by Bret Baier
“Yes, sir,” Allen nodded.
“Keeping that in mind,” Reagan went on, “my theory of the Cold War is, we win and they lose. What do you think about that?”
Allen said he felt as if he’d been hit with a ton of bricks. The hair rose on the back of his neck. “Do you mean that? Do you actually mean that?”
“I said it. Of course, I mean it,” Reagan said with a smile.
“Well, Governor, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re going to do with the rest of your life, but if you intend to run for president of the United States, you just signed me up right now, because that’s been my objective for a long time.”
As Allen recalled the meeting, “I came away walking on a cloud.” He returned to New Jersey and told his wife, “I’m dissolving my committee, I’m giving back the money, I’m not going to run for governor of New Jersey. I’m going to help make that guy, if I can, president of the United States.”
Allen wasn’t alone in his enthusiasm. Reagan had that effect on people. But it was early days. Reagan’s cadre of advisors was still nominally in place, and they were poised for action. But the wise course was to let things develop organically. No one wanted to push Reagan to make a decision about 1980, because he might have said no. Sears, Meese, and Deaver put it to him this way: Don’t decide right now, but let’s start a campaign committee and be ready if the time is right. Reagan was satisfied with that plan, and his public exposure through his radio show and newspaper columns remained high.
In 1978, as he was beginning to seriously contemplate a presidential run in 1980, Reagan found his resolve strengthened by a European trip and a visit to the Berlin Wall. He and Nancy were accompanied by his advisors Dick Allen and Peter Hannaford and their wives for the visit. According to Hannaford, Berlin—and the wall—made a lasting impression on Reagan. He told the US Embassy staff that he wanted to go through Checkpoint Charlie and enter East Berlin, and consular officials accompanied the group through the checkpoint to Alexanderplatz, a large public square half a mile in from the wall.
While Nancy and the other wives ducked into a state-run department store to check out the goods, the men lingered outside. They saw a policeman stop a young man walking through the plaza carrying a shopping bag. As they demanded his papers in a harassing manner, Reagan watched. “It was quite chilling,” Hannaford said. “Reagan saw that and he didn’t forget it.”
Later, back on the western side, they visited the Axel Springer House, the large publishing building overlooking the wall. “And high in the building, you look right down over the Berlin Wall to a place where not long before a young man had tried to go over, and they shot him and left his body hanging there,” recalled Hannaford. “It wasn’t still there, but it had happened not long before. When Reagan heard this story, his jaw set. You could just tell he had it in mind we would change all this one day. You could see it, hear it, in the things he had to say.”
Reagan never forgot the emotional impact of being at the wall. It was incomprehensible that in the decades following the fall of Nazi Germany, such a prison would be erected in the heart of Berlin, with the sole purpose of keeping an entire population of people under guard. The existence of the wall encapsulated his abhorrence of the Communist state. What kind of society, he wondered, can function only by trapping its citizens and forcing them into compliance? There could be no justification in ideology or necessity for such an abomination. Why was the Western world—and the United States!—so complicit in the continuation of this travesty? That wall should come down, he thought. He returned to the United States haunted by what he had experienced.
By the third year of Carter’s presidency, it was becoming clear that there was going to be an opening for a strong contender. The professor and historian Andrew E. Busch captured Carter’s core dilemma well, writing that not only was he besieged by economic crises, but in his posture toward the Soviets “he became Teddy Roosevelt in reverse, speaking loudly and carrying a twig. An increasing majority of Americans thought Carter too small for the job.” If Carter had been elected in a post-Watergate cleansing, his moral authority was diminished by his failures of governance.
The speech that would most symbolize his ineffectual leadership was the so-called malaise speech, delivered on July 15, 1979. Carter believed that an honest appeal to Americans, a form of tough love about their role in the nation’s decline, their crisis of confidence, would be well received. And at first it was. But Carter’s judgmental tone and harsh words were hard to stomach once they sunk in. Americans felt they were being blamed, chastised rather than inspired. With gas lines lengthening and the economy struggling, the nation needed leadership, not stern lectures.
