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HISTORY
DEPT.
The Plot to Out Ronald Reagan
A group of Republicans tried to stymie what they
alleged was a nefarious homosexual network within the campaign of their own
party’s standard-bearer. More than 40 years later, the story can finally be
told.
Illustration
by Derek Abella
By JAMES
KIRCHICK
05/27/2022
04:30 AM EDT
James
Kirchick is the author of the forthcoming book Secret City: The Hidden History
of Gay Washington, from which this article is adapted.
With his
new book, James Kirchick offers a window into an era when “the fear of
homosexuality, or even the mere accusation of it, destroyed careers, ended
lives, and induced otherwise decent people to betray colleagues and friends.”
In this exclusive excerpt, he reveals the extent to which whisperings of a
conspiracy from California to Washington, when met with political opportunism
and overblown anxiety over the potential presence of gay people in positions of
power, nearly altered the course of history.
It was 3:15
on the morning of June 26, 1980, and Congressman Bob Livingston was
extraordinarily drunk, hiding in the congressional gym beneath the Rayburn
House Office Building, petrified that a team of highly trained right-wing
homosexual assassins working on behalf of Ronald Reagan was about to kill him.
To the
extent that the Louisiana Republican is remembered today, it’s for the brief
but sensational role he played in America’s most infamous political sex
scandal. On the same day in December 1998 that Bill Clinton was impeached for
lying about his affair with a White House intern, Livingston, then the House
speaker-designate, shocked the nation with his own admission of adultery.
Preempting a journalistic exposé that had dredged up evidence of his past relationships
with women not his wife, he not only refused the speakership but announced his
resignation from Congress altogether.
Rep. Bob
Livingston (R-La.) announced his resignation, admitting to adultery, just hours
before the House voted to impeach President Bill Clinton on Dec. 19, 1998. |
Image from video by APTN/AP Photo
What people
don’t know is that nearly two decades before this bit part in the Clinton
impeachment drama riveted the nation, Livingston was at the center of another
scandal involving politicians and illicit sex, one that, in his own words, had
the potential to be “world-shaking.” Most explosive about this whole terrible
intrigue, and what tied it all together, was the nature of the sexual activity
involved.
For most of
the 20th century, the worst thing one could possibly be in American politics was
gay. The mere insinuation of homosexuality was sufficient to destroy a
political career, and things could get particularly vicious between intraparty
adversaries. The first outing in American politics, of the isolationist
Massachusetts Sen. David Walsh in 1942, was perpetrated by interventionist
allies of fellow Democrat, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While public
attitudes have become far more open, the insinuation that someone is gay —
whether true or not — remains a potent weapon (as elements of the campaign
against North Carolina Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn recently illustrated),
especially in socially conservative milieus.
This
account of the alleged “homosexual ring” that controlled Ronald Reagan, and the
efforts to expose it on the eve of the 1980 Republican National Convention that
nominated him for the presidency, is compiled from interviews with several of
the surviving participants and documents uncovered in the papers of former
Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee. Appropriately for a story
involving what was once considered the gravest sin in American politics, it has
never been told until now.
The series
of events that led Livingston to take refuge in the warrens of a Capitol Hill
basement began innocently enough.
Shortly
before closing his office on the evening of June 25, Livingston’s secretary
received a phone call from L. Francis Bouchey, executive vice president of a
small conservative foreign policy think tank called the Council for
Inter-American Security. Bouchey’s wife was out of town, and he was home alone
facing the unsavory prospect of a TV dinner. Was Livingston free for supper? As
luck would have it, Livingston’s secretary said, the congressman’s wife was
also away, and his evening was open. Bouchey and Livingston would meet at 7:30
at The Palm near Dupont Circle.
Bouchey
drove into the city from his home in Annandale, the pleasant suburban community
where Livingston also happened to live with his family. The men had several
other things in common. Both were 37 years old, brothers of the Delta Kappa
Epsilon fraternity and committed conservatives. One of Bouchey’s
responsibilities was to enlist up-and-coming legislators in the cause of
rolling back communism across Latin America, a crusade that was beginning to
assume great significance at the dawn of the 1980s. As the congressman
representing the Port of New Orleans, Livingston had every reason to worry
about this threat, and when Bouchey offered him a seat on the council’s
advisory board, he was happy to accept.
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But over
dinner, three weeks before he and his fellow Republicans were to gather at the
Joe Louis Arena in Detroit for their national convention, Livingston had
something more urgent on his mind than the twilight struggle between capitalism
and communism. For months, speculation had been mounting as to whom Reagan
would choose as his running mate. The former governor of California needed a
veep candidate who could heal the widening divide within the GOP between its
moderate establishment and conservatives like himself. Some of the top
contenders were former CIA Director George H. W. Bush, who had recently bowed
out of the race for president, and former President Gerald Ford. But it was the
serious consideration of a fellow House colleague — Rep. Jack Kemp — that most
piqued Livingston’s interest. Bouchey’s group was informally advising the
Reagan campaign on Latin American issues. Perhaps Bouchey had a window into its
deliberations.
