Reagan: The Life (36 page)

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polls showed the typical tightening of the race. By some tallies Carter pulled even with Reagan. But the polls were misleading, for Reagan retained his advantage in the states that would give him the electoral votes he required.

The two sides jockeyed for position regarding debates.
John Anderson had bolted the Republican Party to run an independent campaign; potential voters unsatisfied with Carter but unattracted by Reagan gave Anderson just enough support to make his campaign viable. Carter’s managers didn’t want a three-way debate, for they believed that Anderson would siphon more votes from Carter than from Reagan. Reagan was canny enough to realize that his boffo performance in the Nashua debate couldn’t be repeated; he consented to debate Anderson without Carter. Anderson was more articulate than Reagan, but Reagan didn’t embarrass himself. And the experience afforded him sufficient confidence to accept Carter’s one-on-one terms.

The Reagan-Carter debate occurred the week before the election.
Carter, as expected, showed himself to be a master of detail but deficient in personal appeal. Reagan was just the opposite. And where Carter had to defend the past, Reagan could promise the future. Carter had prepared for the debate by immersing himself in the issues, Reagan by considering one-liners and bons mots he might drop on his opponent. Reagan received an unexpected boost by the mysterious acquisition of a Carter briefing book. James Baker had been brought into the Reagan campaign along with Bush; the Californians around Reagan realized they needed the experience Baker commanded. “
I was the only Republican who had run a presidential campaign and not gone to jail,” Baker commented later, referring to the
Watergate woes of the Nixon team. Baker’s chief task was preparing Reagan for the debates; he later said he got the briefing book from
William Casey, who had taken over as Reagan’s campaign manager when
John Sears alienated the rest of the team and was fired. Casey said he had no recollection of the book. “Casey was not telling the truth,” Baker asserted in the aftermath. Baker nonetheless resisted taking a polygraph test to resolve the matter, as the media helpfully suggested. Casey had become director of the CIA and had a reputation for skulduggery. “I was scared,” Baker admitted. “He could game the lie detector and I couldn’t.” No one was strapped to a machine, and neither party ever proved the other wrong, not least because the briefing book was not very important. Mostly news clippings, it revealed nothing crucial of Carter’s strategy. “It wasn’t worth the paper it was written on,” Baker said.

Reagan had a more important advantage in the debate. “
All you have to do is hold your own in these things, because nobody wins or loses these debates on points,”
Lyn Nofziger explained later. “They do it on perception. Since the press always thinks that Reagan is dumber than the other guy, just by holding his own, Reagan wins.”

Reagan held his own on points, and he won on perception. The highlight of the evening came as Carter was chiding Reagan for being against national health insurance, as he had been against such worthy programs as
Social Security and
Medicare. One camera focused on Carter; another showed Reagan readying his reply. When Reagan’s turn came, he smiled indulgently at the president and said, “
There you go again.” The remark didn’t rebut Carter logically, but the audience in the Cleveland music hall laughed, and millions in the television audience concluded that Reagan was a much more appealing fellow than the humorless Carter.

Reagan rode the approval into his closing remarks. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” he asked. “Is it easier for you to go and
buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago?” The questions needed only to be asked for the answers to be plain. The appropriate response for voters was equally plain.

O
NE THING ALONE
worried Reagan’s team as the election approached. William Casey and others feared that Carter would spring an “October surprise” by arranging the release of the Iran hostages. Casey established what the campaign’s chief of staff,
Edwin Meese, later called the “
October surprise watch” to keep a lookout for signs of a breakthrough in the administration’s negotiations with Tehran.
Richard Allen, who headed the group, explained, “Our business was to react to what happened as the result of a resolution, a successful resolution of the hostage crisis.”

