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

by Shirley, Craig

  Wirthlin was encouraged that Reagan-Bush could take all the states Gerald Ford had carried in 1976 with the possible exception of Michigan and would be very competitive in Carter's South as well as heavily Catholic states, including New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which Carter had carried in 1976. Wirthlin's larger strategy called for making the case against Carter in the Northeast, from New York across the Rust Belt to Illinois. That meant going after the blue-collar vote and shelving Reagan's past attacks on labor unions. “There will be no union baiting in this campaign,” said one campaign official. Wirthlin harbored no illusions that Reagan would get the 54 percent of the labor vote that Richard Nixon had in 1972 when the AFL-CIO sat on its hands. That was especially so because the AFL-CIO had issued an all-points bulletin to affiliated unions to turn up the heat on Reagan, and was expected to spend as much as $10 million in the campaign. Still, Wirthlin was confident that Reagan, the first major-party presidential candidate to hold an active union card, would get more than the 36 percent of the labor vote that Ford had four years earlier.31

  Wirthlin thought Connecticut could be in play because of George Bush's roots there. No one in the campaign, however, thought Massachusetts, which George McGovern had carried singularly in 1972 and which Carter had won handily in 1976, was anything close to being up for grabs.32 Columnists Bob Novak and his partner Rowly Evans discerned something else though in the Bay State. They commissioned Carter's pollster, Pat Caddell, to focus on precinct 7-1 in Waltham, a blue-collar Catholic suburb of Boston. What they found was astonishing. Carter had carried the precinct in a landslide in 1976, but now, among the 79 registered voters, Reagan was getting 37, John Anderson 22, and Carter just 12, with the rest undecided. By large margins, the voters of 7-1 favored the Reagan tax cuts, cuts in the federal government, and a military buildup. The columnists concluded that precinct 7-1 portended not just “another swing by supposedly volatile voters, but a basic revolution in American political attitudes.”33

  Such attitudes were crucial to Wirthlin's plan to fight hard in Carter's South. The Reaganites understood that the South, though behaviorally Democratic, was nonetheless attitudinally conservative. Reagan had already proven in the primaries of 1976 and 1980 his crossover appeal in such states as Texas and South Carolina. The Reagan campaign therefore had high hopes for Texas, which Carter had carried by the skin of his teeth over Ford. Wirthlin assumed that with Reagan, hugely popular in the Lone Star State, and Bush, who had adopted Texas as his home, plus John Connally's help, they might win it.

  Wirthlin had put together an impressive political plan. The problem for the Reagan-Bush team was that it had done little to assemble an operational campaign to marry up with the plan. Fissures soon began to appear between Reagan's “Californians” and the “Easterners,” and each side leaked to the media against the other. Skeptically, Nofziger said of the Bush staff, “It's a matter of bringing them into the Reagan campaign.”34 One GOP consultant, more sarcastically said, “We'll have to get along for only about three months.”35 Whether they could was open to question.

  As a start down the road of internal reconciliation, the campaign hastily arranged a press conference in Washington to announce that Paul Laxalt and Anne Armstrong would be cochairs of the general-election campaign. It had taken a bit of cajoling to get Laxalt back after he'd left the convention ticked off, but the Nevadan wasn't going to miss this one last roundup with his old friend. Laxalt was one of the most easy-going and most forgiving men in politics. At the press conference he spoke up for Bush and said that conservatives upset over the choice of running mate would come back into the family. The Reagan team also took the opportunity to announce that Jim Baker had become a senior adviser to the campaign; the former Bush manager would assume a full-time if undefined position.36

  A new poll by the Associated Press–NBC had Reagan opening up an eye-popping 55–24 percent lead over President Carter. John Anderson had dropped to 15 percent.37 In a Lou Harris poll, Reagan was leading by a whopping 61–33 percent. No one thought the margin would hold, but Reagan clearly got a better convention bounce than anyone had expected. More sober Reaganites remembered the gigantic lead Ted Kennedy had held over Carter just a year earlier, and, even more relevant, Carter's huge 62–27 lead over President Ford four years earlier, following his convention.38 They knew that in politics, what went up must come down.

