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

by Shirley, Craig

  The Carter campaign tried to enlist other attack dogs. Pat Caddell called Bob Shrum, Ted Kennedy's speechwriter, to ask him to have Teddy attack Reagan as “anti-Catholic.” Shrum replied, “Well, I'll ask him, but he isn't going to do it. Not in a million years.”29 Shrum knew his man. Teddy rejected the request out of hand.

  Carter got a bit of good news on the economy for the first time in a long time. The unemployment rate dipped from 7.6 percent to 7.5 percent, and inflation had actually gone down for the first time in more than four years, dropping 0.2 percent for the month of September.30 If Carter could convince enough voters that the economy was on the way back and that Reagan was not the way to go, he still had time to eke out a win, as in 1976.

  To help along the process, the Carter administration was spreading federal aid around as if it were manure. Millions for a gasohol plant in Michigan, tens of millions in largesse for Chicago, all announced by Carter or cabinet officials on the stump.31 There was little Reagan could do except cry foul, just as he'd done in 1976 when Ford was rolling out the federal pork in primary after primary.

  AT THE BEGINNING OF October, Washington's attention temporarily shifted from the presidential race to a pair of Capitol Hill scandals. First, Michael Myers, Democrat of Pennsylvania, became the first congressman to be expelled from the House of Representatives in nearly 120 years. Myers was one of the politicians whose hand had been caught in the Abscam cookie jar. He had already been convicted in court, despite his imaginative defense that the video of him stuffing money into his pockets was in actuality of another man; if it was him, Myers claimed, he was only “play acting.”32 He would ultimately be sent to federal prison.

  The day after the House voted to expel Myers, Congressman Robert Bauman of Maryland, a fiery young conservative and chairman of the American Conservative Union, was charged with soliciting sex from a sixteen-year-old male prostitute.33 Bauman, who had a wife and four children, admitted to “homosexual tendencies” and blamed those “tendencies” on alcoholism.34 He checked into rehabilitation and conservatives checked Bauman off their lists.

  REAGAN'S OPPONENTS STEPPED UP their attacks. A heckler in New Jersey called him a “pig.”35 The National Organization for Women (NOW) said he was “medieval.” At their convention in Texas, NOW members broke out into a chant: “ERA, here to stay! Ronald Reagan, no way!” The women's group adopted a resolution to picket Reagan and Bush, though it did not go so far as to endorse Carter's candidacy.36

  Carter was back in the role of the underdog—a role his campaign always said he preferred. The president's supporters redoubled their attacks on Reagan. Mondale said Reagan's position on the SALT treaty “threatens civilization.”37 Edmund Muskie, the secretary of state, said that if Reagan was elected, the country would be in a perpetual state of war.38 Even Mrs. Carter, in her own way, knocked Reagan. She told crowds she was “proud” that her husband was the “president of peace,” and as the New York Times reported, her message was “a mixture of not-so-subtle digs at Ronald Reagan's conservatism, age and competence.”39

  Carter's union supporters began to plan their own attacks on Reagan—largely because they had almost nothing positive to say about the president. In the battleground state of Pennsylvania, labor officials held a crisis meeting in Harrisburg. Jim Mahoney of the AFL-CIO's political committee said frankly, “Let's face it—Carter is a tough job to sell.… We have to do a hatchet job on Reagan.” Another said, “I can't tell Joe Worker that Jimmy Carter is great. He knows he is worse off today than he was four years ago.… What I have to do is make Reagan a devil.”40 Carter gave his presidency a better grade than did his union supporters. The president went on 60 Minutes and said, “Under the circumstances, I think about a B. The actual results, maybe a C.”41

  Carter himself continued to tear into Reagan. Appearing before thousands in downtown Chicago, he labeled Reagan's rhetoric on national defense “jingoistic” and “macho” and said that his opponent wanted to “push everybody around.”42 That night at a party fundraiser, Carter restated the sinister theme he had unveiled a few days earlier: “You'll determine whether or not America will be unified, or if I lose this election, whether Americans might be separated, black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban—whether this nation will be guided from a sense of long-range commitment to peace, sound judgment and broad consultation.”43 Again Anderson condemned Carter for using “feverish, anything-goes tactics.”44

