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

by Shirley, Craig

  JIMMY CARTER SUFFERED AN embarrassment of his own, over the simmering problem of his brother Billy's six-figure contract with the renegade terrorist nation of Libya. Probes had been announced by Congress as well as by the Justice Department. The president finally as much as said that he had, in fact, been in contact with his brother on the matter—something he had previously denied. Because Muslims put a “great importance on family ties,” Carter said, he felt that asking his brother to bring a Libyan diplomat to the White House for a quiet meeting might help spring the hostages in Iran.68 The whole exercise was asinine.

  Carter was attempting to follow the advice of George Bernard Shaw, who said, “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”69 The mess was particularly devastating for a politician who had come into office sanctimoniously proclaiming, “I will never tell a lie.”70 Carter's greatest asset, his supposedly unassailable integrity, was besmirched.

  Carter at least could take some solace from the fact that the Soviets had blown their chance for the public-relations bonanza they had hoped for with the Moscow Olympics. Dozens of other countries had joined the American boycott, and the Summer Games ended quietly in early August.

  REAGAN FINALLY HIT THE road to fulfill his commitment to speak in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Wirthlin and other aides had wanted him to skip the trip there because it was a tinderbox of racial hatred. Three civil-rights organizers had been murdered there in 1964 and the Ku Klux Klan still operated in the area. Yet the media gave Reagan's Mississippi trip short shrift—for the time being, anyway. Unfortunately, this would not be the last Reagan heard about Neshoba.

  After Neshoba, the Republican nominee moved on to New York City to speak to the National Urban League (even though the Urban League appearance had originally been scheduled first). He met with the organization's president, Vernon Jordan, who was in a hospital recovering from a gunshot wound.71 The two immediately hit it off and found they had many friends in common. Surprisingly, Reagan was received nearly as well when he gave his speech before the Urban League. Refusing to pander, he rejected public housing and called for “urban homesteading” where residents could buy their dwellings from the government for a nominal fee.72 He opposed affirmative action and told the audience so, even though several black leaders had urged him to change his stance. He opposed set-aside programs, the minimum wage, and federal intervention in local schools. The solution to the plight of the black family, he said, was not to argue over a “shrinking economic pie” but to produce “a bigger pie so that everyone will have a chance to be better off.”73

  Reagan pointed to his record of black advancement while governor of California: over eight years, the percentage of African-Americans hired in the state government increased 23 percent.74 He asked the attendees not to look at him as a “caricatured conservative.”75

  Reagan received his biggest round of applause when he said, “We must adopt the goal of making black Americans more economically independent, through means of black enterprise and lasting, meaningful jobs in the private sector. We must assure that four years from now public sector jobs can't be dangled like carrots; that welfare can't be used as a lever to pry loose urban votes; that black Americans have captured more of their destiny.”76

  He was interrupted fifteen times with applause and was cheered “politely at the end,” according to the Washington Star.77 A black columnist, Earl Caldwell with the New York Daily News, was “stunned” at the warm reception Reagan received.78

  While in New York City, Reagan also visited the burned-out slums of the South Bronx, which Carter had famously toured in 1977, vowing to improve the lot of its poor. Nothing had been done in three years since, and the Reagan campaign saw the opportunity to capitalize on the issue. Aides envisioned a photo op with Reagan standing before the decay of boarded-up buildings and offering hope to the out-of-work and desperate people.

  It did not quite work out that way.

  On a sweltering day, around a hundred African-Americans, whites, and Hispanics greeted Reagan with boos and catcalls. He said, “This is an example of how the federal government can fail,” but he was drowned out by the crowd, which chanted, “1–2–3–Boo-oo-ooo!” Reagan tried again, his frustration and anger rising, shouting, “You will listen to me!” The catcalls grew even louder. “Down with Reagan!” they chanted. A Chicano woman kept badgering him, asking repeatedly, “What are you going to do for us?”

  Reagan tried to reason with the hecklers, asking them to look at his record of job growth in California. They shouted back, “We don't need them in California, we need them here!” He got even madder and shouted, “Stop talking and listen!” Some in the crowd tried to listen but the rest were not buying it, chanting, “Go home! Go home! Go home!”

