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

by Shirley, Craig

  On foreign affairs, too, Carter was undermining his own strength. In a White House press conference, the president had told startled reporters and even more startled Kremlinologists that the United States would abide by SALT II, though the treaty had yet to be ratified by the Senate. A poll conducted by Lou Harris in mid-March showed that nearly half of all Americans thought Carter was “a failure” on the Iranian hostage crisis. His numbers had dropped precipitously in just a little over a month. A huge majority, 71 percent, said America had been made to look “weak and helpless” by the Ayatollah Khomeini.72

  Yet although he tried, Kennedy couldn't capitalize on these mistakes. The Republicans were determined not to miss the same opportunity in the general election.

  REPORTERS WERE BEGINNING TO write pieces speculating on Reagan's running mate, a sure sign that the press believed Bush and Anderson would soon throw in the towel. The usual suspects were being mentioned: Don Rumsfeld, Howard Baker, and Bill Brock, among others. Reagan's only stipulations at this point were that his running mate must be younger and agree with him philosophically.

  And yet Reagan still hadn't captured the hearts of all Republicans. GOP voters had flirted with Bush, Ford, Connally, and Anderson and still had not set their hearts on Reagan. When queried by NBC whether anyone would emerge to stop his drive for the nomination, Reagan calmly replied, “They'll find someone.”73

  Like the tormented King Tantalus in Greek mythology, the more Reagan reached for the object of his desire, the more it eluded his grasp. In a New York Times poll, by a 52–27 margin, Republicans still favored Ford over Reagan as their standard bearer against Carter in the fall election.74

  Reagan had miles of primaries to go—and, for his fellow Americans, promises to keep.

  14

  BUSH'S COUNTEROFFENSIVE

  “Nobody said it would be easy. Nobody was right.”

  Fresh off his big win in Illinois, Ronald Reagan jetted to Brooklyn for a day of campaigning, but it didn't go according to plan. Hecklers chanting, “Reagan wants war!” greeted him. The Gipper shot back, “I'll tell you, you jokers. If I did want war, you're where I'd start it!”1 Reagan had been in the Big Apple only a couple of hours and he was already starting to sound like a New Yorker.

  He was welcomed more warmly later in Queens and Manhattan. Reagan had often been critical of New York City, but his initial strength in the Empire State could be found, perhaps surprisingly, in the city rather than upstate. The reason was that in New York City, the GOP “has tended to be more conservative as a counter to crime and decaying neighborhoods,” in the words of the New York Times.2

  Nancy Reagan got a taste of campaigning New York–style. State Senator John Calandra told her he would do everything he could to help her husband, “even if I'm invited to tea in a whorehouse.”3

  While campaigning in the city, Reagan praised Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat, for his efforts to root out corruption, cut spending, and reduce crime. Koch in turn praised Reagan while complaining about the “Arabists” around the Carter administration. Carter's campaign chairman, the normally calm Texan Robert Strauss, referred to Carter's Jewish critics as “emotionally hysterical nuts.”4 Relations between Jewish Americans and the Carter White House were worsening. Vice President Walter Mondale spoke at an event in New York “attended by prominent Jews and was roundly booed virtually every time he mentioned Carter's name,” the Washington Post reported.5

  Anti-Carter sentiment offered an opening to Reagan, who expanded his message while stumping in New York state. As he talked about support for Israel and the plight of the inner cities, it was clear to reporters that he was already turning his attention to the fall contest. Reagan called for a partnership between government and private industry to help alleviate youth unemployment and said that any attempt to cut government “must not come at the expense of the poor and the disadvantaged.”6 He also called for increased funding for Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America as a way to undermine the Soviets—remarks pleasing to Americans of Eastern European descent, many of them traditional Democratic voters.7

