The North Carolina primary was coming up in late March and I had to pull off a victory there in order to remain a credible candidate. I stumped the state day and night and in a last-ditch effort gambled much of our remaining campaign funds to buy a half hour of airtime to present my case shortly before the election.
The gamble worked. The speech generated enough support for me to turn things around and we won North Carolina; this helped us raise the money needed to keep the campaign alive. After that, I won in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, California, and several other states, which set up a confrontation between Ford and me at the convention in Kansas City.
The votes of 1,140 delegates were needed to win the nomination. As the convention approached, the competition for delegates was nip and tuck and I came under pressure, especially from my more conservative supporters, to go on the attack against Ford.
Although I did make it clear I didn’t like some things that had happened under his administration, such as the agreement giving away control of the Panama Canal, which Americans had bought and paid for, it wasn’t in me to violate the Eleventh Commandment and I refused to attack Ford personally.
When the balloting was over, I had 1,070 votes—70 votes shy of victory—and Ford had 1,187. The nomination was his. I’d come close, but not close enough. It was a big disappointment because I hate to lose. But I’d always known that challenging an incumbent president was going to be difficult.
Ford’s people sent signals to me that I could have the vice-presidential nomination if I wanted it, but for months I’d said I wouldn’t consider it. I just wasn’t interested in being vice-president.
After the balloting, President Ford called me down to the platform. Nancy and I went and I asked the delegates to make the vote unanimous for Ford and pledged my support for him. It was an exciting and unforgettable evening.
32
AFTER GERALD FORD WON THE NOMINATION in Kansas City, I met with the members of the California delegation and said: “Nancy and I are not going back and sit on our rocking chairs and say, ‘That’s all for us.’”
Nancy was among those in the room that day with tears in her eyes. She had never tried to influence me, one way or the other, whether I should run for president, but I knew she felt a great sadness for me. She knew how much I hated to lose. In her heart, though, I think Nancy may have felt a sense of relief. Now we could go home and get on with the rest of our lives.
But I think we both knew it wouldn’t—couldn’t—end in Kansas City. After committing ten years of our lives to what we believed in, I just couldn’t walk away and say, “I don’t care any more.”
After the convention, I campaigned in more than twenty states for President Ford and when he lost to Jimmy Carter, I began writing my newspaper column and radio scripts again and continued to speak out for Republicanism and how we had strayed from the visions of our founding fathers. With contributions left over from the campaign, I established an organization called the Citizens for the Republic to focus attention on these concerns.
After Ford’s loss, I knew some of my supporters would begin knocking on my door and urge me to run in 1980, and they did. I told them I wasn’t going to make a decision yet.
I wasn’t the reluctant candidate I’d been in 1965 and 1976. I wanted to be president. But I really believed that what happened next wasn’t up to me, it was up to the people: If there was a real people’s movement to get me to run, then I said I’d do it, but I was going to wait and see.
Paul Laxalt asked if he could put together the nucleus of a campaign organization for 1980 in case I decided to run. I told him I wouldn’t object, but it wasn’t a commitment. He accepted my terms and tirelessly went to work organizing for a campaign that might never take place.
As this was going on, we picked up the threads of our life in Southern California and enjoyed it very much. After the enforced separation of the campaign, we got to see the children more often. Nancy, always the nest builder, never ceased fixing up and redecorating our house in Pacific Palisades and she kept busy with the Foster Grandparents Program. And we had more time than ever for the ranch and more time for travel. On a trip to England, I bumped into Justin Dart, one of the Californians who’d been in my Kitchen Cabinet, and he said he wanted me to meet a friend of his who had recently been elected the first woman to head the British Conservative Party.
I’d planned on spending only a few minutes with Margaret Thatcher but we ended up talking for almost two hours. I liked her immediately—she was warm, feminine, gracious, and intelligent—and it was evident from our first words that we were soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding economic freedom. At a reception that evening, an Englishman who had heard about our meeting asked me, “What do you think of our Mrs. Thatcher?”
I said I’d been deeply impressed. “I think she’d make a magnificent prime minister.”
He looked at me out of the corners of his eyes with a kind of mocking disdain that seemed to suggest the idea was unthinkable: “My dear fellow, a woman prime minister?”
“England once had a queen named Victoria who did rather well,” I said.
“By jove,” he said, “I’d forgotten all about that.”
Of course, it never occurred to me that before many years would pass, Margaret and I would be sitting across from each other as the heads of our respective governments.
• • •
With each passing month of the Carter administration, I became more concerned about the things that were happening—and not happening—in Washington.
Jimmy Carter had run for the presidency on a platform calling for cuts in defense spending and implementation of what the Democrats called “national economic planning.” That meant one thing to me: The Democrats wanted to borrow some of the principles of the Soviets’ failed five-year plans, with Washington setting national production goals, deciding where people worked, what they would do, where they would live, what they would produce.
The Democratic platform also called for “fairer distribution of wealth, income, and power”—code words that to me meant a confiscation of the earnings of people in our country who worked and produced, and their redistribution to people who didn’t.
