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

by Shirley, Craig

  Reagan and his followers, however, found vindication for what they were doing. For the first time in the campaign, Reagan actually moved ahead of Carter in the national polls, 44 percent to 43 percent.31 True, it was within the margin of error, but they took the poll as a sign that his conservative message was getting through to his fellow citizens. The gaffe issue was so much eyewash as far as Middle America was concerned.

  RELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVES WERE BECOMING fully engaged in the 1980 campaign, mostly supporting Reagan, despite the fact that he was a divorced man who had once supported the ERA and that as governor he had signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country. Reagan flipped on the ERA, and shortly after signing the abortion bill he said he'd been sold a bill of goods and expressed lifelong regret over signing it.32

  Religion had been a part of the American political scene since the days of the Revolution, but never had political participation been organized from the pulpit in this fashion, with the possible exception of the activist clergy of the 1960s who protested against the Vietnam War and in favor of civil rights. But the right-wing evangelical tide now swelling in America was dwarfing anything the Berrigan brothers and their cohorts had done during the heady days of the counterculture.

  Most religious leaders had eschewed direct activism (“Render unto Caesar …”). Politics was of this world, while they were concerned with the next world. Carter, Communism, and the culture changed their outlook. Carter had run as a born-again Christian in 1976, making much of his faith, and evangelicals had responded enthusiastically, giving him 60 percent of their vote over Ford and Ford's outspoken wife, Betty, who supported the ERA and abortion and had scandalously condoned a hypothetical affair by her daughter. But evangelical leaders and voters quickly became disaffected with Carter and the Democratic Party, which was more and more being dominated by sideshow politics and special-interest groups. They also were motivated by the profound changes wrought during the 1960s and 1970s. Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll didn't sit too well with these people. Finally, they were terrified by the march of atheistic Communism around the world, and by President Carter's inability (or disinclination) to halt it.

  The “Silent Majority,” as Nixon had once called them, would be silent no longer. Evangelicals formed their own political organizations, including the Moral Majority, the Religious Roundtable, and the National Christian Action Network, and were marshaling their resources to stand up to the cultural forces they feared were tearing society apart—and to do battle with the president.

  Bush acknowledged the rise of religion in speeches across Pennsylvania. In Doylestown, he told Christian voters, “The proper role of government in the 1980s should and must be to encourage the institution of home and community on which our society is based and to preserve our religious diversity.” It was a significant break from the past for the reticent Episcopalian. By his culture and his faith, Bush was taught not to talk about religion in public. Now he went even further, contrasting the religious tolerance in America with the intolerance he had witnessed as U.S. envoy to China.33

  THE PENNSYLVANIA GOP PRIMARY was part “beauty contest” and part delegate selection, but one had no bearing upon the other. It was possible to lose the beauty contest and still win the majority of delegates. Pennsylvania's primary rules made it possible for GOP voters to pick their neighbor who was running as a delegate for one candidate while also pulling the lever for another candidate. Delegate candidates would not be identified as to whom they were affiliated with, the same as in Illinois, so the Reagan and Bush operations would have to conduct guerrilla activities to alert the local Republicans.

  Not so on the Democratic side, where apportionment of delegates would be directly tied to the popular vote.34 Carter was in a tailspin, and even though logic dictated that Kennedy could not catch him, logic was suspended. Kennedy continued to batter the president day in and day out, predicting a worse economy than under Hoover.35 Oddly, Kennedy was now earning the hosannas of devoted liberals who had watched him get pasted in one primary after another. As he soldiered on, a certain nobility attached to him. The media and the elites had turned on Carter and now they cheered the valiant Kennedy. He must have felt like a modern-day Caesar. First the media hordes loved him, then they killed him, and now they mourned him.

