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

by Shirley, Craig

  Reagan increased the pressure on Bush when he picked up another eighty-five delegates in weekend conventions in Missouri, Oklahoma, Arizona, Minnesota, and Guam.75 Moving on to North Carolina, Reagan was welcomed like a son of the Confederacy. Everywhere he went, adoring fans mobbed him. He met with Billy Graham, and aides said with a straight face that the meeting had nothing to do with politics. Reagan also spoke before 15,000 devoted Amway distributors in Charlotte. Kenny Klinge, one of Reagan's more talented fieldmen, said of the Amway rally that he'd never seen a crowd so frenzied, nor had he ever seen so many bouffant hairdos.76 North Carolina had a special place in Reagan's heart. It was where his dead-in-the-water campaign came back to life in 1976, as he stunned Ford after losing the first five contests.

  Bush looked at the remaining primary schedule and claimed a new strategy to win the GOP nomination that would include beating Reagan in his home state of California. Everybody in politics knew that Bush's chances of beating Reagan in the Golden State were almost as good as Reagan's chances of being asked to join Yale's Skull and Bones society, which counted Bush among its members. Polls had Reagan ahead of Bush 7–1 in California.77 Still, Bush stubbornly announced that he would raise $1 million to campaign there.78

  Bush certainly had the will and the resources to fight on, but the schedule ahead was anything but favorable. He had been able to outspend Reagan massively in recent primaries and was preventing Reagan from beginning the long process of consolidating the Republican Party. Not surprisingly, then, the Reagan campaign seemed finally, if reluctantly, willing to call off the dogs and let Bush get out gracefully. Angelo told reporters that Bush was “an articulate spokesman for the Republican philosophy” and predicted that Bush would drop out and endorse Reagan.79 Reagan was asked whether he thought the results in Texas might convince Bush to finally drop out and he said, gently, “It would ease my travel.”80

  Reagan was well on his way toward the nomination, but the road before him would not be easy. Jimmy Carter likewise was on his way, but the cost of his journey had been high. As the primaries wore on, he was weakening politically. Though Kennedy's plan for a breakthrough against him was not coming to fruition, the president needed to start consolidating his party and making the case against the Republicans and especially Ronald Reagan. Vice President Walter Mondale was ready to be typecast as the heavy in this drama. “I'm confident this party will unite very quickly, particularly against Ronald Reagan,” Mondale said. “The country just isn't ready yet for an actor who in his first movie lost the girl to Gabby Hayes.”81

  Carter could not rely on his surrogates forever, though. And now he made a pivotal announcement. For months, he'd been under self-imposed house arrest, saying that he would not actively campaign in the presidential race (though for months he'd been burning up the phone lines calling supporters) “until the status of the hostages had changed.”82 His staff had badgered him to abandon the “Rose Garden strategy,” and Carter, because of his isolation in the White House, had been smirkingly referred to in Washington's drinking establishments as “the fifty-fourth hostage.”83 (Later the number of American hostages in Iran would be reduced by one, from fifty-three to fifty-two, after one hostage, Richard Queen, fell grievously ill and the ayatollah released him to the International Red Cross.)84

  Now the president abruptly announced that the crisis was “manageable,” and Mrs. Carter said that in the wake of the failed rescue attempt the hostages' status had indeed “changed.”85 Carter would join the presidential race in earnest—never mind that the hostages seemed in greater danger than ever as a result of the Desert One fiasco. When told of Carter's decision, Reagan crisply said, “If he feels freed, I wonder if he thinks now that the hostages have now been somehow freed.”86

  Deacon Carter was finally coming down from the mountain. The office had aged him visibly, as it did most presidents, but he was not about to relinquish the position to anybody. Carter had fought tenaciously for the job in 1976 and he was a tenacious man still.

  Three other tough-minded men—Kennedy, Bush, and Reagan—were not about to give up either.

  18

  WINNING IS GOOD

  “Well, I've got the delegates.”