The watch team spared no effort in imagining possible scenarios for a release and devising appropriate responses. On October 19 the team produced a confidential memo for Ed Meese declaring, “
The Iranians know that the race is very close and that Carter will be susceptible to pressure in the next two weeks”—until the election. On the assumption that Carter might yield to the pressure, the team advised that Reagan be ready. “It is recommended that beginning now, up to the time the hostages are released, Governor Reagan’s posture be to emphasize the following: 1) note that there are increasing signs that the hostages’ release may be imminent. Greet this news cautiously, but favorably. Ronald Reagan should express his hopes and prayers that the hostages will be coming home soon, even if it is the day before the election. 2) Insist, though, that the U.S. not complete any deals or trades until all our people are home, and the conditions are made public. Add that we must be mindful of the long-range consequences of any arrangement we make.” Such a posture would have two positive effects for the Reagan side. “1) If the hostages are actually released, it does not come as such a surprise. By generating the
expectation that this will occur, we could dull somewhat the outpouring of enthusiasm to be expected from the hostages’ return. 2) If the hostages are not released before the election, Carter faces a heightened credibility problem because of the greater expectation of their release.”

But the negotiations stalled, and as the election drew nearer, the Reagan team breathed more easily. Bill Casey urged the candidate to keep quiet about the hostages. Speaking of Carter, Casey wrote to Reagan and Meese two days before the election, “
I believe he will be widely perceived as having engaged in a desperate last attempt to manipulate the hostages again for political benefit and to have once more bungled it. If this analysis is correct, we should say very little and leave it that way.” Upon the rest of the campaign staff, Casey imposed a gag order. “
Precautions must be taken to make sure nothing is attributed to our campaign organization that could in any way be said to jeopardize the possibility of securing the release of the hostages,” he wrote. “That means that nobody, except those who are specifically authorized, express opinions to the media from now until Election Day.”

Casey might have had particular reason for his sensitivity to allegations that the campaign was trying to delay the release of the hostages. He soon acquired a reputation for letting little stand in the way of accomplishing ends he deemed worthy and for taking an activist, no-holds-barred approach to covert operations. With others on the Reagan side, Casey considered Carter a disaster as president. It would not have been out of character for him to seek to stall the release of the hostages until after the election so that Carter would be retired to Georgia.

This was precisely what certain Carter supporters later alleged, most pointedly after the
Iran-contra scandal revealed that the modus operandi of Reagan’s administration included methods that couldn’t stand public scrutiny. The strongest indictment came from
Gary Sick, a member of Carter’s National Security Council staff who was closely involved in the hostage negotiations. In a
1991 book Sick asserted that Casey had met with persons with ties to the Iranian government and offered arms aid if the hostages were held until after the election.

The assertion was explosive, suggesting violations of the
Logan Act, the eighteenth-century law that forbids private citizens to engage in diplomacy, as well as the prolonging of the misery and jeopardy of the American hostages. Several of the hostages demanded a congressional investigation, and though most Republicans denounced the charges as baseless and politically driven, the Senate and the House conducted inquiries.

The Senate went first. Its investigation was hampered by the inability of the appointed special counsel to question Casey, who had died by then, or Reagan, who in retirement declined to testify. It was also hindered by the counsel’s limited subpoena power and the reluctance of Senate Republicans and the presidential administration of George Bush to cooperate.

Even so, the investigation uncovered evidence, albeit circumstantial, that lent plausibility to the allegations. The counsel sought records from Casey’s widow and daughter that appeared likely to bear on the subject. The two women produced some documents, but others that appeared to be critical were missing, including a file labeled “Hostages,” a schedule book for 1980, and some loose-leaf calendar pages for the period when Casey’s alleged meeting, in Madrid, with the Iranian middlemen was said to have occurred. Casey’s passport, which should have recorded his travels, was also missing. Eventually, the schedule book surfaced along with some of the loose-leaf pages, but other pages remained unaccounted for.

