To bypass the networks, Reagan's campaign began buying broadcast time on national radio networks. Reagan had been comfortable in front of the microphone for almost fifty years, going back to his days on WHO in Des Moines. In his addresses, he urged the American people to avoid the “trust me” government of Carter, because it bestowed too much on one man, which was contrary to the republican form of government created by the Founding Fathers. Explaining his view of “not only the power but the limits of the presidency,” Reagan made clear his sophisticated understanding of the American federalist system.41
On the campaign trail, Reagan reinforced the message about federalism and his desire to scale back federal power. In the 1970s the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion had erupted in the American West, where the federal government controlled huge swaths of land—an incredible 544 million acres in twelve states—that were off-limits to any form of use or access. Groups had organized to fight for a return of the lands to the states. The “rebellion” had been going on for years, but Reagan took the opportunity to endorse their position. “Count me in as a rebel,” he told a cheering crowd of ranchers, miners, and oilmen in Salt Lake City.42
Reagan wasn't the only one on the attack. President Carter went into Reaganland, traveling to Los Angeles to speak to the annual gathering of the National Education Association. Eight thousand (mostly women) teachers chanted Carter's name over and over. Carter ripped Reagan's tax-cut proposal, labeling it a “free lunch,” which was mildly amusing since that is what Republicans had charged the Democrats with for years.43 He also warned the crowd about Reagan's supposed extremism, saying that if elected, the Republican would choose conservative judges. Finally, he defended his administration's actions against the Soviets over their invasion of Afghanistan as “effective” but “peaceful in nature.”44
Carter then got nasty in a speech that had been billed as “nonpolitical.” He said, “We cannot allow nostalgia built on an incorrect memory to blind us to what life is like when government did nothing to protect minorities, the working people, or the poor.”45
It was a foreshadowing of the coming fight.
WORK WAS PROCEEDING APACE in Detroit on the convention. Political conventions had changed greatly over the years and not altogether for the better. As television dominated the gatherings more and more, the political consultants took control and squeezed tension, emotion, and drama out of the quadrennial gatherings, reducing them to infomercials and the delegates to a one-dimensional caricature of their former selves.
Once, delegates had been the muscle of the party. In 1952 Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, “Mr. Republican” himself, arrived at the Philadelphia convention with 530 delegates, well ahead of Dwight D. Eisenhower and just 74 short of a first-ballot nomination. Delegates maneuvering for Ike's eleventh-hour bid, along with a typical underhanded assist from Senator Richard Nixon, helped rob Taft of the nomination.
That same year, when the Democrats gathered, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois had next to nothing in delegate strength, only 41, while Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had 248, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia had 121, and Governor Averell Harriman of New York, 108.46 Yet it was Stevenson who left Chicago as his party's nominee.
The delegates had also been responsible for writing their parties' platforms. For years the conventions had been preceded by “Platform Week,” in which delegates gathered in committees and subcommittees to work out their party's position on a host of issues, ranging from social policy to economics, national defense, and foreign policy. Delegates in their committees would hear testimony from elected officials, philosophers, economists, labor leaders, and foreign-policy experts. After endless debate and discussion, these delegates—housewives, small businessmen, religious leaders, retired military, a cross section of America—wrote impressive documents setting a philosophical and ideological direction for their political party, all without the interference of self-inflating political consultants. Over the years issues from nullification to slavery to prohibition to suffrage to war and peace were endlessly debated and discussed. What a party stood for at these affairs was just as important as the man it nominated. Notably, the media covered these weeklong events just as enthusiastically as the nomination week itself.
Those days were quickly passing into history, but the platform remained a crucial document for the political parties. And for the GOP in 1980—a party at a crossroads—the debate over the platform would be especially important. Reagan's point man at the 1980 platform hearings was Marty Anderson, his longtime policy adviser. As well as anyone, Anderson knew the political, cultural, and governing philosophy of Ronald Reagan.
THE REAGAN CAMPAIGN'S POLLS on a running mate found that only Gerald Ford helped Reagan in the general election, and it was by a minuscule 2 percent. All the other prospective choices were a drag on his campaign.47 Reagan understood that the best choice was to avoid “buying yourself a negative.”48 Richard Nixon had confessed to a friend at Miami Beach in 1968 that he wished he could run alone. He wasn't the only one on either side of the aisle who felt this way. Kennedy reportedly expressed similar sentiments about Lyndon Johnson.
Other than presiding over the Senate, the second man had no required duties. The Founders thought so little of the office that they didn't even come up with a residence, like the White House, for the vice president. Most stayed in boardinghouses or hotels when they were in Washington, waiting to be told the president had died so they, too, could become a part of history. An official VP residence had emerged only when Gerald Ford took pity on Nelson Rockefeller and gave him the official residence of the chief of naval operations, a Queen Anne–style estate in northwest Washington. Rocky, in character, refused to stay there, but Number One Observatory Circle thereafter became the home for the number-two guys.
