Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (14 page)

Corporate and labor PACs had a great deal of company in Washington during the 1970s and beyond. Lobbyists representing minority groups, women, the handicapped, and gay people joined a swarm of corporate and agribusiness claimants that patrolled the hallways of federal office buildings and Congress. In 1970, some 250 corporations and 1,200 trade associations had offices in Washington; by 1980, these numbers had risen to 500 and 1,739, respectively. “It’s like medieval Italy,” one beleaguered government official complained. “Everyone has his own duchy or kingdom.”
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The area around K Street in Washington, the home of many politically connected law firms and of national headquarters for trade associations, came to be known as “Gucci Gulch.” Membership in the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the nation’s biggest lobby, increased from 1.5 million in 1969 to 12 million in 1980.
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Many of these lobbyists talked the compelling language of group “rights” and entitlements. Forming solid relationships with congressmen, congressional aides, and other federal officials, they also established wider “issue networks” that included reform groups, think tanks, foundations, and other specialists in particular areas of policy.
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In doing so, they advanced a more pluralist—some said more sophisticated—world of policy development. Some of the lobbies, however, aroused widespread criticism. Popular disgust at the perceived expansion in these years of “special interests” and of “identity politics” lay at the heart of rising revulsion toward politicians in general. The percentage of citizens who said they could “trust the federal government” declined from roughly 75 percent in 1964–65 to a low of 25 percent in the late 1970s—and never exceeded 44 percent for the remainder of the century.
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Disgust with politicians was an especially notable characteristic of American popular attitudes from the late 1960s forward.

Seeking to capitalize on such attitudes, a great many candidates for the presidency and other national offices hammered home a central message in their campaigns in the 1970s and thereafter: Politicians in Washington were responsible for a “mess” that was confronting the nation. Riding in as crusading outsiders, these noble knights of reform promised to scatter to the four winds the evil individuals who were endangering the republic. A notable champion of this message, which slighted the formidable structural obstacles to change, and which thereby excited unrealistic popular expectations, was Jimmy Carter in 1976.

B
EHIND THIS RISING POPULAR REVULSION
with national politicians were some questionable assumptions. One was that politics had been more gentlemanly in the Good Old Days. It was true that partisanship in the ugly aftermath of Watergate, an age of apparently endless investigations by partisan congressional committees and of “revelations” highlighted in the ever more voyeuristic media, was often sharper than it had been in the relatively serene mid-1950s.
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But bipartisan harmony could hardly be said to have characterized politics throughout American history, in the FDR and Truman years, or in the heyday of Senator Joseph McCarthy and other anti-Communist Red-baiters who trampled the civil liberties of innocent people. At that time, too, incivility often dominated congressional debate. And partisan warfare had hardly ebbed in the 1960s: The 1964 presidential campaign between LBJ and Barry Goldwater featured an all-time high in attack advertising.

A good deal of the partisan fighting in the 1970s and thereafter amounted to blood sport, often waged clamorously for narrow interests, but some of it, as in the past, was healthy and to be expected. It reflected strongly held ideological points of view that are expressed in any democratic system that features competitive political parties. The United States, an open, pluralistic, and dynamic society receptive to change, then and later had such a system. Moderates, independents, and centrists—sometimes more effective than the partisans who captured many of the headlines—helped to fashion compromises that enabled America’s democratic system to remain one of the most stable in the world.

Some of the complaints about the power of “interests” and of money in politics also tended to be overwrought. In a large, heterogeneous nation such as the United States, a host of groups seeking to influence the political process will organize and demand to be heard, especially in an era when the inclination of government to provide benefits expands dramatically, as it did in the 1960s and thereafter. Moreover, most of the public interest groups that arose in the 1960s and thereafter fought to preserve and to expand liberal policies, such as affirmative action, civil liberties, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other social and environmental programs. Aided by courts and liberal officials who dominated many federal agencies, they had a number of successes and advanced many rights. Conservative presidents and members of Congress after 1974 learned to their dismay that while people might claim to despise government, they also developed ever higher expectations from it. Many New Deal and Great Society programs expanded slowly over time.

It was also unclear whether politics had been better or purer in the Good Old Days, when fewer groups had possessed the resources to lobby effectively in Washington or in state capitals. Was it accurate to say, as many people did after 1970, that politics in general was “dirty”? Were all the newer groups and PACs simply “selfish,” or did they have good reason to insist on the rights and entitlements that others had already enjoyed? Had Congress been a more democratically managed institution when it had bowed to the will of a boss like Lyndon Johnson, whose allies dominated the Senate in the late 1950s, than it later became, when power was more dispersed? Was the steadily increasing power of television in politics necessarily a bad thing? Prior to the TV age, the vast majority of voters had never even seen their candidates. Answers to these questions still provoke sharp debates. In any events, lobbies representing minorities and other once politically marginal groups, working with coalitions in Congress, managed from time to time to score victories in the partisan political arena of Washington.

Why fret so deeply about the role of money in politics? It was true that the system greatly advantaged wealthy candidates and discouraged able aspirants from running. Incumbents who anticipated having to compete against well-heeled challengers felt obliged to devote huge amounts of time to fund-raising efforts, thereby struggling to handle their official responsibilities. Representatives and senators, busy raising money, often did little real legislative work between Friday and Tuesday. Wealthy contributors obviously expected to influence the candidates they supported. And the cost of campaigning escalated: One later calculation estimated that the average cost of winning a seat in the Senate jumped from $600,000 in 1976 to $4 million in 1990.
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For these reasons, reformers understandably struggled to level the playing field so as to wipe out these potential sources of corruption and to encourage people of moderate means to enter politics.

