An unintended consequence of Buckley v. Valeo was that it advantaged conservatives. For it contained a loophole: independent groups could spend whatever they wanted, on behalf of whomever they wanted, as long as they didn’t coordinate it with candidates who accepted matching funds. Groups, that is to say, like the New Right letterhead organizations braying about Eskimo cannibalism and the Nazi regime of genderless restrooms to be ushered in by the ERA. The more ideological the candidates were, the more this brave new campaign finance world would advantage them—and by the same token it would disadvantage moderates like Gerald Ford.
The surprise bonus didn’t come a moment too soon. Those on the Reagan team were worried about an old problem: their candidate being dismissed as an extremist. They rejoiced when Governor Meldrim Thomson, the lunatic who wanted to issue nuclear weapons to the National Guard, surprised them by not asking to chair the campaign. They had managed to recruit instead New Hampshire’s moderate Republican boss Hugh Gregg. “In getting Hugh Gregg,” a Reagan manager said, “we were trying to establish we were not the candidate of the kooks.” But the media, which had all but ignored him as a potential national force the previous year, were working overtime to establish that very proposition now that he was a presidential contender.
Call it the “Bedtime for Bonzo Problem.” Garry Wills wrote in his newspaper column, “Reagan thinks he is being unfairly treated by the press, and he is probably right. It is unfair to expect accuracy or depth from him.” Mike Royko referred to his “TV-anchorman face.” The February Harper’s featured “The Candidate from Disneyland,” labeling him “Nixon without the savvy or self-pity, another pious boyhood pauper in whom God has confided the friendship of suntanned millionaires. Ronald Duck. That he should be regarded as a serious candidate for President is a shame and embarrassment for the country at large to swallow.” More earnestly—and less dismissibly—Elizabeth Drew reported from the campaign plane, “Reagan is a dim figure. There is so much that we don’t know about him. What is he doing with these public relations people as his key advisors? How does his own mind work? Is he a contrived figure? One cannot shake the idea that this is Ronald Reagan the movie actor. . . . His ‘speeches’ are actually sets of four-by-six-inch cards on which he has written paragraphs and anecdotes with a felt-tipped pen, and which he shuffles to give slight variations. His fund of knowledge seems to be made up largely of clippings—stories and polls he has come across that will make good material.” But texts like these revealed more about their authors than they did about the candidate and his political prospects.
The media had said the same thing in 1966, when he won the Republican nomination for governor—and the “joke” had won the election nonetheless, as much because of their condescension as despite it. Reagan had learned what Nixon taught, that being despised by the patronizing Eastern Establishment swells, who pontificated knowingly about the “country at large,” was nothing but a recommendation to the middle-class, middle-American “silent majority” who felt patronized by the same people themselves. He wasn’t a “dim figure” to them. They knew, because they had listened to his radio broadcasts and read the proliferating numbers of conservative movement newspaper columnists from which he so frequently drew his material. Apparently you had to be a New Yorker writer not to understand what he was all about.
And you apparently had to be a Washington Star reporter not to know about another frequent Reagan reference from his broadcasts over the previous year—which, a February 9 feature in the Star reported, had “hit a nerve” with his New Hampshire audiences. The piece began:
WASHINGTON, Feb. 14—Few people realize it, but Linda Taylor, a 47-year-old Chicago welfare recipient, has became a major campaign issue in the New Hampshire Republican Primary.
Former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California has referred to her at nearly every stop, using her as part of his “citizens’ press conference” format.
“There’s a woman in Chicago,” the Republican candidate said recently to an audience in Gilford, N.H., during his free-swinging attack on welfare abuses. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.” He added:
“And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.”
