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

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Preface

  CHAPTER ONE: “Small and Suspicious Circles”

  CHAPTER TWO: Stories

  CHAPTER THREE: Let Them Eat Brains

  CHAPTER FOUR: Executive Privilege

  CHAPTER FIVE: “A Whale of a Good Cheerleader”

  CHAPTER SIX: Sam Ervin

  CHAPTER SEVEN: John Dean

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Nostalgia

  CHAPTER NINE: The Year Without Christmas Lights

  CHAPTER TEN: “That Thing Upstairs Isn’t My Daughter”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Hank Aaron

  CHAPTER TWELVE: “Here Comes the Pitch!”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Judging

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: “There Used to Be a President Who Didn’t Lie”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: New Right?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Watergate Babies

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Star

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Governing

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: “Disease, Disease, Disease”

  CHAPTER TWENTY: New Right

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Weimar Summer

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: The Nation’s Soul

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: “Has the Gallup Poll Gone Bananas?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Negatives Are Positives

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: “Not the Candidate of Kooks”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Born Again

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: “Always Shuck the Tamale”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: They Yearned to Believe

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Bicentennial

  CHAPTER THIRTY: “You’re in the Catbird Seat”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: “Don’t Let Satan Have His Way—Stop the ERA”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: The End?

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  About Rick Perlstein

  Index

  Photo Credits

  To the memory of my father, Jerry Perlstein

  If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.

  —ADVICE TO RICHARD NIXON FROM NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV

  PREFACE

  THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT how Ronald Reagan came within a hairsbreadth of becoming the 1976 Republican nominee for president. But it is also about much more. In the years between 1973 and 1976, America suffered more wounds to its ideal of itself than at just about any other time in its history. First in January 1973, when Richard Nixon declared America’s role in the Vietnam War over after some eight years (if you count it from the first major air strikes and Marine landings in 1965) or nine years (if you count it from the congressional authorization that followed the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964) or twelve years (if you count the first major infusion of fifteen thousand U.S. military “advisors” in 1961) of fighting. Some 58,000 Americans dead, $699 billion expended in American treasure: Nixon called this “peace with honor,” but that just obscured the fact that America had lost its first war. Then, almost immediately, televised hearings on the complex of presidential abuses known as Watergate revealed the men entrusted with the White House as little better, or possibly worse, than common criminals, in what a senator called “a national funeral that just goes on day after day.” Then in October came the Arab oil embargo—and suddenly Americans learned overnight that the commodity that underpinned their lifestyle was vulnerable to “shocks,” and the world’s mightiest economy could be held hostage by some mysterious cabal of Third World sheikhs.

  This list omits a dozen smaller traumas in between. (One of my favorites, lost to everyday historical memory, was the near doubling of meat prices in the spring of 1973, when the president’s consumer advisor went on TV and informed viewers that “liver, kidney, brains, and heart can be made into gourmet meals with seasoning, imagination, and more cooking time.”) In the next few years the traumas continued, compounding: The end of a presidency, accompanied by fears Richard Nixon might seek to hold on to his office by force of arms. Inflation such as America had never known during peacetime. A recession that saw hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers idled during Christmastime; crime at a volume and ghastliness greater, according to one observer, “than at any time since the fifteenth century.” Senate and House hearings on the Central Intelligence Agency that accused American presidents since Dwight Eisenhower of commanding squads of lawless assassins.

  With these traumas emerged a new sort of American politics—a stark discourse of reckoning. What kind of nation were we to suffer such humiliations, so suddenly, so unceasingly, so unexpectedly? A few pages hence, you will read these words from one expert: “For the first time, Americans have had at least a partial loss in the fundamental belief in ourselves. We’ve always believed we were the new men, the new people, the new society. The ‘last best hope on earth,’ in Lincoln’s terms. For the first time, we’ve really begun to doubt it.” And that was only February 1973. By 1976, a presidential year, such observations would become so routine that when the nation geared up for a massive celebration of its Bicentennial, it was common for editorialists and columnists to question whether America deserved to hold a birthday party at all—and whether the party could come off without massive bloodshed, given that there had been eighty-nine bombings attributed to terrorism in 1975. The liberals at the New Republic reflected upon the occasion of the most harrowing 1975 trauma—the military collapse of our ally South Vietnam, the nation on behalf of which we had expended those thousands of lives and billions of dollars—that “[i]f the Bicentennial helps us focus on the contrast between our idealism and our crimes, so much the better.”

  The most ambitious politicians endeavored to speak to this new national mood. An entire class of them—“Watergate babies”—were swept into Congress in 1975, pledging thoroughgoing reform of America’s broken institutions. And nearly alone among ambitious politicians, Ronald Reagan took a different road.

