Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  But—who? Sears’s first choice, Nelson Rockefeller, would have alienated too many Southern supporters. William Ruckelshaus, the former attorney general, seemed ideal, but wouldn’t bring any delegates to the table. And former Illinois governor Richard Ogilvie, Sears concluded, “was too much of a stretch—it would have looked like I was selling the vice presidency to get delegates.” They needed someone from a big northeastern state committed to Ford, whose presence on the ticket would pry delegates away. Sears called Charlie Black and said, “What do you know about this guy Schweiker from Pennsylvania?”

  Richard Schweiker was a choice from left field. He was a two-term senator who had twice defeated popular Democratic opponents, but he was low-key, practically off the radar. Black told Sears that Schweiker was a Ford supporter, “a very liberal guy, but solid on right-to-life issues, gun control, busing, fine on defense issues, and likable, but most people don’t think he’s a heavyweight.” He also had strong union ties—a 100 percent rating from the AFL-CIO—which would put a scare into hard-core conservatives, but Sears thought he could convince them that in a general election union members might be persuaded to cross party lines and vote Republican. After all, Ronald Reagan was a union man.

  But would Reagan go for it? “He’d never heard of Dick Schweiker,” Sears recalls.* “And unbeknownst to me, Nancy had already instructed Justin Dart to see if he could wangle a second spot for her husband on the Ford ticket if we lost the nomination.” According to David Keene, Nancy Reagan was appalled when she met Dick Schweiker. She felt he “dressed like a Cleveland auto dealer,” and she ordered Keene to instruct Schweiker on the necessity of overhauling his wardrobe. Ronald Reagan proved more open-minded. After six hours pacing the patio together in Pacific Palisades, Ronald Reagan found Schweiker “easy to like” and, as Paul Laxalt told him, “no kneejerk liberal.” “On things where we disagree,” Schweiker assured Reagan, “I’ll make my case, and then I’ll support your position.” That was all Reagan needed to hear. “I’ve made a decision, Senator,” he said, “and I’d like you to be my running mate.”

  Before it was announced, however, Sears directed the staff to call their conservative supporters across the country to brief them, heading off any backlash. Charlie Black personally visited Jesse Helms, who said, “Well, I won’t be able to say anything positive about it, but I won’t say anything that would hurt you, either.” Black next put in a call to John Ashbrook, another staunch supporter, which didn’t produce as sanguine an outcome. After a long silence, the Ohio congressman barked, “Tell Reagan I say ‘Fuck you!’” and he hung up, never to return to the campaign. Schweiker’s selection proved that divisive. David Keene found out just how much when he took Schweiker and his wife to meet the Mississippi and Alabama delegations at a venue on the border of those states. Wallace Stanfield, the Reagan co-chairman in Alabama, told them, “When I heard about it, I just assumed my doctor told me I had the clap.” Keene had even less success with the Mississippi delegation. Clarke Reed admitted he “was so shaken by the decision that he was thinking of switching his allegiance to President Ford.”

  Perhaps the most critical call was the one Schweiker placed to Drew Lewis, his closest friend—some said they “were alter egos”—and Pennsylvania power broker, who headed the state’s Ford campaign. Lewis had handpicked and controlled Pennsylvania’s 103 delegates, which were committed to Gerald Ford, but Schweiker estimated he could pry fifteen or twenty away. Not so, he quickly found out. Lewis was staggered by the news that Schweiker had crossed over to Reagan—and crossed Lewis by doing so—and refused to release even a single delegate. In fact, immediately after hanging up, Lewis called the White House and personally assured Ford that he’d deliver Pennsylvania for him.

  No matter how it stacked up, naming Schweiker was a gamble. Loyal conservatives “were stunned and outraged by the choice,” many felt betrayed, and several backed away, including trusty Mel Thomson, who announced he could no longer think of nominating Ronald Reagan at the national convention. And John Connally, who had remained neutral throughout, promptly threw his support to Ford, saying, “Reagan has scuttled his own political principles.”

