So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (31 page)

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My name appears on the infamous White House “enemies list,” and I was involved, from the beginning, in what quickly became called Watergate. The day after the burglary, I was having breakfast with Larry O’Brien, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee, at a restaurant in New York City. We were going over different possibilities for hotel accommodations at the upcoming 1972 convention in Miami Beach, when a waiter came up and said there was a telephone call for him. Larry took the call on a large phone brought to the table, and I heard him say, “Really. Well, what did they take? What’s missing? No kidding? The police thought they planned to stay all night? Strange. Well, keep me informed—let me know whatever happens. Thanks.” And he hung up, turned to me, and said, “Some burglars were caught inside our offices in Washington last night, and, it seems, according to early police reports, that they didn’t steal anything.” We returned to our conversation, never pausing for a moment to think something significant might have happened.

The burglary itself was, indeed, irrelevant. Anybody who knew anything about American politics knew the Democratic National Committee, and O’Brien, were, with all due respect, irrelevant to the action, to the issues the party faced, and to the decisions it had to make. But many insights have yet to be gained from the events and policies now subsumed under “Watergate”—in American popular culture, the gold standard for presidential deceit. For example, President Nixon sought to link the McGovern campaign to the shooting by Arthur Bremer of Alabama’s governor, George Wallace. The key moment in the tapes is when Nixon tells Charles Colson (too late, as it turns out), “Get someone out to Bremer’s place now to plant some McGovern literature.” It’s chilling. Political assassination and attempted assassination are, thank goodness, relatively rare in the United States, and this may be the only time we have access to how a top leader, in this case President Nixon, reacted. Maybe when news of JFK’s killing arrived, some top U.S. political leaders said, “Good, I’m glad the SOB is gone.” But we have nothing like the sheer political calculation on the Nixon tapes. When news of Lincoln’s killing spread through Washington, D.C., for example, did Republican leaders on Capitol Hill say, “Quick, let’s leave some documents in John Wilkes Booth’s rooming house linking him to the Democrats?” Nixon’s action also shows, among other things, that Nixon was far from assuming he could win, let alone in a landslide. He was worried about the campaign in the fall.

There’s something else about Watergate that goes back to my post–World War II years as a student at UCLA. Literary critics teach us that to remain believable, fiction writers cannot follow real-life events too closely—that what really happens is most often too weird to be believed as fiction. By this standard, this story will never appear in a novel: I had ties to John Ehrlichman, who became Nixon’s chief domestic adviser, and H. R. Haldeman, his chief of staff, dating back to when we were all undergraduates at UCLA. Ehrlichman, actually, was practically redeemed in our early years together by his sense of humor (when he asked me to pledge his fraternity, I said I would have to consult my rabbi, and that ended the conversation). But we remained sort of friends until we left UCLA and even had a bet whether or not I could get the word “sedulously” into my speech at graduation. Haldeman, on the other hand, was always dour, humorless, and pure right-wing.

When he was in prison for crimes committed while Richard Nixon’s White House chief of staff, Haldeman began to tell at least one journalist, interviewing him in prison, unbelievably, his belief the impetus for most of the animosity during what he called “all of Watergate” emanated from a 1947 incident in which I, as editor of the UCLA
Daily Bruin
newspaper, had reprinted a story from one of L.A.’s daily newspapers about how Haldeman’s fraternity, as part of hazing its pledges, had captured and killed a puppy by kicking it to death in a paper bag. The dean of students had urged me to withhold the story, because, he said, it would “make UCLA fraternities look bad.” It did, but I made the story a small item, buried on the inside pages, and it had, as far as I can remember, absolutely no impact. And yet there it was, apparently key to Haldeman’s thinking as he sat in prison for Watergate-related crimes. For the first time in U.S. history, a president had resigned; civil liberties had been compromised by the White House; and the United States was still providing military support to a corrupt and repressive government in South Vietnam. And yet Haldeman imagined his problems to come from my personal animus, dating back to when we were both in our early twenties. According to Haldeman, I had “spread the lies” about Watergate to the media—all because of the puppy and the fraternity. If I had indeed possessed that kind of power over the media, George McGovern would have served two terms as president.