  RETURNING TO THE NATION’S ATTENTION toward the end of his second term as California governor, as pundits began speculating about which Republican might succeed Richard Nixon (and then which ones might succeed his replacement, Gerald Ford), Reagan, whenever he was asked about Watergate, insisted it said nothing important about the American character at all. Asked about Vietnam, he’d say the only dishonor was that America had not expended enough violence—that “the greatest immorality is to ask young men to fight or die for my country if it’s not a cause we are willing to win.” One of the quotes he liked to repeat in those years came from Pope Pius XII, writing in Collier’s magazine in 1945, when the United States was on top of the world: “The American people have a genius for great and unselfish deeds. Into the hands of America, God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind.”

  When Reagan began getting attention for talking this way, in America’s season of melancholy, Washington’s touts cited him only to dismiss him. No one who called the Watergate burglars “well-meaning individuals committed to the reelection of the President . . . not criminals at heart,” as Reagan had in the spring of 1973, could be taken seriously as a political comer. But a central theme of my previous two books chronicling conservatism’s ascendency in American politics has been
the myopia of pundits, who so frequently fail to notice the very cultural ground shifting beneath their feet. In fact, at every turn in America’s reckoning with its apparent decline, there were always dissenting voices.

  They said things like: Richard Nixon just couldn’t be a bad guy. And that America just couldn’t be surrendering its role as God’s chosen nation: not possible. At first such voices sounded mainly in the interstices of America’s political discourse—in letters to the editor; among right-wing institution builders whose industriousness exploiting the cultural confusions of the 1970s was being largely ignored by the guardians of polite opinion; in conservative churches whose pews grew more crowded even as experts insisted religious belief was in radical decline. (“Christians must accept being a definite minority for the time being,” one professor told a reporter for a widely republished wire story in 1976.) But these voices were moving from the margins to the center.

  This was related to what Ronald Reagan was accomplishing politically. But things shifted independently of him, too. “Nation’s Hunger to Feel Good Erupts in Fever of Patriotism,” ran one wire service headline about the Bicentennial celebration on July 4, 1976. The keynote of articles like this, which were common, was surprise—surprise that it wasn’t so hard to unapologetically celebrate America, after all. “The feeling of the day sort of crept up on many of us, took us by surprise,” as Elizabeth Drew, Washington’s most sure-footed chronicler of the passing political scene and certainly no conservative herself, wrote in her own article about that special day. “There was a spirit to it that could not have been anticipated. For those of us who had been in despair about this Bicentennial Fourth of July, who feared the worst, the surprise was a very pleasing one.”

  This book is about how that shift in national sentiment took place.

  THIS BOOK IS ALSO A sort of biography of Ronald Reagan—of Ronald Reagan, rescuer. He had been a sullen little kid from a chaotic, alcoholic home, whose mother’s passion for saving fallen souls could never save her own husband. It also seemed to have kept her out of the house almost constantly. But by the time of Ronald Reagan’s adolescence, the boy who told his friends to call him “Dutch” had cultivated an extraordinary gift in the act of rescuing himself: the ability to radiate blithe optimism in the face of what others called chaos—to reimagine the morass in front of him as a tableau of simple moral clarity. He did the same thing as a politician: skillfully reframing situations that those of a more critical temper saw as irresolvable muddles (like, say, the Vietnam War) as crystalline black-or-white melodramas. This was a key to what made others feel so good in his presence, what made them so eager and willing to follow him—what made him a leader.

  But it was why, simultaneously, he was such a controversial leader. Others witnessing precisely this quality saw him as a phony and a hustler. In this book, Ronald Reagan is not a uniter. He is in essence a divider. And understanding the precise ways that opinions about him divided Americans—as in my earlier book that focused on the national divisions revolving around Richard Nixon—better helps us understand our political order of battle today: how Americans divide themselves from each other.

  The pattern emerged extraordinarily early. In 1966, when Reagan, the TV host and former actor in B movies, shocked the political universe by winning the Republican nomination for California governor, a young aspiring journalist named Ralph Keyes began researching a profile of him (it never got published). Industriously, Keyes tracked down acquaintances who had attended tiny Eureka College in central Illinois with Reagan, or taught him there, between 1928 and 1932. The divergent recollections of Reagan map precisely onto how they would sound if you corralled a random sample of politically attuned citizens today. Half remembered him as a hero, a figure of destiny:

  “Always articulate, always had an idea, always moving, always had a program, always with action and words. My sister is a classmate of his and what she and others thought was that he had a future.”

  “He was a respected leader of campus life. He was a first-class gentleman . . . a conscientious, dedicated fellow. He was always committed to principles and big ideals.”

  And half judged him precisely the opposite, shallow at best, a manipulative fraud at worst:

  “Dutch was the cautious big man on a small campus. He’d run a mile to avoid a controversy . . . if this is governor of California material I don’t know what I am. . . . Very immature, strictly rah-rah . . . He was a very personable guy but I never felt he was really a human being, that he ever did anything spontaneously.”

  “[A] whale of a good cheerleader . . . Reagan made his biggest impression on me in leading yells.”

  “Ronald Reagan was a man who was spending a great deal of time impressing the populace with little evidence of depth. . . . I don’t think he is intelligent enough to be cynical.”

