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

  Weicker's affixed sobriquet was invariably “Maverick.” He was a media hound who had had White House ambitions since he'd first run for Congress in the 1960s. It was said that the most dangerous place in Washington was between Weicker and a microphone. When he announced his presidential candidacy in Hartford, he blew a cold blast of rhetoric at his own party: the senator, born in Paris, raised on Park Avenue in Manhattan, and educated at the best New England prep schools before graduating from Yale, said that the GOP “excludes normal people.”24

  Weicker's campaign was over before it ever began; in mid-May, just two months after he announced, he would withdraw from the race, as he was running in only “a strong third position” in his home state of Connecticut.25

  AT THE END OF April, Reagan officially opened his headquarters in Los Angeles, though he was still proclaiming that he had not yet decided on running. Then, on May 1, Ambassador George Bush officially jumped into the race. He had an impressively broad but somewhat shallow résumé and more personal resilience than a Timex watch. His campaign slogan, “A President We Won't Have to Train,”26 was uninspiring, but it drew a contrast with the ever-shrinking Carter.

  Bush's traditionalist positions on the issues—with the notable exceptions of a constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and the tax-cut bill sponsored by Jack Kemp in the House and William Roth in the Senate—might have won cheers from some of the conservatives who dominated the party. What's more, his culturally conservative upbringing, his service during World War II, and his experiences as a husband and father and as a businessman who had to deal with high taxes and excessive regulations aligned him with conservatives. But many conservatives just could not warm up to him, in part because he did not identify himself as one of them. As chairman of the Republican National Committee, Bush was asked if he was a conservative, a moderate, or a liberal and he dismissively said, “Labels are for cans.”27 Unlike Reagan, Bush was not a big reader of conservative books or publications. He was more of an intuitive conservative, and often struck more moderate positions.

  There also seemed to exist a cultural gap. Bush's Brooks Brothers suits, the tasseled loafers, the striped watchband, his good manners—all bespoke his privileged background, which included his education at the exclusive boys' boarding school Phillips Andover Academy and then Yale, where he was a member of Skull and Bones, a supersecret men's fraternity that only “old-money” sons could join. Some conservatives questioned Bush's “toughness,” even though he had been a daring U.S. Navy pilot in the Pacific.

  Bush's speech to the national media stressed his record of achievement rather than ideology. Carter's liberalism was an issue, yes, but this was not fertile ground for Bush to sow; this was where Reagan and others would take their stand.28 Ideological passion was, well, kinda tacky with the Bush family. After Dave Keene had signed on with Bush, the candidate invited him to the family's summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, to talk about the forthcoming campaign. There Keene asked Bush—rhetorically, he thought—“Why do you want to be president?” and was astonished to hear Bush reply, “Because I want to bring good people to government.” Keene turned to Ambassador Bush, twenty years his elder, and said, “No, George, you want to be president because you want to save Western civilization.”29

  Almost everybody called Bush “Sir” or “Mr. Bush” or “Ambassador.” Not so Keene, the son of a union organizer and saloon keeper. He despised elitism and went out of his way to disregard it, down to calling Bush by his first name. Bush of course never complained about it, but he didn't like it.30

  Bob Dole was the next Republican to declare for president, in mid-May. Dole announced in his hometown of Russell, Kansas, and promised a positive campaign, prompting giggles from reporters who remembered him as the guy who once called opponents of the Vietnam War “left-leaning marshmallows.”31

  Dole, well regarded in Washington for his legislative skills, hoped that Reagan would not run or would falter so that the Kansas senator could pick up the conservative baton. Though he was at only 4 percent in new polls, Dole climbed to 15 percent when respondents were asked if they had a second choice.32 He also assumed that if Ford did not run, Ford's support would go to him, not Bush, and that his friendship with Reagan staffers, including Lyn Nofziger, John Sears, Paul Russo, and Charlie Black, meant that they would come over to him if Reagan should stumble. It was, however, open to question whether Dole could overcome his image as a “combination of Attila the Hun, Sammy Glick and the sound of fingernails scratching down a blackboard,” in the memorable words of the Washington Star.33 Suffice it to say, there were a lot of “ifs” in the Dole campaign plan.

  With Dole in the race and Weicker out, the 1980 GOP field remained at six candidates.

  BY SUMMER, PRESIDENT CARTER was under fire from all sides. Some liberals tried to get Congressman Morris Udall of Arizona to run if Kennedy took a pass. When Carter caught wind of the fact that Udall was thinking about this, he called the congressman and specifically asked for his endorsement, but Udall refused. Others from the right side of the Democratic spectrum, such as Senator Pat Moynihan of New York, took soundings. Ted Kennedy was still undecided, even though polls continued to show him pounding everybody—including Reagan in Reagan's own state of California, 61–30 percent.34

  A former Carter speechwriter, Jim Fallows, wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly charging that the president personally approved who could and who could not use the White House tennis courts. Carter denied the micromanaging charge, but then told an astonished television interviewer that his secretary arranged tennis schedules “so that more than one person would not want to use the same tennis court simultaneously, unless they were on opposite sides of the net or engaged in a doubles contest.”35

  Carter one day lurched to the right, as when he proposed the deregulation of the railroad industry. Another day, he lurched to the left, as when he proposed massive new federal agencies such as the Departments of Energy and Education. His administration was spinning out of control.

