Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (2 page)

As the
Wall Street Journal
aptly put it, “What was extreme conservatism 16 years ago, now is politics with mainstream appeal.”
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After two generations in which FDR's New Deal coalition dominated American politics, Reagan had emerged as the Republican answer to Roosevelt: a larger-than-life father figure who would bring his party out of the wilderness and demoralized Americans into the sunshine.

His opponent, President Jimmy Carter, was increasingly seen as a latter-day Herbert Hoover, a hapless incarnation of do-nothing incompetence. The great campaign biographer Theodore White said of Carter, “Approach him with pity. He has been caught up and crumpled by the hand of history more cruelly than any president since Herbert Hoover.” Of Reagan, White said, “Approach him with self-protecting skepticism. He is the most instantly charming and likeable candidate for the presidency since John F. Kennedy.”
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Reagan's new GOP had discarded “détente,” the slow-motion surrender of the West to the Soviets. Tax cuts and reductions in the size and scope of government had replaced balanced budgets as the centerpiece of the party's economic policy. On social matters, Reagan espoused a muscular yet spiritual message: the power of parents over that of the “nanny state.” It all emanated from Reagan's devotion to freedom as the organizing principle of his new Republican Party.

It was hard to believe that just four years earlier, in the wake of the Watergate scandals and the Republicans' devastating electoral losses, the punditocracy was giving last rites to the GOP.

The bloodbaths that had dominated Republican conventions for the past forty years were over, or at least masked over. Even the liberal Republican senator from New York, Jacob Javits, a chronic Reagan critic, was a Reagan delegate in Detroit.

Wall Street, too, was learning to love the populist Reagan. When he had announced his candidacy the previous November, the
Wall Street Journal
wrote in an editorial, “For political packaging, we do not need to turn to a 68-year-old man.” The paper conceded eight months later that Reagan had “learned something.”
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Now the man of the moment stood astride the new GOP, high above the convention floor. In large white letters below the nominee, across a blue half circle, the theme of the convention read, “together … a new beginning.” Hundreds of red and white carnations adorned the rostrum.

On either side of Reagan across the large stage were the many and varied leaders of the revived Republicans. Congressman Jack Kemp of New York; party chairman Bill Brock; Senator Bob Dole of Kansas; Ambassador George Bush, Reagan's running mate; House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona; and of course, according to homey political tradition, the Reagan and Bush families, including Barbara Bush, a bored-looking George W. Bush, and a beaming Nancy Reagan.

Unfortunately, the most important Reaganite of all, Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, the national chairman of Reagan's campaign, was missing. He had left the night before, after nominating his old friend Ron. Rumors held that Laxalt was dismayed over the last-minute choice of Bush, a Connecticut-bred Brahmin, for VP.

B
Y 1980 TELEVISION HAD
become the nation's fully dominant cultural force. Network reporters were firmly affixed atop pedestals in American culture as paragons of knowledge—despite their frequent fatuity, as when rising star (and future tragic figure) Jessica Savitch of NBC asked a GOP operative later in the year how it was that the delegates at the Republican convention could then go to the Democratic convention and be just as enthusiastic.
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Some complained that TV reporters were too intent on making news rather than simply reporting it, as in the case of the “co-presidency” debacle between Reagan and former president Gerald Ford the night before in Detroit. What had started as idle gossip—a Dream Ticket—had become a full-blown imbroglio, much of it fed by ill-informed TV correspondents.

Many print stories in 1980 were devoted to the reporters, the anchors, and the resources the networks invested in the national conventions. In addition, a new trend featuring network anchors interviewing network reporters about network coverage of conventions was inaugurated in 1980. Television reporters increasingly beheld themselves like Narcissus transfixed with his own image. This phenomenon would only accelerate in coming years.

Yet all of these trends were mere eddies in the face of the mighty political currents at work in Detroit in 1980. A tsunami was beginning to crest over America.