I’m sure they meant well—liberals usually do—but our economy was one of the great wonders of the world. It didn’t need master planners. It worked because it operated on principles of freedom, millions of people going about their daily business and making free decisions how they wanted to work and live, how they wanted to spend their money, while reaping the rewards of their individual labor.
Our country didn’t need social engineers or economic master planners. Our economic system is based on the law of supply and demand and the right of individuals to choose their line of work, their manner of living, where they live and how they live—all so long as they do not impose on the right of others to enjoy the same freedoms.
I also thought the administration was a disaster in the arena of national security. While it was cutting back on our military power, we were losing ground to Communism in much of the globe; the morale of our volunteer army was plummeting; our strategic forces were growing obsolete; and nothing was being done to reduce the threat of a nuclear Armageddon that could destroy much of the world in less than a half hour’s time.
There were other serious problems: Unemployment, inflation, and interest rates were climbing and it looked as if administration policies would lead the nation into a serious recession.
But perhaps worst of all, it seemed to me that America was losing faith in itself. Almost every day, the president was sending a message to the American people that America had passed its prime, that Americans were going to have to get used to less in the future, that we should not have the same hopes for the future that we once did, and that we had only ourselves to blame for it.
As the months passed and the problems got worse, I received more and more calls urging me to run for president, and I was edging closer to a decision to run in
1980.
George Bush and several friends visited me in Los Angeles and he told me he expected to run for president in 1980. I suspect that he would have liked me to say I wasn’t going to run, but I said, “You know, I haven’t made a decision yet myself, but I might be doing that, too.”
About the same time, fifteen or so of my most conservative backers asked me to meet with them at the Madison Hotel in Washington. They asked me to run for president as an independent third-party candidate.
Their intention was to launch a full-blown national conservative movement with me at the head of it. Some in the group had made the same pitch four years earlier and I’d turned them down. This time, I told them they were out of their minds. I said the bulk of conservatives in America were Republicans and they wouldn’t desert the party for a third party. If I was ever going to make progress in accomplishing the things I believed in, it would have to be within the Republican Party. They wouldn’t listen to me, and so I walked out on them.
Some of those conservative diehards have never forgiven me for it. (Later, I learned some of them subsequently held a secret meeting at which they almost convinced Alexander Haig to run against me.)
If I decided to run in 1980, I knew I’d have to deal with two issues in particular: I’d have to show the Easterners who were suspicious of any Westerner, but especially Californians, I wasn’t an extremist and I’d have to deal with the issue of my age.
If I won in 1980, I would turn seventy shortly after Inauguration Day and become the oldest president in history. (Actually, that birthday would be the thirty-first anniversary of my thirty-ninth birthday. When I turned sixty-five, I’d begun joking, like Jack Benny, that subsequent birthdays marked the anniversary of my thirty-ninth birthday.)
The truth is, I felt thirty-nine or younger. I didn’t feel any different or any older than the way I’d always felt. But I realized it was inevitable that the press would focus attention on my age.
I’d never taken naps or dyed my hair, but that hadn’t stopped reporters from suggesting I did. (The rumor about dyeing my hair, incidentally, started when I was governor. My barber told me that after I left his shop people sometimes came in and asked if they could pick up a strand or two of my hair to see if the roots were gray. I’m the first person I know of who was actually happy when gray hair started growing on his head.)
At the time I was moving closer to a commitment to run in 1980, the sense of anger and frustration over taxes and government regulation I’d first seen on those cross-country tours for General Electric was beginning to boil over at the polls.
In 1978, voters in California passed Proposition 13, slashing property taxes and setting off a taxpayers’ revolt across the nation. Five years earlier when I was governor, I’d tried to get a similar measure passed, but it was defeated. It had been ahead of its time. Now, people were rebelling, trying to get government off their back and out of their pocketbooks. That prairie fire I’ve talked about was really spreading across the land, and it shouldn’t have surprised anyone.
Between 1960 and the late 1970s, the federal government payroll had jumped from less than $13 billion to more than $70 billion.
Total federal spending had jumped six times to more than $500 billion; the national debt had almost tripled and was approaching the trillion-dollar mark; during the same period, the country’s population had increased only about twenty percent.
People were growing tired of having to work four months of every year just to pay their taxes. Taxes kept rising and the only consistency in the system was that once a tax was imposed, it was never rescinded.
At our factories and workshops, high taxes were discouraging investments in plants and equipment, eroding the productivity of American workers—the best in the world—and obsolete and punitive regulations imposed by government were inhibiting and restricting the dynamic energy of the free market.
After a half century that had given them the New Deal and the “Great Society” and produced a government that took an average of forty-five percent of the national wealth, people were just fed up.
33
I ANNOUNCED MY DECISION TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT in a speech at the New York Hilton Hotel on November 13, 1979. Immediately after the speech, we left on a campaign swing to Washington, New Hampshire, Illinois, and other points. I’m told that en-route to La Guardia Airport, the bus carrying the campaign press corps got lost.
