Reagan: The Life (35 page)

Reagan initially underestimated Bush. The Texas transplant pitched a tent in Iowa ahead of that state’s quirky caucuses and shook hands and kissed babies all around the state. Reagan’s people discounted Iowa, believing the race wouldn’t start until the
New Hampshire primary. In previous seasons they might have been right, but Iowa got more attention than usual because Edward Kennedy, senator from Massachusetts, was challenging Carter for the Democratic nomination. Reporters in Iowa for the Democratic fireworks couldn’t avoid covering the Republican contest as well. And in that contest Bush beat Reagan by a small margin but one large enough to knock the crown off the head of the nominee apparent. “
It was a big surprise,”
James Baker admitted afterward. Baker, having opposed Reagan on Gerald Ford’s behalf in 1976, now opposed him on behalf of Bush, a personal friend from Houston. He ran the Bush campaign. “It gave us a lot of momentum,” he said.

The upset and shift of momentum surprised Reagan as much as anyone else, and it prompted him to campaign harder than before. The vigor of his campaigning, in the New England winter, went far toward allaying concerns about his age. He joined several other candidates for a debate in Manchester the week before the primary, and although he didn’t particularly distinguish himself, neither did Bush, who thereby lost some of that “Big Mo,” as he called the trend in his direction.

A second debate was the event that stuck in the minds of those following the campaign. The Bush camp wanted a one-on-one with Reagan, the better to gather the moderate stop-Reagan vote. Reagan’s side was split. Some of his advisers thought a head-to-head would allow Reagan to finish Bush off with a single blow. Others preferred a Reagan-against-the-rest, which would diminish Bush by lumping him with the rest. The two campaigns eventually agreed to a one-on-one. But then they began arguing about who would pay for the debate. The Bush team shortsightedly balked, and when Reagan’s handlers agreed to pick up the tab, they realized it gave them control over crucial details and terms of the event.

Reagan himself wasn’t privy to the haggling, but his instinct was to
include the other candidates, who were complaining at their exclusion. Word went out to them to show up at the gymnasium in Nashua where the debate was to be held. They arrived at the appointed hour and engaged Reagan in discussion while Bush’s managers complained to moderator
Jon Breen of the
Nashua Telegraph
that their man had been deceived. Breen agreed and refused to let the four extras—
Howard Baker,
John Anderson,
Bob Dole of Kansas, and
Phil Crane of Illinois—participate. Bush walked onto the stage and took his chair. Reagan did the same, but he was followed by the extras, who, lacking chairs, stood on the stage behind Breen.

Bush didn’t know what to do, so he stared straight ahead and said nothing. Reagan argued that the four ought to be allowed to speak. Breen, guided by what he thought were the ground rules, rejected Reagan’s request. When Reagan, encouraged by the capacity crowd of two thousand, continued to argue for the broader inclusion, Breen directed the sound technician to turn off Reagan’s microphone.

Reagan had always been able to play some emotions better than others. One of his best was righteous indignation, which he exhibited now. “
I’m paying for this microphone!” he declared. The other candidates should have their turn at it.

Breen refused and the room dissolved in chaos. Many shouted for Reagan, very few for Bush. The excluded four mugged for the crowd, pointing favorably at Reagan and dismissively at Bush. They ultimately left the stage, and the one-on-one debate proceeded. But it was anticlimactic and got little coverage in the next day’s news, which was all about how Reagan had taken charge and shown his personal ascendancy over Bush. As Bush press aide
Pete Teeley told his candidate afterward, “
The bad news is that the media are playing up the confrontation. The good news is that they’re ignoring the debate, and you lost that, too.”

T
HE RESULTS OF
the
New Hampshire primary corroborated the media judgment of Reagan’s ascendancy. He swamped Bush by more than two to one, with the other candidates even further behind. Bush never recovered, though he kept fighting. Reagan rolled through the subsequent primaries until his nomination became irresistible. The minor candidates dropped out, leaving only Bush, who continued to rebuff the counsel of party elders to concede and fall in behind Reagan. “
Bush is very competitive,”
James Baker observed later, by way of explanation. “He didn’t want to drop out.” Bush himself credited his deceased father, the former senator
Prescott Bush. “
Every time I weighed my options, I could hear my dad’s voice saying, ‘You have to see this through,’ ” Bush remembered. “He taught all of his children not to be quitters. Maybe that advice did not necessarily apply to campaigns, but I couldn’t help but think it did, and I should not quit.”

