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

  Faced with these new challenges, Reagan took off on a fall 1978 campaign swing through twenty-six states in support of Republican candidates. Keeping his options open, he did not limit his campaigning to only conservatives who had supported him in 1976. He also pitched in to help some people who couldn't stomach him in 1976, including liberal senator Chuck Percy of Illinois, who was in trouble with conservatives in his state over his support for the Panama Canal treaties. Reagan also campaigned enthusiastically for Jim Baker in Texas, who was running for attorney general. Baker had been Ford's supremely competent delegate honcho in 1976, but Reagan and Baker genuinely liked each other. So much, in fact, that while Reagan was in the Lone Star State for Baker, he and Mike Deaver took Baker aside to inquire about his availability to run the Reagan for President operation—which struck Baker and his campaign manager, Frank Donatelli, as odd, since Baker was engaged in his own campaign that was looking very promising.26

  Reagan's campaigning also brought him to his first private meeting with Gerald Ford since the Kansas City convention two years earlier. The meeting was held at Ford's new home in Palm Springs, where the two filmed unity commercials for the GOP as well as endorsement spots for Republicans running elsewhere in the country. They met with the media and were unfailingly polite toward each other, if a bit stiff. Still, the bad blood remained. As the Washington Post reported, “Republicans who have talked recently with former president Ford say he rarely fails to remark how old Ronald Reagan is looking.”27

  While Reagan was clearly gearing up for a possible run in 1980, he had to face continuing questions about John Sears. Sears was more and more on the mind of conservatives—and not happily. Since 1976 Reagan had been writing letters to people questioning his former campaign manager. “Don't worry about John Sears,” he confided to one old friend. “He is a political technician, not an adviser on philosophy.”28 The matter came to a head when Reagan met with a group of disgruntled conservatives at the U.S. Capitol.29 The second question Reagan was asked was about Sears's role in the 1980 campaign. Reagan assured them that “John Sears will not be managing my campaign.”30

  Senator Paul Laxalt, slated to be the Reagan campaign's grand pooh-bah once again, delivered the same message, telling Lou Cannon that “Sears will not be the campaign manager in 1980, but will have a role in the Northeast and as a strategist if he wants one.”31 To address the Sears problem, Reagan had approached the well-regarded Bill Timmons, Ford's former political aide, about running things for 1980, but their talks were inconclusive.32 That fall, the Gipper put in fifty-six separate appearances, and over the previous two years, the Associated Press reported, Reagan had “made more than 300 speeches, held more than 200 news conferences and interviews, and delivered more than 700 radio broadcasts and newspaper columns.”33 Still, Reagan was trailing Ford among Republicans, 37–31, according to Gallup in August.34

  IN SEPTEMBER, CARTER ENGINEERED the most significant foreign-policy agreement of his presidency with the signing of the Camp David Accords, a historic and durable agreement between Egypt and Israel. Through the sheer force of his own will, along with not-so-gentle cajoling, he brought the two old adversaries—going back to the Exodus and even before—to an agreement. It was an impressive achievement, one that had eluded every president before him, and he got a momentary bump of 11 percent in the polls.

  Although Americans may have been pleased about the prospects for peace in the Middle East, what really kept them up at night were high taxes and the economy. Unemployment was creeping up, as was inflation. In June alone, almost 500,000 people lost their jobs. By the fall, Carter's numbers had dropped back to where they had been before the Camp David Accords; according to Harris, the president was at 48 percent approval. Voters disapproved of Carter's handling of the economy by a margin of 2–1.35 These issues became the centerpiece of the Republicans' campaign efforts in the 1978 midterm elections.

  Another issue emerged in California, where voters' attention centered on a new ballot proposition—Proposition 6, or the Briggs Amendment. Simply put, the Briggs Amendment would prohibit out-of-the-closet homosexuals or those advocating a gay lifestyle from being public-school teachers in California. State Senator John Briggs had seen what Anita Bryant was doing in Dade County, Florida, with the repeal of a gay-rights ordinance, and decided to do the same in California, mostly to boost his own political aspirations. The usual Hollywood suspects lined up in opposition to the Briggs Amendment.

