In a sense, Reagan benefited from his party's lackluster recent history. Whereas the Democrats were struggling to live up to the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and other leading lights, the Republicans of recent years had only the demon-haunted Nixon, the kind but accidental Ford, and the hands-off Eisenhower. These GOP leaders were not giants; they seemed to hold on to power only to deny it to the Democrats, not because they sought to do anything bold or great.
Ronald Reagan, in contrast, had a bold agenda, a plan for his presidency and for his country. Before he could achieve that plan, he needed to inspire his own party—the conservatives and the moderates, the social conservatives and the sociable conservatives. In Detroit, he would bring them all together for a big prayerful hootenanny.
Or so he hoped.
23
AT CENTER STAGE
“There are always brush fires in politics.”
Gerald Ford appeared on ABC's Issues and Answers the Sunday before the proceedings began in Detroit and was forced once again to knock down the rumors that he would be Ronald Reagan's choice for the ticket. He was as Shermanesque as possible, saying, “Under no circumstances would I be the candidate for the vice presidency.” Ford then praised George Bush to the heavens, calling him “very attractive, very dedicated, experienced.”1 Ford's denial was a page-one story in newspapers across the country.
Ford had ruled himself out, Howard Baker was being ruled out by conservatives, and Reagan was truly stymied. The redoubtable Tommy Thomas, Reagan's state leader in Florida, was adamant that Reagan not take Bush, who he believed was “part of a liberal Republican ‘conspiracy’ to take control of the government.”2 Even the most optimistic of Bush's men were dubious that he'd be picked.
Reagan seemed to be publicly talking himself out of choosing Bush. He told the Los Angeles Times, “I think there's something cynical in choosing someone of a different political view than your own with the idea in mind of getting votes. I think your choice should be based on who do you feel could be a President if he had to be.”3 Reagan was still miffed at Bush over “voodoo economics” and other offenses, as well as Bush's poor performance at the Nashua debate.
He had shown just how miffed, days before the Detroit convention in a private meeting with field staff. Most members of the staff were for Jack Kemp as running mate, but when asked his opinion, Don Devine, the campaign's political director for Maryland, voiced his opinion that Reagan should choose Bush. Devine told the candidate, “I gotta lot of problems with Bush myself, ideologically, but I think we need to do that …” Before Devine could finish, Reagan stormed, “I'll never choose that man; he lied about my record!” The meeting ended abruptly as Reagan stormed out. Devine was “scared shitless,” he remembered in an interview. According to Devine, Frank Donatelli, another field director, later told him privately, “Thank God you did it, because I was going to say the same thing and you got yelled at!”4
In choosing a running mate, Reagan needed someone who was qualified and was comfortable with his conservatism but who could also reach out to the dwindling moderates in the party and unify the convention while earning the respect of the national media. And given Reagan's age, he needed someone who could step into the role of president. Eight VPs in American history had been required to assume the presidency. Reagan was mindful of what the first vice president, John Adams, had said. “I am Vice President. In this I am nothing. But I may be everything.”5
Reagan wanted to be certain that there were no embarrassments or hiccups of the sort that vice-presidential nominees had created in the past. Four years earlier, Bob Dole had embarrassed Ford by talking about “Democrat Wars” and generally ignoring the demands of the national campaign office.6 Typically, Dole would get on his plane, throw away the schedule, point in a given direction, and tell the pilot to go that way.
Too often, there had been a slapstick quality to the selection of the second man for the ticket. The very first political convention, 1832, was not even for the purpose of selecting a president; it was for dumping a vice president. President Andrew Jackson couldn't wait to get rid of John C. Calhoun and replace him with Martin Van Buren.
