Reagan

by Bob Spitz

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  There were still too many hurdles to overcome to worry about Ronald Reagan’s horoscope. As the campaign approached its first genuine test, on February 24, 1976, Sears kept an eye trained on the Democratic caucuses that were playing out halfway across the country in Iowa. For all intents and purposes, the New Hampshire primary was regarded as the first real gauge of the national pulse, but a slate of Democratic hopefuls had edged into Iowa, expecting that its early-January caucuses might provide an indication of who would catch on.

  Ted Kennedy, long seen as the “inevitable” nominee, had taken his name out of contention in 1974, throwing the Democratic race wide open. In the intervening months, other candidates started to surface, chief among them Arizona congressman Morris K. Udall; former governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina; former senator Fred Harris of Oklahoma; Sargent Shriver, Ted Kennedy’s brother-in-law; Idaho senator Frank Church; Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas; and George Wallace, the far-right Democrat who had the fringe vote all to himself. Washington senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a recognized front-runner with strong foreign-policy experience and an enormous war chest, decided to skip the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, which John Sears considered a foolish call, and it was ultimately fatal. Eyeing a possible challenger in the general election, Sears watched the action with great interest to see who would emerge from a crowded field.

  No one—not even a hardened oddsmaker like Sears—imagined a longer shot or a darker horse than the one-term former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter. Sears admits freely, “I’d never heard of him.” Carter, an energetic and determined campaigner, had zeroed in on Iowa, where he’d been stockpiling local coverage and goodwill for the better part of two years. Iowans took to his warm, personable style—one reporter called it “a kind of soft-sell evangelism”—that cut across the ideological divide. “I want a government,” he told audiences, “that is as good, and honest, and decent, and truthful, and fair, and competent, and idealistic, and compassionate, and as filled with love as are the American people.” Especially after the sour taste of the Nixon era, it was a hard credo to refuse coming from Jimmy—Jimmy—which he encouraged everyone to call him, putting his candidacy on a first-name basis. Potential voters who weren’t at home when he knocked on their doors often found a note wedged in a crack that said, “Just stopped by to say hello. Jimmy.” On January 25, 1976, Carter had staged an upset, emerging with a clear-cut victory in Iowa.

  And John Sears knew that gave the dark horse momentum.

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  Momentum seemed to be on Ronald Reagan’s side. As January drew to a close, polls showed him edging past Ford in New Hampshire, which shifted attention to the next major primary in Florida, on March 9.* A decisive win on February 24 would put Florida in play, where sixty-six delegates to the convention were at stake.

  But momentum was a fickle thing. With days to go, both candidates made a final push through New Hampshire to move the needle to their advantage. The Reagan strategy designed by Hugh Gregg was to work their man hard the last week, doubling back through Manchester, Concord, and Nashua, then send him on to campaign in Illinois (including a visit to Tampico) the last three days before the primary, allowing his volunteers to get out the vote. It sounded good as strategies went, but in practice it proved their eventual undoing.

  Things started to unravel very quickly. The moment Reagan left the state, Ford swooped in. Until that time, his staff had employed the Rose Garden strategy: polling showed them that, on the stump, Ford wasn’t connecting with voters; when he stayed in the White House, appearing presidential, his numbers shot up. But in the final days before the primary, the campaign decided to turn him loose. “There is power in the presidency,” Stu Spencer recalls thinking, “and it was time to put it to use.” One of the powers at his disposal was Air Force One. “You fly it in and people drag their kids and grandkids out to see it, no matter who they’re supporting in the primary.” When the president landed in Keene, New Hampshire, where the short runway could barely support the plane, it seemed like half the state turned out to see it. An added attraction featured a firsthand glimpse of the President of the United States. Almost immediately, Ford began making up the difference in percentage, as the Reagan numbers began leveling out. Statistically, the race was a toss-up.

