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

by Shirley, Craig

  As in 1976, the plan was for Paul Laxalt to lead the campaign as chairman. Laxalt told reporters, “Reagan hasn't changed … but the country has. Not since General Eisenhower's first election almost 30 years ago has there been such a perfect fit between the man and the public mood as there is today with Gov. Reagan and the American people.”58

  Four years earlier, Laxalt had held a similar press conference, but only a ragtag group of individuals had been willing to be associated with Reagan's challenge to Ford. Now the list of Reagan supporters was impressive, including four former members of Ford's cabinet. Indeed, fully 25 percent of the people on the list had supported Ford in 1976, including Caspar Weinberger.59

  As long as Reagan remained the front-runner, John Sears would be safe, especially given his close relationship with Mrs. Reagan and Mike Deaver. But he was quickly making enemies inside the Reagan operation. He and Nofziger had been engaged in a four-year feud; Sears had accused Nofziger of leaking against him to muckraking columnist Jack Anderson, while Nofziger accused Sears of trying to “moderate” Reagan. Sears was making clumsy and unpopular personnel decisions. He was insulating himself from critics and driving out perceived competitors. He was beginning to load up the Reagan campaign with people whom Reagan had never laid eyes on and whose names he was not familiar with. By mid-February, there would be seven Reagan staffers working in an office in Alexandria, Virginia, thirty-four in the Los Angeles offices, and another twenty-nine people working in the field—but very few people in New Hampshire, the site of the first primary just one year away.

  At one point, Sears became angry with Reagan—so angry, in fact, that he refused to take his candidate's phone calls.60 Nancy Reagan took note of the change in Sears and wondered what had happened to him since 1976. She thought he had “become arrogant and aloof.”61

  Moreover, as 1979 progressed, Sears's decision to put Reagan on ice was becoming a problem. Reagan's nonavailability became such an issue that Peter Hannaford was forced to produce a memo showing how many interviews the Gipper actually gave between January 1979 and the end of October. All told, Reagan did 101 interviews or media availabilities—almost nothing compared with what the other candidates were doing.62 This monumental mistake, combined with Sears's fights with Reaganites and profligate spending, would nearly destroy Reagan's candidacy.

  3

  LE MALAISE

  “No one is big enough for the job.”

  The decade of the 1970s was winding down, and not a moment too soon.

  The country's bicentennial in 1976 stood out as the only event in which America could take pride. Otherwise, it had been a miserable time of declinism, littered with lost jobs, lost national pride, lost dreams—and lost hope. It was one of the most uninspiring decades in the history of the American Republic. As 1980 approached, there was not much that seemed exceptional about America anymore.

  The decade had begun with the sappy movie Love Story, acted woodenly by Ryan O'Neal and even more so by the pretty but maladroit Ali MacGraw. The poster for the movie carried the inane slogan “Love means never having to say you're sorry,” which was, as the New York Times Magazine noted, a “glossy reflection of the urge to be free of guilt and responsibility to anyone outside the self.”1 How this new Age of Narcissism would finish was unknown, but anything would be better than having to watch that dreadful movie ever again.

  Advertisers were in a mad race to the bottom to appeal to the lowest common denominator. No one had ever accused any advertising agency on Madison Avenue of trying to appeal to Mensa members, but the counterculture's “If it feels good, do it” ethos had reached ridiculous and often scary extremes. From “It's your face, let Schick love it” to “At McDonald's we do it all for you” to Burger King's “Have it your way,” personal pronouns including “me,” “my,” and “I” had replaced the inclusive “we,” “us,” and “our” that had defined America for two hundred years. In the “Me Decade,” as Tom Wolfe tagged it, everyone was out for himself. Vanity license plates began to flourish.

  The sexual and cultural revolutions of the 1960s were codified by the 1970s; what began as heady rebellion became the status quo. The consequences were dark. Trends that seemed novel during the Summer of Love in 1967 now came off as tawdry. The country had spiraled downward from the debauchery of Woodstock to the decadence of disco, from “harmless” grass to dangerous cocaine, from sexual freedom to the same old licentiousness. Love must have been “free,” because it seemed like everyone was giving it away. The aftermath was an American landscape littered with ruined marriages, broken homes, and drug addiction. The social fabric was in tatters.

