Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  Ronald Reagan’s disaffection was the embodiment of a broader ill plaguing Ford: The Republican Party he had served for some thirty years was barely recognizable to him. The party that had been dominated by the Eastern financial and publishing interests, the party of the country clubs and Wall Street was more and more the party of the Sun Belt and the South, where social issues that had never been part of the national debate drove the passions of the rank and file. Abortion, guns, prayer kindled their energies. Ford was a man of the legislature, a man who with his first words as President had promised “communication, conciliation, compromise and cooperation” with the Congress he loved, where a splitting of the difference was the rule of the road. These foot soldiers of the New Right would have turned their anger on whoever was tacking toward the center, whatever party that trimmer belonged to; by the time of the 1978 midterms, the Republicans were as hopelessly split as the Democrats had been a decade earlier over Vietnam and race. When the internal party rifts were combined with a sour economy and the historical pattern of midterm losses for the White House party, the 1978 midterm Congressional elections promised nothing less than a full-scale disaster.

  And this was one political promise that was kept.

  The Republicans lost three Senate seats, and sixteen seats in the House, including such familiar figures as North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, voted out when just enough white working-class voters turned to the populist message of State Insurance Commissioner John Ingram, who attacked Helms not as a neo-racist or an extremist, but as “the hand-picked tool of the fat cats and special interests.” In his bitter concession speech, Helms said, “The man who beat me is not John Ingram. The man who beat me is sitting in a big White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.” One of the Democrats who narrowly won reelection was Iowa Senator Richard Clark, whose campaign received invaluable help from many of the field organizers who had worked in George McGovern’s 1972 campaign. These McGovern foot soldiers signed on to Clark with the encouragement of the man who had run McGovern’s campaign . . . a man whose interest in Iowa was growing by the day.

  HIS OFFICE was like the core of a reactor, bursts of energy radiating outward, onto a hopelessly overworked staff. He was a stand-up guy—literally—writing in longhand at a stand-up rolltop desk, working at a large table, big enough to hold the papers, the clipped-out newspaper and magazine stories. (Even back in the McGovern campaign, there were no chairs in the offices where he’d hold meetings; if everyone had to stand, the meetings were likely to move faster.) Every day he’d put down the paper, clip a note to the piece, scribble out a terse, pointed inquiry: Why haven’t we reached out to Yergin on energy? Let’s see if we can get Reich down from Harvard, he’s got some good stuff on pension portability, did you read this story on demographics and crime? I gotta see this guy. There’d be a never-ending stream of people in and out of his office, over breakfast at the Senate dining room. Bill Cohen, the Republican senator from Maine, had a little breakfast group that brought in speakers, and so did Marty Frost, the Texan from the House, and he would be there, longish hair curled down to the neck, thick eyebrows, easy to find by the laugh—more like a bark, really—that would signal his ironic amusement at one of the absurdities so common to his life now. He no longer dressed in the manner memorably described by Teddy White in his 1972 campaign book (“skin-tight jeans over slim cowboy thighs”—gay porn! a colleague had said.). Now he wore ill-fitting suits, Lucchese boots (“expensive, but they last”), and a belt with a thick Western buckle. He was strikingly handsome, but more compelling than the crinkled eyes, angular face, lean body, and broad smile was the driven nature of his curiosity. Ideas, ideas, ideas. They were what had brought Gary Hart to here before his fortieth birthday, and it was ideas, he was sure, that just might take him to a place that, by any conventional measure, was far beyond his reach.

