Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America Read online

  Although the Panama Canal treaties would still need to receive the votes of two-thirds of the U.S. Senate—by no means a certain proposition—the Carter administration went ahead with an extravagant signing ceremony featuring Torrijos and Carter on the White House lawn. The media and the liberal establishment were startled to see large crowds of protesters mobilized that day on Capitol Hill and outside the White House.61

  Conservative groups in Washington were meeting, often daily, to coordinate their grassroots lobbying, advertising, public relations, and direct-mail efforts to stop the treaties. Reagan gave a speech to the National Press Club in early September blasting Carter over the issue; he cut more radio commentaries on the subject; he also testified before the Senate outlining his opposition.62

  Meanwhile, a letter went out under Reagan's signature on behalf of the RNC, asking for money to help stop Carter's initiative. “I'm convinced the only way to defeat the Carter negotiated treaty is to conduct a full-fledged campaign to alert citizens to the dangers Republicans see in this treaty,” Reagan wrote. “Believe me, without your support, the canal is as good as gone. I've read this treaty carefully from cover to cover, and in my honest opinion, it's a line by line blueprint for potential disaster for our country.” The mail response to Reagan was overwhelming and the RNC raised, by its estimate, more than $1 million.63

  Problem was, RNC chairman Bill Brock had no intention of using a dime of the money to actually stop the treaties. Brock would not go against his old friend Gerald Ford, who remained a supporter of the documents. Nor did he want to create an uncomfortable situation for another old friend, Howard Baker, the minority leader of the U.S. Senate. Brock and Baker were former Senate colleagues, both from Tennessee, and Baker was equivocating his stance, one of the few remaining Republicans not to take a position on the matter. Reagan staffer Charlie Black recalled, “What Brock was really worried about was embarrassing his close friend Howard Baker.”64

  Reagan graciously issued a statement attempting to paper over the disagreement with Brock: “I am concerned that some reports have given the impression that [RNC] officials and I are in disagreement and that I have withdrawn my support of the party. This impression is mistaken. To the extent that there is any difference, it is limited to the ways and means by which to best oppose the proposed … treaties.”65

  Lyn Nofziger and Paul Laxalt, the national chairman of Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign, knew better. They would have liked to tie a millstone around Brock's neck and drop him in the nearest pond. Later that day Laxalt got into the act, as he announced that conservatives were going to the mattresses against Carter without Brock and the RNC, telling reporters that Brock's decision “reaffirms my feeling that if we are going to be effective as conservatives, it will have to be outside the RNC. It's obvious they're not sympathetic to our goals.”66

  After speaking with the fuming Laxalt and Nofziger, Reagan reversed his course a day later and told Brock in a letter that his name was not to be used in any more fundraising appeals for the RNC for any issue, especially the Panama Canal. In snapping tones, Reagan told Brock, “My credibility is involved in this.… Letters with my name on them have gone all across the country asking for money to help fight the treaties. Now we discover that money raised by the letters will not be used for that purpose. And worse than that, we discover that the national party has no plans to campaign against the treaties.”67 Brock ducked reporters' calls about the angry Reagan and a spokesman for the committee lamely said, “The party does not provide money for groups unaffiliated with the party except for cases approved by the party's national committee.”68

  It would not be the last run-in involving the antiestablishment, conservative populist Reagan and the moderate, toast-of-the-establishment scion of the candy company bearing his name, Brock.

  IN THE MIDST OF Ronald Reagan's very public crusade against Jimmy Carter and the Panama Canal treaties, he and his wife sat down for a long interview in Los Angeles with Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal. “Ronald Reagan's political juices are rising again,” the respected journalist noted in his piece. But Hunt accepted at face value the argument that Reagan did not hunger for the White House, concluding that “many Reagan insiders think the farther he gets from his 1976 campaign, the less he may want to try again.” Hunt quoted former Reagan aide David Keene to buttress his point: “He isn't all consumed by the desire to be President the way … Carter or … Nixon were.”69

  Both Hunt and Keene overlooked the obvious: While Nixon and Carter may have been obsessive, Reagan was nonetheless fiercely competitive and was ferociously articulating his future-orientated conservative philosophy in hundreds of newspapers twice a week, on five hundred radio stations daily, and in dozens of speeches across the country. Another run at the White House was never far from his mind.