Jack Kemp—football star, college phys-ed major, self-taught historian and economist—understood this better at the time than almost everybody else. In speaking to the GOP convention two nights before Reagan's speech, Congressman Kemp had said, “There is a tidal wave coming. A political tidal wave as powerful as the one that hit in 1932.”
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The 1932 election was one of the few profoundly meaningful elections in American history. Most elections are only breezes that gently buffet the ship of state. Several, though, have been torrential storms, dramatically changing America's course. The election of 1980 would prove, like those in 1800, 1860, and 1932, to be one of the most consequential in American history, radically altering the future and giving rise to a new generation of conservatism.

B
ILLY
J
OEL'S ALBUM
Glass Houses
topped the charts and his hit “It's Still Rock and Roll to Me” was the number-one single in the country. The number-four album in the country was the movie soundtrack to the
Star Wars
sequel,
The Empire Strikes Back
, a sentiment that could have been the theme for the resurgent Republicans this night.

The mood of the rest of the country, in contrast, was dark, brooding, and apprehensive. Americans faced the second-worst economic calamity in the nation's history, behind only the epochal Great Depression.

Gasoline—when it was available—had nearly doubled in cost over four years, rising from 77 cents to $1.30 per gallon and more.

Taxes, not including Social Security, had gone up 30 percent, but income had risen only 20 percent.

Unemployment was closing rapidly on 8 percent, but this statistic was deceptively low. Millions of despondent Americans who could not find work had simply dropped out of the job market. Some projections had joblessness rising to 9.4 percent by the end of the year.
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The economy was in negative growth, with factories shuttered across the
country. But inflation continued, as it had for three years, in double digits—depending on the day and hour, 17 percent, 17.5 percent, 18 percent. A new word had been coined: “stagflation,” meaning a combination of inflation and stagnating growth, a worst-of-both-worlds scenario that economic textbooks said could not exist.

Few places were as bad off as the city in which the Republicans were gathered. Detroit had become an economic basket case, spiraling downward after the 1967 race riots accelerated “white flight” to the suburbs. The anemic state of the auto industry contributed to the city's decay. Still, Detroit officials had done their best to put on the dog. Almost three dozen decrepit buildings were razed, another fifty painted or boarded up. Junk cars were towed away and thousands of trees and shrubs were planted to spruce things up. Even outdoor water fountains that had not operated for years were turned back on. Joe Louis Arena itself had been built just the year before, at a cost of $57 million. More than two thousand cops were patrolling the city's streets to ensure that nothing befell the Republicans. Meanwhile the Coast Guard was standing watch on the Detroit River, and hundreds of sheriffs, state troopers, and Secret Service agents were also on hand.
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Along with economic disaster, a spiritual depression was afoot in the land. For the first time in the national consciousness, parents did not believe their children's future would be brighter than it had been for them. Many didn't feel good about their country anymore.

A malaise had descended upon America.

Conditions were equally bleak in the international arena. The America of 1980 was confronting a so-called Cold War, but with 55,000 young Americans killed in Vietnam and another 33,000 killed in an earlier quagmire on the Korean Peninsula, it was difficult to see this “long twilight struggle,” as JFK put it, as anything but a hot war.
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The Soviets were on the march after invading Afghanistan a year earlier and were arming anti-American guerrillas in Central America and Africa. The Soviet embassy in Washington was regarded as nothing more than a forward operating post for the KGB. America's military might was a thing of the past, and many GIs were on food stamps. The Eastern bloc was running amok and the West was losing. South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and other countries had fallen to Communism. NATO was withering, and Italy in the '70s had come within a hairsbreadth of voting into power a Communist government.

Dominoes were falling across the globe.

Yet despite America's troubles, and despite the low esteem in which Jimmy Carter was held, the odds were stacked against Reagan. Americans did not like
to kick presidents out of office. In twenty previous elections dating back to 1900, only twice—in 1912 and 1932—had the American people found sufficient reason to boot the elected incumbent. More presidents in the twentieth century had left the White House feet first than had been given their walking papers by the American voter.

