Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  Going on defense, Ford enlisted Reagan’s old gun for hire, Stu Spencer, to serve as political director of his campaign. Snatching Spencer away from the opposition was a strong move, inasmuch as Spencer had designed Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial playbook and felt he knew how to counter it. “Unfortunately,” Spencer says, “I was walking into a rat’s nest.” Donald Rumsfeld was busy consolidating power, which was creating turmoil in the Ford ranks.

  Spencer knew what he was up against. One scene summed it up. He had attended a Reagan speech outside Cleveland’s City Hall with fifty thousand spectators spread across the mall. “I was sitting in front of the stage with Ohio governor Jim Rhodes and Art Model, who owned the Cleveland Browns. We could see Reagan resting at the back behind a drape, looking almost lost on that giant platform.” When he was announced, Spencer recalls, Reagan got up and appeared to be dwarfed by his surroundings. “As he strode to the podium, he looked this big,” Spencer says, holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “But he flashed that great Hollywood smile, and started growing right before my eyes, and by the time he got to the microphone, he’d become the president.”

  Image—it won elections. Jerry Ford exuded a “Mr. Nice Guy image,” which played well on the surface. But there was plenty of show business in politics, and Stu Spencer had witnessed how Ronald Reagan used its gloss to his great advantage. Newsweek pointed to his crackerjack delivery and “Cinerama grin,” and how “he plays Presidential politics as if it were a remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

  Reagan’s appeal was immediately apparent. Early polls splashed cold water in the face of Ford’s campaign. A Gallup poll in mid-October had given the president a lead of 58 percent to 36 percent, but the margin was shrinking by the day as ground forces mobilized. “Polls show the President to be vulnerable,” a newsweekly reported. The first real test would come in the New Hampshire primary, on February 24, 1976, which would serve to determine how the candidates were popularly perceived, if not as a referendum on moderate-versus-conservative Republicanism. Republicans in the state leaned sharply to the right—the Boston Globe called New Hampshire “one of the most conservative states outside the South”—but they were skeptical of slick outsiders. Many felt they owed allegiance to a sitting president. Both camps recognized that New Hampshire was pivotal to their success. Among the Ford team, Stu Spencer says, “I was the only guy who knew that if we lost New Hampshire we were dead.”

  John Sears regarded the state as a rocket launch.

  “New Hampshire would establish the momentum,” he recalls. “Momentum, says Charlie Black, “was his knockout strategy, his vision of how the whole thing was going to work.” It was simple: if you won in New Hampshire, then you’ve got the momentum to win in Florida, the second primary on the calendar, and if that happens and you have the momentum going into Illinois, “then Ford is out of the race.” Momentum, Sears believed, was a force you couldn’t stop. His motto was: Politics is motion. “You are never standing still, so if you’re not moving forward”—that is, if you don’t have the momentum—“look out, because the other guy is.”

  Momentum was established early. On Ronald Reagan’s first visit to the state as an official candidate, Hugh Gregg had laid the groundwork for getting a grassroots organization firmly in place. The Ford people lagged seriously behind. Sears also gave thrust to his strategy by announcing the selection of town chairmen for the campaign in all 278 municipalities in New Hampshire—the first time that had ever been attempted. The news coverage that followed was plentiful and all positive.

  Meanwhile, the candidate was creating his own good first impression. In Manchester, at a jam-packed town meeting—a forum Ronald Reagan relished for its casual, spontaneous nature, where he could field questions, be more facile interacting with the public, and come across as one of them—the reception verged on the idolatrous. He mixed his talking points with homespun anecdotes and aimed a few well-placed zingers at his establishment opponent. Watching from the wings, John Sears and Jim Lake delighted in Reagan’s comfort level, the way he handled the crowd and their questions. “He was a natural, he loved this part of it,” both men recall identically in separate interviews. Interacting with people was essential to humanizing him. If he kept this up for the next few months, they felt certain of putting New Hampshire in their win column.

