by Bob Spitz
Reagan and Meese cut glances at each other and edged into the room in time to hear Nixon say, “Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as president at that hour in this office.”
The next day, at noon, the staff assembled in Governor Reagan’s office to watch the startling events that marked the unprecedented transition. It was a sultry Sacramento afternoon, the thermometer edging into the nineties, prompting shirtsleeves to be rolled up and ties loosened. It was almost surreal watching Nixon board the presidential helicopter and, grinning bizarrely, throw a V-for-victory salute to the throng of well-wishers. “Everybody was in a state of shock,” recalls Jeff Bell, then a young aide who had been recently brought in to help lay the groundwork for a possible campaign. Reagan, watching intently, was unsettled—but also outraged. “He didn’t have any good feeling for Nixon’s enemies,” says Pete Hannaford, “whom he blamed for the whole Watergate mess.” He bristled when Walter Cronkite said, “I think we ought to take Lysol and scrub out the Oval Office.” Reagan’s sympathies were with Jerry Ford, a man very much in the Reagan mold, a Midwesterner who had also worked his way through college washing dishes at a fraternity house and who had starred as center on the University of Michigan football team. Dutch Reagan had even broadcast a game he was in. “We’ve got to give this man a chance,” the governor told the others. “It would be unfair to do otherwise.”
A few minutes later, he read a statement from handwritten notes to a group of reporters gathered outside his office. “It is a tragedy for America that we have come to this,” Reagan said, “but it does mean that the agony of many months has come to an end.” In response to questions that Ford might tap him to be his vice president, he hedged, suggesting Barry Goldwater instead. But strong speculation remained in the wind. If the post was offered, he wouldn’t know how to respond. Accepting it would certainly throw a curveball at his objectives. In one respect, if Ford was to be taken at his word that he would not run for reelection, it would practically assure Reagan of the nomination in ’76. But if Ford decided he liked the job enough to secure his own term, it would be nearly impossible to mount a challenge. To fully gauge the implications of both outcomes, John Sears was summoned back to Sacramento for a meeting with the Nofziger Group. He instructed them to flatly refuse an offer of the vice presidency, fearing it would tie Ronald Reagan to a doomed administration. “Ford isn’t up to the job,” he recalls telling them. “Why go there if it doesn’t fit our needs? And it doesn’t matter if he ultimately decides to run. I don’t think he can win an election, so I don’t see much trouble in running against him.”
Sears didn’t anticipate that kind of offer from Ford, but a few days later the new president’s counselor, Robert Hartmann, sounded out the governor on a list of men they were considering for vice president: U.S. ambassador to NATO Donald Rumsfeld, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and Republican National Committee chairman George H. W. Bush. Would Reagan be interested? He wasn’t, but he told Hartmann halfheartedly that if the president appointed him he would faithfully serve.
Practically as soon as they hung up, Gerald Ford announced that he was appointing Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president, surprising few but angering many. Conservatives were particularly up in arms. They detested Rocky—a congressman from Maryland called him “the single most unacceptable nominee one might contemplate.” Rockefeller was wealthy, he supported abortion rights, and he was from New York City, a place many conservatives viewed as the habitat of Satan.
Reagan didn’t share the disapproval. “He liked Rockefeller,” Meese says. “They teamed up at governors’ conferences and found common ground on many policies.” Though ideologically miles apart, they were both pragmatists, and in 1968 they had worked together, attempting to stop Nixon’s nomination, and there had been talk of a Reagan-Rockefeller ticket to soften the conservative platform for the moderate Republican voter.
There were more consequential reasons to censure Ford than for his choice of a vice president. On September 8, 1974, exactly one month into his presidency, he granted an unconditional pardon to Richard Nixon, setting off a furor on both sides of the aisle. “Polls showed that most Americans wanted Nixon punished. Again, Ronald Reagan professed no qualms. “I support [Ford] in the pardon,” he told reporters during a press conference in Louisville.
