Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (114 page)

Tyrrell and Will were among the conservative columnists who began to flourish in the mid- to late 1970s. The political fires of the '60s had forged these commentators and now they were shaping political thought in America. In an era before cable television, the Internet, talk radio, and the explosion of conservative think tanks, their writings and pronouncements and thus their influence could not be underestimated. Both Will and Tyrrell had Reagan into their homes for dinner parties. Tyrrell, who enjoyed suits from London's Savile Row, expensive wine, and good cigars, was known for the sumptuous dinners he hosted.

History has recorded, too, how Reagan restored American morale, its “cando” spirit, patriotism, and the notion of American exceptionalism. Reagan also revived the American economy after the devastating Carter Recession through revolutionary tax cuts and tight monetary policies, which drastically lowered the terrible inflation, interest rates, and unemployment. The economic growth that began in 1982 continued unbroken for a remarkable ninety-two months, during
which time nearly thirty-five million new jobs were created.
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And in fact, the soaring growth carried on almost unabated until the last months of the George W. Bush administration in 2008—an unprecedented twenty-six-year run of growth, which was due to some of Reagan's economic policies being carried forward, especially by Gingrich and Bill Clinton.

As long as these things are recorded, the word “morale” will always be associated with Reagan while the word “malaise” will always be associated with Jimmy Carter. Yet Reagan did more, much more, than accomplish these three big goals. He changed American politics for a lifetime.

“Once he was the most underestimated man in American politics—a washed-up movie star, it was said, who was too old, too simple and too far right to be President,” wrote Peter Goldman of
Newsweek
several days after the election of 1980.
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How did Reagan manage to overcome all those perceptions not only to win the GOP nomination but also to defeat an incumbent president and a third-party candidate? Dick Wirthlin, Reagan's one and only pollster from 1966 until 1984, had understood early on what Reagan needed to do to win: he needed to achieve realignment. Wirthlin's detailed campaign plan presented at the end of June 1980 laid out how to do just that. It wasn't enough to get the Republican vote, Wirthlin wrote, because, as his surveys revealed, the country was 51 percent Democrat, 30 percent Republican, and 19 percent independent.
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Reagan needed to scramble the old New Deal coalition and create a new ideological and cultural coalition. He needed “Reagan Democrats” to win (though the term would not be coined until after the election).
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Sure enough, that's what Reagan pulled off. George Church of
Time
summed up the remarkable realignment that occurred on November 4, 1980: “Landslide. Yes, landslide—stunning, startling, astounding, beyond the wildest dreams and nightmares of the contending camps, beyond the furthest ken of the armies of pollsters, pundits and political professionals. After all the thousands of miles, the millions of words and dollars, the campaign that in newspapers across the land on the very morning of Election Day was still headlined TOO CLOSE TO CALL turned out to be a landslide. The American voter had struck again. Reagan's triumph dismembered the old Democratic coalition. Jews, labor-union members, ethnic whites, big-city voters—all gave Reagan far more votes than they usually cast for a Republican. The disaster left the Democratic Party, which has held the presidency for 32 of the 48 years since 1932, badly in need of a new vision and a new agenda.”
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Reagan became, in the opinion of renowned historian John Patrick Diggins, one of America's greatest presidents, alongside Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin
Roosevelt. Similarly, the great historian James MacGregor Burns in 1999 said that he would rank Reagan in the “great” or “near-great” category, alongside FDR.
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A good case can be made that Reagan was actually a better president than FDR. Both were confronted with “guns and butter” issues, yet FDR never solved his economic calamity in eight years; only when America went to war did the Great Depression end. Reagan solved the Carter Recession in two years, and his work from 1981 to 1989 caused the collapse of the Soviet threat in 1991, and with it the triumph of freedom over Communism.

