Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (20 page)

Outwardly, Sears projected an “it's all going according to plan” persona. His inner circle was panicking, though. According to Lake, the feeling was “We are up shit creek. What are we going to do?”
⁹
Many in Reagan's camp thought it was the end of the line for him.

Bush—for whom the word “competitive” never had to be explained—did not have time to sympathize with the Gipper. His campaign brochure boasted that “in contrast with” Reagan, Bush “has physical stamina.”
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In case anybody missed the less than subtle verbiage, Bush went to the YMCA in Concord, New Hampshire, and performed jumping jacks and push-ups for the benefit of the news media.
To be sure, the tall, lean Bush was an athletic man and an impressive physical specimen. He now flaunted those advantages and dared Reagan to take “the same [exercise] class next week.”
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The two men had small use for each other and the campaigns detested each other. Bush “considered Reagan a lightweight,” remembered David Keene, Bush's national political director who also had his own ax to grind against the Reagan campaign.
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There were just too many cultural, political, and ideological differences between the two combatants.
Time
journalist Larry Barrett later wrote, “Bush, like the patrician cousins he left behind in New England when he moved to Texas, regarded Reagan as a calcified yahoo, an ideologue unhealthy for the party and the country. When Bush's son George ran for Congress in west Texas in 1978, the conservatives already identified as part of the Reagan cadre savaged him as some kind of subversive. They did the same thing to the father in New England and the South during the 1980 primaries, using Bush's former membership on the Trilateral Commission as Exhibit A. Bush was justifiably bitter about it.”
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Barrett elaborated on Bush's antipathy toward the Right: “One night … he told a few of us, ‘I despise it. It's terrible the way I've been abused. You'd think the national press would have been more indignant over this sort of thing. It's—well, it's anti-intellectual, that's what it is. It's worse than the Birch stuff. And Reagan acquiesces—like he did when his people used it against my son George.’”
¹⁴
Bush was not one to let bygones be bygones. The Kennedys had little on the Bushes. The latter kept an unwritten “Enemies List” and checked it more than twice. Bush bitterly remembered years later how conservatives in his home state of Connecticut had attacked his father, Senator Prescott Bush.

He also resented having been passed over for the vice presidency three times in the space of three years—first by Richard Nixon in October 1973, after the resignation of Spiro Agnew; then by Gerald Ford in August 1974, when the new president opted for former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller; and most recently at the 1976 GOP convention, when Ford picked Bob Dole as more acceptable to the conservatives who dominated the convention. Reporter Jules Witcover, in his book about the 1976 campaign, wrote that Ford had passed over Bush because “everyone knowledgeable in Republican politics considered Bush incompetent to be president.”
¹⁵
The rebuke stung Bush. He'd seen Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter at close range, and he believed they had nothing he didn't have.

Bush had been snubbed again in 1977, when Carter did not keep him on as CIA director, even after he had briefed the Georgian on covert intelligence and
world affairs during the 1976 campaign and had heavily lobbied the incoming president to retain him as head spymaster. Bush loved the CIA; as director, he often signed his memos “Chief Spook.” The brass ring had repeatedly been dangled in front of him and then jerked back. It was enough to drive any man bonkers. Bush's quest for the White House seemed at times to be more about score settling and putting a capstone on his résumé than it was about bringing great ideas to the presidency.

G
EORGE
B
USH WASN'T THE
only one who attacked Reagan in Iowa. The January 5
Des Moines Register
debate took place before a live audience of 2,500 in the city's new Civic Center, was covered by more than 150 local and national reporters, and was broadcast live on PBS and tape-delayed for later broadcast on the CBS network. While Reagan was at his home in Pacific Palisades in sunny California, a thousand miles from the cold and mud of Iowa, the other six GOP aspirants pummeled the absentee Reagan throughout the course of the two-hour debate. Senator Dole said, “Ronald Reagan, wherever you are, I hope you're having fun.”
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Each candidate was asked individually where he differed with Reagan, and all did so with relish, especially John Connally. Fatuously, Connally said he had no idea where Reagan stood on the issues. He also said that they needed to do a few more debates to “smoke him out.”
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Charles Gibson, reporting for ABC, noted that “the only jabs were at Reagan.”
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All the candidates did well, save the one who didn't bother to show up. Everybody in Iowa now knew that Reagan had snubbed them.
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Dole and Bush were forced to sit next to each other in the setting, which did not make them happy, as they had nothing but contempt for each other. In character, during the debate, Dole needled Bush for losing a Senate race in Texas.

Fortunately, Dole was between Connally and Bush, which kept the two Texans from possibly coming to blows, as Bush and Connally detested each other even more than Bush and Dole did.

Before the debate, Bond, Bush's Iowa coordinator, had told the
Washington Post
that the debate “may hurt someone but I don't think it will help anyone very much.”
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Truer words were never spoken, and Reagan quickly found out how much he was hurt by not appearing. The
Los Angeles Times
took Reagan to task in an editorial, saying that “many should and will characterize his absence as a cowardly attempt to maintain a lead in the polls.”
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Reagan was steamed; he hated it when anyone challenged his manhood or his intelligence. Everybody was ripping into Reagan—David Yepsen at the
Des Moines Register
, Mike Glover at the Associated Press, all the local radio stations. “The media just went berserk,” Bond recalled. “Nobody defended him.”
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The day after the debate, while all the other candidates were squeezing as much campaigning into Iowa as possible, Reagan spent a single day in New Hampshire, whose primary was seven weeks off.

