Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America

by Shirley, Craig

  RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY

  Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America

  CRAIG SHIRLEY

  WILMINGTON, DELAWARE

  Copyright © 2009 Craig Shirley

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  Shirley, Craig.

  Rendezvous with destiny : Ronald Reagan and the campaign that changed America / Craig Shirley.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-933859-55-2 (cloth bound : alk. paper)

  1. Presidents—United States—Election—1980. 2. Reagan, Ronald. 3. United States—Politics and government—1977–1981. 4. Political campaigns—United States. I. Title.

  E875.S46 2009

  973.927092—dc22 2009029922

  ISI Books

  Intercollegiate Studies Institute

  Wilmington, DE 19807-1938

  www.isibooks.org

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Most men are lucky to have one good woman in their lives.

  I have been fortunate to have had several. To my mother, Barbara Shirley Eckert, who taught me about life and love; my friend Diana Banister, who taught me about loyalty; my sister, Rebecca Sirhal, who taught me about God's gift of forgiveness; and my daughter, Taylor, who taught me about miracles.

  And to the most important men in my life, my dear departed father, Edward Bruce; and my sons, Matthew McGiveron, Andrew Abbott, and Mitchell Boman Reagan Shirley.

  But most especially for my wife and best friend, Zorine, who taught me about what is really important in this world.

  It is to her that this book, as with everything, is dedicated.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by George F. Will

  Prologue A NEW BEGINNING

  Chapter 1 EXIT, STAGE RIGHT

  Chapter 2 RETURN OF THE REPUBLICANS

  Chapter 3 LE MALAISE

  Chapter 4 THE FRONT-WALKER

  Chapter 5 THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRYSIDE

  Chapter 6 THE ASTERISK ALSO RISES

  Chapter 7 BUSH BEARS DOWN

  Chapter 8 DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM

  Chapter 9 FAST TIMES AT NASHUA HIGH

  Chapter 10 REAGAN ROMPS

  Chapter 11 UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

  Chapter 12 FORD TEES OFF

  Chapter 13 NOW ANDERSON

  Chapter 14 BUSH'S COUNTEROFFENSIVE

  Chapter 15 REAGAN'S DEMOCRATS

  Chapter 16 THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL

  Chapter 17 WEST OF EDEN

  Chapter 18 WINNING IS GOOD

  Chapter 19 SIX MEN OUT

  Chapter 20 COMING OF AGE

  Chapter 21 THE ROAD TO DETROIT

  Chapter 22 SUMMER IN THE CITY

  Chapter 23 AT CENTER STAGE

  Chapter 24 MOTOWN MADNESS

  Chapter 25 FAMILY, WORK, NEIGHBORHOOD, PEACE, AND FREEDOM

  Chapter 26 HORSE LATITUDES

  Chapter 27 THE DEMOCRATS

  Chapter 28 CORBIN

  Chapter 29 GENERAL QUARTERS

  Chapter 30 SLOUCHING TOWARDS NOVEMBER

  Chapter 31 THE TORRENTS OF AUTUMN

  Chapter 32 MISSION FROM GOD

  Chapter 33 STALLED

  Chapter 34 ON DECK

  Chapter 35 CLEVELAND

  Chapter 36 MELTDOWN

  Chapter 37 ENTRANCE, STAGE LEFT

  Epilogue DESTINY

  Author's Note

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Foreword

  by George F. Will

  Looking back, as Americans are notoriously disinclined to do, it all seems so inevitable. But it did not seem so—it did not feel so—at the time. And in fact it was not so.

  Looking only at the electoral-vote outcome—489–49—the victory of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election seems like a walk in the park, a play without drama. But looked at from the inside of the campaign, as Craig Shirley did at the time and now recollects in this exhilarating history, the drama was almost too abundant.

  If we consider only the nation's retrospective affection for Ronald Reagan, and his extraordinary achievements in office—a demoralized nation revitalized, the Cold War concluded victoriously and peacefully—it is easy to assume that his victory over an incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, whose failures were manifold and manifest, was a foregone conclusion. It is easy, but wrong. Shirley demonstrates just how wrong in this worthy successor to his masterful chronicle of Reagan's unavailing quest for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All.

  That volume and this one are antidotes to the intellectual error known as “presentism”—the fallacy of depicting, explaining, or interpreting the past from the perspective of current-day knowledge and understandings. Shirley rescues Reagan's victorious campaign from lazy presentism.

  Reagan's rise to the White House began from the ashes of the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City. Truth be told, it began from the podium of that convention, with Reagan's gracious—but fighting—concession speech. No one who knew the man and listened to him carefully could have mistaken that speech for a valedictory statement by someone taking his leave from national politics.