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  Stu Spencer wasn’t buying it. He was very familiar with Ronald Reagan’s outsize charm and saw it as a smoke screen for his lack of substance, among other vulnerabilities. Spencer also recognized that the president had to counterpunch—and fast. “I was scared to death of New Hampshire,” he admits. “I knew Reagan was ready [as a candidate] and worried that he was a threat to Ford.”

  Spencer had a plan. He would turn a speech of Reagan’s into political dynamite.

  Back in October, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune had walked into Spencer’s office with a copy of an article he’d written about the speech Reagan delivered to the Chicago Executives Club. It was called “Let the People Rule” and laid out a radical plan for decentralization, returning government programs like Medicaid, housing, education, and welfare to the states, while providing for a 23 percent income-tax cut. John Sears had ordered up the speech to budge Ronald Reagan off his standard script. “He was still harping on the woman who was a welfare cheat and the communist threat and taxes,” Sears says. Those topics no longer had the same impact. Instead, he directed Jeffrey Bell to come up with something more than a critique of big government, something that showed “a vision of the future.”

  The Reagan campaign had issued a press release immediately afterward, containing a transcript of the speech along with an itemized list of programs marked for reversion. All told, it eliminated a whopping $90 billion at the federal level, putting more onus on the states. No one so much as raised an eyebrow at the time the speech was delivered. “The press treated the whole thing with a yawn,” according to Pete Hannaford. But Stu Spencer read the details a month later and got what he called “that tickly feeling” telling him something was seriously wrong with the bill of particulars. “They didn’t add up,” he says, and he instructed an aide to “run the numbers.”

  Even Jeff Bell, the author of the speech, admits the arithmetic was out of whack. “It wasn’t well-designed,” he concedes years later. “There were too many uncertainties involved. I’d gotten a little ahead of myself, and that gave the Ford campaign a huge target to attack.”

  Stu Spencer was ready the next time Reagan appeared in New Hampshire. On January 12, 1976, with the primary just a month and a half away and a Gallup poll showing him dead even with Ford, Ronald Reagan barreled back into the state on a four-day visit, intending to stump from town to town. It was a frigid winter’s morning when he landed at the airport in Manchester, where Spencer was lying in wait. “Earlier that day, every reporter who covered the campaign, both in Washington and New Hampshire, got a copy of the $90 billion speech at exactly the same time,” Spencer recalls with uncontained glee. “The minute Reagan disembarked and held an impromptu press conference, they nailed his ass.”

  To say the candidate was blindsided would be an understatement. Bombarded by questions referring to the speech . . . the speech . . . the speech, he was momentarily at a loss to respond. What speech were they talking about? When it finally dawned on him, it was too late. Unprepared with answers, he stumbled trying to defend the details. When reporters asked, “You say you can save ninety billion dollars—how?,” the proper answer would have been, “I’ll get back to you on it.” But Reagan attempted to rationalize the sums, which only made his calculations sound worse. By the time he arrived at his first campaign stop, the speech had blown a hole in his campaign balloon.

  Geographically, New Hampshire poses problems for the best political candidates. Because there are few large cities and so many small towns, most campaigning is done on a stump basis, where you gather in a lo
cal living room or in front of a store hoping to attract a decent crowd, talk to people for two or three minutes, and then open the session up to their questions. Ronald Reagan loved that setting, and he normally thrived in such situations. But the $90 billion speech cramped his style.

  “We spent four days talking about that damned ninety billion dollars,” recalls Jim Lake, “and it undercut our momentum something fierce.”

  With a little help from Stu Spencer’s staff, the transfer of federal programs like Medicaid and food stamps sounded to wary New Hampshirites like “throwing elderly people out in the snow.” In the past Reagan had talked about making Social Security voluntary. Did he intend to cut off their Social Security? What did he mean, they wanted to know, by saving $2.7 billion for the cost of air traffic control or by putting $2 billion earmarked for military pensions on a contributory basis? Why did he seek to cut funds from a national treasure like the Coast Guard? An even more controversial element was the price of decentralization. New Hampshire had neither a state income tax nor a sales tax. “If you send these programs back to the states,” people argued, “it will mean enacting new tax structures.” These issues pursued him from town to town.