  No one—not delegates, opposition forces, or Reagan staff—knew how the addition of Dick Schweiker would eventually shake out. Everything—polls and strategies alike—had to be reassessed and recalculated. But Ronald Reagan was not conceding anything. The nomination remained a wide-open race, and he was heading to the Republican convention with a fifty-fifty chance.

  * * *

  —

  The Democrats had already selected their nominee—a man who delighted in reminding people, “I’m not a lawyer. I’m not from Washington. I’m not a member of Congress. I’ve never been part of the national government.” Jimmy Carter, the onetime peanut farmer, had risen from national political obscurity to vanquish all worthy challengers, men who were all of the above, men who couldn’t compete with his inspirational catchphrases—how Americans needed “to bind our people together to work in harmony and love one another.” When his audience members denounced “lazy” welfare recipients, Carter explained how many of them were mothers and children or the handicapped, all of whom warranted compassion and respect. His call for “a new mood in America” resonated within a party in need of inspiration and hope. One by one, he’d picked off Morris Udall, Henry Jackson, Fred Harris, Sargent Shriver, Birch Bayh, and George Wallace to emerge as the Democratic candidate for president.

  * * *

  —

  On Monday, August 16, 1976, as the Republican convention was gaveled to order in Kansas City, Missouri, the question that echoed through the brand-new Kemper Arena was: Who was better positioned to beat Jimmy Carter—Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan? The 63 percent of Republican delegates who considered themselves conservative believed Reagan alone could win in November by giving voters an unambiguous choice. The moderate wing of the party remained convinced that Ford was the more inclusive candidate—and the incumbent, no small consideration in a national race. There were ideological factors that also weighed. Ford supported passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, a law that would prohibit discrimination based on sex, while Reagan was opposed. And Reagan endorsed an amendment to the Constitution banning abortion outright, while Ford proposed leaving that decision to the individual states. The 4,515 delegates and alternates had a clear choice to make on where they stood and whom they stood with. But on day one of the convention, there was no consensus. Each side was still scrambling for delegates. Most observers believed that President Ford had enough support to win the nomination on the first ballot. The Washington Post put him ahead by seventy-two votes, with “119 delegates remaining uncommitted and others changing their minds daily.” The New York Times found “Mr. Reagan about 100 votes short of the 1,130 majority he needs.” Ford was closing in on the target, but the Reagan team remained confident that it could tip the scales in its candidate’s favor.

  John Sears had one last ploy. “We argued an amendment to the convention rules that called for Ford to announce a running mate before the first ballot,” he recalls. It was an audacious gambit that some read as “a desperate-hours attempt to sandbag the President into naming a Veep who would alienate some delegates.” In any case, it threw the convention into a state of anxiety, forcing a floor vote on the proposal, which became known as the 16-C Rule.

  “We knew 16-C was our last best shot,” says Charlie Black, who was on the floor of the convention hall throughout the evening of August 17. For four frenzied, tension-filled hours, each camp worked furiously, putting pressure on the delegations and their floor leaders to side with them on the procedural vote. The stakes were huge; the outcome prefigured the eventual nominee. Both candidates rolled out the heavy artillery. Ronald Reagan darted this way and that, shaking hands and answering questions. Pat Boone and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. flew in to help sway the vote for Ford. Wavering delegates got a phone call from the president, who trumped Boone a
nd Zimbalist with Cary Grant.

  As the voting neared, it looked to both sides that the thirty delegates from Mississippi would determine who won. Enormous pressure was brought on its chairman, Clarke Reed, who swung back and forth all evening long. “I’ll be all right on 16-C,” he assured aides for both candidates, his voice rasping and shrill. It was anyone’s guess which way he would fall.

  In the end, Mississippi had no bearing on the outcome. At 10:30 that night, Florida, which had abstained during the first roll-call vote, switched to “no” the second time around, dooming 16-C to oblivion. With that, John Sears called all the field leaders back to the command trailer parked outside the arena. “We knew it was over,” says Charlie Black. “From there, everybody went back to our hotel and started drinking.”

