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

by Shirley, Craig

  Reagan would run in the Empire State on the Republican line along with the Conservative line and the Right-to-Life line.27 Carter might appear only on the Democratic line, as the Liberal Party was playing footsie with John Anderson.28

  REAGAN MATCHED UP WELL with Carter in one important regard that was difficult to measure but too obvious to overlook: happiness. As the new decade of the 1980s got under way, people in the South and Southwest seemed—on the surface, anyway—to be friendlier, more garrulous, and more confident. All one had to do was drive across the Mason-Dixon Line and go into a coffee shop. In the North, if you asked for a second cup of joe, you might get a resentful stare instead. In the South and West, you'd get a bottomless cup, and with a smile, too. Reagan's optimistic outlook was clearly appealing to these folks. Their attitude seemed to match the limitless horizon of the skies in the West. In contrast, “Carter has almost no positive-issue profile in the West that makes Westerners comfortable with him,” said Earl deBerge, a Phoenix-based pollster.29

  Reagan sat down for an unusually introspective interview with Howell Raines of the New York Times. Raines found a man who loved the crowds and loved the stage, but who, paradoxically, was deeply committed to his own private world, a world that no one entered except for Nancy. Reagan illustrated for the journalist how zealously he guarded his privacy. As a boy, his brother had once asked their father how much money he made. Jack Reagan turned on his two young sons: “That's a question you don't ever ask anyone. That's a private question that belongs to the individual.”30 It was a revealing peek into Reagan's personal and political philosophy. His refined conservative worldview included a deep respect for individual rights and privacy.

  Reagan also chortled to the reporter that his heavy campaigning had tuckered everybody else out, but he was still raring to go. In another burst of Socratic insight (“Know thyself”), he said, “Maybe one of the reasons that the fellows in the back of the plane are astonished that I'm not in a state of collapse … with the schedule we keep, is maybe there is something that is stimulating to me about having that contact.”31

  BIG LABOR HAD NEVER been a big fan of Jimmy Carter's. Labor leaders from the North regarded Carter as an odd duck and they'd had a long love affair with Ted Kennedy. Yet Carter was the incumbent and had done labor a few favors. As it appeared more and more likely that Carter would be renominated, labor leaders faced an uncomfortable situation. Their cultural animosity toward the president ran strong. One of the more aggressive and liberal union heads, Jerry Wurf of AFSCME, a Kennedy acolyte, was asked whether he would support Carter if and when Kennedy faltered. He replied, “I'll jump off of that bridge if I get there.”32

  Many others, however, were prepared to hold their nose and get behind the president. “The true enemy of labor is Reagan, not Carter,” spluttered one top leader in the AFL-CIO, “and we are almost certainly going to be backing Carter in the fall after the primaries are over. We can't go all-out for Kennedy without hurting Carter.”33 It didn't matter that Reagan, unlike Carter (or Kennedy or Anderson), was a union man. Reagan still paid his annual dues to the Screen Actors Guild. As six-time president of the union, he'd skillfully led it through many negotiations with the feared heads of the studios.

  The opposition of labor was a real concern for Reagan. Unions could and did spend millions of unaccounted dollars outside the strictures set down by the FEC. Labor was specifically exempt from any campaign laws passed by Congress, accountable to no one.

  Big Labor had a long list of grievances against Reagan. He opposed the minimum wage as well as Davis-Bacon, which mandated that the government pay the prevailing wage in any area in which it awarded contracts.34 Davis-Bacon was one way for labor to undermine right-to-work states—many of them in the Sun Belt—which prevented compulsory union membership, also opposed by Reagan. Reagan favored applying antitrust laws to labor as a means of undermining collective bargaining. As far as Reagan was concerned, if the government could break up American businesses that had too much control over an aspect of the marketplace, then why couldn't that same logic apply to labor unions?

  TO GEORGE BUSH'S AIDES, May 6 became known as “Black Tuesday.”35 On that day, Reagan wiped out Bush in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Indiana. In Tennessee and Indiana, Reagan took an amazing 74 percent of the vote, and in North Carolina, 67 percent. Only in the District of Columbia, where Reagan was not on the ballot, did Bush win.36

  After his big day, Reagan stood at nearly 800 delegates. Still, Bush would not quit. He talked about spending $1 million in California against Reagan.37 Bush sequestered himself with Jim Baker and others to discuss his next move.

