The day after the caucuses, most of the pundits agreed that by upsetting me George Bush now had the momentum to win the nomination—the “Big Mo,” as George called it.
Suddenly for me the New Hampshire primary on February 26 loomed as a do-or-die contest. If Bush could beat me there, I knew—and everybody else on our team knew—it would be extremely difficult to ever get the campaign on a winning track.
The Iowa caucuses reminded me too much of my loss in New Hampshire four years earlier, when I’d left the state on the eve of the primary because of the advice I was ahead in the polls and didn’t need to campaign there anymore.
Well, this time, I decided, we weren’t going to make the same mistake again. I knew I had relied too much on the advice of Sears instead of my own instincts and had to take more direct control of the campaign.
I brought everybody together and said we were going to work our tails off in New Hampshire—and we did.
Day after day, we traveled the snow-splattered highways of the state from early in the morning to late at night; I’d speak to anyone who was willing to listen to me, then we’d get back in our convoy of cars and buses and drive someplace else and seldom get to bed before midnight.
I think the loss in Iowa had really whipped up my competitive fires, and I didn’t want to lose again.
As I’ve said, I have often wondered at how our lives can turn on what seem like small or inconsequential events, like my losing the job at Montgomery Ward.
That winter, a brief and seemingly small event, one lasting only a few seconds, occurred in a high school gymnasium in Nashua, New Hampshire, and I think it helped take me to the White House.
34
IN THE FINAL DAYS before the election in New Hampshire, I think almost everybody except the other candidates agreed that the primary had settled down to a race between George Bush and myself, with Bush the front runner.
When the Nashua Telegraph offered to sponsor a debate between the two of us on the Saturday evening preceding the election, we both accepted. Understandably, this brought howls from the other candidates. In protest, one of them, Senator Bob Dole, complained to the Federal Elections Commission that by financing a debate between only two of the seven candidates, the newspaper was making an illegal campaign contribution to the Bush and Reagan campaigns.
The commission agreed with him. Rather than scrap the scheduled debate, we suggested to the Bush camp that the two of us split the cost of holding it. After the Bush people turned down our proposal, we offered to pay the full cost of the debate—a few thousand dollars—and they accepted.
I thought it had been unfair to exclude from the debate the other candidates, most of whom were also campaigning in New Hampshire that weekend, and since we were now sponsoring and paying for it, I decided to invite them to join the debate; four of the other candidates—Bob Dole, Howard Baker, John Anderson, and Phil Crane (John Connally was campaigning elsewhere)—accepted.
When we walked on to a platform set up for the debate at the Nashua High School gymnasium Saturday night, there was one table, two chairs, and six candidates.
When he spotted the four other candidates, Jim Baker, George Bush’s campaign manager, protested and said George would not participate in the debate as long as they were part of it.
Since I had invited them, I couldn’t go along with him and exclude the other candidates, so we were at an impasse, a strange, awkward impasse.
George just sat frozen in his chair, not saying anything; I sat in the other chair with the four other candidates standing behind me, looking embarrassed in front of two or three thousand people while being literally told they had to leave.
Unable to understand what was going on, the audience hooted and hollered and urged us to proceed.
I decided I should explain to the crowd what the delay was all about and started to speak.
But as I did, an editor of the Nashua newspaper shouted to the sound man, “Turn Mr. Reagan’s microphone off.”
Well, I didn’t like that—we were paying the freight for the debate and he was acting as if his newspaper was still sponsoring it—and so I turned to him, with the microphone still on, and said the first thing that came to my mind: “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Breen.”
Well, for some reason my words hit the audience, whose emotions were already worked up, like a sledgehammer. The crowd roared and just went wild.
I may have won the debate, the primary—and the nomination—right there. After the debate, our people told me the gymnasium parking lot was littered with Bush-for-President badges.
During the weeks following the Iowa caucuses when I’d been trying to make a comeback, the bickering, tension, and morale problems on our staff because of John Sears’s efforts to exert total control over the campaign had reached a boiling point again.
I thought Sears was smart and talented, but he became angry if I spoke to anyone but him about campaign affairs and he kept pressing me to fire Ed Meese and other people on the staff whom I thought highly of. And I guess I still hadn’t forgiven him for what John had done to Mike Deaver, and so as election day approached, I decided enough was enough.
The morale problem and bickering wasn’t our campaign’s only problem: We had been spending money at such a rate we were in danger of exceeding limits established by federal election laws, which meant we might not have enough left for important primaries later in the spring.
A change was necessary at the top of the campaign staff. I knew I had to do it before the results were in from New Hampshire because if I lost and then fired Sears, people could say I was trying to make him the scapegoat for my loss, and I didn’t want that to happen.
So, on the day that New Hampshire voters were going to the polls, I invited John, Jim Lake, and Charles Black to my hotel room and I asked them to resign. They took it well and I think they understood why the changes were necessary.