Maybe it was an omen, because the campaign itself didn’t get off to a very smooth start.
To manage the campaign, we’d brought in most of the same team from 1976, led by Paul Laxalt as national chairman and John Sears as director of day-to-day operations. Mike Deaver, a close and valued assistant since my Sacramento days, came aboard as a political strategist and chief fund-raiser; Lyn Nofziger, another old hand from Sacramento, was press secretary; and Ed Meese agreed to serve as my advisor on key issues of the campaign.
During the weeks leading up to the speech in New York, serious friction developed among the top players on the team. John Sears began asserting a right to exercise absolute control over the campaign and move aside some of the people who had been with me in California. Although I intervened and stopped an attempt to remove Paul Laxalt as the general chairman of the campaign, John replaced Nofziger with his own man, Jim Lake, as press secretary, and brought in a new advisor on issues, Charles Black, after ousting Martin Anderson, another valued advisor from California.
John resented in particular my closeness to Mike Deaver and Ed Meese and began trying to bump them from the campaign staff. By the end of November, after we’d been on the campaign trail only two weeks or so, there was so much tension and bickering that I decided to call the key players together at my house in Pacific Palisades to see if I could smooth things over.
As soon as they got there, Sears, Jim Lake, and Charles Black, in effect, gave me an ultimatum: Mike Deaver had to go. They said he had too much authority and was often working at cross purposes to what they wanted to accomplish in the campaign. This put me in the position of having to choose between Mike and the three of them, but before I could say anything, Mike spoke up:
“Look, if it comes down to a choice between me and John, I don’t believe you can afford to lose John, and I’ll leave.”
With that, Mike stood up and walked out of the living room. He had helped bring John Sears on to the team and believed in his capabilities completely and was willing to sacrifice himself.
I ran after Mike and caught up with him at the front door and tried to persuade him to stay. But he said, “No, Governor, you need John Sears more than you need me.”
When I returned to the living room, I was very upset. “Damn it,” I said, “you’ve just driven away someone who’s probably a better man than the three of you are.”
With Mike gone, the friction on the staff began to subside—for a while—and the campaign began to pick up steam.
When I’d announced my decision to run for the Republican presidential nomination, the field was already crowded; with seven candidates already in the race, it promised to be a long campaign.
As I had in 1976, I told my campaign staff that I intended to abide by the Eleventh Commandment: I’d attack only Democrats while trying to let the voters know where I stood.
I figured I would deal with the skepticism that some Northeasterners had about me simply by showing myself to them, answering their questions, and letting them hear what I had to say.
I had never regarded the question of my age as an important or pivotal issue, but I couldn’t ignore it, and to show voters and the press that I was as vigorous as anyone, we kept a dawn-till-darkness schedule of campaigning that usually had members of the traveling press corps complaining of fatigue before anyone else; there were a lot of nights when I’d walk down the darkened aisle of the campaign plane after a day on the stump, and everybody would be asleep but me. (When one of my supporters quipped I was the “oldest and wisest” candidate in the race, I didn’t mind.)
&nb
sp; I learned a lot about how the national press corps covered a presidential campaign. As far as I could tell, when we started out on the campaign trail each morning, the goal of many of the reporters traveling with us was simply to catch me fouling up my speech or to trap me into a minor error about an obscure or inconsequential topic that had nothing to do with the substance of the campaign. Then, satisfied, most would run off in a pack and report the identical story about a minor goof, while ignoring other, important things that were said during the day and neglecting the kind of beneath-the-surface digging that could have shed more light on the campaign and the differences between the various candidates. I thought it was all pretty superficial.
Until 1976, the New Hampshire primary, usually held in mid-February, was considered the first test of a presidential candidate’s strength every four years. But that year Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere and made himself a credible candidate by getting a majority of the votes during a one-day canvas of party members held in communities throughout Iowa a few weeks before the New Hampshire primary.
As a result, by 1980, the first battleground in the presidential contest was considered the Iowa caucuses, which were scheduled for January 21.
John Sears said polls indicated I had a comfortable lead in Iowa, where a lot of people still remembered me from my radio days, and so I didn’t have to campaign much there. He kept me out of a debate sponsored by the Des Moines Register and Tribune that most of the candidates agreed to, and we ended up making only a handful of token appearances there instead of trying to visit all the communities in Iowa where they were going to have those meetings.
Well, as we discovered, it was a big mistake.
George Bush practically lived in Iowa before the caucuses (something I should have done) and he won the caucuses by a narrow margin.
This loss was a real shocker and a big disappointment to me. Even after all those years in Hollywood, I’d thought of Iowa as my adopted home state. Although a lot of years had gone by since I’d lived there, I considered myself a transplanted Iowan and had really expected to win. But we’d made the mistake of taking Iowa for granted; in a way, it was the 1976 New Hampshire primary all over again.
An American Life Page 21