Neither that reporter nor the New York Times editors who reprinted his piece on February 15 seemed to know that Taylor had been the subject of scores of stories in the Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers since 1974 (indeed, the Times reported on her in December 1974); the Trib even had nickname for her, the “Welfare Queen.” The Washington Star went on to patiently debunk the claim: she was being prosecuted for $8,000 in welfare fraud, not $150,000, though the prosecutor allowed that she may have made off with a greater amount. (The Star didn’t point out that Reagan had no evidence to suggest her scams were typical, that using Taylor to cast aspersions on welfare as such was like citing the exploits of a notorious bank robber in order to argue we shouldn’t have banks.)
The Star article went on to debunk other Reagan claims: “We lopped 400,000 off the welfare roles” (it was 232,070). In New York, “If you are a slum dweller, you can get an apartment with 11-foot ceilings, with a 20-foot balcony, a swimming pool and gymnasium, laundry room, and the rent begins at $113.20” (92 out of a total of 656 units in Taino Towers were six-bedroom apartments for large families; these had a high ceiling over only the kitchen and living room “to allow a space configuration that saves what would otherwise be wasted corridor space,” and they went for around $450 a month; the pool, gym, and laundry room served 200,000 neighborhood residents). Social Security was “$2.5 trillion out of balance” (the chief actuary for the Social Security Administration explained that was only true “if the nation stopped producing new workers”). “No other country in the world puts so many taxes on business.” (“According to tax experts, comparative taxation is a very difficult subject because it can be compared so many different ways.”)
The same day there were also would-be embarrassing revelations about Reagan in the Boston Globe (“OIL, GAS DONATIONS FLOWING TO REAGAN”) and the Scripps-Howard newspapers, which revived the story that he paid no taxes in 1971, after Ford released his own federal ($106,000 paid on an income of $250,000) and Michigan state ($9,123) tax returns. Neither made much of an impact. How could a guy who sounded as warmly populist as this—“I believe that the President of the United States is what Harry Truman called him: he is the people’s lobbyist in Washington . . . the only one there who was elected for all the people,” responsible for “taking problems over the heads of the Congress to the people”—be a money-lusting plutocrat?
The $90 million brouhaha having died down, he next faced a brouhaha over Social Security. Having promised in a Florida appearance to reverse the policy of denying benefits to retirees making more than $2,700, he was asked how in the world the country could afford it. He said the only reason we couldn’t was that the Social Security funds “are not invested, as they could be invested, in the industrial might of America”—in the stock market, where they should be. Ford said that this was “back door socialism” and threatened the existence of Social Security itself. Reagan gave back as good as he got: “It is unconscionable,” he said at a senior citizens’ home in Manchester, “for whatever political purpose, for someone to frighten people who are dependent on Social Security into believing that something may interrupt their payments.” He, on the other hand, was working to preserve their payments: “If Social Security were an insurance company, they’d be put in jail by now. . . . Government is not the answer to the problem; government is the problem.”
He was now eligible for Social Security himself, having turned sixty-five on February 6; if he was elected there would be only one president who had been older—William Henry Harrison, who lasted a month in office before croaking. It did not sho
w. The Globe described the “old Gipper” campaigning tirelessly, hatless and coatless, taking questions from all comers for upwards of an hour, “while the reporters and photographers slowly turned gray with fatigue and cold.” (His handlers might have wanted him to play down his age, but he wasn’t having any of it, telling crowds outside a fire station of the time he dreamed of becoming a fireman—“back when horses were still pulling the engines.”)
Ford arrived to a modest turnout on a clear day at the Manchester airport for his first election outside Michigan in his life, and his first competitive campaign since the early 1950s. The stylistic contrast was striking: Ford looked stolid, plodding, square (his face, literally, looked square); his voice sounded simultaneously flat and forced, too slow then suddenly too fast, as if he had glue in his mouth. The ideological contrast, meanwhile, he deliberately obscured. The elite’s media culture might still be liberal. ABC News, for instance, ran a rueful Valentine’s Day report decrying “rampant nationalism” at the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria: a poignant narration of the games’ decline from the original goal of the revived modern Olympics as not “just a place for people to win medals, nor certainly a place to demonstrate the superiority of one political system over another,” but rather “a festival of life and sport,” to something where “the sporting links between athletes from five continents seemed distressingly absent.” Athletes and coaches skipped the recital of the Olympic oath, Peter Jennings ruefully intoned; American fans “seem to see hockey as an extension of the Cold War on ice.” Republican primary voters in New Hampshire were different.
