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

by Shirley, Craig

  A STORM WAS BREWING in the Reagan camp. Lyn Nofziger quit the campaign in frustration. Nofziger had been a Reagan friend and aide since 1966, thirteen long years. He was one of the most respected operatives in the GOP and the conservative movement, in part because he said what was on his mind and didn't put up with any guff, especially from John Sears. Sears, Nofziger charged, was not only trying to moderate Reagan but also keeping the candidate from meeting with important people in conservative circles.

  Nofziger was also miffed that Sears had made the odd decision to reassign him to fundraising. Nofziger had handled Reagan's press off and on since 1966, and he knew nothing about the niceties of polite political fundraising.58 He had all the tact of a Mack truck; the last thing he should have been doing was dealing with anybody who didn't understand his off-color humor, his awful puns, or his roughhouse rhetoric. The smoke-filled room, not the tearoom at some private club, was invented for Nofziger.

  Reagan liked Nofziger, and tried to talk him out of leaving. “I don't want you to quit. We've been together too long,” Reagan pleaded with Nofziger on a Saturday in late August. Reagan asked him to wait over the weekend, until he got back from the ranch.59

  On Monday, Reagan held a meeting at his home in Pacific Palisades. Present were advisers Ed Meese, Sears, Charlie Black, Mike Deaver, and Jim Lake. The only two who spoke up in favor of Nofziger were Meese and Reagan himself. Nofziger was gone, which in Reagan's mind became one more strike against Sears.60

  AS THE REAGAN CAMPAIGN struggled with infighting, the Gipper's fragile frontrunner status was increasingly threatened. Over the summer, the Washington Post surveyed 1,310 delegates to the 1976 GOP convention and found that Reagan had the support of 43 percent. The Post wrote that Reagan was far and away ahead, which was true in one regard but overlooked the fact that Reagan had gotten nearly 50 percent of the delegates' votes four years earlier in Kansas City. Worse, of those who supported him in 1976, only 73 percent now favored him.61 He had gone backwards.

  Reagan's nomination was anything but a foregone conclusion. The field of potential Republicans wanting to take on Carter—and Reagan—was big and getting bigger. One who oddly declared for president but said he was also available to be vice president was Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota. The thirty-seven-year-old first-term senator was a Rhodes scholar and a Vietnam War vet. He engendered little respect, though, not even from his own GOP state chairman, Dan Parrish, who told the Washington Post, “My reaction in three words would be ha, ha, ha.”62 General Alexander Haig, who had served in the Nixon and Ford White House, was also making noises about running, but most saw him as simply a cat's-paw for his mentor, Henry Kissinger.

  Gerald Ford liked to muse publicly about running, especially since Carter had fallen off so badly in the national polls. Ford and Reagan were statistically tied among Republicans, 30–29.63 Though Ford often told the media that he was not a candidate for 1980, at other times he hinted at his interest, telling reporters, “You never say ‘never.’”64

  Ultimately, though, Ford was not about to go sloshing around New Hampshire or Iowa, grubbing for votes. Last time he'd done it, in 1976, he'd had the majesty of the office of the president to protect his honor, but if he were to do it again, he'd be treated like any other candidate, albeit one who had once accidentally occupied the office of the most powerful man in the world. No thanks. A draft, maybe. Or even better, a brokered convention in which the delegates, hopelessly deadlocked, would turn to the man from Michigan to whom they had turned once before. The convention would be held in Detroit, in his home state, and what better way to prove the old adage wrong? He could be a prophet in his own land.

  With Ford staying out of the race and Reagan still reined in by Sears, the real showdown in the early days of the Republican campaign involved the two Texans, George Herbert Walker Bush and John Bowden Connally Jr. Anybody who knew anything about Texas politics knew that Bush and Connally loathed each other. Bush aide Richard Bond bluntly said it “was a hate-hate” relationship and that Connally thought Bush was a “bedwetting Trilateralist.”65 The Trilateral Commission, of which Bush was a former member, was a bogeyman to both the right wing and the left wing, believed to be bent on world domination by corporate interests. Think Nelson Rockefeller standing atop Lenin's Tomb.