  The oft-cited rap against George Bush was that he was a political journeyman who had held many jobs with little to show for it. He had a golden résumé but no gravitas. Something else he did not have was any Republican mayor in Indiana on the eve of its big primary, which came just three days after Texas. Every single one of the fifty-three city executives endorsed Ronald Reagan for president. Even Indianapolis mayor William Hudnut, who had previously supported Bush, jumped ship to Ronald Reagan.1 Dejected, Bush withdrew from the Indiana contest.

  Texas had only briefly reinvigorated his campaign. On May 6 there would be primaries not only in Indiana but in Tennessee, North Carolina, and the District of Columbia as well. Reagan had a hammerlock on all but the nation's capital, where he was not on the ballot. With Reagan poised to grab most of the 146 delegates at stake, Bush said somberly the day before the primaries, “I'm not looking forward to tomorrow.”2 But he vowed to keep fighting until June 3, when eight GOP primaries would take place.

  Jim Baker spelled out Bush's Hail Mary effort: It would require Bush to split the Ohio and New Jersey primaries with Reagan, win California, and raid state delegations that were only pledged and not mandated to vote for Reagan. It was a tall order, especially the California notion, but it was not harebrained. California was a winner-take-all primary. Months earlier Bush supporters had strongly objected to this setup as giving Reagan an advantage and had tried to have the rules changed. Now they saw that it could help Bush. He had the money to contest the Golden State and Reagan's budget was exhausted.

  It was political trench warfare. Reagan aide Keith Bulen spoke for many about the months-long political process when he said, “I'm tired, the campaign's tired. It's a ridiculous sort of thing.”3 Bulen was a tough, chain-smoking operative who had a core of devoted political allies, despite his reputation for angry outbursts. In Bulen's native Indiana, Reagan's team was working tirelessly—and trying to set limits on the press. Reagan's advance schedule in the state directed staff that when the candidate was in a church while on the road, reporters must be told “to remain outside unless they wish to worship.”4

  Republican National Committee high priest Bill Brock was reluctant to declare the race over. Reagan aides, especially Lyn Nofziger and Jerry Carmen, had been openly dismissive and suspicious of the moderate Brock. They began to eye hungrily Brock's well-financed fiefdom at 310 First Street in Southeast Washington, where almost three hundred staffers were laboring for the party. They were whispering in Reagan's ear that Brock was no friend and that the establishment Republicans thought Reagan and his followers were déclassé. “They wondered who this interloper was from the West,” Ed Meese later said. “He was not the Establishment guy.”5 Brock's ace in the hole was Senator Howard Baker, his friend and go-between with the Reagans.

  While looking over his shoulder at his conservative critics, Brock burrowed into the planning of the national convention. The first announcement was that former president Ford would open the quadrennial gathering on Monday, July 14. Congressman Guy Vander Jagt, also of Michigan, would give the keynote address the following night. The idea of having Ford and Vander Jagt speak had come not from Brock but from Reagan's men, who pragmatically wanted to show a unified GOP face to the world.

  But the Reaganites made the new order clear to all, telling reporters that they were “calling the shots” and that if Brock wanted to keep his job, he'd better dance to the Reagan tune. They let Brock make the Ford announcement only as a “matter of courtesy.”6 Former president Richard Nixon, by everyone's agreement, would not be invited to speak to the party that he'd once lorded over.

  When a reporter asked Brock whether he would stay on if Reagan was the nominee, he guardedly said, “I think the Governor would prefer to speak for himself.”7 Brock got some good news w
hen a survey he'd commissioned found that Republican Party identification had grown to 30 percent, up from the 24 percent where it had been stagnating. Meanwhile, Democratic Party identification had dropped, from 46 percent to 40 percent.8 It was the first inkling of a Reagan-spearheaded realignment.

  In even better news, Brock's RNC was light-years ahead of the Democratic National Committee in fundraising. The RNC had already raised $9 million of an expected $19 million while the DNC, despite the advantages of incumbency, had raised only $1.5 million with a staff of just fifty.9

  Reagan went to Indiana for a whirlwind of campaigning. Pennsylvania and Texas had thrown a scare into him. It was not beyond possibility that Bush could rebound, especially given his huge money advantage. Reagan couldn't coast or stumble again.

