by Bret Baier
“What?” Deaver was stunned.
Reagan explained, “Mike, people will tire of me on television. They won’t tire of me on the radio.” How he knew that, Deaver couldn’t imagine, but he later acknowledged that he had been absolutely right. From 1975 to 1979, Reagan delivered 1,027 addresses, and between 20 million and 30 million listeners heard him every week.
On the radio, people were drawn to his storytelling, as he regaled them with the failures of government bureaucracy. “To err is human,” he told them. “It takes a government to really louse things up.” He was a master of the pinpointed anecdote, the tale of some ordinary person just trying to get by who was stymied by some regulation or red tape. Newsweek called him “the most kinetic single person in American political life.”
Repeatedly, Reagan articulated a central premise: “It’s time for us all to realize that government is not the answer to our economic problems. Government is the problem.” Another favorite theme was the evil of communism, a precursor of the battles he’d one day wage as president. His platform was the American way as an ideal still to be fully realized.
RUNNING AGAINST A SITTING Republican president was nearly unheard of, and even Democrats usually pulled their unruly factions together behind the White House—1968 having been a notable exception. So why was Ronald Reagan willing to walk out on that ledge in 1976?
His friends and advisors would later agree that he had one overarching reason for challenging President Gerald Ford in 1976: détente with the Soviets. It had been Nixon’s policy, and now it was Ford’s, formalized in the Helsinki Accords in 1975. Reagan believed that the president’s concessions to Soviet general secretary Leonid Brezhnev had been damaging to human rights and extended Soviet power in the region. He saw détente as a one-way street that had enabled the Soviets to grow stronger at our expense. The accords had placed them on an equal playing field, no longer allowing the United States to negotiate from a position of strength. It was a kumbaya moment, an embrace made without good faith by the Soviets.
Reagan wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Ford’s own secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, opposed the negotiations and, when Ford fired him, publicly stated that Ford was “soft” on communism. Reagan thought Schlesinger had been fired because Ford did not want to deal with the growing imbalance of nuclear arsenals. The goal, Reagan argued, should be to fight the Communists, not to appease them.
Over dinner one night in 1975, Reagan told Laxalt, now a US senator, that he was thinking about running against Ford. He asked for his advice.
“You shouldn’t be making any moves here unless you’re serious about it,” Laxalt said. “Running for President is serious business. Running in California as governor was serious, too, but this is a little bit more significant.” He suggested doing a litmus test to gauge Ford’s political vulnerability and whether the public would be receptive to Reagan. The results were positive, and Reagan told Laxalt he was going to go for it. He asked Laxalt to chair his campaign, and Laxalt agreed—a daring move on his part as the party establishment was behind Ford.
A youthful, vibrant sixty-four, Reagan was serious. Like the lifeguard of his youth, he was determined to save the party, even if it didn’t always realize it needed saving. The party had been sandblasted, and the old alliances no longer existed. Watergate had been a trauma whose effects were still pulsating, notwithstanding Ford’s declaration that “Our long national nightmare is over.” In the meantime, there was Ford, who had never waged a national campaign and who had never been elected to public office outside of a congressional district in Michigan.
Reagan was becoming convinced that he should run. He told Deaver, “I just don’t think Jerry can do it.” He meant, Deaver said, tackling the Soviets. “And if I don’t do it, I’m going to be the player who’s always been on the bench who never got into the game.” Reagan picked up the phone and put in a call to Ford at the White House to tell him he would be announcing his candidacy.
Leading the effort was a new face in the Reagan circle—thirty-four-year-old John Sears, a Washington campaign strategist who had been behind Nixon in 1968. The Reagans thought he was incredibly smart, with the aura of a winner, even though he could be acerbic and difficult and never connected with Reagan on the personal level he preferred. Nancy recalled that Reagan was baffled by Sears’s manner. “He doesn’t look you in the eye. He looks you in the tie,” he grumbled. Nevertheless, Sears instilled confidence. The Reagans were impressed by his broad knowledge and savvy—and they wanted to win.
On November 20, 1975, a week before Thanksgiving, Reagan declared his intention to run, citing the economy—inflation, unemployment, and interest rates—and the wrongheaded policy of détente, which was compromising the United States’ military superiority.
“In my opinion, the root of these problems lies right here—in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “Our nation’s capital has become the seat of a ‘buddy’ system that functions for its own benefit—increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker who supports it with his taxes.”
In spite of its high-minded and optimistic beginnings, Reagan’s campaign was almost over before it began when he lost the first five primaries. As he approached the North Carolina primary, the situation was as dire as it could be. Reagan aide Martin Anderson painted the grim picture:
Okay, so here we are, coming up to the North Carolina primary, he’s lost five straight. The Republican Governors have been calling on him to get out. The editorials are calling on him to get out. Nine of ten of the past Republican chairmen of the party are calling on him to get out. Except for George Bush, who was the current chairman of the party, who didn’t say anything. And we’re out of money. We’re about $2 million in debt. . . . We would stop at a campaign site, [and] I remember Michael Deaver would get out and go to the McDonald’s and come back—no, sorry, Kentucky Fried Chicken—would come back with a big bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. We’d pull out chicken and that was our food. They wouldn’t sell us anything unless we paid cash in advance.