  A cultish faction sprang up in Los Angeles and on college campuses called the “human potential movement,” but no one seemed to quite know what it was. Loss of trust in public institutions, politicians, and societal leaders had sent young Americans scurrying off to find their own slice of heathen. “We're afraid to believe too much in anything or, anyone,” one undergraduate at American University whimpered.2

  Reality seemed to touch these affluent brats only when inflation jacked the cost of their drugs. At the University of Michigan, an ounce of marijuana rose from twelve dollars to fifteen dollars, and at Boston University, Quaaludes went up from thirty cents per tablet to as much as three dollars.3 Prescription drugs were readily available for stressed-out parents, and now they, too, wanted to “ask Alice” about the white rabbit. The era was not graceful, but it was slick. No-fault divorces came into vogue and Catholic priests found their parishioners coming to confession less and less for one simple reason: they no longer felt guilty.

  College students of the late 1970s may have inherited the 1960s commitment to rutting, anonymous, casual sex, but they were, unlike their older brothers and sisters who marched in the 1960s, indifferent to politics and the world around them. With the Vietnam War lost and the draft over, students found new ways in which to occupy their leisure time. Rather than bomb ROTC buildings, male undergraduates at Wake Forest took turns fluff-drying themselves in coin-operated dryers. “It sounds kind of dumb,” one said. “But after a few beers, it seems like an entirely reasonable thing to do.”4 Fewer than half of college students bothered to register to vote.5 The eighteen-year-old vote had seemed so important just a few years earlier. Now no one could remember what the fuss was all about.

  American women had gone in a few short years from “Earth Mother” to “Disco Mama.” Hair care was back in style, as was personal hygiene. Indeed, as men's hair got shorter, women's seemed to get longer. Women also took to wearing makeup once again. As if to compensate for their older sisters' disdain for cosmetics, some of the disco women of the 1970s appeared to apply it with a trowel. Young men were borrowing their mothers' blow driers and hair spray and nobody thought twice about it. Then they headed out to the discos in their double-knit leisure suits.

  In those discos—which were little more than petri dishes for gratuitous sex and “recreational” drug use—young Americans did their bump-and-grind dance routines to the beat of “YMCA,” a celebration of young homosexuals meeting in public bathhouses, and “Bad Girl,” in which Donna Summer sang admiringly of prostitution. Virtually every song of the 1970s was about sex, sex, and more sex, as in the case of “Afternoon Delight” and “Shake Your Booty,” which left little doubt as to their subject matter. People listened to it all on eight-track tapes, the bulky plastic cassettes that had become all the rage, and AM radio, which dominated not with political talk but with rock 'n' roll and “bubblegum” music. Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones began the first of their “farewell” tours. Thirty years later, the band was still on a farewell tour. “You get what you need”? You bet.

  In 1973, the stock market topped out at 1,050 and then fell for the rest of the decade. No one in America was investing in the future anymore. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow there will be no tomorrow became the idealized philosophy of America in the 1970s.

  In the spring of 1979, the famous Russian dissident and
Nobel Prize–winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn saw the decay of the West and eviscerated it in a commencement speech at Harvard. He deplored the “TV stupor” and “intolerable music” along with the “spiritual exhaustion” evident in America.6 To be sure, he hated the Soviet Union, where he had been imprisoned and beaten, leading him to write the internationally acclaimed book The Gulag Archipelago, but Solzhenitsyn could not bring himself to call the culture of the West superior to that of the collectivist state he'd left behind. When a demonstrator in the crowd held up a sign that said, “You Can't Fight Stalinism with Fascism,” Solzhenitsyn departed from his prepared text to angrily condemn the protester, saying that only those who had never been held captive in a Soviet labor camp could have the audacity to call him a Fascist.7