“Do you
know anything about Kemp, is he AC/DC?” Livingston asked, referencing not the
Australian hard rock band but the slang expression for bisexual.
“Yeah, I
heard some things,” Bouchey replied. “That stuff’s been around.”
“That
stuff,” or what Kemp adviser Jude Wanniski termed “the homosexual thing,” had
dogged the upstate New York congressman and former professional football player
since the fall of 1967, when the syndicated newspaper columnists Drew Pearson
and Jack Anderson published a piece linking Kemp to a “homosexual ring”
operating within Reagan’s gubernatorial office. Kemp, then the starting
quarterback for the Buffalo Bills and an aspiring policy wonk, had spent the
summer offseason working for Reagan as perhaps the most famous intern in
America. According to the muckraking duo, Reagan’s security chief had obtained
“a tape recording of a sex orgy” held at a Lake Tahoe cabin leased by two
Reagan staffers, and while Pearson and Anderson didn’t name any names, in the
case of Kemp, they didn’t have to. One of the eight men involved, they wrote,
was an “athletic adviser on youth activities who has since gone on leave for
the fall athletic season.”
Murmurings
about the handsome young athlete spread from the political watering holes of
Sacramento to the locker rooms of the American Football League, following him
all the way to Capitol Hill, where Kemp, who died in 2009, began a meteoric
rise after winning a seat in Congress in 1970. In 1978, during the
congressional midterm elections, senior Jimmy Carter aide Hamilton Jordan told
a reporter to disregard Kemp as a serious presidential contender because he was
a “queer,” and the chair of the Democratic National Committee advised another
journalist that a Kemp-sponsored tax bill had no chance of passing for the same
reason. “There is absolutely not a shred of evidence,” a fed-up Kemp
complained. “There is nothing, and there was nothing.” The “slander” and “old
calumny” that the virile ex-football pro and father of four might be gay,
journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote at the time, was a “vicious
canard,” the sort of “poisonous” “garbage” one found “submerged in the
political sewers” and other “gutter communications” that “not only do gross
injustice to their victims but also demean and pollute democratic government.”
All this
was on Livingston’s mind because of what he had heard the previous month at a
secret meeting with members of the Republican “Wednesday Group,” a club of
liberal to moderate GOP congressmen who gathered weekly to talk shop and plot
strategy over pretzels and booze. Livingston was not a member of the group. But
he had been roped into an impromptu discussion in California Rep. Pete
McCloskey’s office by a colleague. Behind those closed doors, McCloskey
suggested strongly that the possibility of Kemp as a running mate was proof
that the “homosexual ring” around Reagan, long dismissed as rumor, might be
something all too real.
While
Livingston was concerned about the potential political liability for his
party’s impending nominee, McCloskey was worried that Reagan himself
represented a danger to the Republican Party and the country.
In recent
weeks, McCloskey explained to the other congressmen huddled in his office, he
had been in contact with a local television news reporter named Bill Best who
used to work in the Bay Area and had been active in California GOP politics during
the late 1960s. The last time McCloskey had heard from Best was in early 1976,
a few months after Reagan announced his decision to challenge President Gerald
Ford in the Republican primary. Best agitatedly told him that senior Reagan
advisers had sexually propositioned him on two separate occasions. McCloskey
did not hear from Best again until four years later, in the spring of 1980,
when Reagan was on the verge of clinching the nomination. Best began calling
him frantically to report that “homosexual people were very close to Reagan’s
campaign leadership,” that they were “running” Reagan’s campaign, and that “the
situation is absolutely out of control.” It was not until a boozy lunch with a
man claiming to have been a “long time Reagan associate,” however, that Best
found what he believed to be the “smoking gun” proving that Reagan was
controlled by homosexuals. “Bill, you don’t understand the problem,” the man
told Best. “I once engaged in a homosexual act with Reagan.”
As for
Kemp, McCloskey had never known what to make of the rumors surrounding his
colleague. “The big joke on Capitol Hill,” he told me in an interview at his
home outside Sacramento in 2019, “was that the most dangerous position in pro
football is to be Jack Kemp’s center.” After hearing from Best, McCloskey
agreed that a Kemp nomination would revive the 1967 “Scandal in Sacramento,”
possibly leading to revelations about the other homosexuals in Reagan’s orbit
and thereby imperiling the GOP ticket.
As far as
homosexuality itself was concerned, McCloskey was more progressive than the
vast majority of his colleagues. As a lawyer in Palo Alto in the 1960s, he had
represented men arrested for homosexual solicitation, and when New York Rep.