Tributes poured in from Congress when Reagan died, but one of the most gracious and eloquent came from Ted Kennedy. The old liberal spoke of Reagan's conservatism, his love of country, and his convictions, with no bitterness or rancor, but with a genuine affection for the man. Kennedy gave Reagan all the credit as “the president who won the Cold War,” and added, “His deepest convictions were matters of heart and mind and spirit—and on them, he was no actor at all.”
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It spoke very well of Reagan also that his first wife, Jane Wyman, admitted she had voted for him gladly in 1980 and 1984, and that when he died, she broke her silence of more than fifty years to say, “America has lost a great president and a great, kind and gentle
man
.”
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Indeed, Reagan was one of the most incredibly relaxed men in politics. As reporters watched him doing remote TV interviews one sweltering day in a Los Angeles studio in 1980, he suddenly realized that the reporters couldn't hear the broadcasters, only him. Between interviews, a mischievous smile crossed Reagan's face and he began calling an imaginary baseball game, but with a political twist: “And now, Teddy Kennedy is coming to the plate. Kennedy has hit for five out of eight in the primaries today. Kennedy looks loose.” The people in the studio laughed.
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During his mock debate with David Stockman in 1980 to prepare for the real debate with John Anderson, Stockman was pummeling Reagan over the environment when Reagan retorted, “Well, John, sounds like I better get a gas mask!”
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Still, Reagan, like all men, was flawed. He had a temper, although it mellowed in later years. Once as governor, speaking to a political ally who had betrayed him, he pointed to a baseball bat on display in his office and said, “I should have shoved it up your ass and broken it off!”
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Actor Arthur Kennedy, an old friend, said the Gipper's anger “flares like magnesium powder and disappears in a cloud of smoke.”
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Such foibles do not by any means diminish Reagan's significance or, indeed, greatness. His old friend Lyn Nofziger explained it better than anybody: “Our
problem is we are trying to make a saint out of a man who certainly wasn't perfect. But he was a unique president. He believed in three things: God, the American people and himself. And that's kind of unique.”
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P
HIL
A
LEXANDER, A YOUNG
aide on the 1976 and 1980 campaigns, was at Belmont race track in New York the day Reagan died, June 5, 2004. Reagan's death was announced over the public address system and the crowd of unruly thousands was asked to observe one minute of silence in remembrance of the Gipper.

Alexander was astonished when the tough and cynical New Yorkers did just that.
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Alexander wasn't the only young American to be drawn to Reagan. In the 1980 election he received a plurality of voters under the age of thirty, and in 1984 he received more than 60 percent of the under-thirty vote. When he left office in January 1989, Reagan's overall approval rating was 68 percent, making him the most popular president at the end of his term since the Second World War, more popular even than the beloved Ike. Among African Americans he drew 40 percent support, amazing for a post–New Deal Republican. But most incredible was his approval rating among voters under thirty—a stunning 85 percent.
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In 1976 an eleven-year-old Minnesota boy, John McConnell, heard that his hero, Ronald Reagan, was coming to St. Paul. He badgered his mother into allowing his twenty-year-old brother to drive him 250 miles to see Reagan, and giving them twenty dollars to cover the cost of gas and a meal. Young McConnell was so nervous when he met Reagan that he dropped his camera, but he shook Reagan's hand and got a treasured autograph. McConnell went on to become a vice-presidential and presidential speechwriter for Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush.
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Longtime conservative leader Grover Norquist, who was a youthful Reagan aide in Massachusetts in 1980, explained why Reagan held such appeal for young Americans: “What Reagan sells is liberty and freedom and optimism. And if you're seventy-five, what good is that? A limitless future in front of America makes more sense to a thirty-year-old than a sixty-year-old.”
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Newt Gingrich went even further. Reagan, he said, “was actually something quite different for the young.” Young people admire revolutionaries, and in 1980 Reagan brought a revolution, with a replacement not merely of the “people who were in power” but also of “the principles by which power is exercised.” Reagan, Gingrich said, always challenged the status quo; the president “almost never got trapped in the destructive choices of the modern elite, but would simply keep reframing the question.” Gingrich was in his thirties in 1980, in just his first term
in Congress, when he heard Reagan speak before the NAACP. The Gipper's clear and insightful remarks changed the young politician's life.
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William F. Buckley Jr., interviewed before he passed away in 2008, said he saw Reagan's appeal with the young as evidence that they viewed him as “antiestablishment.”
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Ron Robinson, president of Young America's Foundation, observed that some of Reagan's important speeches challenging the status quo were given before college audiences—for example, at Notre Dame in 1981, when he said, “The West won't contain Communism; it will transcend Communism;” and at Moscow State University in 1988, when he told Soviet students of his hope that freedom “will blossom forth at least in the rich fertile soil of your people and culture.”
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In each case, Reagan issued a challenge to his young listeners, but he also provided hope for a future of freedom and opportunity.

