Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (118 page)

Jim Baker told the Albosta committee in 1983 that Bill Casey had “indicated to me” that Corbin “might have been a source” for the books. When I interviewed Baker, he said Dick Cheney had told him that Corbin had taken the briefing books, and we joked about the statute of limitations.

Plus, I knew Paul Corbin. Paul Corbin was a friend of mine. For years, we played together in a weekly poker game, and while he never came right out and told us that he'd stolen the debate books, none of us doubted for a moment that he did it and did it willingly, happy to stick it to Carter. Diogenes' lamp would have never shone on Corbin.

Corbin did deny in a sworn statement to the Albosta committee that he'd given the briefing books to the Reagan campaign. But lying to federal officials was
old-hat for Corbin. As
Time
magazine politely said, his “reputation for veracity is uneven.”

How Corbin got the briefing books out of a sensitive area of the Carter White House is less clear.

In 1983, when the story of the stolen books broke out, the Reagan White House reviewed the guest logs for the Carter White House for the fall of 1980. They did not show a “Paul Corbin” signing in, but security in those days was extremely lax.

Laurie Lucey has been the subject of quiet rumors of involvement for years because of her friendship with Corbin and because she worked in the Carter White House. When I interviewed her in 2008, Lucey repeatedly and emphatically denied playing a role in the briefing-books escapade. She actually left the Carter White House in the fall of 1979, almost a year before the debate books were stolen, and it seems improbable that she would have been able to get back inside the White House complex, given the bad blood between her father, Pat Lucey, and Jimmy Carter.

However, John Seigenthaler told me that he felt Laurie Lucey might have been some sort of “go-between,” saying, “There is no other way.” The courtly, elderly man also believed that Carter aide Bob Dunn had a role. Seigenthaler is not alone in thinking this. Dunn knew Corbin. He was also a protégé of Pat Lucey. Indeed, he had worked for Lucey in Mexico and in Madison, Wisconsin. But surprisingly, Dunn went to work in the Carter White House just as Lucey was resigning as ambassador to Mexico to join Ted Kennedy's campaign in the fall of 1979.

The FBI tracked Dunn down in San Francisco in 1983, but according to Dunn, the agent never even asked him about his relationship of long standing with Corbin. Dunn expressed amusement to the
Washington Post
that the FBI agent knew so little about the case.

When I finally interviewed Dunn after trying repeatedly over three years to speak with him, he denied any role in the heist.

In the exhaustive search for the full story, I attempted to interview Wilma Hall, a secretary in the Carter White House and later the Reagan White House. She refused to talk. Her daughter later worked as an aide to Colonel Oliver North, author of the Iran-Contra scandal. Name of her daughter? Fawn Hall.

The receptionist at the Reagan campaign, Justine Marks, told investigators in 1983 that she recalled a “young, clean-cut man” delivering to the headquarters a package of materials that resembled the Carter briefing books. She said that she did not remember much about the incident or the person. When asked by the FBI
to undergo hypnosis to jog her memory, she demurred. She did, however, recall stopping the stranger, who, she claimed, “had material related to the briefing material for Carter.”

Marks worked on, and controlled access to, the fourth floor of the Reagan campaign headquarters. Both Bill Casey's and Jim Baker's offices were located on that floor. It is of course possible that Corbin simply employed someone to deliver the package for him. But records also show that Corbin was meeting with Casey on October 25, the day the books showed up.

When I interviewed Don Albosta many years after his committee's investigation wrapped up, he was still frustrated by what had gone down. The investigation had proved inconclusive. Albosta said that he found both the Carter men and the Reagan men less than forthcoming. He was especially frustrated with Bill Casey, whom he could not understand, and Jim Baker, whom he knew and did understand. He also told me he thought it was odd that Congressman Dick Cheney came to his office to tell him he had nothing to do with the caper when Albosta hadn't even suspected the Wyoming congressman.

The final report produced by Albosta's committee (officially titled
Unauthorized Transfers of Nonpublic Information during the 1980 Presidential Election
) roughed Casey up while giving Baker the benefit of the doubt. Casey issued a statement in which he said, “The campaign management never contemplated, directed or authorized seeking any inside information from the Carter camp.” True enough, except the statement never said anything about
accepting
anything stolen from the president's campaign.

