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

by Shirley, Craig

  The address had been worked on and polished by Bob Shrum and Carey Parker, Kennedy's two principal speechwriters. Ironically, Shrum had quit the Carter campaign in 1976. Ted Sorensen, JFK's old wordsmith, had added his two cents to the draft. Kennedy, meanwhile, had practiced using a teleprompter.60 It all added up to the finest speech of his life. The performance renewed speculation that he should or would run again in four years.

  Such is often the case with losing politicians. Unsophisticated commentators say in such circumstances—as they did in Kennedy's case—“If only he'd spoken like that in the primaries, the results might have been different.” What these observers failed to understand is that it is precisely because the circumstances are different that losing candidates speak differently. The reason is simple: they have nothing more to lose.

  THOUGH TED KENNEDY'S LONG struggle had ended, one of his key aides and close friends, former Wisconsin governor Pat Lucey, was still thinking about what he could do to hasten Carter's defeat in November. He was being encouraged to do something to undermine Carter by his old friend Paul Corbin, political operator extraordinaire and one of the truly great characters of American politics.

  The day before, Lucey had resigned as a member of the Badger State's delegation in protest over the defeat of the rules suspension. Dismayed that Kennedy had lost, Lucey said ominously that he would “reserve the right” to support someone other than Carter.61

  It so happened that John Anderson was in New York at the time. He was there for a press conference to announce that Mary Dent Crisp, who had been forced out of the Republican National Committee for her anti-Reagan stances, would become chair of his independent campaign. Sure enough, Lucey was spotted paying what he thought was a covert visit to Anderson's hotel, where the two met in private. When Governor Lucey emerged, he praised the independent candidate, saying that he and Kennedy had “very similar positions. I am not at this moment prepared to endorse either Mr. Anderson or Mr. Carter.”62 Lucey and Corbin were up to something.

  ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, CARTER was renominated, winning 2,129 delegate votes to 1,146.5 for Kennedy and 53.5 for a smattering of other aspirants. Texas put Carter over the top. With that, Kennedy's political ally and close friend Thomas P. O'Neill III, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts and the son of the House speaker, moved that the convention unanimously renominate Carter, at Kennedy's urging, and the delegates did so—although some protested, shouting, “No!”63 Kennedy sent a statement to the hall, and O'Neill, the father, read it to the delegates: “It is imperative that we defeat Ronald Reagan in 1980. I urge all Democrats to join in that effort.”64 Kennedy also sent word that he would appear on the dais with the president Thursday evening, signaling his awaited endorsement.

  The hall mostly cheered Carter's renomination. The rebel yells of several joyous southern delegates reverberated around the Garden. Jody Powell, Carter's loyal and effective press secretary, choked up over his boss's renomination, which many had thought impossible less than a year earlier.65 The convention again sang “Happy Days Are Here Again,” but were they?

  A behind-the-scenes kabuki dance had gone on all day long between the Carter team and the Kennedy men over the platform and Kennedy's statement, and the president and Senator Kennedy spoke by phone to try to hash things out. In another sign of weakness, Carter had to send the platform committee a long letter outlining his positions on various issues and where he disagreed with Kennedy. Rumors of a walkout by disappointed liberals and feminists also had to be quashed.66

  Many Democrats were less than enthusiastic about the party's presidential ticket. “It's just not there this year,” said Bill Clinton, the thirty-three-year-old governor of Arkansas. “You can only do that one time—elect the first southern president.”67 Clinton had given one of the best speeches of the week, contrasting the Democrats' past with America's future, but it was largely overlooked.68

  ON THURSDAY, AUGUST 14, the night Carter accepted the nomination, the Kennedy blue signs gave way to the president's green placards. Before Carter spoke, Vice President Mondale addressed the crowd. A favorite of the delegates, Mondale had been renominated with ease (although one delegate cast a ballot for George Orwell).69 Now he gave a highly partisan speech that energized the convention. In refrain after refrain he said, “Most Americans believe,” after which he would cite a federal program. The crowd then answered, “But not Ronald Reagan!” Mondale tore into Reagan's tax-cut proposal, saying that the only way it could be funded would be to wreck every social program, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to veterans, aid to children, aid to cities, and aid to the states. He also went after Reagan for wanting to use the U.S. military to quell crises around the world.70

  After Mondale's spirited speech and especially the Kennedy stem-winder of two nights earlier, President Carter had tough acts to follow. Like Mondale, Carter aimed his fire at Reagan. Unlike Mondale, he distinctly underwhelmed the delegates with his speech.

