Reagan's Revolution (7 page)

The circumstances surrounding Watergate are well-documented as was their astonishing outcome. But one small, alleged event has never been reported to this day. And had things been different, Nixon, Agnew, Ford, Reagan, and America may well have been part of a drastically altered future.

On Friday, June 16, 1972—the night of the Watergate break-in—a uniformed police officer abandoned patrol of his assigned area, which included the Watergate Complex where the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee were located.
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The officer went to a favorite watering hole for a drink—many drinks as it turned out. The co-owner of the establishment, which was a “swinging singles” bar at the time, recalled hearing from his brother bartender that the officer was drinking bourbon and Coke.
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Late into the evening, the police officer’s handheld radio blared for him with an alert from the police dispatcher, ordering him to investigate curious goings on in the Watergate Complex. Frank Wills, the twenty-four-year-old security guard on duty at the time, reported the suspicious activity at the hotel to the D.C. police.
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Too inebriated to respond, the officer—at the bartender’s suggestion— radioed back that he was low on gas and proceeded to tell the dispatcher to send back-up.
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Around 2:00 Saturday morning the backup police officers arrived at the Watergate—the three undercover cops dressed as civilians, driving a beat-up car, were Sergeant Paul Leper and Officers John Barret and Carl Shollfer.
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The spotter for the burglars, in the hotel across from the Watergate Complex, did not notify the team by walkie-talkie that a car containing three harmless “civilians” had arrived in front of the Watergate.

The “civilians,” accompanied by Wills, made the famous arrest of the five Watergate burglars around 2:30 A.M. on June 17, 1972. “They were surprised at gunpoint by three plain-clothes officers of the metropolitan police department in a sixth-floor office at the plush Watergate . . . where the Democratic National Committee occupies the entire floor,” wrote
Washington Post
police reporter Alfred E. Lewis. Eight reporters contributed to the story, including Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
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One can only wonder how the world might be different today had a police car appeared with sirens wailing and lights flashing with a uniformed police officer there to investigate. It would have given the spotter plenty of time to reach the burglars on their walkie-talkies so they could make their escape. Instead, a civilian car with three undercover cops arrived, possibly changing the careers of thousands and the world for millions of people and transforming forever American history. Instead of becoming a mysterious and unsolved crime, earning maybe a small mention in the
Washington Post
, it became one of the biggest stories in the history of American journalism and would lead to the unprecedented resignation of a U.S. President.

Two other critical events led to Gerald Ford’s ascension from Vice President to Chief Executive and helped to open a door to Reagan that had been welded shut. Michael McShane, a young aide to Congressman John Rooney, Democrat of New York, told of one late evening in 1974 when Congressman Rooney called him into his office to “sit down, shut up, and listen” to the tale of former Congressman Emanuel Celler.

Celler, who had been the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, had lost in a bitter and unexpected primary to Elizabeth Holtzman in 1972. Holtzman was a passionate liberal who despised Republicans, conservatives, and Richard Nixon. She successfully tapped into the liberal base in the district to upset Celler. Celler’s political supporters urged him to run in the fall against Holtzman as an Independent, assuring him he would win with a bigger turnout, but Celler declined. Celler’s departure from the Congress elevated Peter Rodino of New Jersey to the Chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee, where he aggressively pursued the Watergate investigation.
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Celler told Rooney and the enraptured McShane that if he had stayed in Congress, he never would have pursued Watergate, fearing it would tear apart the country, which is precisely what it did. “John, if I were still chairman of the committee, I would not have held a single hearing. I would not have put the country through this. And John, there is no one in the House, including the Speaker, who could have forced me to hold a hearing,” McShane remembered Celler declaring.
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Of course, Celler had the luxury of addressing the issue in hindsight. Still, there is no doubt that Rodino was a fiercely partisan Democrat, much more so than Celler.

The third event that would lead to Reagan’s 1976 campaign was the abrupt decision of Spiro Agnew to resign in the fall of 1973. Agnew had been accused of taking cash kickbacks for years from contractors in Maryland, first as a county executive and later as Governor. Agnew was also suspected of taking the money even as Vice President, including in his official office in the White House complex.