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In 1972 the McGovern campaign was a kind of turning point in terms of the impact of television on campaigns. There were a lot of values of the 1950s and 1960s, in terms of how you ran a campaign, tugging at us. But there were new things coming, and we had to understand them. We paid a little more attention to television in 1972 than we had in 1968. But the 1976 presidential race was probably the first major television campaign, the first conducted entirely on television. All presidential campaigns since then have been conducted with a view to what is going to appear on home screens—until surpassed perhaps by the still-evolving emergence of social media, which seems to be creating its own rules of communicating, debating, stimulating passion, and defining “reality.”

After Watergate, Jimmy Carter came across for a while as possibly a good reformer. His acoustics were good. Strong on civil rights. A mother who, at a relatively old age, had served as a volunteer in the Peace Corps. The war in Vietnam was over, so as long as he seemed committed to avoiding military adventurism, his statements on Vietnam did not seem to matter. Strong lefty journalists like Hunter S. Thompson of
Rolling Stone
were enthusiastic about him. He was a veteran of the U.S. Navy, submarine duty, and seemed like the kind of progressive Southerner who might be able to put a majority Democratic coalition back together. LBJ’s civil rights legislation had transformed most Southern Democrats into Southern Republicans, and Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority” had found a home in his “Southern strategy.” Oppose busing. Tell voters it’s good to worry about crime and “welfare abuse.” Blast the Black Panthers and everyone who spoke about Black Power. Create and stir up fear. Use racist fear without mentioning it.

As the campaign of 1976 became imminent, Governor Carter had invited me to fly down to Plains, Georgia, and stay with him and Rosalynn for a few days as a houseguest. I’d never met him before. “I want you to run my presidential campaign,” he said on our first evening together, but as my three days there were winding up, I felt as though I still had not connected with him. As it was almost time for me to leave, I asked him, “Imagine you have run and won and served two terms—eight years. As you leave the White House, what do you think will be your greatest accomplishment?” Carter thought, and replied, “Making government agencies run more efficiently.” Making the government run more efficiently! I politely turned down the opportunity to work for him, and when he ran for reelection in 1980, he became the only Democratic presidential candidate in my entire life for whom I did not vote.

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Ronald Reagan’s legacy must include the legacy of Hollywood. He learned not only his words but his characters. Hollywood had learned in the golden age of the 1940s what Americans want to be told about what kind of people they are as well as what to expect in life. Ronald Reagan had mastered it all, and mastered it well—the optimism, the candor, the will to win—he was a true role model. And like Hollywood, he forever told fanciful stories and made them seem to be true. Part of his legacy is that he taught us we could learn more about America on the sets of Warner Bros. than at any statehouse or in the halls of Congress. And this, of course, was not a situation Reagan created. His predecessor, Jimmy Carter, had hosted a White House ceremony at which he gave the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to John Wayne, because, in Carter’s words, Wayne was a “great American.” But John Wayne was not a great American. He wasn’t even a great actor. He was an actor who
played
great Americans.

That being said, I liked Ronald Reagan personally. He called me, for example, after I wrote him a short note thanking him for awarding a belated congressional medal to Robert Kennedy at a nice ceremony at the White House. I was walking through an airport, and a voice over the loudspeaker asked me to pick up a service phone for a message (those were the days long before cell phones). An operator asked me to hold please for the president. Reagan came on and apologized for being so tardy in thanking me for the warmth and sincerity in my note. That he took the time to call me, someone who obviously opposed him and virtually all of his policies, was impressive enough. His tone and his manner and the way he came across were completely disarming, and we talked about movies for about ten minutes. If he had said to me, in that moment, “Frank, I’d like you to forsake your ideals and come help me dismantle Social Security,” my immediate reaction might well have been, “Of course. I’ll be right over.”