  It was the old Houston versus the new Houston—Connally's family went back generations in Texas, while Bush was a transplanted New Englander. But it went deeper than that. It was also “Old Cattle Money” versus “New Oil Money.” It was the Alamo versus the Mayflower. Bush's friend Vic Gold said, “You knew who he regarded with a kind of disdain, and Connally was one of them.” Connally, he said, was “high on” Bush's “shit list.”66 Bush considered the smooth, garrulous Connally “corrupt.” The belief may have stemmed in part from the fact that in 1974 Connally had been charged with taking a $10,000 bribe over milk price fixing when he was treasury secretary. He was acquitted after hiring Washington superlawyer Edward Bennett Williams for $250,000. Williams battered the witness against Connally into submission. Connally had asked Bush to testify as a character witness in his behalf at the trial but Bush refused, and this solidified Connally's hatred of Bush.

  While campaigning in 1979, Connally often said that he was “the only certified not-guilty candidate running in either party.”67 Audiences nervously laughed, but they were not convinced.

  Connally regarded the blueblood Bush as “a little Lord Fauntleroy”68 and derided him as “all hat and no cattle.”69 When a Bush aide once joshed him that he was afraid he'd find John Connally at his table at the Petroleum Club, Bush haughtily replied, “You don't really understand me, do you? The clubs I belong to wouldn't have John Connally as a member.”70

  The two candidates had only three things in common. They both had a remarkable politician's gift to remember everybody's name. They had both been on aircraft carriers in the Pacific for the Navy in World War II. And corporate America preferred either of them to the populist Reagan.

  Connally's style of campaigning was dramatically different from Bush's. Connally couldn't care a whit for the living-room, retail aspects of politics, where Bush thrived. “If native Texan Connally is a little too big for this state [New Hampshire],” wrote Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in the Washington Post, “transplanted Texan Bush is the native New Englander who fits right in.”71 Connally was, as James Reston noted, “a superb public speaker,”72 but he personified every non-Texan's cliché of the state: too big, too loud, and too pushy. The standard reporter's line about the 6'2”, broad-shouldered, handsome Connally—nicknamed “Big John”—was that he “looks like a president,”73 whatever that meant. Playing on his massive ego, the joke going around political circles was “Yeah, Connally might look like a president, but is the job big enough for him?” Every sentence he uttered seemed to begin with a personal pronoun.

  Where Connally was “Big John,” Bush had a kinder and gentler family nickname, “Poppy.” His grandfather, George Herbert Walker, was “Big Pop,” and his grandson was “Little Pop” and eventually “Poppy.”74 Bush hated it. Everybody in the family had a nickname, it seemed. His wife, Barbara Pierce Bush, was “Bar,” his mother was “Gam,” his brother Prescott was “Pressy,” his daughter Dorothy was “Doro,” and son Jeb was “Jebby.” Even the family pooch was named “C. Fred.”75

  Others scoffed, but Bush believed in noblesse oblige. He believed his class had a duty to give back to society. It was as deeply ingrained in him as was his patriotism.

  Bush could throw elbows, though. In a free-association interview, he described Reagan as “old,” Connally as “slippery,” and Bob Dole as “mean.”76 The self-aware Bush mirthfully described himself as “the elitist candidate.” But he tried to distinguish himself from “those Brahmins,” because he had not settled down in Connecticut, instead striking out for Texas to seek his own fortune and his own identity. He didn't go to Wall Street like so many of his school chums or indeed his own family.77

  If B
ush avoided labeling himself a conservative, Connally did not even grasp what conservatism meant. He had changed parties but not his views of the world. He believed government could solve most problems. A protégé of Lyndon Johnson, he defended the Great Society in one infamous meeting with conservatives in Washington. He also supported the ERA, abortion, and Carter's SALT II (the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) with the Soviet Union, which many Cold Warrior conservatives deplored. One disgusted conservative described Connally to columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak as “LBJ with charisma.”78

  Richard Viguerie, who had recently signed on with Connally after bolting from Phil Crane's campaign, tried to take him in hand and explain how populist conservatism worked. Connally would have none of it. He believed power flowed downward instead of upward. Connally was not building any sort of grassroots organization in Iowa or New Hampshire. It just wasn't the way you did politics in Texas, so why would it work anywhere else?