  The truth was that the thought of going up against Carter's tough campaign operatives terrified the Reagan-Bush team. “We look at the Carter operation and we worry a lot,” fretted one campaign staffer. “On this stuff, they're big-leaguers. We're still babes in the woods.”39 This fear was real, even though Carter's approval rating had bottomed out at 22 percent yet again, just where he'd been in his “malaise” slump of one year earlier.40 Carter was a tough hombre, at least as a campaigner, and had all the power of incumbency at his disposal. Polling also showed the antiabortion plank in the GOP platform to be a drag with some voters. No matter what the early sampling said, this fight wouldn't be some walk in the park for Reagan—especially because Carter had yet to get his own convention bounce.

  Problems began to mount for the Reagan campaign. Bush was continually asked why he was the second pick for the second slot. Ten days had passed since the convention and the stories still hadn't died down about the “co-presidency.” The Wall Street Journal ran the distracting headline “Reagan, Bush Start on Fall Campaign, Haunted by 'dream Ticket' Nightmare.”41 A headline in the Los Angeles Times blared, “Nettled by Rumors …,” and the story reviewed the discord inside the merged Reagan and Bush operations.42 Still under fire, the Reagan campaign announced that it would produce its own account of what really happened with Ford and release it to the media, then abruptly changed field and said it would not release such a report.43

  A new story surfaced in the media, bizarrely claiming that Reagan “had encouraged Bolivian military officials in what turned out to be a successful overthrow of the Bolivian government a week ago.” Lyn Nofziger had to go out and knock it down, saying, “We are not that dumb.”44 Another rumor claimed that Ford had been offered both the vice presidency and defense secretary.

  These stories had no sooner cooled down when the media turned their attention to a fresh controversy: Would Reagan release his income-tax statements, and if so, when?

  Yet another media frenzy resulted when Reagan went to get … a haircut. “Did he or didn't he?” had been a running question for years—did he dye his hair, that is. Now under constant press scrutiny, Reagan was trailed by reporters when he stopped in at Drucker's barbershop, where he had been going for forty years.45 On at least one occasion reporters actually took the cuttings from the floor of the barbershop to have them tested. The samples came back proving that Reagan was telling the truth and did not dye his hair, but that didn't stop reporters from continuing to speculate on why Reagan had so few gray hairs. Actually, he only shampooed with Head & Shoulders and then used a little dab of Brylcreem along with copious amounts of water. Before this campaign was over, however, Reagan would accumulate a few more grays, as would Bush.

  A story buried in the New York Times in late July casually mentioned an invitation Reagan had received to attend the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi in early August, just one day after a planned speech to the National Urban League meeting in New York. The Urban League speech was part of an effort by the Reagan campaign to make amends for skipping the annual meeting of the NAACP. The paper ominously described the region of Mississippi where Neshoba was as “a setting that was once a favorite stumping ground for segregationist politicians.”46

  Dick Wirthlin tried to talk Reagan out of going to Neshoba. Alone in Reagan's bedroom, the pollster made his case that he thought it was a mistake. He must have pushed the issue too hard, because, as he later remembered, Reagan “got so mad at me, he threw his speech papers at me and scattered them all over the bedroom.” When Reagan calmed down, he said, “Dick, I've already given a commitment on it. I'm not goi
ng to disappoint these people.”47

  NATIONAL DEMOCRATS BECAME MORE vocal with their concerns about nominating either Carter or Kennedy. A small group of Democrats, convinced that neither could beat Reagan, had met quietly in Philadelphia to create the Committee for an Open Convention. Its purpose was to investigate the possibility of the party's turning to either Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, formerly a senator from Maine and Hubert Humphrey's running mate in 1968, or Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, two of the most respected men in the Democratic Party.48 Forty members of Congress lent their names to a move to find an alternative candidate. Vice President Mondale had already had his tires kicked, but he was a loyalist and said “no way.”49

