by Bob Spitz
Family. Work. Neighborhood. Peace. Freedom.
The man had a vision, audiences concluded. And they urged him at every opportunity to run for president.
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As late as September 1979, “the acknowledged front-runner” for the Republican nomination was not yet a candidate. Ronald Reagan was still “giving the matter serious consideration,” still telling audiences that “it was up to the will of the people” and “the office seeks the man,” even though a fully staffed Reagan for President Committee was operating and raising funds in its headquarters a few blocks from the Los Angeles airport. There were also volunteer offices and fund-raisers in every major U.S. city. A full team of advisers was already working overtime, writing policy papers and briefing books. Even John Sears was back in his role as campaign manager, despite the fact that he was a controversial figure within the Reagan camp who had caused considerable discomfort with key staff and supporters. “In 1980, I don’t think any of us wanted him to run the campaign,” said Pete Hannaford, a feeling echoed by others. “And his judgment wasn’t perfect.” Paul Laxalt, the campaign committee chairman, was vehemently opposed, and so was Lyn Nofziger, who “thought [Sears] was arrogant” and blamed him for the losing effort in 1976. They aired a litany of complaints: he was imperious, secretive, pushy, inflexible. The drinking problem so pronounced in 1976 was less of a factor—Sears apparently had brought it under control—but it threatened to rear its ugly head. And no one seemed pleased with Sears’s plan to draw Ronald Reagan politically toward the center. That said, he was brilliant as a strategist, everyone agreed—there was no one else in his league. “The smartest guy I’ve ever known in politics,” Charlie Black says forty years later. Mike Deaver argued strongly for him, and so did Ed Meese, who acknowledges, “Sears gave Ronald Reagan an authenticity with the establishment that he wouldn’t have had otherwise.” And Nancy Reagan considered him “the wonder boy of 1976 and . . . the best man to lead us to victory in 1980.”
Sears took the reins early in 1979, along with his chief operatives, Jim Lake and Black. But the trio that had been so coordinated, so cunning, so productive in 1976 seemed jinxed from the moment they launched the ’80 campaign. “We couldn’t get it together from day one,” says Jim Lake. The main snag was a division of leadership. Sears needed to run the show, but felt undermined by the support staff already in place. They were mostly the longtime Reagan sidekicks from Los Angeles and Sacramento—the Westerners, as they referred to themselves—Lynn Nofziger, Marty Anderson, Mike Deaver, and Ed Meese. According to David Keene, “Sears had undisguised disdain for them.” He assigned each man a specific title and function, which didn’t meet with anyone’s approval. It touched off a storm of bickering and backbiting that seeped into every corner of the campaign. “We were in a constant mess,” Lake says in retrospect. “It was a nightmare.”
Marty Anderson, the domestic policy adviser, was the first to pack up and leave. He felt Sears undercut his authority by establishing a covert research policy office in Washington, D.C., which ostensibly repudiated and compromised Marty’s work. Nofziger, who never liked Sears, couldn’t hold his tongue. He would tell anyone who would listen that “that fucking Sears is a disaster.” And Sears could not abide a fool. When Sears had enough of Lyn’s constant badmouthing, he pulled him off the job as deputy press officer and reassigned him to run the state offices in California and Texas—out of sight, out of mind. Sears admits, “Life was easier with him out of the picture,” and entirely more tranquil when Nofziger eventually quit.
Deaver, however, was not so accommodating. Mike refused to accept an official title—any title. He felt justified by his own instincts and management skills, and besides, he’d been there from the beginning. Instead, he bounced from office to office, from assignment to assignment, often working at cross-purposes to Sears’s strategies. “Deaver was territorial,” says Charlie Black, “interfering with the schedule and reporting only to the Reagans.” This infuriated Sears, who resented being sabotaged. He explained that he needed Deaver to cooperate, invoking a simplistic metaphor in an attempt to tame the man’s ego. “It’s like an orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl,” he began. “I’m conducting and I need everyone to take a chair and play their instrument. We need to be in harmony. So I don’t care what you do, what instrument you play, but you can’t dabble. You’ve got to take a title—be in charge of something.” Deaver flat-out refused. “I can’t put up with this,” Sears fumed to his lieutenants. “We can’t win this way.”
