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

by Shirley, Craig

  Campaigns are sloppy as well. Some have asserted that the local operations of both Reagan and Carter didn't always do everything by the FEC book; that is, local money was allegedly used to augment activities, outside the scope of the federal government. Meanwhile, the organizational charts for the Reagan campaign were hastily drawn affairs, with names scratched out, lines going everywhere, and not always a clear line of authority. The youth directors at the campaign, Steve Antosh and Morton Blackwell, flooded campaign offices with their memos complaining about not being able to get any funds or support for their efforts. Eventually, $75,000 was scrounged up for the Youth for Reagan program and the RNC kicked in another $75,000. But then they immediately got caught in a legal sticky wicket when Loren Smith, the campaign's attorney, advised them that they had to sever any ties to independent groups such as Young Americans for Freedom and the Fund for a Conservative Majority.

  For a time, the Reagan campaign couldn't even agree on an official poster. Lorelei Kinder, who was running California, took it upon herself to design a poster with low-quality artwork and a photo of Reagan with a crinkly smile wearing a white cowboy hat and a blue denim shirt, which was snapped by Michael A. W. Evans in 1976. The poster was titled “America. Reagan Country.” Most people in the campaign disliked it, including Mrs. Reagan. Three decades later, the photo is iconic, and the poster is still a popularly selling item in the Reagan Library. The Gipper was so impressed with Evans's work that Reagan asked him to become his personal photographer. Evans passed away in 2005.

  Campaigns bring out all sorts of people. Two enterprising songwriters penned the music and lyrics to “Hello Ronnie, Good-Bye Jimmy” and submitted it to Ed Meese. The song was not adopted; nor were two other unsolicited songs, “We Need a Change in Washington” and “Let Ron Do It.”

  The technology associated with campaigns of the twenty-first century was simply not available in 1980. A “high-speed” copying machine spat out replicas at a blazing ten seconds per. Phone calls were made from an office, hotel, or pay phone. There were no cell phones, no Internet, no Twitter, no e-mail, no fax machine (except for a smelly and rudimentary Quip machine). Computers were used to process numbers, but speeches, statements, and press releases were produced on typewriters, the better ones having correcting ribbon. Either that or use white paint from a small bottle to obliterate typographical errors.

  Many of the campaign daily schedules listed a “twenty-four-hour call assignment.” Usually it was Cindy Tapscott from the scheduling office; her office and home phone numbers were given for anyone to call, night or day, to complain or ask questions about Reagan's itinerary.

  Mark Tapscott, Cindy's brother, was a young, newly hired press secretary to Senator Gordon Humphrey in the summer of 1980. Lyn Nofziger needed an assistant at the Reagan operation. He walked into Humphrey's office and, without consulting the senator, hired Tapscott on the spot. Tapscott immediately left for his new job with Reagan. When Humphrey found out, he was not pleased. Nofziger never worried about niceties.

  In the fall of 1980, Bill Casey thought he was running the campaign from Virginia while Stu Spencer and the boys on the plane with Reagan thought they were running things. Roger Stone, running New York and Connecticut, and many others in the field had a generally poor impression of Casey. Behind Casey's back, they called him “Bill Spacey” and “Mumbles.” (Apparently Jim Baker used to do a dead-on impression of Casey.) Stone later quipped to Kenny Klinge that no one needed to worry about CIA chief Casey giving away state secrets to the Russians because they would never “understand a fucking word he was saying.”

  Years later, Casey was briefing the Reagan cabinet and, according to Jim Baker, sounded as if he had “marbles in his mouth.” Reagan turned to his then–chief of staff, Howard Baker, and said, “Howard, I have never been able to understand Bill Casey.” The chief of staff replied, “Mr. President, that is the scariest thing I have ever heard.”

  Still, Casey brought order to the chaotic mess left behind by his predecessor, John Sears. And later, as Reagan's head of the CIA, he too embraced Reagan's vision of the rolling back of Communism in the Western Hemisphere and the eventual destruction of Soviet Communism.

