Certainly they had been there in the Bicentennial celebration, when Americans surprised themselves in their simple patriotic joy—as if Watergate, as if Vietnam, had never even happened; as if the nation’s economy had never in fact been held hostage by Arab oil sheikhs; as if the Church and Pike committees had never revealed the nation’s security agencies as cold-blooded outlaws.
And here is what Evans and Novak had not understood: that Reagan’s refusal to wax morose about Watergate was not an impediment to his political appeal. It was central to his political appeal.
At the beginning of 1973, the editor of Intellectual Digest explained on the Today show what was different about the time when the POWs went off to war and the time when they returned: “For the first time Americans have had at least a partial loss in the fundamental belief in ourselves. We’ve always believed we were the new men, the new people, the new society. The ‘last best hope on earth,’ in Lincoln’s terms. For the first time, we’ve really begun to doubt it.”
And here was an answer to the Ford aide who was so frustrated that this campaign even had to be fought, even more frustrated that it had become so close. Every time a major distinction emerged between the two candidates, the nub was what kind of nation America was. The Panama Canal issue, for example. Ford’s argument was, fundamentally, that the world’s rules must apply to America as well, that the way America had all but annexed the sovereignty of another nation was an embarrassing and dangerous relic of another time. Reagan’s riposte: the world’s rules did not apply to America at all—for into the hands of America God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind.
Don’t doubt. Blithe optimism in the face of what others called chaos had always marked his uniqueness—at least since, around the time of his tenth birthday, he began mastering the art of turning the chaotic and confusing doubts of his childhood into a simple and stout-hearted certainty. It marked, too, what made others feel so good in his presence—and what drove still others, those suspicious circles for whom doubt was the soul of civic wisdom, to annoyed bafflement at his success.
And now it was what had brought him to the brink of the Republican presidential nomination—if his campaign could just game this convention right.
FIRST CAME A WEEK OF Preliminaries: Credentials Committee meetings and Rules Committee meetings and Platform Committee meetings that were supposed to be interminable and boring, especially when an incumbent president was up for renomination. Not this year—the first since 1952 when the identity of the Republican Party’s nominee was genuinely in doubt.
Close presidential nominating conventions could be extraordinarily dramatic. Smoke-filled hotel rooms, hot asphalt parking lots, convention hall back corridors could become like unto the alleys and cul-de-sacs of a casbah—you could disappear in the intrigue. The key to these dramas was always a single elegant, but portentous, fact: in order to be nominated as a party’s presidential candidate, you needed a majority of the votes of the party’s convention delegates. Come just one vote shy of that majority—even if you had vastly more than any other contender—and the balloting went into a second, or third, or fourth roll call, as many as it took to get to a majority. During that interval after the first roll call, everything could come up for grabs; an also-ran could become a front-runner in an instant, if only the right bargains were struck.
Even the possibility of a less-than-certain first-ballot majority could throw the situation suddenly into disarray. In 1968, for example, at the very last moment, when Richard Nixon’s nomination was supposed to be all but assured, both Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan launched campaigns that were not really even campaigns. The two sides were practically in cahoots—in the hope that denying Nixon his first-ballot win would show him up as a “loser” who’d surrendered the confidence of his party, thereby “tipping the football,” which Rocky and Reagan forces each believed they both thereafter might catch and so emerge with the big prize. It had come much closer to happening than anyone had realized at the time, until Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who preferred Reagan, cut a deal in which Nixon promised him a veto on his running mate choice, and if he became president, special consideration to keep Southern schools segregated and South Carolina textile mills freer from foreign competition and the Supreme Court conservative.
