But when you believed a society gone mad was sanctioning genocide, math like that didn’t matter much.
The debate began. Witnesses addressed a fifteen-member subcommittee stacked by Ford’s team in consultation with Reagan’s, with only three pro-choice but nine pro-life members—the apparent calculation being that a more even representation would heighten the confrontation. That calculation proved wrong. Private security guards prowled the corridors outside; inside, photographers and reporters and TV cameramen jostled for space with pro-lifers shouting about the “mass murderers and baby-killers” on the other side. “The more epithets they shouted at us, the happier they seemed,” Melich wrote. “Our testimony was thoughtful and reasonable”—though her opponents surely judged it brainless and insane. The vote was called: ten to one for Dole’s antiabortion language.
A discussion on the ERA language, which supported efforts for equality for women but didn’t specifically mention the constitutional amendment—a starting place already to the right of any previous Republican platform since 1940—was gaveled forth. Opponents’ signs read, “DON’T LET SATAN HAVE HIS WAY—STOP THE ERA,” “ABORT ERA,” and “MY DAUGHTERS HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE HOMEMAKERS—DON’T LET THE ERA TAKE IT AWAY,” and referenced the perversions of nature like homosexual marriage that would surely follow its passage. A pro-ERA subcommittee member pronounced himself baffled: “It is a basic guarantee of women’s rights—there is no basis in it for abortion or homosexual marriages.” The vote deadlocked, seven to seven—a shock to the feminists, given that Ford forces whipped in favor of it. The subcommittee then voted ten to three to endorse voluntary prayer in the schools. Another subcommittee approved Ford’s preferred language that America would not give up rights over any area of Panama “necessary for the protection of security of the U.S. and the entire Western Hemisphere.” The Associated Press reported that this particular vote “gave Ford a narrow edge in the first major convention confrontation”—because, AP said, “It was on the foreign policy planks that Ford strategists said they had to engage in a test of strength with the Reagan forces rather than commit the party to positions contradicting the policies pursued by Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. . . . On domestic issues such as abortion and school busing, the Ford and Reagan positions were close enough in principle that the President’s manager felt he had plenty of room for agreement.”
On CBS, Eric Sevareid predicted that the Republican Party would go the way of the Whigs if the “revival tent across the road where the orthodox could kneel and touch the remnant of their true cross”—the Reagan campaign, headquartered at the Alameda Plaza Hotel—prevailed. The question remained, though: Which Reagan campaign? The ERA and abortion fights would go next to the full Platform Committee—but so would some of the twenty-two Helms planks, filed as minority reports, which the Washington Post reported might receive forty-five out of the 106 Platform Committee votes. The Platform Committee held its opening debate, on gun control, where “Reagan supporters”—the Associated Press didn’t specify which ones; perhaps it didn’t even know—“defeated an attempt to water down a plank putting the Republicans on record in opposition to all forms of gun control.” The 16-C fight, Sears’s ace in the hole against Ford’s first-ballot nomination, would soon go on to the full Rules Committee—but without buy-in from those selfsame Helms devotees.
It was only halfway through preconvention week, and the intrigue had hardly begun.
ON THURSDAY THE PRESIDENT NAMED names. Among the running mates he was considering, the White House announced, were senators Bill Brock of Tennessee, Jim Buckley of New York, and John Connally, all conservatives—and Lowell Weicker, the liberal senator who’d been among Nixon’s most relentless pursuers on the Ervin Committee; Edward Brooke, the liberal senator who happened to be black; and Mark Hatfield, the liberal senator who’d been the Senate’s second most aggressive Vietnam dove, behind George McGovern. The list also included William Ruckelshaus and Howard Baker, two ideological moderates who were also Watergate heroes, at a time when the Reagan position—that Watergate was a liberal witch hunt—was becoming more and more conservatives’ standby position. Clarke Reed, chief of the still-uncommitted Mississippi delegation, suddenly used this list as an opportunity to save face with his conservative brethren—who were flooding him with letters and telegrams and phone calls calling him a traitor or a quisling or worse—and announced that, since the president was “considering several possible running mates to the left of the mainstream of the Republican Party,” he was reconsidering his previously pledged loyalty to Ford.
