Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  George Bush wouldn’t have it. “No way you’re taking this away from me,” he fumed. “I’ve earned this. You’re not going to screw me.” At his bidding, the Nashua Telegraph threatened to pull out. John Breen, the editor, insisted they’d agreed to a two-man debate. “That’s what we advertised and what everybody’s expecting,” he said, indicating it was the only way the paper intended to let the event proceed. But Charlie Black kept filibustering until it was past six o’clock and the auditorium was already filling up, too late to pull the plug.

  Meanwhile, Jim Lake picked Ronald Reagan up from the hotel in order to brief him on the debate. “Governor, there has been some controversy,” he explained. “The Bush people are upset, the Nashua Telegraph threatened to pull out, so we’re going into sort of a hostile environment.”

  “We’re going to have the debate?” Reagan wondered.

  “We haven’t gotten Bush’s agreement to take the other guys. Still, we’re going ahead with it even though there’s a question as to whether they’ll permit it.”

  The scene at Nashua High School offered no comfort. Ronald Reagan was herded into a kindergarten room, where the other four candidates were sequestered in tiny tables and chairs with their feet splayed into the aisles, surrounded by their wives and Secret Service chaperones and reporters shouting questions. It was chaos, steamy. Bob Dole was livid. “That no-account! Those no good sons of bitches!” he bellowed, throwing in a few choicer words to describe George Bush and his men. Bush, for his part, was barricaded in a holding room down the hall. His campaign manager, Jim Baker, stood guard at the door, refusing to allow even Gordon Humphrey, the senator from New Hampshire, to appeal to Bush’s better instincts. Humphrey made his pitch to Baker while standing in the hall, claiming it would look bad for the state if everyone wasn’t included. “Aw, fuck you guys!” Baker said, and disappeared inside, slamming the door.

  At five minutes to seven, a student knocked on the kindergarten door with a message from the stage. “Mr. Breen says that if Mr. Reagan isn’t onstage in three minutes, he’s going to forfeit the debate to George Bush.”

  Reagan stood up and addressed the room. “Let’s all of us go up there. I’ll make my case, and if they won’t take all six of us we’ll walk out.”

  Jim Lake grabbed him by the cuff. “Governor—no!” he said. “You must stay, no matter what happens.” Gordon Humphrey agreed. “You stay up there and you win,” he insisted. “You walk off, you lose—Bush wins.” Lake chimed in, “Whatever happens, you are going to stay there. You have to stay onstage!”

  “Got it,” Reagan concurred, leading Bob Dole, Philip Crane, Howard Baker, and John Anderson through a maze of back stairs and corridors up to the auditorium.

  When they walked in, the place was mobbed, buzzing with anticipation. The audience sensed that something was amiss. George Bush was already seated onstage, his jaw set in granite. He stared straight ahead, refusing to shake hands with, look at, or acknowledge either Ronald Reagan or the four other Republicans who stood in a soldierly line behind him.

  Reagan stepped gamely to the lectern, leaning over the microphone. “I’d like to have a word . . .” he began.

  John Breen, the moderator, interrupted him. “There is no time for this.”

  “I want to have a moment to explain why these gentlemen, who are all candidates, ought to at least have the opportunity to introduce themselves,” Reagan persisted.

  “If you don’t stop, Governor, we’re going to turn off the microphone!”

  Ronald Reagan shot bolt upright, a wave of crimson tided into his face. “Just a minute here. Mr. Green,” he thundered, botching the moderator’s name, “I paid for this microphone!”

  It was a seminal moment in the campaign. The crowd went nuts, stomping and applauding. A chant went up: “Bring them chairs! Bring them chairs!” It took several minutes to restore order. Reagan must have known the line would play well. He’d heard Spencer Tracy deliver it, almost word for word, as a Republican presidential candidate in State of the Union. George Bush, who had sped around the state on high-octane Big Mo, now looked wilted, like he had nothing left in the tank. After the four also-rans departed and the two-man debate got under way, Bush seemed unnerved, stumbling through his answers.