This time the possibility that the vote would extend past the first ballot was much more probable, perhaps even likely. A South Carolina undecided named Sherry Martschink became a celebrity for switching once, twice, and then again—making the New York Times for consulting her former dentist (now better known as South Carolina governor James Edwards) on the subject. (“He told me if I didn’t vote for Reagan he’d quit pulling my teeth and start knocking them out. But he was only kidding.”) “At the moment I’m a lot more worried about the possibility of chaos than I am about who the nominee will be,” one Republican state chairman said. And as July became August, and news about individual uncommitted delegates breaking this way and that, according to one observer, was “greeted by the media with the fanfare usually reserved for visiting heads of state,” whispers of which wild card might usher in the chaos that might break the convention Reagan’s way sounded everywhere.
There was the question of “Trojan horse” delegates. State laws bound a little less than half the delegates—943 of them—to vote the way they were assigned by primary results, but only on the first ballot. Within many of those state delegations, Ford delegates, given the job as a perk for loyal party service, were actually Reagan partisans. That could give Reagan a boost of forty or fifty or, according to one reliable estimate, seventy-five extra votes, well more than it would take to put him over the top in even the most Ford-friendly estimates, if the nominating went into a second ballot. And yet more intriguingly than that, Reagan’s campaign chairman Paul Laxalt hinted that some of these delegates might be willing to break the law, voting by conscience on the first ballot. Why not? How many divisions did a convention parliamentarian have? A meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, after all, had no apparatus to enforce a law binding in, say, North Carolina—a state where all but two of Ford’s twenty-five delegates were actually hungry for Reagan.
And though touts thought that designating Schweiker might have scotched this possibility—“Nobody’s going to break the law for Reagan now,” one potential Trojan horse told Time—the mischievous Laxalt had also floated a yet slyer possibility, which also happened to be legal: Trojan horses could abstain on the first ballot, denying Ford his victory, persuading delegates rendered emotionally vulnerable in the heat of the moment—these things moved fast—that Ford was a loser, and thus open the floodgates for Reagan once and for all.
Then there was the possibility of credential fights—like in the case of a New Jersey man named Joseph Yglesias, who replaced a delegate who’d died a month earlier. The replacement decided for Reagan, because, he said, “Mr. Ford failed to show concern about the loss of jobs at a Bayonne military base”—but Ford forces said that the method of Yglesias’s selection had violated party procedures, and that the seat properly belonged to one Maria Scalia. Despite a previous accord not to press credential challenges, John Sears promised on August 8 to “go all the way with Joe”—and who knew how many others. The early strength Dwight D. Eisenhower and George McGovern had displayed in credential challenges, after all, was what had broken the back of their opponents in contested conventions in 1952 and 1972.
Or maybe the fight would be over the platform—where Sears could leverage nonnegotiable ideological differences between Reagan and Ford into a resounding victory for Reagan’s positions. There was the Equal Rights Amendment, at a crucial hinge point in 1976: only four more states had to ratify it for “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” to be enshrined in the Constitution. But in shocking referenda results the previous November, both New York and New Jersey had voted against ratification. Gerald Ford was for the ERA (as was Be
tty Ford), and Ronald Reagan was against it (as was Nancy Reagan). And there was abortion. Ronald Reagan was for the “Human Life Amendment” to the Constitution, banning abortion outright. But in a February interview with Walter Cronkite leading up to the New Hampshire primary, Ford had staked out what he called the “moderate” position, that “each individual state should decide what it wished to do.” And then there was pesky Henry Kissinger, from whom Ford staunchly refused to distance himself, and whom Reaganites considered Beelzebub. Maybe some amendment could be whipped, forcing the president to twist in the wind around that.
Meanwhile, impassioned Reaganites impelled by state laws to vote for the president in the first ballot could vote any way they wanted on procedural questions—so, even if all the media estimates had Ford ahead by several dozen votes for the nomination roll call, John Sears estimated he enjoyed a twenty-vote advantage on procedural votes. Call such a vote at just the right time, on just the right question—one that, say, could be spun beforehand as a high-minded, commonsense reform, and afterward as a resounding political defeat for the president—and the president’s aura of inevitability could be broken. (Ford, after all, didn’t have impassioned supporters. “He lacks the ability to inspire people,” one Ford delegate told a visiting political scientist. Opined another: “I wish he were more forceful and charismatic.”) And once that aura was broken—well, then the nomination would fall like overripe fruit into Reagan’s hands. Everyone wanted to get on the right side of the man who might soon be the most powerful man in the free world.
