THE NEXT WEEKEND IN IOWA, Ford won nineteen delegates and Reagan won seventeen—but the president’s aides had hoped to do much better. (The Ford campaign had canceled on the Iowans after the assassination of the ambassador in Lebanon—and released pictures showing a commander in chief poring over military-looking maps.) In Washington State it was Reagan, thirty-one to seven; in a congressional district convention in Colorado he picked up three; in a Texas meeting to pick at-large delegates he scooped up four more.
David Broder talked about maps on Monday in the Washington Post. He detailed how Reagan was now down by only fifty-five delegates, 997 to 942, and said that the two camps were converging—despite psychological gamesmanship by both sides to bluff the highest number they could credibly get away with. He estimated that Ford might be no more than twenty-five votes ahead, or even a little bit behind, when state conventions ended July 17. “In either case,” he concluded, “the balance of power will lie with the bloc of uncommitted delegates now numbering 159.”
Time was impressed by the smooth-running Reagan machine, doing its job F. Clifton White–style: “For months Reagan’s men burrowed into the bedrock, taking control of the local parties at the ward and precinct level. Where Ford built his organization from the top down, Reagan built from the bottom up.” The magazine quoted Betty Ford sniping at her husband’s staff: “They just sit back complacently, thinking that the President would be nominated, that it was some sort of shoo-in.” Her husband was barely less hard on himself in an interview with Hugh Sidey: “I’m the first to admit that I’m not an accomplished speaker. My own speechmaking ability from a text is not first class. . . . I have developed a bad reputation both as to speeches and presentation.” Elizabeth Drew found a Ford-friendly congressman who said, “Ford is so inept that we’d have been better off if Nixon had burned the tapes on the back lawn.” Reagan’s speeches at the state conventions now stressed electability—“Look at the record in California, where I was elected in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans almost two to one and I won the governorship by nearly a million-vote margin”—and stole a line from the president’s old argument: Ford was the regional candidate, a minority taste of the Northeast, and Reagan was the national one.
The national headlines were crazy, as usual. On June 22, the news was that all 50,000 employees of the state of Massachusetts were going out on strike and that seventy miles of Long Island beaches were closed when the tide brought in a gagging plague of sewage. On June 24, the front page of the Washington Post included the following stories:
“The Senate intelligence committee said yesterday that senior officials of both the CIA and the FBI covered up crucial information in the course of investigating President Kennedy’s assassination.”
“Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, a central figure in the investigation of former Teamster union President James R. Hoffa’s disappearance, has been indicted on charges involving the 1961 kidnaping and murder of a New Jersey Teamsters official.”
“A 19-year-old Wheaton [Illinois] woman, charged with murder in the beating death of her infant son last April, has told psychiatrists and investigators that she was trying to rid the baby of a demon that had possessed him.”
“The United States vetoed Angola’s application for U.N. membership today because of the ‘continuing presence and apparent influence of Cuban troops’ in the West African nation.”
That same day, Dr. Maurice Sage, president of the Jewish National Fund of America, was about to present Betty Ford with the gift of a ceremonial Bible when he collapsed of a heart attack. As Secret Service agents sought to revive him, the first lady, cool and calm, took the podium to lead the crowd in a silent prayer. Reporters began noticing the button showing up on the lapels of Republican liberals at the state conventions: “Elect Betty’s Husband.”
The evangelicals at Christianity Today responded cruelly. They had recently run an interview with Reagan affirming his evangelical bona fides. “There’s been a wave of humanism and hedonism in the land. However, I am optimistic because I sense in this land a great revolution against this,” he said. “I think there is a hunger in this land for spiritual revival, a return to a belief in moral absolutes—the same morals upon which the nation was founded. . . . When you go out across the country and meet the people you can’t help but pray and remind God of Second Chronicles 7:14, because the people of this country are not beyond redemption. They are good people and believe this nation has a destiny yet unfilled.”