So, standing behind a podium bedecked with the presidential seal, Ford offered Reaganite utterances that the U.S. government couldn’t have built a Model T for less than fifty thousand dollars. He added boasts that the unemployment rate had dropped from 8.3 to 7.8 percent, and demagogic promises to keep open the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and widen coastal fishing boundaries—then said that “anybody to the right of me, Democrat or Republican, can’t win a national election.” He sent surrogates to dole out the tough stuff. Henry Kissinger said negotiations with China and the USSR were “too delicate, too important for world peace to be used for simply partisan sloganeering.” A team including San Diego mayor Pete Wilson; treasury secretary William Simon; John Tower, the conservative senator; and Elliot Richardson, the Watergate hero, now commerce secretary, fanned out through New Hampshire for Ford. Wilson called Reagan “the worst governor in the history of the state.” Richardson said the prospect of a Reagan presidency terrified him, and called his supporters “right-wing ultra conservatives.” Reagan responded niftily to that: “I’m a little surprised by this statement about my so-called extremism,” he said with a smile. “It does come rather strange because [Ford] tried on two different occasions to persuade me to accept any of several cabinet positions in his administration, and he did appoint me subsequently to his CIA investigating commission.”
A reporter followed up: to dissuade you from running? “No,” he chuckled. “I just thought he recognized my executive ability.” An embarrassed Ford campaign was forced to confirm that what Reagan said about the cabinet offers was true.
The Granite State endured an infestation of hecklers. They came from an outfit called the People’s Bicentennial Commission, whose chairman, Jeremy Rifkin, said “corporate America has conceived a Bicentennial plan to manipulate the mass psychology of an entire nation back into conformity with its vision of what American life should be,” and whose sympathizer Douglas Dowd, a professor at Cornell, published a widely circulated Marxist interpretation of American economic history titled The Twisted Dream. “Now,” Reagan had explained on the radio the previous October, “this group should not be confused with the official American Revolution Bicentennial Committee, though just to fuzz things up a bit the People’s Bicentennial Commission did manage to squeeze some federal grant money out of some gullible bureaucrats to foster its effort to prove that the American Revolution was in reality a kissing cousin to Marxism and Leninism.”
Ford handled them well enough. At the University of New Hampshire, before 3,500 people, a student in an ape suit, representing Ronald Reagan’s most famous costar—not Bette Davis—asked the president a leading question about the abuses of big business. Ford, unruffled, said he couldn’t understand one of the words, got him to repeat it, then answered the question. Reagan, though, veritably thrived in their presence—approaching them before they had a chance to approach him. “Don’t let me get away with it,” he told them. “Check me out. Don’t let yourself be the sucker generation. Check out both sides of an issue. Don’t let anyone indoctrinate you in or out of the question.” Then he gave his side. He quoted Rifkin equating America’s eighteenth-century revolutionaries with Mao, Lenin, Che. “Do you agree with that?”
Students at Dartmouth cheered.
“I’m disappointed. I don’t associate those Americans with the genocide and the dungeon states created by Lenin and the others.”
“He’s good,” said someone who was supposed to be protesting against him, admiringly.
Not that he stopped saying what some might consider to be kooky things—for instance, accusing the National Education Association, the teachers’ union, of working for a “federal educational system” like the one he said had been a “road to disaster” once upon a time, in Germany: “They changed their academic system to suit the rule of the dictator who was in charge at that time. . . . Where they had a national school system . . . when [he] said burn the books, they burned the books.” Or, speaking to a “ranch breakfast” at a Holiday Inn ballroom in Kankakee, Illinois, on February 13, “I happen to believe there was a divine plan in the settling of this land between the oceans.” Even the skeptical Elizabeth Drew had to admit how good he sounded doing it. “He comes across as a pleasant man who understands why people are angry. . . . He talks to people’s grievances, but he doesn’t seem mean,” she wrote; his was “a respectful mad, a decent American fedupness. . . . It is the same list that George Wallace and Spiro Agnew attacked. . . . But Reagan comes across as doing it in a much nicer way.”