  The president entered Madison Square Garden to “Hail to the Chief,” the very song he had banned in 1977.71 Before Carter laid into Reagan, he honored the Democratic Party's long tradition. But when he tried to pay tribute to a fallen hero of the party, Hubert Humphrey, the name came out “Hubert Horatio Hornblower … err … Humphrey!”72 The crowd tittered. It was not an auspicious beginning.

  Carter quickly shifted his focus to accusing Reagan of having an itchy trigger finger: “The life of every human being on earth can depend on the experience and judgment and vigilance of the person in the Oval Office. The president's power for building and his power for destruction are awesome. And the power's greatest exactly where the stakes are highest—in matters of war and peace.”73 Of course, with the American hostages still being held captive in Tehran, Carter himself was plagued by rumors that he was planning a full-scale invasion of Iran.

  “This election,” the president intoned, “is a stark choice between two men, two parties, two sharply different pictures of what America is and what the world is. But it's more than that—it's a choice between two futures.”74 He envisioned a future of “security and justice and peace,” but the other possible future, he said, would be one of “despair,” “surrender,” and “risk.” His voice rising, Carter said that Reagan would “launch an all-out nuclear arms race” and initiate “an attack on everything that we've done in the achievement of social justice and decency in the last fifty years.”75

  Here, the president was signaling the rough treatment that he and his Georgians had in store for Reagan in the fall campaign.76 Carter suffered under few illusions about Americans' attitudes toward his presidency, so with little to trumpet over the past four years, he would need to turn all his guns on Reagan, in an attempt to destroy the Republican's legitimacy as a candidate. “The question in the fall,” admitted a Carter aide, “is who is the bigger turkey? I think people will decide that Reagan is.”77

  By this point in the speech, sweat was pouring off the president's face, and the front of his shirt was noticeably damp. Not much of what he was saying was sticking, though. Indeed, toward the end of the speech, bored delegates could be seen yawning and fidgeting. One problem was that the address—crafted primarily by Hendrik “Rick” Hertzberg, who with Pat Caddell had fashioned Carter's now-orphaned “malaise” speech—reflected the input of a number of different Carter advisers. It ended up touching the bases of all the Democratic constituencies—labor, minorities, women, Jews, farmers, teachers, and others—and a laundry list of typical activist initiatives.

  Things did not get better for Carter after he concluded his bland and uninspiring fifty-one-minute speech. Embarrassingly, a scheduled balloon drop failed, robbing the Democrats of the celebration they had planned for the national television viewership. Tom Brokaw of NBC tried to query a visibly upset Hamilton Jordan on the floor, asking whether the failed balloon drop was a metaphor for the Carter campaign.

  In an attempt to show unity, the Democrats trotted out an array of famous and not-so-f
amous Democrats—cabinet officials, governors, members of Congress, White House staff. Mondale joined him on the stage, then their families, and then a goofy display of Democratic power brokers appeared as Bob Strauss, chairman of the Carter campaign, screamed out their names as the Democratic power brokers joined Carter on stage. It looked like a badly organized high school assembly in which everybody was included so as not to offend anyone.