The North Carolina polls were discouraging; they put Reagan ten points behind. But then an angel appeared in the form of a Texas supporter named James Lyon. He made the campaign an offer it couldn’t refuse: a loan of $100,000, if it would use the money to put Reagan on TV, just talking to the American people.
When presented with the offer, Reagan considered it for a moment and said, “Okay, you borrow that money and I’m going to run in every blankety-blank primary from here to the convention, even if I lose every single one.” It worked. To the astonishment of the Ford campaign and the Republican establishment, Reagan won North Carolina. And he kept winning, so as the convention approached, he was within spitting distance of Ford.
Sears convinced Reagan that it would be a bold move to announce his vice presidential choice a month before the convention. He thought that would force Ford to announce his choice early. Ford was in a bind; he needed a way to appease the conservatives in his party, and the sitting vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, was not going to fill that role. Rockefeller had announced early in the campaign that he wouldn’t be a candidate—he had been pushed or had jumped, no one knew for sure, but he had probably been pushed—and Ford had floated a number of names. However, Sears’s strategy backfired when Reagan inexplicably chose Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker, a liberal-leaning moderate who was anathema to Reagan’s conservative supporters. Later, when the delegate count got painfully tight, some of his conservative backers urged him to dump Schweiker, but he adamantly refused. “If you were to stand here right now and tell me that you could guarantee that I’d get the nomination if I did that, there’s no way I’m going to do it,” he told one of them. Schweiker had been loyal to him, and Reagan was loyal in return.
Leading up to the convention, both camps had showered attention on the wavering delegates, each using their special brand of favors. For Ford that meant invitations to the White House or personal calls from the president. For Reagan
it meant access to Hollywood, as delegates received calls from the likes of matinee idols Jimmy Stewart and Pat Boone. When the convention opened on August 16 at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City, the count was tantalizingly close: with 1,130 delegates needed to win, Ford had 1,118 to Reagan’s 1,035, with 106 uncommitted. The pendulum could swing either way.
Close conventions are like hurricanes fueled by their own manic energy. A surge can go one way, then explode elsewhere. A puddle can turn into a flood in minutes. And bargaining and persuading continue on a more intense level, with surrogates flooding the delegations, creating dozens of miniconventions on the floor. Minds get changed and then switched back, and it’s not certain until the roll call which way the votes are going to go.
The count was so tight that each side fought vigorously for every vote. At one point, a Ford delegate broke her leg stepping off the raised floor of the convention hall, and she was in tremendous pain. The obvious course of action was to get her to a hospital. One problem: her alternate was a Reagan delegate. A doctor was called, who made a hasty splint. She stayed to vote for Ford and was then carried out.
Watching the nominating process from his hotel room, Reagan realized that he was going to be defeated. He could see it before anyone else, and he broke the news to the others, who still didn’t want to believe it. The final vote was 1,187 for Ford and 1,070 for Reagan. Reagan fell short by only 117 delegates.
As his aides tried to control their tears—Nofziger was sobbing in the bathroom—Reagan was calm and even contemplative. “You know what I regret the most?” he asked quietly. “I had really looked forward to sitting down at the table with Brezhnev to negotiate on arms control. He would tell me all the things that our side would have to give up. And then, when he was finished, I was planning to stand up, walk around the table, and whisper one little word in his ear: Nyet.”
The following morning, Deaver, who admitted that he’d been out drinking and drowning his sorrows with staff until four in the morning, was jarred awake at 7:30 by a group of Reagan’s California advisors pounding on the door of the Reagans’ suite. They demanded to see Reagan so they could discuss his becoming Ford’s running mate.
“I think he’s still asleep,” Deaver demurred.
“Well, get dressed and go get him.”
Deaver got dressed, went into the Reagans’ bedroom, and woke them up. He told them about the insistent committee sitting outside. “I don’t want to be vice president,” Reagan said, burying his face in the pillow. “Go tell them that.”
“They don’t want to see me. They want to see you.”
“Damnit!” Reagan got up and stormed around the room, getting dressed. Just then the telephone rang, and Deaver picked it up. It was Ford. Reagan listened, smiling. “Yes, yes, I think that’s terrific . . . just great,” he said. “I’ll do everything I can.”
He hung up. “He just picked Bob Dole,” he said, relieved he didn’t have to debate the matter further. His supporters were disappointed, but Reagan knew he’d make a lousy vice president. It just wasn’t the right role for him. As he told his dejected supporters, “Only the lead dog gets a fresh view.”
