by Bob Spitz
At roughly seven-thirty, Reagan awoke from a catnap and plopped down on a couch in front of three muted television sets. A few minutes later, one set, tuned in to Walter Cronkite’s broadcast, caught his interest when Gerald Ford sat down opposite the CBS anchor. Reagan motioned for the sound to be turned up.
“If I go to Washington,” Ford was saying, “and I’m not saying that I’m accepting, I have to go there with the belief that I would play a meaningful role, across the board, in the basic, crucial, tough decisions that have to be made in the four-year period.”
“It’s to be something like a co-presidency?” Cronkite asked Ford.
A co-presidency!
Reagan nearly fell over on the couch. “Get Kissinger on the phone,” he insisted. “I want Ford’s answer right now. This has gone too far.”
It was time for both men to put their cards on the table. Reagan ordered Bill Casey upstairs to confront Ford, relaying a message that any understanding between them “had to be based on faith or understanding, it could not be a written compact.” Meanwhile, the networks were reporting the ticket as a fait accompli. Reagan began to realize the nomination was running away with itself. Doesn’t Ford “realize there is no way in the world I can accept?” he said aloud to himself. “What kind of presidential candidate would I be in the eyes of the world if I were to give in to such demands?” Yet with all his irresolution, negotiations pushed on.
Ford had modified his demands. He no longer insisted that Kissinger become the secretary of state—a nonstarter as far as Reagan was concerned—but he wanted to be chairman of the National Security Council and to have veto power over major Cabinet appointments.
“Governor,” Meese reported back, “I don’t think this is going any place.” Reagan agreed, discouraged by the impasse. “Let’s get this over with,” he told Meese, “now.”
* * *
—
At 11:13 that evening, during the traditional roll call of delegates, the state of Montana put Ronald Reagan over the top on the first ballot. Word began circulating almost immediately that the nominee would put in an appearance at the convention hall with his running mate, an unusual development considering that the grand entrance was typically reserved for the final night as icing on the cake. But Reagan knew expectations were strong that he would arrive with Gerald Ford in tow. “I ought to go over there tonight,” he decided, “if only to calm things down.”
A string of limousines was lined up in the garage of the hotel, preparing for the convoy to the Joe Louis Arena. “The television was on in the garage,” recalls Jim Kuhn, who was coordinating the motorcade, “and all the talk was about Reagan choosing Ford.” One of the Secret Service agents poked his head in to announce, “We have movement coming down from the sixty-ninth floor.” No one knew who was on the elevator, except that it was not Ronald Reagan. “Whoever gets off that elevator is not Reagan’s choice,” Kuhn announced to the gaggle of drivers and auxiliary staff. The wait was excruciating, Kuhn recalled. “We waited and waited and waited—that elevator took a long time coming down.” Finally, the chime sounded, as everyone in the garage cast a furtive eye on the opening doors to see who emerged. A collective gasp was audible at the sight of Betty and Gerald Ford. “Governor Reagan will be down next,” Kuhn said, “and it’s anyone’s guess who will be with him.”
* * *
—
George Bush was in the bar of the Pontchartrain Hotel, Bush headquarters, having cocktails with his press aide, Pete Teeley. They were commiserating over the news that, a few hours earlier, Reagan staffers confirmed Bush was no longer under consideration as a vice-presidential choice. It was a humiliating blow. Bush felt he had deserved more respect than an outright dismissal. After all, he’d beaten Reagan handily in five major primaries, but word had it that Ford had been chosen. As they talked, Teeley glanced over Bush at a man entering the room, shouldering a TV camera. “We’d better get out of here or you’ll find yourself on the news,” Teeley warned. Bush refused to budge. He was still smarting from Reagan’s obvious rebuff and feeling too proud to duck and run. Teeley, however, persisted, persuading Bush to head back to his suite. He arrived there to a state of general commotion.
Ronald Reagan was on the phone.