He also said, “There is a widespread but false interpretation in many areas that separation of church and state means separation from God. . . . I don’t think He ever should have been expelled.” Of pornography he said, “You can make immorality legal but you cannot make it moral.” Of the Bible, he affirmed, “I have never had any doubt about it being of divine origin. . . . How can you write off the prophesies in the Old Testament that hundreds of years before the birth of Christ predicted every single facet of his life, his death, and that he was the Messiah?” Concerning abortion—no ambiguity: “I think it comes down to one simple answer: you cannot interrupt a pregnancy without taking a human life.” And he asserted, “I have had an experience that could be described as ‘born again.’ ” The editors captioned the article “Promising Candidate.” Those same editors did not feel so generous toward Ford—whose son was an evangelical seminarian. After the first lady’s call to prayer for God to preserve Dr. Sage’s life, they deadpanned that he “was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital a short time later.”
On the weekend of June 26, Reagan took only ten of forty-two delegates at the convention of Minnesota’s Republican Party (which in a fit of post-Watergate embarrassment had changed its name to “Independent Republican Party”). But Reagan swept all but one of the available delegates in New Mexico, Idaho—and Montana, where party officials had tried to make a truce between the two warring factions by dividing the delegation equally. But as a Ford supporter told the Washington Post, the Reagan team “insisted upon a political bloodbath.”
On June 27 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked an Air France plane bound to Paris from Tel Aviv, forcing a landing at the airport in Entebbe, Uganda, where the hijackers divided the passengers into Jewish and non-Jewish groups, letting the non-Jews go free, like Nazis filling a boxcar for Auschwitz. A twenty-seven-year-old launched his balloon The Spirit of ’76 from New Jersey in an attempt to become the first man to float over the Atlantic. He abandoned the deflating craft, broke three ribs, and was retrieved by the Soviet ship Dekabrist.
Reagan’s advisors announced a series of television broadcasts to “reposition him on the issues,” the Washington Star reported, “to make it easier for voters to identify with his conservative ideology. Where he has spoken in the past of the ‘free enterprise system’ he will now stress ‘jobs.’ ” “There will be an effort to moderate the image,” John Sears told Elizabeth Drew. “We’ll start repositioning for the fall.” On July 1 Joseph Kraft reported a leak that Ford had changed his mind and was considering Reagan for his running mate. James Reston approved, partly: “In fact the Vice Presidency, if it weren’t for the possibility of its leading to the Presidency, is almost perfect for Ronald Reagan: decorative, theatrical, and not too much work.” Reagan did not approve of the idea himself. He said, “Only the lead horse gets a change of view.” He was adamant: the notion of an “ideologically balanced” ticket was a political abomination.
On the front page on July 2, Woodward and Bernstein turned their investigatory attention to the Republican miasma, confronting a senator from Wyoming, Cliff Hansen, with evidence that he had promised seven delegates to Ford in exchange for measures to enhance his state’s oil and gas revenue. He denied it. Then, under the investigative reporters’ cross-examination, he cracked. “Well, maybe I did. Okay, I did. Goddamn you.” On July 3, Ron Nessen dissolved the story in an acid bath of cleverness, asking reporters why, if Ford were trading delegates for oil industry favors, he had sig
ned an energy bill that kept him from winning in Texas.
Then, on July 4, the president embarked on a busy day of travel, to culminate with an appearance on the deck of the carrier USS Nashville to watch the Tall Ships sail into New York Harbor, accompanied by seven special guests—all uncommitted delegates.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
* * *
Bicentennial
IF YOU AWOKE ON INDEPENDENCE Day and flipped open your paper to the Sunday funnies—and you happened to be a member of the suspicious circles—Doonesbury provided a comforting dose of cynicism. A plantation slave hears the bells over the horizon and asks, “Hey! Is that freedom I hear ringing?!” His master reads him something from the morning newspaper: “. . . that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. . . . Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!” The slave asks, “That mean what I think it does?” The master answers, “Probably not, Sammy.” The slave concludes, “You mean Jefferson sold us out?”
