textbooks that proclaimed, for example, “American pluck and luck conquered all. . . . The grand dream was realized. In 1913 the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific were united.”

  But to the poor put-upon Panamanians, the “Zone”—“as much a part of the United States as is Omaha, Nebraska,” the travel writer John Gunther observed—was a nightmare of colonialist humiliation. So they fought back: in 1913, when Panamanian police shot three unarmed U.S. marines; in 1947, after America sought to make permanent its supposedly temporary wartime military bases in defiance of the unanimous vote of the National Assembly; in 1958, when students defiantly planted their nation’s flag at fifty points inside the Zone, and 1959, when they burned Americans’ cars; and then, finally, in the 1964 riots that left four Americans and twenty-four Panamanians dead. By the end of 1964 Lyndon Johnson announced plans for an “entirely new treaty” that would “recognize the sovereignty of Panama” over the Zone. And by the presidency of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger was warning, “It will turn into a Vietnam-type situation” unless the Panamanians get some concessions. In February 1974, the State Department announced new negotiating principles “that will guarantee continued effective operation of the Canal while meeting Panama’s legitimate aspirations,” including greater input from Panama into the canal’s administration, a greater share of the canal’s profits—and, most significant, an eventual, if theoretical, end to America’s control of the canal “in perpetuity.”

  And at that, conservatives went berserk.

  Strom Thurmond of South Carolina introduced a resolution for “continued undiluted United States sovereignty over the United States–owned Canal Zone on the Isthmus of Panama.” It included an imperishable comment: “We own it. We bought it. It’s ours.” Ronald Reagan, for one, was sold. In a May 1975 radio broadcast he quoted Senator Jesse Helms, who said, “I have received reliable information, that Dr. Kissinger has approved plans to turn over effective control of police and fire protection and postal services in the Canal Zone of the Republic of Panama.” Reagan then argued that this meant America would soon be helpless to fight back against the next civil disturbance, and that Americans would have their mail opened by the fearsome head of the state security service, “Lieutenant Colonel”—he paused, struggling to pronounce the unfamiliar name—“Manuel Noriega, a man not unfriendly to the Cuban Communists.” He concluded in tones of the John Birch Society—which soon began distributing bumper strikers reading DON’T GIVE PANAMA OUR CANAL: GIVE THEM KISSINGER INSTEAD!—“One can and is forced to ask: Why?”

  On Memorial Day he tied “our seeming willingness to give away the Panama Canal” to the same liberal fecklessness that produced Truman’s stalemate in Korea, Kennedy’s betrayal at the Bay of Pigs, and now our humiliating retreat in Vietnam. He asked, “Have we stopped to think that young Americans have seldom if ever in their lives seen America act as a great nation?” (Apparently the civil rights movement didn’t count.) He told the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their annual convention in August that “that nation exists only because of us”; that the current government of Omar Torrijos was “Marxist” (he was actually an anti-Communist authoritarian, one of the reasons American presidents had trusted him in negotiations); and that under our benign protection “Panama has the highest standard of living in Central America.” That fall, George Wallace joined in, angrily confronting Kissinger at a governors’ conference. A conservative issue was born. In a speech in Bicentennial-happy Philadelphia a month before his official entry into the presidential campaign, Reagan tried on Helms’s line: “I think we’d be damn fools to turn over the Panama Canal. We built it. We paid for it. It’s ours.” It fit like a glove: the Philadelphia Inquirer said he then received “thunderous applause.”

  Ford and Kissinger had desperately hoped to keep the issue out of the presidential campaign. Barry Goldwater, who had come out for calling out the Marines during the 1964 crisis over flying the U.S. flag, now said a new treaty was desperately needed because the canal was all but indefensible against guerrilla sabotage—and accused Reagan of “gross factual errors” and “a surprisingly dangerous state of mind.” Reagan ignored his old friend.

  He’d given a hard-hitting foreign policy speech in New Hampshire on February 10, but the audience was a bunch of prep school boys at Phillips Exeter Academy, and the address had fallen flat. This time, the new rhetorical strategy was tried at a stadium: on February 27 at a spring-training ball field in Winter Park, Florida, idled by a major-league labor dispute. The climax went:

  “State Department actions for several years now have suggested that they are intimidated by the propaganda of Panama’s military dictator, Fidel Castro’s good friend, Gen. Omar Torrijos. Our State Department apparently believes the hints regularly dispensed by the leftist Torrijos regime that the canal will be sabotaged if we don’t hand it over. Our government has maintained a mouse-like silence as criticisms of the giveaway have increased. . . . I don’t understand how the State Department can suggest we pay blackmail to this dictator, for blackmail is what it is. When it comes to the Canal, we bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we should tell Torrijos and company that we are going to keep
it.”