  Governor Mel Thomson provided another chink in the machinery. The campaign had done a pretty good job of isolating him from the press lest he do or say something outlandish that sabotaged its efforts. But during Reagan’s last visit to New Hampshire, the candidate announced, “I want Mel Thomson on board. He is my friend, he’s been good to me, and this is his state.” So against everyone’s better instincts, Thomson rode the bus with Ronald Reagan as they cruised through Manchester and surrounding communities. During the tour, word filtered through the ranks that private polling showed Reagan winning the primary by ten or fifteen points. Lyn Nofziger, in another lapse of discretion, shared the information with Thomson, who immediately reported it to the press. “It was a complete disaster,” says Jim Lake, who had been running the state campaign. “We lost the overwhelming surge of Reagan volunteers—they sat out the last push because the papers assured them we were going to win. And on top of everything else, Reagan was in Illinois, nowhere to be seen.”

  On Election Day, Ronald Reagan and the senior staff crammed into two suites of the Highway Hotel, a stately but ramshackle old warhorse in downtown Concord, to await the returns. A bucket of chilled bottles of Almadén Blanc de Blancs bubbly sat in a corner for the anticipated celebration only hours away. “Everyone was in high spirits,” recalls Jim Lake. “Dick Wirthlin, our polling guru, had done overnight tracking that showed we were going to win.” Even Reagan himself predicted victory, a practice he’d avoided in the past so as not to jinx his chances.

  Once the polls closed, the count started coming in fast. By ten o’clock, with the small towns reporting, Ford clung to a slim lead, but it seesawed—a hundred votes here, a couple hundred there. Lake confronted John Sears sometime later and asked, “What’s going on?” The unflappable campaign manager replied, “Not looking good. The data coming in from key precincts is way too close. There is no ten- or fifteen-point victory in what I’m seeing.” Charlie Black, who had joined them in the suite, says, “We were still holding out hope until about midnight, at which point we were down by about two hundred votes, but by two in the morning, Ford’s lead built to eight hundred or nine hundred votes, so we knew we had lost.” The mood turned grim.

  “And what is worse,” Black says, “Ford now had the momentum.”

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  That was an understatement. Reagan had been six points behind in Florida before the New Hampshire primary. Two days afterward, his standing plummeted another thirteen points. Sears cautioned the staff “to act like we’re ahead,” but it was a struggle. Even David Keene, who was running Florida and North Carolina for the campaign, took a look at the landscape and thought, “We could never come back.”

  Ronald Reagan had damaged his chances in Florida by earlier musing that Social Security might be better served if it was voluntary, not mandatory, or that its funds should be invested in the stock market in order to profit from “the industrial might of America.” He never actually advocated those changes, but in a state where a third of its population were retirees who depended on Social Security for subsistence, it reverberated. And the Ford campaign fanned it like a fire. “They made Reagan sound like a radical,” says Charlie Black. A poll conducted in January showed Ford beating Reagan in Florida by three-to-one among Republican voters, 37 percent of whom were over the age of sixty-five. Another poll gave Reagan higher points for “the personality a President ought to have,” but personality, politicians thought, only won beauty contests. None of this boded well for the March 9 primary. Even Reagan’s repeated attacks on his opponent’s foreign policies, an area of pri
mary interest to Floridians, failed to arouse. Jerry Ford crisscrossed the state in a show of presidential pomp, flaunting Air Force One, motorcades of shiny limousines, an army of Secret Service agents, and buses filled with press. Ronald Reagan couldn’t compete.

  Ford smelled blood and an early knockout. “Florida is really the key,” he told reporters. “If we win and win very well in Florida, they ought to know they can’t win.”

  In the end, it was only a TKO. Ford won the state with 53 percent of the vote to Reagan’s 47, a much smaller margin than anyone had expected. “We came up like a skyrocket at the end,” Reagan told supporters, putting his best spin on a decisive loss. But next up was North Carolina, where they were sure another loss was imminent. John Sears knew the score, but figured they could hold on until the Texas primary scheduled for the first week of May. Reagan had a sizable hold on Texas. A win there could shake things up, but Texas was six weeks off.

  And the pressure was on him to exit the race. The Ford people orchestrated an all-out effort encouraging Republican governors, senators, and congressmen to urge Reagan’s withdrawal. Across the country, in a series of interviews, they echoed a coordinated statement. “Governor Reagan’s made his point. Now is the time to bow out.” Reporters picked up the message at every campaign stop, demanding, “When are you calling it quits, Governor?” Even Nancy Reagan considered that the time was fast approaching when it might be wise for her husband to throw in the towel. North Carolina seemed like such a lost cause. She could see the toll it was taking on Ronnie.

