by Nancy Gibbs
Had the 1976 primaries been quick and dirty and produced a clear winner early on, none of this might have mattered. But the opposite occurred: the Ford-Reagan grudge match went on for months, well after the primaries, far into the summer, all the way to the convention in Kansas City.
The primary turned on foreign policy, which was fine by both men. Reagan wasn’t really running against Ford as much he was running against the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger foreign policy of détente—the idea that the United States and its communist rivals could not only coexist peacefully but perhaps achieve some common goals. To Nixon and Ford, détente was an extension of containment, the bipartisan policy that sought for decades to keep Moscow in a box. But to Reagan, détente was akin to surrender, a grant of moral legitimacy to the communist regimes for which the United States had gained little in return. By attacking détente, Reagan was broadening a split in the Republican ranks between its realist and idealist wings: was the Soviet Union something to be managed—or destroyed?
Though Ford won most of the early primaries, Reagan clawed back with wins in North Carolina, Texas, and Nebraska. Reagan was gaining ground with claims that Ford was on the verge of recognizing Communist-controlled Vietnam (though he wasn’t) and calling on Ford to discard plans to negotiate a new treaty that would turn the operation and control of the Panama Canal over to the Panamanians and their “tinhorn dictator.” In a thirty-minute paid advertisement that helped him win North Carolina, Reagan famously said of the canal: “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours and we’re going to keep it!”
The North Carolina defeat hit Ford so hard that some aides began to talk among themselves about firing Kissinger—or at least letting some reporters into National Security Council meetings so they could see Ford ordering him around. At the same time, there were those in Reagan’s corner, most notably his wife, who wanted the governor to get out of the contest because, despite Reagan’s attacks, Ford was gradually pulling away in the delegate count. Ford was helped in the final primary in California by a Stu Spencer ad that read, “When you vote Tuesday, remember: Governor Reagan couldn’t start a war. President Reagan could.” But even that was not enough to move California into Ford’s column.
Vice President Reagan?
When the primaries ended, neither man had a lock on the nomination. Reagan was about ninety delegates short of the 1,130 needed; Ford was sixty-three short. So Reagan campaign manager John Sears uncorked several clever schemes to keep the race alive.
First, Sears convinced Reagan to name liberal Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker to be his running mate in the hope that some Keystone State delegates pledged to Ford would switch sides out of loyalty to the local favorite. It didn’t work, but the ploy bought Sears a few weeks of continued speculation that Reagan might still be able to seize the nomination.
To keep the clock running, Sears next decided to stage a floor fight over an obscure party bylaw known as Rule 16-C, which would require a nominee to name his vice presidential pick before the voting for the top spot began. This was clever politics: having named Schweiker as his number two, Reagan would push Ford to name his own running mate. As James Baker, at the time the Ford delegate counter, explained it, “Sears wanted to force Ford’s hand. He reasoned that he could pick off some Ford delegates or undecideds who were alienated by whomever President Ford selected as his running mate.”
This fight, arcane though it may have been, sparked a battle that involved millions of dollars, armies of lobbyists, high-pressure arm-twisting, untold presidential favors, and plenty of nail biting. Ford’s team opened a special skybox in the Kemper Arena where wavering delegates were plied with liquor—and then offered a combination of presidential favors (and boiler room threats of retribution) that usually won the day. That fight did not end until the third night of the convention. Ford prevailed by a razor-thin twenty-nine votes on the obscure rule.
Ford’s team was so busy swatting away Sears’s ingenious challenges that it arrived at the convention without a vice presidential nominee. Bowing to pressure from the right, Ford had informed Rockefeller in the fall of 1975 that he would not be on the ticket (a decision Ford would later describe as the most cowardly of his life). But he had yet to decide who would be on the ticket. John Connally? Howard Baker? William Simon? Elliot Richardson? Every imaginable name—including Reagan’s—appeared on Ford’s list.
But if Reagan wanted to be vice president, he did virtually nothing to help his chances and a great deal to douse them once he arrived in Kansas City. During a lunch for key supporters at the Muehlebach Hotel, Reagan heard that some Californians were starting a draft-Reagan-for-vice-president movement. Reagan whipped out a felt-tip pen and scribbled: “To my friends in the California delegation: I have learned of your concern about whether I would or would not accept the nomination for Vice President on the Ford ticket if he should be nominated for President. I thought I had made this clear—evidently I hadn’t. Here is my reply as plainly as I can say it: There is no circumstance whatsoever under which I would accept the nomination for vice president. That is absolutely final.”
Reagan gave the note to his brother, Moon, and told him to deliver it. Moon replied: How are they going to know it’s from you? And so Reagan took the note back and scrawled his signature at the bottom of the page. Several dozen copies were made and distributed to Reagan floor leaders and delegation chiefs to quell the doubters.
Reagan wasn’t closing the door; he was slamming it.
