But in the 1980 election it was an enormously attractive proposition to an American public reeling from double-digit inflation and slowing growth. While we Democrats were fighting among ourselves about the appropriate level of support for the New Deal and the Great Society programs, the country was changing, and the Republicans were engaging in a whole new and more revolutionary conversation that would dominate politics for two generations.
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I naively thought Reagan would be easy to defeat because he had made so many provocative out-of-the box statements: Social Security should be voluntary; unemployment insurance was “a prepaid vacation plan for freeloaders”; plants and trees were responsible for most air pollution; the progressive income tax had been invented by Karl Marx; and fascism was the basis of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Reagan also frequently exaggerated facts and had stories that turned out to be myths created by his fertile imagination. The fact that voters would turn to such a candidate was a measure of their economic suffering and their resentment at seeing their country humiliated by a band of turbaned revolutionaries in Iran.
But I got a cold shower at a meeting of the senior White House Staff in the Roosevelt Room when Ham arranged for a briefing by Jesse Unruh, chairman of the California Democratic Party and a longtime observer and political opponent of Reagan. Unruh was no amateur—his nickname in the political world was Big Daddy—and his message was blunt: Do not underestimate Ronald Reagan; he is a first-rate, charismatic politician with a compelling message.
We never developed a coherent and positive strategy against Reagan, except stoking fear against him. Without a clear, upbeat message of how the president would lead us out of our economic quagmire and resolve the hostage crisis, the Democratic strategy was largely negative—to make voters fear Ronald Reagan by painting him as a wild-eyed conservative who would tear down the social welfare structure of the country and could not be trusted to keep the peace—and it almost succeeded. When Democrats rolled out the same destructive strategy of trying to frighten voters about their opponent in 2016, it failed again.
Reagan did not rely only on new Republican ideas. He took the bold step of inviting the man who ran the campaigns of two of his Republican Party opponents, Ford in 1976 and Bush in 1980, to run his campaign. There are few people in contemporary American public life more capable than James A. Baker. An elegant Texas lawyer with an impeccable family background and education—the private Hill School, Princeton, and the Marines—he was more moderate than Reagan but remarkably adept politically. Baker realized from Ford’s loss, when we promoted Art Okun’s misery index, that the economy is “always the issue.” They threw that index back in our faces. As Baker cogently put it to me later, there were three issues critical to Reagan’s chances of defeating a Democratic incumbent who had been elected president, a victory for which there was no modern precedent: “the economy, the economy, and the economy, in that order. I mean, when you look at the misery index, now how the hell could you guys win in the face of that?!”37
We might have found our answer to this brilliant and focused political strategist in Ham Jordan, but he was diverted during long periods of the campaign in fruitless attempts to negotiate the release of the hostages and fight the cocaine charges cooked up by the attack-dog lawyer Roy Cohn.
DEBATEGATE
While in recent elections we have come to expect presidential debates, there had been a 16-year hiatus between the initial Kennedy-Nixon debate and the one between Ford and Carter. The debate between Carter and Reagan on October 28, only a week before the November 4 Election Day, was decisive. And we were outfoxed by Jim Baker in agreeing to it so close to the election. The common wisdom that the Reagan landslide was a foreordained conclusion is wrong, as Baker himself remembered. The race was close until the debate put Reagan ahead, and then swung back to Carter until his ill-fated reaction to a last-minute offer from Iran on the Sunday before the election.