Bella Abzug introduced the first bill in Congress prohibiting discrimination
against gay people, he was its only Republican sponsor. “I am heterosexual, I
think,” the quirky congressman told The Advocate, a gay magazine, in 1977. “I
wonder sometimes.”
In the
present situation, however, McCloskey’s personal attitudes were beside the
point. An Eisenhower-era executive order barring gay people from holding
federal government jobs (on the grounds that they were supposedly more
susceptible to blackmail) had led to a purge of thousands of workers, and while
the civil service lifted its ban in 1975, gays were still prohibited from
holding security clearances (a restriction that would not be lifted until
1995). “There is nothing inherently wrong with [homosexuality],” McCloskey was
later to write, with a caveat, “in any office which does not have national
security responsibilities.” And since the alleged homosexuals in Reagan’s orbit
were all closeted, they were presumably vulnerable to inducement by foreign
powers.
McCloskey,
a dovish veteran of the Korean War with a jawline so sharp his staff nicknamed
him “Mount Rushmore” had a tortured relationship with his party in general, and
with the darling of its conservative faction in particular. McCloskey was first
elected to Congress in 1967 after defeating the former child movie star, and
Reagan’s friend, Shirley Temple Black in an open primary. The following year,
Reagan declared that McCloskey’s refusal to endorse their party’s archconservative
Senate nominee amounted to a violation of the GOP’s “Eleventh Commandment” —
“Thou shalt not speak ill of any Republican” — as articulated by the state
party chair. “Maybe a young congressman has a little more to learn about party
loyalty,” Reagan cracked. Both McCloskey and Reagan would go on to challenge
incumbent Republican presidents, McCloskey taking on Richard Nixon from the
left in 1972 and Reagan seeking to dethrone Gerald Ford from the right four
years later, and so strikingly did they represent their respective ideological
flanks that Lou Cannon, the dean of California political reporters, described
them as “the two most charismatic contenders for the soul of California’s
Republican party.”
As Reagan
progressed toward the presidency, this battle between the liberal and
conservative factions of the California GOP was projected onto the national
political stage. And at every step of Reagan’s inexorable rise, McCloskey was
there trying to stop him. In 1976, “scared to death that Ronald Reagan was
going to be the next president,” McCloskey recruited fellow liberal Republicans
to support Ford. At the beginning of the next election cycle, despite his
preference for moderates like Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker and Rep. John
Anderson of Illinois, McCloskey supported Bush. “It is absolutely essential to
stop Ronald Reagan from getting the Republican nomination,” he declared, “and
George Bush is the only candidate who can do that.” Alas, Bush couldn’t do it,
and was now vying to be Reagan’s running mate. With Reagan’s nomination all but
sealed, the recalcitrant ex-marine would wage one final, desperate battle for
the soul of his party.
Over dinner
at The Palm, some five weeks after the exchange in McCloskey’s office,
Livingston apparently could not get the salacious stories involving Kemp and
the homosexual Reagan aides out of his mind. As he sipped white wine and
Bouchey downed martinis, the subject of Kemp’s sexuality “dominated” their
conversation, as Bouchey, who died in 2017, was to remember according to notes
of an unpublished interview with a reporter. He found Livingston’s
“preoccupation” with whether “a colleague of his was a switch-hitter” to be
curious. “He was very interested in him,” Bouchey recalled. “The whole subject
was raised by him. It was certainly not raised by me.” At one point, however,
Bouchey might have volunteered the possibility that Kemp and Reagan himself had
both engaged in gay sex.
Following
the meal, Livingston suggested a nightcap in Georgetown. The two hopped into
Livingston’s Mustang and drove to F. Scott’s, a Georgetown haunt. After a drink
there, they went next door to another watering hole, the Tombs. Last round was
called, and Livingston offered to give Bouchey a ride back to Capitol Hill,
where Bouchey had parked his car. By this point, Bouchey remembered, both men
were deep “in the cup,” and he replied that he was “in no shape” to drive
himself home. Livingston offered to take them both back to Annandale.
Collapsing into the Mustang, the men paused for a moment, and Livingston
inserted his key in the ignition. Before he could start the car, Bouchey placed
his hand firmly on Livingston’s knee and asked, “Are you trying to get something
started with me?”
Bouchey
would later insist he had intended nothing sexual by the gesture or the remark.
“I guess I was drunker than he was,” he conceded. A sexual proposition, an
inebriated lark or something in between — it was one man’s hand placed upon
another man’s knee that set off a chain of events with the potential to rattle
the Reagan campaign, upset the presidential race and change the course of
history.
