The next time we broached the subject was on November 2, the night of my Senate reelection. I told my children honestly that I was giving serious consideration to the run, and that I wanted to have one more intense conversation with them about it--perhaps on Thanksgiving weekend, when we would all be together for a few days. I could tell by their faces this time that each was deeply troubled by the prospect, more troubled than I had realized.
On that weekend I asked Larry Horowitz to come to the Cape and brief the children and other family members as to where we stood politically. Over two and a half hours at Jackie's house, Larry reviewed the various polling data and how it reflected the positive view that people had of me after watching those TV spots in focus group sessions in New Hampshire. This was an encouraging and even rather significant trend, given that at the same time, Reagan's poll numbers were rising while those of his likely challenger, Walter Mondale, were slipping down.
The children inferred from this session that my aides and I were gearing up seriously to make a run, and I must say that they were right. Everyone in the room could see the likelihood of my gaining the nomination, and also that the election campaign would be hard-fought and probably be decided by the television debates. Yet the Reagan administration was showing some signs of missteps--they'd been talking lately about taxing unemployment insurance, which would outrage many of their moderate supporters. I really felt that this was the race for me. All of the other times I had taken a pass on running were because it wasn't my time. Those earlier races wouldn't have been about me; they would have been about my being a surrogate for my brothers. And in 1980, as much as I had wanted to win, I felt almost forced into the decision by what I saw as Carter's dragging down of the country and the party. But 1984 would be my race on my terms. And I thought I had a good chance.
I did not ask for reactions from the family at that meeting. My nephew Joe wished me luck, but went on to say that from what he'd heard, the family anticipated a great deal of anguish and anxiety, and that I should give that prospect very serious consideration. My sister Pat seemed to be leaning toward a run; Jean was against it. Steve Smith thought it would be an extremely difficult battle.
The Sunday after Thanksgiving, my children and I went to the Squaw Island house. I told them how much I respected their grasp of the political realities of a run, and of what a campaign would entail. Then I asked them whether they'd formed a final judgment.
Once again, Teddy was the spokesman. He told me that he and Patrick had been having many serious discussions between themselves, and that they both felt strongly that I should not run. I would continue to be a force in the Democratic Party, he pointed out, and in the Senate. People would continue to pay attention to my views. He, Patrick, and Kara were not asking me to step out of public life, he stressed. But given the existing turmoil resulting from Joan's and my divorce, and the change and uncertainty for all of them that that entailed, a run for the presidency might amount to unbearable strain.
I looked at Patrick, who was obviously uncomfortable: he did not want the brunt of my decision placed upon his shoulders. He assured me that he would support any decision that I made. Should the decision be to go, he said he was quite prepared for it--but he just thought the family would be happier if I didn't make that decision to go. There was plenty of time in the future...
I shifted my gaze to Kara. She agreed totally with Patrick: if I felt there was a moral imperative to run, they were prepared to sign on and be part of the team. But quite clearly their choice and recommendation were not to go forward with a campaign.
The meeting lasted about two hours, and by the end of it, as far as I was concerned, the decision had been made. If the children felt that strongly about my not running, then I would not run. They all came back to the Big House with me and we had dinner with my mother. I could clearly detect the relief in their minds and in their attitudes and their general dispositions.
A couple of days later I announced that I would not be a candidate for the presidency in 1984. After the press conference, I had a chance for quiet moments with each of the children and asked whether they thought they made the right decision. The response was so uniform, so complete, so overwhelming--it was the right decision. But it was fifteen-year-old Patrick who really brought it home for me. When Patrick and I were sitting together after the announcement, just the two of us, I looked at his face and his smile. He was so happy and obviously so enormously relieved. If I ever harbored any second thoughts about the decision, they vanished at that moment.
I braced for new battles on even more hostile terrain when Reagan, at seventy-three, won reelection in November 1984. The oldest elected president in American history rolled up the highest electoral vote in American history, 525 to 13, against Walter Mondale.
Reagan had made a laudable choice in his first high court appointment, in 1981. Honoring a campaign promise to nominate a qualified woman, he chose the Arizona Republican Sandra Day O'Connor, who replaced the retiring Potter Stewart. She did not become the predictably conservative vote that the Republican right might have hoped. She became famous for avoiding predictability, as the Court's leading "swing vote" on politically charged cases, including upholding Roe v. Wade. Reagan's next high court appointment was to nominate William Rehnquist to be elevated from associate justice of the Supreme Court to chief justice of the United States.
As an associate justice, Rehnquist had staked out a position on the Court's far right and held it unwaveringly. I was opposed to his elevation to chief justice for the same reasons that I had opposed his nomination to the Court in the first place. But I understood that the odds were strongly in favor of his confirmation. In the Judiciary Committee on July 29, 1986, I bore in strongly on Rehnquist's string of lone dissents as an associate justice. "The framers of the Constitution envisioned a major role for the Senate in the appointment of judges," I declared. "It is historical nonsense to suggest that all the Senate has to do is check the nominee's IQ, make sure he has a law degree and no arrests, and rubber-stamp the president's choice."
