The details of the American automobile industry’s afflictions in the late 70s come from David Halberstam’s 1986 book The Reckoning.
The Principal Players in 1980
GARY HART: The description of Senator Hart’s office and work habits was provided by two of his senior aides: former press secretary Kathy Bushkin Calvin and former chief of staff Billy Shore. Many biographical details and observations were based on the work of Richard Ben Cramer, whose 1992 book, What It Takes, is the best single volume ever written about Presidential campaigning. Hart’s own 1973 book, Right from the Start, covers his role as the chief of George McGovern’s campaign for the 1972 Presidential nomination and sets down the organizing precepts quoted here.
RONALD REAGAN: The best one-volume account of Reagan’s career I know of is Lou Cannon’s The Role of a Lifetime. For a close look at Reagan’s 1976 challenge to President Ford, see Craig Shirley’s Reagan’s Revolution. Shirley also wrote Rendezvous with Destiny, which covers the 1980 campaign in depth.
Gerald Ford’s dyspeptic view of Reagan can be found in Thomas DeFrank’s book Write It When I’m Gone, in which Ford says Reagan’s lack of campaigning in 1976 was “one of the three or four reasons that I lost . . .” (I have altered the quote to reflect the alternate history in which Ford almost lost.)
TED KENNEDY : I have “borrowed” from my 1982 book The Real Campaign to describe the political position of Kennedy in 1979, when the political universe was more or less convinced that he could take the nomination from President Carter without breaking a sweat. The barbs coming from disparate media sources such as the National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, and the Washington Monthly are described as they happened. The same is true of pollster Peter Hart’s warning about the danger of misreading Kennedy’s poll numbers.
HART, BUMPERS, AND BEATTY: Dale Bumpers has told the story of his life in his uncommonly candid and compelling memoir, Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town, which includes the stories and jokes in this section. According to Kathy Bushkin Calvin and Billy Shore, Bumpers and Hart were seated next to each other on the Senate floor and became best friends and fellow gym rats.
Warren Beatty met Gary Hart during the 1972 McGovern campaign, in which Beatty acted less as a “celebrity” and more as a behind-the-scenes advisor. He organized major fund-raising events, including one of the first rock concerts ever held to raise political money. The details can be found in Peter Biskind’s 2010 biography of Warren Beatty, Star.
Gary Hart’s Uncle Ralph provided the history of the Hart family’s many name changes during Hart’s 1984 campaign, when the name change—along with changes in his birth date and handwriting—raised the “weirdness” question. Jack Germond and Jules Witcover’s book on the campaign, Wake Us When It’s Over, has all the details.
Hart’s announcement speech is composed of words he spoke and wrote, the latter in his book A New Democracy, which came out shortly before he announced his intention to run for President in 1984. I fashioned the account of Hart’s travels in Iowa in 1980 from my own travels through the state in covering six caucuses and from the recollections of Hart aides about his habits while campaigning.
In this section, and in the later stories about Hart’s campaign for the nomination, the most indispensable guide was Elaine Kamarck’s book Primary Politics, about which more later. As Hillary Clinton’s campaign discovered in 2008, a campaign will fail in Iowa, no matter how well known the candidate, no matter how much “insider” support it has, if it does not understand the peculiar political terrain of those caucuses, and more generally, the rules of how delegates are chosen in the Democratic Party.
REAGAN’S ROMP TO THE NOMINATION: When Reagan ran for President in 1980, he followed the advice of his campaign chief, John Sears, and stayed above the fray, refusing to debate and refusing to campaign in Iowa. With George H. W. Bush all but living in Iowa, Bush narrowly defeated Reagan in the caucuses, leading pundits to prepare his political obituary. As NBC’s Tom Pettit said the morning after the caucuses, “I would like to suggest that Ronald Reagan is politically dead.” That defeat prodded Reagan into overruling Sears and throwing himself fully into the New Hampshire primary, including the famous debate in Keene, New Hampshire, in which Reagan, in the midst of a heated argument with the debate moderator, bellowed, “I am paying for this microphone!” His unhappiness with Sears, fueled by the campaign chief’s repeated sacking of Reagan’s political team, resulted in Reagan’s firing of Sears and two of his key allies on the day of the New Hampshire primary. Craig Shirley’s Rendezvous with Destiny has the most thorough account of these events.