In mid-November, when Sears made noises about quitting the campaign, Jim Lake approached Ronald Reagan and pleaded with him to intervene in order to resolve the dispute. “Governor,” he said, “you’ve got to step in. John Sears is indispensable.” Earlier, during an episode when Deaver had threatened to quit, Lake offered the same testimonial about him. Never mind: this time, everyone agreed on the necessity of a meeting to iron things out before they deteriorated any further.
The showdown took place on Thanksgiving Day at the Reagans’ home in Pacific Palisades. Deaver arrived first, not realizing that his adversaries had also been invited. He found it odd when Nancy ushered him into the guest bedroom, asking him to wait for a few minutes until they were ready to receive him. After sitting alone for twenty minutes, he burst angrily into the living room, where he found Sears, Lake, and Black talking heatedly to the Reagans. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
Charlie Black had been in the middle of explaining to Reagan that the Deaver and Hannaford firm had been billing the campaign from $30,000 to $50,000 a month to lease his private space in their offices and handling his schedule, marking up their commission 18 percent. “Reagan didn’t like it a damn bit,” Black recalls, “and Nancy liked it even less.” As gently as possible, Black explained that he knew Deaver had done wonderful work for them over the years, but his interference in Sears’s strategies was counterproductive. “It’d be better if Mike left the campaign. He can still help from the outside, and maybe his firm can do some of the PR.”
Reagan reminded Jim Lake that he’d once said Mike was indispensable. “I believed that when I said it,” Lake agreed, “but if you have to make a choice, John is more indispensable than Mike. Without him, this campaign cannot move forward.”
Reagan eased himself out of a chair, but Deaver laid a hand on his shoulder. “Governor,” he said, plainly rattled, “you don’t have to make that decision. I’m quitting.”
“No, Mike, you can’t quit,” Reagan protested—but too late. Without another word, Deaver walked out the front door in grand exit fashion.
Ronald Reagan’s face flushed with anger as his eyes found John Sears and bored lasers into him. “The best man here just left the room,” he said, barely able to contain his wrath.
He was about to express himself in a more vehement way, when Mike Deaver reappeared at the front door. “I forgot that Carolyn dropped me off,” he said sheepishly. “Can I borrow Nancy’s station wagon to get home?”
It momentarily broke the tension, but when Deaver left for the second time, there was barely enough time to clear the air. Everyone shook hands, and Charlie Black hugged Nancy Reagan. “I’m sorry,” he whispered in her ear. “There was no other way.” Jim Lake says she understood. “She loved Mike—but she didn’t try to stop it. Without John, she knew her husband had no chance of getting past New Hampshire.”
The last person left on Sears’s hit list was Ed Meese, who was teaching part-time at a law school in San Diego but had Ronald Reagan’s ear. “Sears thought Meese was ineffectual,” says Jeff Bell, “but opted to cut his losses while he was ahead of the game.” Sears left Meese alone—for the time being. It was a fortunate outcome in the long run; Meese, for all his organizational quirks, was an authoritative conservative who functioned as a trusted, dependable sounding board for Reagan, as he would for the next fifteen years. With Anderson, Nofziger, and Deaver gone, Sears had regained e
nough control of the campaign; his orchestra, composed of loyalists who knew the score, was finally free to fine-tune the arrangements.
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There were more vital concerns to worry about. By the end of October 1979, nine candidates had declared to challenge Jimmy Carter for the presidency, not one of which was Ronald Reagan, the acknowledged front-runner. Positioning him took on tactical importance. “If you are the front-runner and you announce too early,” Sears understood, “you put a target on your back for everyone to take shots at. Then you’ve got no place to go but down. And if your poll numbers decline, you lose momentum.” By holding Reagan out of the fray as long as possible, the ten contenders concentrated on attacking one another.