He had already, at the meeting of the party Rules Committee, threatened to break with the Ford campaign and vote for 16-C when the convention’s Rules Committee met Saturday—in other words, vote with the Reagan side to force Ford to name his running mate early.
Saturday came.
On TV: a riot of colorful confetti-and-balloon-laden ceremonies; “Youth for Reagan” sending off their hero in Los Angeles, then boarding their own buses for Kansas City (back on the radio in October, Reagan would exaggerate their sacrifice as a “forty-eight-hour” bus ride); Richard Schweiker and his wife arrived to enthusiastic crowds at the Kansas City airport. Rockefeller and his wife, Happy, touched down to talk from Rockefeller’s aides, humiliating to the president, that Rockefeller might still make a great running mate. Then he spoke before the full Platform Committee: “Americans must see events in their true light and not permit emotionalism to substitute for moral judgement.”
Behind closed doors: breakfast deep within the Ford high command in the Crown Center Hotel, the most powerful men in the Republican Party surrounding Clarke Reed and warning him of dire consequences if he crossed them at the Rules Committee meeting that afternoon.
Reed assured them, “I’ll be all right on 16-C . . . I’m not going to flip. They ain’t gonna get me.”
Came the afternoon Rules Committee meeting. Rarely had a boring backroom meeting on convention procedures been so closely watched. John Sears worked his hustle, arguing that his was simply a commonsense reform: “Trust the delegates. . . . All it does is put the delegates and the people in the candidates’ confidence before it is the irrevocable choice of the party.” A Reagan delegate recalled, “People were all around us, these little Hitler Gestapo guys with walkie-talkies. They’d radio back to command headquarters about who did not vote properly.”
The question was called, the proposed rule failing by a vote of fifty-nine to forty—the gestapo guys apparently prevailing. A naive Ford aide, one of his top men, told the Washington Post, “We’re out of the procedural minefield now”—ignorant that things were unfolding just as Sears planned: losers of full-committee votes had the opportunity to file minority reports to bring the question before the entire convention if they received but 25 percent of a full committee’s 106 members. Which meant a floor fight, live on prime-time TV. Which had been Sears’s plan all along.
And Clarke Reed? He’d flipped. He voted with Reagan.
He excused himself by saying that, since Ford won decisively, they hadn’t needed his vote anyway. He was working every side of the street. And it was still only beginning. Both sides fanned out their deputies to hostelries across the Missouri River valley, getting their ducks in a row for a vote scheduled for the Tuesday evening of the convention on an obscure little procedural question that might well decide who became the next President of the United States.
THAT SAME SATURDAY AFTERNOON THE feminists were getting their ducks in a row on abortion. Their point woman was the Platform Committee’s only feminist officeholder. Millicent Fenwick was brash, spicy, a Katharine Hepburn character come to life: after her doctor warned her against cigarettes, she started smoking a pipe. She was a former fashion model who’d become a New Jersey congresswoman at age sixty-four. Wayne Hays once threatened to keep her staff from getting paid “if that woman doesn’t sit down and keep quiet.” A male colleague, in a debate on the ERA, addressed her on the House floor: “I ju
st don’t like this amendment. I’ve always thought of women as kissable, cuddly and smelling good.” She replied, “That’s the way I feel about men, too. I only hope for your sake that you haven’t been disappointed as often as I have.”
Her job that Saturday was leading the debate to try to ensure that the issue upon which they believed the very liberty of women to control their own lives hinged was not mentioned in the Republican Party’s 1976 platform. But “in another hot room,” Tanya Melich wrote, “again filled with a profusion of television cameras and right-to-life and pro-choice partisans, and a surfeit of security guards,” Fenwick failed. The vote was twenty-six to sixty-five—one shy of the twenty-seven needed to bring a minority report for a floor debate recommending that the platform not mention abortion.