  President Carter also romped on May 6, winning all three states easily. Jody Powell, Carter's White House press secretary, told the assembled media that the results of May 6 meant that only one of two men would be in the White House in January 1981: Reagan or Carter.38

  Carter's men were plotting their summer offensive against Reagan. “You won't hear any more of that malaise malarkey,” one said. They had but one option against Reagan and that was to send surrogates out to tear the hide off the Gipper. “We've got to crack the veneer of the Reagan appeal,” another said. Their goal was to show that Reagan was an “untried lightweight.” Another goal was to discredit Anderson as some sort of nut. Carterites hoped to use Anderson's earlier attempt to declare America a “Christian” nation to scare Jewish voters back into the fold.39

  The wise old man of the Democratic Party, Robert Strauss, renewed his call for Kennedy to bow out.40 He sent a memo to Democratic Party leaders, urging them to call on Teddy to do that as well.41 Kennedy reacted as Reagan had in 1976 when Gerald Ford tried the same ham-handed tactic: he dug in. No one was going to tell him to exit the race. Bush aides, meanwhile, claimed that the Reagan campaign had tried to get former president Ford to call Bush and tell him to get out of the race, but Ford aides denied it. Indeed, Ford the next day said Bush should stay in the race.42

  Bush also claimed he was not interested in being Reagan's running mate, a pro forma position for any aspirant while still in the heat of battle. On the other hand, Reagan wasn't offering it. “No one in the Reagan camp can be found who expects Bush to be Reagan's running mate,” wrote Lou Cannon in the Washington Post. Adding gasoline to the fire, Cannon noted, “Reagan and his aides are concerned about how a running mate would fare in debates with Vice President Mondale, a respected adversary.” No one missed the skillfully planted suggestion to the respected journalist about Bush's suspect debating skills.43

  Anderson was starting to search for a running mate, but he was embarrassed when Congressman Mo Udall of Arizona, who had already endorsed Kennedy, rebuffed him.44 Udall was engaged in a tough contest for reelection, and though no one knew it at the time, he was also engaged in a fight with Parkinson's disease.45

  CARTER'S DRIVE FOR RENOMINATION was not helped when the governor of New York, Hugh Carey, abruptly called for an “open convention” and asked that both sides release their delegates to be reshuffled in a new deal. Carey ominously said that the Democratic Party was in trouble, real trouble, and cited the reasons why: “The interest rates, the discharge of auto workers, the near collapse of the economy on the housing side, unemployment raging upwards, skyrocketing inflation unchecked, a lack of consistency and total uncertainty in foreign policy for starters.”46

  Carter's aides immediately shot down the Carey proposal, but curiously, so did Kennedy's men. Some thought Carey was angling for the nomination for himself as a compromise choice. Others speculated that he would support Anderson's insurgent effort.47

  A day later, Carey renewed his call, attacking the “flacks, managers and self-styled political pundits” who had attacked him. He then asked, rhetorically, “If conventions were entirely predictable, why hold them?”48 Why indeed?

  Carter's men fussed that the prolonged fight would spoil their eventual nomination. Even as Kennedy faltered, those opposed to Carter questioned whether he should be the Democratic stand
ard bearer. “Dump Carter” movements were rumored around the country. Few were enthralled with Kennedy as the alternative, and several names popped up, including that of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a moderate intellectual who challenged liberal orthodoxy without wanting to upend it. Moynihan's neoliberal views about reforming the welfare state and the importance of buttressing the family unit would one day prove farsighted. But in 1980, he was little known outside of New York.