  Secretly, John Sears called Rogers Morton, who had recently taken over the Ford campaign, and agreed to meet with him in Washington on March 20, four days before the North Carolina primary, to discuss the possibility of a dignified exit strategy should things go the way of the projections. “I wanted to cut a deal,” Sears says in retrospect, “so they’d quit asking us to get out of the race.” But not quite yet. Reagan had polled 49 percent in New Hampshire and 47 percent in Florida, both respectable showings. They’d wait until Texas, Sears insisted. “You beat us in Texas and we’ll get out.”

  Morton agreed and called off the attack chorus. He also knew that other factors might vanquish Reagan before he ever reached Texas. It was no secret that the fiercely competitive primaries had plunged the Reagan campaign into serious debt. Some reports put it at $250,000, but it was closer to $2 million. At one point, the campaign was in Los Angeles, set to fly back to a North Carolina event, but the plane, a jet they’d leased from United Airlines for $50,000 a week, was stranded on the runway filled with staff and reporters. Pete Hannaford nudged Mike Deaver. “Why aren’t we taking off?” he wondered. Because, Deaver said, they first have to open the mail to see if there were enough donations to pay for the flight. It was that bad. John Sears knew; he hadn’t taken a paycheck in months. Contributions had dried up to the point that almost everyone on staff was working off the payroll.

  On March 23, 1976, the day of the North Carolina primary, Ronald Reagan flew to Wisconsin for several unscripted campaign appearances. There wasn’t anything more he could do in the South. They’d worked their hearts out there. The county organizations had blanketed the state, and Jesse Helms rallied his troops. “It was hand-to-hand combat,” says Charlie Black. “The Ford people thought they could put us out of the race there, so we gave it everything we had.” But most aides sensed it was a lost cause. Sears gathered the melancholy staff and proposed scrapping the upcoming Wisconsin and Illinois primaries, both of which they were certain to lose. “Why don’t we fly back to Los Angeles instead,” he suggested, “regroup, and use whatever money is left to buy a half hour of network TV time to speak to the nation and raise funds.” No one objected. “We were all pretty depressed,” Pete Hannaford recalls. “North Carolina was going down the drain, there was no upside in sight. What did it matter?”

  That night, Ronald Reagan prepared to speak in the ballroom of a hotel in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The engagement was a dinner for Ducks Unlimited, a nonprofit dedicated to the conservation of wetlands and waterfowl. When Hannaford asked him if there was something special he wanted inserted in his speech, Reagan grinned. “Pete, we have five hundred drunken duck hunters out front. I think all they want to hear is some jokes.” It was a typical Reagan performance, in which he dragged out all the old standby material—and brought the house down. Sears and his aides watched numbly from the wings. Sometime toward the end of the speech, Frank Reynolds, the ABC-TV anchor, wandered over and joined them. “It’s fifty-five to forty-five in North Carolina,” he said. “I know,” Sears replied glumly. “You don’t understand,” Reynolds told him, “you have the fifty-five.”

  Sears was dumbfounded. Only 2 percent of the vote was in, but it had legs, he figured. When 25 percent was in and the margin hadn’t changed, he knew the count would hold. They’d practically ceded North Carolina and everything in its wake. But a North Carolina win changed the stakes. Suddenly, Sears recalls thinking, “we were back in the ballgame.”

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  The midnight plane ride back to Los Angeles was a full-scale party. The bottles of champagne left over from New Hampshire were opened along with several tubs of vanilla ice cream. Ronald Reagan sat in a seat near the cockpit, quiet and contemplative. “It’s too early,” he thought, refusing to declare victory. He remembered jumping the gun in New Hampshire, when he thought the primary was in the bag, and he opted to hold back any celebration until North Carolina was confirmed. A little past midnight, when the plane was somewhere over the Rockies, the pilot came on the public-address system to report that Reagan had won North Carolina, 52–46.

  “Okay, I win,” Reagan acknowledged with a smile.

