Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America

by Shirley, Craig

  Lyn Nofziger, one of Reagan's closest aides, later confided, “To my surprise, Reagan, who is seldom bitter, went to California a bitter man, convinced that Ford had stolen the nomination from him.”2

  Of Reagan's conservative crusade, Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon presciently wrote, “But whether the Republicans win or not, it is also quite conceivable that Reagan's campaign this year and his impact on the Republican credo may lead Americans to conclude that the GOP, once again, really stands for something.”3

  “He almost certainly believed that his political career, in terms of any future candidacy, was at an end,” Peter Hannaford wrote in The Reagans.4

  So, too, did the rest of America.

  Departing Kansas City on his way to the airport, Reagan passed a hand-painted sign in a bakery shop that read, “Goodbye, Republicans. You picked the wrong man.”5

  Reagan, as far as everybody was concerned, was finished as a prospective president. He had been around the track twice, and lost twice, and would be seventy years old by 1981. Political obituaries popped up in the mainstream press. Newsweek ran a small story on the end of Reagan with a headline that was characteristic: “Into the Sunset.”6

  Though many in Kansas City thought a “unity” ticket between Ford and Reagan was best for the GOP, neither man thought it was best for him. It was the only thing they agreed on. Reagan, and especially Mrs. Reagan, could barely be in the same room with the Fords. President Ford, for his part, utterly rejected the notion of Reagan as his running mate, saying, “Absolutely not. I don't want anything to do with that son of a bitch.”7 Ford ignored the pleas of his staff, including his young White House chief of staff, Richard Cheney, and his pollster, Bob Teeter, even after they came to Camp David several weeks before the convention armed with polling data showing that Ford's only chance against Jimmy Carter in the fall was with Reagan at his side. Cheney and Teeter understood Reagan's ability to connect with disaffected lunch-bucket Democrats in electoral-vote-rich states like New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—voters who would eventually become known as “Reagan Democrats”—as well as Catholics and voters in Jimmy Carter's “Cotton South.”8

  Reagan's militant supporters were just as contemptuous of Ford. When asked what the Reaganites' “demeanor” should be toward the victorious Ford supporters, the irreverent Nofziger quipped, “Da meaner da better.”9 Reagan campaign staffers—now out of work—milled around, drinking, laughing, crying, and bitching about Ford and the convention, the real or perceived failures of Reagan campaign manager John Sears, and the various missed opportunities over the previous year. They, too, felt that despite all the discord and disorganization at the campaign committee, Citizens for Reagan, it had ultimately been luck, money, and naked power in the Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York primaries, along with betrayal in Mississippi, that had cost their man the nomination.

  SETTLING INTO HIS AIRPLANE seat for the flight back to California, Reagan looked quietly out the window, holding hands with Nancy. During the flight, Marty Anderson, the Gipper's key policy adviser, asked Reagan to sign his convention hall pass and Reagan wrote wistfully, “We dreamed—we fought and the dream is still with us.”10

  Peter Hannaford, Reagan's soft-spoken, talented aide, was also on the plane. “I was right behind the Reagans. The seat-belt sign went off and the governor stood and said, ‘Well, fellas, I guess we've got to get back to work.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, your first taping is two weeks from Wednesday and your column is due.'” Reagan looked at him and jokingly said, “You didn't think I'd win, did you?” Hannaford replied, “Yes, sir, but you always have to have a contingency plan!” Everybody laughed, especially Reagan.11 Later, the Reagans walked up and down the aisles, Nancy hugging sobbing staffers, Reagan philosophically saying, “We do not know the reason, but someday we will.” Michael Deaver, another young aide, said everyone was “devastated.”12 Frank Reynolds of ABC did a touching story that evening, closing with a shot of the Reagans' plane flying off into the western horizon as Reynolds was saying, “So long, Rawhide. See you later, Rainbow.” “Rawhide” and “Rainbow” were of course their Secret Service code names.13

