by Bob Spitz
Reagan called it a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” He envisioned it rolling out in much the same way as his welfare-reform bill. But the public felt differently. There was no great groundswell for tax reform, and unforeseen obstacles stood in the way. The California Teachers Association, with its mighty lobbying muscle, saw the measure as a direct threat to education funding and went all-out to vanquish Prop 1. The League of Women Voters called it irresponsible. So did the state’s Democrats, denouncing it as “an economic war on the interests of most of the people in California.” The proposition ran to almost ten pages of wonkish complexity, and voters found it impossible to figure out whether the amendment would lower or raise spending. Even the governor pleaded ignorance. When asked whether he thought the average voter understood the proposition, he quipped, “No, and he shouldn’t try. I don’t, either.”
The wisecrack didn’t help to boost his interests. Nor did the prospect of a special election. As the bill’s proponents discovered, when you hold a special election, only truly interested people turn out. In this case, the voters who streamed to the polls were the state employees unions and the people they could muster who were vigorously opposed. Despite Reagan’s efforts to sell the initiative—and an outsize $1 million to back them, including a $110,000 loan guaranteed by the Kitchen Cabinet to collect the signatures necessary to get it on the ballot—Proposition 1 went down to a resounding defeat.
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In the summer of 1973, Reagan ran into another wall of disapproval when he tried to hand off the state’s welfare programs for the blind, aged, and disabled to the federal government, whose payments were considerably lower than California’s. A protracted fight broke out along partisan lines that reflected poorly on the administration. When Democrats in the legislature introduced a bill to restore state assistance for the handicapped, Ronald Reagan persuaded Republican senators to block it. This didn’t sit well with the electorate. Radical students and welfare cheats were fair game; the disadvantaged and handicapped: strictly off-limits. He had touched a nerve, and the blowback was dreadful. Welfare groups sued the state, accusing the governor of legislative overreach—and they won on appeal, giving encouragement to the Democrats sponsoring the bill.
Two black eyes within months dealt the Reagan administration a withering blow. The mood of the electorate was turning chilly. Polls showed a growing disenchantment with the governor. Californians found him personally likable but inattentive. Many thought he seemed bored with the job. His staff knew the score. To pass legislation, it was generally better not to burden the governor with too much of the messy process. An aide let slip a well-known office slogan: “Let’s work everything out before it gets to Ronald Reagan.” Even the papers started tucking into the appreciable ennui. The Los Angeles Times, in a front-page analysis, quoted an anonymous Republican strategist who said, “There is a definite sickness in the administration.” This gave a fright to the Kitchen Cabinet, which had eyed the future with increasing enthusiasm. Its horse seemed to be stumbling on his warm-up track. Reagan needed to keep his eyes on the prize.
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Unfortunately, he would be blindsided by a scandal he refused to take seriously until it was far too late.
No one dismissed the Watergate scandal with as much conviction as Ronald Reagan. When he first learned of the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee on June 17, 1972, he was convinced it had nothing to do with Republicans, much less the Nixon White House. As the affair unfolded, Reagan turned a deaf ear to the increasingly incriminating evidence. “It’s a partisan witch hunt,” he told supporters at a rally in Atlanta. The president, he was certain, wasn’t culpable; for proof, he pointed out that Richard Nixon himself had ordered the Justice Department to prosecute the burglars. That same week, on a swing through Washington, he praised Nixon and insisted that Watergate mattered only if Americans allowed liberals to let it matter. In a letter to Ben Cleaver, the father of his high school sweetheart, he wrote, “I can’t say publicly but feel very deeply that we are witness to a lynching.” Nixon, he felt, was “a truthful man.” The Watergate burglars were overzealous, nothing more than “well-meaning individuals committed to the reelection of the President,” their offense “no worse than double-parkers.”