Livingston
panicked. “Oh, hell no,” he said, jerking his knee in rebuff. He quickly
started the car, and an awkward silence descended over both men. Livingston’s
mind began to process the jumble of things he had seen and heard over the past
few weeks: the long-standing rumors about Kemp; the supposed gay network
encircling Reagan; McCloskey’s contact who claimed that he, too, had been hit
on by gay Reaganites; Bouchey’s ties to various Latin American juntas and
paramilitaries. Three months earlier, a tragedy involving politics, murder and
homosexuality had occurred when former New York Rep. Allard Lowenstein was shot
to death in his Manhattan law office by a man rumored to have been a love
interest. None of it added up to anything good.
When
Livingston reached Bouchey’s home in Annandale, he stopped the Mustang,
unceremoniously dumped his inebriated passenger off at the curb and sped away.
Extraordinarily
drunk, Livingston fled to the congressional gym, fearing for his life. | Jeff
Taylor/AP Photo
Though he
lived in the same town, Livingston was afraid to return home. He hightailed it
back to Washington, to the safest place to which he had access: the dank
subterranean chamber of the House members’ gym. “When I was 15, someone tried
to make a pass at me,” Livingston recalled to me in a 2019 interview about
these events. “It was the first and last time” he was so approached until that
moment during the summer of 1980. Using a phone in the locker room, Livingston
rang the Capitol Police and asked to be put through to McCloskey.
“You were
absolutely right,” Livingston gasped, according to a summary of their
conversation later recorded by McCloskey.
McCloskey’s
notes (part 2 of a 13-page memo) including a summary of his conversation with
Livingston
“I just had
a terrible experience.” Livingston proceeded to explain how he had just spent
the night drinking with a friend and fraternity brother who “runs a security
agency which furnishes support, training and weapons for Latin American
governments.” This person had in the past mentioned “hits” across Latin
America, and the previous October, a full week before the El Salvadoran
military staged a coup, he predicted with chilling accuracy “precisely what was
going to happen and who would be involved.” He “has the capacity to ‘hit’ people
both in Latin America and here” in the United States, and he “indicated to me
during the evening that Kemp was certainly a participant in homosexual conduct
and that he thought it possible Reagan was also.” After making clear that he
“saw nothing wrong with men enjoying each other’s company sexually,” this man
“made a pass at me on three different occasions” over the course of the
evening. Livingston was calling McCloskey from the House gym, he explained,
because he feared he might be “met by a shotgun blast at the door” of his home
for having rejected the man’s sexual advances.
Signaling
disinterest in the “AC/DC” lifestyle, apparently, constituted more than just a
personal affront to an intoxicated frat brother. Apprised of a clandestine
homosexual cabal reaching all the way from Washington to Sacramento, and from
San Salvador to Santiago, Livingston had balked at its initiation rites and
thus put himself in grave danger. “When he becomes sober and realizes what he
has said to me, and that I refused him,” Livingston said, according to
McCloskey’s memo, “I think he is fully capable of violence.”
“You were
right,” Livingston kept repeating. “There is a network.”
McCloskey
told his worried colleague that he could sleep on his couch. But Livingston
preferred to stay put. They agreed to meet first thing the next day, after the
Republican caucus breakfast.
That
morning, McCloskey recalled, Livingston was “white as a sheet.” Once the
meeting ended, the two legislators marched to Livingston’s office in the Cannon
Building, where Livingston showed McCloskey the wallet and business card
Bouchey had mistakenly left in his Mustang the previous night. McCloskey told
Livingston “it was imperative that Bouchey know that others besides him know”
what had transpired between them, and that Livingston’s secretary should
therefore call Bouchey to inform him that the congressman had his wallet, which
he should feel free to pick up anytime. And then, as McCloskey returned to his
own office, a lightbulb went off in his head.
When Bill
Best first told McCloskey back in 1976 about the homosexual advances made to
him by the two Reagan aides, he had given McCloskey and four other people
sealed envelopes containing a statement about one of those encounters. Best
told his confidants not to open the letters unless something happened to him,
and to destroy them if Ford won the GOP nomination, which he eventually did.
McCloskey, however, held on to Best’s note, storing it in the safe in the tiny
lavatory adjoining his personal office.
McCloskey
asked his legislative assistant to retrieve the sealed envelope. Written across
the flap was Best’s signature and, below it, the words: “To be opened only by
Pete McCloskey.”
Inside was
a one-page statement, dated January 9, 1976, which read, in part:
I, William
H. Best III, discovered, as a function of a homosexual approach being made to
me on November 17th, 1975 by Peter Hannaford of the Ronald Reagan Campaign that
Peter Hannaford was bisexual.
In 1967 I
had indicated to the Governor’s office that there were homosexuals in his
office. Two were fired. From 1967 to 1975 I assumed that there were no longer
any homo, or bi-sexuals associated with Ronald Reagan.
When Peter
Hannaford made his advance on me in his room at the Madison Hotel on the night
of November 17th, I became aware, because of the completely agressive [sic]
nature of his actions toward me that my pervious [sic] assumptions were wrong.