  Carter wasn't helped when David Broder of the Washington Post speculated that the president might be forced to withdraw from the contest to deal with the hostage situation.49 Rowly Evans and Bob Novak took it one step further and suggested that Vice President Mondale was emerging as a “consensus choice … to replace Jimmy Carter.”50 An editorial in the Des Moines Register bluntly said that Carter should “get out” because it was impossible for him to “campaign and lead the nation at the same time.”51

  Anti-Carter sentiment helped Ted Kennedy in Colorado's caucus. For the Rocky Mountain Democrats, supporting Kennedy had little to do with pro-Camelot enthusiasm; it was merely a process of elimination. One Kennedy man explained his loyalty to Teddy by dismissing Carter as “the most incompetent President since Millard Fillmore.”52

  LIKE CARTER'S MEN, REAGAN'S campaign just wanted to get past the nomination fight. The Gipper was now steaming toward an apparently inevitable nomination. The Republicans in Colorado did not even bother to total up the local votes after holding their precinct caucuses on May 5, as all knew Reagan would get the thirty-one delegates chosen at the state convention in early June.53 On May 10, Reagan took sixteen of Wyoming's nineteen delegates and skunked Bush in the first round in Virginia, taking all six initial delegates selected.54

  But George Bush pushed on. Trying desperately to rally his dwindling troops, he went to New Jersey to campaign before the big June 3 primary. Reagan shook his head at his opponent's stubbornness in the face of all odds. Secretly, Reagan must have identified with this trait in Bush.

  With the odds of his nomination looking stronger than ever, one might have expected that Reagan would follow the maxim of Richard Nixon about running to the right in the primaries but then running to the middle in the general election. Reagan did no such thing and stuck to his conservative, anti-Washington message.

  “I think the biggest single cause [of the breakdown in the family] has been the bureaucratic role of government and the insistence by government that it knows more about raising children than parents do,” he said. And this: “I would like to take government back from being—or attempting to be—parent, teacher and clergyman and make government what it is intended to be in the first place and that is the servant of the people.”55

  On May 13, Reagan won the Maryland primary by a surprisingly comfortable margin over Bush of 48–41 percent.56 The state was one of those on Bush's “needed” list if he was to mount his desperate comeback, so the loss was a severe blow. Don Devine, a cerebral conservative who could have easily passed for a longshoreman, was running Reagan's operation in the state. Devine cannily filed four times as many Reagan delegates as necessary, hoping to roadblock Bush. He did.

  Reagan had zipped through the first three weeks of May, winning one primary after another, piling up delegates, moving inexorably closer to the magic number of 998. A new ABC–Louis Harris poll had him in front of Carter, 39–33 percent, with Anderson at 23 percent.57 Most observers believed that like other third-party candidates, Anderson would fade over time and that most of his support would go to the president.

  The media noted for the first time in the campaign that Reagan was getting the support of the front-runners of American politics: corporate America. Their first love had been John Connally, their second Bush. Reagan, suspicious of the concentration of power, governmental or corporate, simply wasn't high on the executives' hit parade, despite his many years as a pitchman for General Electric. Sheepishly, William Agee of the Bendix Corporation said at a lavish fundraiser for the Gipper, “His message has not changed. We have.”58

  The mountain had come to Mohammed.

  RONALD REAGAN'S LONG QUEST to be nominated for president of the United States was nearly over. It had been a long and winding road. Only eighteen years earlier, Reagan had been a registered Democrat. He had once campaigned for liberal Helen Gahagan Douglas and against Richard Nixon for the Senate in California in 1950 and before that for Harry Truman in 1948. In his salad days in Hollywood, Reagan had been a self-proclaimed “bleeding-heart liberal” and a rip-roaring supporter of FDR and the New Deal.

  He now was on the verge of becoming the leader of the Republican Party and maybe—just maybe—leader of the Free World.

  19

  SIX MEN OUT

  “Maybe someplace along the line later today I'll go home by myself and let out a loud yell.”