  Casey even to this day is underappreciated as a courageous Cold Warrior.

  ALMOST THIRTY YEARS LATER, some wounds are still not healed and some will never be.

  Many conservatives never liked or trusted RNC head Bill Brock, and he reciprocated the sentiment. Rich Bond, hero of George Bush's astonishing win in Iowa, ended up estranged from Bush's eldest son, George W., even as Bond had in many ways become the unofficial fifth Bush son. According to Bond, there was also “bad blood” between Jim Baker and Karl Rove stemming from 1980. Baker and Lyn Nofziger ended up despising each other, with Nofziger late in his life saying bluntly, “I don't think he's an honorable man. And you can quote me.”

  John Sears and Senator Paul Laxalt never recovered from their falling out. In 2007, twenty-eight years after Sears had tried to supplant Laxalt as chairman of the campaign, the former senator asked me to lunch and I suggested that Sears join us, thinking the wounds had healed. Laxalt replied, “Oh, Craig, there's just been too much water over the dam.”

  Gerald Ford never really got over his animosity toward Reagan. Neither did Carter.

  Meanwhile, Gordon Humphrey has become a recluse in New Hampshire, dodging old friends. John Sears became a lightning rod for criticism, with people to this day either worshipping him or worshipping the quicksand he walks on.

  Still, Sears was one of the few in 1980 who saw the Reagan crusade as epochal, a “game changer” in the parlance of the modern era. Almost everybody else simply saw it as just another presidential campaign, to battle over and to do battle with each other.

  Old Reagan hand Jeff Bell summed it up in the Weekly Standard: “Many of us on Team Reagan often found ourselves at each other's throats.”

  Some of that happened in the Bush camp, too. Dave Keene and George Bush had a tempestuous relationship, to say the least. Keene told me he was convinced that Bush thought he was an “asshole.” Bush may have had some reason to think that. During the campaign, Bush complained to Keene that he was always criticizing him. Keene replied that he “did not know my job description included kissing your ass; I thought there were a lot of people around that would do that for free.”

  WAS THE 1980 ELECTION settled on ideology or was it simply a rejection of Carter? The evidence is overwhelming that the election was by and large a rejection of big-government liberalism. As Tom Brokaw told me in an interview, “It was the end of the New Deal.” The young TV reporter had covered Reagan for KNBC in Los Angeles, and when he moved up to the network, he warned the easterners not to underestimate Reagan. They scoffed. Americans had come to see that after forty-plus years of looking to Washington, their government was no longer capable of solving their problems. It was now time for a new approach. Reagan's approach.

  Don Devine made the critical point that up until the last days of the campaign, voters were “mainly anti-Carter and not pro-Reagan.” It wasn't until after the debate one week before the election that people began to move into the pro-Reagan column. His debate performance, while unconvincing to the elites, closed the sale with the American voter. As occurred throughout Reagan's political life, his fortunes improved when he took control of his own “rendezvous with destiny.” The old master Walter Mondale knew the night of the debate that the Democrats were in trouble. “I don't think Reagan ever talked about limits,” Mondale told me. “Carter came in and he's talking about scarcity, he's talking about sacrifice.”

  President Carter, of the choice offered the American people, said to me succinctly, “What was at stake for the whole country was just a difference in basic philosophy.”

  He was right.

  HOW CLOSE WAS REAGAN to losing the nomination to George Bush after Iowa? According to Dick Wirthlin's polling in New Hampshire, in April 1979 Reagan stood at 55 percent and Bush at 4 percent. After the Iowa ca
ucuses, Reagan plummeted to 35 percent while Bush surged to 41 percent, a massive shift.

  Fate and luck helped save Reagan. Nowadays, only one week separates Iowa's caucuses and the Granite State primary. Had that schedule been in place in 1980 Reagan would have lost New Hampshire and with it the nomination. But in 1980 there were five weeks between the caucuses and the New Hampshire vote. Those five precious weeks gave the Gipper time to recover and the voters and the media more time to look closer at Ambassador Bush.