  HE GREW UP as Gary Warren Hartpence, in Ottawa, Kansas, a town of some 10,000 people fifty miles southwest of Kansas City, Missouri. His dad, Carl, sold farm equipment; his mother, Nina, was the driving force of the family, the classic Mother of the Prince, the one with the smarts, the energy. As a boy, Gary was drawn to the transcontinental trains that powered through the small town; he could tell you about the engine weights, the wheelbases. His parents were members of the Nazarene Church, a tiny denomination that frowned on drinking, smoking, and mixed dancing, and so did the college he attended: Bethany Nazarene College in a tiny Oklahoma town. His classmates remembered him as brilliant but shy, a bit standoffish—but not so shy that he didn’t wind up marrying the prettiest girl on campus, and the daughter of the college president to boot. He thought he was going into the ministry for a time, attended Yale Divinity School, but somewhere around 1960, maybe drawn to the magnetism of John Kennedy, he entered Yale Law. This was about the time he and his sister changed their last name to “Hart.” Gary and his wife, Lee, settled in Colorado, where he threw himself into Robert Kennedy’s 1968 Presidential campaign—he was devastated by Bobby’s death—and he had settled into a comfortable law practice when Senator George McGovern met with him in a room at Stapleton International Airport in the spring of 1970 and offered him a job with McGovern’s shoestring Presidential campaign. In a few months, he was in charge because, it turned out, nobody was running things in Washington . . . and nobody thought McGovern had a chance in hell of beating Senator Edmund Muskie, the 1968 Vice Presidential candidate who had the backing of everybody who counted for anything.

  What Gary Hart did was to run a classic guerrilla campaign. No big shots for McGovern? Fine; go scout out the veterans from the Kennedy and McCarthy ’68 campaigns, the ones who were trying to stop a war, who saw in McGovern one of their most consistent allies. Decentralize the campaign: no hierarchical pyramid, but concentric circles, with power radiating out to the different states. Put decision-making power in the hands of the field organizers who lived and worked in key states, so there was no clash between the locals and the bigfeet coming from outside to order the troops around. I want them young. Mobile, single, people who can accept a spartan life because we have no money. If the guy running the Midwest, Gene Pokorny, was thirty-four years old, fine, if he could do the job. “The characteristics of a good political organizer,” he’d write later, “are universal—efficient, low-key, persistent, methodical, durable.” And always remember the example of General Mikhail Kutuzov, the real-life hero of War and Peace, the genius whose guerrilla campaign defeated Napoleon’s forces, who counseled “everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait . . . there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all.”

  Even then he was impatient with the demands of political protocol. McGovern, Hart wrote, “suffered fools too gladly. He often listened to people who wasted his time by their own ignorance or by telling him something he already knew. He found it very difficult to shut people off . . . many people [committed] theft or murder of his time.”

  Nobody stole or murdered Gary Hart’s time.

  The campaign lived on fumes, signing up supporters through direct mail, “enrolling” them into McGovern for President clubs, where they’d promise to send ten dollars a month. They looked for a place to make early news and found it in Iowa, where the traditional precinct caucuses that no one had ever cared about had been moved to January, and they brought every supporter they could find, so that McGovern wound up with 27 percent of the vote, well behind Ed Muskie, but good enough to raise some political eyebrows. By then the volunteers were coming out in force, determined not to let a politician who’d supported the Vietnam War become the Democratic Party nominee. By the time McGovern had held Muskie under 50 percent in New Hampshire, and won Wisconsin, the front-runner had collapsed and by summer the darkest of dark horses had become the nominee.

  That was the high point for Hart: The pros started showing up and throwing their weight around, demoralizing the true believers, and the guerrilla campaign hopelessly split the party between the old and new. When the McGovern forces threw Mayor
Daley’s delegation out of the convention, that was the kiss of death, even before McGovern chose a running mate with a history of mental breakdowns who had to be removed from the ticket. It was a historic, crushing loss—Richard Nixon won forty-nine states!—but when the Watergate scandal broke, the McGovern campaign gained some posthumous props: We weren’t the guys who stomped all over the Constitution. When Hart ran for senator from Colorado in 1974, the revulsion against the Nixon tactics, and the lessons Hart had learned about organizing a campaign, gave him a landslide victory of his own and sent him to the Senate. And he took with him the lessons he had learned in 1972 and in the years after . . . not just about organizing a campaign but about the country.

