The savvy knew that he was spouting nonsense: that this was a political move, through and through. That once Sears’s team whipped both enough disciplined Reagan (and Reagan Trojan horse) delegates, and enough naive reform-minded Ford delegates, into voting for 16-C, the vote would be spun into a narrative in which the Reagan forces were in control of the convention—and Ford’s soft supporters might stampede to Reagan. And even if the stampede didn’t begin then, it might after Ford suffered the same political awkwardness Reagan had with his choice of Schweiker: losing conservatives if he picked a moderate, losing moderates if he picked a conservative. This was not a “right to know” but a “misery loves company rule,” complained one Ford supporter—the “right to save a campaign manager amendment,” said another.
Be that as it may. Ford’s side, for now, had no way to respond but with jokes.
The party Rules Committee, stacked with Ford stalwarts, easily voted the measure down. But that was only the first step. On Saturday, the convention rules committee could get to vote on 16-C, dragging the controversy out nicely. A Ford spokesman promptly announced that the president would announce his pick in the “traditional” way—which played nicely into Sears’s hands. Why didn’t Ford trust this Republican convention? The New Yorker asked Sears if he had any more surprises in store. The smiling Sphinx responded: “I really don’t know what surprises you. There will be other things that will be newsworthy. It is our feeling here that this probably stands to be the most exciting convention that our party has ever held.”
THIS WAS CORRECT, BUT NOT only for reasons he would have preferred. Things soon got more interesting when a mutiny developed on Sears’s right flank.
A Sphinx who offered too-clever-by-half procedural strategies out of one side of his mouth and insisted he wanted a united convention out of the other was not to the New Right’s taste at all. Pat Buchanan, with his usual aphoristic intelligence, explained the New Right’s way of thinking in a May column in Human Events. “Ford is a conservative,” he allowed; but his was “a conservatism marked by wariness of conflict, resistance to change, and an abiding ambition to conserve the status quo. . . . It is a don’t-rock-the-boat conservatism exemplified . . . by what Mr. Ford calls the politics of cooperation, conciliation, compromise, and consensus”—but thank God, Buchanan exulted, Reagan was there to lead the army of “Republicans who believe that conflict, not compromise, is the essence of politics.”
Jesse Helms articulated another facet of the right’s maximalist mind-set on the Senate floor earlier in August. His colleagues had been mocking him for his loyalty to Reagan. William F. Buckley described what happened next in his newspaper column: “His eyes passed over the great chamber and he mused that this probably was the most concentrated group of successful politicians in the United States.” (Recall that politician was a term of abuse for Helms; “I know nothing about being a politician,” was one of his favorite maxims.) “He then told his colleagues that several of them (‘You know who you are’) had confided in him in recent months that they would prefer Reagan over Ford as president, but that they couldn’t, for political reasons, make that known.” Buckley concluded, “If everybody in and around government and the Republican party who is privately for Reagan had made known that preference, Reagan could have picked John Wayne as his running mate.”
This political faith of a Bill Buckley, a Jesse Helms, a Pat Buchanan—and the hundreds of Reagan delegates who thought the same way—was announced in one of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign slogans: “In your heart you know he’s right.” The faith was that millions of Americans, both ordinary citizens and politicians, were actually bone-deep conservatives, but were intimidated out of acting on conviction by the malign hegemony of the all-powerful liberals. And the only way to flush out the Trojan horses—across the nation generally, and, this week, in Kansas City—was to deploy another Goldwater slogan: give them “a choice, not an echo.”
You did things, in other words, like forcing platform fights. Not nuanced procedural schemes.
But such fights were precisely what Sears’s strategy was designed to avoid. He reasoned that Ford would find it all too easy to water down the proposed conservative language, or just swallow, say, an anti-ERA or antiabortion plank, then run the other way in the general election, rendering the conservatives’ imagined “showdown” more akin to punching a pillow—and making Reagan look politically weaker than he actually was. Whereas 16-C was elegantly designed to make him look stronger.