Like Ford before him, Carter had a strong challenger emerging in his own party. Senator Edward Kennedy was initially coy about his intentions, but the nostalgia brigade was urging him to run against Carter in 1980. Kennedy’s baggage could be summed up in one word: Chappaquiddick. In 1969, Kennedy had been involved in an accident on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts. After a night of partying, he had been driving in a car with a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, when it had veered off a bridge and plunged into the water. Kennedy had escaped, but Kopechne was trapped in the car and died. Because Kennedy had left the scene and not reported the accident for ten hours, he’d eventually been charged with negligence. But for more than a decade Chappaquiddick had tarnished him, with endless speculation about whether he had acted from more than negligence and to what extent he was implicated in Kopechne’s death. It was an enduring stain on his reputation. However, many Democrats, eager for a reprise of Camelot, chose to ignore it.
Some analysts believe in retrospect that Kennedy’s campaign was doomed before it even began, when he gave an interview to the journalist Roger Mudd. Asked to explain his vision and motivations for seeking the presidency, Kennedy was inarticulate and rambling; he gave the impression of not having a cogent reason for running, perhaps other than having been born a Kennedy. He limped into the primary season without a forceful message, and it was only the national disappointment in Carter that gave his campaign any momentum at all.
On November 4, 1979, Islamic radicals in Iran seized the US Embassy and took fifty-two Americans hostage. The hostage crisis was ultimately so devastating for Carter’s presidency that it’s easy to forget the way it was in the beginning. At first Americans rallied around the president; his approval rating rose to over 60 percent. As the crisis dragged on, however, support for Carter turned to blame, giving Kennedy’s campaign a surge. But by the time of the convention, Kennedy’s star had also dimmed. He lost badly to Carter, then further split the party by standing aloof on the convention stage and refusing to take Carter’s hand in a gesture of party unity. Disharmony among the Democrats, the hostage crisis, and continuing domestic woes teed up the election perfectly for the Republicans.
Reagan announced his candidacy on November 13, 1979, nine days after the hostages were taken, with a forceful, thoughtful speech that covered both domestic and foreign issues, utilizing the stirring, deeply personal prose he favored:
To me our country is a living, breathing presence, unimpressed by what others say is impossible, proud of its own success, generous, yes and naïve, sometimes wrong, never mean and always impatient to provide a better life for its people in a framework of a basic fairness and freedom.
Someone once said that the difference between an American and any other kind of person is that an American lives in anticipation of the future because he knows it will be a great place. Other people fear the future as just a repetition of past failures. There’s a lot of truth in that. If there is one thing we are sure of it is that history need not be relived; that nothing is impossible, and that man is capable of improving his circumstances beyond what we are told is fact. . . .
We who are privileged to be Americans have had a rendezvous with destiny since the moment in 1630 when John Winthrop, standing on the deck of the tiny Arbella off the coast of Massachusetts, told the li
ttle band of pilgrims, “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.”
A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and—above all—responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill. I believe that you and I together can keep this rendezvous with destiny.
REAGAN BEGAN THE PRIMARY season as the front-runner, but he had a strong field of contenders, including George H. W. Bush, John Connally, and Howard Baker. Once more leading the charge for Reagan was John Sears, along with Charles Black and James Lake.
“It was conventional wisdom, even among the press, that Carter was not going to win if he had a strong opponent in the general election,” Black said. “Reagan felt good, and he felt like he could win it.” But there were internal hurdles to be overcome. The tensions in the campaign that had begun to brew in 1976 were now on full display, with two opposing camps—“the California versus the East Coast guys,” as Black put it. Deaver, Nofziger, and Meese had one strategic vision; Sears, Black, and Lake had another—and both sides were vying for control. At first they tried to manage their differences, forming an executive committee that met every Monday in Los Angeles. But as Sears and Deaver continued to butt heads over Reagan’s schedule, the atmosphere between the key aides grew tense. Both Deaver and Sears wanted to run the show, and there wasn’t room for two alpha males fighting over the candidate. Sears decided that Deaver needed to go. Black didn’t think it was a very good idea, given Deaver’s close relationship with Reagan, but Sears insisted.
