“A man wearing an authentic Nazi helmet and who has a red terry cloth T-Shirt draped over his beer gut blows a charge on a bugle, a sound that slices right through the glee club’s gloomy rendition of ‘Climb Every Mountain.’
“ ‘Yeah, Ree-gan,’ he yells. ‘The neksht preshident—Ree-gan!’ ”
(The alcohol flowed freely in a thousand hospitality suites.)
Downtown, the hustlers vying for attention included animal rights crusaders who’d erected a four-foot-high display of color pictures of foxes chewing their own bloody legs off to escape traps, to compete with the bloody pictures of aborted fetuses; “Jesus Freaks”; venders of elephant trinkets, Ford masks, Rockefeller masks, Reagan masks, four-foot-long drinking straws, the sort of silly hats delegates wear to get their faces on TV; a man dressed as Abraham Lincoln with what a reporter thought was “something frightful and unstoppable in his eyes”—assassin eyes.
Celebrities, trailing boom microphones: for Ford, Cary Grant, Sonny Bono, and Tony Orlando, spotted doing the “Bump” with Betty Ford; for Reagan, Pat Boone, and—“Oh, look! That’s Efrem Zimbalist Jr. Oh, God, he’s so beautiful!” John Dean, looking tanned and relaxed, was fawned over everywhere like a movie star. Rolling Stone had sent him. A reporter called that “a benevolent act of genius: they have provided the only evidence at this convention that Nixon ever existed.”
The city’s anemic red-light district was festooned with red, white, and blue bunting; several of the smut peddlers featured dancers in elephant costume in their windows. For nostalgia’s sake, Alf Landon, Kansas’s own eighty-nine-year-old former presidential candidate, was wheeled out, photographed riding his horse at his Topeka farm, regaling reporters: “There are some intelligent people in Washington, but there are more of ’em in Kansas.” (Of Jimmy Carter: “Do you know anyone who has figured him out?” Of Gerald Ford: “He did exactly the right thing [pardoning Nixon]. It had nothing to do with Nixon personally.”)
Political rumors, thicker than in an Oriental bazaar: the latest was that with Jim Buckley having removed his name from consideration, under pressure from the New York State Republican Party (which he couldn’t afford to cross, as he would be facing a reelection fight against the winner of September’s Democratic primary between the neocon-leaning Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the hard-left Bella Abzug), Jesse Helms would be placed in nomination instead. Rumors abounded about filthy hippie hordes set to descend on the city from up in the hills. (“They’re all behind the monument,” a cabdriver told a visitor, passing the city’s World War I memorial. “You can’t see ’em from here.”)
Political billboards, mostly Gerald Ford’s: the official campaign photo, PRESIDENT FORD, the one where he didn’t smile.
Political street-corner sign-bearers: TRANSCEND GUTLESS PLACATER WITH REAGAN.
Monday afternoon, they all streamed in the ninety-degree heat to Kansas City’s striking (some said bizarre) new Kemper Arena, designed by architect Helmut Jahn with all the trusses on the outside to keep the views unobstructed on the inside. In classic 1970s fashion, what was supposed to be a stirring sight, a fifty-foot-tall, 1,500-pound inflated elephant set to soar high above the arena, drooped flaccidly in the parking lot, its stomach accidentally punctured by its rigging. Inside, in air-conditioned splendor, delegates enjoyed unobstructed views, at the convention’s only daytime session, of spectacles like the Tennessee congressman offering his dramatic reading of the lyrics of the Johnny Cash song “Ragged Old Flag,” the presentation of a ceremonial gavel to the local industrialist after whom the arena was named, the interminable reading out of roll calls and rules, speech after speech by obscurities like the chairmen of the National Black Republican Council and the Republican National Hispanic Assembly and the chairman of the College Republican National Committee—a kid named Karl Rove, who said students’ “allegiance will be won only by the intelligence and soundness of our issues and the quality of our candidates.”
Peaceful so far.
Then the evening session. “I know you will all share my enthusiasm and pleasure over this next announcement,” said RNC chairman Mary Smith. “Princess Pale Moon, the beautiful Cherokee Indian, who sang the National Anthem, will entertain us once again. She will sing the brand-new patriotic selection, which was written by Will Rose. This is the first time that this selection has ever been heard in public. If you will watch carefully, you will find that Princess Pale Moon will interpret the lyrics with beautiful Indian dance movements.”