  Connally and Bush even differed in their approaches to Ronald Reagan. While both recognized that their chances hinged on Reagan's faltering, Connally and his surrogates attacked the former California governor much more viciously. Connally took to slurring Reagan about his age by telling the national media that if someone was elected, he “ought to be able to serve.”79 Douglas Hallett, a Nixonian Republican from Reagan's California, wrote several columns for the Wall Street Journal eviscerating Reagan and thereby burnishing Connally's credentials. In one, Hallett wrote, “The Californian's increasingly lackluster rhetorical performance and aloofness from both new issues and the GOP's leadership have revived feelings that Mr. Reagan is too old and too indolent for the nation's top job.… Howard Phillips, chairman of the [Republican National] Conservative Caucus, puts it this way: ‘Some (of us) suspect that Reagan is only a script reader, not a script writer. Nobody thinks that about John Connally.’”80

  Privately, Bush did not think highly of Reagan, and the Bush camp knew that its candidate would have a shot at the nomination only if Reagan stumbled badly. But if Reagan did not mess up, Bush aides wanted to preserve a chance of getting their man on the ticket with him. In the early days, then, they proceeded more delicately than did the others, especially Connally, in public criticisms of Reagan. Not that they thought Reagan would actually win if he was the nominee, but getting Bush on the ticket would set him up nicely to be the nominee in 1984.

  While Connally and Bush battled to position themselves as the best alternative to Reagan, another Republican long presumed to be running finally made his candidacy official: Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee. Baker was handsome, articulate, and exceedingly charming, and as Senate minority leader had proved himself an effective legislator. Most of official Washington thought Baker would be the best nominee against Carter—and indeed, Carter's White House feared Baker above all other candidates.81 In his winning campaign in 1966 for the Senate seat once held by Estes Kefauver, Baker received an impressive 30 percent of the black vote in Tennessee.82 Baker's foray into the race was not welcomed in the Bush camp, as he would be mining for the same moderately right-of-center voters that the tall Texan was.

  Baker had been on Gerald Ford's short list for running mates in Kansas City three years earlier, but Ford chose Bob Dole when Reagan spoke up for the Kansan. Baker was ticked off, and vowed right then that he would be the master of his own fate next time. Another reason Baker may have been skipped over by Ford was his wife's struggle with alcoholism. Joy Baker was a very attractive woman, accomplished in her own right, and had apparently conquered her addiction by 1979.83

  Baker showed that his campaign was serious when he signed up Ford's media man, Doug Bailey of the famous GOP consulting firm Bailey, Deardourff. Conservatives hadn't forgotten Baker's apostasy in supporting the Panama Canal treaties, but the Tennessee senator hoped that his strong opposition to Carter's SALT II would more than make up for this heresy.

  Howard Baker also showed that he was targeting Ronald Reagan. Like all the other GOP candidates, Baker, fifty-four, made a special emphasis of his own age.84 This pattern fit with the assessment of Lou Cannon, the political reporter who had covered Reagan for years. Cannon said there were two candidates in the Republican field: “Reagan and Stop Reagan.”85

  Problem was, it seemed too often that the most effective members of the “Stop Reagan” effort were Reagan's own blundering staffers.

  BEFORE TED KENNEDY COULD jump into the presidential fray, he first needed to get his mother's permission to run.86 Some rolled their eyes when they learned that Teddy wanted Rose Kennedy's consent, but they failed to remember that three of her four sons had died as young men—tragically and heroically. Ted was the only son she had left and she didn't want him prematurely cut down as well.

  Senator Kennedy also had to ponder whether he wanted to endure renewed scrutiny over his fiasco at Chappaquiddick in 1969, when an attractive young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned under mysterious circumstances in a car that Kennedy drove off a small bridge late one summer evening. The unanswered questions about Chappaquiddick would haunt a Kennedy presidential campaign.