The results of the 1972 election only reinforced Reagan’s stance. Nixon trounced George McGovern, his Democratic opponent, in the largest landslide in American presidential history, helping to return Republicans to Congress in record numbers. Despite evidence mounting that suggested Nixon’s stealth hand in Watergate, loyalty weighed heavily on Ronald Reagan—loyalty to the party and loyalty to the president. Dr. Parkinson’s Eleventh Commandment remained very much in force. He had no intention of budging off its objective. Even when Nixon admitted sanctioning a program of wiretaps and initiating illegal campaign tactics between 1969 and 1971, Reagan continued to defend his leader. He maintained that Watergate was “not criminal, just illegal,” that all reporting about it was marred by prejudice and innuendo. “About ninety percent of everything said so far is unfounded rumor, accusations, and so forth,” he insisted.
He took the same public stance in August 1973, when Vice President Spiro T. Agnew came under investigation for corruption charges involving kickbacks he’d taken while serving as the governor of Maryland. As embattled governors, both men shared a common enemy in campus radicals, whose protests Agnew famously dismissed as “the cacophony of seditious drivel emanating from the best-publicized clowns in our society.” Over the years, Reagan and Agnew developed a mutual admiration society. “They’d become friends,” Ed Meese says. “Ronald Reagan really liked Ted Agnew and was shocked and outraged by the allegations.”
He might have been alone in that opinion. Few colleagues, Republican or otherwise, were willing to go on record defending the vice president. Ronald Reagan, however, piped right up. “I have known Ted Agnew to be an honest and honorable man,” he declared in a high-profile interview in the Washington Post. “He, like any other citizen of high character, should be considered innocent until proven otherwise.” It was a generous gesture to the one person most likely blocking his path to the 1976 Republican nomination. A vice president was the natural successor to any president, and party strategists assumed that Agnew would run at the top of the ticket, just as Nixon had after Eisenhower left office. According to an April 1973 Gallup poll, 35 percent of Republican voters named Agnew as their choice in 1976 (slightly ahead of runner-up Ronald Reagan). Agnew was already in the presidential pipeline, making speeches written by William Safire and Patrick Buchanan. He even had a shrewd campaign manager waiting in the wings—Nixon advocate John Sears, who would eventually serve at Reagan’s side. “Should Mr. Agnew somehow succeed to the Presidency before 1976,” the New York Times suggested, casting a gimlet eye on the Watergate imbroglio, “Mr. Reagan would be shut out; Mr. Agnew would be . . . invulnerable to challenge.” “To conservatives,” says Jeffrey Bell, at the time a young Republican operative, “Agnew was a phenomenon. He was whacking the liberals and had eclipsed Ronald Reagan on issues that mattered most to us. We had him targeted as our favorite in ’76.”
It was a short-lived flirtation. On October 10, 1973, after being formally indicted, Spiro Agnew resigned as vice president, opening the nomination to all comers. It also created an immediate job opportunity in the executive wing of the White House. Speculation was rife over whom Nixon would appoint to fill the vice-presidential post vacated by Agnew. The Twenty-fifth Amendment required that the candidate be confirmed by a majority vote of both houses of Congress, so to avoid a partisan fight the nominee had to be someone moderate, someone acceptable to both factions, someone beyond reproach. Someone supremely inoffensive. Holmes Tuttle and Justin Dart considered Ronald Reagan the perfect choice and put the squeeze on Nixon to name him.
Realistically, Reagan’s prospects were slim. While the Twenty-fifth Amendment charges t
he president with nominating a new vice president, the Twelfth Amendment, which established the Electoral College, requires that the appointee “not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves.” Since both Nixon and Reagan were registered to vote in California, such a pairing might trigger a challenge. Even more foreboding was Nixon’s opinion of Reagan. In a 1971 conversation with Henry Kissinger, he summed up Reagan as being “pretty shallow” and “a man of limited mental capacity,” a view he’d expressed in different ways over the years. If nominated and confirmed, the former actor would be a heartbeat away, which Kissinger termed “inconceivable.”
Nixon ultimately chose someone even more supremely inoffensive: the current House minority leader, a six-term congressman from the Fifth Congressional District of Michigan named Gerald Ford. If Nixon ultimately resigned and the vice president became the president, Ford would be the only person in the history of the country not to be elected to either post.