It is plausible to think that without a real battle for the nomination, Reagan would have fired Sears anyway and become a bolder candidate. But, as Shirley recounts, Reagan shied away from conflict in his own campaign; and without a primary setback, the case for changing course would have been harder to make.
THE KENNEDY-HART BATTLE: The harsh coverage of Ted Kennedy from the mainstream media is described as it happened.
In the nomination scenario, Elaine Kamarck’s Primary Politics became my guiding star—especially as it related to the primary calendar.
To understand why, this point is essential: In 1980, four weeks separated Iowa from New Hampshire. In 1984, when Hart in fact ran, eight days separated the two events.
When Gary Hart ran in 1984, he finished far behind former Vice President Walter Mondale in Iowa, with 16 percent of the vote to Mondale’s 49 percent. The New York Times, on the day of the New Hampshire primary, reported that Mondale had the biggest lead of any candidate in primary history. The surge of “Anybody but Mondale” sentiment, and Hart’s winning ways with an ax throw, won him a solid victory in New Hampshire—one that his campaign was completely unequipped to deal with. The sudden mass of attention, the demand for press interviews, the instant tug on his time from every corner of the nation, completely overwhelmed the campaign. Had Gary Hart had a month to deal with a “better than expected showing,” he would have had time to do everything from fund-raise to travel around the country. And he would have been spared the “Who is this guy?” response from an electorate that had never heard of him until he became an instant giant-killer.
The primary calendar also made a huge difference to Ronald Reagan. When Bush beat him in Iowa in 1980, Reagan had a month to respond, to begin campaigning vigorously in New Hampshire, and to debate. Had the 1984 calendar been in effect, Bush’s momentum might well have carried him to victory in New Hampshire eight days after Iowa; and that might very well have proven fatal to Reagan’s chances.
The use of “delegate committees” to skirt campaign spending limits was actually used in 1984—not by Gary Hart, but by Walter Mondale’s campaign, as extensively covered in Germond and Witcover’s book. That book also recounts Hart’s success in hitting a bull’s eye with an ax at the Woodsman Conclave in Berlin.
Ted Kennedy’s 1980 campaign was effectively out of money by the end of the New Hampshire primary. If readers see a parallel between the hypothetical Hart-Kennedy battle of 1980, and the Obama-Clinton struggle of 2008—congratulations!
John McCain, who served as the Navy’s liaison to the Senate, worked across the hall from Hart, who served on the Armed Services Committee. They became close enough so that Hart served as a groomsman when McCain married Cindy Hensley in May of 1980.
The “red phone” ad was used by the Mondale campaign in the 1984 primary to suggest that Gary Hart was an “unsure, unsteady, untested hand . . .”
The abolition of “winner take all” primaries in the Democratic Party continues to be a defining difference between the parties. In 2008, for example, Hillary Clinton’s victories in the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries netted her fewer delegates than Obama got by winning the Idaho and Kansas caucuses! Had the Democrats had the Republican Party rules—with “winner-take-all” primaries in states such as New York and New Jersey—Hillary Clinton would almost surely have beaten Obama for the nomination. At the risk of repeating mys
elf, if you want to understand how important these rules are, read Kamarck’s Primary Politics.
THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION—AND REAGAN’S RUNNING MATE: In 1980, Republicans met in Detroit, Michigan—a perfect venue for highlighting the failure of the Carter administration and the Congressional Democrats to deal with the collapse of the auto industry and the decline of urban America. With a Republican in the White House, it would have been exactly the wrong signal, but exactly the right signal for Democrats. And without an incumbent President Carter running, the South would have been the Republicans’ best target of opportunity (the 1984 Republican Convention was held in Dallas).