Ten days later, Ford offered amnesty to tens of thousands of Vietnam-era draft evaders and deserters who agreed to perform two years in public-service jobs. The backlash was swift. The American Conservative Union was especially vocal in the outrage, insisting that “Rockefeller and Ford are not conservatives.” Reagan remained silent, but privately he fumed. “Those who fought and served were patriots,” he maintained. “Those who refused to serve . . .” A disgusted head shake punctuated his scorn. He stopped short of calling them traitors, but his long face spoke volumes.
The economy also bedeviled Jerry Ford. This was where Ronald Reagan sought to put distance between himself and the president. The economy was in dire straits and getting worse in alarming ways. Double-digit inflation was soaring higher; interest rates approached 10 percent; unemployment was up, too. What’s more, crude-oil prices had skyrocketed and gas prices had doubled at the pump, sparking a severe energy crisis. “The governor felt that the deficit and big-government activities of the Ford administration were on the wrong track,” Ed Meese recalls. “And that put him off Ford more than anything else.”
On October 8, 1974, during an address to a joint session of Congress on the economy, Ford displayed his brainstorm to help turn things around: a “WIN” (for “whip inflation now”) button pinned to his lapel. Grinning broadly, he asked Americans to wear one proudly, joining the fight to boost his economic program. Distributing feel-good buttons with an innocuous slogan struck Reagan as silly, a public-relations gimmick. He expected more from Ford. Across the country, as he made speech after speech, Reagan sensed the administration was failing to grasp the acuteness of the crisis. All around him, during question-and-answer sessions, at receptions, in hotel lobbies, and on the street, he heard anguished laments from people struggling to make ends meet.
Still Reagan refused to signal that he was running. Supporters weren’t sure whether he was playing his cards close to the vest or simply hadn’t yet made up his mind. In December 1975, as his second term was drawing to a close, he met for lunch with his Kitchen Cabinet and longtime staff at the Los Angeles Country Club, where the chief topic of conversation was his immediate future. The financial backers had invested heavily in the Reagan brand, but their enthusiasm for a challenge to Gerald Ford was muted. Henry Salvatori and David Packard were flat-out against it, and even Holmes Tuttle expressed skepticism. “It would be ridiculous to run against an incumbent,” he told Newsweek. “But if Ford doesn’t run, it would be a horse of a different color.” The last thing any of them wanted was a schism in the Republican Party.
There was palpable relief, then, when Ronald Reagan laid out his program for 1975. He wanted to speak directly to voters by hitting the mashed-potato circuit—and to make some serious money in the process. Mike Deaver and Pete Hannaford planned to put him on the road via a public-relations company they’d spearhead in Los Angeles. A schedule of lectures, radio commentary, and newspaper columns promised to make Ronald Reagan a wealthy man, and keep him in the national spotlight. The plan would afford him some much-needed breathing room. Two terms as governor of California had taken its toll. “I think he was tired of the job,” Lyn Nofziger recalled, “tired of dealing with the petty personalities in the legislature, tired of commuting to Los Angeles on most weekends so his wife could socialize with her rich friends, tired of the small-town atmosphere of Sacramento.” The unrelenting politics—and protests—the go-go schedule, the tenacious press corps, the responsibility of a state’s overall health and that of its constituents weighed heavily on his psyche. He’d put all he had into it. It made him wonder i
f he had what it took to be president. He revealed reluctance, but only to his wife. Nancy made no secret she was “dying to return to Los Angeles and a normal, private life.” They’d bought a new, 688-acre ranch high in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara to serve as an escape, their private sanctuary, when the speaking circuit or even L.A. closed in and they needed to “think something out.” They were ready to leave Sacramento to the new governor, thirty-six-year-old Jerry Brown, Reagan’s polar opposite and the son of his predecessor.