Yet reality eventually set in, and Bush too acknowledged defeat. His doggedness, however, had won him respect among Republican voters who thought that though Reagan was the party’s first choice, Bush might not be a bad number two.

Reagan reached the same conclusion more slowly. He didn’t like Bush at this point, and he thought Bush had weakened the party by prolonging the primary season. He flirted with Gerald Ford after a Palm Springs visit that was intended to demonstrate party unity turned into a lovefest. The two agreed that Carter must be defeated at all costs. Reagan apparently broached the idea of a Reagan-Ford ticket. Ford waved the gesture aside but didn’t forget it.

The Republican convention, held in Detroit, was a coronation. The
only issue that provided any drama was Reagan’s choice of a running mate. Reporters got wind of what Reagan had said to Ford, who remembered he liked the limelight. Erstwhile members of the Ford administration perked up. “
All the old Ford guys wanted to make it happen,”
James Baker recollected. “They wanted their old jobs back.” Ford was invited to open the convention, and he did so in a speech that startled observers with its energy and its promise that Jerry Ford was ready to take the field again.

Reagan again offered Ford the vice presidential slot. Ford again declined, but less decisively than before. Reagan grew optimistic about what reporters were calling the “dream ticket.” Several of his advisers, however, thought it was a terrible idea. How would a former president adjust to being the nonentity vice presidents were supposed to be? What if he resisted?

Ford suggested he might resist. He told
Walter Cronkite of
CBS News he would not be a mere “
figurehead” as vice president. “I have to go there with the belief that I will play a meaningful role across the board in the basic and the crucial and the important decisions that have to be made in a four-year period,” Ford said.

Reagan and
Michael Deaver watched the Ford interview together. “
As I had done so many times in the years (now fourteen of them) that had brought us there,” Deaver recalled, “I studied the face of the man next to me.” Ford’s remarks snapped Reagan out of his fantasy about a dream ticket. “He was stunned. His eyes sparked. He said, ‘This has gone too far.’ ” Reagan knew he couldn’t give away some of the responsibilities of the presidency without running afoul of the Constitution; more to the point, after all the effort he had expended getting this far, he wasn’t about to share the presidency. The great stage of American politics was going to be his alone.

He realized the Ford interview might be interpreted as indicating that Ford had the number-two slot wrapped up. He didn’t want to embarrass Ford, but in a hastily arranged private meeting he made clear that he couldn’t agree to Ford’s terms. Ford understood, and the almost-agreement was off.

Reagan turned at once to Bush. He had to hurry lest the media dwell on the deal that fell through. He called Bush and asked him two questions, one broad and the other specific. “
Can you support my policy positions?” Bush said he could. “Can you support my position on
abortion?” Reagan had come to regret his role in liberalizing California’s abortion law, and he now took a conservative, restrictive line. He wanted to be sure
Bush did too. Bush again said yes. Reagan thereupon offered Bush the vice presidential nomination. Bush accepted.

Reagan went to the convention hall. Nearly all the delegates expected him to announce that he had chosen Ford, and so they were flummoxed when he explained that this was not the case. “
He and I have come to the conclusion, and he believes deeply, that he can be of more value as the former president campaigning his heart out, as he has promised to do, and not as a member of the ticket,” Reagan said. Before the delegates could react, Reagan went on to say that instead of Ford he had chosen “a man we all know and a man who was a candidate, a man who has great experience in government, and a man who has told me that he can enthusiastically support the platform across the board.” By the end of this description he hardly needed to add the name: George Bush.

The vice presidential candidate took the stage. “If anyone wants to know why Ronald Reagan is a winner,” Bush said, “you can refer him to me. I’m an expert on the subject. He’s a winner because he’s our leader, because he has traveled the country and understands its people. His message is clear. His message is understood.”