  One who was also opposed, and who shocked people when he did so—but should not have shocked them if they had studied the man—was Ronald Reagan. Reagan was taking on the Christian Right, an important and growing force in American politics that would hold great sway in the 1980 GOP primaries. Reagan didn't care. His attitude of benign neglect toward homosexuality surely came in part from his days in Hollywood, where gay men thrived and morals were rather casual, but for him this issue also involved a deeply felt principle about privacy and free speech.36

  Not to say that he didn't have a sense of humor when it came to gays. Early in his governorship, a homosexual scandal threatened his new administration. When informed of the gays in his administration, Reagan deadpanned to Lyn Nofziger, “Well, none of them ever asked me for a date!”37 He then joked that since Truman Capote was visiting the next week, maybe they ought to tie a rope around him and “troll him down the halls” to see what they could catch.38

  On Election Day, Republicans picked up twelve seats in the House of Representatives—respectable, but nothing near the thirty-plus they had hoped for. They won six gubernatorial contests and managed a net pickup of more than three hundred state legislators. The best news of the night, though, was the addition of three new senators, which meant that Howard Baker and the Republicans had forty-one: enough now to mount a filibuster if necessary.39 Senator Percy won reelection, helped by Reagan's eleventh-hour assistance, but Jim Baker lost the attorney general race in Texas.

  Proposition 6 went down to a crashing defeat in California, and when John Briggs was asked for the reason why, he simply said, “Ronald Reagan.”

  ALTHOUGH THE GIPPER HAD a near mystical hold over grassroots conservatives, he was still not held in high regard by the power brokers in the GOP. In the spring of 1979, a survey of leading Republicans showed John Connally to be their first choice for GOP nominee in 1980, with 31.9 percent of the vote; Howard Baker came in second with almost 18 percent; Reagan was essentially tied with George Bush at 11 percent.40

  Reagan had important work to do to shore up his chances for 1980. He began by romancing the cantankerous Barry Goldwater, who had supported Ford over Reagan in 1976. Goldwater had a love-hate relationship with Reagan. He owed Reagan many favors, but was envious of Reagan's abilities to connect with the American people. Nancy Reagan's parents, Dr. and Mrs. Loyal Davis of Phoenix, had been furious with their old friend Barry for supporting Ford over “Ronnie.”41

  As Reagan began laying groundwork for 1980, he made a tactical decision that would have a profound effect on his campaign: John Sears would come back for another tour as campaign manager, despite Reagan's promises to friends and conservatives that this would not be the case. There was never any meeting in which Sears and Reagan discussed his role; it just sort of happened, for two reasons. One, no one stepped forward to directly challenge Sears's authority, and two, Mrs. Reagan liked Sears. Another reason might have been that the old poker player ran a successful bluff: he told Reagan aide Mike Deaver that Senator Howard Baker was trying to hire him for his campaign. Like the Reagans, Deaver still believed in Sears; he later recalled the controversial campaign manager as “a brain for hire who wanted to play on a winning team.”42

  Distrusted by many Reaganites, Sears was popular among the national media. That was partly because he had no hobbies other than poker, smoking, drinking, and politics—interests that many national political reporters shared. He chain-smoked Viceroy cigarettes and liked a drink, though he seemed to have that under control now. He was also a devout
Catholic who would excuse himself from a poker game to attend evening Mass. He had “the softening physique of a person seldom exposed to sun, wind or exercise,” in the words of Time magazine.43

