Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (115 page)

It has also become common to conclude that Reagan made the final decision to reject the “co-presidency” in Detroit with Gerald Ford. In fact, both President and Mrs. Reagan wrote in their autobiographies that Ford took himself out of contention.
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(Nancy Reagan also acknowledged her opposition to Ford.) Of course, we will never know what Reagan and Ford said to each other in private that night they secreted away to try to hash it out one more time. Reagan had clearly grown uncomfortable with any power-sharing arrangement, and it may be that Reagan—the
über
-negotiator—simply let Ford talk himself out of the idea. That would have allowed Ford to save face while keeping the former president on Reagan's side for the fight ahead against Jimmy Carter. Ford later told NBC that “it might have turned out differently” if they hadn't run up against the deadline Reagan had set.
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Those looking to attack the Reagan legacy often seize on a myth about spending and the size of government. According to this line of argument, despite his rhetoric about reducing government, Reagan did nothing to tame spending or
unnecessary programs and a result sent federal deficits soaring. In fact, setting aside the very necessary defense buildup after Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter had allowed the military to fall into ruination, discretionary federal spending under Reagan
fell
13.5 percent. Government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product also fell under Reagan. Moreover, the number of subsidy programs in the federal budget was cut back after Reagan entered office, dropping from 1,123 in 1980 to 1,013 in 1985. (Such subsidies took their greatest leap under George W. Bush, from 1,425 in 2000 to 1,804 in 2008.)
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Reagan also used the veto pen more than any president since Eisenhower.
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A particularly persistent and pernicious myth holds that Reagan's appearance at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi in the summer of 1980 was part of some nefarious plot to woo white racist voters. Liberal commentator Paul Krugman seized on this point with a nasty insinuation: “[Reagan] began his 1980 campaign with a speech on states' rights at the county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. Everyone got the message.”
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But even longtime Democratic operative Bob Shrum acknowledges that Reagan didn't know the symbolism of the location.
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In truth, Reagan didn't have a racist bone in his body, and it pained him terribly when people falsely charged him with racism.

Yet another myth is that Reagan was somehow “unknowable.” I did not know the man well, but after working on his campaigns; after immersing myself in his writings, speeches, columns, diaries; after conversations with countless who knew him; and after reading hundreds of books and articles and monographs about him, I feel I at least understand him.

Reagan often said that he genuinely liked people and maybe that's why they liked him. He was garrulous, chatty, could be very thoughtful, but when people disturbed him or got on his nerves, especially strangers, he'd simply clam up. With friends, close aides, and associates, he might let on some anger, break a pencil, but he would also verbally express himself. With two people, he never clammed up. Peter Hannaford and Ken Khachigian were clearly his and Mrs. Reagan's two favorite speechwriters. For all of his big speeches, from his acceptance speech in Detroit to his breathtaking remarks on the eve of the 1980 election to his inaugural address, he always turned to Peter and Ken.
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The people who didn't know Reagan would draw the wrong conclusion that he had some sort of mysterious zone of privacy. While he clearly relished his solitude with Nancy, especially alone at the ranch, his life was not a mystery. They had their private corners like all happily married couples and he could easily make himself happy alone, reading, writing, working at the ranch.

Many who felt they couldn't know Reagan probably never really understood him. That category may include his own vice president. George Bush, in 1989, told the Gridiron Club in Washington, “Let's face it. If I was funnier than Ronald Reagan, I would have won in 1980.”
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The same went for Reagan's erstwhile campaign manager, John Sears, who slammed Reagan for simply looking to others “to tell him what to do.”
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The unknowable Reagan seems to be a myth created by people who weren't paying attention.

D
ESPITE HIS LANDSLIDE VICTORY
, not everyone was happy about the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. At Berkeley, two thousand students and professors took to the streets, rioting for three days. The violent protests, which resulted in scores of arrests, were sponsored by Students for Peace.
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Edward Heath, the former British Conservative prime minister, said on the BBC that while he was pleased Reagan had been elected, “it would be disastrous if Reagan really let people believe that there were simple ways to solve the problems of terrorism or oil prices.”
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Radical chic conductor Leonard Bernstein said Reagan's election would unleash the forces of fascism in America.
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Columnist Judy Bachrach of the
Washington Star
had come up with a term of derision to describe Reagan: the “Great Communicator.” She never knew that one day he and his supporters would embrace it.
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The Soviets weren't happy about Reagan's victory either. Several days after the election, on the anniversary of “Revolution Day,” a giant parade was held in Moscow, complete with tanks, “goose-stepping troops,” and “missile carriers that roared across cobblestoned Red Square,” as UPI reported. Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov said the Soviets “would never accept second place to the Americans.”
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Even some of Reagan's conservative supporters seemed unhappy after Election Day. Campaign aide Michele Davis, who had traveled for several months and hundreds of thousands of air miles with the Gipper and the staff, went into a funk when it all ended. “Everything is different,” she confided in her diary. “There are different Secret Service agents, advance men that I've never seen before and guys in dark suits in every nook and cranny. And my traveling buddy the Gipper is far away from us all. Sigh.” She later did what any sane campaign worker would do at the end of a glorious campaign. She took a bottle of Courvoisier to the headquarters and, with some friends, got drunk.
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Within days of the election, Reagan was being zinged in the pages of the conservative newsweekly
Human Events
under the headline “Mixed Reviews for
Reagan Transition Team.” A five-member team of “coordinators” had been created to begin the process of staffing the new government. It was headed by Bill Timmons, Reagan's 1980 political director, whom conservatives held in suspicion for his longtime association with moderate Howard Baker. Of the members of the group, only Loren Smith, Reagan's 1976 and 1980 general counsel, was considered a “movement conservative.” The paper also ran a sidebar item in which it quaintly noted that “many talented conservatives from around the country have in the past shown little interest in relocating in Washington. We hope, however, that the November 4 election may have changed their thinking.”
Human Events
solicited résumés from conservatives and promised to send them along to the Reagan transition team.
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But out west—in the heart of Reagan Country—billboards materialized overnight after the 1980 election proclaiming, “Welcome to the Reagan Revolution.”
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Fearing Reagan, while also contemptuous of Carter, the Ayatollah released the hostages—only after the fortieth president replaced the thirty-ninth president.