  Thousands of energized Hoosiers met Reagan across Indiana. On the stump, he said it might be possible for the GOP to gain control of the U.S. Senate for the first time since the early 1950s.10 He also loved to tell a corny joke that always got a big laugh. He would relate to audiences about how he and Nancy were campaigning in the Midwest when they met up with an old man who didn't recognize the Reagans. Reagan gave a hint: “We're from California.” No response. “We're in the movies.” No response. “My initials are RR.” Eyes brightening, the old man yelled, “Ma, come quick. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are running for president.”11

  While in Indiana, Reagan went to see an old friend, Colonel H. N. Park. They had been pals years before in Des Moines. Park remembered Reagan in those days as someone “who made things happen.” Reagan, he said, was “handsome, well-mannered … yet could party with the best of them on a Saturday night.” As young men, they often gathered at the Moonlight, a gin mill outside of town.12

  Dick Wirthlin was already writing a 176-page plan for the fall campaign. He identified several “Conditions of Victory” needed for Reagan. These included expanding his appeal to draw the support of “moderates, Independents, soft Republicans and soft Democrats.” He advocated holding back on campaign spending until the final twenty days before the November election. Reagan's pollster also urged the campaign to search for ways in which to “neutralize Carter's ‘October Surprise,’” which Reagan's men believed would be the dramatic release of the hostages in Iran.13

  Reagan's campaign temporarily dealt with the gaffe issue by eliminating any statistics he might cite in a speech unless and until they were verified and reverified. By now, many in the media were lying in wait, just hoping to catch Reagan making a mistake on the stump. So was Bush.

  Another solution under discussion was to bring Stu Spencer back into the Reagan fold. Spencer, since 1966, had had an “off again, on again” relationship with the Reagans. He'd run Reagan's successful campaign in 1966 for governor and was involved in the successful 1970 reelection. Around that time, he'd lost some political business and blamed Ed Meese and others around Reagan for dropping dimes on him. The relationship bottomed out after that. In 1976, Spencer signed up with Gerald Ford, telling people, “It's one thing to elect that right winger governor, it's another to elect him as president.”14

  Late in the spring of 1976, in the heat of the campaign, Reagan had been asked a hypothetical question about quelling the situation in Rhodesia, which was going through a bloody civil war as it transitioned from white minority rule to black majority rule. Reagan postulated some sort of international peacekeeping force, including American troops to prevent more bloodshed, nothing more. Spencer wrote radio and television scripts for Ford making an analogy to Vietnam. The tagline was, “Remember, Governor Reagan couldn't start a war. President Reagan could.” Reagan was beyond furious, first at Spencer and then at Ford because he defended the commercial and made sport of Reagan's anger. The “warmonger” issue backfired on Ford in the California primary, because the charge just didn't jibe with the voters' actual experiences of Reagan as governor. But it contributed to the deterioration of an already bad relationship between the two men.15

  Four years later, the rift between Reagan and Spencer had somewhat healed. Mrs. Reagan, to her credit, knew that her husband, despite all the past dustups, respected Spencer and that Reagan needed someone on the plane to hold his hand and eliminate or at least minimize the misstatements. Spencer also had front-line experience in presidential campaigns and knew that general elections were fought differently from primary contests. At Nancy's direction, Mike Deaver and Wirthlin quietly approached Spencer about the Prodigal Son coming home. Spencer laid out some conditions, and when these were met, he later joined the campaign.16

  At an early meeting, Karen Spencer joined her father for a drink with Bill Casey. Spencer already had a reputation for having terrible taste in clothes, but even his daughter was appalled when he showed up wearing “white socks, yellow pants, a blue shirt, and a red tie.” If that weren't bad enough, he was also wearing golf shoes—with the cleats still in them. She remembered that neither she nor her father could understand one word Casey said: “He just sat and mumbled into his tie.”17