Helms wasn’t having a bit of it. His planning for Kansas City had begun in July, shortly before Schweiker was chosen, when he called warriors of like mind to a meeting in Atlanta, where they began drafting twenty-two planks upon which to make their stand. They covered the waterfront: against gun control; for “sovereignty” over the Panama Canal Zone; for “superiority,” not parity, in nuclear arms; for trade with Rhodesia’s white minority government, whatever the United Nations said; a fight to the death for the anti-Communist Chinese government-in-exile in Taiwan; for constitutional amendments to ban abortion and forced busing and to require a balanced budget—and for throwing “détente” onto the ash heap of history. Four key Sears aides were there, too, nodding politely, each side adhering to a principle articulated by Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part II: “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
Helms made his next move the Sunday before committee week, the same day Sears was introducing the 16-C fight. Helms invited fifty conservative delegates and alternates for some serious backroom plotting because the actual planks that the Reagan high command had apparently signed off on were offensively pallid. (The one on Panama read merely, “In no events will the U.S. surrender fundamental interests.” The one on Taiwan said only, “We shall not remain indifferent to assuring the future security of Taiwan.”)
They called their strategy “purposeful conflict on substantive issues.” Helms insisted they were working “independent of Reagan and not taking orders from anyone.” Insider pundits greeted that claim skeptically. Wrote columnist Charles Bartlett (sufficiently an insider to have once set up young Jacqueline Bouvier on a blind date with Senator John F. Kennedy), “Although a delusion is being floated that he is acting on his own, this has to be a Helms-Reagan strategy, because the two have taken the long, winding road together.” He described the scheme as “raising a series of nerve-tingling, party-splitting issues which will oblige the President to take positions on which a majority of the uncommitted delegates may not be willing to follow him.” He called that “burning down the house to roast the wienie,” concluding: “A nomination secured through the success of a divisive pull to the right will be no great prize,” serving only as “a reminder that Helms belongs to that rabid band of committed conservatives who stop just short of conceding that they are willing to kill the party if they can’t control it.”
Like most Washington insiders, Bartlett was unaware that without Helms’s stealth New Right machine, Reagan would have never won his come-from-behind victory there—and never would have made it this far. To pundits, the Helms forces were merely stupid—“incredibly,” one wrote, “many of them did not comprehend the very simple politics in 16-C. They took it simply as a reform of the system, the kind of thing ‘liberals’ proposed, and turned their noses up at it.” And, yes, this view had evidence to recommend it. Plenty of conservatives preferred gut feelings to math: 86 percent of Reagan delegates told a pollster that if he were the nominee he would defeat Jimmy Carter in the fall; the Gallup poll, with more objectivity, gave it to Carter, 64 to 28. They were the sort of ideologues who spied conspiracies everywhere. One told a visiting political scientist that at Helsinki, “a Republican president voted people into absolute slavery.” Another, unable to believe a nice man like Ford could conceive such wickedness on his own, said, “If I were a political cartoonist, I would draw a two-headed Edgar Bergen with Kissinger and Rockefeller as the heads, and Ford as Charlie McCarthy.”
But politics is about mo
re than mathematics. It is also a matter of will. Polite Georgetown insiders didn’t like to admit this. Sometimes they willfully ignored it—moderates could be as oblivious to evidence that didn’t confirm their biases as any conspiracy-mongering extremist. Rabid partisans beat moderates all the time, precisely by dint of the very passion that sometimes blinds them.
And in any event, the extremists were too powerful for the official Reagan campaign to ignore.
Sears dispatched six of his top men to meet with them, Reagan intimates including Edwin Meese and Martin Anderson, and the Houston banker who had all but single-handedly saved the campaign back in May with a $100,000 unsecured loan. The Helms bitter-enders appeared unimpressed. They emerged, Helms floating word that it might make sense to give delegates a third first-ballot option for the presidential nomination: Senator James Buckley of New York.