  Reagan, though, certainly had the energy to win the nomination. In 1980, Nancy Reagan told the Washington Star, “I can assure you … Ronnie's a young man mentally and physically.” This would have come as news to her childhood friend Mike Wallace, who told a young Californian Reaganite, Pat Nolan, that Reagan was “too old” to run again. Wallace told Nolan this in 1968.

  WHAT IS FASCINATING IS how many people will tell you today how much they supported Ronald Reagan in 1980 or that they worked for him. Much of it is poppycock. One low-level numbers cruncher in Bush's campaign insisted to me that he actually ran the Bush campaign and then moved over to run the Reagan campaign after Detroit. Another person who clearly worked for John Connally in the primaries swore that he was always with Reagan. The party committees, including the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee, were essentially incubators of anti-Reagan sentiment all through the late 1970s, but now most who worked there will tell you they supported Reagan from the get-go. I will not embarrass them by naming names, but their revisionist claims are simply not true.

  Ernie Angelo, a loyal Texas Reaganite, was repulsed by the GOP operatives who “made fun” of the conservatives and Reagan. “Principle or philosophy had nothing to do with it for them; it was winning.”

  THE FIRST ANSWER IS yes, Paul Corbin delivered the stolen Carter briefing books to the Reagan campaign in the fall of 1980.There is little doubt of his involvement. George Will was delighted to learn this from me, as Jimmy Carter for years has falsely blamed him for giving them to the Reagan campaign. Nobody but Carter would ever cast Will as a second-story man. Carter has made some other odd assertions over the years, including that Will had asked Carter for forgiveness, which, if anyone knows the taciturn columnist, is claptrap. In his own inimitable fashion, Will called the former president a “recidivist fibber” in a 2005 column.

  A number of sources confirmed various aspects of Corbin's role in the caper, including Dick Cheney, John Seigenthaler, Bill Schulz, and others. Corbin, at various times, admitted directly or at least hinted that he'd stolen the briefing books. Vice President Cheney recalled that his former aide the late Tim Wyngaard had said that Corbin had told him of passing the briefing books to Bill Casey; Wyngaard himself told this to the congressional investigating committee headed by Democratic congressman Don Albosta. Casey gave up Corbin's name to the Albosta committee in early July 1983, but said that Corbin had given him only “some material,” not the actual briefing books. Corbin denied having given Casey the books, natch.

  Jim Baker told the Albosta committee in 1983 that Bill Casey had “indicated to me” that Corbin “might have been a source” for the books. When I interviewed Baker, he said Dick Cheney had told him that Corbin had taken the briefing books, and we joked about the statute of limitations.

  Plus, I knew Paul Corbin. Paul Corbin was a friend of mine. For years, we played together in a weekly poker game, and while he never came right out and told us that he'd stolen the debate books, none of us doubted for a moment that he did it and did it willingly, happy to stick it to Carter. Diogenes' lamp would have never shone on Corbin.

  Corbin did deny in a sworn statement to the Albosta committee that he'd given the briefing books to the Reagan campaign. But lying to federal officials was old-hat for Corbin. As Time magazine politely said, his “reputation for veracity is uneven.”

  How Corbin got the briefing books out of a sensitive area of the Carter White House is less clear.

  In 1983, when the story of the stolen books broke out, the Reagan White House reviewed the guest logs for the Carter White House for the fall of 1980. They did not show a “Paul Corbin” signing in, but security in those days was extremely lax.

  Laurie Lucey has been the subject of quiet rumors of involvement for years because of her friendship with Corbin and because she worked in the Carter White House. When I interviewed her in 2008, Lucey repeatedly and emphatically denied playing a role in the briefing-books escapade. She actually left the Carter White House in the fall of 1979, almost a year before the debate books were stolen, and it seems improbable that she would have been able to get back inside the White House complex, given the bad blood between her father, Pat Lucey, and Jimmy Carter.