  In addition, he needed to consider the scrutiny his wife, Joan, a sad alcoholic, would have to face. They had been living apart for several years and their uneasy marriage would be put under the microscope, as would his rumored dalliances with other women. She blamed her alcoholism on his philandering.87

  Teddy also liked the sauce. A prominent Boston politician whose family had known the Kennedys for years was in Washington on business and had lunch with the senator. Prior to dining, Kennedy polished off a couple of highballs, then plowed through an exceptional amount of wine during their meal and afterward downed a couple of snifters of Courvoisier. Kennedy's guest, himself no stranger to drink, was nonetheless aghast at the senator's prodigious noontime thirst and asked Kennedy, “Do you do this every day?” Kennedy sheepishly replied, “Yeah, pretty much.”88

  The senator did have the Kennedy name, which conjured nostalgia for Camelot. But Ted was different from his brothers. JFK was smooth and reserved and RFK was intense and passionate, but Teddy was a bearish backslapper in the ward-heeler mode. He laughed easily and loudly, was given to silly pranks, and he always needed a haircut. Although forty-seven, the youngest Kennedy brother seemed pathologically boyish. If he entered the race, he would not be running just against Carter. He would also be running against ghosts: the memory of Jack and Bobby, who, especially after the dispiriting presidencies of LBJ, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, maintained a deep hold on the American imagination.

  According to Walter Mondale, the memory of his brothers did not dissuade Kennedy from running for president. In fact, it may have compelled him to enter the race. “All this pressure was on Ted to fulfill the family tradition,” Mondale recalled. “He really felt he was the holder of something precious in the Kennedy legacy.”89 Mondale always felt that Kennedy was forcing Carter's hand to give himself the reason to dive in to the race.

  There was certainly little love lost between Carter and Kennedy. Real cultural and ideological difference separated the two men. Carter found Kennedy's undisciplined morals repugnant and Kennedy thought Carter sanctimonious. In addition, Carter, inside his party, was seen by doctrinaire liberals as a “mugwump”—someone who had broken faith with their party. Carter's preachy sermons about holding the line on spending and morality were not in keeping with the modern sensibilities of liberalism. They also disagreed about national health insurance, a pet Kennedy issue: Carter wanted it phased in slowly, while Kennedy demanded its immediate enactment. There was personal animosity as well: Congress had directed a gold medal struck commemorating the life of Robert F. Kennedy, but Carter refused to order it cast. The family of long memories would never forget this slight by Carter.

  During the summer of 1979, Kennedy reportedly dropped twenty pounds (in part because he gave up ice cream), which was seen as another sign that he was moving toward a challenge of the president.90 He was still trouncing Carter by more
than 2–1 in the national polls.91 The president of the United States was an underdog in his own party. This in and of itself was astonishing. In the twentieth century, this could only be said of William Howard Taft in 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt came out of retirement and beat Taft in nine GOP primaries. Yet because Taft, as the incumbent, controlled the levers of power at the national committee and the national convention, he, not Roosevelt, was nominated.

  With the reforms of the Democratic Party that began after 1968, there would be no such “back-room deals”; primary voters in the various states would select the delegates almost entirely. This seemed to spell political death for Carter, whose national approval rating fell to 19 percent—even lower than Richard Nixon's the day before his resignation.92

  The national media were ready to crown Kennedy. According to many stories, Kennedy would have the advantage not only against Carter but also, in a general election, over Ronald Reagan. Unlike Reagan, Kennedy would appeal to young voters and to the middle. The other Republican candidates encouraged this thinking, making the case that they matched up better against Kennedy than did Reagan.

  According to the media, it didn't matter that the Massachusetts senator would be getting a late start on the campaign. He was well positioned to perform in the primaries, thanks to a “well-oiled Kennedy machine” that would be run by “old Kennedy hands.” Jack Germond and Jules Witcover quoted “one old hand” saying, “You don't have that tooling up time with Kennedy.”93