John Sears kept Reagan away from Iowa but arranged a three-day issues briefing for the candidate. The sessions, which started at 9
A.M.
and usually finished by mid-afternoon, featured some thirty policy advisers, who briefed Reagan on all matters of national policy, from economics to trade to armaments. Participants included Art Laffer and Jack Kemp on economics, and Ken Khachigian, who had recently come aboard as a consultant to help Reagan with agricultural issues. Kemp aide Dave Smick kept getting peppered with notes from Congressman David Stockman, who was in the lobby, trying to horn in on the briefings.
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Smick was appalled at how little respect Sears and some of the others showed for Reagan behind his back. He did, however, remember Sears saying that Reagan's political instincts were “phenomenal … and that will carry him through.”
²⁴

Reagan mostly listened during the briefings but sometimes asked questions. He came out of the meetings with stepped-up attacks on Carter. He began by urging the president to aid the “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan who were trying to dislodge the invading Soviet army.

On January 11, the
Des Moines Register
released a new poll showing that Reagan's support among GOP voters had plunged from 50 percent in December to 26 percent; Howard Baker went from 7 percent to 18 percent; Bush zoomed up from only 3 percent to 17 percent, just 9 points behind Reagan.
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But Sears still saw Connally as Reagan's main competitor, and he remained unconcerned about Iowa. He rationalized that with such a big and diverse field, no one could get Reagan into a one-on-one contest early. “If we win Iowa, New Hampshire, Massachusetts … we'll have eliminated everybody and it will be a two-man race.”
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Though he was mostly avoiding Iowa, Reagan did find time to go to New York to appear on Bill Buckley's TV debate program
Firing Line
.
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He also sat down with the
New York Times
for a long interview. The questions ranged far and wide—from SALT II to energy to the federal government's Alaska land grab, which had prevented millions of acres from being explored for natural resources—and Reagan answered each with great detail and knowledge. He argued forcefully for returning authority and power to the states, demonstrating his refined understanding of federalism and conservatism. He was asked, “Do you favor a tax cut in 1980?” and with blue eyes twinkling, Reagan responded, “I favor tax cuts any time.”
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Anybody who took the time to read the interview with Reagan would have discovered a cultured, thoughtful, and articulate conservative whose clarity of thinking had only been sharpened by his experiences and omnivorous reading.
Reagan's supporters griped that it was too bad this thinking man had not bothered to go to the Des Moines debate. Reagan's enemies were not about to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Bush, who had campaigned mainly by commercial travel for two years, traded up for a chartered Learjet that seated twenty and had a shower and, even more important, a bar. Leasing a private plane was a sure sign that a campaign was catching fire. His paid staff had grown to 215; most were in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, but 50 salaried staffers were toiling in Iowa. Each night, 300 volunteers and 60 paid locals worked the phones, calling Republicans in Iowa, exhorting them to support Ambassador Bush.
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Jim Wooten of ABC reported that the hardworking Bush had “fifty-seven stops scheduled in the next week.”
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On the other side of the aisle, Carter, like Reagan, had ducked the Des Moines debate, but it was to his benefit. Carter was smashing Kennedy, 57 percent to 25 percent, in surveys of Democrats in Iowa.
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Kennedy shifted tactics, telling reporters that unless Carter got 50 percent in Iowa, it would be a “major setback.” Reporters smirked behind their notepads at Teddy.

The less Carter campaigned, the more presidential he seemed and the more he went up in the polls. The less Reagan campaigned, the less courageous he seemed and the more he dropped. “Behaving almost as though he were an incumbent President,” a reporter noted, “the former California governor visited Iowa rarely.”
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But Reagan was not an incumbent president. Voters, derided by some of the unblinking lizards who called themselves “campaign consultants,” were a lot smarter than given credit for by these cold-blooded mercenaries. They clearly understood the important difference between holding the office and seeking the office. Carter was being rewarded for his “Rose Garden strategy” and Reagan was being punished for his.

Iowa's GOP voters were not mollified when Reagan made an abbreviated appearance in the state in mid-January. His Iowa tour did not go well. The media saw it as a panicky move, designed to stop his “severe erosion.”
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“One signal to emerge from all this,” reported John Laurence with ABC News, “is that Reagan seems to be slipping not only in the polls but in his ability to concentrate as well. Even with his notes he has been having difficulty putting complicated new issues into understandable language.”
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Reagan had also been to Florida and to South Carolina, to blunt the Connally effort there. One newspaper report said that he'd held “2,500 people spellbound” at an event in Florida.
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Unfortunately, none of these folks would be voting in the Iowa caucuses.

H
OWARD
B
AKER WAS UNDER
no illusions about his chances. He knew his organization paled when compared with Bush's. He managed expectations, telling reporters, “Right now Reagan and Bush are ahead of me and Bush may be ahead of Reagan.… I wouldn't be surprised at all to see George make a serious challenge of Gov. Reagan.”
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Baker's campaign was faltering, but he was a disciplined man. In getting ready for the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, Baker had lost twenty pounds in preparation through an unusual diet: “protein … and resuming smoking.”
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Third place in the expectations game was getting crowded. Baker, Connally, and Dole all claimed they would come in third, while predicting Bush would come in first. Bush testily threw off the premature crown, and Reagan, showing weakness, openly said he'd do better in a primary than a caucus.
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The sharks of the national media smelled blood in the water. They began using words like “senility” and “staleness” when describing Reagan.
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Reporters questioned Reagan's “stamina” and mockingly nicknamed his campaign plane the Ponce de Leon after the explorer who vainly searched for the fountain of youth. On the plane, Reagan would sometimes wander back to the press section to josh reporters that he was still awake or get on the intercom and announce a “four hour disco party when we land.”
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But they were more interested in cutting up Reagan than cutting a rug.