  REAGAN WAS EXHAUSTED AFTER ten grueling months on the campaign trail. From the time of his announcement in November 1975 until the end of the convention in August, he had been on the road continuously, traveling perhaps one hundred thousand miles or more, eating on the run, sleeping in hotels, getting up early, going to bed late, shaking hands with thousands, giving innumerable interviews and speeches. He needed to recharge his batteries, and nothing did that for him like being at Rancho del Cielo—his “Ranch in the Sky”—with only Nancy and his horses for company. The ranch covered nearly seven hundred acres high in the Santa Ynez Mountains, thirty miles outside of Santa Barbara. There, for days on end, he woke early, rode, cut trees and underbrush, erected fences, rebuilt the 1,200-square-foot main building, tended the horses, soaked up the sun, and thought. At night, he'd relax with a book, write letters, go for long quiet walks with “Mommy”—Reagan's nickname for Nancy—and talk, as always, about the future.

  He quickly set to work, however. As Hannaford had promised, Reagan needed to return to his nationally syndicated column, which King Features distributed to hundreds of newspapers twice a week. He also started recording five-minute radio commentaries that began broadcasting on September 20. The commentaries went to more than five hundred radio stations with a combined audience of around forty million people at any given time. One of Reagan's early radio segments touted the tax cuts in a bill offered by a young Republican backbencher in Congress, Jack Kemp of Buffalo. It was a revolutionary concept; tax cuts had been a Democratic issue, not a Republican one. John Kennedy had cut taxes, and the GOP was the balanced-budget, green-eyeshade party. Giving people back their money fit into Reagan's pro-growth optimism and evolving political framework. Tax cuts, which empowered individuals and lowered their dependence on government, were a critical part of the development of Reagan's new conservatism; his optimism involved much more than just a sunny personality.

  In September, Reagan gathered the core of his defunct campaign staff, some members of his “Kitchen Cabinet”—a group of wealthy Californians who had advised him to run for governor back in 1964—and a handful of other friends and aides at his home in Pacific Palisades for a “seafood salad served on avocado wedges and a raspberry desert,” and conversation.14 Conspicuously absent from the meeting was the controversial John Sears, which was just fine with several of the attendees, especially Nofziger. They were still angry at Sears's missteps over the past year, which they believed had cost Reagan opportunities to overtake Ford.15 Many blamed Sears at least in part for the “$90 billion” gaffe in late 1975. At Sears's direction Reagan had given a speech in which he made specific proposals for shifting responsibilities to the states without proposing how to fund them. The flap contributed to Reagan's losing the New Hampshire primary. (Some years later Sears did take responsibility for the “$90 billion” mayhem.)16

  No one at the meeting talked about a 1980 Reagan campaign. It was just blue sky over the horizon. Still, Reagan was looking ahead. He decided to create a permanent political operation designed to assist candidates and campaign staffers of the Right in building for the future, spreading the word about Reagan's small-government approach to policy and politics, and keeping Reagan in front of the American people. The new organization would not be announced until after the election, however. Jimmy Carter was well ahead of Ford in the polls and few at the meeting thought the president would win; some Reaganites, in fact, were pulling for Ford to lose. But Reagan did not want to appear to be presumptuously dancing on the grave of Ford's presidency before Ford actually lost the election.

  Although Reagan still felt wounded by the derision and ridicule that the Ford team and the GOP establishment had directed at him, he did agree to campaign for President Ford and his running mate, Senator Robert J. Dole of Kansas. Reagan also made a thirty-minute television appeal for the GOP
, taping the entire speech in one take. It aired on Sunday, September 19, at 10:30 P.M. eastern time on NBC. The focus of the speech was not on Ford but on the differences between the Republican and Democratic platforms—an important issue for Reagan, since the GOP platform had his fingerprints all over it.17 Later in the campaign, he made four commercials in Hollywood, promoting the platform and, finally, Ford. But as the New York Times noted, “It was duty more than heartfelt enthusiasm that produced the Reagan ads for the Ford campaign.”18