This was some Sears-style cleverness of their own: Reagan delegates could defect to Buckley, signaling their frustration with the Reagan campaign while simultaneously denying Ford the nomination on the first ballot, forcing the Reagan campaign to capitulate to the “true” conservatives by the time of the second ballot, perhaps by dropping Schweiker. (“I think it’s a distinct possibility,” Helms said.) The New York senator, for his part, claiming he’d been approached by representatives of both candidates (though he was able to name only Reaganites), said he would not “slam the door.” The Californian was asked about the news by the UPI for the papers published August 11: “All Ronald Reagan could utter was a puzzled, surprised ‘Gosh,’ ” the article reported. Maybe these half-cocked insurrectionists were crazy enough to try a Buckley bid for real—who knew? “The possible entry of New York’s conservative Senator James Buckley into the Presidential race has added to the confusion and the infighting already underway. With the nomination still undecided, the jockeying for position becomes more complex every day.”
And so the insurrectionists prepared to march into a subcommittee meeting helmed by Charlie Pickering to force confrontations on the “hot-button” issues—busing, abortion, the ERA, gun control—to flatten the opposition with an ideological artillery barrage. Not that sneaky sissy stuff favored by John Sears.
AN UNLIKELY SOUND—SHRIEKING BABIES—FILLED THE too-small, too-hot hotel meeting room. Some of the squalls came from infants, cradled by pro-life activist mothers, many of whom were wrestling toddlers with their free hand. Others were recorded, and issued from the portable speakers other activists carried into the room. Some of those carrying neither infants nor loudspeakers held pictures of bloody fetuses. Others shouted insults at their sworn adversaries, who made up another cadre of ideological warriors who’d come to Kansas City eager to provide the Helmsites just the showdown they’d been itching for: the feminists of the Republican Women’s Task Force.
The Republican Women’s Task Force grew out of the 1972 convention, where Republican women had won a (watered-down, unenforceable) rule that the party should “take positive action to achieve the broadest possible participation in party affairs” by racial, ethic, and religious minorities, and that “each state shall endeavor to have equal representation of men and women in its delegation to the Republican National Convention.” That year, 30 percent of the delegates had been women. As 1976 dawned, they thought they might have a better chance with Ford—an ERA supporter, he of the feminist wife, with a decent record appointing female officials like Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Carla Hills and the RNC chairman, Mary Louise Smith. Surely it would be a piece of cake to keep the party’s historic endorsement of the Equal Rights Amendment in the platform, perhaps with even strengthened language. As for abortion, their demand was a simple one: keep the divisive issue out of the platform altogether—hard to disagree with that.
History, feminists were confident, was on their side. The progress, really, was staggering. Married women had as a matter of course been denied bank accounts and credit cards; in 1974 the Equal Credit Opportunity Act made that illegal. In some states, mostly in the South, women were omitted from jury duty; the Supreme Court banned that in 1975. In California, the entire estate of a deceased man was taxed, the taxes to be paid by the widow, even though under community property laws, half the estate belonged to the spouse; soon that was gone, too. In 1967 the first woman entered the Boston Marathon—and the race organizer chased after her and tried to pull the number off her jersey. She had to complete the race (time: three hours, seven minutes, twenty-nine seconds) surrounded by a protective cordon. But in 1976 the first woman entered astronaut training. That January Time had declared “American Women” as its, um, Man of the Year. “Feminism has transcended the feminist movement,” the editors wrote. “In 1975 the women’s drive penetrated every layer of society, matured beyond ideology to a new status of general—and sometimes unconscious—acceptance.”
But not in Kansas City, where only 31.5 percent of the delegates were women.