The investigation’s authority and money ran out with many questions still unanswered. Yet the investigators concluded that the existing evidence did not support the allegation that the Reagan campaign had struck a deal with the Iranian government to delay the release of the hostages. In fact, the existing evidence pointed in the opposite direction. “
The great weight of the evidence is that there was no such deal,” the report of the Senate committee declared. The report labeled as “wholly unreliable” the testimony of the principal witnesses to the bargain. “Their claims regarding alleged secret meetings are riddled with inconsistencies, and have been contradicted by irrefutable documentary evidence as well as by the testimony of vastly more credible witnesses.”

But the report didn’t let Casey off the hook. “The totality of the evidence does suggest that Casey was ‘fishing in troubled waters’ ”—the report here quoted a witness—“and that he conducted informal, clandestine, and potentially dangerous efforts on behalf of the Reagan campaign to gather intelligence on the volatile and unpredictable course of the hostage negotiations between the Carter Administration and Iran.” The report also chided Casey’s heirs, saying that their refusal to cooperate with the investigation suggested “a willful effort to prevent Special Counsel from getting timely access to the materials.”

A House task force examining what had come to be called the “
October Surprise” question—despite the absence of such a surprise—drew the same general conclusion the Senate panel did. Chairman
Lee Hamilton,
a Democrat of Indiana, reiterated the gravity of the allegations against Casey and the Reagan campaign: “
If true, these extraordinarily serious claims would have cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Reagan Presidency.” He added, “If false, it would have been unfair to allow this cloud to linger over the reputations of those accused of being involved.” Hamilton reported that the task force he headed had concluded that the claims were not true. “There was virtually no credible evidence to support the accusation. Specifically, we found little or no credible evidence of communications between the 1980 Reagan campaign and the Government of Iran and no credible evidence that the campaign tried to delay the hostages’ release.” Hamilton acknowledged that some important evidence remained missing. “The task force did not locate Mr. Casey’s 1980 passport, and one of the three Casey 1980 calendars the task force did obtain—a looseleaf version—was missing a few crucial pages.” But the lacuna was not fatal to the investigation. “The absence of these materials did not prevent us from determining the whereabouts of Mr. Casey and others on dates when meetings were claimed to have occurred.” Hamilton declared the case closed: “The overwhelming weight of the evidence should put the controversy to rest after all.”

The controversy did rest for a time, but it didn’t die. New evidence sporadically rekindled interest. In 1996 author
Douglas Brinkley, at work on a book about Jimmy Carter as former president, told a conference of diplomatic historians about a comment made to Carter by
Yasser Arafat earlier that year. Carter had traveled to
Gaza City to meet with Arafat; Brinkley tagged along. “
Mr. President, there is something I want to tell you,” Arafat said, according to Brinkley. “You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the election.” Arafat looked for a reaction from Carter, but Carter merely listened. “I want you to know that I turned them down,” Arafat said. Brinkley, speaking in his own voice to the historians’ group, added, “Arafat kept detailed records, which should soon be made public.”

The records Brinkley referred to never became public. Nor did Carter display interest in seeing them. Asked later about Arafat’s statement,
Brinkley said Carter seemed not to want to hear more. Brinkley attributed the lack of interest to Carter’s desire to focus on Middle East peace in 1996 and not on what had happened in 1980.

Other records, however, did become public. In 2011 the presidential library of George (H. W.) Bush, responding to Freedom of Information
Act requests, released documents relating to the earlier Senate and House investigations of the October Surprise affair. The documents reflected a debate within the Bush administration as to how fully it should cooperate with the investigations. The Bush team worried that the mere raising of the October Surprise issue would damage Bush’s 1992 reelection chances, in that some of the allegations asserted a Bush role in contacts with the Iranians, in particular at a meeting in Paris in October 1980. The administration preferred that the investigations be kept small and short. But it couldn’t stonewall entirely. Bush indignantly denied the allegations that touched him. “
I can categorically assure you that I never was in Paris as claimed by the rumormongers,” he wrote to one of the former hostages. “I can also categorically assure you that I have no information direct or indirect of any contact with Iranians relating to this hostage question.” He said the same thing to reporters. And the administration turned over to the investigators materials corroborating Bush’s denial.