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

by Shirley, Craig

  But if the briefing books were filled with pedestrian public-record material, the fact of the matter is that all sorts of other White House documents did show up in the Reagan files, just as Reagan material showed up in the Carter campaign files (and can now be found in archives in the Carter Presidential Library). In September 1980 Reagan-Bush staffer Stefan Halper passed along an internal Carter/Mondale memo advising President Carter on how to deal with various issues Reagan was advocating. Newsweek reported that another internal Carter document arrived on Reagan aide Bob Gray's desk with a note saying, “Bob—Report from a White House mole.” The Carter White House leaked like a sieve.

  And no, no evidence or even the tiniest shred of accusation has ever emerged that Reagan knew about the briefing books coming into his campaign's possession. Everybody knew that if he had been told, his reaction would have been to send them back with an apology to President Carter.

  Pat Caddell years later asserted in our conversation his belief that Bill Casey set up a covert operation using former CIA operatives to steal documents out of the Carter White House. Caddell may be right, but no evidence has been forthcoming of such a conspiracy involving so many people.

  Likewise, there has never been any evidence that the Reagan campaign sent George Bush to Paris in October 1980 to orchestrate a reverse “October Surprise” by meeting secretly with the Iranians to ensure that the hostages would not be released before the election. As with the stolen briefing books, some Carter supporters have pointed to this alleged secret mission to explain why Carter lost the election. But there is plenty of suspicion that Carter manipulated the hostage crisis for his own political gain, as written by the renowned David Broder of the Washington Post then, and by others since.

  Carter was also deeply bitter over Ted Kennedy's primary challenge and the fact that liberals went with John Anderson in the fall rather than sticking with him. “I was never reconciled to the more liberal wing of [the] Democratic Party as long as I was in office,” he told me. “And there is no doubt that the Kennedy supporters in the left wing of the Democratic Party, the liberal wing, supported John Anderson over me in campaigning.”

  President Carter did not lose the 1980 election because of the stolen briefing books. He lost because the economy was a catastrophe, because the world situation was worsening, because he could not get the American hostages out of Iran, and because the citizenry was downright scared, ready to listen to Reagan's message, which he delivered at the Cleveland debate. If President Carter is bitter over the election (and by all accounts he is), it could be because he did not listen to Caddell, who opposed any debates and instead devised a campaign plan to destroy Reagan and force voters, reluctantly, into reelecting Carter. A Carter aide said at the time, “The whole thrust of our media this Fall will be to paint Ronald Reagan as dangerous and stupid.”

  After the election, it leaked out that Rosalynn Carter had opposed the debate, which is interesting, as so too did Mrs. Reagan. It also leaked out that Carter's men had warned him against invoking his daughter, Amy, in the context of a serious policy debate on nuclear armaments. Almost to a man, Carter's aides believe he lost the election because he lost the debate. Pat Caddell said in our interview, Carter was ahead in national polling before the debate, and although he was behind in the electoral vote count, Reagan was nowhere near the needed 270. Even as Reagan won an electoral-vote and popular-vote landslide, many, many states went only very narrowly for the Gipper, Caddell bitterly remembered.

  One of the best postelection lines to come out of the 1980 campaign was from Tim Kraft of the Carter campaign, who quipped to Jerry Rafshoon that they should have taken the $30 million spent on the campaign and instead put it into buying two more helicopters for the ill-fated rescue attempt of the hostages in Iran. And who is to say that Kraft's whimsical notion might not have changed the outcome? Had the hostages been rescued, it may have boosted American morale enough that a majority of voters might have forgiven Carter for the terrible economy and given him his second term. We'll never know.

  One thing is certain, though: Carter's fall campaign repulsed many Americans, and not just conservatives. The president was eviscerated by liberal columnists and editorialists for the meanness of his campaign. Recall Hugh Sidey's denunciation of Carter in the pages of Time magazine in late September 1980: “The past few days have revealed a man capable of far more petty vituperation than most Americans thought possible even in a dank political season. The wrath that escapes Carter's lips about racism and hatred when he prays and poses as the epitome of Christian charity leads even his supports to protest his meanness.” Sidey was one of those writers everybody read and took to heart, and was among the most gentle of men. For this urbane and regarded man to pen a column so contemptuous of Carter was stunning. And he was not alone. In turn, the Washington Post and even the liberal Scotty Reston of the New York Times took Carter to task for his vicious campaign.

  AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF my book on Reagan's 1976 insurgent attempt to steal the GOP nomination away from Gerald Ford, Reagan's Revolution, I was surprised but obviously also delighted to receive favorable reviews from across the political spectrum. But the issue came up a few times then and now as to whether I am a “Reagan worshipper,” as one person put it. No, I am not a “Reagan worshipper.” While I am in awe of the man's many and varied accomplishments, I am also in awe and respectful of JFK. In any case, looked at factually and critically, Reagan certainly looms as one of the half dozen most influential men of the twentieth century. And history is being good to him.

  I worked for Reagan's 1980 election and reelection in 1984, running and supervising large independent expenditure (IE) campaigns. In 1980, after Reagan lost Iowa and was reeling, I was approached by Bob Heckman, John Gizzi, and Ralph Galliano of the Fund for a Conservative Majority (FCM) and asked whether I was interested in running an IE in support of Reagan. At twenty-three years of age, I jumped at the chance, even though, according to the election laws of the time, I could not work for the official campaign thereafter. I'd met Reagan on a campaign in New Hampshire in 1978, and though he didn't know me from Adam's off ox, he afforded me kindness and sincerity.

  Heckman et al. gave me free rein and a check for $750,000. Remembering what my old friend Lyn Nofziger said about people messing around with Reagan's presentation, I decided simply to buy as much radio time as humanly possible beginning in New Hampshire and “just let Reagan talk,” as Nofziger said. In a decrepit old studio in Georgetown, for hours at a time, I listened to Reagan's speeches, picked out the best passages, and produced thirty- and sixty-second commercials. With no Internet then, reel-to-reel tapes—complete with the federally mandated disclaimer identifying FCM as the sponsor—were boxed and mailed to hundreds of radio stations in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Illinois.

  In those days, $750,000 went a long, long way on radio. FCM's commercials pretty much ran wall-to-wall in every market in New Hampshire for weeks before the primary. No other group on the Left or Right was conducting a significant independent campaign, and I like to think that Bob, John, Ralph—and I—deserve a small amount of credit for coming to Reagan's aid when he needed it the most, when his campaign was collapsing, out of money, and beset by internal discord after the stunning loss to George Bush in Iowa.

  After Reagan went to Washington, I worked at the Republican National Committee at the behest of Nofziger for the 1982 cycle and later went to the National Conservative Political Action Committee, helping to manage a $14 million IE in support of Reagan's reelection. And during those eight years, it seemed as if I was always at the White House, pitching in on a variety of issues, attending speeches, seeing friends, drinking beer and smoking cigars on Frank Donatelli and Frank Lavin's balcony in the Old Executive Office Building on Friday afternoons.

  Still, to write a work of history, a writer must present the facts and let readers draw their own conclusions. The facts I present show Reagan at his best and his worst. I tried to follow the
maxim of Jeane Kirkpatrick, who in 1979 told Wayne Valis, “I want to be a good scholar; to unearth the truth, and follow the truth no matter where it leads; and to expose falsehood and lies. That is the definition of a good scholar.”

  The story is favorable to Reagan because the facts are favorable to Reagan.

  The facts are less favorable to Carter. He was, all objectively agree, an unsuccessful president. He came to the presidency with the best of intentions: human rights around the world, reorganizing government, cleaning up Washington, reducing the nuclear threat. But he was simply overwhelmed by the office—“lost in power,” as Bill Buckley succinctly told me. Still, I believe that Carter deserves more credit than history has given him in undermining the Soviets. He was the first president to call attention to the human-rights abuses behind the Iron Curtain, and he increased the funding for Radio Free Europe and secreted thousands of copies of The Gulag Archipelago behind enemy lines.