In January of 1973, just as the second inaugural of Nixon and Agnew was taking place, an ambitious new Republican U.S. Attorney for Maryland, George Beall, was investigating corruption between local and state government officials and contractors. He had blanketed the state with open subpoenas in his fishing expedition.

Among knowledgeable Marylanders, kickbacks for contracts were known to be a common practice. Maryland ranked right up there with New Jersey, Illinois, and Louisiana in its reputation for doing business in this fashion. Beall was not looking to haul in the biggest fish he would eventually land, but Agnew’s undoing came nonetheless, when a small-time contractor, Lester Matz, met with his lawyer, Joseph H. H. Kaplan, to solicit advice on his subpoena.

Kaplan advised his client to tell the investigators everything he knew. Matz pressed Kaplan, and his attorney renewed his advice. Matz waffled and suggested he could not cooperate. Now Kaplan pressed his client. Why? “Because,” Matz blurted out, “I have been paying off the Vice President.”
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The
Wall Street Journal
and later the
Washington Post
broke the story in July of 1973, and Agnew vowed to fight the accusations. When the story first appeared, it did not initially have any negative effect on the Vice President. But after several months of an unremitting drumbeat of negative stories coming out of Maryland, it began to take its toll. He had always been the frontrunner for the 1976 GOP nomination, but by the end of August of 1973 Agnew’s support among Republicans for the 1976 nomination had fallen to 22 percent, putting him into a virtual tie with Governor Reagan.

Agnew continued to fight the allegations for some months until October 10, 1973, when White House military aide Mike Dunn, whom the Agnew staff detested, gathered them together to inform them that Agnew was at the moment in his limousine on his way to the Baltimore Federal Courthouse to plead
nolo
contendere
to one count of tax evasion. Dunn also told them that Agnew would resign as Vice President of the United States.

Agnew’s staffers, including Elizabeth Leonard, were stunned, embarrassed, and angry. Keene, then Agnew’s political consigliore, slammed his hand down on the table and shouted, “Then the bastard should have told us himself.”
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Rumors swirled around the nation’s capital in the days after Agnew resigned as to the rea- son for his departure—including stories of political blackmail by people wanting him out of the Vice Presidency. Another quiet rumor was that Agnew had a mistress on his staff and fear of disclosure by some of his political enemies in the White House forced him to resign.

Myron Mintz, a young attorney who had worked for Donald Rumsfeld at the Cost of Living Council before joining the firm of Colson & Shapiro, recalled several meetings and phone calls between Agnew and White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig. At his firm, Mintz had been asked by Chuck Colson to help out on Agnew’s case against the Justice Department. He remembered the dark threats leveled at the beleaguered Vice President.
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Indeed, Agnew recounted in his book,
Go Quietly . . . Or Else
that Haig was, “totally self-centered, ambitious, and ruthless.” Further, Haig sent a message via Dunn to Agnew that things could “get nasty—and dirty.”
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Haig turned the screws on Agnew, telling him in September of 1973 that his indictment was imminent and that his resignation must be forthcoming. Haig later threatened that “anything may be in the offing.” Agnew feared for his life.
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Washington was thunderstruck. Only John C. Calhoun had previously resigned the Vice Presidency in December of 1832. Calhoun had feuded with President Andrew Jackson and cast the tie-breaking vote to defeat Jackson’s appointment of Martin Van Buren as Ambassador to Great Britain. After he was elected to the Senate in South Carolina, Calhoun resigned as Vice President to take his seat as his home state debated nullification of federal tariffs.

Agnew’s resignation may have been even more earth-shattering in Washington than the resignation of Nixon ten months later. Agnew’s resignation inured some people against Nixon’s departure. Throughout those ten months, White House staffers dropped like flies as they were subpoenaed, indicted, convicted, and sentenced. Their seemingly daily testimony before Congress and the drumbeat of news stories added to the eventual numbing process occurring in the country over Watergate.