A PLATFORM FIGHT SEEMED THE smartest play. Whatever Ford’s delegate lead, this was, by any measure, a predominantly right-wing gathering. In one survey 63 percent of the delegates called themselves “conservatives,” up 10 percent from 1972, with the number who called themselves “liberals” dropping from 12 percent to 6. That was in part a function of a new rightward tilt in the nation’s electorate—but it was also due to a historical quirk. States that voted Republican in the previous presidential election got bonus delegates for the next convention—so that in 1964, when Goldwater won only six states, five of them in the Deep South and the sixth his native Arizona, those states were further advantaged in a delegate formula that already favored states with small, generally rural—hence conservative—populations. In 1971 the progressive Republican organization the Ripon Society sued on the grounds that such imbalance was unconstitutionally antidemocratic. (Conservatives, in turn, called the lawsuit antidemocratic—an attempt to win through the judiciary what couldn’t be won through grassroots political effort.) The suit made it all the way to the Supreme Court—which ruled that such things were up to the parties to decide. So the question was put to debate at the Republican convention in Miami Beach in 1972—and reformers, led by the moderate congressman William Steiger, lost in a floor vote, 910 to 434. (Nixon, who liked the rules as they were, did everything he could to fix the vote, including tapping the Ripon operatives’ phones.) The upshot was that the eight biggest states, with 49 percent of the population, had only 37 percent of delegate votes—and these were Ford-leaning states, mostly. Put ERA, abortion, or détente up for a vote and you could stage a story line about a party abandoning the nonelected incumbent. Presto! A runaway convention. For many Reagan devotees streaming into Kansas City, this strategy seemed obvious.
But not, apparently, to John Sears. Practically every time a microphone was placed before him, when he wasn’t gaming delegate numbers he was telling the press that he would be avoiding any strategy for victory that would unleash the sort of ideologically driven emotionalism that would divide the party for the general election. That, after all, was what had happened in 1964—and look how well the Republican nominee had done then.
But John Sears, he of the recruitment of Richard Schweiker, was a sneaky cat. Elizabeth Drew noted his “flat, round, moon face” and “light, mysterious—sphinx-like—smile”; he seemed, she said, “imperturbable. He moves slowly, talks slowly, and never appears rattled.” He never told anyone what he had up his sleeve, even those close to him in the Reagan campaign; he never committed strategies to paper. He had, she said, “the other side thoroughly spooked. When they talk about him, they nervously cite his maxim ‘politics is motion.’ And they await his next move.”
And no one saw coming the next wild card Sears ended up playing, least of all the Ford camp, who were left flat-footed.
MONDAY, AUGUST 9, WAS THE opening of the week for the Rules, Platform, and Credentials committee meetings. It was also the second anniversary of Richard Nixon’s helicopter ride to oblivion. Writers noted the connection when they described the trailers the campaigns were setting up in the convention parking lot: extensive temporary networks of secret communications lines to the delegations and leaders and whips on the convention floor: phones, television monitors, walkie-talkies—not unlike the listening post across the street from the Watergate used to monitor the Democratic National Committee, revealed when those Cubans were arrested that summer night in 1972. The lines were guarded by security cameras and swept daily for bugs. Because the Ford campaign’s phone lines had to pass beneath the Reagan trailer, they were encased in steel to guard against possible taps.
You could also preview the fight to come on the lapels of the committee members trickling into the city: “BETTY’S HUSBAND FOR PRESIDENT”—something to bait the conservatives with the “GIVE ’EM HELMS” badges, for whom the first lady remained the nadir of America’s moral dissolution. Posters bearing Reagan’s face: “HE’LL BEAT CARTER”—something to bait Ford supporters by calling their man a loser. President Ford looking stern on his posters—a deliberate choice, a strategic swerve from the guy-next-door English muffin image. And one button in which the two contenders faced off Western-style, brandishing pistols: “Shootout at Kansas City.” Which captured the soul of the gathering right there.