Texans, down on the floor in matching red-white-and-blue cowboy hats, were fidgety, waiting for something to happen. “I want to skin Dan Rather,” their chairman, Ray Barnhart, told Texas Monthly’s reporter (who backhandedly complimented him for his “unqualifiedly handsome face and a patina of good breeding”) about something the CBS newsmen had said about their delegation being ready to give up on Reagan. “You know one of the problems with a thing like this is all of a sudden you hear a rumor and—zoom!—it’s a reality.” Perhaps the person in his delegation who started the spontaneous demonstration for Reagan overheard him, and decided to prove Dan Rather wrong. The delegation revived an old ritual conservatives had begun at the 1964 convention—the conservative Woodstock, some called it. The Texans on the convention floor turned to the Texans clustered together up above them in the arena’s raked seating—the gallery—and cried “Viva!”
The gallery answered back: “Olé!”
Directly between them, as it happened, were the Ford family’s box seats. And it was at precisely that moment that Betty Ford—accompanied by her son Jack, the one who had tried marijuana, and her son Steve, the one who was studying stockyard management, and who wore a cowboy hat—appeared at one of the openings into the arena. Every Ford supporter in the house applauded. But Betty didn’t make her move to the family box behind the boisterous Texas delegation; instead she milked the reaction. Maureen Reagan, a sharp political operative herself, saw what was happening: the convention managers had held the Fords’ arrival for the moment when they could dampen the first show of enthusiasm for Reagan. Michael Reagan was about to escort his stepmother down to their seats. Maureen held them back, got the attention of the California delegation, signaled madly with her arms—and got them restarted on another round of “Viva!” and “Olé!” with the Texans all the way on the other side of the arena. She recorded the political triumph in her memoirs: “Thinking this signaled Nancy’s arrival, Betty Ford made her entrance. We quieted the crowd as best we could and allowed the Ford delegates to cheer Betty’s arrival. She seemed thrilled, thinking she had cut short the welcome intended for Nancy,” and sat down in the family box.
Then Maureen had her mother walk in.
The reception was staggering. The band, as it had been instructed to do when Nancy Reagan arrived, struck up “California, Here I Come,” chorus after chorus. Time, which hadn’t even noticed Betty’s entrance (“Nancy made the first move”; the band had goofed, and gave Betty no welcoming song), called her “a stunning study in red.” And the Reaganites could not get enough.
Mary Smith: “Ladies and gentlemen, may we please have your help, please, so that we can go on with our agenda.”
More earsplitting din.
“We love the enthusiasm. We appreciate your spirit. Will you please come to order!”
But there was no order.
“May I have your help please!”
Finally, after fifteen minutes, the noise began to die down. “I can look up from the back row of the Texas delegation,” the Monthly’s reporter wrote, “and see the underside of Betty Ford’s chin”; she looked “calm, regal, arrogant.” Then, sheathed in an aquamarine dress, Betty swept her arms high to the crowd. But the response from her supporters could not silence the Reagan throngs. She had been upstaged.
The convention script that night had been written to maximize comity. But there was none. The governor of Illinois charged that Reagan supporters had literally tried to purchase the votes of two Illinois Ford delegates. On
e of them said, no, it was the Ford campaign that offered cash to a congressional campaign he was managing. The FBI opened an investigation.
Old rivals spoke: Nelson Rockefeller, joking about his sixteen years trying and failing to get the Republican nomination; Barry Goldwater, who’d denied him in 1964, hailing “two of the best candidates ever to come before a convention,” calling upon the crowd “to pick one, and then . . . work, work, work to elect him” over “Mr. Carter and his warped idea of what this country is about.” But when Rockefeller began, a journalist said, “the convention’s enthusiasm pull[ed] back like a tide.” The public address system failed for a moment; Rockefeller later fumed that Dick Cheney must have pulled the plug. As for Goldwater, as he made his way to the podium, slowly, on crutches from a knee infection (he hadn’t even wanted to show up), the word “sellout!” rang out in the great hall. Afterward, in an interview, he sounded like Dr. Frankenstein surveying the work of his monster. His former supporters now working for Reagan, he said, were “some of the most vicious people I have ever known. If you waver an inch they call and write and say you’re a dirty s.o.b.”