  He was also booed for criticizing the anti-American protests during the Vietnam War. The peaceniks of the '60s and '70s, he said, “wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there.”8 He hit the materialism of America especially hard, condemning the worldview that put “man as the center of everything that exists.”9 The world, according to Solzhenitsyn, was “at a major turning point.”10

  For pointing out the obvious problems plaguing America and the West, Solzhenitsyn was denounced as “dangerous” and a “zealot” by the New York Times.11

  But the signs of decay were everywhere. America's cities had become burned-out shells. New York City was now a war zone. A record 1,733 New Yorkers were murdered in 1979. On New Year's Day 1980 alone, twelve people were slain, including a pregnant girl and her teenaged boyfriend, who got into a melee over seating arrangements in a disco.12

  Detroit was suffering because it was turning out some of the worst cars imaginable: flimsy, gas-guzzling heaps that often began rusting within months of leaving the showroom. Japan's auto industry, exporting sporty, well-made, fuel-efficient, and economical cars to the United States, had nearly destroyed the domestic auto industry—and with it, Detroit.

  The city of Cleveland was in worse shape. Teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, the “Mistake by the Lake” was in awful condition in every way imaginable. Even its sports teams stank, especially baseball's Indians and the Cavaliers of the NBA, who set records—for the most losses and the least fans. One-third of Cleveland's citizens said they wished they lived somewhere else. The city's mayor, a pint-sized thirty-two-year-old named Dennis Kucinich, was in over his head in every way imaginable, and he'd been photographed tottering embarrassingly behind a podium on several large phone books, struggling to reach the microphones.13 The city had become the butt of jokes nationwide. A favorite was about a man who won a contest; first prize was one week in Cleveland, and second place—two weeks in Cleveland.

  All in all, America was a crummy place for many Americans in the 1970s. Cultural, economic, political, and foreign Lilliputians had tied down the pitiful giant America.

  THE GROWING SENSE IN America by the late spring of 1979 was that Jimmy Carter, though by reputation a nice guy, was not up to the task. One of his own “allies” in the House, Majority Leader Jim Wright of Texas, said bluntly of Carter's presidency, “No one is big enough for the job.” He then coldly added, “So we have to settle for what we've got.”14

  The U.S. economy continued to founder. When the first-quarter results came in, they showed 0.7 percent growth in the gross national product, which was just ahead of a recession level. Inflation was also on the rise and housing starts plummeted.15 The price of oil had risen from $1.80 a barrel in 1970 to $14.54 per barrel in 1979, an approximate 800 percent increase.16

  The international scene was becoming more and more disturbing as well. Iran was the latest concern. Under the shah, a longtime U.S. ally for his anti-Communist and pro-West positions, the situation inside Iran had been deteriorating for several years. The shah infuriated Iran's powerful radical Muslim clerics, who regarded him as a puppet of American imperialists and oil companies and were outraged by his recognition of Israel and such western-style reforms as granting suffrage to women. By the beginning of 1979 Iran had descended into chaos as basic services vanished and widespread strikes crippled the country. The Soviets exploited the unrest by broadcasting anti-American propaganda into the country, fomenting revolution.

  Carter, with his insistence on human rights, turned his back on the shah, seeing the authoritarian ruler as a torturer and tyrant. Without the help of the United States, the shah could do nothing to quell the growing tumult in his country, and in February 1979, he and his family fled the country. Jubilant Iranians danced in the streets of Tehran and pulled down statues to celebrate the shah's toppled regime.

  The shah became an international pariah, as no country would allow him permanent residence. Although America's insistence that the shah “Westernize” his country had contributed to his downfall, Carter shabbily opposed allowing the shah to come to the United States; in a letter the president cited the “high probability” of an outbreak of anti-American retaliation in Iran.17 For a time, the U.S. intelligence community hoped that Iran's new leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, might be an ally against the Soviets, but this turned out to be a delusion.