  Finally, the governor got up and worked the aisle, shaking hands and accepting congratulations. His son Ron tossed him a football, which he one-handed, before flinging it back. An aide broke out in song. “Mike [Deaver] and Lyn [Nofziger] told me there was more booze consumed on that flight than on the whole rest of the campaign put together,” says Charlie Black. Finally, he said, “we had a good solid win.”

  More than that, they had momentum.

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  Reagan rode that momentum into Texas on May 1, 1976, and won every precinct in the state, along with its ninety-six delegates. “This is a turning point,” he exulted upon hearing the news. Sears immediately put him on a plane to Indiana, whose primary was three days off. They were eighteen points behind Jerry Ford in the polls there, but Sears was upbeat. “Because we won big in Texas, we would win the next one no matter where it was,” he says.

  Momentum.

  The force at Ronald Reagan’s back was palpable—and on full display when he flew into Indianapolis. “It was like Napoleon entering Paris,” says Charlie Black. “Huge crowds turned out, more conservative people than in most of the Midwest, which was surprising, because we’d stayed out of the state until the last possible minute.” The turnout had been masterminded by L. Keith Bulen, one of the virtuoso political bosses of his generation. Bulen claimed responsibility for Richard Lugar’s rise to prominence, as well as most politicians elected to the state legislature and not a few mayors and governors. Even though every elected official in Indiana was for Ford, Bulen instructed the precinct captains to shut down their efforts. He had the state sewn up. He not only turned people out, he told them how to vote, and when the polls closed in Indiana, more of them had voted for Ronald Reagan than for Jerry Ford.

  It was a miraculous, come-from-behind win. Reagan won primaries the same day in Alabama and Georgia. That made it five in a row. They were on a roll.

  Momentum.

  After a victory in Nebraska on May 11 and a loss in Gerald Ford’s home state of Michigan, where thousands of Democrats had crossed party lines to vote for Reagan, he was the undisputed front-runner for the Republican nomination. “We’re way ahead of where our projections were for this point,” he boasted to recor
d crowds at a Louisiana rally. Data revealed he had surged ahead of Ford in pledged delegates, 357–297, but the count was too fluid to trust. “I believe in my own heart that I can go to the convention with enough delegates to win on the first ballot.”

  It would be a startling, unprecedented upset, though not out of the question. Five weeks before the Republican convention in Kansas City, Ford’s delegate count stood at 1,104 to Reagan’s 1,090, with 65 still up for grabs. With 1,130 required for the nomination, the situation was “highly volatile.” Both camps were worried about poaching—luring delegates already committed to switch sides. As James Baker, who ran the Ford delegate operation, summed up the strategy: “Acquire delegates, protect your delegates and steal other delegates.” Ford had an arsenal of weapons at his disposal that leveraged the prestige of his office: White House visits, Cabinet and ambassador appointments, special honors, personal phone calls. On July 4, 1976, the American Bicentennial, he invited seven uncommitted delegates to be his guest aboard the USS Nashville to watch the tall ships sail into New York Harbor. He’d courted the thirty-vote Mississippi delegation, which went to the convention uncommitted, by inviting its chairman, Clarke Reed, to be his guest at a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth in the White House Rose Garden. As the New York Times noted, “The Ford campaign threw all the perks of the presidency it could at delegates.”

  John Sears needed his own surefire method to lure away moderate and liberal Ford delegates as well as any “undecideds” leaning Reagan’s way. Delegate support, he feared, “was in danger of slipping away.” Not all the delegates on Reagan’s scorecard were 100 percent committed to him. He also knew that CBS-TV planned to broadcast a story on July 26 announcing that its latest poll showed Gerald Ford had the nomination wrapped up, effectively ending the Reagan candidacy. His delegates would scramble onto the Ford bandwagon, like rats deserting a sinking ship. Now Sears needed more than a conventional weapon—he needed a bomb to blast CBS out of the water—and when he hit on one it was a doozy. With two weeks left before the convention, he persuaded Ronald Reagan to name his vice-presidential running mate—something that had never been done by a candidate—a move certain to shake up the race. “You think it’ll work?” Reagan asked him when the strategy was proposed. “It’s as good a shot as we’ll get,” Sears replied.