On January 3, 1975, after the final day in the governor’s office, Ron and Nancy took off for their new retreat, which they dubbed Rancho del Cielo. It was easy to become intoxicated by the grandeur of its landscape: gently sloped meadows carpeted with wildflowers that stretched across the horizon as far as the eye could see; crystal-clear streams trickling through the low-cut brush; clean, cool breezes that swept off the ocean and made the climate so delightful; a sky so blue and brilliant that one could lie in a chaise longue abutting the small adobe ranch house and stare up at it, transfixed, for hours on end. Ideally, he and Nancy would be “content to spend the rest of our lives that way.”
In reality, they had a couple of days, at best.
* * *
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The phones started ringing even before the ex-governor crossed the Sacramento County line. Well-wishers, businessmen dangling ventures, and the curious checked in. Among the most curious was President Gerald R. Ford, who came courting just a day into the retirement. Would the governor, he wanted to know, be interested in a Cabinet post? A few openings were coming up. One particular in Transportation had his name written all over it. Or perhaps an ambassadorship? Walter Annenberg was leaving his post at the Court of St. James. There was no finer place to spend a few years abroad. Fortunately, the president couldn’t see Reagan’s grin through the phone. “Hell, I can’t afford to be an ambassador,” he told Ford. But his mirth was directed at the president’s cheek. Ford had heard the rumors about a Reagan run, knew his staff was assembling a campaign. This was an obvious scheme to neutralize him.
There was no reason to cozy up to Gerald Ford. John Sears advised Reagan against it. “You’d be joining a ship that’s going down in a few months,” Sears said. When the president addressed Congress and the nation on January 15, 1975, declaring “the state of the Union is not good,” Reagan knew Sears was right. Disenchantment would attach itself to this administration. Besides, he had his hands full with all of the offers that his new business managers, Deaver & Hannaford, Inc., dished up.
The actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr. told Reagan about his work with a radio syndicator who hired him to do short programs about fascinating historical figures. “The producer thinks there is a market for a daily conservative commentary, and he thinks you’d be the perfect person to do it,” Zimbalist said. The show was the brainchild of veteran broadcaster Harry O’Connor, who proposed a five-minute spot bracketed by commercials they’d sell to local businesses in various markets. O’Connor figured they could attract a good hundred stations. In fact, no sooner had he announced the program than 350 signed up. (The first two were no surprise: WOC in Davenport and WHO in Des Moines.) When CBS television learned of the interest, it offered a competing proposal: a weekly commentary opposite Eric Sevareid on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. A national audience—it was hard to beat. Mike Deaver pushed Reagan to consider it, but he demurred. “With radio, you don’t outlive your welcome very quickly,” he explained. “If people like what they hear, they’ll want to hear you again tomorrow, whereas with television you run the risk of overexposing yourself.” Anyway, Ronald Reagan was an old radioman at heart.
They taped the show, Viewpoint—fifteen episodes at a clip at Harry O’Connor’s Hollywood recording studio on the eighth floor of the Taft Building on Vine Street. The space was crammed with an audience of famous friends—Art Linkletter, Jack Webb, and John Carradine, among others. Sally Cobb, who owned the Brown Derby next door, showed up with platters of smoked salmon and champagne.
Pete Hannaford had also met with Vic Krulak, a former Marine Corps general who ran Copley Press, a right-leaning newspaper syndicate based in La Jolla, whose publisher, James S. Copley, and many of his employees had reportedly spied on antiwar protesters for the FBI and cooperated covertly with the Central Intelligence Agency. Copley Press signed up a Reagan column that began appearing in early March 1975 in thirty-nine papers. Hannaford wrote most of the material based on pinpoint conservative themes, but Reagan contributed his share. “He had a restless mind,” Hannaford says. “He did a lot of reading. And when he went on the road for his speaking tour, he’d come back with a stack of legal-sized yellow-ruled pages and say, ‘There! Three weeks of radio spots!’”
The first few shows of Viewpoint hit all his favorite Republican issues—a federal bill to create a consumer protection agency (he was opposed to it), one to tie congressional paychecks to budget balancing (he favored it), the threat of worldwide communist domination, the gospel of free enterprise, and a guaranteed-income plan such as the Family Assistance Program, which he had helped to defeat during his governorship. He knew how to capture his audience’s attention:
If you’ve had the experience of standing in the checkout line in the supermarket next to a strapping young fella with a big basket of groceries who pays for them in food stamps, and you’re worrying how long you’ll be able to find the cash to feed your family, and you’ve paid your taxes, you’ve probably worried about the food stamp program and how it works.