  Before Reagan had served a single day in any political office, a polarity of opinion was set—and it endured forevermore. On one side: those who saw him as the rescuer, hero, redeemer. Read a handwritten get-well note he received after the 1981 assassination attempt against him. It referred to his first job, as a youthful lifeguard: “I met you in the 20s in Lowell Park, Illinois. Do you remember the good times we had in the 20s. You were 17 years old then and everyone called you Duch [sic]. Please get well soon. We need you to save this country—remember all the lives you saved in Lowell Park.” The letter appears in a religious biography of Reagan that argues that his coming into the world, culminating with his single-handed defeat of the Soviet empire, was literally providential, the working out of God’s plan.

  On the other side: those who found Reagan a phony, a fraud, or a toady. The first time such an opinion of Reagan shows up in the historical record is in his high school yearbook. He’s depicted fishing a suicide out of the water, who begs, “Don’t rescue me. I want to die.” Reagan responds, “Well, you’ll have to postpone that: I want a medal.” Like the Reagan-worship, the Reagan-hate lives on. I think of a friend who grew up in California in the 1960s and ’70s. I’d wanted to share this manuscript with her, thinking it would benefit from her brilliance. She told me that I’d best not send it; she couldn’t think straight about Reagan for her rage. Her beef, and that of millions of others, was simple: that all that turbulence in the 1960s and ’70s had given the nation a chance to finally reflect critically on its power, to shed its arrogance, to become a more humble and better citizen of the world—to grow up—but Reagan’s rise nipped that imperative in the bud. Immanuel Kant defined the Enlightenment, the sweeping eighteenth-century intellectual-cum-political movement that saw all settled conceptions of society thrown up in the air, which introduced radical new notions of liberty and dignity, dethroned God, and made human reason the new measure of moral worth—a little like the 1960s and ’70s—as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” For these citizens what Reagan achieved foreclosed that imperative: that Americans might learn to question leaders ruthlessly, throw aside the silly notion that American power was always innocent, and think like grown-ups. They had been proposing a new definition of patriotism, one built upon questioning authority and unsettling ossified norms. Then along came Ronald Reagan, encouraging citizens to think like children, waiting for a man on horseback to rescue them: a tragedy.

  The division was there even among his own offspring. Maureen, for instance, his eldest, who became a Republican activist, wrote of the time her father as governor missed one more in a train of important milestones in her life (he was away representing President Nixon at an international meeting in Denmark). She cast it in the most optimistic possible way: “I think dad always regretted times like these, at least a little bit, the way the tug and pull of his public life kept him from enjoying firsthand the successes of his children. Oh, he enjoyed them with us in spirit, and he was always there for us emotionally.” She wrote in a similar way of both her and her brother Michael missing their father’s wedding to his second wife because they were both stashed away by their self-ab
sorbed parents at boarding schools: it was for the best—“because my folks wanted only the smallest of ceremonies.” She was her father’s daughter. In this book you will read how Ronald Reagan framed even the most traumatic events in his life—even his father’s funeral—as always working out gloriously in the end, evidence that the universe was just.

  At the other pole there was his other daughter, Patti, a rock-and-rolling liberal. She wrote, “I had been taught to keep secrets, to keep our image intact for the world. . . . Under our family’s definition of ‘loyalty,’ the public should never see that under a carefully preserved surface was a group of people who knew how to inflict wounds, and then convincingly say those wounds never existed.” She wrote of how her mother, Nancy, beat her, was addicted to pills, and used their house’s state-of-the-art intercom system (installed by General Electric, their corporate benefactor) as a tool for Orwellian surveillance. (Maureen described that same intercom system as a providential gift, writing of the time it broadcast the sound of little Ron, the youngest, crashing to the floor in the nursery, allowing them to save his life.)

  Call Maureen’s version “denial”—liberals are always accusing conservatives of a politics of being in denial. Call Patti a cynic, always seeing everything in a negative light—and God knows conservatives are always accusing liberals of doing that. Optimism, pessimism; America the innocent, America the compromised: these incommensurate polarities have come to be part of the very structure of the left-versus-right order of battle in American political life—as much as the debate over the role of government led by Barry Goldwater that I described in my first book, Before the Storm; and the culture war between mutually recriminating cultural sophisticates on the one hand and the plain, earnest “Silent Majority” on the other that I wrote about my second, Nixonland.

  NOTE WELL, THOUGH, THAT REAGAN’S side in this battle of political affect, which is carried out far above the everyday minutiae of policy debates and electoral tallies, has prevailed. Listen to Liz Cheney in 2009, speaking for Republican multitudes: “I believe unequivocally, unapologetically, America is the best nation that ever existed in history, and clearly that exists today.” And here is Mitt Romney, accepting the Republican nomination in 2012, speaking of the day he watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon: “Like all Americans we went to bed that night knowing we lived in the greatest country in the world.” He’d been saying the same sort of thing on the campaign trail all year, in nearly every speech: a Google search for “Mitt Romney” and “greatest nation in the history of the earth” just yielded me 114,000 hits.