Extremism in defense of liberty: now a vice.
Goldwater was gulping bourbon. He told his interviewer, “Reagan has become one of those people, the really ideological ones who won’t change.”
THE MISSISSIPPI DELEGATION, STILL UNCOMMITTED, still the keystone of either side’s victory, would still be a thirty-vote bloc—unless they voted to undo their unit rule, which was a possibility, too. Reagan operatives reminding him of his conservatism, and Ford operatives reminding him of their pledge to him, trailed Clarke Reed like shadows, wheedling him, humoring him, threatening him. Reporters trailed him, too—at first to his evident delight, and then, as the pressure closed in, to his growing discomfort. Monday morning at the Muehlebach Hotel, Truman’s Midwestern White House and the convention headquarters hotel, while shopping in the men’s clothing store, Reed had told one journalist he was taking a “good, hard look at 16-C” as a means of pressuring Ford to name a conservative running mate. Someone relayed to Ford’s Southern chief, Harry Dent: “Better watch Clarke, he’s flipping.” Charlie Pickering, the conservative who was to succeed Reed as state chairman, announced his switch from Reagan to uncommitted—though Pickering, smarter than Reed, did it as a maneuver to move other uncommitted Mississippians to Reagan. Then Reed said he might have “overreacted” when he endorsed the president. Dent gathered his Ford allies within the Mississippi delegation in a room at their hotel, the Ramada East, preaching to them like a black Baptist, half humorous, half serious as a heart attack, saying any of them who liked Ronald Reagan—which was most of them—had better hold fast against 16-C if they wanted to see Reagan live another day in Republican politics: his only hope now was to be named as Ford’s running mate, which would be impossible if Ford had to name a running mate while the contest was still going on. He was bluffing; Ford had zero intention of tapping Reagan. Intrigue upon intrigue.
Mike Wallace shoved a microphone into Reed’s face on the floor early Monday afternoon. Ford’s Mississippi floor whip, Jack Lee, in a red baseball cap (Ford state whips wore red caps so they could easily be identified at a distance during the fast-moving chaos of a contested vote; “floating” whips, who moved between delegations, wore yellow), thought he overheard Reed say he planned to vote for 16-C on the floor the next night—maybe even (hard to tell; convention floors were noisy) lead the fight for the Reagan amendment. Lee pushed a button on an electronic console: a code red that went straight to the Ford trailer. Harry Dent ambushed Reed later in his room at the Ramada East Hotel.
“Clarke, my goodness, what in the world you doing to us!”
“Whattaya mean, whattaya mean, cat?”
“You just told Mike Wallace on CBS you gonna lead the fight and deliver thirty votes for Rule 16-C.”
Reed, overwhelmed by the pressure, flopped, exhausted, onto his bed. “Oh my God! What can I do? What can I do?” (He was getting some pretty nasty letters from Ronald Reagan fans, calling him a scumbag and worse; maybe that had something to do with it.)
What he could do, Dent firmly advised him, was honor his pledge to the man in possession of the nation’s nuclear codes.
“I gotta get out of this! I gotta get out of this!” answered poor Clarke Reed, his rather pathetic attempt to cast himself as the Mark Hanna of the 1976 Republican Party plainly reaching the end of the line.
Back in the arena, under the red Mississippi standard, Dent and Reagan’s leader in the delegation, Billy Mounger, were toe-to-toe, throwing hot words at one another, Dent arguing that the delegation was so divided they should hold a formal caucus to vote on its will. Other key players joined the scrum; like iron filings drawn to a magnet, reporters pulled toward them to listen in. The Magnolia State Republicans’ twenty-nine-year-old executive director, Haley Barbour, belted out the names of Mississippi’s eighty-two counties in backward alphabetical order, Yazoo to Adams, to safeguard the privacy of the deliberations. It didn’t work; the screaming was too loud. Mounger to Dent: “You’re not a member of this delegation! We don’t want a vote!” Dent to Mounger: “I know why you don’t want a vote! We’ve got the votes and you don’t!”