  Sears was called “brilliant” by some and “erratic” by others. His first national campaign had been Richard Nixon's in 1968, and he viewed everything through the prism of that experience. He told reporters that the 1980 Reagan campaign would be one of “new ideas with Nixonian thoroughness.”44 That thoroughness involved thick briefing binders that provided answers to every probable question under the sun. Nixon was obsessed with paper and despised working with people; he needed the briefing books because he had no governing framework. Reagan loved to read, but he'd rather be with people than paper, and he had a governing framework based on freedom. Reagan was indifferent to the briefing books Sears had painstakingly prepared; Reagan staffers remember the yelling matches between the candidate and the campaign manager over the binders.45

  One of Sears's first decisions in 1979 was to take Reagan off the road, where he had been almost constantly for thirty years. Reagan would travel little and say less. He was still doing his radio commentaries and writing his syndicated column, but the relentless public speaking came to an end. Sears regarded Reagan as the clear front-runner and adopted a strategy of risk avoidance: the only person who could beat Reagan was Reagan. To have Reagan say nothing and go to few places was safer than to have the candidate speak his mind, Sears concluded. His plan was to make clear that Reagan's nomination was “inevitable” and that he was the “mainstream” candidate.

  Later that year, political columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover wrote a piece that clearly took the side of their old poker and drinking buddy Sears, and patronizingly talked about Reagan as if he were a product that was being repackaged for 1980: “The purpose … is to have the old model sound a lot newer—and better informed—when he is wheeled out of the showroom onto the campaign trail later this fall.”46

  But the “keep Reagan under wraps” strategy only encouraged reporters to begin speculating that Reagan was too old for one more try. Worse, it deprived the Reagan campaign of one of its great strengths—the candidate's public-speaking abilities, which had matured considerably. The Reagan of the 1960s was often angry—angry at student protesters, angry at college professors, angry at recalcitrant Democratic legislators in Sacramento. By 1979, he had developed a more hopeful and more optimistic message. He had been working on a new stump speech, one that was more upbeat: “We have to make our own successes by our own effort.… At the heart of that message should be five simple, familiar, everyday words. No big economic theories. No sermons on political philosophy. Just five short words. Family, Work, Neighborhood, Freedom, Peace.” He said that Republicans needed to begin “looking at things in a new way.”47

  Sears's plan provided an opening for John Connally, who was even better than Reagan in a large setting. Connally formally announced his candidacy in January 1979. He had spent most of his life as a Democrat—as Texas governor he had been in the car in Dallas on November 22, 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated, and had been severely wounded by one of Lee Harvey Oswald's bullets—but he changed parties in 1973 after he became Richard Nixon's treasury secretary. Many in Washington and corporate boardrooms expected “Big John,” with his bravado and good press clippings, to be a formidable candidate who would fare much better against Carter than would Reagan.

  It wasn't going to be easy for Connally, though. The dean of Washington columnists, James “Scotty” Reston of the New York Times, wrote that Connally was “denounced by the Democrats as a turncoat and resented by many Republicans as a presumptuous newcomer.”48 When the Texan made his first foray into New Hampshire, the Manchester Union-Leader, published by Reagan's number-one fan, William Loeb, blasted Connally as a “Born-Again Wheeler Dealer.”49

  Less noticed at the time, but detrimental to Connally's candidacy, was the fact that the governor of Texas, the position Connally held from 1963 to 1969, was a constitutionally weak role. In contrast, Reagan had been the governor of California, which had a constitutionally strong executive branch.

  The Sears strategy also opened a door for George Bush, who actively campaigned despite not having formally announced his candidacy. Bush had already made repeated trips to Iowa, doing his utmost to replicate Carter's achievement in 1976; that year “Jimmy Who?” unexpectedly won the Democratic caucuses against a field of better-funded and better-known contenders, and became the nominee. While the Iowa caucuses had not received much emphasis from GOP activists up to that point, the situation would be very different in 1980. Bush campaigned everywhere in Iowa, spoke to everyone, and was unfailingly polite, as he wrote thousands of handwritten notes to people he had met. Handwritten notes had become passé by 1979 and struck some as slightly effeminate (a joke going around at the time: “Why do Junior Leaguers hate group sex? All those thank-you notes!”), but from Bush these were effective and became cherished keepsakes. Along with outhustling everyone else in the field, the athletic Bush was going to out-good-manner them as well.