  When Zbigniew Brzezinski was announced, the somnolent delegates booed lustily. Some delegates booed Carter himself, while the rest of the crowd offered tepid applause. Then, like the cavalry coming over the hill, Ted Kennedy appeared on stage. The delegates perked up and the noise in the hall grew appreciably louder and warmer. They began chanting, “We want Ted!” as they had two nights before. Kennedy, with a small smile pasted on his face rather than his usual broad grin, waved to the audience and moved from one side of the dais to the other, always away from Carter. Carter kept following Kennedy, like a little kid, trying to engage Kennedy in the traditional victory clasp, but Kennedy would have none of it. It was embarrassing and Carter was furious.78

  The bitterness between the two men only deepened. Carter complained that Kennedy was not on the stage immediately at the conclusion of the speech, while Kennedy claimed that he'd done exactly what the president's men wanted, so as to not show Carter up. Kennedy then walked off the stage, when decorum demanded that the president leave first.

  A Carter aide said ruefully, “He wanted to put that last wound into us.”79 In an interview with the former president years later, it was clear that the old animosities still existed.80

  THE NIGHT OF TED Kennedy's speech, a family retainer, Paul Corbin, was standing on the floor of the convention with his friend Bill Schulz of Reader's Digest, watching Kennedy concede the nomination to Carter. Corbin hated Carter. He turned on his heel to leave, and as he was storming out, Schulz called after him, asking what his plans were now that Kennedy was out of the race.

  Corbin, a Kennedy Democrat, labor organizer, former Communist agitator, and political troublemaker par excellence, yelled back, “I'm going to go work for Reagan!”81

  28

  CORBIN

  “I can argue it both ways.”

  It would be too easy to call Paul Corbin “Runyonesque.” A better question might be which one of the two inspired the other.

  Damon Runyon, the cocksure novelist, had a taste in his writings for the slangy-type phrase, and Corbin certainly “cracked wise.” Since they both lived in New York City in the 1930s, no one will ever know whether they knew each other, but one thing is for sure: they would have liked each other.

  Runyon, the chronicler of the New York netherworld, drank heavily, smoked, and cheated on his wife. Corbin did all of these things, too, but was particular about his brand of cigarettes, smoking only blue-and-white Pall Malls. Runyon once quoted Ecclesiastes, with a twist: “The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.”1 Corbin would have fixed the race or the fight so there would be no risk involved, at least for him. He then would have figured out how to get his enemies to bet the other way, to increase his payout.

  Corbin, in later years, resembled the actor Barry Fitzgerald in The Quiet Man, gray-headed, lines deeply etched in his face. With his fedora, gangster-like black suits, gravelly voice, whispered late-night phone calls, nefarious deals, and bizarre collection of friends, he intrigued some. Most people who knew him, though, used obscenities in describing the diminutive, shadowy character. When he walked into a restaurant, he would greet the waiter by shouting, “Fellow worker!” and then ask how poor the working conditions and the pay were: “How do the bosses treat you around here? They treat you like shit, don't they?”2 He had a variety of mistresses throughout his life and even in his late seventies he was supporting a woman in Nashville who referred to herself as “The Wanton Woman.”3

  An FBI file was opened on Corbin in 19404—only four years after he entered the country illegally from his native Canada5—and entries were still being made twenty-eight years later.6 The initial report said he was 5'6” and weighed 145 pounds, with black hair and blue eyes. The bureau assigned him a number, 2417609.7 For nearly three decades the FBI filled Corbin's ever-growing file with hundreds of documents, news clips, photos, arrest records, and informants' reports. He was under almost constant FBI surveillance through the 1940s and '50s and into the early '60s.

  By the time of his death in early January 1990, Corbin had accumulated an FBI file of nearly two thousand documents. Yet when a Freedom of Information Act request was filed seventeen years later, the FBI held back several hundred pages, the oblique reason cited being “national security.” The documents that were released, if reluctantly, were heavily redacted.

  The papers released by the bureau revealed the life not of an apparent national-security risk but of a crook and a rogue—sometimes charming, mostly not. His was a lifetime spent in labor, left-wing, and Democratic politics, but also in business and personal dealings with Republicans and conservatives. A common thread through the files was that Corbin liked to cheat, especially the system and his enemies, but also friends.

