Reagan: The Life (32 page)

At this moment Reagan entered the room. “He thought that I was going to go along with her,” Nofziger remembered. “And he said, ‘Lynwood’—which is not my name, but it’s what he calls me—he says, ‘I am not going to get out of this race. I am going to stay in this through Texas. I am going to stay in it all the way.’ ”

Nofziger finished the story, which he considered characteristic of Reagan and his relationship with Nancy. “She accepted that okay. People who thought that Nancy ran Reagan—no. She ran Reagan when he didn’t care. When he cared, she didn’t. I mean, I’ve been there on a number of occasions where she wanted her way, and he got his way.”

So Reagan stayed in the race, reiterating that he would fight through to the convention. Yet brave words were no substitute for hard dollars, and as his chances of victory grew slimmer, so did his campaign coffers. The primary contest moved across the South, with Reagan desperate for funds to continue the campaign. Then a supporter in
North Carolina, recalling the effect of Reagan’s 1964 televised speech for Goldwater, suggested airing something similar on stations in the Tar Heel State. Nofziger found a half-hour clip of a speech Reagan had given in Florida, and, slightly edited, it went out to North Carolina viewers.

The effect was less dramatic than that of the 1964 national speech,
but it showcased Reagan for southern voters. The message had hardly changed in a dozen years, yet it was what southern conservatives wanted to hear.

They liked something else Reagan said. So far in the campaign he had trod lightly in the realm of foreign policy, in part because attacking the commander in chief on matters of national security carried the greatest risk of a political backlash, and in part because he could claim no expertise or experience on the subject. But
Jesse Helms, a conservative Republican who represented North Carolina in the Senate, had been railing against
détente and other aspects of the Nixon-Kissinger-Ford foreign policy, and he was getting a good response. Reagan decided to chime in.

He criticized arms control as controlling only American arms; the Soviets continued their buildup, he said. Before long the United States would find itself vulnerable to Russian blackmail, if not wholesale annihilation. He blamed Ford and Kissinger for ignoring the activities of Soviet proxies and communist agents in
Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. And in a line he borrowed from Helms, he accused the Ford administration of trying to give away the
Panama Canal.

This last count of the indictment was puzzling. Negotiations over the future of the Panama Canal had been under way since the 1960s. They had never sparked much interest among Americans, and North Carolinians had even less stake in the canal than residents of several other states.

But for some reason they responded. Reagan’s recycled television speech and his dark warning about a canal giveaway, combined with the conservative disposition of most North Carolina Republicans, resulted in a stunning victory in the North Carolina primary. Reagan beat Ford by 52 percent to 46. North Carolina’s Republican rules specified proportional division of the delegates, so the effect on the delegate count was modest, with Reagan winning 28 delegates to Ford’s 26. But North Carolina allowed Reagan to fight on. The pressure to abandon the race didn’t end; if anything, the jolt prompted the Ford side to intensify its efforts to cast Reagan as a wrecker. Yet Reagan could now dismiss the efforts as evidence that his message was boring home. And the money flowed in, not in gushers, but in a steady stream.

He scored victories elsewhere in the South during May. He captured Indiana and Nebraska and predictably thrashed Ford in
California in early June.

Ford countered with victories in the industrial Midwest and the Northeast. And the president’s team enlisted the services of
James Baker,
a Houston lawyer with an uncanny ability to work the political system in his candidate’s favor. Baker hunted down delegates in states with conventions and caucuses, employing the charm of his southern upbringing, the guile of his years in law, and the leverage of the White House.

By the time the primaries, conventions, and caucuses had been completed, Ford held a modest lead in delegates over Reagan. The numbers were imprecise, given the diversity of rules determining whom the delegates were bound to, if bound at all. Each side publicly interpreted the imprecision in its favor. Each spoke of covert supporters who would surface at the decisive moment of the convention. But impartial estimates gave Ford around 1,090 delegates and Reagan about 1,030. Ford needed roughly 40 delegates to claim the convention’s majority; Reagan some 100. In the scrapping for those last delegates, the president’s institutional heft would surely work in his favor.