After
thinking about the matter for some time, I concluded that there was a remote
possibility that Ronald Reagan might, and I repeat, might be bi-sexual. Because
of the potential implications in matters of national security in the event he
becomes President of the United States, I felt, since I assume I am the only
person who knows, or was willing to say anything about the matter, that it was
in the national interest to have a careful examination made of the possibility
…
I hope and
prey [sic] that this letter is never opened, but if it is, fight the good fight
for truth, justice and honesty.
Over the
course of the following week, McCloskey typed up everything he knew about the
intrigues concerning the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — the 1967
“homosexual ring” scandal in Sacramento, the repeated sexual importuning of
Bill Best by various Reagan aides, Bob Livingston’s dramatic escape from a
dread homosexual hit squad — into a two-part, 13-page, 33-point confidential
memorandum.
Ronald
Reagan — photographed in 1985 with first lady Nancy at an event surrounded by
Hollywood friends — as the ventriloquized pawn of shadowy and sinister forces
has long been a motif in assessments of the 40th president. | Scott Stewart/AP
Photo
The crux of
the document was encapsulated in point 32: “Bill [Best] expressed extreme
concern about the danger of a former Hollywood actor in fact being the
‘Manchurian candidate’ and spoke at length on the nature of the Hollywood movie
industry and the fact that an actor is in the hands and under the manipulation
of studios, producers, directors, etc., and that he must carry out orders in
order to survive. He felt that Reagan had been manipulated all of his life, and
that he was essentially ‘in bondage’ to those around him.” Ronald Reagan as the
ventriloquized pawn of shadowy and sinister forces — his “Kitchen Cabinet” of
California millionaires, his wife Nancy, Nancy’s astrologers, the Mafia — has
long been a motif in assessments of the 40th president, and what McCloskey’s
contribution to the genre might have lacked in plausibility, it more than made
up for with originality. Controlling Reagan in this scenario was a “network” of
homosexuals who “shared an almost religious zeal against communism and [on]
behalf of right-wing causes.”
McCloskey
had to act fast. He was scheduled to depart with his
girlfriend-cum-press-secretary on July 3 for a backpacking trip to Yellowstone
National Park, where they would stay until the 12th, just two days before the
start of the Republican convention. This left precious little time to avert a
Manchurian Candidate-style catastrophe at the Joe Louis Arena. McCloskey sprang
into action.
Taking his
concerns to the FBI was a nonstarter. The bureau was overly bureaucratic, its
reputation still tarnished by the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses. This left
McCloskey with only one option: He would play the role of Deep Throat. After
midnight on July 3, he put a copy of his confidential memo and Bill Best’s 1976
statement into a manila folder, walked a few blocks to a home near Dupont
Circle, and knocked on the door. Answering in his slippers and a bathrobe was
Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post who had become legendary for his
role in helping to bring down a previous Republican president. McCloskey
quickly summarized the matter and handed him the documents. Intrigued, Bradlee
said he would put his best reporters on the story and update McCloskey on their
progress at the Republican convention.
At Post
headquarters the next day, Bradlee assembled a group of journalists — assistant
managing editor Bob Woodward and reporters Scott Armstrong, Lou Cannon, Ted Gup
and Patrick Tyler — in his office. According to Armstrong, Bradlee spoke of the
story related to him by McCloskey as if it had the potential to be what he was
fond of calling a “holy shit” exclusive. “The brass ring is up there, boys,”
Bradlee said, offering one of his favorite metaphors for a huge journalistic
scoop. “We just got to reach up and grab it!”
As to the
story’s newsworthiness, “the focus was that there could be a circle of people
trying to control Reagan and there may be a commonality of gay-ness,” Tyler
recalled. “We weren’t investigating whether there were gay people around
[Reagan],” per se.
Bradlee was
determined to find out more, and like every great newspaper editor, he was
determined to beat the competition and find it out before anyone else. “He
didn’t know where the story was in this, but he felt that there was a story in
there and we better be the first to get it,” Tyler said.
Reinforcing
Bradlee’s hunch, according to Armstrong, Gup and Tyler, was that Sen. Barry
Goldwater also urged the Post to investigate the matter. Goldwater likely heard
about it from his fellow Arizonan, Republican House Minority Leader John Jacob
Rhodes, whom McCloskey had briefed. If true, Goldwater’s participation in a
shambolic effort to stop Reagan’s nomination would have been yet another
episode in a long-simmering rivalry dating back to his 1964 presidential
defeat. Goldwater had taken it personally when Reagan, running for governor two
years later and wary of being associated with a loser, rejected Goldwater’s
offer to campaign for him. The decisive rift would not arrive until 1976,
however, when Reagan, having spurned Goldwater’s aid 10 years earlier but now
running for president on the back of a movement that had recast the 1964 rout
as a heroic martyrdom, asked for Goldwater’s endorsement. Goldwater declined.