  The path from that nadir to the triumph four years later was a rocky, uphill climb. It was achieved by a politician whose cheerfulness and amiability concealed a toughness and longheadedness that few have analyzed as meticulously as Shirley does here. As was the case with Winston Churchill, another politician spurned by his party and consigned to “wilderness years,” the iron entered Reagan's soul after adversity. In a sense, therefore, his loss in 1976 was doubly fortunate: The Carter presidency made the country hungry for strong leadership, and the Reagan of 1980 was stronger and more ready to lead than was the Reagan of 1976.

  This book is both a primer on practical politics and a meditation on the practicality of idealism. It arrives, serendipitously, at a moment when conservatives are much in need of an inspiriting examination of their finest hour.

  Here it is.

  Prologue

  A NEW BEGINNING

  “I believe this generation of Americans today also has a rendezvous with destiny.”

  July 17, 1980

  Ronald Reagan stood before the multitude of cheering Republicans in Detroit's Joe Louis Arena, at long last master of all he surveyed.

  Millions of his fellow Americans watched on television. Most had little choice, as the three networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—dominated the airwaves and promised gavel-to-gavel coverage. Cable was in its infancy. The upstart Cable News Network, only five weeks old, also was covering the Republican convention, but with its tiny audience and seemingly quixotic mission of providing twenty-four-hour news coverage, most political pros regarded CNN as Ted Turner's folly.

  A tiny, hidden fan blew lightly on Reagan's face at the podium to keep him from sweltering. Several strands of his forelock wafted gently in the stirring air. Reagan, sixty-nine, was dressed handsomely and impeccably in a dark suit, every crease sharp. With his aging but still handsome movie star profile and aw-shucks grin, he appeared to be an o
asis of cool in the oppressive summer heat.

  Everybody on the floor, however, was sweating heavily. Convention planners failed to appreciate that the thousands of gesticulating, dancing, partying, delirious Republicans packed into the arena—far more than official capacity of twenty thousand allowed—would raise the temperature and overwhelm the air-conditioning system unless the facility was precooled for hours ahead of time. A heat wave had ravaged the nation for three weeks; Detroit's daytime temperature had topped out at 97 degrees on the second day of the convention. Nobody on the floor seemed to mind the sticky conditions, though.

  Fortunately, fashion had changed dramatically since the last time Republicans had gathered to nominate a president. Sensible summer suits for men in 1980 were made of breathable, lightweight cotton, wool, and poplin, more loosely tailored and with narrower lapels. They had replaced stifling, tightly woven polyester suits, with garish colors and wide lapels that made every man look like a John Travolta wannabe. Women, too, had gone from the suffocating and unflattering synthetic pant suits of 1976 to cooler, more comfortable natural-fiber dresses and skirts. Long hair had also gone out of style, for both men and women.

  Times they were a changin' in both style and substance.

  Conservatism in 1980 no longer meant a calcified status quo—it represented change. For the first time since Reagan's boyhood hero Franklin Roosevelt transformed the political landscape, conservatism posed a serious challenge to the reigning liberal orthodoxy. The conservative “movement,” of which Reagan was the avatar, was changing the way Americans viewed their government and their world. Conservatism was leading the sprint away from the 1970s, one of the most dispiriting decades in the history of the American Republic. Reagan, the maverick populist, had wrought a fusion between the “Social Right” and the “Sociable Right,” and the moderates in the party would have to get comfortable riding shotgun in the new GOP.

  As the Wall Street Journal aptly put it, “What was extreme conservatism 16 years ago, now is politics with mainstream appeal.”1

  After two generations in which FDR's New Deal coalition dominated American politics, Reagan had emerged as the Republican answer to Roosevelt: a larger-than-life father figure who would bring his party out of the wilderness and demoralized Americans into the sunshine.

  His opponent, President Jimmy Carter, was increasingly seen as a latter-day Herbert Hoover, a hapless incarnation of do-nothing incompetence. The great campaign biographer Theodore White said of Carter, “Approach him with pity. He has been caught up and crumpled by the hand of history more cruelly than any president since Herbert Hoover.” Of Reagan, White said, “Approach him with self-protecting skepticism. He is the most instantly charming and likeable candidate for the presidency since John F. Kennedy.”2

  Reagan's new GOP had discarded “détente,” the slow-motion surrender of the West to the Soviets. Tax cuts and reductions in the size and scope of government had replaced balanced budgets as the centerpiece of the party's economic policy. On social matters, Reagan espoused a muscular yet spiritual message: the power of parents over that of the “nanny state.” It all emanated from Reagan's devotion to freedom as the organizing principle of his new Republican Party.

  It was hard to believe that just four years earlier, in the wake of the Watergate scandals and the Republicans' devastating electoral losses, the punditocracy was giving last rites to the GOP.

  The bloodbaths that had dominated Republican conventions for the past forty years were over, or at least masked over. Even the liberal Republican senator from New York, Jacob Javits, a chronic Reagan critic, was a Reagan delegate in Detroit.