In 1900 Teddy Roosevelt was put on the ticket with William McKinley mainly because he had become such a pain to the New York GOP party bosses that they hoped he would never be heard from again. To their dismay, McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and they heard far too much for far too long from the old Rough Rider. The office had opened in the first place only when McKinley's first vice president, Garret Augustus Hobart—who was a threat to no one except an open bar and a free buffet—literally partied himself to death. As one writer recounted, Hobart “went to six dinner parties and a dozen receptions a week. He died in office, some say the first politician to be killed by the Washington social scene.”7
In 1960, in an eleventh-hour deal in Los Angeles, John F. Kennedy offered the vice presidency as a conciliatory gesture to his main opponent, Lyndon Johnson. JFK needed Johnson's support in the general election but assumed that the proud Texan would turn him down. To his and his brother Bobby's consternation, LBJ said yes—and then tearfully refused to step aside when the Kennedy camp tried to get him to do so.
In 1964 Barry Goldwater selected little-known conservative congressman William Miller from upstate New York because he “bugged” Lyndon Johnson.
A famous Hubert Humphrey campaign ad in 1968 targeted Richard Nixon's running mate, the little-known Spiro Agnew. The commercial's soundtrack featured nothing but a man's nonstop, derisive laughter at the prospect of Agnew as VP. Later Agnew set a new standard for embarrassment, as far as the Washington establishment was concerned.
And, of course, in 1972 George McGovern went through a comedy of errors because his campaign failed to look carefully into running mate Tom Eagleton's history of severe mental health problems.
Reagan was intent on avoiding such pitfalls. A press conference was scheduled for 11 A.M. on Thursday morning to make the announcement. He wanted this thing to go smooth as silk.
Right.
REAGAN OFTEN JOKED THAT in his Hollywood days, he made some pretty bad movies, which “didn't have to be made well, they had to be made by Thursday.” This time he would have plenty of time to prepare for an audience of thousands in Detroit and millions across America. This performance, though, would be live. There would be no directors yelling “cut.” He had to get it right on the first take. The media understood the importance of his acceptance speech. “Most of the national television audience,” the New York Times observed, “has never heard him give [a] speech.”8
To espouse his statecraft, Reagan would first need great stagecraft. Detroit's Joe Louis Arena would help give him that. The visuals looked terrific, with the speaker's platform high above the convention floor. The platform, a deep blue half circle, boasted the convention's slogan in huge letters across the front: “Together … A New Beginning.” Splayed under the motto was a sea of red and white carnations. On either side of the stage were two huge American flags, the thirteen-star flag on the left and the fifty-star flag on the right. The lighting and the camera work, though maybe not up to Hollywood standards, would be sufficient for Reagan's purposes.
The rest was up to the Gipper. The old trouper had always known when to manfully leave the stage, but he also took pride in knowing how to gracefully make an entrance.
CONSERVATIVES COULD SCARCELY BELIEVE it. At last, their man, Reagan, was about to become the nominee of the GOP. Some bitterly remembered how their first hero—Senator Robert Taft of Ohio—had, in their view, been robbed of the nomination in 1952. Forces supporting Dwight Eisenhower challenged the seating credentials of some southern delegates supporting Taft, who were then replaced with delegates for Ike. Conservative boos rained down on Eisenhower's forces, especially New York governor Tom Dewey. Conservatives cheered when Governor Frank Clements of Tennessee eviscerated the Eisenhower supporters, labeling them as “broad fairways of indifference.”9
&n
bsp; True Believers were never completely enamored of Richard Nixon and would have been even less so had they known that he'd maneuvered behind the scenes to cut the legs out from under Taft in Chicago. They went along in 1960, although a number of conservatives quietly voted for Kennedy because he came off as far more anti-Communist, especially when it came to Castro's Cuba and the supposed “missile gap” with the Soviets. (The old soldier Eisenhower was annoyed with Kennedy, knowing that in reality there was no missile gap.)
Barry Goldwater was the Right's real first love. When conservatives temporarily seized control of the party at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964, they ironically joined in with Eisenhower as he attacked the media; the conservative delegates turned and shook their fists and shrieked at the press section in the hall.