And there was plenty of dissing to go around. The Republican rivals were formidable politicians. Many of the key Reagan supporters, along with the Washington beat reporters, believed that John Connally posed the toughest competition. He had name recognition and a bulging corporate war chest. But Sears and his staff dismissed Connally as a windbag without much substance. Their Southern aide, a young go-getter named Lee Atwater, reported early on that Connally’s rallies in the Carolinas were ineffective affairs. “He’s like a Chinese lunch,” Atwater quipped, “great going down, but two hours later you’re hungry again.” Howard Baker, on the other hand, was a respected and personable politician with a natural base within the GOP who Sears thought had the wind at his back. Baker’s poll numbers were substantial. What’s more, he wasn’t the moderate that everyone assumed he was. His lifetime rating by the Conservative Union was eighty-eight, second only to Ronald Reagan’s among the Oval Office seekers. The other candidates, as Bob Dole admitted, were “just out here waiting for lightning to strike.” Phil Crane was too much of a right-winger to gain traction; Larry Pressler, the South Dakota senator, had no operation in place; John Anderson was seen as too liberal, and his argument in favor of a fifty-cents-per-gallon gasoline tax would sink him; and George Bush, the former director of Central Intelligence, had no foreseeable constituency.* They could hit the campaign trail and scrimmage for all Ronald Reagan cared.
The only candidate who might have produced serious jitters was too preoccupied playing golf in Rancho Mirage. In September 1978, Reagan arranged an informal lunch meeting there to gauge Gerald Ford’s intentions about a possible rerun in 1980. Ford was cordial, considering their tempestuous history, but hardly forthcoming. The most he would concede was an ambiguous shrug. According to Pete Hannaford, “Reagan’s impression was that Ford liked what he was doing and, at that moment at least, was inclined to stay out of the race.”
Sizing up the opposition, Ronald Reagan looked to many like the man to beat. “We’re the front-runner,” Sears declared pugnaciously in October 1979. “The race can’t start without us.”
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But the start time was fast approaching. There were drawbacks to waiting too long to announce—not acting interested enough in the job, seeming too confident, giving the rest of the players too much time in the spotlight without having to take punches. Ronald Reagan still hadn’t admitted he was running—not to the press, not even to John Sears. “I didn’t even bother asking him,” Sears recalls. “I knew he’d never officially declare. So I just told him to be ready on November 13. We were announcing his candidacy in New York City.”
New York—enemy territory. It was a solid Democratic stronghold with a political counterbalance in Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, and John Lindsay, whose inclinations leaned so far left that they were barely considered Republicans. Still, as Sears counseled Reagan, “The President of the United States is always at home in New York,” and someone not well-known to New Yorkers needed to “go there and lay claim to it.” It also indicated the campaign’s intention to compete in the Northeast and to convert Democratic centrists to a Ronald Reagan constituency. Many, including upstart California governor Jerry Brown, sensed a watershed, a shift in the country’s views. “There will be some kind of political realignment,” Brown reasoned. “The nation is not governable without new ideas.”
The announcement, which doubled as a $500-a-plate fund-raiser, rolled out in a ballroom at the New York Hilton. Ronald Reagan surrounded himself with friends, contributors, and family. It was the first time in ages his children had all gathered together. Aides had held their breath over who would actually show up. Maureen, Michael, and Ron were expected to attend, as all three had done for the 1975 announcement, but Patti’s appearance was always up in the air. In 1975, she was a no-show; she just flat-out refused to cooperate. Heading into the 1979 event, her whereabouts were unknown. Her parents had no idea where their daughter was living. Nancy finally learned through an agent at MCA that Patti had taken up with Bernie Leadon, one of the guitarists for the Eagles, and was traveling with the band. She had also changed her name—dropping Reagan for the more anonymous Davis, her mother’s maiden name—adding distance from her father’s political identity. John Sears tracked Patti down on the road and, through an intermediary, persuaded her to support her father in New York.