With Agnew gone, the Republican Party was without a frontrunner for the 1976 nomination. But Watergate had not yet set off a public scramble inside the Republican Party. From day one, Agnew had made it clear that he wanted to run for President and had spent five years giving voice to the middle class and the “silent majority,” echoing their frustration with the anti-war movement, race riots, the growing unseemliness of the culture, and the discord on American college campuses.

Before Agnew’s resignation, the Watergate burglars had pled guilty and the convictions of G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord were just the tip of the iceberg. The nascent investigations had just begun to create a climate of widespread distrust of the government. At this point, Nixon hoped only to survive to 1976. To this end he needed a replacement for Agnew, and not a prospective successor. Congressman Gerald Ford, whom Nixon had known from his days in the House, was not his first choice. But Ford, in meeting with Nixon, assured him that he would not seek the GOP nomination in 1976 and would support the candidacy of John Connally, which satisfied Nixon.

Author Richard Reeves, who had little respect for Gerald Ford and his people, did capture the mindset of Richard Nixon when it came to selecting Ford as his new Vice President. In his book,
A Ford, Not a Lincoln
, he wrote,

Gerald Ford was not Richard Nixon’s first choice. He was his last choice, in more ways than one. In the privacy of his own White House, Nixon had contempt for Ford—to the point, according to one man on the President’s staff at the time, that he had Haig deliver the “good news” to Ford because he literally could not bring himself to do it.

The man Nixon wanted to appoint, insisted on appointing, was John Connally, the former Democratic Governor of Texas who had become a Republican and his Secretary of the Treasury. The President insisted while his advisers—particularly Alexander Haig, his Chief of Staff, and Melvin Laird, his most important counselor—argued vehemently that Connally would never be confirmed by Congress. The Texan was too controversial and too dangerous, he was a political turncoat whose extensive business dealings at home and in Washington were too vulnerable to FBI checks and confirmation hearings under the 25th Amendment.
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On December 6, 1973, the Senate and House confirmed Nixon’s appointment of Gerald Ford by votes of 92-3 and 387-35, and he became the fortieth Vice President of the United States. Ford later expressed his resentment at the votes against him, charging “partisanship.”

When Ford was confirmed, some around Reagan believed once again that the White House was not an option for the Californian. While he was not constitutionally limited to two terms, Reagan had earlier ruled out a third term as Governor of California. He was burnt out on Sacramento politics and fighting with the Democrats in the legislature. Frankly, he liked the freedom of the lecture circuit where he could speak his mind instead of dealing with the niggling, day-to-day bargaining with the Democrats in Sacramento.

Some in his camp had urged Reagan to run for the U.S. Senate from California in the 1974 campaign against the eventual winner, liberal Democrat Alan Cranston. Cranston had been the leader of a “Democratic Truth Squad” in the 1970 campaign, where he literally stalked Reagan from campaign stop to campaign stop. He irritated the hell out of Reagan. But those who knew Reagan knew he was not interested in being a member of a committee and thus would not have been happy in the U.S. Senate, especially in the minority. Reagan had been a leader all his life, in all aspects of his life. He never viewed himself as a follower of the crowd.

Meanwhile, Reagan’s men, led in part by Franklyn “Lyn” Nofziger and Edwin Meese, had already begun informal meetings in early 1973, even before Agnew’s resignation, to discuss Reagan’s political future. Nofziger, a former reporter, had become a political public relations operative who would never have come over from Central Casting. Hard-bitten, tough, and loyal to a fault, he was also a key link for the Reaganites to the conservative movement and to many key offices in Washington, D.C.

Nofziger was widely known and respected in the Republican Party for his political acumen and bad puns, but he was also a peerless quipster. In 1980, at the Republican National Convention in Detroit, a group of senior advisors to Reagan was reviewing the list of his prospective Vice Presidential choices. Nofziger was asked his opinion of Donald “Rummy” Rumsfeld going on the ticket with Reagan. Mindful of Rumsfeld’s famous overarching ambition, Nofziger replied, “Rummy would be fine, but you realize we’ll have to hire a food taster for Reagan!”
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