Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (21 page)

Reagan was telling reporters he was “very cautiously optimistic” about the outcome in Iowa—this was a long way from the arrogance of his team just several weeks before.
⁴¹
It was a bad time.

Two days before January 21, the Reagan campaign hit upon the bright idea that Reagan should return to his old radio station, WHO, for an appearance. WHO was no mom-and-pop operation; it was a clear-channel, 50,000-watt station. Trouble was, Reagan called in from New York, which got things off on the wrong foot. He called in fifteen minutes late, which made things even worse. Reagan had expected a softball interview with the morning hostess, Susan Bray, but she hurled one beanball after another at the candidate. “Why haven't you campaigned more in Iowa? Why didn't you come to the Iowa Republican debate? Why are you acting as a recluse? Are you trying to conserve your strength?”
⁴²

If that weren't enough, one Iowan called in and said to Reagan, “You don't sound like a young man.” For the fifteen minutes Reagan was missing, listeners were treated to commercials for George Bush (“We're going all the way,” cried Bush in the spot) and Bob Dole. During Reagan's disastrous interview, an ad ran for a magazine with articles on restoring “potency to men whose sex lives are over” along with “ten ways to grow healthier as you grow older.” The
embarrassing show brought gales of laughter to the headquarters of other GOP candidates.
⁴³

Listening to the unmitigated failure, a Reagan aide shook his head and muttered the old conservative joke, “It's a Communist plot.”
⁴⁴

There was a small bright spot in his January schedule when Reagan spoke to a group of high school students in New Hampshire. He received two standing ovations from the kids. Sixteen-year-old Tommy Duprey was not deterred by the fact that he couldn't vote, saying, “We're going to be 18 in two years and if he's president, we can re-elect him.”
⁴⁵

I
N A TESTAMENT TO
the media's new regard for Bush, he was invited to appear on CBS's
Face the Nation
the day before the caucuses. Bush wisely refused to predict how Reagan would do in Iowa. He did tell the national audience, “But he's got to be stopped by me and he's got to be stopped before Illinois.”
⁴⁶
He was again talking more like a campaign manager than a presidential candidate. Bush missed his opportunity in the spotlight to talk about what he later derisively referred to as the “vision thing.” Indeed, he lamented to a reporter that voters didn't know about “all these fantastic credentials” he had on his résumé.
⁴⁷

Bush's operatives were telling reporters half-jokingly that a blizzard on Monday was what they needed, in order to keep Reagan's soft support at home. Bush was frenetically campaigning; he attended fifty-four events in the month of January alone.
⁴⁸
Connally decided to make a last-minute effort, spending more than $150,000 on television ads trying to catch up to Bush and Reagan.
⁴⁹
Big John was now actually deigning to meet the little people of Iowa. Bob Dole spoke “midwestern” better than anyone else in the campaign, but dogs just didn't go for this dog food. More embarrassing for Connally, on the eve of the caucuses he was also hit with lawsuits charging that he had stiffed campaign vendors for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
⁵⁰

O
N THE
D
EMOCRATIC SIDE
, Ted Kennedy was jetting hither and yon, making a last-minute bid in Iowa. His wife, Joan, accompanied him. She got good reviews for her poise and a good laugh when she asked a group to vote “for the future of the country and for the future of Teddy.” She gracefully defended her husband's behavior at Chappaquiddick.
⁵¹

One of Kennedy's top lieutenants, Pat Lucey, the former governor of Wisconsin and until recently Carter's ambassador to Mexico, did his best to bring order to the stumbling campaign. Lucey was a Kennedy man through and through. He'd helped JFK in his crucial win in the Wisconsin primary in 1960 and had become
close to the family. Still, he raised eyebrows when he abruptly left his diplomatic post in late 1979 to join Teddy's effort. Lucey's longtime political fixer, Paul Corbin, was small in stature but had often been at the center of big problems in American politics. Corbin had worked with Lucey in Wisconsin and caught Bobby Kennedy's attention, becoming the attorney general's political eyes and ears. Corbin now was naturally working on the campaign of RFK's younger brother.

