Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (102 page)

Reagan closed his address in the most human terms possible. He told of a fifth-grade girl in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Andrea Baden, who wanted a pair of roller skates. So she saved her allowance and went to the store, only to find that the price had gone up. She waited and saved some more and went again to the store, only to find that the roller skates had gone up in price once more. So she patiently saved some more but then found to her dismay that the price had gone up yet again. Plaintively, she said, “It's just not fair.” Reagan replied, “Well that's right, Andrea: What Mr. Carter has done to this country's economy just isn't fair. It just isn't right.”
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He closed by saying, “I would like very much to do something about that lack of fairness to hard-working Americans and, Andrea, to thrifty Americans like you. I need your help, your support. But first of all, I need your commitment, your hope, and your belief in this great nation's ability to begin again. I think the time has come for fair play for Americans. If you agree, together we can have a new beginning, for ourselves and for our children.”
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The campaign had plunked down $150,000 for this speech, but if it had been ten times that amount, it still would have been a bargain.
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A Reagan aide said, “We're going to beat [Carter] over the head with the incompetence thing from now until the election.”
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In the days leading up to the debate, Reagan settled on this theme and audiences reacted favorably.

Peter Dailey's ads focused on the competence question. The Reagan campaign was running hard-hitting spots focused on Carter's record. Dailey had capitalized on an oversight by Gerald Rafshoon: the Democratic adman had neglected to copyright the commercials he had produced for Carter in 1976, meaning that they were on the open market for anybody to use—or abuse. Reagan's campaign and conservative independent groups employed the four-year-old ads to mock Carter for his broken promises.
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Reagan wanted the competence issues front and center, and on the eve of the big debate he got an assist in this area from an unlikely source: Libya's dictator, Muammar al-Gaddafi. Gaddafi ordered his French-made Mirage fighter jets and Soviet MIG-23s and 25s to harass U.S. Navy jets in the Mediterranean. The unstable dictator then sent letters to Carter—and to Reagan in the form of a full-page ad in major newspapers—telling them to stay out of the affairs of the region. Under Carter, the American fighters were under standing orders not to engage the Libyans in aerial combat, even as the Libyan fighters locked their missiles on the American planes.
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American fecklessness was on display for all the world to see.

For Reagan, the incident was just more evidence of Carter's “demonstrated inability to govern our nation.”
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C
ARTER DIDN'T RESPOND TO
Reagan's ABC speech. There wasn't much he could say to spin the economic news. Instead, he hit Reagan for changing his position on the grain embargo of the Soviets over their invasion of Afghanistan. Reagan had initially supported it, but when farmers pointed out that they alone were bearing the burden, he called for a general boycott of trade with the Russians or the blockade of Cuba.
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Carter didn't address his own shift on the matter, as the United States had recently begun selling grain to the Soviets once again. Alas, the Russians reported yet another crop failure, this one owing to too much rain.
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In the past, it had been not enough rain. In the Soviets' collectivist world, things were never “just right.”

Agriculture Secretary Bob Bergland, complying with the White House's directive to all cabinet secretaries, did his part to help the president's campaign. Carter's remarks were rebroadcast on rural radio stations.
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Now the president needed to hunker down and get ready for the big debate. He jetted from Ohio to Camp David for a day of preparation. Sam Popkin, a college professor, had been recruited to stand in for Reagan in their mock debates. Several of their sessions were contentious, and Carter stormed out more than once, so angry was he with Popkin's rhetorical hits.
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At one point in the debate prep, the president made a reference to asking his daughter, Amy, for advice. Jody Powell said that the comment “had not come across, did not quite work.”
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Carter's aides advised him not to make any policy references to his thirteen-year-old daughter.

The president's plan for the debate was to go right at Reagan, hitting him on several issues of which he had changed his mind. Carter also wanted to show off his own command of data. But the Reaganites questioned the president's unwavering
confidence in his ability to take on Reagan. A few days earlier Ed Meese had pointed out to the Wall Street Journal that Carter would have a harder time making assaults on Reagan with the Republican standing right there on the stage.

“We've found,” Meese said, “that when more people see Ronald Reagan, they like what they see.”
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“
Are you better off than you were four years ago?
”

K
ennedy family confidant and historian Arthur Schlesinger bumped into his old friend Bill Casey in Washington just as autumn was deepening and there was a snap in the air. They had first met in the Second World War when Casey was stationed in London working for the OSS. The two men had little in common, politically, but they were both members in good standing of the Washington–New York political establishment.

Casey introduced the Kennedyite to Reagan's top aides Ed Meese and Dick Wirthlin. Since Schlesinger loathed Jimmy Carter, they knew he was a temporary ally. They confided the bad news revealed by Wirthlin's polling: under Carter's relentless attacks, Reagan had “lost 12 points on capacity to keep the peace” but Carter had only “lost 3 points on decency”—“a pretty good trade-off from Carter's viewpoint.”
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As Carter's mother, “Mizz Lillian,” once said, her son was “a beautiful cat with sharp claws.”
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The latest polls showed that the race was as tight as ever. Most national surveys had Carter ahead of Reagan or the race statistically tied with the momentum on Carter's side. An ABC poll released just before the debate did show that Reagan had moved into a small lead over the president, 45–42 percent.
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It had Reagan leading in twenty-four states with 217 electoral votes and Carter ahead in fourteen states with 146 electoral votes.
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But Republicans could not rest easy with that assessment, since a new poll by
Time
had Carter ahead, 42–41 percent. In
Time
's breakdown of seven Rust Belt states, Carter had broken out to a seven-point edge over Reagan. Even more important, 62 percent of Americans had confidence in Carter's ability to handle foreign affairs. Moreover, support for Carter's economic
programs had improved markedly, with 69 percent of Americans expressing confidence in them.
⁵