  Some will argue that in addition to being a bad president, Carter was also a bad man. Others dispute that. My own opinion is that Carter was a good man who had bad days, as opposed to a bad man who had good days. On one particular bad day in 1979, when confronted with the petition of the deposed shah of Iran to enter the United States for cancer treatment, Carter replied, “Fuck the shah.”

  Carter experienced his share of difficult days after he lost to Reagan. He suffered the humiliation of being the first incumbent Democrat ejected by the voters in almost a century and then, to make matters worse, of having the Iranians wait until minutes after he left office to release the hostages. Worn out after four years in Washington and a brutal campaign, he had planned to spend time alone in a Georgia cabin near a favored fishing stream. But when Carter arrived home in Plains, he discovered to his horror that his carefully constructed finances were a shambles and that he was near bankruptcy. He had to set to work trying to paying the bills.

  AND SO IT GOES, as Billy Joel wrote in 1983.

  Funny how things go. My father was a self-taught historian and a good writer, and loved politics. He died in 1977, but the farther in time I get away from him, the more it seems I am becoming like him. He was certainly more prescient than many in 1965, when he told my brother, my sister, and me after listening to a Reagan speech that the former actor should be president.

  This book for me has been a frustrating but wonderful labor of love.

  I wouldn't have had it any other way. The search for facts and telling the story combined research, reading, writing, meeting people—some of the things that make living enjoyable.

  I plan on writing other books on Ronald Reagan, including one on the 1984 campaign, but I am also planning on writing other works on American political and cultural history. I discovered in my last book that recording history is the imperfect search for perfection. Records go missing, memories fade, people prevaricate, and reporters file mistaken stories.

  But excepting God's love, there is no perfection in this life.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE: A NEW BEGINNING

  1. Norman C. Miller, “The Republican Revival,” Wall Street Journal, July 16, 1980, 24.

  2. Theodore H. White, “The Small-Town Boys Who Seek to Govern,” Washington Star, September 29, 1980, A3.

  3. “Beyond Packaging,” Wall Street Journal, July 16, 1980, 24.

  4. Jessica Savitch, in discussion with the author, October 1980.

  5. Tom Marganthau, Gloria Borger, and James Doyle, “Republican of the Future?” Newsweek, July 28, 1980, 33.

  6. Tom Wicker, “The Politics of Taxes,” New York Times, July 25, 1980, A25.

  7. “Campaign '80: A Spirited GOP Gears Up for Its Big Show,” U. S. News & World Report, July 14, 1980, 27.

  8. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum Historical Resources, “Inaugural Address of President John F. Kennedy,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, http://www.jfklibrary.org/Historical+Resources/Archives/Reference+Desk/Speeches/JFK/003POF03Inaugura101201961.htm.

  9. David Lucey, in discussion with the author.

  10. Robert Scheer, “Collapse of Reagan-Ford Deal Blamed on Kissinger,” Los Angeles Times, July 20, 1980, A22.

  11. Don Oberdorfer, “Kissinger Said to Have Courted Both Sides in '68,” Washington Post, June 2, 1983, A1; Terence Smith, “Kissinger Role in '68 Race Stirs Conflicting Views,” New York Times, June 13, 1983, B6.

  12. “Washington Whispers,” U. S. News & World Report, May 8, 1978, 16.

  13. Michael Barone, “Big Stick Politics,” U. S. News & World Report (Special Issue), July 17, 2002.

  14. Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum Audio Clips, “Rendezvous with Destiny,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/audio.html; Thomas V. DiBacco, “Nothing Conventional about Democrats' History,” Washington Times, August 13, 2000, C6.

  15. Robert G. Kaiser, “Smooth Operator,” Washington Post, February 22, 2004, T3.

  16. Victor Gold, in discussion with the author, April 16, 2007.

  17. Lou Cannon, “Man from Main Street, Middle America,” Washington Post, April 25, 1980, A1.

  18. Howell Raines, “From Film Star to Candidate: Ronald Wilson Reagan,” New York Times, July 17, 1980, A1.

  19. A Time for Choosing: The Speeches of Ronald Reagan, 1961–1982 (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, 1983) 57.