  On December 20, 1977, Reagan convened a very private dinner at his home with his most trusted former advisers. The topic was 1980. Attending were John Sears, Lyn Nofziger, Ed Meese, Peter Hannaford, Jim Lake, Marty Anderson, Dave Keene, and a few others. Several who were playing footsie with other candidates were surprised when both Reagans showed “more enthusiasm than most members of his inner circle,” as the Washington Post later reported.70

  It was unclear whether Sears would run Reagan's 1980 campaign—if there was one. He had accumulated a wealth of political enemies, many of them influential conservatives and Reaganites. Former Reagan press secretary Jim Lake said that some Reagan staffers had nicknamed Sears “John P. Satan.”71

  Reagan had many decisions to make, but it seemed that on the big question—whether to run again in 1980—he had already made up his mind, even if his closest advisers weren't yet on board.

  2

  RETURN OF THE REPUBLICANS

  “Jimmy Carter will never have a nonturbulent year.”

  Sitting in a comfortable chair in front of a crackling fire in the library of the White House, Jimmy Carter attempted in a twenty-two-minute nationally televised address to refute charges made by critics of the Panama Canal treaties. It was February 1, 1978, and Carter told the viewing audience that the treaties were of the “highest national interest of the United States.”1

  Then the leader of the Free World openly took on private citizen Ronald Reagan. Directly quoting Reagan's oft-repeated phrase “We bought it, we paid for it, it's ours,” Carter intoned, “I must repeat a very important point. We do not own the Panama Canal Zone—we have never had sovereignty over it. We have only had the right to use it.”2

  The Gipper could not have been more thrilled. The president had singled him out for criticism and CBS offered the Californian unprecedented broadcast time to reply. Reagan responded to Carter's left jab with a right uppercut, telling his national audience that the president was being less than forthright with the American people by suggesting that the treaties were about protecting America's “permanent right to use the canal.” Reagan said, “We have that permanent right—right now—but will we effectively have it if the Carter-Torrijos treaties are ratified? I have very serious doubts that we will.” He suggested that President Carter had misled the American people, leaving “the mistaken impression that we acquired the Canal Zone by some underhanded means; that the Canal was somehow forced on Panama. Nothing could be further from the truth.”3

  Reagan would ultimately lose the fight. In the spring, the Senate finally (though barely) mustered the required two-thirds votes to pass the treaties. The first treaty, which affirmed that the United States could defend the canal against any interference with its continued neutral service to ships of all nations, was ratified on March 16 by a vote of 68–32;4 the second, which turned the canal over to Panamanian control on December 31, 1999, was ratified on April 18, 67–33.5 Reagan, in Japan on a lecture tour, issued a statement lamenting the loss: “Naturally, I am disappointed.… I feel this is a very extreme case of ignoring the sentiment of the people of our country. They were overwhelming in their disapproval of the treaties.”6 In private to ai
de Peter Hannaford, Reagan released a blast of invective and obscenities over the Senate votes.

  But the long fight over the Panama Canal had boosted for a time Reagan's political capital—and drained Carter's. The president's unpopular campaign for the canal treaties, combined with the slowing economy and White House missteps, had dropped him in the polls. According to a new Harris survey for ABC News, Carter was losing in a trial heat against Gerald Ford, 48–43 percent, and to Reagan, 47–46 percent. Only two months before, he had bested Ford, 50–42. He was also getting trounced among Democratic voters by Senator Ted Kennedy, 60–35. The number of Americans who thought Carter was doing a good job had fallen to 29 percent.7 “Jimmy Carter will never have a nonturbulent year,” his White House consigliere, Hamilton Jordan, said.8