The governor explained he was leaving soon for a late-night appearance at Joe Louis Arena. “George,” he said, “I would like to go over there and tell them that I am recommending you for vice president.” Bush was so taken aback he could barely get the word “yes” out of his mouth. “Could I ask you one thing,” Reagan continued. “Do I have your permission to make an announcement that you support the platform across the board?” This had been another serious factor against selecting Bush as a running mate. He had campaigned in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment, a woman’s right to abortion, and gun control, to say nothing about crowning Reagan as the houngan of voodoo economics. Ed Meese later joked that Bush had an exorcism that night. He agreed wholeheartedly to endorse the platform from top to bottom. He “was honored,” he said, and “would work, work, work.” In fact, he’d change clothes in a jiffy and head over to the convention in time to walk in alongside the party’s nominee.
When Ronald Reagan and George Bush entered Joe Louis Arena, they carried themselves with the easy intimacy of longtime partners. The two men seemed dynamic, dignified—a force to be reckoned with. Together, they were loaded with Big Mo.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“A REFERENDUM ON UNHAPPINESS”
“Politics is just like show business. You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while and then have a hell of a close.”
—RONALD REAGAN
Jimmy Carter seemed eminently beatable. Saddled with high inflation, spiraling unemployment, a groaning energy crisis, and a hostage situation (including a botched attempt at a rescue) that confounded his diplomatic efforts while scaring and demoralizing the country, Carter led an administration that many saw as inept. Ronald Reagan offered a stark alternative, promising to slash taxes, streamline the federal government, and show belligerent nations who’s boss. Voters took an immediate shine to him. Coming out of the conventions in early August 1980, polls showed Reagan with a significant lead.
The contrasts between Carter and Reagan were significant, and battle lines were quickly drawn. Intercepting a secret memo from the Oval Office aide Hamilton Jordan, Time learned that “Carter is expected to portray Reagan as a Red-baiting, trigger-happy right-winger who would be dangerous in the White House.” In an early campaign speech, Carter set the tone by knocking Republicans as “men of narrow vision who are afraid of the future and whose leaders are inclined to shoot from the hip.” It was a veiled reference to the B-actor and cowboy labels Reagan’s opponents customarily attached to him. In Carter’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, the veil came off. The Reagan vision, he insisted, is “a world of tinsel and make-believe . . . [in which] all problems have simple solutions. Simple—and wrong.”
Reagan also came out swinging. The president had the target of incumbency on his back, inviting potshots to be taken at his floundering policies. Reagan accused Carter of “economic failures” that amounted to “an assault on the hopes and dreams of American families.” The Middle East and the Soviet Union also provided ripe targets. “Because of the weak and confused leadership of Jimmy Carter, we are approaching a flashpoint with Soviet power now deployed in a manner which directly threatens Iran, the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea; with Soviet fleets and air bases emplaced along the sea lanes along which we and our allies and the entire free world depend.” As always, Reagan used humor to great effect. In one of his stock jokes, he claimed that Jimmy Carter came to him in a dream and asked him why he wanted his job. “I told him I didn’t want his job,” Reagan quipped. “I want to be President.”
But front-runners stumble, and Ronald Reagan took his share of pratfalls. In the seventeen days following the convention, he committed a string
of substantive gaffes that dented his credibility. The first was a foreign policy blunder in which he announced his “intention to reestablish official government relations with Taiwan” that left the Chinese “hopping mad.” The Chinese foreign minister immediately denounced the scheme as an act of “retrogression . . . [that] would be detrimental to world peace,” forcing Reagan to backtrack and to claim he’d misspoken. Days later, in a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he called the Vietnam War “a noble cause,” which rankled a good deal of the electorate. And in an address to Dallas evangelicals, he admitted he had “a great many questions about evolution,” adding, “I think that recent discoveries down through the years pointed [to] great flaws in it.”