  Wall Street, too, was learning to love the populist Reagan. When he had announced his candidacy the previous November, the Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial, “For political packaging, we do not need to turn to a 68-year-old man.” The paper conceded eight months later that Reagan had “learned something.”3

  Now the man of the moment stood astride the new GOP, high above the convention floor. In large white letters below the nominee, across a blue half circle, the theme of the convention read, “together … a new beginning.” Hundreds of red and white carnations adorned the rostrum.

  On either side of Reagan across the large stage were the many and varied leaders of the revived Republicans. Congressman Jack Kemp of New York; party chairman Bill Brock; Senator Bob Dole of Kansas; Ambassador George Bush, Reagan's running mate; House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona; and of course, according to homey political tradition, the Reagan and Bush families, including Barbara Bush, a bored-looking George W. Bush, and a beaming Nancy Reagan.

  Unfortunately, the most important Reaganite of all, Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, the national chairman of Reagan's campaign, was missing. He had left the night before, after nominating his old friend Ron. Rumors held that Laxalt was dismayed over the last-minute choice of Bush, a Connecticut-bred Brahmin, for VP.

  BY 1980 TELEVISION HAD become the nation's fully dominant cultural force. Network reporters were firmly affixed atop pedestals in American culture as paragons of knowledge—despite their frequent fatuity, as when rising star (and future tragic figure) Jessica Savitch of NBC asked a GOP operative later in the year how it was that the delegates at the Republican convention could then go to the Democratic convention and be just as enthusiastic.4 Some complained that TV reporters were too intent on making news rather than simply reporting it, as in the case of the “co-presidency” debacle between Reagan and former president Gerald Ford the night before in Detroit. What had started as idle gossip—a Dream Ticket—had become a full-blown imbroglio, much of it fed by ill-informed TV correspondents.

  Many print stories in 1980 were devoted to the reporters, the anchors, and the resources the networks invested in the national conventions. In addition, a new trend featuring network anchors interviewing network reporters about network coverage of conventions was inaugurated in 1980. Television reporters increasingly beheld themselves like Narcissus transfixed with his own image. This phenomenon would only accelerate in coming years.

  Yet all of these trends were mere eddies in the face of the mighty political currents at work in Detroit in 1980. A tsunami was beginning to crest over America.

  Jack Kemp—football star, college phys-ed major, self-taught historian and economist—understood this better at the time than almost everybody else. In speaking to the GOP convention two nights before Reagan's speech, Congressman Kemp had said, “There is a tidal wave coming. A political tidal wave as powerful as the one that hit in 1932.”5

  The 1932 election was one of the few profoundly meaningful elections in American history. Most elections are only breezes that gently buffet the ship of state. Several, though, have been torrential storms, dramatically changing America's course. The election of 1980 would prove, like those in 1800, 1860, and 1932, to be one of the most consequential in American history, radically altering the future and giving rise to a new generation of conservatism.

  BILLY JOEL'S ALBUM Glass Houses topped the charts and his hit “It's Still Rock and Roll to Me” was the number-one single in the country. The number-four album in the country was the movie soundtrack to the Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, a sentiment that could have been the theme for the resurgent Republicans this night.

  The mood of the rest of the country, in contrast, was dark, brooding, and apprehensive. Americans faced the second-worst economic calamity in the nation's history, behind only the epochal Great Depression.

  Gasoline—when it was available—had nearly doubled in cost over four years, rising from 77 cents to $1.30 per gallon and more.

  Taxes, not including Social Security, had gone up 30 percent, but income had risen only 20 percent.

  Unemployment was closing rapidly on 8 percent, but this statistic was deceptively low. Millions of despondent Americans who could not find work had simply dropped out of the job market. Some projections had joblessness rising to 9.4 percent by the end of the year.6


  The economy was in negative growth, with factories shuttered across the country. But inflation continued, as it had for three years, in double digits—depending on the day and hour, 17 percent, 17.5 percent, 18 percent. A new word had been coined: “stagflation,” meaning a combination of inflation and stagnating growth, a worst-of-both-worlds scenario that economic textbooks said could not exist.

  Few places were as bad off as the city in which the Republicans were gathered. Detroit had become an economic basket case, spiraling downward after the 1967 race riots accelerated “white flight” to the suburbs. The anemic state of the auto industry contributed to the city's decay. Still, Detroit officials had done their best to put on the dog. Almost three dozen decrepit buildings were razed, another fifty painted or boarded up. Junk cars were towed away and thousands of trees and shrubs were planted to spruce things up. Even outdoor water fountains that had not operated for years were turned back on. Joe Louis Arena itself had been built just the year before, at a cost of $57 million. More than two thousand cops were patrolling the city's streets to ensure that nothing befell the Republicans. Meanwhile the Coast Guard was standing watch on the Detroit River, and hundreds of sheriffs, state troopers, and Secret Service agents were also on hand.7

  Along with economic disaster, a spiritual depression was afoot in the land. For the first time in the national consciousness, parents did not believe their children's future would be brighter than it had been for them. Many didn't feel good about their country anymore.