  Kennedy was so devoted to his cause that he had attempted to get Congressman Morris Udall of Arizona, a liberal of great self-deprecating wit who had run a fairly strong campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1976, to run in his stead, but the legal hurdles were too great, so Teddy vainly fought on.36 He must have been bitterly disappointed that so many friends he'd helped over the years had cut and run on him, but he never complained, at least publicly. His aides and family were less circumspect. When he became reflective, he twisted a lock of hair behind his left ear, a habit eerily reminiscent of his brothers. He contemplatively told a reporter, “Everyone … is three individuals. What you think you are. What you are. And what others think you are.”37

  REAGAN'S POLLSTER, DICK WIRTHLIN, was not only a quiet and gentle Mormon; he was also one of the most perceptive students of American culture and politics. In mid-April, he did a remarkable thing. He took a poll in which he did not ask the American people what they thought about Reagan or Bush or Kennedy or Carter; he asked Americans what they thought of themselves. The results were starkly revealing. Those at the highest end of the scale of “well-developed confidence in self” were Reagan's strongest supporters. Another pro-Reagan group consisted of those who could be labeled “self-assertive.” These people typically took responsibility for their actions and tended to be pro-life and pro–gun ownership. According to Wirthlin, these Reagan supporters skewed heavily Catholic, ethnic, blue-collar, and Democratic. Another group in Reagan's camp was the “optimistic.” These were Americans who believed in the future and that they had control over their own destinies.38

  The pollster found, in short, that Reagan was appealing to a new values system that was not part of the old formulaic Republican message. By narrowing his message, Reagan was broadening his base. Wirthlin said, “The statements that Reagan makes about what the nation can do to recover its freedoms and its greatness help reduce the uncertainty of the future.… The assumption that we're making is that [these voters] will vote for a political change.”39

  On the stump, Reagan was often just winging it, without using his speech cards. As the long primary season wore on his voice sometimes weakened, especially at the onset of making remarks. But as the crowd warmed to him, he seemed to gather strength from them and his voice would mostly boom again.40 Eleanor Roosevelt once observed that John Kennedy had the same quality as her husband, that they gathered inner strength from their audiences.41 Reagan was in the same mold.

  “Americans aren't losing their confidence, they're losing their shirts,” Reagan said to supportive crowds.42 But to seasoned Reagan watchers, he was getting ragged and sloppy. He didn't have the time now to work on the details of his speeches the way he had before, and there wasn't enough staff help. It was the price one paid for being a front-runner with little money.

  Even as elites in the media, government, and the academy were scrutinizing Reagan's every move, they were coming to terms with the possibility that he could be elected president of the United States. Many were manifestly scared. Even the moderately conservative British magazine The Economist had a cover that announced, “It's time to think the unthinkable,” referring to a possible Reagan win.43 This from a publication that had supported, albeit with doubts, the election of Margaret Thatcher a year earlier in Great Britain.44

  During a campaign stop in North Carolina, whose primary would be held two weeks after Pennsylvania's, Reagan was introduced by the Tar Heel State's own Jesse Helms. Senator Helms spoke of a “coalition of shared values” and referred to a movement that was as much about spiritual matters as it was about ideology. He said, “It may well be that God is giving us one more chance to save America.”45 The elites snickered, but m
illions not only knew what Helms meant, they agreed with him.

  A COMIC-DRAMA WAS PLAYING out in the Bush campaign. Months earlier, while assembling the campaign's operation, both Jim Baker and Dave Keene had resisted traveling with Bush. It wasn't personal, but both could take candidates only in small doses. So they recruited a stalwart conservative, writer Vic Gold, to travel full-time with the candidate. Gold suffered no fools and was a rough operator, but he was a superb, erudite attorney and one of the best wits and writers in Washington. He also had a temper like few men in politics.46

  Gold had come out of southern politics in the 1950s. He worked as deputy press secretary for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and later was press secretary for Vice President Spiro Agnew in the Nixon White House. Gold had left, quitting many times in a fit of pique, before Agnew resigned. He was already a legend before he swore off politics to concentrate on his writing career. The specter of out-of-control journalists and dumb Republicans playing into their hands disgusted him. He became a feature essayist for a number of publications, including National Review, The American Spectator, and the Washingtonian, and a regular commentator on ABC's Good Morning America opposite longtime liberal and scion of Hollywood royalty Frank Mankiewicz. Gold's dinner friends included Frank Sinatra and baseball great Stan Musial. In 1979, Gold was a contented man, far from the political free-fire zone.