  Since the end of September, Reagan had been mostly circumspect about Carter's attacks, talking about what he wanted to talk about and not allowing himself to be diverted. Indeed, he'd joked with audiences that his secret agenda was to cancel Social Security and start World War III. Yet when reporters confronted him with the newest broadside from Carter, Reagan became visibly irritated. His response was mostly measured nonetheless: “I'm saddened that anyone … could intimate such a thing.… Certainly he's reaching a point of hysteria that's hard to understand.”45

  Carter was the subject of another round of editorials blasting him for his ruthless speechifying against Reagan. The president's high command convened an emergency meeting and determined that a change in tactics was required. The Carterites finally had to face facts: the president's relentless assault on Reagan had blown up on Carter. Not only had Carter been unsuccessful in provoking Reagan, but he had also tarnished his image as a decent man and instead developed a reputation for nastiness. The president's men acknowledged as much, saying that the strategy “ends up backfiring.…What we're doing isn't working.”46 Even Bob Strauss was critical of Carter, saying he “used a poor choice of words sometimes.… He gets into personal confrontation.”47 Carter had no choice but to tamp down his rhetoric. Reagan campaign aide Michele Davis went out drinking one evening with a group of reporters covering the campaign and was astonished to hear them. She wrote in her diary, “They sure do talk shit about the Carters. Funny.”48

  The president went on ABC for an interview with Barbara Walters, a rite of passage for public officials wanting to express public contrition. Yet it may have been the oddest nonapology in American political history: “I think it's true that when Mr. Reagan says that I'm desperate or hysterical or vindictive that he shares part of the blame that I have assumed.”49 Carter explained away some of his overheated rhetoric by saying, “It's not a deliberate thing. Some of the issues are just burning with fervor in my mind and in my heart, and I have to sometimes speak extemporaneously and I have gotten carried away on a couple of occasions.”50 The president did tell Walters that he wanted to get his campaign “back on the track” and that he should not have implied that Reagan was a warmonger.51 Going forward, he said, he would tone down his attacks on Reagan and instead give a series of long, issues-oriented speeches.

  When told about Carter's “apology,” the Gipper replied, “Well, I think that would be nice if he did … if he's decided to straighten up and fly right.”52

  Despite Carter's promise to clean up his act, Anderson was unmoved. He told liberals in New York that the president was “incompetent,” that he had “no clear and compelling vision of our nation's future,” and that Carter was simply an “opportunist” who craved power.53

  Carter's quasi mea culpa seemed too little and certainly came too late. He was still forced to address the issue on the campaign trail. During a swing through the South he acknowledged before a large crowd that he'd been “overly enthusiastic” in his comments about Reagan. During a town hall meeting with 4,400 people at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry, Carter was taken aback when a high-school student came full bore at him, asking, “Sir, why is it that if you are the right man for the job, that you and your staff have to lower yourself to the extent of slinging mud and making slanderous statements [against] your rival, Ronald Reagan?” The hall exploded in applause at the young man's brazenness.54

  In his postpresidential memoir, Carter did not express much regret at having directed “a harsh phrase” at Reagan. The media, he wrote, had misin
terpreted his attacks on Reagan as being “personal.” What really bothered Carter was that the “political damage” from the attacks “was afflicting me as much as it was him.”55

  REAGAN HAD BEGUN INCHING toward the middle. First he had softened his position on the bailout of Chrysler and on federal aid to New York City, causing conservatives to squawk. Now, during yet another tour of Ohio, a battleground state, his campaign distributed hundreds of thousands of flyers in which he reversed his earlier stance on subjecting unions to antitrust laws.56

  Unexpectedly, Reagan also called on the government to speed up the purchase of cars from Detroit as a means of helping the ailing industry. The Carter White House was livid, believing that Republican moles had found out that Carter was going to take just this action. Reagan had stolen the president's thunder.57

  Moderates in the campaign even tried to convince Reagan to give up on his tax-cut plan and to drop his support for eliminating the Departments of Education and Energy, but on these and other issues, his position was unshakable.