That night, by prearrangement, Ford called on Reagan in his hotel suite. The visit had been worked out days before by their aides: to preserve party unity, both camps agreed that the winner would visit the suite of the loser and then appear at a joint press conference afterward. Reagan’s aides had insisted on one ground rule for the meeting: Ford could not under any circumstances offer Reagan the vice presidency. Reagan’s staff said they wanted to spare Ford the embarrassment of having Reagan turn it down. But what they didn’t say was that they didn’t want to create any circumstances where Ford’s folks might later claim that Reagan was not interested in party unity. And so no offer was made—or expected. “Governor, it was a great fight,” Ford said. “You’ve done a tremendous job. I just wish I had some of your talents and your tremendous organization.”
After posing for photographs, Ford dismissed the press and then asked Reagan to huddle privately. “Ron,” Ford then asked, “who do you recommend that I select for vice president?” This was, in Ford’s retelling at least, one last dangle, a final chance for Reagan to volunteer; Ford insisted later that he phrased the question in such an open-ended way “to somehow get confirmation myself that he didn’t want to be on the ticket.” If so, Reagan declined the bait. The two men instead discussed a number of candidates—William Ruckelshaus, Richardson, Baker, Connally; Reagan spoke most favorably that day of Bob Dole. (Even this was according to the script: Dole had asked Nofziger earlier in the day if Reagan might put in a good word for him in the event Reagan truly didn’t want the job.) And then, after asking Reagan to campaign in the fall—“I hope,” Ford pleaded, “you are going to be able to help us”—Ford left. Reagan, who had been subdued throughout the entire session, said he wanted to rest and make some money, but would campaign in the fall.
The dream ticket, if that’s what it might have been, was not to be.
A variety of Reagan aides and allies insisted in the years to come that Ford had missed a huge opportunity in the Muehlebach suite to bring Reagan aboard, unify the party, forge a partnership that could have defeated Jimmy Carter in November. Instead of playing by the prearranged rules, they argued, Ford should have appealed directly to Reagan’s patriotism and asked him to put aside his pride for the good of the country. Reagan, they insisted, would never have turned down a commander in chief. Ford and Reagan confidant James Baker pressed Reagan on this historical what-might-have-been after he became president and came away convinced Reagan would have agreed—even if it doomed his chances to become president late
r. Explained Baker, “I had two or three conversations one on one [with President Reagan] in which I said, ‘If President Ford had offered the vice presidency and you had taken it, you might never have been president.’ Reagan replied, ‘I understand that. But if he offered it to me, I would have felt duty bound to take it.’”
But all that would have required Ford to have wanted Reagan by his side enough to press him to come aboard. And there is very little evidence that he did. “I had mixed emotions,” Ford said. “I thought he would strengthen the ticket. On the other hand, we had had such a bitter fight and we had such strong disagreements, we would have had a lot of trouble reconciling those differences publicly.”
That was an understatement. “Basically, Reagan didn’t want it, I know that,” said Spencer, who worked for both men. “Ford didn’t want it. I know that.”
In any case, even if Ford had invited Reagan to be his vice president, there is no reason to think the race would have turned out differently. Reagan would have made a poor number two; the staffs would have quarreled endlessly; and while Reagan might have helped Ford in some Southern states, where Carter was strong, he would have undercut his chances in the more moderate Midwest, where Ford needed to win.
But the outcome was, in any event, a disappointment to Reagan, the second time in eight years the nomination had eluded his grasp at the convention. Before leaving Kansas City, Reagan said farewell and thanks to his aides, the California delegation, and close friends. Time’s Dean Fischer filed a telling dispatch to his editors in New York that afternoon: at one point, confronted with a friend who began to weep, Reagan had to leave the room to control himself. During a speech he delivered to the California delegation, it was Nancy’s turn to sob. Reagan himself had difficulty speaking; a nearby aide explained: “He’s not a good actor.”
The Impromptu Floor Speech That Wasn’t
But there was one last weird drama to play out. The final scene in Kansas City was to be a reminder that Reagan left few big moments to chance—and how much he saw himself on a mission that was broader than mere politics. It was Thursday night; the balloons were poised; the band was ready; the delegates were fired up. As Ford concluded his acceptance speech, he turned to Stan Anderson, a convention manager, and said, “That went well. Now go get Reagan.” And so Anderson scurried downstairs, ran headlong underneath the arena floor, through a passageway clogged with trash receptacles, and took an elevator up to a skybox on the first-tier balcony. He found Reagan, Nancy, and political aide Lyn Nofziger watching the activities on the floor below. “Governor Reagan,” Anderson said, “the president would like you to join him on the podium.”
“No fucking way,” Nofziger replied.
“Oh Ronnie,” added Nancy, “I don’t think you should.”
Anderson could see that the Reagans were still feeling bruised. But by now Ford was actually motioning Reagan to join him on the podium—and many on the floor were beckoning him with calls of their own. “Reagan, Reagan,” the crowd chanted. Television crews panned their cameras from the skybox to the podium, waiting for one man or the other to relent. Meanwhile, Anderson pressed: “With all due respect, Governor, the President of the United States has asked you to join him for the good of the party.” Anderson said it did not take Reagan long to rise to that challenge, whatever Nancy and Nofziger advised. “I’m doing it,” Reagan said. And, grabbing his wife’s hand, Reagan followed Anderson back toward the front of the hall.