Jerry Brown was campaigning in Iowa, but politicos considered his candidacy a punch line at this point. All the while Carter sat serenely above the fray, “acting presidential.” The economy was in the toilet, the Soviets had overrun Afghanistan and were threatening the West in other arenas, Americans were being held hostage by a crazed religious fanatic in Iran, inflation was high, unemployment was high, gas prices were high, gold was at more than $500 per ounce, and American morale had bottomed out.
⁵²
Carter had a nearly 60 percent approval rating. Go figure.
⁵³

B
EGINNING AT 8 O'CLOCK
on the windswept, wintry night of January 21, Iowa Republicans turned out in 2,531 precinct caucuses, which took place in churches, schools, bars, and living rooms, to begin the process of picking delegates to county conventions. Who in turn would pick delegates to go to congressional district conventions. Who in turn would pick delegates to go to the state convention. Who in turn would pick thirty-seven delegates to go to the national GOP convention. There was also a nonbinding straw poll, and it was on this that everybody's attention was focused.

Reagan had made radio commercials encouraging a big turnout. There was a big turnout—indeed a record turnout. Steve Roberts, the state GOP chairman, had thought that about 55,000 Republicans would show up. He was off by only 51,000. This rush of caucus voters ironically did Reagan in.
⁵⁴

The night of the caucuses, while Bush was squeezing the last bit of media coverage out of his foray into the Hawkeye State, Reagan was in Los Angeles, at home having dinner with friends and then watching a private screening of the new movie
Kramer vs. Kramer
.
⁵⁵
The movie was about an ugly divorce and many saw it as a metaphor for the state of the Reagan-Sears marriage.

Sears called the Reagans that night to tell them the stunning news that Bush had won the caucuses. “They took it not well,” he later said.
⁵⁶
Reporter Lou Cannon said that the Reagans were “shattered” by the loss in Iowa.
⁵⁷
Sears also called syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan and complained that Reagan had been using the same stump speech for the past year, even though the Gipper had barely been out in that time.
⁵⁸

Bush had not only upset Reagan but had left all the other Republican candidates in the dust. Howard Baker won the fight for third place with about 15 percent of the vote. Poor Bob Dole brought up the rear with a humiliating 1.5 percent.
⁵⁹

All three networks broadcast live coverage of the Iowa caucuses and Bush was seen all across the nation, with a slightly dazed look, in a room full of shrieking kids who looked as if they had just stepped out of a J. Press catalogue. One reporter said Bush “acted like a Yale undergraduate after the Elis had beaten Harvard.”
⁶⁰

Sadly for Rich Bond, he could not celebrate the victory in which he'd invested a year of his life and for which he was most responsible. Jeb Bush recalled, “I was trying to find him to congratulate him and he was behind a screen in this … hotel reception room and he had just found out that his wife had a miscarriage that night.” Bond told no one except his friend Jeb. Behind the stage, they embraced, Bond quietly weeping.
⁶¹

Barbara Bush found out and the next morning was the first to call Bond and his wife, Valerie, at the hospital where she was recovering. Jim Baker later had the campaign pay for the Bonds to spend a week in St. Thomas.
⁶²

T
HE MORNING OF
J
ANUARY
22, headlines across the country trumpeted Bush's “stunning” defeat of Reagan in Iowa. It was a genuine upset and people everywhere were bowled over that Reagan had lost. Tom Pettit of ABC said on national television the night of the caucuses, “We have just witnessed the political funeral of Ronald Reagan.”
⁶³

Some Reaganites desperately claimed that Reagan really had not lost. They charged that because Bush's operatives controlled the GOP state party apparatus, they had simply stopped counting when Bush pulled ahead. A claimed computer malfunction made Reagan's supporters even more suspicious as the balloting resumed with a hand count. The “final” tally as announced by Steve Roberts, who if not a Bush supporter was certainly a cheerleader, was 33,530 for Bush and 31,348 for Reagan. When pressed, Roberts conceded that only 94 percent of the total vote had been counted. He claimed that the rest had never been phoned in or had been lost. He then halfheartedly said that maybe some would show up “in the mail.”
⁶⁴