  Reagan, still processing the shock that the nomination had eluded him, offered his own concession speech. With most of his staff and campaign workers gathered in the Alameda Plaza ballroom, their eyes red and glistening with tears, he assured them, “Nancy and I aren’t going [to go] back, sit on a rocking chair and say that’s all there is for us. We’re going to stay in there, and you stay in there with me—the cause is still there.”

  The script for the next night, the last night of the convention, was already written before the festivities began. Ronald and Nancy Reagan, along with three of their children, had a quiet dinner in their suite at the hotel before heading to Kemper Arena for the crowning event. It was a solemn affair. The family knew the race had ended in defeat and that the rest of the evening would unspool as a humbling experience. Before departing, Reagan gathered them in the living room and extended an apology. “I’m sorry that you all have to see this,” he said. Nancy, in tears, toasted her husband, and then clamped down on her emotions in order to soldier the family through.

  When both candidates’ names were placed in nomination, there was no Reagan operation on the floor of the convention hall. The final vote went as predicted. Just after midnight, West Virginia put Ford over the top on the first ballot, handing him 1,187 delegate votes to Reagan’s 1,070. Ronald Reagan, watching from a secluded skybox, nodded his head and murmured to no one in particular, “I feel at peace with myself.”

  For months afterward, delegates from the 1976 convention would claim their votes went for Ford but their hearts were with Reagan. They cheered lustily and wept when Ford invited Reagan to the podium to call for party unity and bid his farewells. For Ronald Reagan, it offered little consolation. He was sixty-five, lapsing into the realm of elder statesmanship. He had already experienced the comedown of outliving his relevance in Hollywood. According to Pete Hannaford, who accompanied him from Kansas City back to Los Angeles, “He almost certainly believed that his political career, in terms of any future candidacy, was at an end.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE FRONT-RUNNER

  “Let’s talk sense to the American people.”

  —ADLAI STEVENSON

  I’m at peace with the world,” Ronald Reagan assured a group of reporters that had surrounded him outside his polling place in Pacific Palisades on Election Day, November 2, 1976.

  He had about twelve hours left to savor his serenity before learning that Jimmy Carter, the improbable Georgian, had defeated Gerald Ford, turning the presidency back to the Democrats for at least four years. It was reasonable to question how much peace Reagan actually enjoyed, considering his gimlet-eyed worldview. For the past three months, since his loss in Kansas City, he’d been retracing old steps on the mashed-potato circuit, railing against various national-security policies that concerned him, including détente. The country’s military’s dwindling preparedness preoccupied him, as well as the possibility of U.S. talks with the Soviet Union on limiting strategic arms, which he felt jeopardized America’s security. And the Panama Canal treaty still signaled nothing more to him than another indication to U.S. enemies of “America’s longing to withdraw inward” and to “create a power vacuum in the Caribbean that Fidel Castro and the Soviet Union will seek to exploit.”

  At peace with the world—not by any stretch of the imagination.

  He was struggling to figure out where he fit in the Republican political apparatus. His function in the foreseeable future, he said, was as party missionary, “courting conservatives who now call themselves Democrats and Independents.” Reagan and most conservative Republican leaders viewed Southern and Sunbelt Democrats as ripe for the picking. There was an enormous shift to the right among middle- and working-class voters from that swath of states who tended to feel fed up with big government’s heavy hand and with liberal policies like forced busing of schoolchildren, welfare, and the right to an abortion. Many had been Wallace supporters, others were former cabinet members of Democratic governors, and still others were law-enforcement officers who advocated for less outside influence in their precincts. Richard Nixon’s Southern strategy in 1972 had brought a lot of those people across party lines, people who had never voted for a Republican before and found that doing so didn’t pinch them. Ronald Reagan’s candidacy in 1976 had pushed the migration rightward so rapidly that the traditional Republican Party of Harding and Eisenhower was actively redefining itself. Its core principles—its very essence—were in a serious state of flux. One unknown still to be determined was Ronald Reagan’s role in shaping this crazy-quilt constituency he called “the New Majority.”