Occasionally, in the flush of delivering a real zinger, he’d roll out an anecdote without checking the facts:
If you’re not familiar with the term “boondoggle,” consider the fact that our federal government recently underwrote the cost of a study dealing with Polish bisexual frogs. If that doesn’t give you a hint, stand by, I’ll be right back.
He had stockpiled this yarn almost a year earlier, when he read a column in the Congressional Record about a “scandal” exposed on the House floor by an outraged Idaho congressman. A little digging might have uncovered a newspaper article revealing there was no taxpayer funding involved and, in fact, the “boondoggle” was scientific research into “the lingering mysteries of genetic evolution” and how hybrids might lead to improving the efficiency of agriculture. But the broadcast drew the anticipated storm of indignation.
The radio shows and columns were good and useful, but it was the speeches, the public appearances, that truly invigorated Reagan. He’d do eight or ten a month, barnstorming into the provinces, connecting with working- and middle-class people who, for the most part, shared his conservative views. It harkened back to his General Electric plant talks, when he took the pulse of a disgruntled constituency. After a short opening statement, he would slip his notes into a jacket pocket and say, “Rather than a monologue, let’s have a dialogue. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
For speeches to political groups, however, there was business to conduct. Conservatism was gaining strength within the Republican Party, and its advocates—many of them young activists, particularly in the South and Midwest—demanded to be heard. They’d been demoralized by the pasting Goldwater took in 1964, but Ronald Reagan restored their confidence. They pinned their hopes on him; he was their voice. In a speech in February to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., he did not disappoint. He repeated the thrust of one of his radio broadcasts, decrying how the $52 billion deficit written into President Ford’s new budget proposal “abandoned his pledge of a balanced budget . . . made little more than four months ago,” requiring “borrowing on a scale too colossal to comprehend.” It was old-fashioned conservative religion repurposed to fire a salvo into the Oval Office. While he ducked questions about a ’76 run, going after Ford reminded his audience that, should the president cater solely to the party’s moderate wing, Reagan stood poised to protect their interests.
The gung-ho reaction
of the CPAC audience raised talk of a possible third-party alternative built around conservative values. The concept had been advanced by the National Review’s publisher, William Rusher, who with a corps of true believers had been promoting a Ronald Reagan–George Wallace ticket to the Republican Party’s disenchanted ranks. Wallace, the segregationist Democratic governor of Alabama, had enormous blue-collar appeal, especially among Southern whites. In the 1972 presidential primary, he had run strong in Southern states and parts of the West when his candidacy was derailed at a Laurel, Maryland, campaign stop by an attempted assassin’s bullet that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Nevertheless, the attack failed to end his political ambitions. There were clear signals from Wallace aides that he eyed the 1976 election with reinvigorated determination. Strategists feared he would split the conservative vote, handing the election to a Democrat. A new Conservative Party challenge might upend the status quo and prevail. They pointed to James Buckley’s shocking win in the 1970 New York senatorial election, running on the conservative ticket. He’d targeted Republicans who were alienated from the GOP’s silk-stocking ranks and disenfranchised Democrats—blue-collar Catholics from the suburbs and rural districts—whose interests lay outside the two-party debate.
Could it work again, this time on a larger scale? Ronald Reagan wasn’t so sure. He much preferred “a new and revitalized second party . . . making it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people.” And running with George Wallace? He found many of the governor’s far-right-wing views repugnant. Despite Wallace’s conservative appeal, there was little crossover in their ideologies. Wallace practiced the politics of negativism, with little or no interest in foreign policy. “We’re completely different on a lot of issues, especially economics,” Reagan said. Alabama’s finances were a mess, and the state ranked dead last in public education.