In a close nomination fight, there is always the urgent question of what to do with the loser’s supporters, who are still in their seats and feeling emotional. So when the Reagans entered the hall the final night to enormous applause from their supporters, Ford’s people looked on with some chagrin. Overnight, the calculation had changed from winning the nomination to winning the general election, meaning that party unity must be achieved, almost magically. Like any winner, Ford might have wanted to claim the spotlight all on his own, but he had to contend with more than a thousand disillusioned delegates whose hearts were breaking. That is not an uncommon spot for the winner to be in—the 2008 Democratic National Convention, when Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton, comes to mind—and the fear of a rogue insurgency is quite real. Throughout the day there had been behind-the-scenes conversations between the Ford and Reagan staffs about whether Reagan should speak that night. The word from the Reagan camp was that he’d consider it only if Ford asked him to come up onto the stage. The word came down that Ford would ask Reagan to join him onstage at the end of his speech. However, when he stood onstage, trying to speak above the clamor, Ford had a moment of truth. As Reagan’s delegates rose up in an ovation that showed little sign of abating, Ford raised his hand and beckoned to Reagan.
Reagan wasn’t sure what the gesture meant. “Am I being asked to come down?” he asked Deaver as the convention erupted in shouts of “Come on down!”
“I think so,” said Deaver as Ford beckoned again. Reagan stood up and adjusted his jacket. “What am I going to say?”
“You’ll think of something,” Deaver shouted above the din.
He bounded onto the stage, vigorously shook Ford’s hand, and waited for the delirious cheering to stop. And then, in a conversational, folksy manner, he began talking about a bicentennial-year assignment he’d received to write a letter for a time capsule that would be opened in Los Angeles in a hundred years. “They suggested I write about the problems and issues of the day,” he said. “And I set out to do so, riding down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa Ynez Mountains on the other, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day.” He spoke sincerely of how the experience had convinced him that writing about contemporary domestic problems would be meaningless to that future generation if the great threat of nuclear weapons had not been addressed. In 1976, there was no way to know whether a century later those people would know whether his generation had accepted the challenge to prevent a nuclear future.
Will they look back with appreciation and say, “Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom? Who kept us now a hundred years later free? Who kept our world from nuclear destruction?”
And if we fail they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it. This is our challenge and this is why we’re here in this hall tonight. . . .
We must go forth from here united, determined, and what a great general [Douglas MacArthur] said a few years ago is true: “There is no substitute for victory.”
The delegates, most of whom had remained standing throughout the speech, cheered, and the band played “California, Here I Come.” As Ford once again took center stage, more than one delegate said, “We nominated the wrong guy.” It was such a dramatic moment and such a riveting speech that the convention felt a bit let down when Ford spoke. Reagan was too much of a gentleman to have intentionally hijacked Ford’s big night. But effectively that’s what happened.
The next morning, as Reagan thanked his campaign advisors and prepared to head home, he quoted some lines from an English ballad he had learned as a child: “I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile . . . although I am wounded, I am not slain. I shall rise and fight again.”
Ford never regained momentum during the campaign. The Republican establishment, which had been solidly behind the president, quickly began to see the fissures in his candidacy. The floundering economy was a big factor. The energy crisis, high unemployment, and low economic growth, a bitter cocktail termed “stagflation,” had the nation on edge. But the party also had to face a more existential truth: the nation was still recovering from Watergate, and there were lingering doubts about Ford’s pardon of Nixon. Since Ford had not been elected, either as vice president or as president—a historic first—there had been none of the natural bonding process between the man and the people that occurs during an election campaign. Instead, he’d been appointed by the person he had replaced and then pardoned. The American people were not happy with that; it stank of a quid pro quo. The 1976 campaign became a cleansing process, a crusade to rid the Oval Office of old ghosts. Unfairly or not, Ford was swept away in the discontent. Jimmy Carter, the littl
e-known governor of Georgia, was able to portray himself as not only competent but good—a moralist seeking an office that had been tarnished.
Ford was not a particularly fine campaigner, and as a result his mistakes were magnified. The worst gaffe occurred in a debate with Carter when he defended the Helsinki Accords, saying “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” It was blatantly untrue, and the statement made Ford look as if he didn’t know what he was talking about. He later clarified that he’d meant he did not accept Soviet domination, but it was too late. On November 2, the nation voted to end Ford’s presidency after less than two and a half years.
TEN DAYS AFTER JIMMY Carter’s inauguration, Reagan had a houseguest in California. Richard Allen was an old Nixon hand who was planning to run for governor of New Jersey. He’d asked Reagan aide Pete Hannaford if he could meet with Reagan and get him to sign some fund-raising letters for him. The appointment was arranged, and Allen showed up at Reagan’s house. He told Reagan he’d like him to sign the letters and maybe come to New Jersey to do a campaign appearance.
Reagan looked at him, puzzled. “Why, yes. I’ll do that. But you came all the way out here to ask me that?”
“Yes, I did,” Allen replied.
“Why didn’t you just call me on the telephone? I’d have been happy to say yes.”
Allen told him he’d thought he should ask in person, and Reagan appreciated that. Then, to Allen’s amazement, he invited him to stay and talk. And they spoke for most of the day, breaking for sandwiches at lunch. At one point Reagan said, “I’d like now to tell you my basic theory about the Cold War.”
“What’s that?” Allen asked.
“Some people say I’m very simplistic, but there’s a difference between being simplistic and simple. A lot of very complex things are very simple if you think them through.