  At one point—before Spencer came back aboard—he and Deaver had run into each other in the lobby of a New York hotel. There had been bad blood between the two for a number of years, but they decided to get a drink and hash things out. Many drinks later—Spencer was counting swizzle sticks—they patched things up and renewed their old friendship. But Spencer also warned Deaver, “If you ever fuck with me again you are going to rue the day you were born.”18

  The Reagan campaign was looking ahead to the Republican convention. There would be headaches from dealing with strident conservatives who wanted to tear the GOP platform apart and include all manner of proposals, such as “repealing the Panama Canal treaties, breaking diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, or pulling out of the United Nations,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Fights were anticipated over abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment.19 Reagan's men agonized that their conservative supporters might want to hold show trials and symbolic beheadings of moderate and liberal Republicans to avenge past offenses.

  The city of Detroit was preparing for the convention as well. City fathers saw the opportunity to showcase Detroit, so to forestall anything like the riots between leftist protesters and cops in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Detroit officials designated several protest sites far from where the Republicans were to meet. Protesters had to make reservations to use the sites. To hold a spontaneous protest, applicants were asked to write a certified letter of request to the city council and specify the time, the number of protesters, and what they were protesting. So far, only the Citizens Reacting Against a Sick Society and the Irish National Caucus had made spontaneous-protest reservations.20

  UNLIKE RNC CHAIR BILL Brock, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee showed no reluctance in calling a winner. John C. White proclaimed the fight between President Carter and Ted Kennedy “resolved.” Though respected on both sides of the aisle and in the media, White had been handpicked by Carter, and Kennedy aides called for his resignation.21

  Still, Carter's advisers were already looking ahead to the fall campaign, just like Reagan's team. Carter maintained a huge advantage over Reagan on the “war and peace” issue, even among Republicans, who by better than 2–1 thought Carter more likely than Reagan to keep the country at peace.22 Carterites felt this would be the issue the campaign would ultimately turn on, as voters would forgive Carter for the bad economy as long as he could keep the world from blowing up.

  What worried Carter's strategists was the recent phenomenal growth of the Sun Belt across the South, from Carter's beloved Georgia to Reagan's adopted California. Lower taxes, a lower cost of living, open space, plentiful sunshine, less government interference, and other inducements brought jobs and prosperity to this conservative and increasingly Republican region. During the economic upheavals of the 1970s, the Sun Belt suffered less, at least in terms of unemployment, than did the Rust Belt and other regions. For the first time in American history, according to the Census Bureau, m
ore Americans lived in the South and the West than in the rest of the country.23 Texas had passed Pennsylvania in the 1970s to become the third most populous state in the Union.24

  In 1976 Carter had only narrowly won several states in his native South against Gerald Ford. It was an inherently conservative region where Reagan had far greater appeal than Ford ever did. Reagan was counting on sweeping the West, knowing that Carter was unlikely to make a dent there, with the possible exceptions of Oregon and Washington, two western states that represented an unpredictable blend of frontier conservatism and liberal urbanism. Reagan could pin Carter down, forcing him to defend his Democratic stronghold of the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and some states in the South. Reagan's initial campaign plan called for picking off a couple of states in the South while grabbing the swing state of Ohio, which Carter had won narrowly four years earlier. The goal was 302 electoral votes, just 32 more than needed to win the presidency.25

  Even New York was now in Reagan's crosshairs. Reagan had strong appeal with ethnic voters, and the state, though Carter had also carried it narrowly in 1976, always held the Georgian at arm's length. The state GOP was falling in line behind Reagan. Even the Republican machine boss of Nassau County, Joe Margiotta, opened his arms to a candidate for whom he had previously no use; Reagan ended up raising untold dollars for the county organization. The Gipper was being ably assisted in New York by one of the most streetwise of operators, Mike Long, a leader in the conservative party, who by day owned a liquor store in Queens and had the dubious honor of once being shot by a would-be robber.26