The previous evening, in Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo had hissed out a warning: “I hope and pray that nothing happens, but know this—a lot of people are coming to this town who are bent on violence.” Amtrak closed luggage lockers in stations along the Northeast Corridor, a precaution against those who might use them to hide bombs. The People’s Bicentennial Commission promised two hundred thousand marchers on Washington to declare “Independence from Big Business.”
There was plenty, then, for skeptics to feast upon when America celebrated its two hundredth birthday party on July 4, 1976. But the skeptics turned out to be lonely. Everyone else just forgot their fears and had fun. They heeded John Adams, who said when the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, “It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.” And so it was—beginning where light first reached the North American continent, high atop Mars Hills Mountain in Maine, when NBC and CBS began sixteen hours of live coverage with the raising of the Bicentennial flag to the accompaniment of a fifty-gun salute.
Came next a riot of parades and picnics. Kids in their crepe-paper-draped bikes and red wagons. Clanging fire trucks, clambakes, rodeos. Sack races, ox roasts, barbecues—nostalgia, which a grateful nation drank in like so much ice-cold lemonade. America the beautiful. Land of the free, home of the brave. My country ’tis of thee. This land is your land. And it all felt very, very good. Yes: people yearned to believe—suspicious circles be damned.
THE PRESIDENT BEGAN HIS LONG weekend on Thursday, dedicating the new National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (“Confined within these walls and windows are the products of American men and women whose imagination and determination could not be confined.”) He led a ceremony that unveiled a continuous seventy-six-hour display of the nation’s official copies of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. He went by helicopter to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where two thousand pilgrims in two hundred covered wagons from all fifty states camped out in anticipation. There, he signed a bill establishing as a national park the sacred site where General Washington’s Continental Army camped out over the frigid winter of 1777–78—then signed a scroll of 22 million names of Americans pledging to rededicate themselves to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. “Our Bicentennial is the ‘happy birthday’ of all fifty states,” he said, clambering with boyish glee up to the seat of the covered wagon representing his home state, Michigan.
He was next ferried to Philadelphia, where at precisely 2 P.M. he tolled the Centennial Bell thirteen times (the Liberty Bell was too fragile)—one of thousands pealing nationwide, from church towers and town halls and front yards at the exact instant the Declaration was said to have been announced. Then he gave the first of his six speeches that day. (“The world may or may not follow, but we lead because our whole history says we must.”) Queen Elizabeth II stood by his side (she caused a stir by touching the Liberty Bell). A visiting boys choir from Paris sang. The “Mummers” of South Philadelphia’s Italian neighborhoods, famous for their gaily costumed New Year’s parade antics for seventy-five years, delighted children. A 49,000-pound cake was displayed—though an even bigger cake in Baltimore helped celebrate the flag at Fort McHenry that inspired “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Goofy, delirious fun: for America’s sacred days, no massed displays of military weaponry like in those other, less idealistic nations. “A Super Bowl of superlatives,” a columnist in Columbus, Ohio, called it: “the biggest, the loudest, the best and the brightest; a blur of extravaganzas months in anticipation.” The sixty-square-foot cherry pie on display in the aptly named town of George, Washington. That world-record-setting pole-sitter, descending from his perch to delighted cheers in San Jose, California. (Had it been conceived to boost the sales of a car dealership? No one cared.) A goofball arrived in the City of Brotherly Love after pushing a watermelon all the way from Georgia. In Hawaii the telescope at Mauna Kea Observatory focused light from a star precisely two hundred light-years away onto a sensor that triggered a switch that transmitted the current that relit the lantern of one-if-by-land Old North Church in Boston, as the USS Constitution boomed its guns for the first time in a century in a twenty-one-gun salute. A woman in Peoria, Illinois, shouted to a reporter over the blare of a passing parade, “It makes you want to believe in the country!”