Corbin became closer to Bill Casey after Reagan appointed Casey as head of the CIA. Corbin used to tell his daughter, Darlene, that he was going to Nicaragua to help the Contras, and he also used to josh his poker pals about his long absences, saying that he was “running guns” in Central America. With Corbin, anything was possible.

One thing is for sure: Corbin was sui generis, even in a time when American politics was filled with colorful characters who rarely ended up in the newspapers and never on television. There were times when anonymity was necessary in this game. Tom Brokaw neatly summed up the differences between that era and the modern era: “In those days, you couldn't get anybody to talk; now you can't get anybody to shut up!” The era of the political operative as colorful and mysterious has passed and it should be lamented. Men like Corbin and Lyn Nofziger would despise the current consultant-as-celebrity culture of Washington, and the modern, TV-obsessed political operators would have been eaten alive by Nofziger, Corbin, and others of their era.

The second answer is no, the outcome of the election was not affected by the briefing books. President Carter, to this day, is still deeply upset about his purloined briefing books and it was evident in our interview. “I don't think there's any doubt that it made some difference,” he complained.

But the briefing books were little more than a compendium of Reagan quotes, comments, speeches, columns, and radio commentaries spanning his public life. Reagan knew what he'd said during all that time, because he had deviated little from his fundamental philosophy over the previous twenty to thirty years. He himself acknowledged that he'd pretty much been saying the same thing; it was just that by 1980, more people were agreeing with the Gipper.

But if the briefing books were filled with pedestrian public-record material, the fact of the matter is that all sorts of other White House documents did show up in the Reagan files, just as Reagan material showed up in the Carter campaign files (and can now be found in archives in the Carter Presidential Library). In September 1980 Reagan-Bush staffer Stefan Halper passed along an internal Carter/Mondale memo advising President Carter on how to deal with various issues Reagan was advocating.
Newsweek
reported that another internal Carter document arrived on Reagan aide Bob Gray's desk with a note saying, “Bob—Report from a White House mole.” The Carter White House leaked like a sieve.

And no, no evidence or even the tiniest shred of accusation has ever emerged that Reagan knew about the briefing books coming into his campaign's possession. Everybody knew that if he had been told, his reaction would have been to send them back with an apology to President Carter.

Pat Caddell years later asserted in our conversation his belief that Bill Casey set up a covert operation using former CIA operatives to steal documents out of the Carter White House. Caddell may be right, but no evidence has been forthcoming of such a conspiracy involving so many people.

Likewise, there has never been any evidence that the Reagan campaign sent George Bush to Paris in October 1980 to orchestrate a reverse “October Surprise” by meeting secretly with the Iranians to ensure that the hostages would not be released before the election. As with the stolen briefing books, some Carter supporters have pointed to this alleged secret mission to explain why Carter lost the election. But there is plenty of suspicion that Carter manipulated the hostage crisis for his own political gain, as written by the renowned David Broder of the
Washington Post
then, and by others since.

Carter was also deeply bitter over Ted Kennedy's primary challenge and the fact that liberals went with John Anderson in the fall rather than sticking with
him. “I was never reconciled to the more liberal wing of [the] Democratic Party as long as I was in office,” he told me. “And there is no doubt that the Kennedy supporters in the left wing of the Democratic Party, the liberal wing, supported John Anderson over me in campaigning.”

President Carter did not lose the 1980 election because of the stolen briefing books. He lost because the economy was a catastrophe, because the world situation was worsening, because he could not get the American hostages out of Iran, and because the citizenry was downright scared, ready to listen to Reagan's message, which he delivered at the Cleveland debate. If President Carter is bitter over the election (and by all accounts he is), it could be because he did not listen to Caddell, who opposed any debates and instead devised a campaign plan to destroy Reagan and force voters, reluctantly, into reelecting Carter. A Carter aide said at the time, “The whole thrust of our media this Fall will be to paint Ronald Reagan as dangerous and stupid.”