The Midwest was, as
U.S. News & World Report
called it, a “slugfest.”
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While a St. Louis Post-Dispatch poll had Reagan at 36 and Carter at 32 in Missouri,
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a St. Louis Globe-Democrat poll had it just the opposite, with the president at 35 and Reagan at 28 percent.
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“Tense” was the oft-used—overused—phrase in both camps. Even the placid Meese was observed snapping at reporters. Press aide Jim Brady ran down the aisles of the campaign plane as it flew over a forest fire in Louisiana, joking to reporters, “Killer trees! Killer trees!” It was a mirthful reference to Reagan's earlier claim about trees and air pollution, but he was temporarily banished from the aircraft.
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Speechwriter Ken Khachigian also joined in the fun, but he was not caught and punished like Brady.
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Many had lost what they needed most in these last few hours: a sense of humor.

G
ERALD
F
ORD HAD TEMPORARILY
set aside his animosity for Reagan to rally support for the GOP candidate. Ford and Reagan—especially Ford—still had little use for each other.
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But Ford was a competitive and partisan Republican, happy to do his part to hammer Carter. On CBS's Sunday morning show,
Face the Nation
, he returned to the rumors that Carter might orchestrate the release of the hostages for his own political gain. “There is no doubt in my mind,” Ford said, “that President Carter will do whatever he can in political terms to ensure his reelection.”
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Henry Kissinger, Howard Baker, and Dick Allen all echoed Ford's charges. Allen was an intellectual, urbane and sophisticated, yet underneath the surface lurked someone who could take care of himself in a bar fight. In the 1950s he had competed against Paul Hornung for the quarterback position at Notre Dame—though, as Allen himself would good-naturedly acknowledge years later, it wasn't much of a competition: he ended up tutoring the Heisman Trophy winner in Spanish for $2.50 an hour.
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The Carter campaign was once again forced to deny the charges of a secret deal to free the hostages. Walter Mondale was trotted out to issue a denial, while Jody Powell labeled Ford's charge as “trash.” Ford did not back off, however. The next day, he cranked it up another ten notches when he asked, “Why didn't Carter show the same initiative over the past fifty-one weeks” as he was with the election looming?
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Panicked that Anderson would drain off enough voters to deliver the election to Reagan, liberal groups in the last days rallied to Carter's cause. The Americans for Democratic Action, one of the oldest liberal organizations around, gathered
together the best and the brightest to endorse Carter. Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP and Gloria Steinem, utility feminist, held a press conference in which he repeatedly called Reagan a “racist” and she said she was “fearful” for women and minorities if Reagan won. She also said that Reagan was the candidate of the John Birch Society.
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Actually, the Birch Society opposed Reagan's election, saying he was a “lackey” of “Communist conspirators.”
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All the nuts were now coming out, from the Left and the Right.

H
IS DAYS ON THE
road were winding down, and for the most part, Reagan had had a ball. Several weeks earlier in Philadelphia, he'd been taught a new greeting backstage so he went out to the Polish audience and said, “Dziekuje and dzien dobry.” The crowd ate it up. Reagan then rattled off the names of Phillies slugger Greg Luzinski and Eagles quarterback Ron Jaworski and the audience exploded again. He also mentioned Pope John Paul II and eviscerated the Democrats, charging that they no longer represented the values of Polish-Americans.
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That was it as far as they were concerned; Reagan was now an honorary Pole.

Reagan won the endorsement of Oscar-winning actor George C. Scott, though it was doubtful his endorsement would carry much weight among his liberal colleagues in Hollywood.
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More big-city newspapers weighed in with their endorsements. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
supported Carter's reelection “with grave misgivings,”
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and the
Chicago Tribune
threw its qualified support behind Governor Reagan, saying, “There is good reason to worry” about him.
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Carter won the support of the
Youngstown Vindicator
and Reagan nailed the
Indianapolis Star
.
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W
EXFORD WAS THE PERFECT
site for Reagan's debate practice sessions. The driveway alone was two miles long, making the secluded estate safe from prying reporters' eyes.

In a garage made to look like a debate set, Reagan went up against David Stockman as Carter. Stockman had been the final recipient of the purloined Carter briefing books and absorbed them to channel Carter. The books, having been given to Bill Casey by Paul Corbin, went first to Baker and then to David Gergen and finally to Stockman. George Will, helping prepare Reagan, looked at the Carter material for all of thirty seconds, dismissing it as meaningless.
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Will had a critical point. The books were simply a recitation of Reagan's comments, positions, columns, and radio commentaries. It was all a part of the public record, and Reagan had been hit on all this by his political opponents and reporters for years.

Baker was on hand, pencil behind one ear, cursing and telling ribald jokes. The candidate often dressed in cowboy boots and western shirts for these sessions. At any one time up to twenty people were hanging around, until Meese and Baker called the drill to order and a small group got down to work with Governor Reagan. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Marty Anderson, Howard Baker, and others would pepper him with questions while “Carter” went after him, hammer and tong. Reagan lost his temper more than once. A young aide to Ed Meese, Marc Rotterman, was at Wexford and during a break Reagan sidled up to him and said, “They are taking me to the woodshed out there.”
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The candidate later said, “After Stockman, both Anderson and Carter were easy.”
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At one point Reagan was withering under Stockman's assault and stormed in frustration, “Damn it, here you go again!” The briefers laughed, startling Reagan. He told them he was going to tuck the phrase away and “may save it for the debate.”
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