  Finally, Reagan exploded, “I can't do a damn thing for you unless I am elected!”79

  Defeated, he retreated to his twelve-car motorcade and the safety of his air-conditioned limo, where Mrs. Reagan had wisely stayed. But asked whether he planned any more urban tours, Reagan surprisingly said yes. Despite his rough treatment in the South Bronx, he wasn't shutting the door to the dispossessed. In 1968, when asked why he and Richard Nixon weren't campaigning in urban America, Spiro Agnew declared with characteristic artlessness, “If you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.” Reagan was far less harsh. He truly felt bad about the plight of the poor, perhaps because the memories of his own deprivations during the Depression were deeply etched in his psyche. “There we were, driving away, and you think of them back there in all that ugliness and they have no place to go,” he recalled with genuine compassion. “All that is before them is to sit and look at what we just saw.”80

  27

  THE DEMOCRATS

  “This election is a stark choice between … two futures.”

  Everybody, it seemed, was in a bad mood by August 1980. Millions of fans of the evening soap opera Dallas were angered by the strike of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. In the spring the hit program's season had ended on a cliffhanger when an angry, unknown assailant shot the odious oilman J. R. Ewing. The series was supposed to resume in September, but if the strike was not settled soon, no one would find out the answer to “Who shot J. R.?”—the catchphrase on everybody's lips in the summer of 1980.

  The irate actors in Hollywood weren't the only ones striking. Angry garbagemen in Boston went on strike, as did hotel workers in San Francisco. American productivity had declined for six quarters in a row, according to the Labor Department.1 Consumer spending was down dramatically, output was down, and a July report from the White House predicted that the recession would deepen even more than previously thought.2 Even the most optimistic economists called for only an anemic recovery in late 1981.

  Millions of Americans were out of work and could not find employment. The unemployment rate had jumped fully 2 percentage points since February.3 Americans were angry and scared. An out-of-work steelworker in Homestead, Pennsylvania, crossly said, “All we got is unemployment.… The lines are getting longer. Men with families and no work. We're getting butchered.” An angry young man in Miami lamented that though Cubans could get work and Haitians were willing to work for little, there were no jobs available for him. “Foreigners got it made over here, especially if they speak Spanish.” Among black Americans, it was not a recession—it was a depression. Joblessness among African-Americans had climbed to over 14 percent. Among all teenagers, unemployment hovered just under 20 percent, but among black teenagers, it was an appalling 36 percent.4

  It didn't help anyone's spirits that the drought and heat wave that had afflicted the nation for weeks still had not abated. Dallas and Fort Worth went thirty-three days in a row in which the temperature topped 100 degrees. By late July the death toll nationwide had exceeded 1,200 Americans. Otherwise healthy men and women were dying from heart attacks and heat stroke. Crops had shriveled, lakes and streams had dried up, livestock were dying,
chickens had stopped laying eggs, and there was still no end in sight. The governor of Oklahoma, George Nigh, organized a state-sponsored day of prayer for rain. In St. Louis, baseball's Cardinals drenched their feet in cold water—without removing socks or shoes—as the temperature on the artificial turf spiked to 146 degrees.5

  In Washington, pro-Khomeini Iranians showed up at the White House to protest angrily whatever it was they were protesting. In response, a group of Americans spontaneously took up battle positions and began their own counter-protest, yelling obscenities and insults at the Iranians. President Carter had issued a ban on Iranian protests at the White House, but somebody forgot about it and gave the “Khomeiniacs” a permit.6

  Naturally, the Summer of Anger spilled into domestic politics. Americans were angry at Jimmy Carter for his handling of the economy, unemployment, the hostage crisis—practically everything. Fully 86 percent criticized his management of the economy, according to an ABC–Harris poll. If that were not bad enough, two-thirds of Democrats attacked his stewardship of their party.7

  Democrats were angry that the best they had to put up was either the incompetent Carter or the badly flawed Ted Kennedy. Democratic officeholders were angry that if Carter was renominated, he might drag the whole lot down to defeat. A Carter operative counted his blessings and said, “If it had been anybody else but Ted Kennedy, Carter would be long gone.”8 Still, Carter's men couldn't rest too easy: the “Dump Carter” rumors kept cropping up.