  Eventually, Ronald Reagan threw his hands up in surrender. “I guess I made a mistake,” he admitted.

  It didn’t matter. The speech continued to haunt him. The only way to neutralize it, his handlers decided, was to run him ragged, blanketing the state so that people got a chance to experience the Reagan magic. In one forty-eight-hour stretch alone, he appeared in twenty-two rural communities, holding “citizens’ press conferences” in places like banks, schools, and grocery stores. No hand was too remote to shake, no Instamatic too bothersome to pose for. Reagan was determined to work the state as if he owned it. John Sears told him, “We win New Hampshire, it’s all over.”

  The same might be true if he ran a close second. No one had to remind him of the results of the 1968 primary, when Eugene McCarthy lost to Lyndon Johnson, the incumbent, by a slim 6 percent, virtually forcing Johnson to withdraw from the race. If Reagan polled between 40 and 45 percent of the 1976 vote, it was said, he could claim a moral victory.

  That outlook sounded reasonable as a strategy and, for the most part, seemed to be working. Toward the end of January, aides told Reagan privately that he was polling ahead of the president by as much as 8 percent. Gerald Ford was nowhere to be seen in New Hampshire, and his presidency generated little enthusiasm. Over the course of the next few weeks, momentum began swinging back Ronald Reagan’s way. His constant presence contributed mightily to the shift, but his message also began to resonate with voters. Instead of sticking to general political topics like taxes and foreign policy, he pounded out populist themes that struck at simmering resentments. Abortion “on demand,” he stated, was snowballing to indulge “the inconvenience of the unwed mother.” He blasted subsidized housing projects in New York City, where “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 play room, and the rent begins at $113.20, and that includes utilities.” And he trotted out his old standby, the welfare queen, dredging up a woman in Chicago he claimed “has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” netting her “tax-free cash income of over $150,000.”

  He based these anecdotes largely on stories he’d read in unverified accounts in small-town newspapers and crackpot magazines. It didn’t matter that most of the facts and figures didn’t check out. They stuck where it mattered: in the craw of hardworking taxpayers who felt cheated by so-called government entitlements. John Sears grew concerned that these yarns of Reagan’s might come back to haunt him. “He devoted hours to reading letters that people wrote,” Sears recalls, “and would pick some awful stuff out of them that found their way into his speeches.” Once, off the cuff, Reagan announced there was more oil in Alaska than in Saudi Arabia. “Someone wrote that to him and he took it for fact.” Another person wrote him that the best way to get rid of atomic waste was forming it into golf-ball-sized projectiles and launching them into the ocean. When Reagan ran it past Sears to get his reaction, his campaign manager suggested they “save that one for later.”

  No one would have raised an eyebrow had Ronald Reagan read the briefing books his staff had prepared. Sears had introduced the briefing-book model in the 1968 election—comprehensive analyses of every imaginable topic, written by political heavyweights William Safire, Richard Allen, Martin Anderson, Pat Buchanan, and Alan Greenspan, among others—so that Richard Nixon not only knew the issues inside and out, but had the answers at his fingertips to any question ever asked by a reporter. The books were indispensable tools in confrontations with the media, especially when trying to defend a complex proposal, but Sears couldn’t persuade his candidate to read them. “Reagan wouldn’t do the homework,” says Jeff Bell, a contributor to the 1976 books. “He had a framework that enabled him to answer questions, even when he didn’t know much about the details.” Occasionally that backfired, but more often than not Ronald Reagan came through convincingly on the strength of his storytelling talent and charisma.