During the Democratic primaries the president refused to debate Kennedy at all, citing the hostage crisis and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I advised him in a meeting in his private study as early as June to debate Kennedy and then Reagan—“anyone and any time”—and run a give-’em-hell campaign like Harry Truman’s.38 The Carter campaign team repeatedly refused to engage in a three-way debate, fearing that national exposure for third-party candidate John Anderson would draw votes from Carter. On September 21 Reagan debated Anderson alone and taunted the president for refusing to join. He said that Carter knew “he couldn’t win a debate even if it were held in the Rose Garden before an audience of Administration officials with the questions being asked by Jody Powell.”39
Jimmy Carter on the political attack was never very good at wielding a stiletto, and his attacks on Reagan became increasingly shrill and personal. I emphasized to the president in midcampaign that he should quote Reagan’s own words back to him and not engage in personal characterizations. He agreed, but said that “we should make the strongest rhetorical statement we can” against the Kemp-Roth tax cuts. While economically sound, politically it was a little like withholding dessert or a trip to the movies from a rebellious teenager: a punishment with no lasting effect.40
As September turned into October, Reagan continued to insist on sharing any debate with Anderson. But our greatest mistake was dragging out our insistence that Carter would take on Reagan only head-to-head, leading with our chins. By contrast Baker confessed that even within his own organization many senior campaign officials feared that Reagan could not stand toe-to-toe against Carter’s knowledge of issues and might make an embarrassing stumble. Reagan’s pollster, Richard Wirthlin, felt that the race was so close, it was worth the risk to debate. As he put it, “The election is going to hang or fall on that debate.” But Baker’s was the decisive voice, and his confidence in his candidate may have assured his election, as he was “always impressed with his ability on television.”41
Reagan’s mastery of the medium, not just the message, is what proved decisive. But the broader reason was that without an opportunity to break out from the closely divided electorate, the Republicans could lose. With two weeks to go, the League of Women Voters agreed to exclude Anderson, as the electorate returned to the traditional parties and the third-party candidate’s poll numbers fell. Now that Reagan had accepted Carter’s terms, Carter was pushed into a box, making the debate at a time dangerously close to the election.
Rafshoon ruefully recalled that as long as Reagan would not accept the one-on-one, “we were on top of it. We were saying he was afraid of one-on-one.” When they saw their poll numbers dropping in the final weeks of the campaign, they shifted tactics and agreed to debate Carter alone.42 Caddell called me on October 18, expressing grave concern that “one of the great mistakes of the campaign was to agree to such a late debate” on October 28, little more than a week before the election.43
As I traveled back to Washington with the president on Air Force One from his joint appearance with Reagan at the annual Al Smith Dinner in New York, he was in an expansive mood and even told a ribald joke, the first I had ever heard him make.44 But he soon turned deadly serious with the crucial debate with Reagan ahead of him. In preparing the debate book for the president, we reached out to the most experienced political operatives, including Bob Barnett, a prominent Washington lawyer and presidential debate coach, and former LBJ White House aides Jack Valenti and Harry McPherson. Their advice was for Carter to be presidential, forget the past, and state that he had learned lessons for a second term from his own mistakes, while reminding voters of Reagan’s dangerous stands on subjects from Medicare to nuclear weapons.45
When Ham, Jody, Rafshoon, Caddell, and I met Saturday morning, October 25, to review how we would recommend Carter approach the debate, we all agreed he should not have his regular jog around Camp David, because it was wet and cold and we did not want to take a chance on Carter catching a cold. But he would not listen and jogged anyway, leading Jody, who, with Ham, had known him l
ongest, to remark with some admiration, “He’s a hardheaded little son-of-a-bitch.” He would not have made his improbable journey from Plains to the Oval Office without this stubborn quality. When we met with him, he was no worse for the wear, but he developed laryngitis a day later.46
For the first time in his political career, President Carter, realizing the enormous stakes, began sustained debate preparations on October 25 at Camp David’s Hickory Lodge, with Jody asking his questions, and then the first lady, Kirbo, Ham, Caddell, David Rubenstein, and I following up, as the reporters would at the debate.47 During the two practice sessions the next day Carter was in a feisty mood, talking about Reagan’s tax cuts as “radical,” and a “rich man’s tax cut that would flood the country with dollars” like “throwing gasoline on a fire” with already high inflation. When he moved to Reagan’s opposition to the SALT II treaty he used terms like “belligerent,” “ridiculous,” and “dangerous.” Ham wrote a note on my legal pad: “Pat’s got him excessively combative. He needs to ignore many of Reagan’s claims, etc.”48
For the second session he agreed to a full practice confrontation, with Reagan played by Sam Popkin, a suave, blunt, and analytic professor of political science who worked with Caddell on his polls. “Reagan wins if he shows he does not have a warlike bone in his body,” Popkin warned me privately, adding, “Carter wins if he turns the debate to the next four years” rather than attacking Reagan as a person. He cautioned: “Reagan does not have a jugular vein Carter can attack, because he’s a free-fly or a butterfly.”49 There were cameras, and mock questions and answers were drawn from our debate book. While we were in practice, Carter, always a tough campaigner, made clear that he understood what he faced: “Reagan is out campaigning like a Democrat, but the people he will appoint are ready to govern as Republicans.”50 But his prescience was no match for the debating skills of the former movie actor opposing him.