In 1968 Nixon convinced much of the conservative movement, including the exuberantly polysyllabic Bill Buckley, that he'd learned his lesson, that he was one of them and would govern as a conservative. Within a matter of weeks of his inaugural, Nixon was careening off on a binge of liberal policies that eventually included wage and price controls, détente, and overtures to Communist China. Conservatives grumbled and, in 1972, fielded a sacrificial lamb, Congressman John Ashbrook, in the primaries. Nixon waxed the conservative.
Nineteen seventy-six was a magnificent, memorable, messy, and thrilling roller coaster ride for the conservatives. Gerald Ford had never been one of theirs, going back to his days in the House of Representatives. When conservatives met in Washington, certain members of Congress had to be present to make the meeting meaningful—Goldwater, Senator Everett Dirksen, Ashbrook, others—but no one ever thought that Ford's presence was necessary. So when he became president in August 1974, the conservatives had nothing invested in Ford, because he had nothing invested in them. They were free to criticize his administration, which they did with relish. That led to the extraordinary insurgent campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1976.
The campaign, Citizens for Reagan, was a splendidly haphazard and rollicking movable feast, one day brilliant, another day bungling, but with few exceptions, the staffers were devoted to one another and venerated their man Reagan. Friendships developed that lasted a lifetime among the overworked and underpaid campaign crew. So on the last night of the 1976 convention in Kansas City, when Reagan gave his memorable, bittersweet, touching, and heartrending comments, upstaging Ford, there wasn't a dry eye among his followers. “I felt torn apart, just tragic,” said Cynthia Bunnell, a 1980 Reagan delegate from California, about the 1976 convention.10
But the losing quest had left a legacy upon which to build a movement and rebuild a party. Conservatives flocked to Reagan's banner in 1980. One young woman, Michele Davis, was offered other jobs in other campaigns for far more money, but she decided, “I want to follow this guy. He's got that special something that makes me feel like we've actually got a chance. Let's go!”11 Now this hardy and growing band of conservatives felt utterly and completely vindicated. After Goldwater's loss in 1964, the mantra among conservatives was: twenty-seven million people could not all be wrong. Sixteen years later, these conservatives stood atop the GOP. “The ideas that were frighteningly radical when Barry Goldwater espoused them in 1964 are what is called moderate conservatism today,” wrote Jack Germond. “The notion that the government can be an effective agent for citizens has been challenged across the ideological spectrum.”12
The conservatives had taken over the Republican Party in a bloodless coup, and the country was becoming more conservative as government was failing at almost every level. Sometimes it was hard to believe. Sometimes they had to pinch themselves. It seemed as if they'd always been in the minority, as if they had always been derided. They had heard all the shopworn jokes about meeting in phone booths, or been reminded of the smug proclamations of Lionel Trilling, a sanctimonious liberal who years earlier had sniffed in his book The Liberal Imagination that conservatism was irrelevant, just a rash of “irritable mental gestures.”13 Trilling died in 1975, coincidentally as liberalism's decline and conservatism's ascendancy were accelerating.
The contributions of Buckley and National Review could not be underestimated in the growth of conservatism. From the 1950s right up to the impending nomination of Reagan, Buckley, his message, and his magazine had been a beacon of brilliant light slicing through a fog of ignorance and incoherency. Buckley was every conservative's hero. He made conservatives feel intelligent, and beat back the dyspeptic prattling of liberals such as Trilling. Every man admired his breezy style, his writings, his wit, his urbane and laid-back manner, and his many interests. Women admired him as well and he was in many ways the movement's first sex symbol. Buckley certainly made it “cool” to be a conservative. He was a true Renaissance man, a swashbuckler who sailed the Atlantic. He admonished his young son, Chris, that “industry is the enemy of melancholy.”
This new movement also contained a healthy dose of elements of the Christian Right. “The white, right, born-again faithful, once safe in the fold of Jimmy Carter, or abstaining from the deviltry of politics altogether, are flocking to the Republican mother church this year where they feel they have a friend in Ronald Reagan,” the Washington Post rightly noted.14 Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority had taken over or exerted considerable influence in a number of state Republican parties. Reaganites now held sway over nearly every element of the GOP.