After the election, it leaked out that Rosalynn Carter had opposed the debate, which is interesting, as so too did Mrs. Reagan. It also leaked out that Carter's men had warned him against invoking his daughter, Amy, in the context of a serious policy debate on nuclear armaments. Almost to a man, Carter's aides believe he lost the election because he lost the debate. Pat Caddell said in our interview, Carter was ahead in national polling before the debate, and although he was behind in the electoral vote count, Reagan was nowhere near the needed 270. Even as Reagan won an electoral-vote and popular-vote landslide, many, many states went only very narrowly for the Gipper, Caddell bitterly remembered.

One of the best postelection lines to come out of the 1980 campaign was from Tim Kraft of the Carter campaign, who quipped to Jerry Rafshoon that they should have taken the $30 million spent on the campaign and instead put it into buying two more helicopters for the ill-fated rescue attempt of the hostages in Iran. And who is to say that Kraft's whimsical notion might not have changed the outcome? Had the hostages been rescued, it may have boosted American morale enough that a majority of voters might have forgiven Carter for the terrible economy and given him his second term. We'll never know.

One thing is certain, though: Carter's fall campaign repulsed many Americans, and not just conservatives. The president was eviscerated by liberal columnists and editorialists for the meanness of his campaign. Recall Hugh Sidey's denunciation of Carter in the pages of
Time
magazine in late September 1980: “The past few days have revealed a man capable of far more petty vituperation than most Americans thought possible even in a dank political season. The wrath that escapes Carter's lips about racism and hatred when he prays and poses as the epitome of Christian charity
leads even his supports to protest his meanness.” Sidey was one of those writers everybody read and took to heart, and was among the most gentle of men. For this urbane and regarded man to pen a column so contemptuous of Carter was stunning. And he was not alone. In turn, the
Washington Post
and even the liberal Scotty Reston of the
New York Times
took Carter to task for his vicious campaign.

A
FTER THE PUBLICATION OF
my book on Reagan's 1976 insurgent attempt to steal the GOP nomination away from Gerald Ford,
Reagan's Revolution
, I was surprised but obviously also delighted to receive favorable reviews from across the political spectrum. But the issue came up a few times then and now as to whether I am a “Reagan worshipper,” as one person put it. No, I am not a “Reagan worshipper.” While I am in awe of the man's many and varied accomplishments, I am also in awe and respectful of JFK. In any case, looked at factually and critically, Reagan certainly looms as one of the half dozen most influential men of the twentieth century. And history is being good to him.

I worked for Reagan's 1980 election and reelection in 1984, running and supervising large independent expenditure (IE) campaigns. In 1980, after Reagan lost Iowa and was reeling, I was approached by Bob Heckman, John Gizzi, and Ralph Galliano of the Fund for a Conservative Majority (FCM) and asked whether I was interested in running an IE in support of Reagan. At twenty-three years of age, I jumped at the chance, even though, according to the election laws of the time, I could not work for the official campaign thereafter. I'd met Reagan on a campaign in New Hampshire in 1978, and though he didn't know me from Adam's off ox, he afforded me kindness and sincerity.

Heckman et al. gave me free rein and a check for $750,000. Remembering what my old friend Lyn Nofziger said about people messing around with Reagan's presentation, I decided simply to buy as much radio time as humanly possible beginning in New Hampshire and “just let Reagan talk,” as Nofziger said. In a decrepit old studio in Georgetown, for hours at a time, I listened to Reagan's speeches, picked out the best passages, and produced thirty- and sixty-second commercials. With no Internet then, reel-to-reel tapes—complete with the federally mandated disclaimer identifying FCM as the sponsor—were boxed and mailed to hundreds of radio stations in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Illinois.

In those days, $750,000 went a long, long way on radio. FCM's commercials pretty much ran wall-to-wall in every market in New Hampshire for weeks before the primary. No other group on the Left or Right was conducting a significant independent campaign, and I like to think that Bob, John, Ralph—and
I—deserve a small amount of credit for coming to Reagan's aid when he needed it the most, when his campaign was collapsing, out of money, and beset by internal discord after the stunning loss to George Bush in Iowa.