  Then it came to light that earlier in the spring, he had been fishing in a secluded pond near his home in Georgia when, startled, he was attacked in his boat by what became known as the “Killer Rabbit.” The creature in question was not Bugs Bunny but a “swamp rabbit,” large and unfriendly and, to judge by its menacing hiss and flashing teeth, probably rabid, making it potentially dangerous to Carter. But city folk simply didn't understand how a bunny rabbit could also be a vicious beast.36

  White House press secretary Jody Powell had innocently told the story to Brooks Jackson, a reporter with the Associated Press, who wrote a small, lighthearted account of the incident. But then the Washington Post, the New York Times, and all three television networks picked up on it, putting a darker pall on the story. Everywhere Carter went, he was asked about the “Killer Rabbit.” It was just one more embarrassing incident in a long line of embarrassing incidents.

  To such embarrassments were added far more serious problems. Like Richard III, Carter was becoming “rudely stamped.” It would be the political “winter” of his “discontent” yet would be a “glorious summer” for King Edward, the “sun” of Massachusetts. Carter was a political cripple and was consumed with jealousy of the beloved Edward. Democratic men and women would adore Edward Kennedy, while “dogs bark” at poor Carter. President Carter had “no delight to pass away the time” and his supporters lamented the “deformed” quality of his administration.37

  But it might have been Hamlet, not Richard III, on Carter's mind. Whether 'tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the Oval Office—or, by taking leave of it, to end them?38

  Carter's presidency had become a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1979 the Soviets were making noises regarding the internal affairs of Afghanistan. The OPEC cartel had cut oil production and raised prices, a problem compounded by the fact that Carter had closed off exploration for oil and gas
in much of Alaska, which by some estimates had 60 percent of domestic reserves. He had ordered oil companies to cut production of gasoline and instead produce home heating oil for the coming winter. Demand for gasoline now outstripped supply. Long gas lines snaked around blocks and through the suburbs in the late spring and summer of 1979. Bumper stickers appeared that read “Carter—Kiss My Gas.”39

  Fecklessly, Carter issued an executive order that nonresidential buildings in America, both government and private, could not set their thermostats lower than 78 degrees in the summer or higher than 65 degrees in the winter.40 No one took Carter's order seriously.

  RONALD REAGAN'S CAMPAIGN ALSO seemed to be paralyzed. In early June the Los Angeles Times reported that Reagan's support had “declined since the first of the year,” as he was now favored by only 28 percent of GOP voters nationwide.41 He was also lagging in fundraising. John Connally had raised about $2.2 million by mid-1979 and Phil Crane, mostly through direct mail, had raised $2.5 million, though he was heavily in debt to Richard Viguerie, his direct-mail sage. Reagan had raised only about $1.4 million.42

  With John Sears still keeping Reagan on a tight leash, George Bush worked Iowa assiduously and in August unexpectedly won the Ames straw poll, which the Des Moines Register conducted at the annual fundraising dinner organized by the state GOP. Bush took almost 40 percent of the vote, with Reagan a distant second at 26 percent.43 The Ames straw poll should have been a warning to Reagan and his flaccid operation, but the campaign made no changes in Iowa. Bush and his team could scarcely believe their good fortune.

  Bush also signed up a veteran of the GOP wars in New Hampshire, former governor Hugh Gregg. Gregg had been Reagan's state chairman in 1976, but this was not the coup it might have seemed for Bush. The Gregg and Bush families were longtime friends, and in any case many Reaganites blamed Gregg for Reagan's losing New Hampshire by a whisker in 1976. Gregg had told his candidate to get out of the state the weekend before the primary, believing that Reagan's volunteers and town coordinators needed the time and space to get their voters out to the polls rather than hear the Gipper speak one more time. Reagan lost by about 1,300 votes out of 108,000 cast. Many thought that had he stayed to stump the state, he would have upset President Ford and perhaps won the nomination in 1976.44

  Reagan, meanwhile, signed up Gerald P. “Jerry” Carmen as head of his New Hampshire operations. Carmen, who had been a GOP state chairman, was a shrewd and tough operator who had his critics. He had been flirting with Connally, but as soon as he joined the Reagan team, he signed up chairmen in nearly all of the Granite State's 236 towns, some of them hamlets that were nothing more than two roads crossing in the night. This operation in New Hampshire provided one of the few pieces of evidence that the Reagan campaign had not entirely stalled.