Sometimes the choice of a running mate spilled over into the bizarre and even tragic. In 1972 Democratic nominee Senator George McGovern took Senator Tom Eagleton of Missouri as his running mate. McGovern said he was “1,000 percent” behind his choice when it was revealed that Eagleton had been institutionalized in a mental hospital and had even undergone electroshock therapy. McGovern then went south on Eagleton and engaged in a bizarre search for a running mate, enduring the sorry spectacle of almost everybody turning him down until party man Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy in-law, gamely went on with McGovern—and later down in flames with him.
Reagan didn't want a similar embarrassment, so Bill Casey hired a private investigator to check out the men remaining on Reagan's list—peeping through keyholes, dumpster diving, talking to enemies, making sure there was nothing that would embarrass Reagan. At some point, Reagan's men would speak to each person on the list, and if a VP candidate passed muster, he could meet with Reagan himself. Anyway, that was the plan.
Bush's stock began to rise. Indeed, a plurality of Republican delegates in a survey conducted by the Washington Post showed a strong preference for the Houstonian. Bush was well out in front with 34 percent and Kemp a disappointing second at 21 percent.49 Similarly, a survey of the fifty Republican state chairmen showed that Bush was the most popular choice.50
The problem was, Reagan—and especially Mrs. Reagan—just could not warm up to Bush. The Washington Star reported that Reagan had “private reservations” about his rival, who had “choked up” in their debate in Nashua months earlier. Reagan reportedly told an aide, “If he couldn't stand up under that much pressure, how could he be president?”51
ONE OF THE MOST significant stories of the campaign was first reported by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in early July. The columnists wrote about a meeting of two hundred Protestant evangelicals and fundamentalists who had passionately supported the born-again Jimmy Carter in 1976 but after four years had soured on him. One Georgia pastor in attendance at the Atlanta meeting clearly had a sense of humor; he said, “The problem is to get any of them to confess they voted for Carter last time. But believe me, they did.”52
The meeting had been organized
by New Right leader Paul Weyrich, whose specialty was grassroots pulpit politics. The leaders in attendance felt betrayed by Carter and were eager to support Reagan, who was on their side on abortion, prayer in school, and private Christian education.53
Grafting this new coalition onto the GOP would not be easy, as the old elements of the party viewed the interlopers with suspicion. Reagan's campaign faced a stiff challenge in trying to keep these various coalitions together. Much of the hard work would have to be done at the convention, and especially in the debate over the party's platform. Reagan had already gotten an idea of how difficult this work would be when he tried to find a compromise on the ERA, only to anger both sides.
It was clear that the some in the New Right would not give up the platform without a fight. Senator Jesse Helms and his men had been stewing over being left out of key campaign decisions, including those involving staff. In 1976 Helms had offered substitute planks to the Republican platform at the Kansas City convention, and he was threatening to do the same in Detroit.54 He went public only days before the platform hearings, charging that convention managers were playing “hardball” because his request to testify in Detroit had gone unanswered. It had already been confirmed that Henry Kissinger and other moderates would appear before the platform committee. Angry over Reagan's choice of Alan Greenspan, another Fordite, as principal adviser on the budget, Helms railed, “The Ford people are taking over the Reagan campaign. And now it looks like they're taking over the platform as well.”55
The summer of 1980 was shaping up as a scorcher. In early July the temperature in some parts of the country lingered above 100 degrees for days on end.
It remained to be seen how hot it would get politically in Detroit for Ronald Reagan.
22
SUMMER IN THE CITY
“Republicans have been running around on Democratic turf. I don't blame them. We left a vacuum.”
Long before the oppressive, sticky, and sweltering summer of 1980, Detroit had descended into a pit of urban rot. Things had started out just fine in 1701, when French officer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded a settlement there with permission from the French Crown. The city grew prosperous through water and overland trade, and its healthy commercial development fostered a vibrant city culture. Detroit became known as “the Paris of the West” for its architecture and wide, tree-lined avenues. Industrial production boomed after Henry Ford and the rest of the automobile industry settled in Detroit; by the 1920s word was out that Ford was paying extraordinarily high wages on his state-of-the-art assembly lines. During World War II, Detroit's huge industrial plant was turned into a massive arsenal for democracy, churning out tanks, airplane engines, troop transports, and other war matériel.
But in the ensuing decades the city had become a burnt-out shell of its former self. Though millions of poor blacks from the agrarian South had migrated north in search of less racism and more economic opportunities, they found to their dismay that in Detroit and in so many other northern cities the conditions were far from ideal. (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that Chicago was the most racist city in America.) Detroit, like other American cities, erupted in race riots in the 1960s. That only accelerated the massive “white flight” to the suburbs that hollowed out Detroit.
It wasn't just white residents who left. Motown Records, founded in Detroit in 1959 by Berry Gordy Jr., was one of the best-recognized labels in the country and the most prominent record company owned by an African-American. Motown had discovered and promoted one great musical act after another—Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Gladys Knight and the Pips, the Jackson Five, and dozens of others. But in 1972, the Motown label fled Detroit and headed for Los Angeles.