  The political classes in the spring of 1980 were all over the lot as they considered the prospect of a “President Ronald Reagan.” Many feared him, a few welcomed him, some reevaluated their previous opinions of him, and others did not know what to make of him. European journalists were positively apoplectic. Across the continent, newspapers editorials bewailed the nominees of the American parties. A Frenchman lamented to America, “You lack a man!”1 The rest of the French media simply referred to the Gipper as “le Cowboy.”2

  Back in the United States, story after story analyzed the Gipper's appeal to union households, corporate boardrooms, rural Baptist farmers, ethnic and Catholic factory workers—and, most mystifying of all, young voters. Youthful voters had been the province of the Democratic Party since the New Deal, and in 1980, it was assumed that John Anderson's “difference” would make him the candidate of the campuses. Yet a poll of students at Ohio State showed Reagan virtually tied with Jimmy Carter, with 35.3 percent to the president's 36.6 percent, and well ahead of John Anderson, who drew 14.6 percent.3

  Reagan, the oldest candidate, knew what was on the minds of young Americans: they had been robbed of their future and they didn't like it one bit. The economy lost almost 900,000 jobs in May alone, and it was reported that between eight and nine million people were out of work for this period.4 What prospects did a well-scrubbed college grad, résumé in hand, have in a job market that couldn't provide work for his or her own parents? What chances did a young graduate of vocational school have for honest work as a skilled craftsman, when his old man had been laid off at his factory job months earlier?

  For the first time in polling history, parents did not believe the future would be better for their children. Reagan told them he wanted to be president so their children would “know the freedom that you and I knew when we were their age, and which has greatly disappeared in recent years.”5

  Carter's campaign, looking ahead to the general election, said that it would welcome a debate with Reagan, as the president believed he would pound Reagan in verbal combat. On the other hand, Carter said there was no way he would debate Anderson. His press secretary, Jody Powell, said the idea was a “fantasy.”6 Carter's men worried that in a close election, Anderson would siphon off liberal votes from the president, costing them reelection. They began rolling out the phrase “A vote for Anderson is a vote for Reagan” as a way to scare errant liberal sheep back into the Carter flock.7 The president's campaign had already generated a blizzard of paper to keep close track of Anderson's ballot-access progress across all fifty states.8

  The problem for Carter was that Reagan had already said he would be happy to debate Anderson in the fall. “Sure, that's alright with me,” the governor good naturedly said. “I'd like to hear him explain some of his positions.”9 Reagan's casual announcement put Carter on the spot, making the president look weak for refusing to debate Anderson.

  Reagan's canny comments kept the three-way-debate issue alive for weeks. The national media pounded Carter over ducking Anderson. Polls showed that a majority of Americans supported a three-way debate. It didn't matter that, given the substantial obstacles to any third-party cand
idate's viability at the federal, state, and local levels, Anderson was marginalized to the point of being an entertaining sideshow. Reagan's pressure, the media fixation on the debate issue, and public sympathy for including Anderson ensured that Carter faced yet another embarrassment.

  Of course, the Carter campaign caused many embarrassments of its own. The campaign staff decided to “deemphasize” the Iranian hostage crisis, as if it could somehow make more than fifty Americans just disappear.10

  ON MAY 13, THE same day that Reagan won the Maryland primary, he also took the prize in Nebraska.11 He now needed just a handful more delegates to go over the magic mark of 998, and on May 20 he would have a shot at Michigan's 82 delegates and Oregon's 29. He was confident about both states, even though he had lost them to Ford in 1976.12 George Bush knew the situation was bleak, telling reporters that the numbers were “discouraging.”13

  Rumors, hushed conversations, smoke signals, and veiled signs went back and forth between Gerald Ford and Reagan at the staff level. Bryce Harlow, who had served every Republican president since Eisenhower, wrote to Ford advocating a Dream Ticket.14 The letter was leaked to reporters, who took the notion seriously because Harlow was one of the wise old men of the GOP. Reagan's men now signaled via Newsweek's Periscope section that Reagan was indeed interested in the revolutionary idea of running with the former president.15 Likewise, a Reagan man told the Baltimore Sun that the idea “warrants close examination and serious consideration.”16 Paul Laxalt did little to shoot down the idea, saying it had “a lot of support … but it is a long shot.”17 No one knew for sure how far the Ford talk would go or how serious it was, or whether Reagan was simply flattering his old adversary in hopes of enticing him to lend his aggressive support in the fall. If the Ford discussions were real, the Reagan and Ford people would need to address the obvious problem that both men were residents of the same state. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution prohibited a member of the Electoral College from casting both his votes for candidates from his own state, and California was too rich in electoral votes to trifle with.18 Ford would need to change his residence back to his native Michigan.