  Jim Lake, watching from the back of the hall, borrowed a piece of paper from NBC anchor John Chancellor, who was standing next to him. Across the top he scrawled a short message, then scooted down the aisle and through a door that led backstage. “Would you please give this to the governor,” he instructed a Secret Service agent positioned in the wings.

  George Bush was in the midst of a feeble explanation about the perils of Soviet appeasement when the note was delivered into Ronald Reagan’s hands. Reagan’s face remained frozen in the same stern gaze that accompanied Bush’s rebuttal as he glanced down and read the message. “Governor, you’re doing great,” it said. “That was fantastic. But you have to stay on the stage.”

  Reagan gave Bush another determined scowl, then he turned around to where Lake was standing and winked.

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  —

  It was unanimous. Everyone agreed Ronald Reagan had won the debate the minute he took the stage with the four uninvited candidates. George Bush’s intransigence was regarded as a serious blunder by which, as Newsweek reported, he “thoroughly embarrassed himself.” “Looking back on it,” said Jim Baker, Bush’s campaign manager, “I wish we had met with the other candidates before the debate.” Had Bush said, “Governor, you make a good case,” and welcomed the others, he’d have been applauded for his generosity and a hearty debate would have ensued. As it turned out, he came off as petty and weak.

  Three days later, New Hampshire agreed. Reagan “handily defeated” George Bush in the primary, with a 50 percent, come-from-behind victory. It was a stunning reversal of the Iowa outcome and a harbinger of what Newsweek called “the engine of his revival.”

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  Before any celebration, there was housecleaning to tend to. Nancy Reagan opened the deliberations by saying, “We can’t go on like this. It’s now definite—all three must go. Power must be handed over to Bill Casey.” When her husband suggested that Charlie Black and Jim Lake might be persuaded to stay on through the remainder of the primaries, she waved him off. “Let’s not go over this again.” Their dismissal was choreographed with pinpoint precision. Sears, Black, and Lake were called into the Reagans’ suite in Andover just after lunch on primary day and presented with their resignation letters. Before Charlie Black even read it, he said, “Don’t bother—I quit!”

  Bill Casey was a brilliant but awkward, enigmatic creature, tall and hunched-over with robotic movements. When he didn’t want to be understood or quoted, he mumbled to great effect. And he did this now, in a hastily-pulled-together press conference, sounding almost cryptic and playing with his tie while attempting to explain the changing of the guard. The press was poised for a couple of pithy quotes, but as Casey rambled on in something that sounded like Urdu, the journalists cut glances at one another, wondering if this was part of a joke. “They would ask him questions,” Pete Hannaford recalls, “and he’d go mumble, mumble, mumble and say three of four clear words.”

  Nevertheless, Casey got right to work—sharply cutting the staff in Washington and Los Angeles and slashing the salaries of everyone who remained. Cost-cutting was his first priority. Even Nancy Reagan’s hairdresser was temporarily sent back to Los Angeles.

  The campaign was headed to South Carolina with practically no money in the bank. But Casey had access to East Coast money, and he brought in Charles Wick, a social friend of Nancy and Ronnie’s with connections to West Coast money, and together they turned on the fund-raising spigots, gradually replenishing the reserves. Money was crucial to maintaining the positive energy, but so was Big Mo—and now Ronald Reagan had it.

  * * *

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/>   Big Mo swept him through the South Carolina primary, where he knocked John Connally out of the race. And three days later, he pulled out decisive wins in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, forcing Howard Baker and Bob Dole to withdraw. For all intents and purposes, the Republican primary was down to a four-man race: Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Phil Crane, and John Anderson, although the Ghost of Elections Past was rearing its head.

  By mid-March 1980, there were serious rumblings that Gerald Ford was considering wading into the mix. GOP moderates expressed concern that Reagan’s eventual nomination as a right-leaning conservative might augur a repeat performance of the Goldwater debacle in a national election. Ford, they recalled, had nearly beaten Jimmy Carter four years earlier, and recent Gallup polls showed Ford leading Reagan among all candidates prepared to take on the president, and that “Carter would lose to Ford but would win handily over Reagan.”