In Ronald Reagan’s eyes, that would make Ford nothing more than a surrogate—“a caretaker.”
In that case, the presidency would be up for grabs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“A HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR”
“There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”
—WILLIAM JAMES
Richard Nixon was taking a schoolyard beating.
By the spring of 1974, the Watergate scandal had evolved into a full-blown spectacle and began closing in on the Oval Office. There was no place left to hide. New and incriminating revelations appeared daily in the country’s major newspapers, spelling disaster for the administration, which inched closer to collapse. In the House Judiciary Committee, impeachment was in the air. Fourteen months of Watergate-Watergate-Watergate proved too exhausting for the most battle-tested pols. Even high-ranking Republicans, once fierce defenders of the president, threw in their towels and took early vacations.
The last loyal soldier was Ronald Reagan. The way he saw it, the Watergate conspirators were “not criminals at heart” and the president was an innocent man, hounded by “a lynch mob.” Reagan’s standard response to any question about Nixon was: “Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.” Resignation—a solution gaining steam in the press—never entered into Reagan’s thinking. “The governor was firmly and publicly behind Nixon right up until the end,” says Ed Meese, who not only shared his boss’s view but set the tone for the rest of the governor’s office. As late as May 1974, Reagan’s lieutenants believed that Nixon would tough it out through the end of his term. But either way, they were looking ahead.
The 1976 election lay squarely in their sights. But his candidacy would run against all trends. His age was an obstacle: he would turn sixty-five during the election cycle. Nobody that old had ever been elected president other than William Henry Harrison, who had dropped dead within a month. And age wasn’t the only obstacle. There was Reagan’s strident conservatism, which had sunk Barry Goldwater in 1964 (and, some argued, the Republican Party). Reagan had sold his agenda to satisfied Californians, but voters in the East and South weren’t familiar with his accomplishments—or with him.
When Nixon appointed Gerald Ford to replace Spiro Agnew as vice president, Ford promised him that he would not seek the GOP nomination in 1976 and would support John Connally. That suited the Reagan camp’s interests. Connally, they reasoned, wouldn’t pose a challenge. He’d recently switched parties—from Democrat to Republican—and both sides still viewed him with suspicion. But if Nixon ultimately resigned and Ford became president, it would greatly complicate Reagan’s situation. As the incumbent, Ford would have a formidable advantage.
Some in the governor’s office urged him to run for California’s open U.S. Senate seat instead. His opponent would be Alan Cranston, a liberal and the perpetrator of the Democratic Truth Squad that had stalked and pestered Reagan from campaign stop to campaign stop in 1970 and, in Reagan’s supporters’ eyes, deserved a good thrashing. Reagan could beat Cranston, that they were sure of, but he had no interest in joining a body ruled by committee. He was his own man, a leader, not a team player. He’d also ruled out a third term as governor. When asked about the possibility—and he was asked incessantly from 1970 on—he never wavered in his reply: “One term may not be enough, but two is plenty. If you can’t accomplish what you set out to do after two terms, you’d better leave it for the next team.”
Anyway, he now had his eyes on one prize.
His lieutenants were even more focused. Since early 1973, a core group of Reagan insiders met for breakfast once a week at the Sutter Club in Sacramento to discuss their boss’s future. They were all fully committed, come what may—Lyn Nofziger, Ed Meese, Tom Reed, and Mike Deaver, along with Bob Walker, Reagan’s Washington aide; Jim Lake, officially the assistant finance director and California’s representative in D.C.; and Pete Hannaford, a senior assistant to the governor. Later, Holmes Tuttle and David Packard, chairman of Hewlett-Packard, would join in. For now, they called themselves the Nofziger Group, after its loudest and most vociferous participant. They were unified behind one man, even though their goals often varied. Lyn Nofziger was a broken record: Reagan for President in ’76, no matter who else ran. Ed Meese wasn’t so sure. “My feelings were that it would be a very tough campaign,” he recalls. “Watergate would be a specter that would permeate everything.” He felt Reagan might fare better in the public sector as a mouthpiece for conservative causes. The others lined up behind either Nofziger or Meese but were obliged by circumstances to take a wait-and-see approach.