  In Syracuse, Reagan hammered Carter over his handling of the hostages in Iran. Up to this point, he'd pulled his punches on this issue. No more. “There must come a time, if we are to get them back, when we tell them [Iran] this is the end of the road,” Reagan declared.8 He had met in private with the mother of a hostage and came away disgusted when she told him President Carter would not meet with her.9

  While Reagan turned an eye to Carter, the president's campaign began to plot its assault against Reagan. One column by James “Scotty” Reston of the New York Times, who frequently savaged Reagan, reviewed how the Carter White House feared all the Republican contenders except Reagan, who was “Carter's favorite opponent.… Seldom in the history of American politics has a party out of power shown so much generosity to a President in such deep difficulty.”10 Pat Caddell, Carter's pollster, was bragging that the president would not only hold on to his base in the fall but would also pick up a sizable number of Republican voters alienated by the “extremist” Reagan.

  By this point most national political journalists were writing off George Bush's chances. Bush had staggered out of Illinois, stunned at the Reagan avalanche that had buried him. He'd flown to New York with no press in tow; they had been disinvited from his plane, as he didn't want to hash over the results of Illinois.

  Many others who had dismissed Reagan were starting to recognize that his chances for the nomination looked good. A sure sign that the winds were shifting came when power junkie Henry Kissinger called Bill Casey and sanctimoniously told the campaign manager that he “would do nothing to hurt the governor.” Casey, unmoved, queried why, then, had Kissinger stepped in front of the television cameras just a couple days earlier and urged Jerry Ford to get into the race? Kissinger answered sheepishly that he had done what he had to do.11 Kissinger had flirted with John Connally the year before, when many thought Connally would be the Republican nominee. Now, with Reagan ascending, Kissinger deigned to say he could serve in a Reagan administration—as secretary of state, of course. As always, Kissinger's most important constituency was … himself.

  Casey took control of the Reagan campaign. To be sure, he made missteps, such as telling ABC, NBC, and CBS after the fact that he'd canceled the campaign's charter plane, leaving three camera crews stranded in Atlanta.12 Staffers joked behind his back about his forgetfulness, his wardrobe, his dandruff, and his dated knowledge of politics.

  But the man had a set of brass ones. He brought sorely needed order and discipline to the Reagan campaign. He fired more than one hundred staffers, while others stayed without pay. Ed Meese said that Casey was “intelligent, exceptionally decisive, and easy to get along with.”13 But he was not always easy to understand. Reagan, Dick Allen, and Meese met Casey one day in the Midwest. After the meeting, in which Casey spoke in his trademark mumble, Reagan turned to Meese and said, “What the hell did he just say?”14 Some thought the mumbling was an act to get people to pay attention. The media missed their old friend John Sears, but there was a new sheriff in town and they might as well get used to it.

  NEW YORK AND CONNECTICUT would hold their primaries on the same day, March 25, a week after the Illinois contest. Up for grabs were a total of nearly 150 GOP delegates.

  Bush was trying to pick up the pieces of his once-promising campaign, and Connecticut was a great place to start. The state was Bush country. He'd grown up there, and his father, Prescott, had once been a U.S. senator from Connecticut.

  Newspapers used words like “shattering” and “crippling” to describe Bush's flagging effort.15 After the devastating loss in Illinois, one aide at Bush headquarters had grumbled, “It's over. It's all over.”16 Others had wept. Days before the Illinois primary, Bush was already bracing for a loss; he wanly told one crowd, “Nobody said it would be easy. Nobody was right.”17

  But now Bush was back in his old stomping grounds, where he was warmly welcomed. He devoted six d
ays of frenetic campaigning to the state, delivering speeches going after Carter and the scandals of the Democratic Party while touting his own tax-cut plan. He told reporters, “I'm not as far over on one side as Reagan is, and I'm certainly not as far over on the other side as John Anderson.”18 Bush was trying for a second introduction, this one centered on policy, not the “Big Mo.” He went so far as to say, “I'm the new guy that's talking only about issues, not polls.”19 Bush realized too late that Jim Baker and other staffers had been right when they urged him to make that switch after Iowa.