  THE GREATEST POLITICAL UPHEAVAL of 1978 took place on June 6 in Reagan's California with the passage of Proposition 13. If it had been measured as an earthquake, Proposition 13 would have gone off the Richter scale and much of California's political establishment would have slid into the Pacific. This was “The Big One.” Property taxes in California had been going up for years, and by June 1978, property owners had had enough. In some cases, unchecked property taxes had gone up more than 1,000 percent.9 Suddenly, those who'd pooh-poohed tax cuts were in a headlong rush to prove they were for them and had been all along. The referendum didn't just pass; it passed in a rout, 65–35 percent.10

  One of the most neck-straining turnarounds came from California governor Jerry Brown, who was contemplating his own 1980 challenge to Carter in the Democratic primaries. Brown switched sides within a matter of hours and on June 7 was championing Proposition 13, talking as if he'd invented it. Even Reagan, who had initially been lukewarm about the radical “Prop 13,” was now embracing it.

  The new law cut property taxes by 57 percent and compelled government programs to be cut across the board, as it immediately slashed $7 billion in annual revenue headed for Sacramento.11 It was the first tax cut since 1970, when Governor Reagan refunded California's taxpayers $73 million.

  The two leaders of Proposition 13 were Paul Gann, a sixty-five-year-old retired real estate agent and head of People's Advocate, a grassroots antigovernment pressure group, and Howard Jarvis, a seventy-four-year-old self-made millionaire who enjoyed large cigars. Jarvis was sui generis. He was short with a booming voice, a face and neck that looked like a California mudslide, and a knack for self-promotion. Jarvis became a household name in America and an instant folk hero.12

  At once, tax-limitation propositions sprang up in sixteen other states and were described by the Washington Post as “sons of Proposition 13, California's gift to the tax rebellion.”13 States included were spread across the country and no region was left out. They ranged from the liberal Hawaii to the conservative Alabama. It was truly a nationwide populist uprising. Nearly all the initiatives and ballot referenda were a result of direct citizen action and not that of elected officials, most of whom were running for the tall grass, terrified of these newly empowered citizens' tax groups.

  Because of Reagan, Congressman Jack Kemp, and celebrity economists such as Art Laffer, Jude Wanniski, and Milton Friedman, tax cuts had become a canon of the Republican Party in just two short years. Reagan and the fast-rising Kemp had star billing in the GOP, but Laffer and the others had developed their own cultish fan base as well. Laffer, a professor of economics at USC, talked a blue streak. The political columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak depicted the flamboyant Laffer “sipping wine on the patio of his $225,000 home in Palos Verdes … while a big green macaw perches on his shoulder.”14

  Laffer and Wanniski had attempted to sell their ideas to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld while Ford was in the White House, but the young aides had dismissed the radical approach out of hand. Kemp was the first politician to embrace Laffer and Wanniski's ideas. Laffer said they sold the concept to Kemp, whose middle name was “French,” in part by telling him that he could be the next “JFK.”15

  Laffer also began meeting with Reagan—often over meals—to discuss economic theories. “He would bring in all sorts of stuff,” Laffer recalled. Once, over lunch, they got into a hot-pepper-eating contest. Laffer ate one and thought his mouth was on fire. “I literally couldn't breathe.” There was Reagan, “bright purple. And when we finally caught our breath he said, ‘Okay, Art, you ready for another one?’ And I said, ‘Surrender, sir,' and he won the contest, because I don't know whether he was bluffing or not, but I sure as hell wasn't about to call him on it.”16

  The center of liberalism was collapsing and conservative thinkers and writers moved to fill the void. “The prevailing theory of liberalism, providing a common intellectual core of beliefs that many leaders in Washington could rally behind, has broken up,” said William J. Baroody of the American Enterprise Institute.17 Some argued that this was merely the manifestation of a “countervailing” force in that the “outs” always looked better than the “ins” to the American people, and indeed there was some truth in this. On the other hand, a populist, middle-class revolt was washing across the country. Referenda, the growth of the conservative movement and right-of-center think tanks, the growing popularity of conservative books, new lawsuits against affirmative action, the outpouring of opposition to the Panama Canal treaties and the Equal Rights Amendment—all were tangible evidence of creative revolt in the land. People were “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.”