  Ford was lagging far behind Carter and needed desperately to shore up his base, but the president waited almost a month after the convention before actually calling Reagan and asking him to campaign. Even then, the Ford team did not make good use of the popular Reagan. Hannaford later recounted that “the Ford campaign had made few specific requests until near the end of the campaign, when they wanted [Reagan] in a place he could not get to one day without scrubbing several other long-promised appearances.”19

  In late October, by which point the polls had tightened, a leak from Ford aides to the New York Times said, “Former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California has refused a request by President Ford's top election strategists to campaign on the President's behalf in three key states in the final days of the Presidential race.” The story made it appear as if Reagan wanted Ford to lose the election, when in fact Reagan was campaigning heavily for Ford and the GOP in California, which Ford needed if he was to have any chance of winning the election.20 Reagan also campaigned in North Carolina, Texas, Louisiana, and the Midwest.21 All told, he appeared in twenty-five states for the Republicans in the closing months of the 1976 campaign. Reagan was also asked to become the honorary chairman of the Ford campaign, but he took a pass.

  Despite his campaigning for the Ford-Dole ticket, Reagan made it unmistakably clear at a joint appearance in Los Angeles that he wanted to be anywhere other than with Gerald Ford. “It was the worst I'd ever seen him,” remembered Lou Cannon, who was covering the event for the Washington Post.22 Reagan's body language and his refusal to address the president directly, much less talk up his chances against Carter, were lost on no one. “I can remember saying … to my editors, this is not much of an endorsement,” said Cannon. “The words do not begin to convey how distant he was. I've never seen Reagan like that in my entire life.”23 The Ford children and the Reagan children stood at opposite sides of the room and simply glared at each other.24 Cheney had previously gone to California on a “peace mission” to smooth the relationship between Ford and Reagan, but he met with little success; when he reached Mike Deaver on the phone, “he got a distinctly cool reception.”25

  Ford loathed Reagan, but he needed him. Reagan loathed Ford, but he needed to keep up appearances for the sake of any political future.

  CARTER BEGAN TO DECLINE in the polls but it was not because the voters had discovered that they had fallen in love all of a sudden with the wallflower Republicans. Far from it. Doubts were being raised about Carter. Even the old crook Willie Sutton said, “I've never seen a bigger confidence man in my life, and I've been around some of the best in the business.” Sutton knew his psychobabble. When a psychiatrist once tried to plumb his depths, asking why he robbed banks, Sutton famously replied, “Because that's where the money is.”26

  By Election Day 1976, Gerald Ford had battled back from a 30-point midsummer deficit in the polls, thanks in part to his so-called Rose Garden strategy, which amounted to staying in the White House and acting presidential. But in the end, Carter successfully ran out the clock on Ford. He won narrowly in the Electoral College, 297–240, and even more closely in the popular vote, defeating Ford by a hairsbreadth, 50–48 percent.

  So it was that America ended up with this improbable president, James Earl Carter, the peanut farmer and former one-term Georgia governor. Carter, like Reagan, had grown up in an atmosphere of populism; also like Reagan, he had campaigned against the Washington buddy system. The beliefs of Carter and Reagan were based on cultural, religious, and moral values, though Carter was a distinctly more left-wing populist. But the media and the American people had a hard time figuring the Democrat out. “I was a conservative southern governor who believed in human rights … and a balanced budget,” Carter recalled. “It was kind of a strange mixture.”27

  Some of Reagan's aides were delighted at the outcome of the election, because to them it proved that a conservative majority existed in America, outside the limited boundaries of a clannish, elitist GOP, which excluded Democrats and independents, but not outside the reach of Reagan, the conservative populist. They were convinced that had Reagan been the nominee, he would have made inroads into the South and won the election. They were also convinced that Reagan would have made mincemeat out of Carter in the debates, unlike Ford, who had made a hash of them.

