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

Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America

C
RAIG
S
HIRLEY

W
ILMINGTON
, D
ELAWARE

Copyright © 2009 Craig Shirley

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Shirley, Craig.

Rendezvous with destiny : Ronald Reagan and the campaign that changed America / Craig Shirley.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-933859-55-2 (cloth bound : alk. paper)

              1. Presidents—United States—Election—1980. 2. Reagan, Ronald. 3. United States—Politics and government—1977–1981. 4. Political campaigns—United States. I. Title.

E875.S46 2009

973.927092—dc22                                                                                      2009029922

ISI Books
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Wilmington, DE 19807-1938
www.isibooks.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

Most men are lucky to have one good woman in their lives.

I have been fortunate to have had several. To my mother, Barbara Shirley Eckert, who taught me about life and love; my friend Diana Banister, who taught me about loyalty; my sister, Rebecca Sirhal, who taught me about God's gift of forgiveness; and my daughter, Taylor, who taught me about miracles.

And to the most important men in my life, my dear departed father, Edward Bruce; and my sons, Matthew McGiveron, Andrew Abbott, and Mitchell Boman Reagan Shirley.

But most especially for my wife and best friend, Zorine, who taught me about what is really important in this world.

It is to her that this book, as with everything, is dedicated.

by George F. Will

L
ooking back, as Americans are notoriously disinclined to do, it all seems so inevitable. But it did not seem so—it did not
feel
so—at the time. And in fact it was not so.

Looking only at the electoral-vote outcome—489–49—the victory of Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election seems like a walk in the park, a play without drama. But looked at from the inside of the campaign, as Craig Shirley did at the time and now recollects in this exhilarating history, the drama was almost too abundant.

If we consider only the nation's retrospective affection for Ronald Reagan, and his extraordinary achievements in office—a demoralized nation revitalized, the Cold War concluded victoriously and peacefully—it is easy to assume that his victory over an incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, whose failures were manifold and manifest, was a foregone conclusion. It is easy, but wrong. Shirley demonstrates just how wrong in this worthy successor to his masterful chronicle of Reagan's unavailing quest for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination,
Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All
.

That volume and this one are antidotes to the intellectual error known as “presentism”—the fallacy of depicting, explaining, or interpreting the past from the perspective of current-day knowledge and understandings. Shirley rescues Reagan's victorious campaign from lazy presentism.

Reagan's rise to the White House began from the ashes of the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City. Truth be told, it began from the podium of that convention, with Reagan's gracious—but fighting—concession speech. No one
who knew the man and listened to him carefully could have mistaken that speech for a valedictory statement by someone taking his leave from national politics.

The path from that nadir to the triumph four years later was a rocky, uphill climb. It was achieved by a politician whose cheerfulness and amiability concealed a toughness and longheadedness that few have analyzed as meticulously as Shirley does here. As was the case with Winston Churchill, another politician spurned by his party and consigned to “wilderness years,” the iron entered Reagan's soul after adversity. In a sense, therefore, his loss in 1976 was doubly fortunate: The Carter presidency made the country hungry for strong leadership, and the Reagan of 1980 was stronger and more ready to lead than was the Reagan of 1976.

This book is both a primer on practical politics and a meditation on the practicality of idealism. It arrives, serendipitously, at a moment when conservatives are much in need of an inspiriting examination of their finest hour.

Here it is.

“
I believe this generation of Americans today also has a rendezvous with destiny.
”

July 17, 1980

R
onald Reagan stood before the multitude of cheering Republicans in Detroit's Joe Louis Arena, at long last master of all he surveyed.

Millions of his fellow Americans watched on television. Most had little choice, as the three networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—dominated the airwaves and promised gavel-to-gavel coverage. Cable was in its infancy. The upstart Cable News Network, only five weeks old, also was covering the Republican convention, but with its tiny audience and seemingly quixotic mission of providing twenty-four-hour news coverage, most political pros regarded CNN as Ted Turner's folly.

A tiny, hidden fan blew lightly on Reagan's face at the podium to keep him from sweltering. Several strands of his forelock wafted gently in the stirring air. Reagan, sixty-nine, was dressed handsomely and impeccably in a dark suit, every crease sharp. With his aging but still handsome movie star profile and aw-shucks grin, he appeared to be an oasis of cool in the oppressive summer heat.

Everybody on the floor, however, was sweating heavily. Convention planners failed to appreciate that the thousands of gesticulating, dancing, partying, delirious Republicans packed into the arena—far more than official capacity of twenty thousand allowed—would raise the temperature and overwhelm the air-conditioning system unless the facility was precooled for hours ahead of time. A heat wave had ravaged the nation for three weeks; Detroit's daytime temperature had topped out at 97 degrees on the second day of the convention. Nobody on the floor seemed to mind the sticky conditions, though.

Fortunately, fashion had changed dramatically since the last time Republicans had gathered to nominate a president. Sensible summer suits for men in 1980 were made of breathable, lightweight cotton, wool, and poplin, more loosely tailored and with narrower lapels. They had replaced stifling, tightly woven polyester suits, with garish colors and wide lapels that made every man look like a John Travolta wannabe. Women, too, had gone from the suffocating and unflattering synthetic pant suits of 1976 to cooler, more comfortable natural-fiber dresses and skirts. Long hair had also gone out of style, for both men and women.

Times they were a changin' in both style and substance.

Conservatism in 1980 no longer meant a calcified status quo—it represented
change
. For the first time since Reagan's boyhood hero Franklin Roosevelt transformed the political landscape, conservatism posed a serious challenge to the reigning liberal orthodoxy. The conservative “movement,” of which Reagan was the avatar, was changing the way Americans viewed their government and their world. Conservatism was leading the sprint away from the 1970s, one of the most dispiriting decades in the history of the American Republic. Reagan, the maverick populist, had wrought a fusion between the “Social Right” and the “Sociable Right,” and the moderates in the party would have to get comfortable riding shotgun in the new GOP.