  An issue he orchestrated to his advantage was the notion that the Panama Canal, governed by the United States, would be slipping out of American control when the treaty with Panama expired. Jesse Helms had brought it to his attention during a campaign swing in Charlotte, insisting “there are secret talks going on about giving away the Panama Canal.” Reagan looked it up in Human Events, the ultraconservative publication he read every week, and found all the evidence he needed to confirm his suspicions that little good could come of returning the canal to Panama with its current leader, Omar Torrijos. He told audience after audience: “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours—and we aren’t going to give it away to some tinhorn dictator.” The first time he used the line, in a speech to a retirement community in Sun City, Florida, “it brought the house down,” says David Keene. “Reagan was so taken aback that he momentarily lost his place, but you could see the wheels turning. Here was an issue, relevant or not, that tapped into the public’s frustration about our misguided foreign policy. The way in which he presented it fired up their patriotism.”

  Subsequently, in one of his radio addresses, Reagan indicted Ford’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, as the architect of the secret canal giveaway and implied it would lead to Americans having “all their mail monitored” by Panama’s intelligence agency. And, now in New Hampshire, he poured it on, complaining that “our government had maintained a mouselike silence. . . . I don’t understand how the State Department can suggest we pay blackmail to this dictator, for blackmail is what it is.”

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  Abortion, subsidized housing, welfare, the Panama Canal—these issues, substantive or not, galvanized Republican conservative audiences. And when Ronald Reagan presented them in his inimitable way, they took on a kind of righteous quality. No one could stir up sympathies with as much seeming integrity or sensitivity. On a stage or standing in a small-town living room, he was a dominant, commanding figure, handsome, larger-than-life, and as polished and persuasive a speaker as politics had ever encountered. Even at sixty-five, with crow’s-feet tugging at the corners of his eyes and the hint of a crêpey chin below a well-chiseled jaw, he came across in person as glamorous and elegant, a tall, strapping man with dark, fashionably styled hair and a ruddy California tan. A personality, but also a flawless orator. The well-modulated delivery he employed to emphasize his viewpoints—a synthesis of tones learned from veteran radio announcers and Warner Bros. vocal coaches—infused his speeches with dramatic intensity. He could segue from earnest to comic to indignant to authoritative as seamlessly as major-league infielders executing a triple play. He knew which tone to use when, how to achieve the maximum effect, and when a hand gesture like the pounding of a fist, the jabbing of
a finger, or the swiping at an imaginary tear put the finishing touch on an emphatic point. Most times, in front of a sizable audience or at rallies, he spoke using a packet of his trusty four-by-six index cards full of hieroglyphics that steered him through the topical maze, but on the stump in New Hampshire aides suggested he slide the cards into a jacket pocket and instead “speak from the heart.” On those occasions, he’d glance around the intimate gatherings, from face to face—at folks who resembled the Midwesterners he’d grown up with—leaving people with the impression he spoke directly to them. An instant rapport was established. And word began to spread across the state that Ronald Reagan was a man of the people.

  John Sears noted how this was getting through to voters and decided to increase the number of meet-and-greets as a way of differentiating his candidate from the imperial president. The pace was grueling—but suited to a man whose increasingly confident staff sensed he was headed toward victory. “I worked Reagan hard in New Hampshire,” Sears says, “long, fourteen-hour days for two weeks at a time, after which he needed a break.” Nancy Reagan, who guarded her husband’s stamina as if it were as rare and fragile as a Fabergé egg, was dispatched by Sears to make her own campaign appearances. “We’d create an event for her,” Jim Lake says. “That way, John could handle him as he wished when she wasn’t around.” Otherwise, she never interfered with Sears or his strategy. Her only input toward scheduling was dictated by her reliance on astrology. She advised Sears that some days might be more advantageous than others for Reagan. “If I told you which ones were good days, would that be helpful?” she wondered. Sears recalls that she would phone him every so often to say, “Wednesday is a good day.” Not that it mattered to him in the overall scheme of things. “We were always doing things on Wednesdays,” he says with a shrug. “So she couldn’t complain—and neither could I.”