The members of the Republican Women’s Task Force thought they could get twenty-seven signatures, though, for a minority report recommending the following plank: “There is no wide public consensus on this issue. It is felt by some to be a moral issue and by others to be an issue of personal choice, but most agree it should not be in a political party platform. . . . [W]e think that the Republican party platform, like those of years past, should not attempt to commit its candidates and officers, as well as members, as though this were a traditional political issue.” They had forty hours to file the signatures. They decided on stealth—if the Ford campaign found out, it might put a stop to the potential disruption. But stealth wasn’t hard to achieve, since the press was preoccupied with the 16-C soap opera. Armed with lists of Platform Committee members and their addresses at hotels across the city and its environs, they bodied forth, located their quarry, and found little resistance: “Glad you’re doing this, thank God someone’s concerned.” “This is right.” “What’s gotten into Ford?” Two of their signatories were doctors. Several more were doctors’ wives. Four were pledged to Ronald Reagan. They reached one sleeping delegate at his airport hotel an hour away at midnight; he signed in his pajamas. “They represented,” Melich remembered, “every section of the nation but one. It was as though we were reliving the Civil War. No one from the South or the Border States was represented, except Faye Chiles of Tennessee, and Tennessee had been on the Union side.”
The same regional balance of forces had marked the full Platform Committee’s earlier vote on ERA—fifty-one to forty-seven to keep it, a squeaker. Then John Sears asked Phyllis Schlafly to forgo the attempt to win her own minority report for a floor fight. More politically disciplined than Jesse Helms, she acceded. “I consider it immensely more important that Reagan be nominated. If Reagan is nominated, the platform is irrelevant because Reagan is against ERA and Mrs. Reagan is against ERA. If Reagan is nominated, we’ve won.”
GERALD FORD HAD REACHED A similar conclusion: almost any insult on the platform could be swallowed, if it advanced his nomination. Coincidentally, Sears was backtracking a bit on his strategy not to confront Ford frontally on ideology. He feared a genuine mutiny on his right flank if he did not throw the Helmsian fire-breathers a bone. “We were asking our troops to fight battles that were important, but were not the kind of battles they came to Kansas City to fight,” his conservative deputy David Keene told Jules Witcover in an after-action review. “You had to give them something to keep the blood warm in their veins.”
There also was the problem of the vote count on Rule 16-C: he wasn’t confident he could win, or win decisively enough to deal Ford a true setback. So he devised one more strategy, to kill two birds with one stone: confront Ford with the one platform insult he couldn’t swallow. Not the ERA, not abortion, not budgetary politics. But détente, Henry Kissinger, Panama, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Helsinki—the president’s prerogative to make foreign policy, which happened to be what Jesse Helms cared about most, the soft underbelly where Ford’s political manhood could really be poked. Surely he’d rise to that bait. There would be a rip-roaring debate on the convention floor: true drama, Reagan’s vision versus Ford’s. A debate Reagan had the votes to win, and one that Ford, because suitable foreign policy language was so important to him that his proxies kept the Platform Committee debate on the subject going until 3 A.M., wouldn’t dare duck.
And so, as Witcover described it, Reagan’s most trusted strategists, Ed Meese, Martin Anderson, and Peter Hannaford, joined Sears in “drafting a comprehensive foreign policy plank,” to be filed as a minority report, “that was compatible with Reagan’s position and party policy, but that would have to be contested by the Ford camp. The language had to make the challenge unmistakable, yet it had to be deftly worded so that it did not too crassly repudiate the incumbent Republican President.”
Richard Schweiker alighted in ABC’s suite and sat down for its Sunday interview show Issues as Answers, claiming hidden delegates, now as many as fifty from Pennsylvania alone. No one trusted him. Garry Wills noticed even Reagan distancing himself from him by consistently mispronouncing his name. Evans and Novak had reported, “Whereas poisonous erosion of Reagan strength in the South can be blamed on Schweiker, he cannot take credit for modest Reagan advances in the Northeast.” He also starred in the Sunday morning papers:
WASHINGTON (AP)—Senator S. Schweiker, R-Pa., was a top congressional participant in a Nixon-era program set up to help find government jobs for friends of the White House, and members of Congress, government documents reveal. . . . Civil Service Commission investigators found the purposes of the unit was to assure “that timely and responsible action would be taken on referrals received from members of Congress and administration officials.” Records of the special unit show that it received 134 referrals of job applicants from Schweiker. . . . Only the Nixon White House personnel office had more.