.
Washington
Post editor Ben Bradlee, top left, and reporter Bob Woodward, top right, were
among the team assembled to look into McCloskey’s concerns about the Reagan
campaign. Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), bottom center, who had a close
relationship with Bradlee, had also pushed the Post to investigate the matter.
| Ron Galella via Getty Images and AP Photo
Bradlee had
personal reasons for taking Goldwater’s judgment seriously. The Arizonan was an
important source for the Post during Watergate, and Goldwater was a close
family friend of his in-laws. When Bradlee and his wife, Sally Quinn, moved
into a Georgetown mansion, it was “Goldy,” as Bradlee called him, who installed
the hi-fi stereo sound system. Goldwater admiringly dubbed Bradlee’s paper the
“Post-mortem,” because “if you manage to survive everything else in Washington,
Bradlee and the Post will eventually get you.”
Now, at the
instigation of a motley crew of Republicans from the party’s ideological poles,
the Post was coming to get Ronald Reagan.
The team of
reporters scrambled. Scott Armstrong traveled to Phoenix, where Bill Best was
working as a reporter for a local news station. According to Armstrong’s notes
of their conversation, Best said that his ordeal began in 1966, when, while
running for a seat in the California State Assembly, he had dinner with a
political consultant whose firm was running Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign. As
he drove the inebriated consultant back to his car, Best said the man put his
hand on Best’s leg. “He propositioned me,” Best told Armstrong. “He indicated
to me that it would be very much in my interest to cooperate, and he indicated
to me who else had benefited. It included a lot of people I knew, but I took it
with a grain of salt. I was skeptical, but the implication was that [the political
consultant’s] protégés slept with him and then became successful.”
Fast-forward
nine years, to November 1975, and Best was visiting Washington in hopes of
landing a job with Reagan’s presidential campaign. Best crashed at McCloskey’s
house in Georgetown, and through the recommendation of Reagan aide Michael
Deaver, who died in 2007, he set up a meeting with Deaver’s business partner
and fellow Reagan adviser Peter Hannaford in his room at the Madison Hotel. The
two depleted the minibar, and as Best got up to leave at around 1 a.m.,
according to Armstrong’s notes of Best’s retelling, Hannaford abruptly asked,
“Are you ready to go to bed?”
“What?”
Best replied.
“Are you
ready to go to bed?”
“What are
you talking about?”
“If you
didn’t come over here to go to bed, why did you come over here?”
“To discuss
a job with the campaign.”
“We did, so
now it’s time to go to bed,” Hannaford, who died in 2015, allegedly replied.
Best said
he fled the room, stumbling down five flights of stairs to his car and speeding
back to McCloskey’s.
Best told
Armstrong that he had informed a few other Republican activist types about
these incidents and was confounded by their nonchalance. “Big deal,” he said
was the reaction of Egil “Bud” Krogh, head of the Nixon Plumbers unit. “There
were lots of gays in the Nixon administration too.”
At one
point in the spring of 1980, Best said he confronted Deaver over lunch about
Hannaford’s proposition. “It’s your partner and you ought to know,” Best told
him.
“Who else
knows?” Deaver asked.
“I told two
groups,” Best said he replied. “Those I needed to talk to and those I needed to
protect me.”
Deaver,
Best said, evinced no reaction as he continued eating his lunch. “You could
probably keep eating if I told you that World War III had started,” Best said
he remarked, adding that Kemp as the VP pick would be a “giant mistake,” an
assertion with which Deaver apparently agreed.
Best also
told Armstrong about the man, a then 17-year-old volunteer on Reagan’s first
gubernatorial campaign named William Seals Jr., who claimed to have had sex with
Reagan. Best said Seals told him the encounter took place on the night of
Reagan’s first inauguration in Sacramento. Reagan, wearing nothing but a
bathrobe, had invited Seals into his hotel suite. “If Reagan is elected
president,” Best said Seals boasted to him, “I could be first lady.” Seals
further asserted that he had participated in the alleged Lake Tahoe orgy and
had “gone to bed” with Kemp. Despite his best efforts, Armstrong was unable to
track down this elusive figure, and Best and Seals have both since passed away.
The essence
of Best’s allegations, Armstrong wrote in a memo to his colleagues, was that
submission to the sexual demands of an influential circle of gay men was “the
sine qua non of success in the Reagan organization.” Best, he wrote, was “sane,
sober, careful and restrained,” not “flaky or kooky.” In appearance, he was
“sort of Calif. Preppy (Woodward as beachboy)” and “probably jail bait when he
was in his early 20s.” But Best also struck Armstrong “as a man who has seen a
flying saucer on two separate occasions and can’t get anyone to believe him,”
which left the reporter with the feeling that the story lacked legs.