On our way to Cleveland for the debate, we made a short campaign stop at Huntington, West Virginia, which I found dispiriting. I put in my notes: “Deadest crowd I’ve ever seen for the president—no enthusiasm.”51 At our last practice session at the Bond Court Hotel in Cleveland, he was reluctant to handle any questions about the Iranian hostages, telling us: “Iran is hanging by a thread, and I do not want to hit them too hard.”
When we asked a question on nuclear proliferation, in a misplaced attempt to personalize the challenge, he responded that he had just talked with his young daughter, Amy, about the scope of this problem. As Rafshoon recalled, everyone thought he was joking, including me, but Carter definitely was not: We winced when he repeated it in the debate. It was one of his most criticized responses.52
Reagan gained credibility by a reassuring manner that reached deep into his heartland roots. Few remember the details of the debate itself, but no one in politics can forget that when Carter tried to nail him on his promise to limit Medicare and make Social Security voluntary, Reagan’s inimitably soothing baritone simply swatted him away with a perfectly timed interjection: “There you go again.” His brilliantly framed closing statement, delivered with an actor’s sensibility, has passed into American political discourse: “It might well be if you ask yourself: Are you better off than you were four years ago? If so, vote for four more years of Carter; if not, I suggest another choice that you have.”53
The reason the debate mattered so much was that Reagan temporarily managed to dispel the fear factor planted by our negative campaign, reassuring the American people that he was not a risky choice. His avuncular manner turned the trick, and the dam broke. Rick Hertzberg, Carter’s chief speechwriter, later said, “When people realized that they could get rid of Carter and still not destroy the world, they went ahead and did it.”54
Going into the debate, which was watched by a record 100 million viewers, average poll data gave Reagan a narrow lead of two or three points. After the debate the lead expanded significantly, and clearly Reagan had won. Caddell’s polls showed that the debate added to Reagan’s honesty factor and lessened his risk factor.55 Caddell and his polling colleague, Sam Popkin, called me to say that in the past, presidential debates on average had not moved polls more than 1 percent, but this was an exception. The New York Times poll, for example, showed that in the Midwest, Carter had gone from three points ahead of Reagan to six points behind, an unprecedented shift.56 Caddell reminded me that Ford was ahead of Carter the Sunday before the election, but lost when people took a hard look at Ford being president for the next four years—and this could happen again to Carter, just as it had to Ford. But Caddell said: “We [could] still do it” if Carter followed his strategy of asking voters to contemplate the risks of Reagan in the White House. That remained Carter’s campaign strategy in the final week before the election.