On August 5, 1974, events forced their hands. A bombshell struck: the “smoking gun” tape was released, revealing that Richard Nixon had orchestrated the Watergate cover-up and ordered his men to obstruct the FBI’s investigation. It sealed the president’s fate: Nixon would either have to resign or be removed from office. Even Ronald Reagan finally had to acknowledge Nixon’s culpability. “In view of the President’s statement,” he said in a hastily prepared press release, “I believe it is absolutely imperative that he go before Congress and make a full disclosure of all the information he has in this matter, answering any and all questions they may have.” Privately, Reagan was disgusted. According to Pete Hannaford, “he felt a sense of disappointment that Nixon had let his country down, mixed with anger over what he felt was the hypocrisy of many Nixon-haters, who had finally run their quarry to ground.”
The next night, August 6, the Nofziger Group (now calling themselves the National Political Group) was hosting a dinner at the Firehouse Restaurant in Sacramento for a much-anticipated guest. John Sears, a thirty-four-year-old powerhouse lawyer and veteran of the Nixon White House, had been summoned from his office in Washington to discuss the possibility of managing a Reagan presidential campaign. Sears’s reputation as a legendary “delegate hunter” preceded him. He had cherry-picked the delegates for Nixon’s triumphant 1968 campaign and was known to have racked up political chips from coast to coast. As Nixon’s political adviser, Sears understood how to run an effective operation. He was known as a master strategist with almost superhuman drive. If Reagan decided to make a run, the sentiment was strong that John Sears was their man.
Unfortunately, the person who showed up at the Firehouse powwow bore no resemblance to the legend. On the flight from Washington to Sacramento, Sears had drunk heavily and was “fairly smashed” when he arrived. His “rather oracular dissertation” delivered at dinner amounted to “nothing but babble,” according to Pete Hannaford, who spoke for the rest of the group when declaring the meeting “a terrible disappointment.”
A good night’s sleep made a world of difference. The next afternoon, at Reagan’s home, Sears dazzled an audience that included the governor and his wife, Ed Meese, Mike Deaver, Jim Lake, and a handful of financial supporters—Holmes Tuttle, Justin Dart, and David Packard. He put on a clinic on organizing a campaign, explaining his methods of analyzing prospec
ts and motivating a staff. “Reagan didn’t say much,” Sears recalls. He found it difficult to get a read on Reagan. The governor remained Sphinx-like, noncommittal, when it came to running in ’76. But at one point, he asked to take a poll of those assembled on the likelihood of Nixon’s fate. Going around the room, one by one, it was unanimous—the consensus was that Nixon would survive. Sears came last. “Nixon will be out one way or another by fall,” he insisted. “He’ll either have to resign or be impeached and convicted. Ford will be president. But he’ll be the strangest kind of incumbent because nobody ever voted for him, so he won’t come to the campaign with any personal constituency. That makes him vulnerable in the political sense. He won’t have the power an incumbent normally has, so it makes it possible to run against him.”
Sears didn’t hold Ford in high esteem. He liked him personally, but didn’t think he had the stuff to be president. “Nixon told me that he picked Ford because he thought Jerry would be confirmed [as vice president],” Sears says, “but that nobody would want him to be president!” Nixon wasn’t discreet about his estimation of Ford. With wicked acidity, he asked Nelson Rockefeller, “Can you imagine Jerry Ford sitting in this chair?”
John Sears could, but he didn’t think Ford would be sitting in it very long.
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On Thursday, August 8, 1974, Ronald Reagan was still processing Sears’s analysis as he was leaving the Executive Residence on Forty-fifth Street in Sacramento for his trip a few blocks north to the capitol. Ed Meese was with him, and as they passed the maid’s room, a little television on the bookshelf stopped them dead in their tracks. Richard Nixon’s countenance filled the screen, his face serene but solemn. “I have never been a quitter,” he was saying. “To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But I’ve decided to put the interests of America first. . . .”