Scott
Armstrong, who was on the team of journalists assembled to investigate
McCloskey's claims and ultimately concluded that the story lacked legs,
photographed in 1986. | Cynthia Johnson/Getty Images
“Count me
out until someone on this list [of alleged homosexuals] is actually serving in
a presidential administration with access to national security information or
until a more current pattern of some group is evident,” Armstrong concluded.
Reporter Ted
Gup tracked down Bouchey in a depressed suburb outside Dallas, where the think
tank director was with his wife and children visiting his father-in-law at his
mobile home. Bouchey was “shocked” that a Post reporter would come all the way
to interview him, Gup later wrote in a memo, but he agreed to speak outside, in
the 112-degree heat, away from his family. As Bouchey described the events of
June 25 and 26, he reenacted for Gup the moment that sent Livingston fleeing to
the basement of the Rayburn Building, grabbing Gup’s “knee and thigh firmly” in
a “quick unexpected action.” (“His hands were strong,” Gup recounted. “I
thought, ‘My God, if he grabbed Livingston that way, no wonder the guy spent
the night in the gym.’”) As for ordering “hits,” Bouchey unreservedly denied
that “any of his contacts were terrorists or violent,” and he expressed
bewilderment that Livingston had felt fearful for his safety. He was less
surprised, however, about the suggested existence of a “gay network”
surrounding Reagan.
“He didn’t
laugh at the idea,” Gup wrote. “He took it seriously. He did not question the
legitimacy of a reporter inquiring into it.”
Bob
Woodward interviewed Livingston, whom McCloskey had apparently not bothered to
consult before relating their conversations to the Post. “I’m petrified and
paranoid about this,” Livingston said, according to notes taken by Woodward,
who wrote that there was “lots of pushing necessary to get him to talk.”
Woodward repeatedly declined to speak with me about these events.
According
to Woodward’s notes, Livingston disputed McCloskey’s characterization of his
early morning phone call from the House gym, specifically that he told
McCloskey that Bouchey had alluded to assassinations. “McCloskey’s imagination
went wild,” Livingston said. That grumble aside, Livingston was concerned about
the hidden gay network, which he even suggested to Woodward could possibly be
tied to the office of Sen. Jesse Helms, the viciously anti-gay North Carolina
Republican and conservative ally of the Reagan campaign. Livingston told
Woodward it would take “months to do this story right” but he hoped the Post
would pursue it because “I don’t want to see the world run by a bunch of
weirdos.” While Livingston allowed for the possibility that what he took as a
sexual advance on the part of Bouchey might have been a mere drunken
misunderstanding, “I would never base a story on just what happened to me. If
you guys ever prove it, it will be world-shaking.”
Afew days
before the Republican convention in Detroit, the Post team regrouped in
Washington. Undoubtedly, gay men had played prominent roles in Reagan’s
political career. But with the important possible exception of Peter Hannaford,
none were expected to hold a job in a potential Reagan administration that
would require a security clearance.
As a rule,
Bradlee was hesitant to report on the private lives of public officials unless
it had a tangible, direct impact on their work. In 1976, explaining his decision
to spike a Jack Anderson column divulging details of congressional adultery,
Bradlee wrote, “Public persons’ private lives tend to be their own business
unless their personal conduct is alleged to violate the law or interfere with
performance of the public job.” Just a few months before McCloskey showed up on
his doorstep, he had been approached by another congressman, Democrat William
Moorhead of Pittsburgh, whose escapades with a transgender prostitute the Post
was investigating. A rattled Moorhead “went to Bradlee and pleaded with him not
to print the story,” a journalist working at the Post recalled. “Bradlee
suppressed it, saying, rightly, that a man’s private sexual entanglements were
his own affair.”
While gay
sex might still have been illegal in most American states at the time, and gay
people officially remained “security risks,” it was hard to see how any of the
alleged activity involving the Reagan aides threatened the public trust. “In
the end, I can’t remember anyone postulating a lede that made sense of this,”
remembered Patrick Tyler. There was smoke but no fire, as Bradlee would tell
McCloskey when he saw him at the Republican convention.
The rumors
about Jack Kemp, however, persisted. On the first day of the convention,
Reagan’s longtime communications man Lyn Nofziger told Robert Novak that the
New York congressman was a strong contender for the veep nomination. After
Reagan selected George Bush, Novak asked Nofziger what had dashed Kemp’s
chances. “It was that homosexual thing,” Nofziger conceded, repeating Kemp
adviser Jude Wanniski’s phrase. “The governor finally said, ‘We just can’t do
this to Jack.’”