Republican feminists had already been disappointed by Ford on abortion. In the heat of the New Hampshire primary, in that interview with Walter Cronkite on CBS, Ford had staked out what he called his “moderate position”: abjuring a “Human Life” constitutional amendment, but averring that since Roe v. Wade had gone “too far,” “each individual state should decide what it wished to do.” The press, back then, had been surprised he’d chosen to address the matter at all; the Washington Post said the issue had “got somewhat overblown and out of hand.” If so, it got more overblown that next day, when Betty Ford released a statement, “I am glad to see that abortion has been taken out of the backwoods and put into the hospital where it belongs.” The Boston Globe responded, “President Ford would be a better man and a better leader if he paid more heed to his wife, Betty, who is consistently demonstrating that she has more sense, honesty, and moral courage than the man she married.” However, what the liberal editorialists judged as plain, uncontroversial evidence of “sense, honesty, and moral courage” was in fact but a pole in what was becoming one of the most scarifying debates to emerge in American politics in a generation—a position that tens of millions of other Americans, conservative ones, believed to be inherently senseless, dishonest, immoral, cowardly, or all of the above. Liberals tend to get into the biggest political trouble when they presume that a reform is an inevitable concomitant of progress. This is when they are most unprepared for the blinding backlash that invariably ensues.
As, indeed, had been happening with the Equal Rights Amendment, too. It had passed in thirty-four of the thirty-eight states required for it to be put in the Constitution for all time. But the setbacks in New Jersey and New York the previous November had been brutal. Its champions in the Empire State had campaigned with the slogan “All people are created equal,” printed on red-white-and-blue Bicentennial-style buttons. The slogan “didn’t work very well,” the campaign’s leader admitted to a scholar. “Our natural constituency wasn’t turned on by it, and the average person on the street didn’t understand what we were getting at.” The opposition, organized into a coalition with the hair-on-fire moniker “Wake Up New York,” did much better with leaflets calling ERA the “Common Toilet” law. A local Fair Campaign Practices Commission in Rochester unanimously ruled that the leaflet was unfair; experts agreed ERA would mandate nothing of the sort; the coalition continued using it anyway, calling the FCPC a “kangaroo court.” They told the story, too, of a mining camp in Montana, which had a state ERA, where women were forced to use the same restrooms as men; the pro-ERA forces then pointed out that the mining camp in question in fact did not even have female employees. Wake Up New York still kept making the same claims—and won, in November 1975, with 57 percent of the vote.
And so, the following summer, the Republican Women’s Task Force booked rooms across the Missouri River in Kansas, in protest against the Show Me State’s failure to ratify the ERA. They dropped a rules challenge to delegations with too few women when advised it might threaten Ford’s nomination. But they rebuffed warnings that an abortio
n fight would embarrass the president. “We believed the party must take a stand for abortion rights,” one of their leaders, a Republican activist named Tanya Melich, wrote later. “If the Republican Party was going to give up on women’s freedom, there had to at least be a fight.”
The language the subcommittee debated proposed “to restore protection of the right to life of unborn children,” without specifying state or federal action, and criticized a recent Supreme Court decision allowing minor children to obtain abortions without parental consent under some circumstances. It was introduced by Robert Dole, who had barely won back his seat in the Watergate backlash election of 1974 against a pro-choice obstetrician. He believed his slim margin of victory had come from his strong right-to-life stance and the energy antiabortion warriors had poured into his campaign.
He was eager to cement those political gains for himself. But his language was not nearly far right enough for the forces led by Helms: dodging the question of federal action, and a constitutional amendment, it was just the sort of Ford straddle they despised. (The Democrats went with an only slightly less anodyne statement: “We fully recognize the religious and ethical nature of the concerns which many Americans have on the subject of abortion. We feel, however, that it is undesirable to attempt to amend the U.S. Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court decision in this area.”) The conservatives in the room were out of step with the convention as a whole, which was if anything to the left of the Republican Women’s Task Force’s position to drop abortion from the platform altogether: a survey of 449 randomly selected convention delegates found that a majority of 60 to 32 percent agreed it was “the right of a woman to decide whether to have an abortion”; even 48 percent of Reagan supporters agreed.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 105