The next night Reagan reiterated that message. He hammered Carter and the Democrats for failing the people of America domestically and in foreign affairs. “
The major issue of this campaign is the direct political, personal and moral responsibility of Democratic Party leadership—in the White House and in Congress—for this unprecedented calamity which has befallen us,” Reagan said. “They tell us they have done the most that humanly could be done. They say that the United States has had its day in the sun; that our nation has passed its zenith. They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems; that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities. My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view. The American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves.” Those who believed this lie should have no role in governing the nation. “I will not stand by and watch this great country destroy itself under mediocre leadership that drifts from one crisis to the next, eroding our national will and purpose.”

Reagan painted an alternative vision. “I ask you to trust that American spirit which knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional or economic boundaries; the spirit that burned with zeal in the hearts of millions of immigrants from every corner of the earth who came here in
search of freedom. Some say that spirit no longer exists. But I have seen it—I have felt it—all across the land; in the big cities, the small towns and in rural America. The American spirit is still there, ready to blaze into life if you and I are willing to do what has to be done.” He pointed to the Pilgrims as examples of the American spirit. He cited the founding fathers and
Abraham Lincoln. And he again drew on Franklin Roosevelt. “I believe that this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny,” he said. “The time is now, my fellow Americans, to recapture our destiny, to take it into our hands.”

He concluded with a carefully considered ad-lib. “I have thought of something that is not part of my speech and I’m worried over whether I should do it,” he said, gazing out over his audience. But he went ahead and brought God into the conversation. “Can we doubt that only a divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe freely:
Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain, the
boat people of Southeast Asia, of
Cuba and Haiti, the victims of drought and famine in
Africa, the freedom fighters of Afghanistan and our own countrymen held in savage captivity.” He paused and again looked out across the convention hall. “I’ll confess that I’ve been a little afraid to suggest what I’m going to suggest—I’m more afraid not to—that we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer.” The hall fell duly silent. Then Reagan dismissed them with the sign-off that would become his trademark: “God bless America.”

R
EAGAN REMEMBERED THAT
Franklin Roosevelt had won the presidency in 1932 chiefly because he wasn’t Herbert Hoover. He guessed that he himself would similarly benefit from not being Jimmy Carter. By mid-1980, Carter’s position had become politically unsustainable. The
misery index of unemployment plus
inflation topped 21 percent in May and June and remained above 20 percent through the election. Considering that this was nearly as high as it had been in 1932 (when unemployment was higher than
in 1980 but inflation was inconsequential—in fact, negative), Carter was doomed on economic grounds alone. The international situation merely made things worse. Soviet troops and aircraft brutalized Afghanistan, reinforcing the Republican message of Carter’s early naïveté about the communists. The American hostages still languished in Tehran. Carter had authorized a rescue attempt during the spring, but the opera
tion went badly awry, killing several U.S. servicemen and marking Carter as more inept than ever.

Yet Reagan wasn’t good at playing to protect a lead. He overthought things and lost his spontaneity. And precisely because he was ahead, his slips received more scrutiny than they would have in an underdog. Addressing a convention of the
Veterans of Foreign Wars, he described the American effort in Vietnam as a “
noble cause.” The veterans applauded, but Reagan’s managers grimaced. They didn’t disagree with the sentiment, but the comment led to a debate over the
Vietnam War that distracted the media from Reagan’s central message: that the economy was in shambles and that fixing it required a change in the White House. On another day some ill-considered words by Reagan appeared to link Carter to the
Ku Klux Klan. Carter’s side naturally protested, and Reagan was forced to apologize. At a convention of
Christian evangelicals, Reagan was asked for his views on
creationism, as opposed to
evolution. He knew what the audience wanted to hear, and he said creationism should be taught in the schools. Again his handlers shuddered, although one put the incident in context. “
The only good news for us at this time was that we were making so many blunders that reporters had to pick and choose which ones they would write about,” this staffer said afterward. “ ‘Creationism’ made Reagan look like an idiot, but he got away with it.”