  The issues that Reagan had been warning about for years—excessive government spending and regulations, taxation, a drooping economy, a falling dollar, job stagnation, inflation, Soviet expansion, decaying moral standards, weak national leadership—were now on everybody's mind. And he and his fellow conservatives were offering concrete solutions, including a more aggressive foreign and national defense policy for the United States against Soviet adventurism.

  But it was unclear, at least to the public, whether Reagan himself would attempt to lead conservatives into the White House. Like Ford, Reagan remained coy about whether he would actually run for president in 1980.

  George Bush, meanwhile, was anything but coy. By the summer of 1978, the former congressman, United Nations ambassador, and CIA director was telling potential supporters, the media, and anyone else who would listen that he was going to make the race. He called his son Jeb, working in South America, and told him that he was going to run for president. The young man replied, “President of what?”18

  Senate minority leader Howard Baker was also moving ahead. When pressed he had finally come out in support of the Panama Canal treaties, which had badly damaged his chances for the GOP nomination. In any case, though he was well known and well liked in Washington, he did not have a high profile outside the Beltway and had not acquired a signature issue on which to campaign for the presidency.19

  Jack Kemp's stock was rising so quickly that his name was being mentioned as a possible contender in 1980 as well. He faced a potential pitfall: a news report said that some in the GOP considered him a “pushy upstart.” The overly confident Kemp was unfazed by such criticism.20

  Another young and articulate congressman looking at 1980 was Philip M. Crane of Illinois, whose father, “Dr. Crane,” had been a nationally syndicated columnist for many years. Crane, the highly intelligent chairman of the American Conservative Union, was only forty-seven years old in 1978, with chiseled features that made women look twice. Elected in a 1969 special House election in Illinois to fill the unexpired term of another intelligent if brash young man, Donald Rumsfeld, who had gone into the Nixon administration, Crane, some conservatives were saying, was a “younger Reagan.” Crane paid a courtesy call on Reagan and Paul Laxalt in late July 1978, when the governor was in Washington, to advise them of his intentions to run for the GOP nod. Reagan took it okay until Crane suggested that the Californian step aside and become a “senior statesman” in the party.21 Crane had been a part of Citizens for Reagan in 1976, but he had heard from many people that Reagan was being too guarded
, that he was too old, and that the detested John Sears would be back running Reagan's campaign.

  Reagan was not happy about any of this. Earlier, Crane had as much as told Reagan's men that he would support Reagan again. Worse, Crane threatened to compromise Reagan's support among New Right leaders. Richard Viguerie, for example, joined Crane's direct-mail fundraising. Although Crane was nowhere in the polls, he had assets. The American Conservative Union claimed 300,000 members. He had written three books, including Surrender in Panama, and had a nationally syndicated column. He had seven attractive daughters and one young son, so he could count on a photogenic entourage.22 Crane knew his chances for winning the 1980 nomination were slim, but if a moderate like Howard Baker or George Bush won the nomination, the candidate would need a conservative running mate to create a unified convention and party. And if Crane shaved off a few points from Reagan in the primaries and in so doing cost Reagan the nomination, well, c'est la vie.

  Nor was Reagan pleased with the way Crane and many others focused on concerns about his age. Crane himself told reporters that Reagan's age could be “a potential problem” for the Gipper.23 A Crane supporter would later describe his candidate as “Reagan without wrinkles.”24 Publicly, Reagan laughed off the issue, using self-deprecating humor with audiences. He sometimes said, “I can remember when a hot story broke and the reporters would run in yelling, ‘Stop the chisels.’”25 But privately, Reagan sometimes fumed over the age issue.