The threesome took the elevator downstairs, back through the basement with Nancy, who implored her husband at one point, “Ronnie, why are we doing this?” But Reagan was determined, taking a comb out of his pocket to make sure his hair was in place.
What unfolded next was a performance that could have been translated: I came close. And I’ll be back. The Reagans joined the Fords, vice presidential nominee Bob Dole, and their families onstage and the president turned the microphone over to his vanquished rival, who proceeded to give what nearly everyone at the time believed were brief, impromptu remarks. They certainly seemed improvised. But Reagan had in fact been warned by his aides (who had been warned by Ford aides) that the president might ask him to speak. Though he prepared no remarks for such a moment, Reagan took those warnings seriously enough to at least discuss with policy advisor Martin Anderson what he might say should Ford call him to the podium. He did not arrive without the outline of a speech in his head.
And those remarks are surely one of the more curious speeches of any modern political convention.
Reagan did not mention, much less endorse, Ford beyond a brief thank-you at the top of the speech. He took credit for forcing the adoption of a robust foreign policy platform, which he described as “a banner of bold, unmistakable colors, with no pastel shades.” But at the core of the roughly one-thousand-word riff was a story of how he had been recently asked to write a letter to Americans in the year 2076. As Reagan pondered what to say to those people in the future, he noted, he realized that far too much hung in the balance in 1976 to be certain that they would even be around to read it.
“Will they look back with appreciation and say, ‘Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now 100 years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction?’ . . . This is our challenge; and this is why here in this hall tonight, better than we have ever done before, we have got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we have ever been, but we carry the message they are waiting for. We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory, Mr. President.”
It was powerful, self-glorifying—and a little strange. It was as much a challenge to Ford and his team as it was to the rival party—and maybe more so.
Reagan departed Kansas City more resentful of Ford than before he had arrived—and no less determined to become president the next time around. “He thought Gerald Ford had stolen the nomination from him,” Nofziger said later. “Gerald Ford had not. But I think Reagan just couldn’t conceive that Ford could have got that from him honestly. So he determined that he would run.”
In the months that followed, Reagan traveled to twenty states on Ford’s behalf. Ford later complained that Reagan had not pulled his weight for the ticket—a not entirely fair assessment. But it is true that Reagan declined Ford campaign requests that he campaign in Texas and Mississippi, where Ford was weak and Jimmy Carter was stronger. Lou Cannon recounted in his biography that Reagan appeared with Ford on one California swing during the fall but then found a reason not to join the president on a second—a decision that Ford surely did not forget. “The best way to say it is that Reagan didn’t bust his tail to help,” Spencer said later. “Ford knows that. That’s not the reason he lost. But the point is, when you come out of the Nixon school of politics, you take your poison. You do your dishes and you go out and bust your tail for the next guy. That’s the way I was raised. Reagan never had that philosophy.”
What philosophy did move Reagan? Spencer believed that Reagan always heard a different music than other politicians—and that rhythm was anticommunism. Having come from an impoverished, dysfunctional background, and then having made it big as a radio announcer and Hollywood actor in the midst of the Depression, Reagan’s love for America was always shot through a prism of good and evil. His experience as leader of the Screen Actors Guild had taught him that communism could damage all that was dear to him. And when Spencer would ask Reagan why, at the very core of things, he wanted to be president, the answer was always the same: ending communism. “It was the only thing he really thought about in depth, intellectualized, thought about what you can do, what you can’t do, how you can do it,” Spencer said. “With everything else . . . he went through the motions.” Some years would pass before the rest of the country caught up to Spencer’s insight.
Before the year was over, Ford came to believe
that Reagan—and not Jimmy Carter—had cost him the 1976 election. By distracting him with a primary challenge, depleting him of time, resources, and party delegates, dragging the fight all the way to the third night of the convention—and then slow-walking through the fall, Reagan had, in Ford’s view, prevented him from winning his first national election. “They didn’t give a damn whether I won or not,” Ford said, “because they were already planning to run in 1980.” And Ford carried this grudge with him for years. As he told Cannon a few months before he died, “It was not in [Reagan’s] nature to help someone else. He believed in winning on his own.”
Dream Ticket, Reversed
Through the late 1970s, the club limped along on life support. Though Ford and Carter worked closely during the transition between their presidencies, Carter wanted little to do with his predecessor once he was sworn in and wanted even less to do with Nixon. Carter invited Nixon to a state dinner in January 1979 honoring Deng Xiaoping, and included the former president in a small reception he and Rosalynn hosted for Deng in the White House residence. Carter recognized, as an aide said later, that Nixon had begun the process of normalization with Beijing and “so he should be invited.” But Carter refused to let Nixon stay in the special Lafayette Square guesthouse that Nixon himself had created for Johnson.