Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (10 page)

He was also booed for criticizing the anti-American protests during the Vietnam War. The peaceniks of the '60s and '70s, he said, “wound up being involved in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in a genocide and in the suffering today imposed on 30 million people there.”
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He hit the materialism of America especially hard, condemning the worldview that put “man as the center of everything that exists.”
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The world, according to Solzhenitsyn, was “at a major turning point.”
¹⁰

For pointing out the obvious problems plaguing America and the West, Solzhenitsyn was denounced as “dangerous” and a “zealot” by the
New York Times
.
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But the signs of decay were everywhere. America's cities had become burned-out shells. New York City was now a war zone. A record 1,733 New Yorkers were murdered in 1979. On New Year's Day 1980 alone, twelve people were slain, including a pregnant girl and her teenaged boyfriend, who got into a melee over seating arrangements in a disco.
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Detroit was suffering because it was turning out some of the worst cars imaginable: flimsy, gas-guzzling heaps that often began rusting within months of leaving the showroom. Japan's auto industry, exporting sporty, well-made, fuel-efficient, and economical cars to the United States, had nearly destroyed the domestic auto industry—and with it, Detroit.

The city of Cleveland was in worse shape. Teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, the “Mistake by the Lake” was in awful condition in every way imaginable. Even its sports teams stank, especially baseball's Indians and the Cavaliers of the NBA, who set records—for the most losses and the least fans. One-third of Cleveland's citizens said they wished they lived somewhere else. The city's mayor, a pint-sized thirty-two-year-old named Dennis Kucinich, was in over his head in every way imaginable, and he'd been photographed tottering embarrassingly behind a podium on several large phone books, struggling to reach the microphones.
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The city had become the butt of jokes nationwide. A favorite was about a man who won a contest; first prize was one week in Cleveland, and second place—two weeks in Cleveland.

All in all, America was a crummy place for many Americans in the 1970s. Cultural, economic, political, and foreign Lilliputians had tied down the pitiful giant America.

T
HE GROWING SENSE IN
America by the late spring of 1979 was that Jimmy Carter, though by reputation a nice guy, was not up to the task. One of his own “allies” in the House, Majority Leader Jim Wright of Texas, said bluntly of Carter's presidency, “No one is big enough for the job.” He then coldly added, “So we have to settle for what we've got.”
¹⁴

The U.S. economy continued to founder. When the first-quarter results came in, they showed 0.7 percent growth in the gross national product, which was just ahead of a recession level. Inflation was also on the rise and housing starts plummeted.
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The price of oil had risen from $1.80 a barrel in 1970 to $14.54 per barrel in 1979, an approximate 800 percent increase.
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The international scene was becoming more and more disturbing as well. Iran was the latest concern. Under the shah, a longtime U.S. ally for his anti-Communist and pro-West positions, the situation inside Iran had been deteriorating
for several years. The shah infuriated Iran's powerful radical Muslim clerics, who regarded him as a puppet of American imperialists and oil companies and were outraged by his recognition of Israel and such western-style reforms as granting suffrage to women. By the beginning of 1979 Iran had descended into chaos as basic services vanished and widespread strikes crippled the country. The Soviets exploited the unrest by broadcasting anti-American propaganda into the country, fomenting revolution.

Carter, with his insistence on human rights, turned his back on the shah, seeing the authoritarian ruler as a torturer and tyrant. Without the help of the United States, the shah could do nothing to quell the growing tumult in his country, and in February 1979, he and his family fled the country. Jubilant Iranians danced in the streets of Tehran and pulled down statues to celebrate the shah's toppled regime.

The shah became an international pariah, as no country would allow him permanent residence. Although America's insistence that the shah “Westernize” his country had contributed to his downfall, Carter shabbily opposed allowing the shah to come to the United States; in a letter the president cited the “high probability” of an outbreak of anti-American retaliation in Iran.
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For a time, the U.S. intelligence community hoped that Iran's new leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, might be an ally against the Soviets, but this turned out to be a delusion.