Reagan forces drew first blood, at a preliminary meeting of a key platform subcommittee. Before the full platform committee the previous day, a Saturday, Joseph Coors, the Colorado brewer and New Right donor, moved to let each subcommittee select its own chairman; that motion passed 43 to 39. So for head of the Subcommittee on Human Rights and Responsibilities the Reaganites were able to jettison the moderate governor of Iowa, Robert D. Ray, impaneling instead Charles Pickering, a conservative state senator set to take over the chairmanship of the Mississippi Republican Party in 1977. The victory came because Ford delegates had better things to do on a Sunday night, perhaps sampling Kansas City barbecue. “The right-wingers always come early and stay late,” Ford’s spokesman Peter Kaye, frustrated, told the Washington Post. The pundits read the tea leaves and saw a platform fight on the horizon—because Human Rights and Responsibilities was where hot-button issues like abortion, the ERA, busing, and gun control would be decided.
AT A MEETING OF THE Republican Party’s Rules Committee in the ballroom of the grand old Continental Hotel at Eleventh and Baltimore—this committee was separate from the convention’s Rules Committee; such things could be confusing—John Sears rose to speak. The expectation was that he would oppose the Ford campaign’s proposed “justice amendment,” which would bind delegates to follow all state laws, keeping designated Ford delegates from voting for Reagan on the first ballot. The cagey Sears defied that expectation. Instead he proposed to add to the convention’s Rule 16—of which subsection (a) said the nomination had to have majority support from at least five delegations and (b) said, among other banalities, that nominating and seconding speeches had to be limited to fifteen minutes—a subsection (c), which would say: “All persons seeking to be nominated for President under Sections (a) and (b) above shall announce to the convention and file with its Secretary a declaration stating whom he or she will recommend to the convention as the Vice Presidential nominee. This declaration shall be filed with the Secretary of the convention by 9:00 A.M. on the day on which the nomination for President is held.”
Sounded boring. It was actually explosive. It had been the pr
erogative of presidential nominees since time immemorial to present the vice presidential pick after the nomination—present it, in other words, as a fait accompli, for the convention to rubber-stamp. Now Sears was saying Ford must do what Reagan did: name his running mate in advance, subject to convention debate.
Sears made an earnest, high-minded pitch for what soon became known to every political junkie in America by the shorthand “16-C.” And there was an earnest argument to be made. The issue of presidential succession had been far from academic since John F. Kennedy’s assassination. At the joint session of Congress in which the new president pledged to fulfill Kennedy’s legacy, before Johnson had time to nominate a new vice president, the second and third in line in presidential succession, the House speaker and president pro tem of the Senate, looked so old and frail sitting behind him that they inspired a movement for a Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, clarifying rules for presidential succession, which passed in 1967. As for the running mates picked at conventions, the one chosen by Barry Goldwater was such a nonentity he inspired nothing but jokes: “Here’s a riddle / It’s a killer / Who the hell is William Miller?” Same with Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s pick in 1968—“Sparrow who?” someone asked at the announcement press conference. And everyone remembered what had happened to poor George McGovern: his selection process was so hasty and incompetent that the campaign never knew Thomas Eagleton had undergone electroshock treatment for depression. According to Sears’s argument, the responsibility for choosing the man a heartbeat away from the presidency should be subject to the cool, deliberate vetting of an august body such as the one assembled before him—not a choice made in haste, via who knew what backroom quid pro quo. Delegates, he said, had a “right to know” what sort of ticket they were picking when they cast their convention votes. “I think most people worry about the vice presidency and the way that it’s done simply because they wonder if someone isn’t being paid off after the fact.”
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 104