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I also had a close relationship with Lyn Nofziger, one of Reagan’s top political aides. Lyn and I, unlikely as it may seem, were good friends, off and on, for fifty years. During that time, I doubt we ever agreed on any public matter (except for one, on which I dwell in a few moments). His consistency in some other matters is worth noting: I never saw him without a tie, its design usually a variant of Mickey Mouse, nor did I ever see his collar buttoned. The tie was always well knotted, but an inch or two below his throat. We first talked during the 1950s, when he was a journalist at Copley Newspapers in San Diego and I was a sometime Democratic campaign official and an aspiring lawyer. We debated occasionally, although it always seemed difficult for him to take the disputes as seriously as his colleagues did.

We came together, I recall ruefully, in 1967, when he was the press secretary for Ronald Reagan, the newly elected governor of California, and I had the same job for the relatively new U.S. Senator from New York, Robert Kennedy. Years later, after Lyn went to work at the White House as the assistant to President Reagan for political affairs, I sent Lyn a copy of a column I had written a few years before, attacking and satirizing the attempt by some organized do-gooders to inflict the metric system on Americans, a negative view of mine Lyn had enthusiastically endorsed. So, in 1981, when I reminded him that a commission actually existed to further the adoption of the metric system and the damage we both felt this could wreak on our country, Lyn went to work with research material the two of us had pulled together. He was able, he told me, to prevail on the president to dissolve the commission and make sure that, at least in the Reagan presidency, there would be no further effort to sell metric. It was a noteworthy victory, but one that we recognized would—at least for a few years—have to be shared only between the two of us, lest public opinion once again begin to head toward metrification.

We debated after that, from time to time, on some cable television show or other, but often found we agreed, or that our respect for each other made the venom the talk shows sought (and alas, still seek) disappear, and made our friendly participation less suitable for audiences accustomed to near violence. In the early years of the twenty-first century, we talked from time to time about starting a program ourselves, but Lyn always begged off on the grounds he was overworked. I suspect the “overwork” consisted largely of a battle against cancer he never mentioned. When his doctor gave him the diagnosis, I’m betting he eventually chuckled and then loosened his tie.

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The United States seems to be taking a hard turn to the right—for Democrats and Republicans—as money and media increasingly dominate public life. This can be seen, in part, by the language of presidential labels. John F. Kennedy, accepting his party’s presidential nomination, first mentioned to a national audience his “New Frontier.” The phrase, of course, took hold, and the Kennedy administration
became
the New Frontier. In the intervening half century, however, no other phrase has come along to describe a presidency in any similarly strong way. This absence is notable, particularly because JFK was proceeding on a path taken by at least four of his predecessors in the previous fifty years.

Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned by offering “a New Deal for the American People,” and once in the White House he continued—and encouraged others—to talk about the New Deal. He was harking back, slogan-wise, to his most recent Democratic predecessor as president, Woodrow Wilson, whose “New Freedom” had found considerable resonance in 1912, and to his Republican forebear Theodore Roosevelt, whose “Square Deal” had been the first catchphrase to serve as the signature description of a presidency. One would think a pattern had been set, given the communications revolution of first radio and then television, but in the terms of eleven chief executives after FDR—twelve if you count the current president—only Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal” and JFK’s “New Frontier” have followed.

Interestingly, those phrases came to describe not only an administration but also its operatives and supporters. Just as JFK’s followers became “New Frontiersmen,” FDR’s people were “New Dealers” and Truman’s were “Fair Dealers.”

How, then, do we account for the absence of any descriptive term for a presidency since 1960? Richard Nixon had his “Silent Majority,” but that didn’t define his presidency. Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” was a useful label for a set of domestic objectives, but it was hardly a New Frontier. (Could one describe, say, Joe Califano as a Great Societor?) Jimmy Carter is still touched by “malaise.” Gerald Ford had the unforgettable tag “I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln,” but no memorable description for his administration. Ronald Reagan brought “morning in America,” but that and even the phrases associated with both Presidents Bush (“Read my lips: No new taxes” and “Compassionate conservatism,” respectively) referred more to the presidents’ campaigns than to their administrations. Bill Clinton won by running on a “new breed” of Democrat and a bridge to the twenty-first century but without any slogan that stuck.