  He was far more conservative than Bush and had known Reagan for years, but thought, like most, that Reagan was too old to run. The nascent Bush operation wasn't happy with the speeches being written by David Gergen and others, so Gold was introduced to Bush. He met with Bush over drinks at the Alibi Club in Washington, and during a later trip to Houston they bonded by jogging together. He was introduced to Jim Baker and was talked into traveling with Bush as a speechwriter—but Gold would be more than that. He was Bush's peer, and the adult confidant that every candidate needs to talk frankly and confidentially to and with. Gold assumed that Bush's effort would be respectable but would come up short. He hadn't counted on the failings of the Reagan campaign in the early going or the tenacity of Bush.47

  Bush hung in there like a terrier and Gold with him. But by the eve of the Pennsylvania primary, Gold had suffered one insult too many and furiously quit the campaign. The final straw had come when Bush aide Jennifer Fitzgerald showed one of Gold's speeches to Gergen and Gergen made a few minor edits. When Gold found out, he hit the ceiling.48

  As soon as Bush was without Gold, he began to make glaring mistakes on the road and was taking the wrong advice. By this time, with Reagan strongly in the lead, Jim Baker was looking to make a soft landing of the Bush campaign. Baker's notion was to get Bush out of the race gracefully, not offend Reagan and Nancy any more than the campaign already had, and angle to get his candidate the second slot leading up to Detroit. That meant that Bush could no longer insult Reagan on the campaign trail.

  Gold acutely understood this, but Pete Teeley, Bush's liberal press secretary and Reagan skeptic, did not. For months, Bush had been bedeviled by the political advantage Reagan had gained with his proposal for massive tax cuts. Bush was an old-fashioned balance-the-budget Republican. Bush's advisers convinced him to propose his own modest tax-cut plan, which he reluctantly did, even though it was focused more on cuts for business than for individuals.

  It was in Pennsylvania, at the prodding of Teeley and Bush researcher Stef Halper, where Bush unveiled a line that, while sounding good at the time, would become a source of enormous tension between him and Reagan for a long time.49 He called Reagan's 30 percent tax-cut plan “voodoo economics.”50 “I went off the campaign trail for a while and voodoo economics comes up and Teeley writes the goddamn speech,” Gold later recalled.51

  It was a good line. Too good. The media immediately picked up on it. As soon as Baker and Keene heard about it, they knew Bush's chances for going on the ticket were headed into the toilet. If Bush was making fun of Reagan's plan, he might as well be making fun of Reagan. And while Reagan could laugh at himself, Nancy flipped out when anybody made fun of her Ronnie.

  Bush dropped the voodoo-economics bomb during a speech before students at Carnegie Mellon University. In it he accused Reagan of “phony promises” and “economic madness.”52 Bush wanted to know where the corresponding cuts in spending would come from to pay for huge tax cuts. He did not believe in the supply-side theory that the tax cuts would generate more revenues for the federal treasury than they would cost. Bush previously had danced around the policy differences between the two men, but this speech went full-bore against the Gipper. Bush was as dismissive of Reagan's ideas as he was of someone not using the correct fork at dinner.

  Baker and Keene knew they needed to get Gold back out on the road with Bush, if only to protect the candidate from himself. They delicately suggested to Ambassador Bush that he call Gold at his home and ask him to come back. Bush balked. He didn't understand why he had to apologize. Finally he acceded. Bush called Baker and Keene at the campaign office, not knowing that he was on a speakerphone. “So how did it go?” Keene asked. Bush snapped back, “Well, I did what you asked me to do.” Keene replied, “Yeah, so everything's fine?” “He told me to go fuck myself and hung up.” As Keene and Baker rolled on the floor laughing, Keene choked out, “Well, it usually works!”53 Baker and Keene did not immediately respond to Bush's lamenting. They were still too busy laughing hysterically.