The day after Thanksgiving, Sears, Black, and Lake went to see Reagan, and Sears laid it out for him: if they were to have a chance of winning, Deaver would have to go.
“Are you going to talk about this guy behind his back?” Reagan asked sharply.
“No, not necessarily,” Sears replied.
Reagan picked up the phone and asked Deaver to come over.
Nancy was also in the room, and when Deaver arrived, they discussed the problem for a while. Finally Deaver stood up. “Look,” he said, “if I’m in the way of you being president, I’m going to quit. I quit.” He walked out.
Reagan looked at the others with a tight expression on his face. “The best man in this room just left,” he said. He was very unhappy to have been pushed into that spot, and later in the campaign he brought Deaver back and then took him to the White House.
Meanwhile, the campaign had other problems. An early misstep was the decision to all but skip the Iowa caucuses. The Sears team believed it made more sense to focus on New Hampshire, a vital early-voting primary state where Reagan could establish a foothold in the East. Sears showed Reagan a poll that predicted he’d win Iowa without heavy lifting. In his absence, Reagan’s opponents stormed the state, and they made hay by calling out Reagan’s absence at an Iowa debate. Bush won Iowa, grabbing the front-runner status. The loss had tremendous symbolic significance. Partisans whispered that perhaps Reagan didn’t have the stamina, perhaps he wasn’t a golden boy after all. So much had been invested in creating the image of his dominance that the loss briefly took the wind out of his sails. Reagan felt blindsided, and his confidence in Sears started to fade, but Sears continued to insist that New Hampshire was the jewel in the crown.
“We made a decision that even if we got run out of the campaign, we had to get a win in New Hampshire,” Black said. It didn’t lift Reagan’s mood when Newsweek ran a cover story on Bush with the headline “Bush Breaks Out of the Pack.”
Reagan decided that the only way to win was to do it his way. That meant getting out among the people. Reagan biographer Craig Shirley recounts a decidedly Reaganesque move. His sixty-ninth birthday would be on February 6, 1980, three weeks before the New Hampshire primary. He decided to “celebrate” by campaigning like crazy and with tremendous vigor. He’d show them what a sixty-nine-year-old could do! On his birthday, he made a remarkable nine campaign stops.
But his masterstroke was to initiate a one-on-one debate between himself and Bush just three days before the primary, hosted by the Nashua Telegraph. Reagan offered to pay for the event himself, and Bush agreed, in spite of the outrage of the other candidates who were excluded. According to Shirley, Sears masterminded a trick: on the day of the debate he invited the other candidates to the debate, and when they showed up on the stage before an audience of 2,500 people, Bush went ballistic. That hadn’t been the agreement. The Telegraph’s editor, Jon Breen, wasn’t happy, either. After arguing with Reagan, Breen ordered that his microphone be shut off. Reagan pulled himself up to his full stature and declared indignantly, “I’m paying for this microphone!”
That delighted the crowd, and the other candidates left the stage to Reagan and Bush. Few people remember what was said during the debate. Reagan stole the show before it even started and regained his momentum.
At about two in the afternoon of primary day, while the polls were still open, Reagan nabbed Black. “Charlie, where’s John?”
“He’s making telephone calls.”
“Could you round up John and Jim and come and see me in the suite?”
Black nodded, and as Reagan walked away, he thought, “I know what this is.”
Sure enough, when they arrived at the suite, Reagan, who notoriously hated to sack people, fired them. After that, he was unbeatable. He won New Hampshire decisively with 50 percent of the vote, and he continued to win, sewing up the nomination early, with more than double the votes Bush received.