  Some saw the move as a ploy by Kennedy forces. Kennedy was hundreds of delegates behind Carter in the count, yet an odd sort of hopefulness took hold in his campaign and in the media that, somehow, he might still win the nomination. Kennedy's plan rested on a slim reed: that a sufficient number of delegates would vote to suspend Rule F(3)c. According to the rule, delegates were required to cast their first roll-call votes for the candidate to whom they were pledged. The open-convention scheme necessitated a suspension of that rule so that those committed to Carter could reverse field, presumably on the basis that Carter had so badly faltered in the last primaries. In short, Kennedy wanted a new deal of the delegate cards. It was not likely to happen. Already a majority of Democratic state chairmen had called on Teddy to give up the ghost. But the rumors of a “Dump Carter” movement grew.

  THE SHAH OF IRAN passed away in late July. He'd been suffering from cancer for months. Carter refused to send any representative from Washington to the funeral and said nothing publicly. His administration's only acknowledgment of the shah's passing came in a statement released by the State Department—which went out only after both Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, reviewed the draft personally. Reagan, in contrast, called the shah a “loyal and valued friend” and said that his death “reminds us of the value of remaining true to our friends.”50

  THE REAGAN CAMPAIGN AND the Carter team had the same essential strategy for November: to make the election about their opponent. Dick Wirthlin recognized this when he said that the Reaganites' task was to make the election a referendum on Carter's presidency, and that it would be “problematical” if they allowed Reagan to become the issue.51

  To underscore Reagan's supposedly controversial economic agenda, the Carter campaign for a time referred to the “Reagan-Kemp-Roth” tax bill. Democrats confidently predicted that Reagan would be running away from the plan by the fall.

  Going on the attack against Reagan, the Carter administration rolled out some big guns. Brzezinski broke conventions as a diplomat and negotiator by going right at Reagan on the war-and-peace issue, attempting to exploit the Republican's image of having an itchy trigger finger. Brzezinski attacked the GOP platform and Reagan's call for military superiority over the Kremlin, saying that containment combined with diplomacy would keep the Russian bear from prowling outside his territory.52 Secretary of State Muskie broke the tradition into a thousand pieces by saying that Reagan could kick off a new arms race; however, Soviet officials were at the same time, attempting to get a private meeting with Reagan's aides just “in case” he won.53

  Carter then trotted out Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who called Reagan “simplistic,” “unrealistic,” and “dangerous.”54 The Carter administration was going to use every resource at its command.

  Although the Democrats were attempting to portray the Republican candidate as an extremist, Reagan showed no signs of moving to the middle now that he had secured the GOP nomination. During an extensive interview with U.S. News & World Report he detailed the government agencies he would cut or eliminate, including the Departments of Energy and Education, and he insisted on pushing tax cuts and big increases in defense spending.55 He said he planned on delegating authority to people who understood his framework of governance, a point Lyn Nofziger reiterated when he harked back to California and said, “cabinet officers were Reagan's men in the departments; they were not the departments' men in the Reagan cabinet.”56 Reagan did show his pragmatic side in the interview, saying he'd learned in Sacramento that “if I found … that I could not get 100 percent of what I asked for, I took 80 percent.”57

  JOHN ANDERSON HAD FADED somewhat into the background over the summer. Though he had managed to qualify for the ballot in all fifty states, money had slowed to his campaign and the media attention had tailed off. As a result, Anderson was stuck in the polls somewhere between 15 and 25 percent.58 Reagan's pick of Bush had assuaged some moderate Republicans and persuaded them to stick with the party rather than bolt for Anderson.