  Reagan himself remained publicly undecided about whether to take another shot at the GOP nomination and the White House. When a UPI reporter caught up with him on Election Day and asked him about his plans for the future, Reagan said frankly that he “‘wouldn't rule out and wouldn't rule in’ another try … in four years.”28

  POSTELECTION, PRESIDENT FORD SUMMONED Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, former Texas governor John Connally, and Reagan to discuss the future of the GOP. The time for the meeting was changed at the last minute and Reagan had to scramble to make it. He later confided in a letter to an old friend, former senator George Murphy of California, “Do you suppose they were hoping I wouldn't come?”29

  One of the key issues involved the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee (RNC). Ford and Rockefeller were quietly supporting James A. Baker III, Ford's skillful delegate hunter in the spring and summer of 1976. Baker had done more than anyone in the Ford operation to secure Ford's nomination, thwarting Reagan. Reagan objected, saying that Baker would be unacceptable to Sun Belt conservatives. The meeting was inconclusive—except for the fact that when the old curmudgeon of the Republican Party, Mr. Sun Belt himself, Barry Goldwater, caught wind of the meeting, he pitched a fit for not having been invited, said it was an “insult,” and vowed never to raise money for the party again.30 By then, however, Ronald Reagan had eclipsed Goldwater as the conservative leader in America.

  In mid-January, the GOP's state chairmen and national committee members gathered to vote for a new national chairman. It was the first time anyone could recall an RNC chairman being chosen in such a fashion. Prior, the chairman was either handpicked by an incumbent Republican president or chosen by party elders. Ford pushed Baker, perhaps too overtly, as it caused a number of the more conservative Republican committee members to support former Tennessee senator William Brock or Reagan's choice, the little-known Dick Richards of Utah. Baker quickly dropped out of contention and Richards did not engender much enthusiasm. Brock won on the third secret ballot.31

  Brock was the Republicans' “third way”: choosing him provided neither Reagan nor Ford with bragging rights. The choice was vitally important for the party, as Brock, despite his distaste for Reagan, would become one of the most effective chairmen in the GOP's history, credited with bringing it into the modern political world.

  Such modernization was crucial for the fate of the Republican Party, for at that point the party's very survival was in doubt. “Back in the 19th century,” the Washington Post noted in 1976, “a Minnesota legislator described a mule as a creature that has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity. The legislator was talking about the Democratic Party of his day, but his definition would fully apply to the Republican Party.”32 The mule is, of course, the hybrid offspring of a donkey and a horse. Sterile at birth, it cannot create a breed of its own, so it literally has no past and no future. Much like the Republican Party, it seemed then.

  Among voters less than thirty years of age, identification with the GOP stood at a humiliating 11 percent in 1977. The party was seen as corrupt and just plain worn-out. Despite the Republicans' famous “Southern Strategy,” after the wipeouts of 1974 and 1976 the GOP controlled o
nly 10 percent of the state legislative seats in the eleven states of the Old South.33 Such was the ruinous political legacy of Richard Milhous Nixon.

  In Reagan's view, the Republican Party could stage a comeback only if it made itself a home for conservatives and conservatism. To that end, in late January 1977 he formally announced his political action committee, Citizens for the Republic (CFTR), through which he would “promote conservative Republican candidates and promote conservative views.”34

  The CFTR headquarters was set up on the second floor of a nondescript office building in Santa Monica, California. Reagan tapped Lyn Nofziger to run the operation. One of Nofziger's first employees was Cindy Tapscott, a chatty young woman from Oklahoma. In her interview, Nofziger asked Tapscott two questions. “Do you smoke?” She did. “Do you drink?” She did. Tapscott was hired.35 Nofziger himself was partial to a cigar and a dry martini—no olive, and no vermouth. Aide Jim Stockdale said the group around CFTR in those days resembled “adult juvenile delinquents. I don't think we took ourselves as seriously as the crowds that followed us.”36 A young follower, Fred Ryan, was a college student at nearby USC, and would frequently drop by the CFTR offices to pick up Reagan literature to pass out to his classmates.37