  Bush busily assembled a team of talented if eclectic political pros. Jim Baker came aboard as campaign chairman. Baker's assets included a very smooth relationship with the national media. He didn't play poker with them or drink with them like John Sears, but he always returned their phone calls and was a master at giving reporters much-needed background information.

  Also signing on was Vic Gold as speechwriter, consultant, and body man, or personal assistant. Bush needed a peer whom he respected on the plane with him; Gold, an attorney, speechwriter, and novelist who had been Barry Goldwater's deputy press secretary in 1964 and Vice President Spiro Agnew's press secretary in the White House, filled the bill. Gold would have been more ideologically comfortable with Reagan, for whom he had worked in 1968. But the mercurial and hot-tempered Gold (Jim Wooten of ABC once said that the “working definition of insanity in Washington is Vic Gold”) would never have meshed with John Sears. For a time a young political knockabout, Karl Rove, worked for Bush, but before the campaign got going, Bush fired him for leaking to the media, according to Dave Keene.50

  Another addition for Bush was Keene himself, who had been Reagan's southern political director in 1976. Keene had done a commendable job winning delegates and primaries for the Gipper, and the media had grown to like him for his candor, humor, and blunt talk. Bringing a prominent Reaganite over constituted a coup for the Bush campaign and advanced the case that Bush was acceptable to conservatives. Keene had angled to be the Reagan campaign's chief spokesman, which made some sense given his relationship with the national media. But Sears had other ideas. Keene had been seen by many as Sears's protégé in 1976, but as the native Wisconsinite became more and more prominent in Washington, he emerged as a threat to Sears's authority and a competitor for the media's affection. Sears offered Keene jobs either as head of coalitions or as the campaign's liaison with Capitol Hill—both of which Keene considered “ghetto” positions.51

  Sears then offered Keene up as tribute to some of the Californians around Reagan, who were suspicious of the campaign manager. But Keene had also run afoul of Mike Deaver by refusing to support Deaver's brief covert bid to replace Sears; this meant, by extension, that Keene was also in hot water with Mrs. Reagan.52 Deaver, who had tried to take Sears out, then joined forces with Sears to take Keene out.

  Keene was furious with Sears for selling him out. Jim Baker of the nascent Bush operation caught wind of this and offered him a position, but Keene's old friend Lyn Nofziger tried to keep him in the Reagan fold. Nofziger arranged for a private meeting with Reagan, Keene, and himself at the Madison Hotel the next time Reagan was in Washington. They met after work and had a couple of drinks, and Reagan told jokes, quipping to the two conservatives that, between marriages, he'd been pretty randy in Hollywood, “but I got so tired.”53 Reagan never asked Keene to remain with his campaign, however, even after Nofziger told him that Keene would stay onl
y if Reagan directly asked him. Keene signed on shortly after that with Bush.54

  While the Bush and Reagan teams were jockeying for staffers, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas entered the race for the Republican nomination in late February 1979.55 In any other year, Dole would have been considered a more serious candidate. He was a wounded war hero who had struggled through years of painful therapy to regain partial use of his left arm and hand but virtually no use of his right. Dole worked his way through law school, was elected to the House and then the Senate, and had been Ford's running mate. He was well liked by both the media and conservatives. His voting record was conservative enough, without being off-putting to more moderate elements in the party.

  But Dole was also a wisenheimer, leading some to conclude he was not serious. As a Kansan, Dole knew farm policy better than anyone else in the GOP. This should have made him more popular in rural states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Yet in Iowa he was only scoring 2 percent in the polls, tied with both Crane and Bush.56

  ON MARCH 7, REAGAN filed his own campaign exploratory committee with the Federal Election Commission. The charade of the exploratory committee rather than a full-fledged campaign committee was chosen so Reagan could continue to earn income from his speeches, radio commentaries, and syndicated column.57