  The crowd went wild.

  David Keene, in charge of organizing Florida for Reagan, was surprised: People weren’t reading about Panama in the newspapers. So why were they reacting like this? Ronald Reagan understood. “The issue I sense,” he told Kevin Phillips, “is, ‘The empire is in decline.’ . . . The Establishment doesn’t want to raise it.” His listeners remembered those shameful images of the evacuation of Saigon, that line of bodies snaking up the ladder to that shack atop the CIA station chief’s home. God’s chosen nation, with its tail between its legs. They remembered those Panamanian riots from 1964, and now Panama was being rewarded for rioting—just like those ungrateful Negroes in those Northern cities they had left behind to retire in Florida: they had rioted, and then got more civil rights bills and social programs. (“Rioting for rent supplements,” a congressman had called it back in the 1960s.) And now Jerry Ford was ready to let it happen again. Damn right they cheered. We bought it. We paid for it. It’s ours.

  Evans and Novak had described his previous rhetoric in Florida as “wrapped in cotton wadding with scarcely a glint of a sharp edge.” Now he wielded a dagger. To a woman who asked, “Will you help New York please?” he answered, “Well, I won’t saw it off.” And at a March 4 press conference in Orlando he said, “All I can see is what other nations the world over see: the collapse of the American will and the retreat of American power. There is little doubt in my mind that the Soviet Union will not stop taking advantage of détente until it sees that the American people have elected a new President and appointed a new Secretary of State.” That made news—news that a Republican presidential administration might not star Henry Kissinger any longer. He said, “Last year and this, the Soviet Union, using Castro’s mercenaries, intervened decisively in the Angolan civil war and routed pro-Western forces. Yet Ford and Kissinger continue to tell us that we must not let that interfere with détente.” He continued, “Despite Mr. Ford’s evident”—ouch!—“decency, honor, and patriotism, he has shown neither the vision nor leadership necessary to halt and reverse the diplomatic and military decline of the United States.” So it was high time for Ford to announce, “We are getting out of détente. . . . I believe in the peace of which Mr. Ford speaks—as much as any man. But in places such as Angola, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the peace they have come to know is the peace of the grave.”

  That same morning left-leaning Mozambique closed its border with Rhodesia, a white-ruled anti-Communist power, and Kissinger testified before the House International Relations Committee, warning, if that was the word, that Cuba should act “with great circumspection” in southern Africa. Compared to that, Reagan’s dagger thrust that “under Kissinger and Ford this nation has become number two in military power in a world where it is dangerous—if not fatal—to be second best” sounded swell to Florida’s retirees.

  IT WAS NOT ENOUGH IN Florida to win. In fact, Reagan lost by a wider margin there than in New Hampshire. He also lost that week in Vermont (Ford 84 percent, Reagan 15), and Massachusetts (Ford 61, Reagan 34, with twenty-seven delegates for Ford and fifteen for Reagan; a Boston Globe exit poll found he’d done well only among “conservative” and “very conservative” voters), two states where he hadn’t campaigned. Florida, in fact, was his fifth loss in a row—though he still managed to respond, the next day, “I cannot tell you how delighted I am. The incumbent in these first couple of primaries has thrown the whole load at us; he has shot all the big artillery there is, used everything in the incumbency he can, and we are still possessing almost half the Republican vote.”

  The Florida loss had been in the cards. His campaign chairman was an overweight, oafish car dealer who told reporters things like “If I was going to give the world an enema, I’d insert the nozzle in Washington.” Stuart Spencer, who’d helped run Reagan’s 1966 campaign but was now working for Ford’s, was not surprised by his former client’s string of losses: “He’s lazy, that’s all,” Spencer told Vic Gold. “I think his energy level is going to be a problem. Low blood sugar. I think that’s why he likes those jelly beans. . . . Sure, aides can brief him. But if a guy’s deep, he’s deep. If he’s shallow, he’s shallow.”

  The president’s campaign machine, on the other hand, was finally humming. Dick Cheney, his tough chief of staff, was riding herd—hiring twenty-four new staffers in ten days and opening a phone office that reached four hundred thousand voters. The candidate toughened up his Cold War rhetoric, blunting Reagan’s: he said he would have nothing to do with “international outlaw” Fidel Castro—this scuttled plans to begin normalizing relations with Cuba—and claimed “détente was only a word that was coined” and he would no longer use it. His actual policy, he said, was “peace through strength.”