With even prominent Democrats questioning Carter, it became increasingly clear that the president might face a challenge in 1980 from his own party. For a time California governor Jerry Brown, who succeeded Reagan in 1974, had seemed the kind of fresh face who could take on Carter. Brown, the son of former California governor Pat Brown, the man Reagan had defeated in 1966, had entered a few presidential primaries in 1976 and shown astonishing strength, but his late-starting campaign could not catch Carter. After a surprisingly strong reelection for governor in the Republican year of 1978, Brown seemed ready to take on Carter again. But by 1979 voters and journalists had grown tired of his quirks and non sequiturs, his New Age “the Earth is your mother” utterances, and his high-profile relationship with singer Linda Ronstadt, which struck many as just plain weird. Chicago columnist Mike Royko bestowed the moniker “Governor Moonbeam” on Brown, and he never shook it.

A more likely, and prominent, Democratic opponent was Ted Kennedy. Polls showed Kennedy swamping Carter in popularity contests; a survey in New Hampshire, for instance, showed Kennedy beating the president by better than 2–1.
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“Draft Kennedy” organizations were popping up around the country.

In full bravado mode, Carter told a group of Democrats when asked about
a Kennedy challenge, “I'll whip his ass.” Stunned to hear the president use such language, one of those present asked him to beg their pardon, but what did you say, Mr. President? Carter repeated the sentence, word for word.
¹⁹

The president's pollster, Pat Caddell, saw a different picture. In the spring of 1979, his polling showed a precipitous drop in the president's numbers across the board, especially relating to Americans' confidence in the future. Caddell turned to First Lady Rosalynn Carter, the president's best friend and closest confidante. In an extended meeting with the first lady, the pollster laid out Carter's atrocious standing. Mrs. Carter immediately scheduled Caddell for a private breakfast with the president.

At their breakfast, Caddell reviewed the gloomy outlook and began to pass along to Carter books to read, including Christopher Lasch's
The Culture of Narcissism
. Caddell later gave Carter a 107-page memo analyzing the state of disrepair in his administration.
²⁰

I
F RELATIONS WERE FROSTY
between Carter and prominent Democrats, they were downright glacier-like between Ronald Reagan and Phil Crane. After Congressman Crane jumped into the campaign in August 1978, the former Reagan supporter had a few good months, but then he began making one stumbling mistake after another. Much of the problem was the meddling of the candidate's wife, Arlene, who could not bear being the candidate's wife; she wanted to be the candidate, the manager, the chief pollster, and the center of all attention. The
Washington Star
described her as “destructive” and a “cannonball rolling loose on the pitching deck.”
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(Mrs. Crane once told a reporter that raising seven daughters was easy: “You just put birth control pills in their cereal.”) Many talented individuals, such as Paul Weyrich, walked away from the campaign because of her divisive ways.

William Loeb, the curmudgeonly publisher of the
Manchester Union-Leader
and a Reagan man through and through, used his statewide daily paper to denounce the candidate he saw as betraying the Gipper. Loeb published a flurry of stories and editorials charging Crane with serial infidelity and claiming that the congressman and his wife engaged in excessive partying. One anonymous source told the
Union-Leader
that Crane said it was his goal to “bed down 1,000 women.”
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A young female aide in the offices of Senator Gordon Humphrey, smitten with the handsome Crane, said her goal was to be “number 1,001.” Crane probably wouldn't have seen the humor in the comment.

Crane's campaign blamed Reagan for putting Loeb up to it; Reagan was furious at Crane for making the unfounded charge. This was the first time that someone
had accused Reagan of engaging in dirty politics and he did not like it one bit. It was an aspect of politics that Reagan despised.

Another Republican for whom Reagan had little regard announced his candidacy in early 1979. Senator Lowell P. Weicker of Connecticut, a liberal Republican, hated Reagan, and Reagan in his diaries later responded in kind, confiding that he thought Weicker was a “schmuck” and “a pompous no good fathead.”
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Indeed, Weicker had an ego that made Charles de Gaulle's look retiring by comparison. The senator stood 6'6” tall and he needed every inch of that frame to house his massive sense of self.

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.”
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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.
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A
T 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,”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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
.
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Suffice it to say, there were a lot of “ifs” in the Dole campaign plan.