  With even prominent Democrats questioning Carter, it became increasingly clear that the president might face a challenge in 1980 from his own party. For a time California governor Jerry Brown, who succeeded Reagan in 1974, had seemed the kind of fresh face who could take on Carter. Brown, the son of former California governor Pat Brown, the man Reagan had defeated in 1966, had entered a few presidential primaries in 1976 and shown astonishing strength, but his late-starting campaign could not catch Carter. After a surprisingly strong reelection for governor in the Republican year of 1978, Brown seemed ready to take on Carter again. But by 1979 voters and journalists had grown tired of his quirks and non sequiturs, his New Age “the Earth is your mother” utterances, and his high-profile relationship with singer Linda Ronstadt, which struck many as just plain weird. Chicago columnist Mike Royko bestowed the moniker “Governor Moonbeam” on Brown, and he never shook it.

  A more likely, and prominent, Democratic opponent was Ted Kennedy. Polls showed Kennedy swamping Carter in popularity contests; a survey in New Hampshire, for instance, showed Kennedy beating the president by better than 2–1.18 “Draft Kennedy” organizations were popping up around the country.

  In full bravado mode, Carter told a group of Democrats when asked about a Kennedy challenge, “I'll whip his ass.” Stunned to hear the president use such language, one of those present asked him to beg their pardon, but what did you say, Mr. President? Carter repeated the sentence, word for word.19

  The president's pollster, Pat Caddell, saw a different picture. In the spring of 1979, his polling showed a precipitous drop in the president's numbers across the board, especially relating to Americans' confidence in the future. Caddell turned to First Lady Rosalynn Carter, the president's best friend and closest confidante. In an extended meeting with the first lady, the pollster laid out Carter's atrocious standing. Mrs. Carter immediately scheduled Caddell for a private breakfast with the president.

  At their breakfast, Caddell reviewed the gloomy outlook and began to pass along to Carter books to read, including Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism. Caddell later gave Carter a 107-page memo analyzing the state of disrepair in his administration.20

  IF RELATIONS WERE FROSTY between Carter and prominent Democrats, they were downright glacier-like between Ronald Reagan and Phil Crane. After Congressman Crane jumped into the campaign in August 1978, the former Reagan supporter had a few good months, but then he began making one stumbling mistake after another. Much of the problem was the meddling of the candidate's wife, Arlene, who could not bear being the candidate's wife; she wanted to be the candidate, the manager, the chief pollster, and the center of all attention. The Washington Star described her as “destructive” and a “cannonball rolling loose on the pitching deck.”21 (Mrs. Crane once told a rep
orter that raising seven daughters was easy: “You just put birth control pills in their cereal.”) Many talented individuals, such as Paul Weyrich, walked away from the campaign because of her divisive ways.

  William Loeb, the curmudgeonly publisher of the Manchester Union-Leader and a Reagan man through and through, used his statewide daily paper to denounce the candidate he saw as betraying the Gipper. Loeb published a flurry of stories and editorials charging Crane with serial infidelity and claiming that the congressman and his wife engaged in excessive partying. One anonymous source told the Union-Leader that Crane said it was his goal to “bed down 1,000 women.”22 A young female aide in the offices of Senator Gordon Humphrey, smitten with the handsome Crane, said her goal was to be “number 1,001.” Crane probably wouldn't have seen the humor in the comment.

  Crane's campaign blamed Reagan for putting Loeb up to it; Reagan was furious at Crane for making the unfounded charge. This was the first time that someone had accused Reagan of engaging in dirty politics and he did not like it one bit. It was an aspect of politics that Reagan despised.

  Another Republican for whom Reagan had little regard announced his candidacy in early 1979. Senator Lowell P. Weicker of Connecticut, a liberal Republican, hated Reagan, and Reagan in his diaries later responded in kind, confiding that he thought Weicker was a “schmuck” and “a pompous no good fathead.”23 Indeed, Weicker had an ego that made Charles de Gaulle's look retiring by comparison. The senator stood 6'6” tall and he needed every inch of that frame to house his massive sense of self.