Reagan resorted to novelty. At the instigation of
John Sears he announced his running mate ahead of the vote on the presidential nomination.
Richard Schweiker was a moderate Republican senator from Pennsylvania. “
What Sears thought was that if he picked Schweiker, we could peel off the Pennsylvania delegation, and that would help us get some of these other delegations,”
Lyn Nofziger recalled.

The announcement intrigued the media but backfired among the delegates. “
The Southern Reagan thing just fell apart overnight because of Schweiker,”
Michael Deaver remembered. “We go down to Mississippi and we start meeting with all of the delegations, and it was just a total disaster. The whole point of picking Dick Schweiker was to cut into the Northeast, and to see if we could get Pennsylvania. Then maybe we could get a little bit of New Jersey, New York, and then it would all start to unravel for Ford. Of course, Schweiker couldn’t even deliver Pennsylvania. So then we had to go defend our base, which was in the South. We’d had these delegations into this Marriott or Ramada Inn, or wherever it was, in Jackson, Mississippi. The
Alabama delegation, there were four of them, I think. We’re in this room that’s about four times the size of this, with these four little people sitting out there. Schweiker, and Mrs. Claire Schweiker, and Ronald Reagan are up at this head table. They go through this whole thing, and this man from Alabama stands up. He’s got a bow tie on, perfectly dressed. ‘Governor,’ he said, ‘I am not a drinking man. But when I heard that you picked Dick Schweiker to be your running mate, I went home and drank a pitcher of whiskey sours.’ And he said, ‘I
would rather have had my doctor call me at home and tell me that my wife had a venereal disease.’ ”

The Schweiker gambit sealed Reagan’s defeat. The delegates gathered and did the usual convention business until the roll call, when, in the predawn hours of August 19, they gave Ford the nomination by 1,187 votes to Reagan’s 1,070.

Some conservatives refused to yield even in defeat.
Jesse Helms thundered his undying opposition to
détente and to those responsible for it. A Reagan campaign worker from Missouri, buttonholed after the balloting, hoped for Ford’s November defeat. “
The Republican party needs to lose soundly, and that’s the inevitability of the Ford candidacy,” he said.

But the candidates moved quickly to close ranks. Ford gestured toward making Reagan his running mate. Reagan responded diffidently, or perhaps coyly. James Baker, who later worked closely with Reagan, thought a Ford-Reagan ticket would have been appealing to voters and could have happened had either side been a bit more forthcoming. “
You know, Mr. President,” he told Reagan afterward, “if President Ford had asked you to run with him, he would have won.” Baker added, thinking of what happened in the next four years, “And you might never have been president.”

“You’re right,” Reagan responded. “If he had asked, I’d have felt duty-bound to run.”

Baker continued: “President Ford didn’t ask you because we received word from your campaign that you would join him for a unity meeting only on condition that he
wouldn’t
offer you the vice presidency. And besides that, you very publicly shut down the movement by your supporters in Kansas City to draft you for the vice presidential nomination.”

“Look, I really did not want to be vice president, and I said so at the time,” Reagan responded. “But I don’t have any recollection of telling anyone to pass a message to President Ford not to offer me the spot. If he had asked, I would have felt duty-bound to say yes.”

Baker could hardly believe what he was hearing. “I was shocked,” he recalled. “How different history might have been. Given the intensity of their primary battle, Ford really didn’t want Reagan as his running mate, but the president might have asked if he had thought Reagan would accept. And with a Ford-Reagan ticket in 1976, I think two portraits might be missing from the White House walls today—those of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.”

Ford did not ask Reagan to join the ticket, but he did invite him to
join the victory celebration on the convention stage. Their clasped hands conveyed at least the appearance that unity prevailed among the Republicans. Reagan’s supporters demanded a speech from their man; his remarks caused their hearts to flutter anew and some to consider demanding a recount. But he understood that the moment wasn’t his, and he stepped aside before provoking a stampede, but not before receiving an ovation louder and more heartfelt than Ford got.