Reagan and his campaign manager, John Sears, had shown a willingness to play high-stakes poker with a Vice Presidential choice back in 1976. Coming into the convention a few dozen delegates behind President Ford, Reagan broke with tradition by announcing he would choose as his running mate Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker. In part, the choice of a liberal Republican was designed to show that Reagan was no zealot. The tactical intention was to force Ford to announce his choice, thus alienating partisans of other contenders (the ploy failed).
In 1980, much attention was focused on the “gender gap.” Democrats ran better among women than among men. Had Reagan been running to succeed an unpopular Republican incumbent, with Gary Hart staking a plausible claim to be the “change” candidate, choosing a woman running mate would have made real political sense. In his campaign, Reagan promised to put a woman on the Supreme Court, which he did at his first opportunity in 1981, when he named Sandra Day O’Connor. Further, John McCain’s choice of Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008 was seen—at first—as a political ten-strike after she delivered a masterful acceptance speech at the convention. Only later, especially in her interviews with CBS anchor Katie Couric, did her limitations emerge.
Reagan’s acceptance speech is composed largely of speeches he delivered during the 1980 campaign.
THE REAGAN-HART DEBATE, AND DAVID GARTH: Reagan prepared for his debates with full-blown rehearsals on a mock stage in Wexford, Virginia, as described in many accounts of the 1980 campaign, including Craig Shirley’s Rendezvous with Destiny. Gary Hart’s method of debate preparation was described to me by Kathy Bushkin Calvin. Warren Beatty worked with Hart as a behind-the-scenes advisor in George McGovern’s 1972 campaign and in Hart’s own 1984 run for the Presidential nomination (see Peter Biskind’s Star).
My knowledge of David Garth, whose career as a prominent politicalmedia strategist spanned three decades, comes firsthand: I worked for him from 1970 to 1976 helping to shape campaign themes, draft speeches, create political commercials, and work on debate preparation. The best neutral appraisal of Garth I’ve seen was written by Robert Sam Anson for New Times magazine in 1978, “The World According to Garth.” The ad he and I did for Tom Bradley in his 1973 race for Los Angeles mayor—where he talked bluntly about racial fears—remains in my mind as the best work he and I ever did.
Garth’s rule that “Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck” comes from a piece I did for Slate magazine in the 2008 campaign.
The substance of Hart’s opening remarks can be found in his 1983 book A New Democracy, where he presents the themes he would use during his Presidential run the following year. Ronald Reagan’s misstatement about the GI Bill of Rights is cited in my book The Real Campaign. None of his primary opponents challenged him about it—at least, not in any debate—and it had been forgotten by the time Carter and Reagan debated in 1980. For David Garth, who employed first-rate researchers to comb the records of both his clients and his adversaries, it was the kind of mistake that would never have gone unremembered—or unused.
Reagan’s closing statement in his debate with Jimmy Carter—“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”—has rightly gone down in political history as a classically effective summation of his case. I was astounded to discover that George McGovern had used not just that same argument, but almost those same words, to encapsulate his case against Richard Nixon in 1972.
Nancy Reagan’s dissatisfaction with John Sears is recounted in Shirley’s book. In the 1980 campaign as it unfolded, old Reagan hands that John Sears had forced out of the campaign kept up backchannel communications with Nancy Reagan, which helped lead to Sears’s ouster on the day of the New Hampshire primary.
IN CONCLUSION: The idea of a sitting President of the United States engaging in intimate physical contact with a woman half his age within the very walls of the White House is, of course, unthinkable. I apologize for permitting my fevered imagination to run away with my better judgment.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first debt is to my publisher, Putnam, and my long-suffering editor, Neil Nyren—for what may appear to be an unlikely reason: They threatened me.
For years, I drifted between evasion and struggle in an attempt to produce the novel for which Putnam had delivered a significant amount of money (significant to me, if not Stephen King). And for years, I suggested, then implored them, to employ the one method of inspiration sure to invigorate my sclerotic creative impulses: Give us a book or give us back the money.