  Reagan doubted Ford would run, and he goaded his former opponent, saying he “should pack his long johns and come out here on the campaign trail with us.” But the press fanned the flames of a Ford candidacy, and Nancy Reagan took it to heart. “She was a nervous wreck about it,” recalls Jim Kuhn, who escorted her during appearances in Florida. “It’s going to happen! He’s coming in,” she insisted, certain it would derail her Ronnie’s path to the White House. Her fears crescendoed further when news filtered back that John Sears and Stu Spencer had been summoned to Ford’s home in Rancho Mirage to discuss a possible run and that Tom Reed, Reagan’s devoted former national committee chairman, had launched a Draft Ford committee with GOP backing.

  Ford continued to toy with Reagan, still stung by the challenge in 1976. “Ford was dismissive of Reagan,” Tom Reed says. “He told me, ‘Reagan isn’t fit to be president.’” But by the end of March, with time closing in for him to file in the California and Ohio primaries, Ford convened a meeting of supporters in Palm Springs, and, as Reed recalls, “all those guys who were red-hot for him early on were suddenly nowhere to be found. The few of us who showed up went around the table saying, ‘If you want to run, we’re with you—but you can’t win.’” Ford couldn’t argue with such hard-boiled facts. “Let’s not do that,” he told them, realizing he had waited too long. Instead, he went directly from that meeting, called a press conference, and announced that he reached the decision not to run.

  Ford’s withdrawal propelled Reagan into a decisive win in Illinois on March 18, where he beat native son John Anderson. And on March 25, he converted enough moderates to win in New York before sweeping all challengers in Wisconsin a week later.

  By mid-May, Reagan’s nomination seemed like a runaway certainty. No less a skeptical authority than the Washington Post published articles with titles like “Why Ronald Reagan Will Be the Next President.” Convincing losses in Michigan and Pennsylvania sent Reagan’s Big Mo into a skid, and primaries in California, Ohio, and New Jersey on June 3 still gave some cause for concern. But not much. And on May 30, Memorial Day, Bush called a press conference and dropped out of the race. A Reagan landslide was inevitable, he conceded, and he refused to be a spoiler at the Republican National Convention.

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  The Republican National Convention opened in Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena on Monday, July 14, 1980. The Reagans arrived in town around noon. “Nancy and I were just flying by and thought we’d drop in to see what was going on,” Reagan joked to a crowd of supporters at the airport before checking into a sixty-ninth-floor suite at the Plaza Hotel in the Renaissance Center, their hideaway, more or less, until the nomination was resolved on Thursday night. From the outset, aides calculated Reagan had enough committed delegates to deliver a victory on the first ballot, eliminating the chore of trolling for votes. It allowed him to concentrate entirely on the most outstanding task: choosing a running mate.

  As early as July, at Bill Casey’s suggestion, they’d assembled a list of twelve possible candidates and enlisted Ed Smotes, the deputy secretary of the treasury, to collect their income-tax data, to give them physical exams, and, most important, to vet them. One of the contenders, Cliff Wallace, an appellate judge from San Diego, discovered during his physical that he had a cancerous tumor and removed himself from consideration; Jack Kemp was viewed as too young and inexperienced; Jesse Helms was well-liked by diehard conservatives but not by anyone else; Howard Baker lacked strong conservative credentials; Richard Lugar got rejected out of hand; and Richard Thornburgh, the popular governor of Pennsylvania, announced that “Reagan’s people have given him ‘no indication’ they even know who he is.” “Ronald Reagan would have loved to run with Paul Laxalt,” says Ed Meese, who oversaw the selection process. The governors had become good friends over the years, and Laxalt wanted the job—badly. But Stu Spencer, who’d returned as an adviser to the campaign, explained to Reagan that Laxalt “was the governor of a gaming state, where you don’t get elected without doing business with the boys.” The last thing the campaign needed was fielding questions about the mob. There was already plenty of smoke about Nancy’s buddy Frank Sinatra, who had applied for a gaming license in Nevada using Reagan as a reference while under investigation for alleged Mafia connections.