Patti’s appearance was out of character. “I disagreed with my father’s politics across the board,” she recalled. “I did not want him to be president, for every reason imaginable.” Arriving in New York, she told her friend the singer Paul Simon, “It’s like every political disagreement I have ever had with my parents is now going to be played out in front of the whole country.” But she ultimately showed up to indulge her desire to be part of a family.
Her brother Ron also needed a gentle nudge. He was “estranged a bit,” according to Sears. Like the politics of his sister, Ron’s hewed decidedly to the left, which caused its share of friction in the family. What’s more, he’d declared himself an atheist while still a teenager and made it a lifelong cause. And like his siblings, Ron was starved for attention from his parents.
Every politician was expected to parade his children before the public to demonstrate that he was a family man, but for Ronald Reagan this took some doing. His family wasn’t a warm and fuzzy clan. For the Reagans, public life had always superseded private life. When the children were young, Ronnie and Nancy were taken up with travel, with work, with perpetual socializing, all of which advanced his career. Now that the children were entering adulthood, there wasn’t much parent-child foundation to call upon. Patti was always cynical about her father and his conservative ideals; Ron wafted in and out of engagement with the family. The way they saw it, their father had rarely been there for the kids when they needed him. They never had his full attention. Now, when the situation was reversed, Patti and Ron didn’t feel any urgency about making an effort. So it was reassuring when the family united to stage a Kodak moment.
“Good evening,” Ronald Reagan said, welcoming the packed crowd in the Hilton ballroom with his usual Hollywood polish. He promptly got to the point. “I am here tonight to announce my intention to seek the Republican nomination for the President of the United States.”
Once again borrowing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most storied phrase, Reagan reminded the audience three different times that America had “a rendezvous with destiny.” He intended personally to keep that assignation, and there wasn’t one person in the seats—or among the millions of viewers who watched a videotaped broadcast—who didn’t believe he had the means to pull it off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“BIG MO”
“There is a sea-change coming in American politics. This will be the most important election in this century.”
—JOHN CONNALLY
Just days after Ronald Reagan’s announcement, his campaign kicked off a four-day, eleven-state pacesetting tour with a splash of good news: a New York Times/CBS poll showed him decisively ahead, with 37 percent of Republicans favoring him to 15 percent for John Connally and 13 percent for Howard Baker. On the stump, he trotted out all the themes he’d struck for the past fifteen years: reduced feder
al spending, a sizable tax cut, a stronger national military, downsizing the federal bureaucracy, and a return to good old American values. One other issue emerged that no one could have anticipated: on November 4, 1979, a throng of Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two Americans hostage. The shah had been overthrown in a yearlong revolution, and the new Iranian government, presided over by fundamentalist Islamist clerics, refused to negotiate for the hostages’ release. Jimmy Carter set the negotiations on a path of no return when he announced, “The United States will not yield to terrorism.”
Reagan initially held off from criticizing President Carter on Iran, not wanting to interfere with efforts to free the hostages. But by mid-January 1980, after the Soviet Union had invaded neighboring Afghanistan, Reagan reconsidered and went on the attack. Speaking to reporters in South Carolina, he stated, “I cannot doubt that our failure to act decisively at the time this happened provided the Russians with the final encouragement to invade Afghanistan.”
The Iranian and Afghan situations generated ample campaign fodder, but Ronald Reagan had a crisis of his own to attend to. The first real test of the campaign was the Iowa caucuses on January 21, 1980. Iowa was still pretty much an anomaly. Until the 1976 election, when Jimmy Carter used the state to launch his presidential bid, the caucuses were seen as nothing more than a beauty contest, with all the national spotlight focused on New Hampshire. But Carter showed that Iowa could propel an unknown into the Oval Office, so in 1980 it loomed large on the political map as a harbinger of things to come.
Everyone assumed Reagan would carry the day in Iowa. He was polling there at roughly 50 percent, so John Sears elected to keep his candidate’s presence in the state to a minimum. “We were going to win Iowa anyway,” Jim Lake explains. “Why go to a place that doesn’t count for anything in terms of delegates?” Ronald Reagan made a few appearances in the state, but conserved his energy for rallies in New Hampshire and Florida, states that really mattered.