I had already asked Bill Casey, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission whom I’d met while campaigning in New York City, to take over as campaign director, straighten out our finances, and assure we didn’t run out of money prematurely; Ed Meese became chief of staff in charge of day-to-day campaign operations; and soon Mike Deaver, Lyn Nofziger, and Martin Anderson rejoined our team. Later on, Stu Spencer also became a part of the leadership group.
Several hours after the meeting in the hotel room, the polls closed and I learned I had won the seven-way New Hampshire primary with fifty-one percent of the vote.
In retrospect, this was really the pivotal day of the whole primary campaign for me. From then on, with the management changes we had made, the campaign ran smoothly and the victory in New Hampshire gave us a momentum that helped me win all but a few of the remaining primaries that spring.
Shortly after New Hampshire, all the candidates except George Bush dropped out, and then, near the end of May, he dropped out, too.
In early July, when Nancy and I arrived at the Republican National Convention in Detroit, it appeared I had more than enough delegate votes to win the nomination and the next thing on my agenda was choosing a running mate.
Even before we landed in Detroit, a number of party leaders and members of my own team such as Paul Laxalt had been talking up the possibility of asking Gerald Ford to run with me as the vice-presidential candidate. By the opening day of the convention, the idea had really taken on a momentum and everyone was calling it a “dream ticket.”
An ex-president, of course, had never run for vice-president before, but we had been through an unusual time in history, and I said I was in favor of it.
Members of our campaign team began quietly discussing the idea with Ford and some of the people close to him, and for a while it looked like the plan would fly. Then Paul Laxalt and some of the other people in our camp began coming back from the meetings with word there might be some problems with the dream ticket.
Some of Ford’s advisors were pushing for him to become a kind of “copresident” wit
h responsibilities in foreign affairs and other areas much broader than those normally assigned a vice-president.
After news of our secret negotiations leaked out, Gerald Ford spoke to Walter Cronkite on CBS and during the interview hinted at some of the things that his people were proposing and said that if the plan went through, he expected to play a significant role with me in making White House decisions; well, as I watched the interview, it really hit me that we had some major problems with the idea: Wait a minute, I remember thinking, this is really two presidents he’s talking about.
The talks continued for a few more hours, but that night Ford came to my suite and said, “Look, this isn’t gonna work.”
Until this point, I had still thought there might be a way of working something out. Although I never envisioned him sharing in decisions and wouldn’t have accepted it if that had been proposed to me, I thought there might be assignments he could handle that would take advantage of his experience and prestige as a former president.
But, when he came to my suite, he took himself out of consideration.
Because he was a former president, he said his advisors believed it would be appropriate for him to take on responsibilities beyond those normally given to a vice-president. But he said he knew from his own experience in the White House the country couldn’t operate with two presidents.
For several days, I had expected Ford to be on the ticket and I hadn’t given much thought to other candidates; now I had to choose a running mate and time was of the essence. The delegates were waiting for me at the Joe Louis Arena to announce my decision.
The obvious choice was George Bush. We had been through a competitive and sometimes rough primary battle, but I had always liked him personally and had a great respect for his abilities and breadth of experience; and I knew he had a lot of support within the party.
George and Barbara Bush were upstairs in the hotel. A few moments after Gerald Ford left my suite, I called Bush and said:
“George, it seems to me that the fellow who came the closest and got the next most votes for president ought to be the logical choice for vice-president. Will you take it?”
George jumped at it without a moment’s hesitation and said he would be pleased to be on the ticket.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m going to get in the car and go over to the convention right now and tell the people that you’re my choice.”
When I announced my decision to the throng of delegates crowded into the arena, they rose to their feet with a tremendous roar. The roof almost came off. As George and I stood there together, it was almost as if we were putting the party back together again. I then asked the delegates to join me in a silent prayer.
Now George and I faced a challenge together: beating Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.
35
AS THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE PRESIDENCY got under way late that summer in 1980, Americans for a second year in a row were trying to cope with the ruthless effects of double-digit inflation, which was eating away at their savings, their paychecks, and their way of life like a horde of locusts. Interest rates were over fifteen percent, depriving millions of American families of a chance to buy a home; in countless communities, the unemployment rate, like inflation and interest rates, was in double digits.
Militarily, our nation was seriously in danger of falling behind the Soviet Union at a time a former naval officer was holding the watch as Commander in Chief. The Soviets were modernizing their fleet and their ground and air forces on a massive scale. Yet on any given day, I was told as many as half the ships in our navy couldn’t leave port because of a lack of spare parts or crew and half our military aircraft couldn’t fly for lack of spare parts; the overwhelming majority of our military enlisted personnel were high school dropouts.