Whether the caps on contributions offered a significant solution to such problems, however, was doubtful. In many cases, the caps, which were low, had the effect of discouraging citizen involvement in political activity.
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Whether money being spent by candidates was “excessive,” moreover, depended on one’s point of view. A careful study in 1978 of the effects of the campaign finance amendments of 1974 pointed out that federal candidates spent roughly $212 million in 1976. In the same year, corporations spent $33.6 billion advertising their wares. The report concluded: “Electoral politics is in competition with corporate advertising for the attention of American citizens. . . . Limited campaign funds often mean limited campaign activity, which, in turn, means a poorly informed and apathetic electorate.”
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Most Americans, including representatives of the media, did not have much use for arguments such as these. Polls consistently indicated that people were disgusted with politicians and with politics in general. After all, the lies and deceptions of Vietnam and Watergate were fresh in people’s minds. In the mid-1970s, when Ford had the task of combating such perceptions, Americans were quick to blame villains “inside the Beltway” for the tarnishing of politics in the United States over time. It was the misfortune of this well-meaning man—and of Carter over the next four years—to lead the nation at a time when many angry Americans thundered against the evils of politics and of government.
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G
ERALD FORD INDEED MEANT WELL
. Born in Omaha in 1913 as Leslie Lynch King, he was sixty-one years old when he replaced Nixon in August 1974. In 1914, his parents having separated, young Leslie moved with his mother, Dorothy, to her parents’ hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 1916, she married Gerald R. Ford Sr., who owned and operated a paint and varnish company. Young Leslie later took his stepfather’s name, becoming Gerald R. Ford Jr. Jerry was a hardworking and dutiful son who became an Eagle Scout and who starred in football. Earning an athletic scholarship at the University of Michigan, he waited on tables to help support himself. He served briefly as an assistant football coach at Yale, where he then attended law school, graduating in 1941 in the top one-fourth of his class and returning to Grand Rapids as an attorney. During World War II he saw combat as a naval officer in the Pacific. The war convinced him that the United States must play a major role in world affairs.
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Back in Grand Rapids after the war, Ford soon entered politics, in 1948 beating a Republican incumbent, an isolationist, in a primary and then winning a House seat representing his heavily Republican district. A conservative on most issues, he battled vigorously against liberal Democrats over the years. But most of his colleagues liked Jerry Ford, who worked hard and kept his word. President Johnson named him to the Warren Commission, which investigated Kennedy’s assassination. His Republican colleagues entrusted him with growing responsibilities, including the post of House minority leader in 1965. He held this position until late 1973, when Spiro Agnew was forced to resign as vice president. Nixon seems privately to have favored John Connally, a Democrat who had been governor of Texas and had become his secretary of the treasury, as Agnew’s replacement. Still, Nixon liked Ford, with whom he had been friendly as a House colleague in 1949–50. He realized that Ford, popular on the Hill, would have relatively little trouble getting confirmed as vice president. His judgment was accurate, and Ford was sworn into the vice presidency in December 1973.
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Nixon, however, did not have great respect for Ford’s intelligence. Believing that Congress shared this view, he anticipated that it would shy away from initiating impeachment proceedings, which if successful would elevate Ford to the White House. In this political calculation Nixon was of course mistaken, but he was correct in thinking that many politicians considered Ford to be a ponderous public speaker and a somewhat plodding, unimaginative party regular. “Good old Jerry,” they said patronizingly. President Johnson had famously declared that Ford had played football once too often without a helmet. Richard Reeves, a decidedly antagonistic journalist, popularized Ford’s image as inept in an article that he wrote for
New York
magazine in November 1974. Titled “Jerry Ford and His Flying Circus: A Presidential Diary,” it chronicled the new president’s blunders and speech errors during the congressional campaigns. Reeves punctuated his account with commentary such as “It is not a question of saying the emperor has no clothes—there is question of whether there is an emperor.” The cover portrayed Ford as Bozo the Clown.
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Attacks such as these irritated Ford, but he had no choice but to accept them as part of the political game. As a graduate of the Yale Law School, he had confidence in his abilities. He was genuinely modest and unpretentious, memorably declaring on becoming vice president, “I am a Ford, not a Lincoln.” On assuming the presidency, he told Americans that his watchwords would be “communication, conciliation, compromise, and cooperation.”
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As president he rejected the imperial trappings that Nixon had relished and directed that the Michigan fight song be played in place of “Hail to the Chief” on ceremonial occasions. Despite two attempts on his life in September 1975, he was unusually accessible for a president, traveling widely and holding thirty-nine press conferences in his 875 days in office. This was eleven more than Nixon had held during his more than five and a half years in the White House.
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Ford, an experienced, knowledgeable politician, chafed at the widespread view in late 1974 that he was merely a “caretaker president,” but he also recognized the obvious: Americans were looking to him to put out the fires that had seared national life during the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War and Watergate. In his autobiography, revealingly entitled
A
Time to Heal
(1979), he wrote, “If I’m remembered, it will probably be for healing the land.”
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This is what he tried to do in 1974.