Ford, tacking right once more with an announcement that he’d newly support the death penalty for some crimes, suffered his usual blight of bad luck. His vice president humiliated him by announcing he would not rule out running himself if Ford were defeated in a few primaries. (Reagan came back with another nice quip: “If he chooses to run that’s fine, but they’ve got twenty-seven candidates on the other side tied for last.”) The man who made Ford president, Richard Nixon, humiliated him by reemerging in the news with the announcement from San Clemente that he would be making a return trip to China, just before the New Hampshire vote. (William Loeb ran a front-page editorial: LET THE RED CHINESE KEEP HIM.) In the week before the balloting, polls had them neck-and-neck. Mel Thomson went on Meet the Press and said Reagan would win the New Hampshire primary by 5 points. A Ford supporter said, “If people are apathetic and don’t vote, Reagan wins because those goddamned Reagan people will vote no matter what.”
“MR. GELINAS, I AM DICK DENNY from Atlanta, Georgia, and I am here on behalf of my friend Jimmy Carter.”
Of the twenty-seven Democrats tied for last place in New Hampshire—well, there were only nine, but who was counting—once more it was Carter who defined the terrain, and once more that was the product of sedulous organization. Since April he’d had a cadre of political guerrilla warriors living and working out of a drafty, tumbledown house in Manchester—“Camp Carter.” That fall, they established the “Peanut Brigade,” Hamilton Jordan’s revision of a program from the 1970 governor’s race in which natives of Carter’s Sumter County fanned out across Georgia carrying scrolls with testimonials to their man’s character and integrity. Gone national, the cadre brought some ninety-eight from the Peach State to the Granite State in a Southern Airways charter, ages fifteen to seventy-eight, including an air-conditioning contractor, a history professor, a grandmother of six, the retired dean of Georgi
a Southern College (he smoked a cigar), the wife of Lieutenant Governor Zell Miller, a rehabilitated drug addict, and Starlett Mackendree, proprietor of Possum’s Poke & Tote Shop in Albany, Georgia. Not to mention a complement from Carter’s colorful family: Aunt Sissy, Cousin Hugh—and Ruth Carter Stapleton, the candidate’s sister, proprietor of a faith-healing ministry, who in a story soon to become famous led her brother to a “born again” experience during a walk in the woods after his crushing 1966 loss in his first gubernatorial race. They arrived in New Hampshire on February 4 to subzero weather and three feet of snow, which made for splendid pictures on that evening’s news when many threw snowballs for the first time in their lives.
The next morning, bundled up in boots and gloves and “ ‘long Johns,’ or thermal underwear”—as their Boswell, Harold Isaacs, described the novel garment in a 1977 book—they headed out, baffled by New England street numbers, 100 on one side of the street and 1700 on the other. They aimed to reach forty thousand voters—one-third of the state’s Democrats—and reached a third of their goal in the first three days alone.
A retired college dean said: “We’ve got a mighty good man running for President from our state.”
A housewife, teeth chattering so hard she could barely speak, was invited in for a cup of hot coffee and told by her host, “Bless your heart, we don’t even go out in this weather ourselves.”
Roy Wood, from Roswell, Georgia, won a vote from a little old lady who thought he was the plumber she’d called and who was so embarrassed she invited him in for Greek wine: “They know we believe in him,” he said of what the other outmatched campaigns derided as “peanut crackin’ storm troopers” and “a group of carpetbaggers telling New Hampshire to vote,” and evidence—these opponents wished—that Carter didn’t have enough local support to staff a campaign.
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 84