The next day Reagan bade his supporters thanks and farewell. At least one journalist spotted him dabbing a tear; many observers assumed, given the candidate’s age, that this was his last convention. Reagan’s words revealed little of his plans. “
Sure, there’s disappointment in what happened,” he said. “But the cause, the cause goes on … It’s just one battle in a long war, and it’s going to go on as long as we all live … You just stay in there, and you stay there with the same belief and the same faith to do what you’re doing here. The individuals on the stage may change, but the cause is there. The cause will prevail because it’s right.”

James Baker left the convention with the winner but deeply respectful of the loser. “
He damn near took us down,” he said of Reagan’s challenge to Ford. “It was really close.”

T
HE BLOW OF
defeat was softened for Reagan by the common perception that the Republican nomination wasn’t worth much that season. The Republicans were still answering for
Watergate, which the Democrats milked for every vote. Several prominent Democrats made a run for their party’s nomination, but the best known suffered from the taint of government experience, especially in Washington, the home of the corruption voters extrapolated from Watergate to politicians at large. Jimmy Carter had been governor of Georgia, but he soft-pedaled this part of his résumé in favor of his background as a plainspoken peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia. His persistence and evident candor, which included an interview with
Playboy
magazine in which he admitted to lustful feelings about women not his wife, impressed enough primary-season Democrats for him to secure the nomination a month ahead of the July convention. The result was that while Ford and Reagan were still wrestling their way to Kansas City, Carter was catching his breath and building his campaign reserves. Polls gave him a big lead over either Republican.

The campaign for the general election inspired almost no one. Ford was damaged goods following the Nixon pardon and his close call with Reagan; though the race tightened after Labor Day, as presidential campaigns often do, flubs by Ford in debates with Carter recalled the cutting comment by
Lyndon Johnson that Ford had played too many football games without his helmet (at the University of Michigan, where he was the sort of lineman Reagan had aspired to be at
Eureka College).

Reagan did little to help the Republican cause. He gave enough speeches on Ford’s behalf to deflect charges of sulking in his tent, but
his enthusiasm for the moderate president was conspicuous by its absence. Reagan never wholly mastered the partisan mind-set: the psychological frame that puts the interest of the party ahead of that of the country. He could and did say that Ford was preferable to Carter, but he barely believed it. He wasn’t immune to the conservative argument that the best thing for the country would be Ford’s defeat and the final discrediting of Republican moderation. The conservatives could then seize the party and spearhead an American renaissance.

They got the first part of what they wanted. Ford continued to gain ground but finally fell short of Carter by a popular vote of 50 percent to 48. Many in the Ford camp blamed Reagan for weakening the president in the long battle for the nomination. “
We might never have lost to Carter without that challenge,”
James Baker said. The result was a less resounding repudiation of Republican moderation than the most zealous conservatives desired, but at least it meant that the next GOP nomination would be wide open. And nearly all the conservatives assumed that Carter would so mishandle the presidency that voters would be happy to give the Republicans another try.

“O
NCE UPON A
time there was a little red hen who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered some grains of wheat,” Reagan told radio listeners two weeks after the election. He was glad to be back on the air, happy for the opportunity to tell his stories, and appreciative again of the discipline required to distill complicated questions of policy into a few minutes of airtime. In this installment he borrowed from an old fable to make a modern point. His little red hen calls her neighbors and asks who will help her plant the wheat, that they all might have bread. The cow, the duck, the pig, and the goose beg off. So the hen plants the wheat herself. It grows tall and bears ripe grain. She asks who will help harvest the wheat.

“Not I,” says the duck.

“Out of my classification,” says the pig.

“I’d lose my seniority,” says the cow.

“I’d lose my unemployment compensation,” says the goose.

So the hen harvests the wheat herself. In time she asks who will help her bake the bread.

“That would be overtime for me,” says the cow.

“I’d lose my welfare benefits,” says the duck.