  The obvious choice—George Bush—got short shrift from Ronald Reagan, perplexing many on his campaign staff. Bush was young and energetic with a strong New England base, and his moderate constituency would balance the ticket, uniting factions of the Republican Party. Moreover, he’d run strong in the primaries. But Reagan had never forgiven Bush for coining the phrase “voodoo economics” to describe Reagan’s free-market and supply-side policies. And the lingering image of Bush freezing up on stage at the Nashua debate left Reagan feeling that Bush had no backbone. “Doesn’t matter,” Stu Spencer advised Reagan on the flight to Detroit, “you’re a pragmatic guy and you need him.” But Reagan wasn’t convinced. “He just didn’t like him,” Spencer says.

  Reagan was intrigued by a rumor that had been floated by Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft—a “dream ticket,” they were calling it, with Ronald Reagan as president and Gerald Ford as vice president. It seemed ludicrous at first. A former president returning to the White House in a lesser capacity was unprecedented and frankly inconceivable. Besides, there was no love lost between Reagan and Ford, which stemmed from the 1976 primary. Ford attempted to nip the idea in the bud, telling the press that he had no intention of running with Reagan as late as two days before the convention. But the scheme persisted as a potential bonanza—and it picked up steam. “There were a sufficient number of people in high places within the party who wanted this,” Ed Meese recalls, singling out moderates and “establishment people” who he says weren’t convinced that Ronald Reagan had the stuff to be president—or to win. “So the governor felt we ought to at least look into it as a possibility.”

  Not an hour after the Reagans settled into their hotel room, Ronald Reagan hit the elevator directly to Ford’s suite on the seventieth floor of the Plaza in order to sound out the former president’s intentions. In a 1999 interview, Ford recalled the meeting as an outright invitation. “Ron said that he and Nancy wanted me to be his running mate in 1980! I was overwhelmed and flattered. In deference to his request, I said I would think about it and talk to Betty.”

  The offer, according to Meese, was intended as nothing more than a polite gesture, and Reagan “was surprised when Ford in essence said that he would think about it.” In any case, the response kicked the idea of the dream ticket into high gear. The Detroit News, among the many papers who endorsed the notion, declared, “The ideal Reagan running mate would be Gerald Ford.”

  Ford got a jump on producing an overall game plan. The next evening, he spent two hours with Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan, devising a strategy by which “the President would be the Chief Policymaker, but the Vice-President would be the Chief Operator.” In effect, it would give Ford control over the National Security Council as well as the Office of Management and
Budget, with Kissinger and Greenspan as his respective point men.

  Their proposal was delivered to Meese the next morning. “It was a bad idea,” Meese thought immediately. “It gave away a lot of the power of the presidency. If we accepted it, it would be a sign that Ronald Reagan wasn’t up to the job, that he needed bolstering, which would sink him in the campaign.” Others on the staff agreed—Deaver, Nofziger, and Allen were flat-out opposed—but felt that, in good faith, they should negotiate with Ford’s team.

  Meese wanted the particulars on structure and duties spelled out: how the two offices would operate, how policy would be handled with Congress, who would dictate foreign policy. He, Bill Casey, and pollster Dick Wirthlin met with Kissinger, Greenspan, and Jack Marsh, Ford’s former counselor, on Wednesday morning to flesh out details. They went back and forth all day long until, by evening, some clarity emerged. When Lyn Nofziger asked Reagan how things shook out, he responded, “Ford wants Kissinger as Secretary of State and Greenspan at Treasury.” Dick Allen, who overheard the exchange, blurted out, “That is the craziest deal I ever heard of.” Nancy Reagan was beside herself. “I thought the whole thing was ridiculous,” she recalled. “It can’t be done,” she told Ronnie. “It would be a dual presidency. It just won’t work.”

  Reagan, however, remained vaguely optimistic. All signals from the convention floor were that the delegates loved it. Two Republican headliners taking on Jimmy Carter—the ticket, to them, sounded thrilling, unbeatable. Discussions between the interested parties continued, and by nightfall, the press had gotten wind of them, splashing news of the potential partnership across the TV networks.