Abroad, the Soviet Union was engaged in a brutal war in Afghanistan and Communism was extending its tentacles deep into Central America and Africa. In Iran, more than fifty Americans had been held captive for almost a year under the regime of a vicious religious despot who had risen to power while an old and loyal ally of the United States had been forced from power and our country had done nothing to help him.
I made a decision not to criticize President Carter regarding Iran. I knew anything I might say could interfere with efforts to free the hostages. Being governor had taught me that sometimes there are things going on that only the top person in the government knows about, and I thought it was best for me to keep quiet; there might be something going on I didn’t know about.
But I wasn’t happy with the events in Iran. The sudden emergence of fanatic Islamic fundamentalism as a political force in the Middle East was a development that would have posed a difficult challenge to any Western leader concerned with our strategic interests there. It wasn’t an easy situation for Carter to deal with, and he couldn’t be faulted for the awakening of this dark and fanatical force.
But I felt that by standing by and failing to come up with a viable alternative to deal with the crisis when the Shah of Iran was forced from power in early 1979, the Carter administration had sown the seeds of the foreign policy disaster that would later engulf it.
I was told by officials of the Shah’s government that after rioting began in the streets of Teheran in 1979, the Shah’s advisors told him if they were allowed to arrest five hundred people—the most corrupt businessmen and officials in the government—the revolutionary fires could be extinguished, and they could head off the revolution.
But people in the American Embassy told the Shah to do nothing, and he didn’t. Until the very end, he kept telling his staff, “The United States has always been our friend and it won’t let me down now.” Well, he took our advice on how to respond to the mobs and when he had to flee his country, the United States didn’t even want to let him in for the medical care that he desperately needed. It was terrible treatment for a man who had been our friend and solid ally for more than thirty-five years.
Yes, there had been serious human rights abuses under the Shah. But he had done many good and progressive things for his country; he had brought it into the twentieth century, and in the years preceding his downfall, the Shah had begun to tolerate dissent to his policies and try to stamp out the corruption that was so prevalent in his country that had made it ripe for revolution.
Our government’s decision to stand by piously while he was forced from office led to the establishment of a despotic regime in Teheran that was far more evil and far more tyrannical than the one it replaced. And, as I was to learn through personal experience, it left a legacy of problems that would haunt our country for years to come.
During the summer and fall of 1980, there were many problems facing our nation: the tragic neglect of our military establishment, high unemployment and an ailing economy, the continuing expansion of Communism abroad, the taking of the hostages in Iran.
But to me none was more serious than the fact America had lost faith in itself.
We were told there was a “malaise” in our nation and America was past its prime; we had to get used to less, and the American people were responsible for the problems we faced.
We were told we would have to lower our expectations; America would never again be as prosperous or have as bright a future as it once had.
Well, I disagreed with that.
Yes, we had problems in 1980, a lot of them of our own making in Washington. But I disagreed with those who said that the solution was to give up and be satisfied with less. I saw no national malaise. I found nothing wrong with the American people.
We had to recapture our dreams, our pride in ourselves and our country, and regain that unique sense of destiny and optimism that had always made America different from any other country in the world.
If I could be elected president, I wanted to do what I could to bring about a spiritual revival in America.
I believed—and I intended to make it a theme of my campaign—that America’s greatest years were ahead of it, that we had to look at the thi
ngs that had made it the greatest, richest, and most progressive country on earth in the first place, decide what had gone wrong, and then put it back on course.
In September, Nancy and I rented a lovely home in the Virginia hunt country an hour or so from Washington called Wexford, once owned by Jacqueline Onassis, to serve as our base of operations while I stumped the country in the final weeks of the campaign.
On those rare days when we weren’t on the campaign trail, I was able to ride across the lovely green hills and mentally sort out the problems we faced at the time.
Obviously, no one could take the challenge of defeating an incumbent president lightly. Although public opinion polls indicated Americans were fed up with the leadership in the White House, by then I had had enough experience in politics to realize that no one, least of all the candidate, should take anything for granted.
I tried to focus the campaign on the things that had gone wrong in America during the previous four years, especially regarding the economy, and to present my vision of how, working together, we as a people could get our country back on track again and advance it toward the fulfillment of its destiny.
Carter took a low road of personal attacks on my character. Because I said I believed states should be allowed to regain the rights and powers granted to them in the Constitution, he implied I was a racist pandering to Southern voters; because I opposed Senate ratification of the SALT II treaty in the belief it had serious weaknesses that would leave the Soviets with a dangerous preponderance of nuclear weapons—I wanted true arms reduction—Carter went around the country suggesting I was a warmonger who, if elected, would destroy the world.
I think the voters saw through these false and often mean-spirited personal attacks; I do know that they made me even more anxious to beat him. Nothing has ever aroused me more than competing against someone who I think isn’t fighting fairly.
An American Life Page 22