  Kentucky's first lady, former Miss America Phyllis George Brown, was angry with Carter because she thought her husband, Governor John Y. Brown, should have been asked to give the keynote speech at the upcoming Democratic convention.9 Carter's brother, Billy, was furious that people were interfering in his business deals with Libya, and that his brother's campaign had told him his help was not needed. President Carter was angry that Congress was not letting him testify soon enough to deny that he had done anything to help his brother.

  Republicans and independents were angry, too—Republicans, because Reagan was dawdling; independents, because John Anderson was not making his case more effectively. In Denver, Anderson suffered the indignity of being hit with eggs thrown by angry Communist protesters.10

  Carter's campaign was angry at the Anderson candidacy. “We are caught in the middle,” one Carter aide whined in a memo. On the other hand, “Ronald Reagan's candidacy poses a more complex problem. Reagan's style, rhetoric and conservative philosophy are attractive to many disaffected Democrats.”11 Reagan was cutting into Carter's base, and the Democrats were not happy about it. Carter himself was angry about the relentless criticisms coming from his opponents. He lashed out at Ronald Reagan, calling the Republican “irresponsible.” Reagan sharply responded, “I'll admit to that, if he'll admit that he's responsible.”12

  The newspapers and magazines were filled with annoyed letters, firing back and forth over Reagan, Carter—whatever was steaming them. Nancy Reagan sent in her own hot dispatch to Time, blasting the magazine for an unfair and inaccurate portrayal. “Just to keep the record straight: I do not buy $5,000 dresses [July 7]; I do not have an extensive jewelry collection, or paintings, or antiques; and I do not have a hairdresser and interior decorator in tow. I get my hair done once a week, and I'm at a loss as to what an interior decorator would do. Perhaps rearrange the furniture in all the Holiday Inns I've been staying in.”13

  It was also the silly season, or maybe the brutal August heat was just making everybody swoon. Ron Dellums, a black congressman from California, declared his candidacy for the presidency, and the president of the New York City Council, Carol Bellamy, also announced her intention to seek the Democratic Party's nomination. Farmers were looking to nominate one of their own as well.14

  Ronald Reagan may not have been angry, but he had reason to be frustrated about backbiting and negative press coverage. The media were kicking over the dead embers of his decision to go to Mississippi. The Reagan-Bush campaign began to leak to reporters that it had been a mistake to go to the Neshoba Fair, that the symbolism and history were just too burdensome, especially for a conservative trying to fight off false charges of racism. The media leveled Reagan for using the phrase “states' rights” while at the fair, because some saw it as a code phrase for racism.

  Reagan strongly begged to differ. Ever the Jeffersonian Republican, he had used the phrase “states' rights” for years, North and South, East and West. To Reagan, the Tenth Amendment, limiting the power of the national government, was just as important as the nine previous amendments to the Constitution. He said, “I believe in states' rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can at the private level.” He wanted to “restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them.”15 Yet to Reagan's critics, all that mattered was that he had once opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The fact that he later recanted, saying his opposition had been a mistake, seemed irrelevant. The Neshoba appearance would haunt Reagan.

  Kenny Klinge, running part of the South for Reagan, had successfully argued for the Mississippi appearance as part of an effort to go after Carter right in his own backyard. Klinge was already in hot water with Mrs. Reagan for insisting that they leave the ranch early to go to Mississippi. At the end of Reagan's remarks in Neshoba, he was unexpectedly given a rocking chair, and Klinge along with advance man Lanny Wiles cringed, sensitive to the age issue. But Reagan didn't miss a beat. He sat in the rocker and pulled Nancy down onto his lap. The crowd, as well as the media, ate it up.16 What could have been a disaster turned into a charming photo of the two, which appeared in newspapers throughout the South.