  Many GOP stalwarts had hoped he’d accept the vice presidency to run with Gerald Ford, but he’d scotched that option months before the convention—and, in point of fact, the job was never offered. In a way, it was a blessing in disguise. There was no evidence that his inclusion on the ticket would have tipped the election to Ford, and the wages of campaigning had taken their toll.

  At a rally, during an early primary stump in Florida, Secret Service agents had tackled a man who had pointed a toy gun at the podium. Some weeks later, another close call on the campaign plane warned of the tenuousness of life. Ronald Reagan had been relaxing just before takeoff in Ohio, enjoying a soda and a handful of peanuts, which he tossed in the air and caught in his mouth with a carnival flourish. As the plane rolled down the runway for takeoff, Darrell Trent, the young aide who was sitting directly behind Reagan, saw him come up out of his seat, struggling to breathe. “He was turning blue,” Trent recalls. “He couldn’t talk.” Nancy Reagan, sitting across the aisle, heard someone yell, “Heart attack! Give him oxygen.” Mike Deaver, in the seat next to Nancy, leaped over her and wrapped his arms around Reagan from behind, dislodging a peanut that had caught in his throat.

  “He was ready to get off that treadmill,” says Jim Lake. “You could see it in his face. The guy was just plumb exhausted.”

  And so was his bank account. Ronald Reagan had been campaigning for almost two years, during which time his income flatlined. Suddenly, there were plenty of expenses to consider. The new ranch in Santa Barbara required considerable upkeep, as well as an addition to its tiny adobe house. And his son Ron’s college tuition had to be factored in; he’d been accepted into the freshman class at Yale, whose price tag for tuition was a hefty $4,750. Legally, Reagan could have tapped into his surplus campaign funds. Under federal election laws, a candidate with a balance left over after a race was entitled to keep it for personal use. It seemed incredible that a campaign once scrounging for nickels had anything left in the till, but miraculously, due to a deluge of last-minute contributions, the ledger showed a $1.5 million surplus. But swapping it into his personal account seemed impolitic, if not downright shameless. Ronald Reagan earned his money the old-fashioned way. It was time for him to go back to work.

  A newly resurrected Deaver and Hannaford cranked up the old pipeline of radio broadcasts and newspaper columns, then booked a full schedule of dates on the after-dinner speaking circuit. The New York Times reported, “His income from these activities is expected to gross considerably more than $500,000 next year.”

  A political action
committee—Citizens for the Republic—was also created so that Reagan could solicit contributions and underwrite the campaigns of Republican candidates to Congress and handpicked state legislatures. To administer it, Lyn Nofziger was installed as the executive director, along with a steering committee of the country’s most prominent conservative ideologues, including John Sears and Richard Schweiker. But as confidants went, it was critical to have Nofziger and Mike Deaver on board, protecting his interests.

  Nofziger and Deaver: no two advisers were as close to Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

  “Nobody planted the seeds of conservatism deeper or more fruitfully than Lyn Nofziger,” says Stu Spencer. “He kept Reagan focused on issues that mattered most to the base and never took his eyes off the White House. He saw Reagan sitting in the Oval Office as early as 1965 and was determined to install him there, come hell or high water.” It was Nofziger who came up with the idea for Citizens of the Republic as a way of keeping Ronald Reagan on the path to the presidency. He devised a series of Citizens-sponsored weekend seminars—“How to Be a Good Campaigner”—for volunteers in different cities around the country, with Reagan featured as the keynote speaker and primary draw, that ran for a two-year stretch, from 1977 to 1979. The turnout was nothing less than sensational. “Folks came away with a good grounding in campaigning,” says Pete Hannaford, “and it became the framework for a volunteer organization for the 1980 presidential campaign.”