The stock market was also pleased with the Reagan tide. The day after the election was the second busiest day of trading in the market's history, and stocks soared.
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And while scholars since the death of JFK had lamented that the job of president was “too big for one man,” all that talk stopped abruptly after the election of Reagan.

Solzhenitsyn's three young sons, Ignat, Yermolai, and Stephan, were among those pleased by Reagan's victory—though they paid a price for it. By this point they had settled in Vermont with their parents after their father had been exiled from the Soviet Union. On the day after the 1980 election, their teacher was mourning the election of Reagan, referring to the “dark night of fascism descended under the B-movie actor.” When the teacher asked his students whether any disagreed with him, the three Solzhenitsyn boys raised their hands. Outraged, he sent the children out into the cold November morning without their coats, under an American flag that had been lowered to half mast. The boys saw the bright side; the hour they spent shivering “was a relief from sitting in the auditorium listening to the party line.”
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Then, of course, there were Reagan's legions of devoted followers across the country. He had plenty of fan clubs, and not just from his movie days. Muriel Coleman, a devoted conservative and Reagan staffer, told of the hundreds of “R. Clubs” that dotted the Midwest. For an annual fee of $50 or $100, you became a member and got a little pin. Muriel said many people were buried wearing their “R. Club” pins.
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During the campaign, Jeb Bush discovered Reagan's extraordinary appeal to Americans—and found out what it was like to play second banana to the Gipper. In North Dakota, eight thousand people filled a hall, rabid for Reagan. When young Bush went on the stage to make a pitch for his father, there remained only about “two hundred people in the room.”
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T
O BE SURE
, R
EAGAN
had a different view of the GOP from the country clubbers. He often said that the GOP was “not the party of big business and the country club set, but the party of Main Street, the small town, the shopkeeper, the farmer, the cop on the beat, the guy who sends his kids to Sunday school, pays his taxes, and never asks anything from government except to be left alone.”
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What kind of conservative was Reagan then? He flirted with liberalism in his youth, but after seeing the government take up to 90 percent of his income in the 1940s, and the efforts of thuggish Communism provocateurs in Hollywood, Reagan began his historic move to the right. Yet during the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, while some, like his friend and fellow actor Robert Taylor, called for the expulsion of Communists from America, Reagan said, no, that would be contrary to the principles and spirit of America.
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We were strong enough to tolerate all political points of view, as long as they were peaceful. At that stage, he was pretty much a garden-variety man of the right, more anti-liberal than pro-conservative. As he grew older, his political philosophy matured, became refined. Thoughtful. Reagan realized that nothing was more sacred than the privacy and dignity of individuals.

Maybe the best place to start is with a policy statement he issued in April 1980, in the heat of the primary battle, on “homosexual rights.” “While I do not advocate the so-called gay lifestyle, all citizens have equal rights before the law,” he said. “I believe the government should not interfere with the private lives of Americans, nor should there be any place in our society for intolerance and discrimination. So long as a person's private life is private and does not interfere with his or her job performance, it should have no bearing on private-sector or government hiring.”
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At the same time he believed that “gay ordinances” were wrong that compelled an employer to hire someone simply because he or she was gay.

Reagan was not a libertarian who denied political realities. He was also pragmatic, telling a group of conservatives that he did not view the GOP as a party “based on a principle of exclusion. After all, you do not get to be a majority party by searching for groups you
won't
associate or work with. Conservatism is not a narrow ideology nor is it the exclusive property of conservative activists.”
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In addition, Reagan was a constitutionalist who honored the federalist system
set up the Founders. In his first inaugural address, which he wrote largely himself, Reagan said, “From time to time we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”
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In a letter to this author, historian John Patrick Diggins told of how in he reviewed a collection of writings by American conservative Russell Kirk and discovered that in six hundred pages, Ronald Reagan's name was never mentioned. It then dawned on Diggins that Kirk's inspiration was Edmund Burke and Reagan's was Thomas Paine.
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Burke and Paine, contemporaries, reviled each other. Where Burke believed in the divine rights of kings, Paine despised royalty, or any concentration of power, and celebrated the citizenry. Paine, like Reagan, believed in challenging the status quo, not defending it. Paine, like Reagan, believed that power should flow upwards and not downwards. Reagan articulated his views when he said, “I've always thought of myself as a citizen politician, speaking up for the ideas and values and common sense of everyday Americans.”
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Paine also happened to be fond of the phrase “common sense.”