But the report had no apparent impact. No one seemed to care about Richard Schweiker one way or another. It was like a Greek tragedy about the fate that befalls bearers of vaulting ambition.
Ronald Reagan arrived in Kansas City, met by the usual delirious throngs. He said, “We come here with our heads high and our hearts full. We’re going to come here and do what we have to do.” He argued that he’d done delegates the honor of giving them three weeks to learn about his running-mate selection, where Ford would give them but half a day. Then, three hours hence, an incredible development: the president arrived.
Air Force One landed. The president ambled down the steps with the first lady and his photogenic children in tow (Reagan had only three kids present; Patti abstained), taking in the gaze of all three networks’ live cameras, acting as if this was not an unprecedented sign of weakness: incumbent presidents were supposed to arrive at political conventions the day of the nomination, brashly confident, not sullying their office by politicking like ward bosses. A reporter said Ford looked as humble as a pilgrim. He worked the delegates’ hotels, trailing clouds of Secret Service men bearing plastic stanchions to cordon off aisles for him to walk through. A man wearing a giant Styrofoam Snoopy head showed up wherever the stanchions did—the Peanuts character was running for president, sponsored by Dolly Madison cakes, and his handlers were keen to get him in a photograph with Gerald Ford, who was busy re-wooing delegates supposedly already committed to him but now threatening to withhold their support unless he chose a running mate congenial to them: indignity upon indignity.
Reagan glad-handed at various delegations, too—then repaired to his headquarters at the Alameda Plaza Hotel, where he lunched with Joseph Coors, Jesse Helms, and a dozen other conservative movement leaders. Then he glad-handed some more. It was only at a late-night meeting alongside his wife, Nancy, that Reagan was finally apprised by Sears of the details of the strategy by which his nomination could be won: the 16-C debate and vote, then the foreign policy plank debate and vote before the whole convention on Tuesday night, the day before the final balloting. “Two rolls of the dice to take the whole pot” is how an old ink-stained wretch from the campaign planes, where they knew a thing or two about gambling, described it.
The Washington Post went to press with the observa
tion, “The spectacle of a President enduring such blatant pressure tactics from the party rank and file is mind-boggling to anyone who recalls the manner in which Mr. Ford’s two most immediate predecessors, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, lorded over their party convention.”
Dawn broke Monday on a metaphoric shoot-out in Kansas City.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
* * *
The End?
“THE CITY OF FOUNTAINS,” THE tour-bus drivers instructed their passengers to call Kansas City—more fountains than any city but Rome, went the civic boast. Like the one in front of Ronald Reagan’s massive Spanish-themed headquarters hotel, the Alameda, which featured a frolicking naked woman. “The men have the look of successful business and new-car franchises, their women the aura of beauty-parlor habit and the bridge table,” Jules Witcover wrote. They were welcomed at hot buffets with cold shrimp at receptions where busboys frantically popped stems into disposable plastic wineglasses, in hotel banquet rooms with the letters G and O and P hewn out of giant blocks of ice. Kansas City’s hotels were putting on the dog: it was the first national political convention held there since 1928.
Hotels, and motels: there being not nearly enough fancy hostelries downtown to accommodate the thirty thousand visitors, delegations were stashed as far as an hour down the freeway. Pennsylvania’s chairman told Time his place near the airport was “like getting stuck in the middle of a cornfield—you can’t walk to a bar or get a suit pressed.” The manager threatened to cancel his entire delegation’s reservations until the chairman apologized; the place had four bars, and valet service, too.
Two hundred Texans, a hundred delegates and a hundred alternates, all pledged by law to Reagan on the first, second, and third ballots and in their hearts until hell itself froze over, were in a motel half an hour away. Texas Monthly sent a sardonic reporter to report on the home-state delegation for an article that ran under the title “Republicans Are People Too”:
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 106