These gaffes created serious questions about his competence and gave the press license to revisit previous statements, such as Reagan’s wacky claim that plants and trees caused more pollution than automobiles or industry, and that “Alaska has larger oil reserves than Saudi Arabia.” There was little love, too, for his opposition to the minimum wage, Medicare, and unemployment insurance, which he called “vacation money for the lazy.” But it didn’t stop there. On Labor Day, when Jimmy Carter kicked off his campaign in Tuscumbia, Alabama, Reagan told a Detroit crowd, “Now, I’m happy to be here, while he is opening his campaign down there in the city that gave birth to and is the parent body of the Ku Klux Klan.” He could tell right away from the audience reaction that he’d grossly erred, trying to tie Carter to the Klan. Afterward, he admitted to aides, “I blew it.”
Worse than that. “This was the first week after the convention, and he’d fucked up something fierce,” says Stu Spencer, who was called in by Nancy Reagan to help stabilize the campaign. Spencer had been on the outs with the Reagans for his role advising Gerald Ford in the 1976 primary and especially for a cheeky ad he’d authored: “Governor Reagan couldn’t start a war, but President Reagan could.” That had stung, but given the moment, it was deemed prudent to let bygones be bygones. The most recent Gallup poll had shown that Carter had pulled even, sending shivers through the ranks. The Reagans had moved into Wexford, the former weekend retreat of Jackie and Jack Kennedy on Rattlesnake Mountain near Middleburg, Virginia. Shortly after Labor Day, in a moment of snowballing panic, they convened a summit of the top command.
Spencer, who arrived late at Wexford, saw immediately that the problem was disorganization. Bill Casey, the campaign manager aides referred to as “Spacey,” and Ed Meese were out of their depth; they’d never run high-powered national campaigns and had no experience with the volume and pace of decisions that had to be made. Lyn Nofziger picked self-defeating fights with the press for its relentless coverage of Reagan’s blunders. Bill Timmons, in charge of field operations, had no rapport with the candidate, and Mike Deaver, who did, was drinking heavily.
Spencer knew someone had to be around full-time to hand-hold the candidate, to coach him to stay on point and to keep him poised. He sensed that Reagan’s confidence level was shaky. “The level of campaigning he was in now was much different than he was in before,” Spencer says. “He was no longer talking to audiences at every [campaign] stop—he was talking to the whole nation. And everything he said would be scrutinized ten times more than ever before.” It was time to dispense with the repackaged rhetoric of past campaigns.
First, Spencer reshuffled the staff. He brought in James Brady from John Connally’s campaign, and James Baker III, who had been George Bush’s adviser. He summoned Ken Khachigian, a Nixon-era speechwriter from California, to work with Marty Anderson and Dick Allen, the resident policy wonks. There would be no more clumsy chain of command where crucial details got lost in the bureaucracy. From now on, all decisions would be made and speeches written on the campaign plane, a Boeing 727 nicknamed LeaderShip ’80, where the atmosphere was purposely kept light and extremely loose. “If we have an uptight ship, we’re going to have an uptight candidate,” Spencer reasoned. So, each time the plane took off, Nancy Reagan bowled an orange down the aisle, trying not to hit any of the seats, while the cabin cheered her on, and a tape of Willie Nelson singing “On the Road Again” boomed over the sound system. As soon as the plane leveled off, Nancy passed out chocolates to the press corps in the back, keeping them lighthearted—and away from her husband. Spencer noticed a change immediately. “From that day on, it was the tightest, best, and most fun campaign I was ever involved in,” he says.
A strategy materialized from the noticeable shift among working-class voters. The unions had always been staunchly Democratic, yet the workers themselves, suffering under crushing inflation and unemployment, were inching to the right, disgruntled with the status quo. Plant closings in the industrial heartland gave the Reagan campaign rich, fertile electoral fields to plow. Speeches were scheduled in towns like Steubenville, Ohio; Langhorne, Pennsylvania; West Allis, Wisconsin; Allen Park, Michigan—places where blue-collar workers had been hit hard and were primed for Reagan’s fiery message, which blamed the president for their miserable circumstances.
Jimmy Carter and Reagan continued running neck and neck through early September, dogged by John Anderson, the moderate Republican congressman from Illinois, who had entered the general election race as an independent and managed to poll a respectable 15 percent. Anderson wasn’t anyone for Reagan to lose sleep over, but another factor was. Dick Wirthlin, Reagan’s pollster, raised it early in the campaign. “We may have a surprise coming in October,” he warned.