  Anderson still hadn't selected a running mate. It appeared his best opportunity for choosing a vice-presidential partner would come after the Democrats held their convention in August, when—assuming Kennedy lost to Carter—some hard-core Kennedyites who couldn't stomach Carter might be willing to support the independent ticket.

  Anderson and Kennedy got together on Capitol Hill for no reason other than to give the media something to cover. It was a pure photo op as the two met briefly with no agenda and then addressed the media and had nothing to say. It was dutifully covered by all the major media, including the networks. All the while Kennedy had a slightly dazed look on his face. The only “news” to come out of it was that Anderson “might reassess” his independent bid if Carter was not renominated.59

  As renegade Democrats continued calling for an open convention, Kennedy worked the phones hard, leaning on wavering delegates. His argument was a difficult one to make. As the champion of “reform,” Kennedy had been on the side of letting the primaries rather than the political bosses select the delegates. Now he was arguing for a return to the legendary “smoke-filled rooms.”60 In politics, where you stood was often defined by where you sat.

  Carter got support from an unusual quarter: Reagan. He wasn't being cynical about it, either. Reagan said, “When you free the delegates, you disenfranchise the voters who elected them.”61 It was the best argument in support of Carter's renomination.

  REAGAN'S CAMPAIGN COURTED NEW controversy when it finally released the nominee's tax returns for 1979, which showed his income at $515,878. Between federal and state taxes, more than half—$262,936—went to government. Most of Reagan's income had come from his speeches, radio commentaries, and newspaper columns.62

  To the media, the bigger news was that he had donated just a little over $4,000 of his six-figure income to charity—as compared with the $15,000 Carter had donated. Moreover, he had checked “No” on a voluntary one-dollar contribution to the “presidential election campaign fund”—a fund that had just given him, as the Republican nominee, $29.4 million to finance the balance of his campaign. The media also howled because Reagan took an operating loss of more than $9,000 on Rancho del Cielo even though it was only technically a working ranch, and because he had charged his daughter Maureen $481 interest on a loan he'd made to her.63

  An old allegation surfaced against Reagan, one that Ford's campaign had investigated in 1975, over a real estate deal Reagan had made with Twentieth-Century Fox when he became governor. In the 1950s, Reagan had bought a tract of 290 acres adjacent on three sides to land owned by Fox Realty, a division of the film company. Reagan bought it for just $65,000 and sold it to Fox Realty in 1966 for more than $1.9 million.64 The documents had been leaked to the Ford campaign by Reagan's Democratic enemies in California, and in 1980 they were leaked to the media. The truth of the matter was that real estate prices had gone through the roof in the Golden State for years and it wasn't unusual to realize such profits—or for movie studios to be sloppy with money.

  Reagan suffered still another embarrassment when the Right to Life Party withdrew its endorsement. The national pro-life group called the choice of Bush “unacceptable” and took Reagan off its voter line. This move jeopardized Dick Wirthlin's strategy f
or taking New York in November. His ambitious plan was contingent on Reagan's running on the Republican, Conservative, and Right to Life lines to scoop every vote possible in the state, and on Anderson's getting the Liberal Party line to deny Carter those votes.65

  With Reagan still not out on the stump, the media began to intensely scrutinize his big proposals: a massive tax cut, a giant increase in defense spending, and a balanced budget. Alan Greenspan was asked how these seemingly conflicting goals could be reconciled; he said, “There are any number of answers on how to resolve these goals,” although he didn't give any specific examples.66

  It had been more than two weeks since the end of the convention and yet Reagan seemed stuck in neutral. Even the reliably pro-Reagan conservative weekly Human Events was taking the Gipper to task over the Ford mess, over his stalled campaign, over the poor treatment afforded Jack Kemp, and over the choice of Bush.

  About the only bright sign came when Fidel Castro of Cuba said, “The fate of humanity would be at stake if Ronald Reagan won the presidential election.”67 There was no truth to the rumor that Ed Meese sent a bouquet of flowers to the Communist dictator to thank him for attacking Reagan.