An estimated ten thousand immigrants took the oath of citizenship—7,141 in Miami alone. In Lake City, Pennsylvania, a 2,300-citizen town near Lake Erie, workers threw the switch on a landing pad for flying saucers—approved by the federal Bicentennial Administration for listing in the official Bicentennial program—encircled by a red, a white, and a blue ring of light. “We thought if there actually were UFOs, we might as well give them a place to land,” said the project’s director. “This thing is bringing the whole town together. And isn’t that what the Bicentennial is all about?”
The presidential helicopter alighted atop the USS Nashville in New York Harbor. Millions massed on both sides of the Hudson, two hundred thousand people in Weehawken, New Jersey, alone. “We don’t know if those antique railings can hold and frankly we anticipate fatalities,” the mayor warned. But everything turned out fine. They witnessed the magical parade of 224 Tall Ships and thousands of small boats, in the city where the Democrats would hold their nominating convention in a week; then the president was off to Washington, D.C., to review an eighteen-float “Pageant of Freedom” depicting the nation’s history in eight twenty-five-year tableaux, culminating with the 1969 moon shot (though Los Angeles’s parade, which lasted eight hours, was bigger).
Suddenly the nation’s capital was not a seat of wickedness and dissolution. It was lawns honeycombed with happy families, museums bursting with awestruck tourists—and, after darkness fell, the “damnedest fireworks display the world has ever seen,” in the words of the chairman of the convening group, Happy Birthday, U.S.A., whose day job was president of the Giant supermarket chain. People watched from picnic blankets, from hotel rooms, from town-house rooftops in Georgetown, from cars stalled in a massive Bicentennial traffic snarl that somehow seemed to agitate drivers not at all—900,000 happy revelers oohing and aahing over twenty thousand rockets and thirty-three tons of explosives, controlled by a sixteen-mile matrix of electrical wires.
And the president saw it was good. He bade his countrymen good night from the Oval Office: “In its first two centuries the nation has not been able to right every wrong, to correct every injustice, or to reach every worthy goal. But for two hundred years we have tried, and we will continue to strive to make the lives of individual men and women in this country and on this earth better lives—more hopeful and happy, more prosperous and peaceful, more fulfilling and more free. This is our common dedication and it will be our common glory as we enter the third century of the American adventure.” Before his own head hit the p
illow, he would later recollect, he declared a personal victory: “Well, Jerry,” he told himself, “I guess we’ve healed America.”
YOU COULD MOCK.
You could laugh at Mayor Rizzo because his city got half as many tourists as expected because he had scared all the rest away. You could point out that Philadelphia’s original Bicentennial plans for a World’s Fair had been scrapped years earlier, organizers explaining that “national and international hard times” made it impractical. You could laugh at the fact that the lasers during the D.C. fireworks show that were supposed to spell out “Happy Birthday America 1776–1976” did not quite work on cue. You could laugh at Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who’d marched his zombies across the Mall in revolutionary costume, then allegedly gathered them at midnight at the Washington Monument, where they poured their blood into a vat and prayed for True Father’s “success in America.” You could point out the Bronx cheers the president would have earned if he had had the guts to actually set foot in Manhattan—CITY TO FORD: DROP DEAD—instead of hiding on an aircraft carrier watching the ships go by. (One of them, it was reported, the four-masted barkentine from Chile, had been used as a torture chamber by General Pinochet.) You could point out superciliously that many of Philadelphia’s Mummers only a dozen years earlier had pranced about in blackface.
You could point out that the nation being celebrated was more and more one of cynics and smart-asses, the gross and the uncouth (like the broad in the halter top from a home movie of the parade in Minersville, Pennsylvania, who looked into the camera from amid the shirtless and hot-pants-wearing throng, smirked, and threw up a two-handed middle-finger salute). Or that the estimated $400 million spent on the parties, including $51.8 million in federal funds for the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Commission, could have been spent more patriotically by actually making America a better place.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 98