An October surprise.
Reagan’s chief aides sensed progress was being made in negotiations to bring the Iranian hostages home. Rumors of a military operation to rescue the hostages also circulated. A good outcome was fine by Reagan. In fact, Dick Allen had been dispatched to the office of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, with the following message: “We have heard that a hostage rescue attempt is underway. We want you to know that if you try and fail, you will not be attacked by Ronald Reagan. And if you succeed, you will be applauded.”
This was true as far as it went, but there was still dread that Carter would time the release to late October, when it would have the greatest impact on the election, and the campaign took steps to blunt the impact of such an event. Marty Anderson and Dick Allen announced the formation of an October Surprise Group, with the aim of getting the press to carry the charge. Howell Raines, the New York Times’ correspondent on the Reagan beat, took the bait. On October 9, 1980, he published a story under the heading “Reagan Aides See Way to Defeat Any Surprise.” With that, “October surprise” was injected into the race. If the surprise came to pass, at least the triumph would be clouded by the suggestion of possible hidden motives.
Some would accuse the Reagan team of darker efforts. For years afterward, rumors persisted that Bill Casey slipped away to Madrid in early April 1980 to conspire with Mehdi Karubi, an Iranian cleric, to hold the U.S. hostages past election day on the chance that if Reagan was elected, he could bring them home in triumph. Others allege the negotiations occurred in Paris and that George Bush was present, although he persistently denied there was any truth to such charges, and there is absolutely no evidence.
In any case, Reagan had hoped to confront Carter directly about his thus-far failed efforts during the first presidential debate, in Baltimore on September 21. But Carter refused to participate so long as John Anderson was included. Sensing that Anderson drew votes away from the president, Carter’s advisers felt the audience for the debate would be diminished if he was a no-show, rather than appearing and giving Anderson’s stature a nationwide boost.
Reagan knew it was a mistake. By backing off the Iowa debates nine months earlier, he’d brought a serious defeat on himself. He attempted to underscore Carter’s absence by demanding an empty chair be placed on the debate stage, but his request was denied. Not that it mattered. The president’s nonappearance was a self-inflicted wound. The next day, editors across the country published reviews singling out Jimmy Carter as
“the only loser in the televised political debate,” while praising the performances of Reagan and Anderson. Anderson probably helped himself the most, giving an American public to whom he was largely unknown a chance to hear him express his views. The upshot was that Anderson came across as “an articulate fellow” and Reagan as “polished.”
But no one was satisfied. People, including the candidates’ handlers, wanted to see the two front-runners in a televised debate. That tradition, begun in 1960, humanized the presidential nominees and helped voters to make up their minds about the candidates and their policies. Including John Anderson was a fine diplomatic gesture, but his chances of winning were nonexistent and his attendance would only cloud the bigger picture. The very next day, Carter’s staff, in damage-control mode, pressed for a title-bout debate between their man and Ronald Reagan.
Would Reagan agree? The campaign staff was divided. In a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, the top advisers went around the room arguing for and against. Bill Casey, Dick Wirthlin, and Bill Timmons were dead-set opposed. If it was earlier, so that if he came off poorly there would be enough time left to regroup and make up lost ground—maybe. But this late in the game? They couldn’t justify it. Meese, Deaver, and Nofziger—the men who knew Reagan best—were in favor, knowing he could hold his own. Nancy Reagan, who listened to both sides from a seat off in the corner, had plenty of reservations. Earlier that morning, Ronnie told her, “I can beat that guy,” but she wasn’t convinced. She feared that any spontaneous remark had the potential to doom the campaign. Was it worth taking a risk? She thought not. Stu Spencer “listened to all the bullshit from everybody,” then took the offer straight to Reagan. “There’s no way you can run for president without debating.” “We’re going to do it, aren’t we?” the governor said eagerly. “Hell, yes!” Spencer exclaimed. “It’s part of the culture.” He knew Reagan understood the drama of the debate and would have done his homework when the cameras rolled.