T
HE ROAD AHEAD FOR
Ronald Reagan would be rough, but the road behind had been strewn with many hazards. In 1980 he made his third try for the Republican Party's nomination. This was his last chance, after he lost in 1968 to Richard Nixon and again in 1976 to Gerald Ford. The defeat in 1976 was particularly bitter. His fight against President Ford had grown nasty and had been carried all the way to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City.

Awful things had been said and written about Reagan, and not just by liberal editorialists. Some of the worst had come from the GOP establishment and self-appointed conservative leaders. Reagan was in many ways a libertarian, distrustful of the abuses of governmental power—including abuses by overzealous conservatives, some of whom viewed government as a weapon to be used against those who dared oppose them. Many in the New Right had opposed this candidacy, supporting other, more malleable contenders. They remained wary of him.

So, too, did many on the left. David Lucey was the son of Pat Lucey, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin who became independent presidential candidate John Anderson's running mate in 1980. The younger Lucey recalled in an interview, “People on our side of the spectrum in 1980, we thought [Reagan] was a nutcase.”
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Reagan's uphill climb, especially over the past four years, had been nothing short of remarkable. He had defied doubts about his age, his wisdom, his endurance, and his capacity—doubts not only from his political opponents but also from his own party and even top aides. He had also overcome a hostile media; a sometimes balky campaign operation; his own mistakes, gaffes, and indifference to the management of his last quest; and several bona fide heavyweight contenders for the 1980 GOP presidential nomination. His campaign had utterly collapsed seven months earlier after the disastrous loss in Iowa's caucuses to George Herbert Walker Bush. Only through sheer force of will did Reagan right himself and his campaign and turn it around to win the nomination.

Even in the past twenty-four hours Reagan had had to overcome big obstacles. He had picked Bush to be his running mate only at the very last moment. He so resisted the notion of choosing Bush, the obvious choice to some if not to the Reagans themselves, that the Gipper had seriously pursued the Dream Ticket with
Ford. Just a day earlier, the entire assemblage in Detroit—the media, the delegates, the hangers-on, the operatives—was convinced that the two men would go under the gun and marry at the political altar. Negotiations between Ford's and Reagan's representatives didn't break down for good until near midnight. Having exhausted all options, Reagan only reluctantly called Bush.

Henry Kissinger, Reagan's old nemesis, was the Machiavellian behind the “co-presidency” idea. In the end, his presence and demands helped torpedo the deal. One Reaganite had the last word on the role of Kissinger's obstinacy in the negotiations when he said, “For the first time in my life, I felt sorry for the North Vietnamese.”
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Kissinger, who had negotiated Nixon's “peace with honor” end to the American military presence in South Vietnam, was interested in maintaining his own proximity to power, insisting on a major foreign-policy portfolio in any Reagan-Ford administration. It was a self-serving, behind-the-scenes role Kissinger had played in the past. During the 1968 presidential race, he had hedged his bets by relaying sensitive information to both the Nixon and Humphrey camps.
¹¹
Realpolitik, indeed.

If politics was the art of the compromise, the art of the possible, the unlikely ticket of Reagan and Bush proved it. Both had to get over their mutual dislike and make possible a “team of rivals”—something many considered unlikely, if not impossible. Two years earlier Reagan had campaigned against Bush's son George W. in a Republican congressional primary in Texas, prompting
U.S. News & World Report
to write, “A Ronald Reagan–George Bush ticket for the Republicans in 1980? Party leaders who like the idea now say personal animosity between the two all but rules it out.”
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R
EAGAN WAS BORN IN
1911, only a few years after Teddy Roosevelt had used the presidential “bully pulpit” to exhort America. TR once said, “The only true conservative … sets his face toward the future.”
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