William Loeb of the
Manchester Union-Leader
said Bush's win in Iowa had “all the smell of a CIA covert operation.”
⁶⁵
If only the CIA were that competent. Marty Plissner, political director at CBS, thought the numbers that had been reported in for Bush from some precincts looked “funny.”
⁶⁶
Asked years later whether he knew anything about the missing Reagan votes in Iowa, Rich Bond simply rolled his eyes.
⁶⁷

Former Reagan aide Stu Spencer had been right when he told reporters that no one was going to beat Reagan for the nomination except Reagan himself.
⁶⁸
Reagan had beaten himself in Iowa, and now it looked as if he may have lost his third and last chance to win the GOP nomination and the presidency.

Reagan and Sears tried to downplay the loss despite the fact that Reagan had spent more than $400,000 in Iowa.
⁶⁹
Sears called the caucuses “essentially an organizational exercise,” but that was an indictment of his own stewardship of the campaign.
⁷⁰
Why didn't Reagan put together his own “organizational exercise”?

The day after the caucuses, Reagan bizarrely told reporters that losing in Iowa helped him because “I told you once before, I didn't like being a front-runner.”
⁷¹
Reagan complained that his speech the Saturday before the voting, televised statewide, had been poorly promoted. He also told reporters there would be no change in strategy and no “heavying up” of his schedule in New Hampshire, a little less than five weeks away.

Sure enough, after only a minor campaign swing, Reagan returned home on Friday for some unnecessary “R and R.” The wheels were coming off the Reagan for President campaign. Sears and his team had been overconfident for months, and now the Gipper was paying a heavy price. “The sons of bitches are dividing up the spoils and they haven't even won a primary yet,” a GOP official had noted back in November about Reagan's team.
⁷²

Bush didn't waste a moment. He was winging his way to New Hampshire. Reagan forlornly said, “George has the momentum now.”
⁷³

W
HILE ONETIME
R
EPUBLICAN FRONT-RUNNER
Ronald Reagan was narrowly edged out in Iowa, onetime Democratic front-runner Ted Kennedy was routed. Jimmy Carter defeated him by 59–31 percent.
⁷⁴
The embarrassing image of Carter the loser had been banished. Thirty days earlier, they'd been tied at 40 percent apiece in a Des Moines Register poll.
⁷⁵
Kennedy's campaign was in complete disarray. It was the worst loss ever inflicted upon a member of America's political dynasty. Teddy and the Kennedy family were humiliated.

At a particularly bad time for Kennedy, both
Reader's Digest
and the
Washington Star
ran exhaustive stories that undermined two central theses of Kennedy's story about the night of the accident at Chappaquiddick. Kennedy had always contended that strong currents nearly swept him out to sea and it was this and his exhaustion at fighting the current which prevented him from saving Mary Jo Kopechne. But the
Star
reviewed tide and weather charts for that night and reported that in fact the tide was running in—slowly. The
Digest
reported that Kennedy was driving much faster than he'd previously stated.
⁷⁶

Kennedy and his staff attacked the two articles, but never said out-and-out that they were untrue. Joe Kopechne, Mary Jo's father, broke his eleven-year silence and took Teddy to task for lying.
⁷⁷
Kennedy's campaign was forced to devote the first five minutes of a half-hour televised commercial to featuring him saying he did not cause the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.

Kennedy's campaign finances were in an even greater shambles than the rest of his campaign. In a short amount of time he had raised and frittered away $4 million, and he had less than $200,000 on hand as he limped into New Hampshire.
⁷⁸
Campaign workers in the Granite State were notified that they could very well be going off the payroll. But no one was ready to give up on Teddy now, not after the seven-day-a-week, eighteen-hour-a-day investment they'd made. Nevertheless, already there were calls for Kennedy to get out, including by many of the union officials for whom he'd hauled water for years.