  He made the remarks on Castro while swearing in 1,161 new citizens from Cuba. Noted a reporter, “Ronald Reagan brings a political campaign to town. Gerald Ford brings the White House.” And so Ford dangled a Treasury Department job before the former president of the Florida Conservative Union. He also announced so much pork for Florida, Reagan told his audiences, that “when he [Ford] arrived in their town ‘the band won’t know whether to play ‘Hail to the Chief’ or ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.’ ” A free tape of Betty Ford urging everyone to vote was sent to every radio station in Florida. The first lady’s press secretary denied this was dirty pool; it was only, she said, a “public service announcement.”

  Reagan went on Meet the Press and downplayed expectations for the next primary, in Illinois, saying he’d be happy with only 40 percent—in the state where he’d been born and spent his youth, and which John Sears’s original campaign plan had pegged as Ford’s Waterloo. Fighting a cold, and, reportedly, depression, he leveled the nasty swipe that the Chinese invited Nixon back to China because they did not have faith in Gerald Ford, and that having Ford on the ballot in November would mean “having to defend a part of the past which Republicans would like to be left to history.” He backtracked in the face of a flurry of questions from reporters who wanted to know if that meant he held Ford responsible for Watergate.

  The genial optimist was uncharacteristically desperate. His campaign had a $688,000 deficit; Ford’s had a $1.15 million surplus. Citizens for Reagan filed a complaint with the FEC, maintaining that since Kissinger was “using his high office for the express purposes of a campaign platform to promote the Ford candidacy,” his trips should be charged as a campaign expenditure. Reagan’s aide Don Totten, in remarks the New York Times reported had been approved in advance by the campaign press secretary, said Ford’s strategy was “actual buying of the votes by outright bribery.” Reagan, asked if he agreed, said only that he would not have used the same words—and also said on the campaign trail that Ford’s deputies were “lying through their teeth” when they said Reagan had expected victory in New Hampshire (they weren’t).

  It got the president’s back up—he was suddenly filled with a gust of fighting spirit. The Times quoted an aide who spoke for the mood of the campaign concerning Reagan: that it was time to “crush him”—once and for all.

  And, in Illinois on March 16, crush him Ford did, with 58.9 percent of the vote. Reagan responded in a statement from California, “We appear to have met our goal with something over 40 percent of the vote. I have never been under any illusion that our grassroots campaign could successfully buck both the Illinois Republican organization and the promises being issued so bountifully by the White House. . . . I look forward to the North Carolina primary next week.”

  That was his rebuff to fellow Republicans who were telling him that it was now time for him to quit.

  THE DAY BEFORE THE ILLINOIS balloting, and eight days before North Carolina’s, the Reagan campaign 727, scheduled for Raleigh, North Carolina, sat idling for hours on the tarmac in Los Angeles. The staffers were waiting while volunteers in Washington emptied envelopes and counted checks to see if they had enough to pay for the flight. They made plans to start taking commercial flights. The day before Illinois,
Frank Reynolds of ABC said, “The odds against him are very long now and because he is not a dreamer, Ronald Reagan must know he is on the edge of defeat.” The Times quoted Ford supporters like Senator Charles Percy patting his opponent condescendingly on the head: “Ronald Reagan has sharpened up the Ford organization. His campaign has helped us. It would have been a very poor organization . . . without the Reagan challenge.” The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew wrote, “the problem with suggestions that Reagan quit is that they overlook the fact that to quit would leave him without a role.” As the New York Times reported, “The Californian argued that he still had a 50–50 chance of nomination—an assessment even his staff made no attempt to defend.”

  It was around then that the candidate walked in on a meeting between his wife and Lyn Nofziger. She thought her husband was beginning to look “foolish.” She was in the middle of pleading with his old confidant to talk him into dropping out.

  Reagan had had quite enough of talk like that. On the nineteenth, reporters waved a press release from the National Conference of Republican Mayors announcing their telegram to him begging him to step aside, which brought on a rare break in the old trouper’s composure: “For heaven’s sake, fellas, let’s not be naive. That pressure to quit the race is being engineered from the same place that engineered pressure for me not to run in the first place—The White House! I’m not getting out! I’m not going to pay any attention to them now when they suggest that I should quit. Why doesn’t he quit?”

  Someone then asked him again: why don’t you quit? There followed several seconds of awkward silence, before Ronald Reagan walked away.