The Republican National Convention in July didn’t have much suspense, except for a certain pressing matter. “One of the most amazing things to me is that we went to that convention without knowing who was going to be vice president,” Deaver, who was back by Reagan’s side, recalled. “I think that’s just fascinating. It didn’t seem so odd at the time. I honestly believe Ronald Reagan had thought about this and eliminated people, and that George Bush was the guy who made sense to him.” But that wasn’t always apparent. Ed Meese and pollster/strategist Richard Wirthlin had suggested that Reagan consider picking Gerald Ford as a unity candidate. He wasn’t immediately averse to the idea, and he asked Meese and Wirthlin to test the waters with Ford and his people.
Deaver stayed in the suite with Reagan, and he could see him growing increasingly uneasy as time passed and he hadn’t heard back from Meese and Wirthlin. Around six o’clock, he decided to have dinner and turned on the TV. There was Ford talking to Walter Cronkite about a “co-presidency.”
“Reagan almost choked on whatever he was eating, and said, ‘Co-presidency? Where the hell is that coming from?’ ” Deaver recalled. “He said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this right now. You go up and tell Ed and Dick that I want them to come down here right now.’ ”
Deaver raced upstairs and summoned the negotiators away. “Reagan wants to talk to you.” Henry Kissinger, who was on Ford’s team, walked in at that point, and Deaver said, “You’d better get President Ford down to talk to Reagan. Reagan has just seen this thing on television, and he’s livid.”
Soon Ford arrived at the suite, and he and Reagan went into the bedroom to speak privately. When they came out and said their good-byes, Reagan told his staff, “Jerry didn’t want to do it. Jerry thinks it’s a bad idea. Jerry’s going to be with us all the way, said he would do whatever it took to help us. Unless somebody’s got a better idea, get me George Bush.”
Clearly, Bush had not expected to be asked. He told reporters, “Out of a clear blue sky, Governor Reagan called me up and asked if I would be willing to run with him on the ticket. I was surprised, of course, and I was very, very pleased. I feel honored. I did tell him I would do what all Republicans should do—support the platform. And I told him that I would
work, work, work.”
Judging by the response of the convention, Republicans were also pleased. This was not only a unifying ticket, it was a winning ticket. Bush, who had once jabbed at Reagan’s policies as being “voodoo economics,” was ready to draw a new alignment. No one was particularly concerned about Illinois congressman John Anderson’s decision to mount an independent run. Although he would do relatively well in the general election, with 6.6 percent of the popular vote, the liberal-leaning Anderson drew equally from both parties.
There was no question about who was at the top of the Republican ticket. The election was Reagan’s alone to win or lose. He was the anti-Carter, the slayer of mediocrity, and the two men’s relationship, bordering on mutual contempt, was reminiscent of the icy standoff between Eisenhower and Truman. In his White House diary, Carter frequently jabbed at Reagan as inept and superficial, saying in one passage that his “life seems to be governed by a few anecdotes and vignettes that he has memorized.” He thought Reagan swam in a shallow pool, and he didn’t fully appreciate the growing affection and trust many Americans felt for him. Rosalynn Carter shared that view. She recalled being glad when Reagan was nominated by the Republicans to run against her husband, writing in her diary that his politics were so bad it would be no trouble to beat him. Throughout the campaign, the Carters and their team underestimated Reagan’s unique appeal.
For his part, Reagan thought Carter was mean-spirited and a poor leader. His lack of clarity and resolve on the subject of nuclear arms especially troubled Reagan, as did his weak response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But Carter’s biggest problem was that he lacked a compelling vision. As Andrew E. Busch put it so cogently, “There was a distinct sense in which Americans were repudiating not just the failures of Carter’s stewardship, but the failures of his imagination. Reagan was the only candidate among the three who did not accept the widespread assumption that the United States must simply accept its fate as a power and a society in decline.”