The remaining moderates and liberals in the Republican Party were reduced to sitting around the Salamandre Bar in Detroit, literally crying into their beer. Their drinking establishment, one reporter wrote, “is dimly lit, which puts it in marked contrast to the moderate Republican national committeeman who, at 1:15 A.M., is well lit.”15 The tables had turned for the moderates in the party, and they were decidedly unhappy.
Someone else who was miffed over being left behind was Reagan's former campaign manager, John Sears. He wrote a scathing piece for the Washington Post essentially dismissing Reagan as a lightweight who was a creation of his staff. The candidate “simply looks to someone to tell him what to do,” Sears claimed.16
THE FIRST DAY OF the convention began only two minutes behind schedule. Bill Brock used an oversized gavel to bang the hall to attention. After the call to order, Pat Boone led the delegates in the Pledge of Allegiance. (The next night, Tuesday, a U.S. Marine veteran of the Vietnam War named James Webb would lead the delegates in the Pledge.) Glen Campbell and Tanya Tucker sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Brock got down to party business—the roll of states, the election of temporary convention officers, and the adoption of rules.17
Later in the morning, Senator Richard Lugar spoke. Delegates were still arriving, checking into their hotels and meandering over to Joe Louis Arena for the pro forma session. Being handed such a lousy speaking slot, well out of the glare of prime-time coverage, was a sure sign that Lugar was off the list of potential running mates. Bob Dole was on the floor and quipped to a reporter, “Poor Lugar. [He's] up there speaking and really wondering if his phone is ringing right now.”18
Two others cited as VP possibilities, Don Rumsfeld and Bill Simon, scored prime-time speeches that night. But like Lugar, both had dropped down considerably on the veep list kept by the “Great Mentioner”—a.k.a. the national media.
The entertainment the Republicans rolled out was better than the Lawrence Welk fare of previous conventions, although they could have used a George Jones or Johnny Cash in Detroit. It featured Donnie and Marie Osmond, Vikki Carr, Dorothy Hamill, Richard Petty, Ginger Rogers, Jimmy Stewart, Michael Landon, Wayne Newton, and several others.19 The television critic at the New York Times couldn't resist a shot: “There is no need to switch channels in search of an old movie.”20
On Monday afternoon, “Commitment '80” was announced: a massive door-knocking operation that would involve as many as half a million grassroots Republicans in the fall. The goal was to take maximum advantage of the thousands upon thousands of the Gipper's fans. The plan was enormously ambitious, with videotape pitches from Reagan
and his running mate as well as from Brock, simultaneous meetings in three hundred locations coordinated by satellite downlinks, phone conference call-ins, and direct mail. It was back to the future for the GOP, which for too long had eschewed the shoe-leather politics that was so vital in campaigns. Brock had appointed a drawling and effective Virginian, Dennis Whitfield, to supervise the massive affair.21
Two independent groups held press conferences in Detroit that day to announce specific plans for independent expenditure campaigns in support of Reagan in the fall election. Terry Dolan, head of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), previewed ten commercials for the media, some praising Reagan but most blasting Carter. Dolan, as always, made grandiose announcements and then left the details to underlings.22 The fundraising for the NCPAC's campaign fell on the shoulders of a young conservative, L. Brent Bozell III.23
Bozell, a chain smoker with a thatch of red hair and matching red beard, was the son of one of the seminal writers and thinkers in the early days of the conservative movement. The elder Bozell had ghostwritten The Conscience of a Conservative for Barry Goldwater. Young Brent's mother was the sister of Bill and Jim Buckley, which meant he grew up reading not Spiderman and Batman but National Review and the Pink Sheet on the Left, and being bounced on the knee of some of the most important political leaders of the Right, including “Uncle Bill.”
Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America Page 48