Now the once-confident metropolis was continually plagued with municipal strikes and was often without dependable police or fire protection, not to mention satisfactory trash removal. Frequent teacher walkouts and interrupted bus service only added to the city's woes. Unemployment in 1980 hovered just under a heartrending 20 percent, a level not seen since the Great Depression.1 When Hollywood film directors needed a convincing backdrop for science-fiction movies about futuristic “dystopias,” they would often choose the grim city streets of Detroit—without changing a thing.
Detroit's proud professional sports teams, the Lions, the Tigers, the Pistons, and the Red Wings—often derided as the “Dead Wings”—had become struggling, losing franchises. The two-dollar-per-seat bleachers at Tiger Stadium became a no-man's-land as inebriated fans took to throwing cherry bombs and other assorted items at players on the field. The bleachers were closed.2 The fortunes of all four teams had spiraled downward right along with those of their host city.
Eyebrows had been raised, then, when Republican chieftain Bill Brock announced his plans a year and a half earlier to hold the GOP's quadrennial confab in the Motor City. Conservatives like Senator Paul Laxalt furiously fought Brock over the decision. Laxalt wanted the convention in Dallas, capital of the New West. The committee members voted and it came up a tie, with one woman, a Reaganite, who nonetheless had promised Brock that she'd vote for Detroit, missing. Brock sent aides to find her and finally discovered her in the ladies' room, standing on the toilet seat in a stall, hiding. When she was finally cajoled out, she reluctantly voted for Detroit, just as she'd promised Brock.3 A blue-collar city, largely ethnic, unionized, and in a heavily Catholic state—this was just what Brock wanted to counter the white-bread, Protestant, Buick-driving, country-club image of the GOP.
Detroit was struggling to right itself, just as the GOP was in the latter part of the twentieth century. Detroit mayor Coleman Young, famous for his all too frank comments, was a shrewd executive who saw the convention as a way to showcase his city in the hopes of attracting new businesses and investments. It would be the city's first chance to gain positive coverage since the race riots of 1967. Mayor Young was an urban liberal Democrat who normally had little use for the country-club Republicans, but he and Brock worked well together and the city rolled out the red carpet for the Republicans. City fathers chose the welcoming slogan of “Detroit Loves a Good Party” to greet the thousands of Republicans who would stream into town.4 The center of the festivities would be the Renaissance Center, a new, gleaming high-rise that had cost hundreds of millions of dollars and now towered over the burnt-out slums of the rest of the city.
Brock had invested plenty of resources reaching out to black America, even though in 1980 only 2.8 percent of the GOP's delegates were black, down from the 3.4 percent of four years earlier.5 In 1976 Jimmy Carter had received almost 90 percent of the black vote,6 so Republicans had nowhere to go but up with this relatively small but politically important voting bloc. The image of the party as one of privilege and access had to be jettisoned in favor of inclusion and opportunity for all. The theme of the 1980 Republican Convention, “Together … A New Beginning,”7 summed up perfectly Young's goal for his city, Brock's goal for his party, and Ronald Reagan's message to America.
Of Brock's choice of Detroit the head of the United Auto Workers, Douglas Fraser, observed, “Republicans have been running around on Democratic turf. I don't blame them. We left a vacuum.”8 The Democrats had certainly left a vacuum in Detroit. Despite being the party of the workingman, they had never held their national convention in the U.S. capital of the workingman. Now the Republicans were stepping in—and hoping to appeal to those same working people. The auto-workers had supported the Democratic Party for years, but some labor management and a great deal of the rank and file had become increasingly dismayed with its economic policies. Fraser made clear his disdain for Carter when he noted the “correlation” between the rise in unemployment and the rise in Reagan's support.9 The American workingman was also hard-core anti-Communist and didn't like to see the president knuckling under to the Russians. Reagan, a union man and tough guy when it came to the Kremlin, was more to the liking of the working class.
Brock's bold choice of Det
roit came with more than a little risk. As thousands of fussy Republicans and thousands more indifferent journalists prepared to descend on the city for the GOP jamboree, a new strike by trash collectors meant that refuse was piling high and stinking deep. Mayor Coleman was working furiously to settle the strike and get his city's streets cleared of the piles of garbage before the convention got under way.10 Another strike had sidelined the Detroit Free Press. The paper had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover the first national convention in the city's history, but the editors' and reporters' hands were tied, as the Newspaper Guild ordered them to abide by the Teamsters' strike.11
Some Republicans were skeptical of Brock's choice of Detroit and reportedly brought Mace with them. One woman from the South was walking along the Detroit waterfront when a boat passed with several black people on board. She turned to a friend and said, “I didn't know blacks had boats.”12 The poor woman, guilty of cultural clumsiness, was overheard by a reporter for the Washington Star.
CARTER, TAKING SOME VERY bad advice, made a political swing through Detroit on the eve of the Republican convention. He succeeded only in embarrassing himself, as news reports used the unemployment plight of the city as a metaphor for his presidency. The visit came across as a cheap political stunt. A Reagan spokesman, James Brady, zapped Carter, saying, “It was like Sherman visiting Atlanta. He was returning to visit the scene of his crime.”13
Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America Page 46