  Bush's chairman in Connecticut, Malcolm Baldridge, worked the state hard. He had an army of three thousand volunteers and coordinators in 150 towns and villages. Bush also had phone operations in six cities, attempting to call all 400,000 of Connecticut's Republicans.20

  Reagan was under no illusions about his chances in Connecticut. The state had not held a primary four years earlier, but Reagan had been skunked at the Republican state convention that had been held instead. Now he was facing one of Connecticut's own. Reagan told reporters it was George Bush's “backyard.”21 Of course, he was inflating expectations for Bush. Reagan had some first-rate operatives in Connecticut, including state senator Nancy Johnson and former state Republican chairman Fred Biebel, and his campaign had assembled an impressive list of three hundred supporters that included many Italians and Roman Catholics, not to mention Andy Robustelli, the great former New York Giants football player.22 At the very least the Reagan campaign hoped to take a few delegates in the state.

  Reagan went to Connecticut, a shot across Bush's bow. He boarded the 7:11 A.M. commuter train in New Haven and rode along with the rest of the straphangers. It was a good media event for Reagan, especially because he took the train all the way into New York, where he was not at such a disadvantage compared with Bush. When he arrived at Grand Central Station just before 9 A.M. he was met by a small but enthusiastic crowd.23 One rail user yelled out, “Win one for the Gipper!”24 Reagan smiled and later went to the New York Stock Exchange, where he received a “tumultuous welcome on the trading floor,” according to Peter Hannaford, who had accompanied him on the swing.25

  Reagan was in better shape for New York's delegate-selection primary, at least as compared with 1976, thanks to longtime conservative operatives George Clark of Brooklyn and Roger Stone, Reagan's Northeast co-coordinator. Clark and Stone worked well together, despite the fact that Clark was as stable and low-key as Stone was colorful and controversial. Stone, though only twenty-nine, had seen a world of politics in his short life, including performing some junior-varsity dirty tricks for Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (“CREEP”) eight years earlier.

  Like Illinois, New York then held a “blind” primary, in which delegates remained undeclared. Many of Bush's delegate slates had been disqualified in the Empire State, thanks to Clark and Stone's challenges, so Reagan delegates would run unopposed in five congressional districts. The Gipper and Bush would go head-to-head in another eighteen districts, while uncommitted slates were running in the remaining sixteen districts. Reagan was sure to add to his overall delegate lead, and his campaign hoped to take as many as 62 of New York's 123 delegates. The Reagan campaign passed out flyers and ran newspaper ads telling GOP primary voters who the Reagan delegates were. Also, a Reagan man of long standing, State Senator Fred Eckert of Rochester, declared himself no longer “uncommitted,” though no one ever thought he was anything but.

  Stone, like his counterparts in other states for Reagan, operated with an enhanced autonomy after the departure of Charlie Black and the arrival of Casey. Black knew politics as well as any man alive in 1980. Casey had far less experience and thus was forced to depend on the regional and state political directors assembled by Black. Not only were they skilled in organization and media, they were all dedicated conservatives who had come of age starting in 1964, with the rise of Barry Goldwater.

  Reagan took his campaign to upstate New York. In Syracuse, reporters confronted him with a letter signed by a small coterie of Californians critical of his claims over cutting spending there while serving as governor. Reagan, quite out of character, wondered aloud about the “obscene phone calls” one of the signers had apparently been charged with, but the candidate, ashamed, quickly caught himself, saying it was a “dirty trick” to have brought up the matter.26 Nancy Reynolds, an old friend, said that in all the years she had known him, she had “never heard him say a mean, unkind, vengeful word about anybody.” She did say he would get mad, but it would pass in a moment.27

  LIKE BUSH, TED KENNEDY was desperate to turn his campaign around in Connecticut and New York. Kennedy's ground forces in Connecticut had in fact organized very well for their beleaguered candidate. And despite Kennedy's awful performances thus far, the primary season was still young. It had been less than a month since New Hampshire and only a little over two months since Iowa. Two dozen primaries lay ahead over the next three months, culminating in no less than eight state primaries on June 3—including New Jersey, Ohio, West Virginia, Montana, and California—the “big enchilada,” as Reagan was wont to refer to it.