  REAGAN'S PENNSYLVANIA COORDINATOR, FRANK Donatelli, was a native of the state and knew the political landscape. Equally adept was another key member of the Reagan operation in Pennsylvania, the widely respected Drew Lewis, whom John Sears had recruited. Lewis was one of the most influential GOP leaders in the state, and when working for Ford in 1976 he had held the line against any defections engineered by Reagan's running mate, Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker. Lewis and Schweiker had been boyhood friends, but 1976 caused a temporary rift in their friendship. Schweiker's aides called Lewis a “Judas” for supporting Ford.54

  Lewis earned the undying respect of many in the GOP because he was a terrific fundraiser and because he was a man of his word, loyal to a fault.55 Lewis even won the support of the tough-minded Billy Meehan, the old boss of the Philadelphia GOP, who delivered his thirteen delegates after Reagan agreed to appear at a fundraiser for him.56

  Lewis once told Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal that “most of my business and political friends had little nice to say about Reagan; the only people I enjoyed talking to about Reagan were the gas station attendant and the guy at the parking garage.”57

  Reaganites dominated the heavily Republican counties of Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester, while Bush's support would come from the blue-blooded “Main Line” of Philadelphia's western suburbs. Two of Lewis's notable conservative recruits were Faith Whittlesey and Congressman Bud Schuster.58 On the other hand, John Eisenhower, son of the former president, was vehemently opposed to Reagan.59

  Bush's newest strategy was to declare he was going to tell the truth, Harry Truman–style. He repeatedly said, “I'm going to resist the popular appeal.” He claimed that Reagan was proposing ideas that sounded good but would not work.60 Bush was often angry on the stump and it showed, as he frequently balled up his fist for effect. His attempts at humor rarely came off well.

  Washington insiders familiar with Bush said that for all his obvious talents, the man was just tone-deaf when it came to politics. The reputation had deepened when, in the black depths of Watergate, Bush, as head of the national Republican Party, did not speak out against President Nixon and his cronies. The party was falling apart, and yet Bush chose to be loyal to Nixon instead of the GOP. Many in the media and the Republican Party became deeply disappointed over Bush's timidity. At the very time when he should have shown caution and gone easier on Reagan, he did just the opposite and endangered the slim chance he had to go on the ticket with Reagan in Detroit.

  It was time for Vic Gold to get back on the plane. Gold called Keene at 2 o'clock one morning and barked, “W
here is he? It's time to save the son of a bitch from himself.”61 His pride salved, the high-maintenance Gold did eventually return to the road with the low-maintenance Bush.

  Gold's return to the Bush entourage was evident immediately. Bush adopted a softer approach and David Broder of the Washington Post took note: “Only in the past month … has Bush begun to recover. He has finally begun to distinguish his own ‘reasonable’ conservatism from Reagan's more free-swinging variety. Republicans have begun to notice that Bush is making sense and scoring points in his criticisms of President Carter's foreign and domestic policies.”62

  Reagan addressed 1,200 rabid fans in Philadelphia. The Gipper was introduced by Governor Thornburgh, who was booed by the crowd for not doing more for their city, and because he was taking a neutral stance in his state's presidential primary (though he did call Bush's campaign “hopeless”). Reagan walloped Carter, charging him with costing the city 2,000 defense-related jobs at the recently closed Frankford Arsenal because of cuts in Pentagon spending. Reagan said America's military might should be so great that “no nation on this earth will dare to lift a hand against us.”63

  Earlier in the day, Reagan had plunged into an excited, mostly Democratic crowd at the South Philadelphia Italian Market, accompanied by Senator Dick Schweiker and an overcaffeinated supporter, Paul Giordano, owner of a locally well-known grocery store. Giordano took note of the makeup of the crowd and told a reporter that Carter might do well there because the president was “a babbling idiot.”64 A street band played the theme to Rocky … again … though Mr. and Mrs. Balboa were not spotted.