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What we did not know at the time of the crucial debate and learned only several years later was that Nixon was not the only one to employ dirty tricks. Knowing how high the stakes were for a successful debate, the Reagan campaign obtained a stolen copy of the debate book I had laboriously prepared with my two deputies, Carp and Rubenstein, incorporating the outside advice of the campaign veterans of the Johnson administration and other Democratic insiders on how to deal with specific issues and adopt a winning personal stance against Reagan. As they prepared Reagan for the championship match, our opponents were studying our book as closely as Carter himself, and they knew our strategy. This was confirmed to me by no less than Reagan’s campaign manager, Jim Baker. When I told him years later that it was widely believed they had stolen our debate book, he joked: “That’s widely believed because it’s widely true.” He insisted defensively that the information “didn’t help us a damn bit [and] wasn’t worth a shit.”57
Maybe so, but Carter believed firmly that it made some difference. I know that we certainly would have liked to have similar information on the strategies of the Reagan camp, although we would not have resorted to thievery to obtain it. After I prepared the debate book, Jim Rowland, my staff administrator, was in charge of assembling and copying the book. He told me later that, starting the night of October 24 and finishing around eleven the next morning, he made copies under the strictest supervision, using the vice president’s copying machine.58 I kept one copy and gave one each to the president, Powell, Rafshoon, and Jordan.
The book contained all our proposed attack lines and answers to Reagan’s likely attacks. Baker contended that Reagan’s famous comeback to Carter’s attacks on his positions on Medicare and other popular programs—“There you go again”—was spontaneous and not part of their debate preparation. Even if this was the case, armed with our plan of attack, he had an advantage that he knew how to exploit.
Baker’s account of how our debate book landed in his hands is a story of intrigue that exposes how the Reagan campaign operated—but also reflects the depth of hatred among some of the diehard Kennedy supporters, who simply did not care if Carter lost. Baker was sitting in his campaign office with the debate preparation team when William Casey, the campaign’s titular chairman, walked in with a black-bound book, dropped it on Baker’s desk, and said: “You might want to give this to your debate prep people.” Casey had been the chief of American espionage in Europe during World War II and would be rewarded by Reagan with the directorship of the CIA. As Baker thumbed through the book, he could tell it had come from the Carter campaign. He did not ask where Casey had gotten it and told me that he “probably shouldn’t have passed it on—but I did.”
The story leaked out in 1983, leading to a ten-month congressional investigation headed by Michigan Democratic Congressman Donald Albosta, during which Baker testified that he had seen the book. But Casey denied that he had ever given it to Baker. The investigators concluded that Baker was telling the truth and Casey was not. Baker admitted to me that the congressional probe “put the fear of God in me, because I know Casey had been out there at the CIA, and he probably knew how to game the polygraph and I didn’t—but I knew I was t
elling the truth. The investigators interrogated hundreds of witnesses and produced a report more than 2,000 pages long, without determining who stole our debate book.”59
In what was quickly headlined as “Debategate” (initiated by Time magazine White House correspondent Laurence I. Barrett) after the election, the FBI examined the book and found the fingerprints of Baker and David Gergen, my Harvard Law School classmate, then working with Baker and later a member of the Reagan White House staff. Rowland also later told me that several strategy memos we sent to the Carter campaign staff were found in the files of David Stockman, then a Republican congressman and later Reagan’s OMB director, which Stockman confirmed during the investigation.
Almost 30 years later the truth finally came out. What made it all possible appears to be some rogue elements of the Kennedy clan’s intense antipathy toward Carter. Adam Walinsky, a senior speechwriter for Jack Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, justified undermining Carter because he felt his administration had been so “disastrous” that he deserved to be voted out of office even if it meant Reagan’s election. So Walinsky responded to a request from Paul Corbin, a member of Ted Kennedy’s 1980 campaign team, for a memo he could pass on to the Reagan campaign on how to handle Carter in the debate.60 (In 2016 Walinsky publicly supported Donald Trump because he felt his own Democratic Party had become warmongers.)
Corbin, a no-holds-bared labor organizer in Wisconsin, was intensely loyal to the Kennedy family and appears to have been the spider at the center of the web orchestrating the theft of the debate book, using Kennedy loyalists on the White House staff as intermediaries. Craig Shirley, a conservative public relations executive, put the pieces together in a book he wrote about the Reagan campaign.61
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