  Around this time a seventh Republican presidential candidate, Congressman John B. Anderson of Illinois, emerged to replace Lowell Weicker as the GOP's “liberal” alternative. Anderson had begun his career as a conservative and a kooky one at that, as he introduced and reintroduced a bill in Congress that would specifically designate America to be a “Christian” nation.45 But over the years, he had drifted to the left, and he became particularly miffed when social conservatives fielded a primary candidate against him in 1978. Although Anderson won, the challenger from the right gave him a scare—and a chip on his shoulder.

  ON JULY 5, 1979, President Carter was scheduled to give a national address on the energy crisis, but his aides were divided over whether the president should give the address at all, let alone what he should say. Rosalynn Carter read the initial draft and didn't like it. Rumors leaked out of the White House that a shake-up of the cabinet was on the table. Just a day before the speech, Carter, who was at Camp David, abruptly and angrily canceled the address altogether when he hung up the phone on advisers Hamilton Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon and Vice President Walter Mondale.

  The White House never fully explained why the speech had been canceled, and as the Chicago Tribune reported, this “inspired speculation that Carter was suffering from nervous exhaustion or a nervous breakdown.”46 The president was scheduled to return to the White House the following day, but he scrapped this plan too.

  Carter officials told a Washington Star reporter that the administration was in “total disarray” and “chaos.” “No one knows what the President is up to,” one exasperated aide said.47 Pat Caddell was called for a one-day meeting with Carter at Camp David, but it stretched into six days. All told, Carter remained at the secluded retreat for eleven days, summoning some 150 different people for meetings, including Democratic governors, a couple of GOP governors, Vice President Mondale, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, AFL-CIO leader Lane Kirkland, and Washington access-seller Clark Clifford. Most days, Carter was dressed casually—tennis shoes, no tie, slacks. Sometimes he would gather with his guests and sit on the floor, cross-legged. It was a group encounter session before the phrase came into common usage; Carter's aides called it a “Domestic Summit,” trying to put the best face on things.48

  At long last, Carter was ready to make a major television address. The July 15 speech was ostensibly to be about energy, but the real goal was the resurrection of the Carter presidency. The Georgian wanted to get back to the spirit of the 1976 campaign, when he had told the American people that they were good and that decency would cure all. In 1979, in the face of joblessness, long gas lines, high inflation, high interest rates, and high thermostats, Americans were scared and ornery. They wanted action.

  The ironic truth is that Jimmy Carter never actually uttered the word “malaise” in his now notorious speech, but Caddell did in a memo to the president, and the word so perfectly fit Carter's tone and message that he was saddled with it anyway. It would bedevil him for the rest of his presidency—and his life. If the word “malaise” sounds suspiciously French, that is because it is. Dictionary.com has eight definitions for it, including “weakness,” “discomfort,” “mental uneasiness,” and “lethargy.”49

  The president began the speech with a bit of a mea culpa, telling viewers that he had lost focus and admitting that he had become more worried about the “isolated world” of Washington than the larger welfare of the American people. Carter attempted to plumb the depths of the American psyche, dangerous ground for a president with a 25 percent approval rating. “It's clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper—deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession,” he said. Carter told the American people they were suffering from “a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”50

  No president had ever talked to the American people like this before: heavy, bordering on apocalyptic. David Broder of the Washington Post wrote the next day, “It will surely go down in history as one of the most extraordinary addresses a chief executive has ever given.”51 This was “Deacon Jimmy,” the brooding, judgmental Baptist at his very worst.

  In midstream of his speech, Carter changed abruptly and outlined a six-point program for energy independence and sacrifice. He promised action and new presidential initiatives; at no time did he prescribe free-market solutions to what ailed America, only more governmental measures. Carter closed the address by praising American resilience and resolve, and feebly urging his fellow Americans to “say something good about our country.”52

  Newspaper commentary the next day was for the most part guardedly supportive, and Carter's poll numbers actually went up. But some around the White House, including Vice President Mondale, thought the speech was a noble but wrongheaded effort. Mondale recalled warning Carter that “for an administration that got elected to be as good as the people, it's a bad idea now to say we need people as good as the go
vernment. And I said these are real problems out there, there's inflation, there's gas lines and that sort of thing, we ought to be working on that and not trying to psychoanalyze the emotional condition of the American people.”53 The vice president thought the speech would make Carter look like “an old scold and a grouch.”54 Mondale seriously contemplated resigning his office if Carter gave the address. He was that opposed to it.55

  Reagan immediately denounced the speech, saying, “There really isn't any crisis in the country. There's just a crisis in the White House.”56 Armed with a scalpel, he added, “People who talk about an age of limits are really talking about their own limitations, not America's.”57

  By the summer of 1979, the president and the former California governor had virtually nothing in common. Reagan was an optimist and Carter a pessimist. Carter wanted to apologize to everybody and Reagan believed everybody should thank America. Reagan believed in the future while Carter feared the future. Reagan believed in conservatism while Carter believed in collectivism. Carter had come to Washington as a skeptic of government, but once he became president, his view on government changed dramatically. Reagan had started out as a New Deal Democrat who believed fervently in government, but had evolved over the years into a self-described “libertarian-conservative” who was deeply distrustful of centralized authority.