  As the Reagans walked through the muddy field back to the bus, Mrs. Reagan spotted Klinge and said, “You're a pretty lucky boy, you know that?” Klinge sheepishly replied, “Yes, ma'am.” She stayed mad at Klinge for several weeks, and it became a running comedy for the staff to hide Kenny before she could spot him and demand he be fired.17

  The Reagan campaign's fumbles led more and more reporters to openly criticize the operation. “More than most campaigns, the Reagan effort has been hampered by logistical problems,” wrote Lou Cannon of the Washington Post. “Schedules are slow to be prepared and changed frequently.” An ongoing gag on his plane among reporters was that Reagan “would have to manage the country much better than he does his campaign schedule.”18

  DESPITE ALL THE PROBLEMS Jimmy Carter had experienced, he was not always angry. In fact, there was, at least briefly, a light spring in the president's step—what Newsweek described as a “preternatural serenity.”19 New polling came out showing that he had drawn much closer to Reagan. In only about three weeks since the Republican convention, Reagan's lead had already been cut in half, from nearly 30 points over Carter to 14.20 Reagan's men had expected that his numbers would come back to earth, but he was sinking more quickly than anticipated. Reagan's campaign was stumbling. Even better for Carter, the president had received good reviews for his nationally televised press conference in which he handled rough questions about his ne'er-do-well brother; Carter got a bit of sympathy for manfully dealing with Billy's bumbling.

  Carter remained confident that he could portray Reagan as another Gold-water. Hamilton Jordan, his erstwhile White House chief of staff who was now running the reelection campaign, recognized that Reagan was a tougher cookie than was widely assumed. Later, in his memoirs, Jordan recounted that he alone among the Carterites sized up Reagan properly.21 He planned accordingly for the fall assault on the Gipper, and would earn every bit of the $161,000 per annum he was paying himself.22

  Jordan knew he had history on his side. The American people did not like to fire their presidents. Indeed, at this point Carter should have been marching to his own coronation, as most incumbent presidents did. On a number of issues, the American people were on Carter's side, not Reagan's. From the pro-life amendment in the GOP platform to federal controls on the price of oil to the 55mile-per-hour speed limit, Americans took
Carter's side. They had also become ambivalent about Reagan's economic proposals. Yet here Carter was, still dealing with Ted Kennedy. The delegate math clearly didn't work for the challenger, but Kennedy wouldn't bow out gracefully. He went on Face the Nation the Sunday before the convention and airily said, “I think the vote itself will be decided by fifty votes one way or the other.”23

  President Carter did harbor some anger, though at Camelot's prince. He was resolutely rejecting all suggestions of magnanimous gestures to heal the breach between himself and Kennedy. He wanted to crush Kennedy in the delegate vote for all the world to see. The enmity went back a long way. When Kennedy had criticized Carter in 1976, the then-candidate responded to an aide by saying, “I don't have to kiss Teddy's ass” to win. Two years before that, when both Kennedy and then-governor Carter were invited to speak at the University of Georgia, Carter had offered Kennedy the use of his state airplane, only to renege at the last minute. Kennedy had to scramble to find a car and almost missed his speech. Kennedy would not have been faulted for thinking that Carter intentionally sabotaged him so that when Carter spoke at the same event, he would get better reviews than Kennedy, especially since Carter delivered possibly the best speech of his career until then.24 The man from Plains who had once spoken so unabashedly of his “love” for the American people was sometimes revealed to have a vindictive streak.

  In this case, Carter clearly had the upper hand on Kennedy. The president had a comfortable cushion of 316 delegates beyond what he needed for the nomination, giving him an iron grip on the upcoming convention. Supporters of an “open convention” were still pushing for a suspension of Rule F(3)c, which would be voted on during the first day of the convention, Monday, August 11. In fact, several dozen protesters gathered outside the convention site, New York's Madison Square Garden, to chant, “One, two, three, F-C-3!”—until, that is, the organizer corrected them: “No, no, guys—it's F-3-C!”25 But Carter's team was taking special precautions to prevent defectors from voting for the rule suspension: setting up 128 whips—dressed in green—on the floor to keep delegates in line. The Carterites held a dress rehearsal to test their communications equipment, quell imaginary delegates, and hold a mock roll-call vote.26 Moreover, Vice President Walter Mondale and cabinet officials were working individual delegations in preparation for the showdown vote on Monday.27 Kennedy had no such plan or organization.