  20. James C. Roberts, ed., A City Upon A Hill: Speeches by Ronald Reagan Before the Conservative Political Action Conference, 1974–1988 (Washington, DC: The American Studies Center, 1989), 13–21.

  21. Cannon, “Man from Main Street.”

  22. “Living Over the Store,” Newsweek, February 16, 1981, 21.

  23. Arnold Koch, “The Lifeguard,” Melrose Mirror, December 3, 1999.

  24. A Time for Choosing, 219.

  25. “‘The Time Is Now… to Recapture Our Destiny,’” Washington Post, July 18, 1980, A10.

  26. “Reagan's Announcement of Running Mate, and Comments by Bush,” New York Times, July 18, 1980, A12.

  27. “Text of Reagan's Speech Accepting the Republicans' Nomination,” New York Times, July 18, 1980, A8.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Jon Meacham, Andrew Murr, Eleanor Clift, Tamara Lipper, Karen Breslau, and Jennifer Ordonez, “American Dreamer,” Newsweek, June 14, 2004, 22.

  32. Koch, “The Lifeguard.”

  CHAPTER 1: EXIT, STAGE RIGHT

  1. Frank van der Linden, The Real Reagan: What He Believes, What He Has Accomplished, What We Can Expect from Him (New York: William Morrow, 1981), 143–44.

  2. Lyn Nofziger, Nofziger (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1992), 206.

  3. Lou Cannon, “Reagan: A Healing Hand on the GOP,” Washington Post, August 21, 1976, A1.

  4. Peter Hannaford, The Reagans: A Political Portrait (New York: Coward-McCann, 1983), 137.

  5. Nancy Reagan with William Novak, My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan (New York: Random House, 1989), 201.

  6. Tom Mathews, Gerald C. Lubenow, and William J. Cook, “Into the Sunset,” Newsweek, August 30, 1976, 45.

  7. Reagan with Novak, My Turn, 197.

  8. Richard Cheney, in discussion with the author, June 9, 2004.

  9. Nofziger, Nofziger, 199.

  10. Ronald Reagan, Reagan: A Life in Letters, ed. Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson (New York: Free Press, 2003), 219.

  11. Peter Hannaford, in discussion with the author, March 24, 2006.

  12. Mike Deaver, in discussion with the author, October 18, 2006.

  13. Ibid.; John Carmody, TV Column, Washington Post, July 21, 1983, D8.

  14. Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), 433.

  15. Peter Hannaford, in discussion with the author, June 30, 2009.

  16. John Sears, in discussion with the author, March 18, 2004.

  17. United Press International, “Reagan to Appear on TV Tomorrow to Assist
GOP,” New York Times, September 18, 1976, 10.

  18. Christopher Lydon, “Reagan Ads for G.O.P. Set for Television, New York Times, October 11, 1976, 18.

  19. Hannaford, The Reagans, 137.

  20. Associated Press, “Reagan Bars Aiding Ford in 3 Key States,” New York Times, October 28, 1976, 47.

  21. Christopher Lydon, “Reagan Is Too Busy to Aid Ford in 5 States,” New York Times, September 20, 1976, 22.

  22. Lou Cannon, in discussion with the author, December 5, 2006.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Michael Reagan, in discussion with the author, July 2, 2004.

  25. Lydon, “Reagan Is Too Busy.”

  26. National Review, October 15, 1976, 1098.

  27. Jimmy Carter, in discussion with the author, July 11, 2006.

  28. United Press International, “Reagan Will Not Bar Another Try in 1980,” New York Times, November 3, 1976, 17.

  29. Reagan, Reagan: A Life in Letters, 224.

  30. United Press International, “Goldwater Bars G.O.P. Fund Role,” New York Times, January 6, 1977, 18.

  31. Warren Weaver Jr., “Top Republicans Unable to Agree on Filing Two Major Party Posts,” New York Times, January 7, 1977, 10;Warren Weaver Jr., “Brock Takes Lead for G.O.P. Chairman,” New York Times, January 14, 1977, 8.

  32. Lou Cannon, “Disunity, Nixon Debacle Plague, GOP,” Washington Post, August 15, 1976, A1.