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

by Shirley, Craig

  The Reagan offspring were introduced. Maureen exuberantly threw her arms around her father and stepmother. Michael, wife Colleen, and their baby, Cameron, were introduced next, and Mike and his father kissed each other on the cheek. Ron and Patti came on together. The body language and space between the Reagan children was unmistakable. Maureen, Mike, and Colleen gathered on one side while Ron and Patti stood on the other side, holding hands. All except Patti embraced their parents. Reagan reached out toward his younger son with his left hand and “Skipper,” with a look of hero worship on his face, reached back for his father with his right hand, affectionately.

  Also on stage were Reagan's older brother, Neil, and his wife Bess, along with members of the extended family, including Maureen's husband, Dennis Revell.

  Finally it was time for Reagan to speak. He started slowly but firmly. “There's never been a more humbling moment in my life,” he began. Pausing, the history of the moment sinking in, he told the thousands in the hotel and millions watching, “I consider the trust that you have placed in me sacred, and I give you my sacred oath that I will do my utmost to justify your faith.”

  Reagan spoke warmly of the call from President Carter and the outgoing president's pledge to ensure a smooth transition. Out of the blue, some unknown aides came on stage carrying a tremendous cake in the shape of the continental United States. Nervously, they tipped it so everybody could see it and the massive confection started to slide off, nearly coming down on Mrs. Reagan. For a moment, her smile faded, but Reagan moved to catch the cake and help tilt it back. Reagan's smile had also left his face; he had just been warming up when the staffers interrupted him. The aides with their cake departed the stage quickly.

  The president-elect went back to his remarks, thanking the staff, the volunteers across America to whom he owed “an immeasurable debt of thanks,” and then George and Barbara Bush. “We're going to have true partnership and a true friendship,” he said of the vice president–elect. That elicited another cheer. He thanked his family, then thanked Nancy and said adoringly, “She's going to have a new title in a couple of months.” The crowd cheered lustily. He pointed out that it looked at though the GOP would “control one house of the Congress for the first time in a quarter of a century,” and the audience shouted approval again. Someone in the crowd held up a hot-off-the-presses Los Angeles Times that proclaimed, in big letters above the fold, “Reagan Landslide!”

  Reagan reminded the audience of what Abraham Lincoln had told a group of reporters the day after his election: “Well, boys, your troubles are over now; mine have just begun.”

  Nearing the end of his brief remarks, Reagan summed up his view: “I am not frightened by what lies ahead. And I don't believe the American people are frightened by what lies ahead.”110Time later said the president-elect had given his remarks with “the same mixed tone of humility and boyish glee that so obviously had charmed American voters during the campaign.”111

  To leave no doubt about his priorities, Reagan added firmly, “Together, we're going to do what has to be done. We're going to put America back to work again!”

  He paused for a moment. His speech was short and lacking some of the soaring rhetoric usually associated with the Gipper. The end had come so swiftly for Carter—and the beginning so quickly for Reagan—that he had little time to review or work on his remarks, but Reagan did not doubt that he was ready for the colossal mission handed him by the American people. “I aim to try and tap that great American spirit that opened up this completely undeveloped continent from coast to coast and made it a great nation, survived several wars, survived a great depression, and we'll survive the problems that we face right now.”

  A reverent mood came over Reagan. “When I accepted your nomination for president, I hesitatingly … asked for your prayers at that moment. I won't ask them for this in particular moment, but I will just say, I would be very happy to have them in the days ahead.” His voice caught for a moment.

  “All I can say to all of you is thank you.” Then, revealingly, his thoughts drifted back to Tampico and Dixon, the two little towns in Illinois where he'd grown up. The old broadcaster had arranged to have his message aired on a small radio station in downstate Illinois to reach the folks there. He wanted to tell them that he was still thinking about them. “So to all of them,” he said, “thank you, too, back there in the hometown.”112

  There—sixty years earlier—a wistful boy had dreamed of being a hero, of saving people, of saving his country one day when it needed him most. The little boy's dream had come true. He would get his chance to save America.

  RONALD WILSON REAGAN, THE president-elect of the United States, departed the Century Plaza's stage to step shortly onto a much bigger stage—in fact, the biggest stage of his life. He'd been on stages big and small his whole life—high-school stages, soundstages, convention stages—but this was something different, bigger, more vast, indeed all-encompassing.

  Ronald Reagan would finally get a chance to ply his trade.

  On a world stage.

  Epilogue

  DESTINY

  “Now that damned cowboy is in the White House!”