  However, John Seigenthaler told me that he felt Laurie Lucey might have been some sort of “go-between,” saying, “There is no other way.” The courtly, elderly man also believed that Carter aide Bob Dunn had a role. Seigenthaler is not alone in thinking this. Dunn knew Corbin. He was also a protégé of Pat Lucey. Indeed, he had worked for Lucey in Mexico and in Madison, Wisconsin. But surprisingly, Dunn went to work in the Carter White House just as Lucey was resigning as ambassador to Mexico to join Ted Kennedy's campaign in the fall of 1979.

  The FBI tracked Dunn down in San Francisco in 1983, but according to Dunn, the agent never even asked him about his relationship of long standing with Corbin. Dunn expressed amusement to the Washington Post that the FBI agent knew so little about the case.

  When I finally interviewed Dunn after trying repeatedly over three years to speak with him, he denied any role in the heist.

  In the exhaustive search for the full story, I attempted to interview Wilma Hall, a secretary in the Carter White House and later the Reagan White House. She refused to talk. Her daughter later worked as an aide to Colonel Oliver North, author of the Iran-Contra scandal. Name of her daughter? Fawn Hall.

  The receptionist at the Reagan campaign, Justine Marks, told investigators in 1983 that she recalled a “young, clean-cut man” delivering to the headquarters a package of materials that resembled the Carter briefing books. She said that she did not remember much about the incident or the person. When asked by the FBI to undergo hypnosis to jog her memory, she demurred. She did, however, recall stopping the stranger, who, she claimed, “had material related to the briefing material for Carter.”

  Marks worked on, and controlled access to, the fourth floor of the Reagan campaign headquarters. Both Bill Casey's and Jim Baker's offices were located on that floor. It is of course possible that Corbin simply employed someone to deliver the package for him. But records also show that Corbin was meeting with Casey on October 25, the day the books showed up.

  When I interviewed Don Albosta many years after his committee's investigation wrapped up, he was still frustrated by what had gone down. The investigation had proved inconclusive. Albosta said that he found both the Carter men and the Reagan men less than forthcoming. He was especially frustrated with Bill Casey, whom he could not understand, and Jim Baker, whom he knew and did understand. He also told me he thought it was odd that Congressman Dick Cheney came to his office to tell him he had nothing to do with the caper when Albosta hadn't even suspected the Wyoming congressman.

  The final report produced by Albosta's committee (officially titled Unauthorized Transfers of Nonpublic Information during the 1980 Presidential Election) roughed Casey up while giving Baker the benefit of the doubt. Casey issued a statement in which he said, “The campaign management never contemplated, directed or authorized seeking any inside information from the Carter camp.” True enough, except the statement never said anything about accepting anything stolen from the president's campaign.

  Corbin became closer to Bill Casey after Reagan appointed Casey as head of the CIA. Corbin used to tell his daughter, Darlene, that he was going to Nicaragua to help the Contras, and he also used to josh his poker pals about his long absences, saying that he was “running guns” in Central America. With C
orbin, anything was possible.

  One thing is for sure: Corbin was sui generis, even in a time when American politics was filled with colorful characters who rarely ended up in the newspapers and never on television. There were times when anonymity was necessary in this game. Tom Brokaw neatly summed up the differences between that era and the modern era: “In those days, you couldn't get anybody to talk; now you can't get anybody to shut up!” The era of the political operative as colorful and mysterious has passed and it should be lamented. Men like Corbin and Lyn Nofziger would despise the current consultant-as-celebrity culture of Washington, and the modern, TV-obsessed political operators would have been eaten alive by Nofziger, Corbin, and others of their era.

  The second answer is no, the outcome of the election was not affected by the briefing books. President Carter, to this day, is still deeply upset about his purloined briefing books and it was evident in our interview. “I don't think there's any doubt that it made some difference,” he complained.

  But the briefing books were little more than a compendium of Reagan quotes, comments, speeches, columns, and radio commentaries spanning his public life. Reagan knew what he'd said during all that time, because he had deviated little from his fundamental philosophy over the previous twenty to thirty years. He himself acknowledged that he'd pretty much been saying the same thing; it was just that by 1980, more people were agreeing with the Gipper.