  Corbin cheated even when he didn't have to, as when he played poker with his friends, just to see if he could get away with it. Democratic operative and later columnist Mark Shields, one of the most genial men in Washington, declined an invitation to a friendly weekly poker game that Corbin played in because he refused to sit at the same table, still detesting Corbin over some ancient disagreement. When Shields was told Corbin had died, he retorted, “Yeah? Prove it!”8 Corbin was a man of utterly no convictions except self-interest and loyalty to a small circle of associates—and he grifted even them once in a while.

  In the late 1980s, Corbin, who for years had been very close to Robert Kennedy's family, convinced two of his conservative friends to contribute to the debt retirement of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, RFK's eldest daughter. She'd lost a race for Congress, so Corbin took his conservative friends to Hickory Hill, longtime residence of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. There, at the reception, he ushered them around as if he'd just delivered tribute. Corbin's out-of-place right-wing friends gamely went along, chatting with Ethel, the kids, and the dozens of liberals who had gathered. Their one stipulation was that Corbin tell no one that they had contributed money to a Kennedy. One month later, in Chuck Conconi's gossip column in Washingtonian magazine, an embarrassing item appeared detailing how two conservatives had given money to Kathleen.

  They smelled a rat and burned a phone line to Corbin. He responded with that rough little laugh of his and as much as admitted that he'd called Conconi. As much as cheating people, he loved upsetting them, especially the high and mighty of Washington. Whenever he saw Ted Kennedy, he was forever embarrassing him, doing such things as telling him to get his suit pressed.9

  As a result—and for hundreds of other reasons—Corbin made enemies as easily as eating breakfast. He was loved by a handful that understood him and hated by hundreds more who understood him. At his sparsely attended funeral in January 1990, his longtime friend and pallbearer Bill Schulz quipped, “There wasn't a wet eye in the house.”10

  Kennedy Townsend said simply, “He was a rascal. He created trouble. He upset people.… He didn't respect people.” As she was preparing for her wedding, Corbin went to her future husband to give him conjugal advice. “Make her come to you” was Corbin's gravelly counsel to Kathleen's beau.11

  In 1989 Corbin had known for several months he was dying of cancer. Despite their rocky relationship, Teddy Kennedy had arranged for Corbin to get preferential treatment at the National Institutes of Health. A young friend of Corbin's would often drive him there, and sometimes Corbin would get in the car and with black humor say, “Well, it's Boot Hill for me!” Other times, he wanted his friend's assurance that God loved and forgave all.12 Yet when an old friend, Ray Thomasson, went to see him in late 1989, Thomasson grew weepy and tried to hug the frail old man. “What the hell are
you trying to do, kill me?” was Corbin's grumpy response.13 Joseph Sweat, another friend, asked Corbin how he was feeling. “Goddamn it, how the hell do you think I'm doing, you son of a bitch? I'm dying!”14

  On his last Christmas, Kathleen's mother, Ethel Kennedy, and several of her children went to his home to sing Christmas carols for the failing man. He hadn't completely lost his humor. “I really must be going,” he joked, making allusions to hearing crooning heavenly angels.15 When Corbin died, the Kennedy clan turned out in force for his wake and funeral. For years, the children of Robert and Ethel Kennedy called Corbin “Uncle Paul.”

  Kennedyite John Seigenthaler, one of the most ethical and moral men in American politics, delivered a touching eulogy for one of the most unethical and immoral men ever to work in American politics.

  MUCH OF CORBIN'S LIFE had been spent one step ahead of the law, grand juries, the FBI, and union thugs wanting to beat him up. Even into his late sixties, he was still evading investigating committees, including a congressional committee formed in 1983 to try to solve a crime. Someone in 1980 had stolen top-secret debate-briefing books from deep inside the Carter White House and had clandestinely given them to the Reagan-Bush campaign. Three years later, when the theft became known, the city of Washington was in an uproar over the scandal, which became known as “Debategate.” Congressman Donald J. Albosta, Michigan Democrat, headed the congressional investigation, and the FBI and everybody in the national media were trying to find out who'd stolen the Carter briefing books.