Along with Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, I resurrected the two damaging pieces of evidence that Rehnquist had shown racial bias in his past. These were the charges that he had harassed black voters at the polls in Arizona in the 1950s and '60s, and the memo he'd written in 1971 maintaining that "separate but equal" should be reaffirmed.
None of it mattered. Rehnquist sailed past the committee by a vote of thirteen to five, and he was confirmed by a vote of sixty-five to thirtythree. Still, he received the most "no" votes ever cast against a chief justice nominee up to that time.
Lewis Powell announced his retirement that same year. Powell was a true moderate on the bench and was often a swing vote, sometimes bridging differences between his more liberal and conservative colleagues. I had a strong sense that Reagan's nominee to replace Powell would not share his qualities of moderation.
By the time Powell resigned, on June 26, 1987, I had prepared myself to seize the initiative against the likely replacement nominee: Robert Bork.
I'd had my eye on Bork since he fired Archibald Cox during Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre." I'd watched him closely and believed his legal theories were totally out of the mainstream. And he had a written record that set forth his extreme views for all the country to see. On July 1, within forty-five minutes of Reagan's announcement that Bork was in fact his nominee, I arose on the Senate floor and spoke out against Bork and his vision of America.
I knew my speech was red-hot even before I delivered it. I wanted it that way--immediate and fiery--because I wanted to frame the debate. I knew I was making myself a target by being so heated in my rhetoric, but it was a price I was willing to pay to keep this man off the court.
In what came to be known as the "Robert Bork's America" speech, I urged Bork's rejection on several grounds: that he stood for an extremist view of the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court; that he'd opposed the Public Accommodations Civil Rights Act as well as the S
upreme Court's "one man, one vote" ruling in 1964; that he saw the First Amendment as protecting only political speech, and not literature or works of art or scientific expression.
"Robert Bork's America," I continued, "is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is--and is often the only--protector of the individual rights that are at the heart of our democracy." I closed with the declaration that President Reagan "should not be able to... reach into the muck of Watergate, and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and on the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice."
On summer weekends, I turned the house at Hyannis Port into a command center, from where I invited or telephoned dozens of legal scholars, my fellow senators, advocates for African Americans and women--anyone I could locate who had an informed opinion as to issues at stake. I listened, debated, researched, synthesized, and finally began to draft the input into an argument.
An early head count by the Democratic whip Alan Cranston in mid-July showed a tilt toward Bork's chances for confirmation. By mid-August, the mobilization against him was accelerating. I helped it along by sending out briefing books on the nominee's positions to senators, and a personal letter to sixty-two hundred black elected officials across America alerting them to Bork's threat to civil rights. I telephoned many leaders of national civil rights organizations. I urged Archibald Cox himself to speak out on his views of the "Saturday Night Massacre."
The hearings began on September 15, led by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Joe Biden. Fortified by preparation that was even more exhaustive than usual--I'd held mock hearing sessions with such constitutional experts as Lawrence Tribe of the Harvard Law School--I was able to get the nominee to admit that at one time he saw no right of privacy in the Constitution, didn't think the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to women, believed the states had the right to levy poll taxes, and that he'd once characterized the 1964 Civil Rights law requiring proprietors to serve African Americans in public places as "a principle of unsurpassed ugliness." These were words from his own testimony. The second two days were more of the same. On September 18, in fact, I played a tape that annihilated Bork's claim that as a justice he would give full weight to judicial precedent. The tape captured him telling a college audience in 1985, "I don't feel that in the field of constitutional law, precedent is all that important.... I think the importance is what the framers were driving at."
It was an onslaught of fact and damaging admission, and it worked dramatically. By late September, opinion polls were showing a 10 percent shift against Bork as a result of the hearings. On October 1, five previously uncommitted southern Democrats and the then Republican from Pennsylvania Arlen Specter announced their opposition to Bork. The full Judiciary Committee voted nine to five against recommending him five days later, and on October 23 his nomination was rejected by a vote of fifty-eight to forty-two, with seventeen Republicans in the majority--the largest margin of defeat in history for a Supreme Court nominee.
My final summation of Ronald Reagan is complicated. I recognize that millions of people will always remember him as a great president. It is too early to really know what history's verdict will be.
I believe that he failed to meet the ultimate criteria of greatness. His economic theories were certainly debatable, to say the least. But more than that was his complacency and even insensitivity regarding civil rights. He opposed the principles of the Voting Rights Act, for example, which he'd described during his campaign as "humiliating to the South," rather than focusing his comments on the practices that led to the need for such a law as humiliating to African Americans.