  The campaign's sudden moderation reflected how close the race was in vital swing states. Reagan had picked up his share of protesters and picketers on the campaign trail, in part because his operation continued to have problems with the local advance work. The protests became an outsized problem for the Reagan campaign because the media often highlighted boos or heckling. During his latest Ohio tour, for example, hecklers came out to a poorly advanced event in Steubenville, and the New York Times duly noted their presence in its news report.58 The focus on the protesters detracted from Reagan's message. In this case the candidate was calling for a close examination of the Clean Air Act, which he claimed had closed many factories in the Buckeye State.59 Ohio, where unemployment had approached 9 percent, was the rustiest of all the Rust Belt; from Akron to Zuck, factories were boarded up.60 Reagan knew that Ohio was crucial for him. Carter had carried the state by only a handful of votes in 1976, and in the twentieth century, no Republican had won the presidency without carrying Ohio.

  The Reagan campaign enlisted Bush to make the case in battleground states. Once relegated to the backwaters, Bush was now put in a series of television broadcasts modeled on his effective “Ask George Bush” formats from the primaries, only these were billed as “Ask Reagan/Bush.” The shows were broadcast all over the northeast and Midwest along with Texas. Stu Spencer told reporter Lisa Myers, whom the Washington Star had promoted to the Reagan plane, that Bush would be especially helpful in American suburbs.61

  Bush's prominent role in the campaign was a surprising break from GOP precedent. Ford had tried to muzzle his running mate, Bob Dole, and Nixon had put a leash on his rabid dog, Spiro Agnew. Nixon himself was ground under Eisenhower's heel for eight years. Bush, however, benefited because Reagan was growing more comfortable with him and because some of Bush's staff had emerged in key positions in the campaign, especially Jim Baker.

  Another Reagan effort to reach beyond conservative voters—his courting of traditionally Democratic groups—was paying off. A month earlier, the National Maritime Union had strongly denounced Reagan in its newsletter. But Reagan attended a meeting of the union in St. Louis, and by voice vote the seamen changed course, endorsing the GOP nominee for president.62 Reagan himself seemed stunned at the development.

  Almost as surprising, and much more significant, was the endorsement of the 2.3–million–member International Brotherhood of Teamsters.63 Reagan had been warmly received by the Teamsters back in August, but the endorsement was nonetheless unexpected.

  Odd as the Teamsters' endorsement of Reagan seemed at the time, nothing nefarious—at least on the surface—was involved, according to Myron Mintz, a veteran of the Nixon White House and a tax attorney for the controversial union and its then president, Frank “Frankie” Fitzsimmons, a protégé of Jimmy Hoffa's. The union was angry with the Carter administration and Ted Kennedy for supporting deregulation of the trucking industry. The Teamsters had flirted with endorsing John Connally in the primaries, but Fitzsimmons's rival, Jackie Presser, later held a rally for Reagan in Ohio over the summer of 1980. Anxious not to be cut off from Reagan inside his own union, Fitzsimmons agreed to endorse Reagan; he did so at the urging of Mintz during a game of gin rummy with Mintz.64 Fitzsimmons, a lifelong Republican, wasn't that difficult to persuade. Presser needed to do more work with the board. He said: “You Italians, listen up! More than anyone else in this room, you should be supporting Reagan! Reagan has agreed to lay off of us! The Justice Department will not be on our backs for once!”65 He also told them that Reagan would not pursue trucking deregulation as aggressively as Carter had. They immediately voted to support Reagan.