  He was a Democrat, but it was clear to him that the verities of the party faithful had long ago lost their persuasive force. He’d been drawn to Robert Kennedy precisely because Bobby was challenging these ideas at their roots: Top-down government is oppressive, soul deadening; spending money is not the key to making life better.

  “We’re not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” he’d said of his generation, and while it may not have been the most politic way to express the idea, it was what he believed. “Time had made change a threat,” he said of the old-line Democrats, and he said more: that liberalism had come close to “intellectual bankruptcy.”

  And what the failures of ideas hadn’t accomplished, what the war hadn’t accomplished in the snuffing-out of public purpose, the Watergate conspirators had.

  “These selfish, power-lusting little men,” he wrote, “in their greedy struggle for self-preservation, ruined decades of effort to restore the stature of public service, to exalt the role of government, and to inspire in men and women the highest aspiration of political involvement.”

  There was, he was sure, a discontent across the board, one that Jerry Ford had not come close to grasping in the two years since his remarkable comeback. People were fed up with the orthodoxies of both parties, especially now that the thirty-year postwar run of prosperity had apparently come to a dead end. Discontent is a lot easier to take when income keeps rising, when the cars and homes are bigger, the TV sets righter, the promise of comfort is kept. Now with inflation eating away at the future of millions, with once-mighty industries back on their heels if not on their knees, was the country really going to have a choice between the gauzy pastoral fantasies of Ronald Reagan and the tinny liberal trumpetings of Ted Kennedy? Or was it . . . barely possible . . . that 1980 would be a year when an utterly improbable, utterly audacious challenge . . . just might work?

  FOR ANOTHER CONTENDER, there was no doubt, no hesitancy. It was his time.

  He had been preparing for the office for thirty years, although he did not know it when he began, at work that no one could imagine was a prelude to the Presidency. All through the 1950s, he had traveled the country for General Electric, sponsor of the television series he hosted, touting the glories of the free-enterprise system, warning of the perils of rapacious government, preaching the conservative gospel that had lured him from his roots as a Roosevelt-Truman Democrat. When he finished speaking, he would talk with the workers gathered in the cafeterias, and would answer their questions. Before he ever gave a campaign speech, he’d spoken to more than 250,000 GE employees at 139 plants, meaning that he’d probably had more extended conversations with more working Americans than any elected official.

  Those travels, those interchanges, had honed his speaking skills. It wasn’t just the techniques he’d learned in the years in front of Warner Bros. cameras—the bob of the head, the dramatic pause—but the way to take an idea and put it on its feet, choosing the concrete image. He would describe a $10 billion deficit as a stack of hundred-dollar bills stretching six and a half miles into the sky. By the fall of 1964, when he’d made that nationally televised speech for the doomed candidacy of Barry Goldwater, he’d become the most compelling conservative spokesman in America. The Speech—that’s what it would be called by his coterie forever, “the Speech”—raised a raft of money for Goldwater, and, more important, convinced a roomful of some of California’s richest Republicans that they had found their next candidate for governor.

  In that 1966 campaign, one of Ronald Reagan’s greatest political assets was unveiled: His prior career as an actor, and his sharply drawn conservative philosophy in an era of liberal ascendancy, caused his opponents to relentlessly, consistently, underestimate him. When he first announced for governor, movie studio mogul Jack Warner was supposed to have said: “Ronald Reagan for Governor? No! Jimmy Stewart for Governor; Ronald Reagan for best friend!” When he won the GOP primary in a landslide against former San Francisco mayor George Christopher, aides to Governor Pat Brown broke out in cheers: We beat Nixon, for heaven’s sakes. Taking down this has-been will be a walk in the park.

  “Remember,” Brown told a group of schoolchildren, “it was an actor who shot Lincoln.” With anger over taxes and crime, with working-class fury over the tumult at Berkeley and other California campuses, Reagan beat Brown by almost a million votes.