Princess Pale Moon made beautiful Indian dance movements. Four Mississippi Republican leaders and a White House official from South Carolina found a dark warren behind some bunting to crouch beneath and continue deliberating to find some mutually agreeable procedure to determine the fate of the delegation to determine the fate of the convention to determine whether it would be Ronald Reagan or Gerald Ford to face Jimmy Carter in the fall. Pat Boone, meanwhile, worked over a black female minister, Jean Long of Gulfport, Mississippi, who’d declared for Ford after visiting with him on July 30. The Christian conservative crooner persuaded her to visit Reagan’s suite. There, Reagan turned her around. After which, according to Ford’s daily diary preserved at the National Archives, she heard out the president once more. Recorded Jules Witcover, “Nobody knew whose nose count was right by now.”
The gavel sounded, closing the first evening’s session. At that, the Texas contingent joined forces with Reagan’s twenty-nine delegates in the Michigan delegation and charged through a Ford cocktail party in a sunken pit of the Crown Center Hotel lobby chanting, “We want Reagan! We want Reagan!” with hands outstretched in the “hook ’em horns” gesture, encircling the traitors, who joined the battle themselves:
“Ford can win! Ford can win!”
“We’re against Ford! We’re against Ford!”
Grown men and women. The custodians of a major American political party. “The pandemonium,” Texas Monthly reported, “is total.”
TUESDAY MORNING. ALL OVER THE traffic-jammed town, each side was tearing down and ripping up the other’s posters. Two teams of young supporters, “Youth for Reagan” and “The Presidentials,” like homecoming football game rivals, lined the driveways of both campaigns’ headquarters hotels, cheering and booing and beaming and glowering at motorcades accompanied by police cruisers in the ninety-degree heat.
Open the papers: “REAGAN DELEGATES TURN ON THEIR MAN” was the headline of a UPI article about conservative opposition to 16-C. Conservatives were unimpressed with the argument of Mary McGrory that “John Sears had saved Reagan the fate of being labeled another Goldwater,” who “won the nomination in 1964 with the help of right-wing fanatics and hit-men.” A conservative spokesman was quoted, though whether he meant Sears or Sears’s candidate went unspecified: “He can go to hell. . . . In the bottom half of the ninth inning here they come with a Mickey Mouse proposal.”
Jack Anderson reported on the doings of Richard Nixon: “His memoirs, according to sources who have been in touch with him, will reassert the President’s right to steal and wiretap and rig court cases in the national interest.” And of Spiro Agnew, who’d raised thousands in donations from conservatives including Joseph Coors, William Rusher, John Wayne, and Ronald Reagan for a nonprofit, “according
to associates, to assert his views and assail his enemies. He is particularly eager, the associates say, to renew his assaults upon the press.” A New York Times feature alerted the nation to the importance of one Phyllis Schlafly, “who introduces herself as a lawyer’s wife from Alton, Ill., and the mother of six, a correct but incomplete description. . . . A blonde with deep blue eyes, a figure that can still be called willowy, and a winning smile,” she was also author of “two book-length tracts, Kissinger on the Couch”—actually more than ordinary book length; it was 846 pages—“and, hot off the presses, Ambush at Vladivostok.”
The Times also profiled one of her adversaries, Elisabeth “Betsy” Griffin of the Republican Women’s Task Force. “Tall and blond and—to repeat an adjective because once again it applies—glamorous,” Griffin was quoted as mocking Schlafly’s claim that ERA was an attack on “homemakers”: “I know perfectly well that Phyllis Schlafly has domestic help to scrub her kitchen floors. I scrub my own kitchen floors. Some day we can compare dishpan hands.” It continued, “Miss Griffin, who is married to John Deardourff, a political consultant who specializes in moderate Republicans, made it a point to bring her wedding ring, which she doesn’t normally wear.” (The Times didn’t mention Griffin’s profession: she was headmistress of a prestigious private school.)
“Do you hate men?” a delegate asked her.
“Can’t you tell I’m pregnant?” she replied. “I have a lovely husband who supports the Equal Rights Amendment.”
But this fight was just one of the sideshows. Turn on the TV, and the Today show starred the only delegates who now seemed to matter—the ones from Mississippi who were uncommitted. They were talking about the only issue that seemed to matter. “The energy, in these pre-16-C hours, is intense,” Texas Monthly’s man observed. “You can sense the desperation with which the caucus drives off intimations of defeat.” Ray Barnhart: “I’m reminded that according to all the experts Ronald Reagan didn’t have a chance. Well, I’m afraid that some of our pollsters along with some of our politicians just don’t understand people.”
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan Page 107