Reagan retained his appeal to young Americans to the end. Karen Spencer, daughter of longtime Reagan aide Stu Spencer, once watched as Reagan's helicopter landed on a softball field in Mission Viejo, California, before he was to give a speech. The field adjoined a grade school. Reagan had been out of office for years, but “the kids were just standing by the windows. And they burst out the door, about 200, 250 of them, and they just mobbed him, mobbed President Reagan. The Secret Service went nuts. He just smiled. He loved it. That was the last time I ever saw him.”
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A
S OF
F
EBRUARY 2009
, 11,800 books have been written about Reagan, second only to Christ, according to
Newsmax
, and well ahead of JFK and Lincoln.
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Within the GOP, and indeed across the political spectrum, Reagan is now revered, even beloved. But it wasn't always so. Within the party establishment, Reagan was never much loved, even after his election. After the 1982 elections, in which the GOP suffered reversals, a Republican National Committee functionary taped a piece of paper to her door announcing the signup for the 1984 Bush for President campaign. Today, most party apparatchiks who were around in the late 1970s and early 1980s will plead how much they always loved Reagan. But Ed Blakely, who ran the media division for the National Republican Congressional Committee all those years and at the time was no fan of Reagan's himself, had a simple response when asked about such claims: “Bullshit.” Reagan was not liked and was barely tolerated in the various national GOP committees, according to Blakely.
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As Dick Cheney recalled in an interview, however, “By the end … we were all Reaganites.”
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If Republicans entertained doubts about Reagan, the feelings were far more intense among liberals. A
Washington Post
critic aptly observed that for many on
the left in the 1980s, “hating Ronald Reagan was as elemental as hating August without air conditioning.”
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The notion that Reagan was universally loved while in office is just one of many myths that have surrounded him. One widely accepted in political circles in the late 1970s was that Reagan was lazy. This myth was best dispelled by an aide who said, “He isn't lazy. He just doesn't like to hang around the office.”
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The laziness idea has largely faded, but other myths, large and small, still abound.

One of the more popular is that Reagan changed the inaugural ceremony from the East front to the West front of the U.S. Capitol. In fact, that decision had been made months earlier by the congressional committee with the oversight for one simple reason: to save money. Carter's inaugural stand in 1977 cost $825,000, but because the West front could accommodate so many more without costly temporary construction, Reagan's inaugural stand in 1981 cost only $463,000. The East front of the Capitol had been used by every president starting with Andrew Jackson in 1829.
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Another myth is that Reagan and Tip O'Neill were great friends. O'Neill in his autobiography revealed his low opinion of Reagan, saying it was “sinful” that he'd become president and that Reagan was the worst president O'Neill had ever known.
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To the House Speaker's everlasting credit, however, when Reagan was shot, O'Neill quietly slipped into the president's hospital room at George Washington University, got on his knees, held Reagan's hand, and they prayed, reciting the Twenty-third Psalm. O'Neill then kissed Reagan. According to White House aide Max Friedersdorf, the Democrat wept at Reagan's bedside.
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