  Mintz, who grew up on the rough-and-tumble streets of Philadelphia, was well suited to be a union lawyer, a world in which allegations of mob ties were routine. He'd once gotten into a fistfight with government officials who had come to his office with a search warrant for union documents. A lifelong Jew, Mintz changed his religion to Baptist during his divorce proceedings with his first wife so he could get their children on Christian holidays. When the court awarded their unoccupied house to his former wife, he went there one Friday afternoon, put a garden hose in the basement window, turned on the water, and left.66

  The welcomed union endorsements were mostly lost in a miniflap over Reagan's assertion that the EPA was too aggressive in pursuit of a clean environment. Reagan had gone off script, and he and his campaign ended up stuck in a debate with Carter's EPA and the media over what constituted air pollution and how it was created. The controversy reminded people of an earlier comment he had made to the effect that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles,” a statement for which he had been roundly denounced.67 Worse, Reagan tried to suggest that the spill of more than 200,000 gallons of oil off of Santa Barbara was no big deal. From an environmental standpoint he was right, for as Lou Cannon wrote in Governor Reagan, the “long-term biological effects of the spill were negligible.” But the political impact of the spill was “enormous,” as Cannon said; it gave force to the environmental movement and led to a ban on drilling in federal waters.68

  Michele Davis confided in her diary, “Old RR came out with some real off-the-wall bloopers on the environment today.”69 Reagan opened himself up to attacks with such remarks. One environmental activist said Reagan had “a Neanderthal understanding” of the problems of the environment and the media whipsawed him over his comments.70 Reagan was tired and he needed to get off the road to recharge his batteries.

  Adding to Reagan's embarrassment was a case of bad timing. On the heels of his assertion that air pollution was coming under control in America, two press planes following his campaign aircraft into Los Angeles had to be diverted because of poor visibility due to smog. Later, at a rally with Roy Rogers, he was met by environmental activists who heckled him, one carrying a sign that read, “Stop Pollution; Choke Reagan.”71

  CARTER'S NEWEST PROMISE TO elevate the tone of his campaign lasted exactly twenty-four hours. On a swing through Florida, he said Reagan would not be “a good man to trust with the affairs of this nation in the future.” Jody Powell was sent to the back of the plane to clean up Carter's mess. Reagan that day had said the hallmark of the Carter presidency was “a string of broken promises and trusts that have been betrayed.” Powell made the equivalency argument: “If one is a harsh personal attack, the other damn sure is.”72

  Reagan might have been expected to receive sympathetic coverage in the wake of Carter's newest assault, but then he accused the president of plotting an “October Surprise,” the first time the candidate had used this phrase in public. Reagan simply let it be known that “presidents can make things happen.” Carter hotly denied that his administration was cooking up an October Surprise, but the Reagan campaign had injected the issue into the national debate, attempting to tap into voters' cynicism about Carter.73

  Reagan went off message when he charged that Carter engaged in “fits of childish pique” and that he was the
“greatest deceiver ever to occupy the White House.” Reagan added, “We trusted him and now as president he's broken probably more promises than any president in United States history.”74 Reagan was off his game, which was precisely what Pat Caddell had hoped to achieve with his attack strategy.75 Up to this point, though, Reagan had mostly avoided such attacks and spoken directly to the voters. “Keep in mind,” he said, “this dream is not so much for those who are already well-off as it is for … the great majority of Americans who are less fortunate—for the poor, for minority Americans and for the elderly.”76

  Traveling through the Sunshine State, Reagan told elderly voters that he favored repealing a law which prohibited them from making outside income with out reducing Social Security benefits. The limitations, dating back to the Depression, did not apply to government officials, known at the time as “double dippers.” Reagan told a crowd at Al Lopez Field in Tampa that he would work to preserve the oft-maligned retirement system.77 From Florida he headed back to California for a much-needed weekend of rest.

  When he was on message, evident in Reagan's speeches and at his rallies, was a renewed appeal to American patriotism that had been out of fashion for years. The elites had made patriotic Americans a caricature, from Johnny Carson's dim-witted “Floyd R. Turbo” to comedian George Carlin's rants against traditional American values and the culture; and the counterculture had made anybody who wore an American flag lapel pin out to be some sort of Bozo. Many sports facilities simply stopped playing the national anthem. In a country where it was once impossible for a man in uniform to walk into a bar and not have someone buy him a beer, by the 1970s servicemen were sometimes spat upon. But Reagan spoke unabashedly about loving his country and old-fashioned values, and also about his hope for the future. One wag said it best about Reagan: he was nostalgic for the future.