  So exclaimed the Karl Rove of his era, Mark Hanna, when his man President William McKinley succumbed to an assassin's bullet and the irrepressible Theodore Roosevelt became president.1 The reaction to Ronald Reagan's election, another cowboy, was much the same among the country-club moderates who still made up a portion of the Republican Party of 1980 and still loathed Reagan. They could not forgive a man who had said, in a 1977 speech before a group of conservatives, “The New Republican Party I envision will not be, and cannot be, one limited to the country club–big business image.”2

  Reagan and the elites had little use for each other. Helene Von Damm, Reagan's longtime secretary in Sacramento, recalled an item from National Review: “It seems no one likes him … except the voters.”3

  It took a man from another country, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, to express the prideful sorrow Americans felt days after Reagan died on June 5, 2004. “In July 1975, I concluded my remarks in the Reception Room of the U.S. Senate with these words: ‘Very soon, all too soon, your government will need not just extraordinary men—but men with greatness. Find them in your souls. Find them in your hearts. Find them within the breadth and depth of your homeland.’ Five years later, I was overjoyed when just such a man came to the White House. May the soft earth be a cushion in his present rest.”4

  Solzhenitsyn had been a Soviet dissident, had been imprisoned for ten years, beaten and starved by the Communists, but refused to bend or break. His “crime” was that he had criticized Joseph Stalin in a private letter. In prison, he kept writing. His words in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich spoke the truth to millions about the terrors of the Soviet regime. At Henry Kissinger's urging, President Ford refused to meet with the famed Nobel Prize–winning author who had been banished from the Soviet Union, fearing the wrath of the Kremlin.5 Two and only two senators had the courage to officially greet Solzhenitsyn: Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Joe Biden of Delaware. Former California governor Reagan greeted him unofficially. Reagan also wrote a column excoriating Ford and Kissinger, and this latest knuckling under to the Soviets may have been the last straw in making him decide to challenge Ford in the 1976 primaries.6 Had Ford told the Soviets where to get off and met with the famed author, Reagan might not have run for president in 1976. Had Reagan not run and lost then, he never would have run in 1980.

  But after he won, he too continued to write and speak out and take actions against the Soviet Union, telling audience after audience that the USSR would be consigned to “the ash heap of history” and that it was “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Reagan called Communism “another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.”7 Another imprisoned dissident, Natan Sharansky, gives Reagan the credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the victory of the West over Soviet Communism
. Sharansky recalled being imprisoned with “a Christian named Volodya. We called our [Bible reading] sessions Reaganite readings.”8 Of Reagan's impact, former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar said simply, “Without this man, I would be somewhere in Siberia in chains.”9

  Reagan abhorred Communism. He told the annual gathering of the 1977 CPAC, “When a conservative says that totalitarian Communism is an absolute enemy of human freedom, he is not theorizing—he is reporting the ugly reality captured so unforgettably in the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.”10 After Reagan was reelected in 1984, the diplomatic tags on the cars used by the Soviet Embassy in Washington were changed to begin with the initials “FC.” Nobody needed to guess what it stood for.11

  The Communist nations didn't much like Reagan either. “Probably no American policymaker at any time during the Cold War inspired quite as much fear and loathing in Moscow as Ronald Reagan,” according to a definitive book on the Cold War, The Sword and the Shield. The Communists began tracking Reagan years before he was elected president. The East German secret police, the Stasi, maintained an ever bulging dossier on Reagan, while Soviet agents, beginning in the mid-1970s, were under orders to find “compromising material” on him. After 1976 the Soviets worked covertly in America to undermine his political career and to plant anti-Reagan stories in the world press, courtesy of “Service A” and the “Centre,” two Soviet-funded propaganda operations.12

  And of course, history has recorded how Reagan put the neck of Soviet Communism under his cowboy heel and crushed the life out of it, freeing millions, winning the Cold War. Some academics and historians try to make the case that Reagan “ended” the Cold War with Mikhail Gorbachev's cooperation. Nonsense. From 1917 up until 1991, no Soviet dictator ever willingly gave up power. From 1917 up until 1980, the Soviets gained territory against every American president—until Reagan, working with Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, turned the tide toward freedom.

  There was no doubt in 1980 about the Soviets' intentions. The Carter years were “frightening,” Newt Gingrich recalled. “I think that the real risk was the Soviet Union winning the Cold War. They were in Nicaragua, they were in El Salvador, they were in Cuba, they were in Mozambique, they were in Afghanistan, they were paying … partisans in Germany and Great Britain.… There is no reasonable way that they would not have attempted under a Carter II to expand their capacity very significantly.” Gingrich, the history professor, rated Carter as “the second most destructive president after James Buchanan.”13

  The stakes, in short, were sky high in the 1980 election. Conservative writer and commentator George F. Will said, “For the first time in my life, I regarded an election as a national emergency.”14

  Another influential conservative writer, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., founder of The American Spectator, summed up the stark choice American voters faced in the fall of 1980. Carter, he said, had an “antipodal view of mankind. Reagan is the optimist. Carter is the pessimist. Reagan sees us as capable. Carter sees us as inept and wobbling for Skid Row were it not for government's watchful eye.”15

  Tyrrell and Will were among the conservative columnists who began to flourish in the mid- to late 1970s. The political fires of the '60s had forged these commentators and now they were shaping political thought in America. In an era before cable television, the Internet, talk radio, and the explosion of conservative think tanks, their writings and pronouncements and thus their influence could not be underestimated. Both Will and Tyrrell had Reagan into their homes for dinner parties. Tyrrell, who enjoyed suits from London's Savile Row, expensive wine, and good cigars, was known for the sumptuous dinners he hosted.