  But by now almost no one thought Kennedy would last until June. To the boys on the bus, the Kennedy operation was a running joke. It became the theater of the absurd when he attended a press conference with five black leaders from Harlem who spent forty minutes in a mutual admiration society while never once mentioning or endorsing Kennedy, which had been the purpose of the event. Kennedy's plane was then forced to wait on the ground in New York while Air Force Two, with Vice President Mondale aboard, was given priority. Kennedy finally landed in a torrential rainstorm in Syracuse, where he was supposed to receive the endorsement of the local congressman, Jim Hanley. In front of the media, Hanley stammered and spluttered. When an exasperated reporter yelled out asking whether he was endorsing Kennedy, Hanley replied that he would have to keep that vital information “private.” Everybody roared with laughter, including Kennedy, who put his arm around the befuddled congressman and said, “You can tell these guys, Jim, they won't tell anybody.”28

  During a harrowing leg of the trip, reporters broke out kazoos and played the theme to The High and the Mighty, a movie starring John Wayne about an airplane that almost crashed. Kennedy's sleek jet, Air Malaise,29 had long since been grounded because of the cost, so his campaign had chartered a twin-engine old-timer from a regional airline, Air New England, nicknamed “Scare New England” by its terrified customers. The airline had a history of losing luggage—at five thousand feet, with suitcases landing in potato patches in Maine—and of losing propellers while in flight. The star-crossed airline would go out of business in 1981.

  Kennedy moved on as best he could. He told reporters in Rochester that even if Carter got enough delegates for a first-ballot nomination, he still wouldn't drop out of the race. With polls putting him behind Carter in New York by a 2–1 margin, more and more prominent Democrats were urging Kennedy to call it a day.30 John White, the respected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, admonished Kennedy and those liberals who said he should not get out, calling them the “masochist fringe of politics.”31

  The prolonged fight, White knew, was not going to be helpful to the party in the fall. Carter had pulled way out in front of Kennedy, with 615 committed delegates to Kennedy's 192.32

  Kennedy was a young man selling old wares. The country was moving dramatically to the right. He'd been on the national scene for twenty years and was trapped in a time warp. He favored wage and price controls, though they had failed miserably under Nixon; he favored more government programs, though Americans now believed that government was the problem and not the solution and that Washington was mostly corrupt. He favored social activism and massive redistribution of wealth. When Chappaquiddick was added to the mix, it was just too much for too many Democrats.

  He was undeterred. Teddy ran his staff ragged, turning in one sixteen-hour day after another. The only time he showed the wear and tear of the camp
aign was each evening, when a whirlpool machine was placed in his hotel room so Kennedy could treat his bad back.

  Kennedy's campaign showed its first sign of life in weeks when a New York Times/CBS News poll indicated that he had actually gained on Carter nationally. Kennedy was still miles behind, of course, but Carter's national approval numbers, from Iran to the economy, continued to plummet. Carter's dive was the biggest one-month drop in the history of the poll. His approval rating had gone down 13 points from 53 in February, and 21 points since December, when he was at 61.33

  The media were becoming fed up with Jimmy Carter and his arrogant White House. Michael McShane was a young advance man in Mondale's office. McShane remembered that many Fridays after work, White House employees would meet up for cocktails. He saw Carter staffers laughingly dig into their pockets and pull out thick wads of phone messages left on pink slips of paper, competing with one another to see who had returned the fewest calls that week.34 Even worse, Carter's chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, was facing a grand jury probe into alleged cocaine use at Studio 54.35 (Jordan was later cleared.)