Finally, they made me that offer I could not refuse.
Thanks to the efforts of my longtime literary agent, Sterling Lord, the agreement we reached proved . . . agreeable.
More significant was the encouragement I received from Neil—and from many others at Putnam, including president Ivan Held, and publicity director Marilyn Ducksworth—after they saw the first section of this book. Their enthusiasm was the best source of energy an author can have.
My second debt is to one of my best friends in the world, Pat Mitchell, who runs the Paley Center for Media. As it happened, I was on a panel at the Center just after Putnam made its demand, to discuss a film about Robert Kennedy’s memorable speech the night Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed. I was asked (as I have been innumerable times), “What would have happened had he lived?” I started to answer, as I always have, “Who knows?,” and then found myself talking about the strong possibility that Chicago Mayor Daley would have backed RFK and how that would have changed the whole dynamic at the Chicago convention, and . . .
. . . And that was the germination of this book.
Along the way, I was helped by the generosity of friends, colleagues, and players in these events, over breakfasts, lunches, dinners, interviews, and e-mail exchanges that form much of the spine of these stories.
Harry McPherson, who worked closely with Lyndon Johnson in his Senate and White House years, provided shrewd insight into how LBJ might have governed had he been thrust into the White House, not in 1963 but before John Kennedy had ever been inaugurated.
Richard Goodwin, whose experience spanned JFK’s 1960 campaign and his White House years, LBJ’s Presidency, and RFK’s doomed 1968 campaign, spent an evening with me, along with Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was Johnson’s closest confidante in his post-White House years, and whose sense of the interplay between personality and history was invaluable to me. Dick was also one of Robert Kennedy’s best friends, and his take on Kennedy’s character and impulses was of enormous help in shaping the history of that 1968 campaign that never was.
Doug Bailey, the legendary Republican media master, guided me through the strategy, tactics, and ultimate frustration of the campaign that almost pulled off a 1976 upset worthy of Harry Truman’s 1948 victory.
Brent Scowcroft, Ford’s National Security Advisor, cheerfully took up the challenge of assessing the response of a Ford Presidency to upheaval in Iran, and helped sketch for me what a very different Middle East might look like.
For the imagined 1980 campaign of Gary Hart, I received guidance from two of Hart’s closest Senate and campaign colleagues: press secretary Kathy Bushkin (now Kathy Bushkin Calvin) and top staff aide Billy Shore.
I also had the great good fortune to have the best possible guide through the 1980 political terrain: Elaine Kamarck, a veteran of Democratic Party wars, whose knowledge re
aches from the most serious of public policy disputes to the Byzantine rule disputes that have driven generations of Democratic Party operatives to drink and drugs.
Throughout my work on this book, I found myself turning for help to one of Washington’s most insightful thinkers: Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Norm has for decades been one of the most quoted figures on everything from elections to Congressional-Presidential relations to Constitutional matters. It turns out that there’s a reason: In contrast to much of what passes for “analysis” on cable news and talk radio, Norm actually is deeply grounded in what he is talking about.
For well over twenty years, one of the greatest pleasures during campaign season has been the companionship of journalist-author Joe Klein; we have broken bread from one end of the country to the other, and on several occasions have gathered a gaggle of colleagues for lengthy lunches and dinners. Beyond that, Joe is a good friend and a one-man generator of ideas. He was especially helpful in guiding me through the construction of an “alternate” Middle East.
When it comes to dedication to the coverage of politics, no one can top Walter Shapiro, who is even now (I suspect) staking out the opening rounds of the 2012, and 2016, and 2020 Presidential campaigns. He is also a man on whom fortune has smiled; he gets to be married to another first-rate journalist, Meryl Gordon. Had I incorporated all of their worthy notions about alternative political histories, the book would have been twice as long.
For nearly thirty years, I have been part of a standing Wednesday lunch group, with exclusive membership standards (no diphtheria allowed). Each of these miscreants, in their own way, were of inestimable—make that estimable—assistance.
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