  History has recorded, too, how Reagan restored American morale, its “cando” spirit, patriotism, and the notion of American exceptionalism. Reagan also revived the American economy after the devastating Carter Recession through revolutionary tax cuts and tight monetary policies, which drastically lowered the terrible inflation, interest rates, and unemployment. The economic growth that began in 1982 continued unbroken for a remarkable ninety-two months, during which time nearly thirty-five million new jobs were created.16 And in fact, the soaring growth carried on almost unabated until the last months of the George W. Bush administration in 2008—an unprecedented twenty-six-year run of growth, which was due to some of Reagan's economic policies being carried forward, especially by Gingrich and Bill Clinton.

  As long as these things are recorded, the word “morale” will always be associated with Reagan while the word “malaise” will always be associated with Jimmy Carter. Yet Reagan did more, much more, than accomplish these three big goals. He changed American politics for a lifetime.

  “Once he was the most underestimated man in American politics—a washed-up movie star, it was said, who was too old, too simple and too far right to be President,” wrote Peter Goldman of Newsweek several days after the election of 1980.17 How did Reagan manage to overcome all those perceptions not only to win the GOP nomination but also to defeat an incumbent president and a third-party candidate? Dick Wirthlin, Reagan's one and only pollster from 1966 until 1984, had understood early on what Reagan needed to do to win: he needed to achieve realignment. Wirthlin's detailed campaign plan presented at the end of June 1980 laid out how to do just that. It wasn't enough to get the Republican vote, Wirthlin wrote, because, as his surveys revealed, the country was 51 percent Democrat, 30 percent Republican, and 19 percent independent.18 Reagan needed to scramble the old New Deal coalition and create a new ideological and cultural coalition. He needed “Reagan Democrats” to win (though the term would not be coined until after the election).19

  Sure enough, that's what Reagan pulled off. George Church of Time summed up the remarkable realignment that occurred on November 4, 1980: “Landslide. Yes, landslide—stunning, startling, astounding, beyond the wildest dreams and nightmares of the contending camps, beyond the furthest ken of the armies of pollsters, pundits and political professionals. After all the thousands of miles, the millions of words and dollars, the campaign that in newspapers across the land on the very morning of Election Day was still headlined TOO CLOSE TO CALL turned out to be a landslide. The American voter had struck again. Reagan's triumph dismembered the old Democratic coalition. Jews, labor-union members, ethnic whites, big-city voters—all gave Reagan far more votes than they usually cast for a Republican. The disaster left the Democratic Party, which has held the presidency for 32 of the 48 years since 1932, badly in need of a new vision and a new agenda.”20

  Reagan became, in the opinion of renowned historian John Patrick Diggins, one of America's greatest presidents, alongside Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Similarly, the great historian James MacGregor Burns in 1999 said that he would rank Reagan in the “great” or “near-great” category, alongside FDR.21 A good case can be made that Reagan was actually a better president than FDR. Both were confronted with “guns and butter” issues, yet FDR never solved his economic calamity in eight years; only when America went to war did the Great Depression end. Reagan solved the Carter Recession in two years, and his work from 1981 to 1989 caused the collapse of the Soviet threat in 1991, and with it the triumph of freedom over Communism.

  Tributes poured in from Congress when Reagan died, but one of the most gracious and eloquent came from Ted Kennedy. The old liberal spoke of Reagan's conservatism, his love of country, and his convictions, with no bitterness or rancor, but with a genuine affection for the man. Kennedy gave Reagan all the credit as “the president who won the Cold War,” and added, “His deepest convictions were matters of heart and mind and spirit—and on them, he was no actor at all.”22

  It spoke very well of Reagan also that his first wife, Jane Wyman, admitted she had voted for him gladly in 1980 and 1984, and that when he died, she broke her silence of more than fifty years to say, “America has lost a great president and a great, kind and gentle man.”23

  Indeed, Reagan was one of the most incredibly relaxed men in politics. As reporters watch
ed him doing remote TV interviews one sweltering day in a Los Angeles studio in 1980, he suddenly realized that the reporters couldn't hear the broadcasters, only him. Between interviews, a mischievous smile crossed Reagan's face and he began calling an imaginary baseball game, but with a political twist: “And now, Teddy Kennedy is coming to the plate. Kennedy has hit for five out of eight in the primaries today. Kennedy looks loose.” The people in the studio laughed.24 During his mock debate with David Stockman in 1980 to prepare for the real debate with John Anderson, Stockman was pummeling Reagan over the environment when Reagan retorted, “Well, John, sounds like I better get a gas mask!”25

  Still, Reagan, like all men, was flawed. He had a temper, although it mellowed in later years. Once as governor, speaking to a political ally who had betrayed him, he pointed to a baseball bat on display in his office and said, “I should have shoved it up your ass and broken it off!”26 Actor Arthur Kennedy, an old friend, said the Gipper's anger “flares like magnesium powder and disappears in a cloud of smoke.”27

  Such foibles do not by any means diminish Reagan's significance or, indeed, greatness. His old friend Lyn Nofziger explained it better than anybody: “Our problem is we are trying to make a saint out of a man who certainly wasn't perfect. But he was a unique president. He believed in three things: God, the American people and himself. And that's kind of unique.”28