I feel that Ronald Reagan led the country in the wrong direction, sensing and playing to its worst impulses at a moment in history that called desperately for a higher vision. The term "government" was degraded into a working synonym for "ineptitude" or even "hostile entity." Nearly all the important imprints of his presidency bore features that rebuked or rolled back the hard-earned progress of African Americans dating to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His choice of the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, as the site for his first speech after being nominated was appalling: Philadelphia was the site of one of the most heinous racial crimes of the twentieth century, the murder of three young civil rights workers by white supremacists in 1964. He slashed education and social programs that protected the dispossessed, while scolding the phantom "welfare queens" who used their food stamps to buy steak and whiskey. He denounced the imprisoned Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and supported the apartheid government of South Africa. He vetoed a bill that would have authorized sanctions against that country's racist De Klerk regime. (Congress overrode the veto.)
And yet I cannot help affirming that Ronald Reagan deserves his special niche in the minds of the American people. As an optimist myself, I admire optimists. He made people feel upbeat about the country, a welcome mood shift after the Carter era.
As the nation moved rightward, many pundits suggested that--and many politicians acted as though--we were entering a sweeping and permanent new political climate. I never agreed with that view, harvested mainly from opinion polls and focus groups, nor the repositioning that it spawned. I recognized that some sort of shift was inevitable. My brother Jack used to say that ours was basically a conservative country, but that people wanted progress. So if you talked conservative and voted liberal, you'd win every time. I believe there's a lot to that bit of political wisdom. While I haven't mastered the art of talking conservative, experience has convinced me that genuine, principled leadership can persuade our people that their enlightened self-interest lies to the left. The historic gains of the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society attest to that. I maintained my conviction that the working-class majority forged by Roosevelt remained our best hope for justice and progress.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Family Business
1988-1990
As 1988 dawned and the Reagan administration entered its final year, I looked forward to a fascinating fall election season. Reagan's vice president, George H. W. Bush, was viewed as an early favorite in the crowded Republican primaries that also featured Congressman Jack Kemp of New York, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, and former cabinet members Alexander Haig and Donald Rumsfeld. The Democratic primary field crackled with talent: Congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri; Senator Paul Simon and the Reverend Jesse Jackson of Illinois; Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts; Senators Al Gore of Tennessee and Joe Biden of Delaware; former senator Gary Hart of Colorado; and former governor Bruce Babbitt of Arizona. Hopes ran high among Democrats that one of these men would lead the nation past eight years of "Reaganomics" that had tripled the national debt, from $900 billion when he took office to more than $2.8 trillion at the end of his term.
I faced a reelection test of my own that year. But even as I prepared for it with the diligence that any campaign for the Senate deserves, my highest hopes were keyed to a race that involved neither the presidency nor the Congress, but a relatively obscure state-level district in Rhode Island, and a fellow just barely old enough to vote, let alone stand for office. In April, my son Patrick had decided to toss his hat into the political ring.
He was a sophomore at Providence College that spring. He would not turn twenty-one until July. Yet his call to politics was serious and mature, and his passion for it ran deep. And that passion was his own. Patrick was not a carbon copy of me, in his views or in his style. Though our beliefs are similar on most issues, I've never tried to tell him how to think. Nor has he needed me to. Patrick lived politics his whole young life. His friendly face beneath
his shock of red hair instantly draws people to him. Patrick returns the warmth. Then too, he had and maintains a zest for campaigning, despite the fact that he had grown up reserved and rather shy. He quickly learned to love getting out there. He knew that people liked to see their representatives; needed to see them out there, working hard.
Patrick gave his political impulses a test run in early March, when he ran for and was elected a Rhode Island delegate to the Democratic convention, committed to Michael Dukakis. He liked the feel of that, and set his sights on the Rhode Island House of Representatives. A few months later, he threw himself into the fray like a veteran. Since no Republican was running, the Democratic primary would produce the overall winner. His opponent was the incumbent, Jack Skeffington, a veteran of the state's ward politics who, despite his good nature, was none too pleased to be going up against a youngster whom he considered no more than an upstart with a famous name who ought to be waiting his turn. Skeffington's fellow Rhode Island Democrats, an understandably close-knit group, felt the same way. And so my son found his welcome to electoral politics delivered with a bare knuckle or two.
Patrick fought back with energy and good cheer. He campaigned hard and shrewdly, but fairly, against Skeffington and his supporters. Patrick argued that Skeffington had grown out of touch with the people he represented. Still underweight and a little weakened from recent surgery on a benign spinal tumor, and packing an inhalator to combat his chronic asthma, Patrick bounded about the district, practicing retail politics in his neat blue blazer and white shirt with endless handshakes and knocks on doors. His strategy worked--reinforced somewhat by many voters' perception that Skeffington's people were coming down too hard on the young man. Patrick later admitted that he'd been anxious and nervous through much of the campaign. Yet he won in September with 1,324 votes, against 1,009 for his rival. He was off on a political career that six years later would take him to the United States House of Representatives.
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