  Reagan was set to pivot immediately into a race for the White House in 1968 when a scandal inside the governor’s office—the emergence of a “homosexual ring” among the staff—diverted his energy. By the time he’d launched a last-minute effort at the convention, Richard Nixon had locked up the nomination.

  In 1976, he tried again, this time taking on the sitting (though unelected) Republican President. He had stumbled out of the gate, fallen hopelessly behind, then regained his footing and come agonizingly close, closer than anyone ever had, to depriving a President of renomination. Any one of a dozen different decisions would have made the difference: Had his New Hampshire chairman not predicted a landslide, thus making his tie seem like a defeat; had he not left New Hampshire in the days before the primary, and beaten Ford decisively; had he competed harder for delegates in New York and Pennsylvania; had he won over three or four more Mississippi delegates, giving him full control of the slate. Change any of those outcomes and he might well have taken the nomination and, he was sure, handily beaten Carter in November.

  Now, as he prepared for his third try, Reagan was bringing to the campaign formidable assets—and potentially serious liabilities. He was the most imposing figure in his party, who fused a commanding presence on the speaker’s platform with credentials as solid as any: eight years as the chief executive of the most populous state in the union, where he had governed, in the words of one reporter, with “a string of successes and a record on which he could run for President.” His rhetoric delighted the true believers—he said of anti-war protesters, “Their signs say ‘Make Love, Not War,’ but they look like they couldn’t do either”—but his record was far more nuanced. He’d signed one of the most liberal abortion bills in the land (which he later disavowed), supported a vigorous campaign to save the redwoods and other jewels of the California environment, and learned to work well with the solidly Democratic legislature. He had remained in the public eye after his nomination loss, writing hundreds of newspaper columns and radio commentaries; in 1978, he’d crossed the country for Republicans, had given 300 speeches, held 200 news conferences. He was as much “Mr. Republican” as conservative hero Robert Taft had ever been, except that Taft looked as if he had just chewed on a sour persimmon and Reagan lit up the room.

  But it wasn’t so simple.

  There was, first, the Age Question. Reagan would be sixty-nine in 1980, and no one of that age had ever won the Presidency. Reagan was still vigorous, broad-shouldered, his hair so lustrous that people assumed he was coloring it (it was in fact Brylcreem, that survivor of the greasy-hair era, that darkened his locks, although that didn’t stop comedians from noting his “prematurely orange” hair). His appearance, however, could not stop the questions, especially when Reagan had a tendency to offer evidence in support of his positions that were often flatly, factually false. (“Once he reads something and it strikes a chord,” advisor Mike Deaver conceded, “it stays there forever.
”) So he would choke up every time he told the story of a doomed World War II plane plunging to earth with a young radioman trapped inside, and the heroic pilot who instead of bailing out, said to the terrified young man, “Don’t worry, son—we’ll ride this down together.” And people would ask: Hey, wait—if the plane crashed and they both died . . . how did we learn about this? (They learned because it was a scene from a movie.) Or he’d tell an audience about what it was like to liberate a concentration camp, and the nitpickers would say: Hey, wait—you made training films in Hollywood during the war. You were never in Europe. Or he’d cite facts and figures and incidents that seemed to come from . . . thin air. And there was a danger here, not that he got details wrong, but that he’d be seen as a foggy senior citizen, not in full command of his faculties, maybe not the man you’d want with his finger on the button.

  Then there was the problem of the man who occupied the White House. Reagan was a political figure who painted in bold stripes, who drew sharp distinctions between himself and the ideas of his adversaries, whose strongest argument was a call for a wholesale break with the past. He’d run for governor against a quarter century of “liberal” state government that had begun under Republican Earl Warren in the early 1940s. His argument for the Presidency would be a frontal assault on a big-spending, expansionist federal government.