Top: Reagan
accepted the nomination for president during the Republican National Convention
at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, on July 17, 1980. Bottom: Jack Kemp was
passed over for running mate, in favor of George H. W. Bush, in large part because
of “that homosexual thing,” according to Reagan associate Lyn Nofziger. | AP
Photo and Bernard Gotfryd via the Library of Congress
McCloskey
remained unfazed. By September, the maverick congressman was still withholding
his endorsement. The presence of a closeted homosexual, Peter Hannaford, in a
potential Reagan administration could pose a threat to national security,
McCloskey believed, and so he took his concerns directly to Reagan’s longtime
adviser and campaign chief of staff, Ed Meese.
“United
States cryptographers and British scientists have defected to the Soviet Union,
reportedly in part because of the threat of exposure of homosexual conduct,”
McCloskey wrote Meese. “With the growing numbers and political involvement of
the homosexual communities across the nation,” a development McCloskey
welcomed, “it would be my judgment that there will be very few secrets about
who has and who has not engaged in homosexual conduct.”
McCloskey
suggested that Meese ask “any persons against whom reputable citizens have
raised contentions of homosexual conduct to step aside from positions of
responsibility in the Reagan team at the earliest possible date. I make this
suggestion solely in the interest of trying to give Governor Reagan the best
possible chance of being the kind of President the country desperately needs at
this time.”
On Sept. 4,
Meese met with McCloskey at the congressman’s Capitol Hill office. In a letter
to Best recapitulating their hourlong conversation, McCloskey wrote that while
Meese “accepted Pete Hannaford’s absolute denial of your allegations … he does
not expect to allow Hannaford to be in a job which would embarrass the Governor
if others come forward to raise the issue.” Meese, interviewed in 2020,
disputed this account. While he did not “specifically” recall the meeting with
McCloskey, “the implication that Pete [Hannaford] had anything to do with
homosexuality is absolutely false, and the reason, if I said [he was not
joining the administration] at the time was that there was no point in going
into it because Pete wasn’t going into the administration anyway.”
Whatever
the nature of their discussion, McCloskey endorsed Reagan two weeks later,
sealing the deal by letting the candidate slap a “Reagan/Bush” bumper sticker
on his beat-up 1971 Volkswagen convertible.
Ronald
Reagan pointing to a bumper sticker while Pete McCloskey kneels beside the car.
Having lost
his final, desperate battle against Reagan for the soul of the Republican
Party, McCloskey looks on as Reagan slaps a “Reagan/Bush” bumper sticker on his
car in San Jose, Calif., on Sept. 25, 1980. | Harrity/AP Photo
And as
Meese promised, Hannaford did not join the Reagan administration.
The passage
of time validated the Post team’s intuition that the instigators of this wild
goose chase might not have been the most credible sources. According to
McCloskey, Best came to regret the role he played in denying Hannaford a job in
the White House, phoning McCloskey at one point in the mid-1980s to complain
that the Reagan administration was “going to hell in a handbasket” and that
“the worst thing I ever did was get rid of Hannaford. He was the smartest guy
of all. Nancy’s running it with an astrologer in San Francisco,” a reference to
Joan Quigley, the oracle whom the first lady began consulting after the 1981
assassination attempt on her husband.
McCloskey
gave up his House seat in 1982 to run for the Senate, losing in the Republican
primary after campaigning against “the Jewish lobby.” In 2000, he emerged
briefly from obscurity to deliver a speech at a Holocaust denial conference. In
light of this record, his last-ditch effort to torpedo Ronald Reagan with a
tale portraying him as the dupe of a right-wing homosexual conspiracy looks
like just another episode in a career spent tilting at windmills — his unlikely
friend John Ehrlichman described him as “a latter-day Don Quixote” — though one
much less honorable than challenging Richard Nixon for the presidency.
Had the
whole farrago of rumor and innuendo about the gay Reaganite conspiracy come to
light during the campaign, it’s difficult to say what effect it would have had
on the election. Of all the voters most likely to be troubled by such charges,
it would have been the evangelical Christians whose support Reagan was courting
so assiduously. Reagan’s eventual 10-point victory over Carter obscures how
close the race was during the final stretch. In June, just as the Post
investigation was about to unfold, Carter led Reagan 35 percent to 33 percent
in a national Gallup poll, and few predicted anything near the landslide Reagan
ultimately won.
Over four
decades later, the plot to out Reagan vividly demonstrates the extent to which
the specter of homosexuality cast a pall over American politics. Livingston’s
fellow Louisianan, the comically corrupt Gov. Edwin Edwards, might have been
joking with his infamous quip that the only way he could lose an election “is
if I’m caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.” But he was also telling
an important truth. For as difficult as it might be to imagine today, when an
openly gay man can mount a serious campaign for the presidency and gay people
have never been more visible in American public life, there was only one
offense that rivaled murdering a member of the opposite sex, and that was
loving a member of the same one.
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