Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (22 page)

Kennedy had a bad habit of chewing his fingernails, and after all this he may have gnawed them down to the nub.

I
N MID
-J
ANUARY, LABOR LEADER
George Meany passed away at age eighty-five. He'd been a fixture in the American labor movement for more than twenty-five years. Though a liberal Democrat, he was a vociferous anti-Communist and he had been an admirer of Reagan, in part because he saw Reagan's appeal with the American working man and woman. Meany went to great lengths to keep Communist unions from joining the AFL-CIO over the years, and in 1975 he had ordered union members to refuse to load American grain headed for Russia. Meany was deservedly mourned by hundreds of thousands of patriotic Americans.
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W
INNING EARLY, THOUGH CERTAINLY
preferable to losing early, brought with it its own problems for George Bush. The night of the Iowa win, Bush blurted out, “We'll do even better there,” referring to New Hampshire.
⁸⁰
At a subsequent press conference, he could not contain his glee and said confidently that if he won New Hampshire, “there'll be absolutely no stopping me.”
⁸¹
The
Nashua Telegraph
upped the ante, running a wire story headlined “Bush Predicts N.H. Victory.”
⁸²
Jerry Carmen, Reagan's crafty director in the state, told the media that Bush “should get at least 50 percent in New Hampshire.”
⁸³

The Bush campaign had wisely bought a great deal of television time in Boston, aimed at New Hampshire, with the notion that if Bush did well in Iowa, he had better follow it up with a strong performance in the next contest. But Bush eschewed the notion of getting too specific on issues. The tagline to the commercials was “George Bush—a president we won't have to train.”
⁸⁴
Once again,
the focus was his résumé. He didn't have a story to motivate potential supporters, other than to say that he had “Big Mo,” the silly, vaguely preppy slang Bush had used for his “Big Momentum” since Iowa.

Someone who did have a vital story to tell his fellow citizens was Ronald Reagan—if only he and his campaign would decide to tell it. Reagan's conservative ideology had become more refined and less dogmatic, more reflective and less reflexive. The “new” Reagan had not changed his basic ideology, only how he presented it. The focus became the positive aspects of his conservative philosophy. Rather than talking about balanced budgets, he spoke of limitless opportunities. He spoke of new horizons for the American people. His eye was on the dawn and not the dusk. Rather than dwelling on the past, he offered hope for the future. Rather than just denouncing collectivism, he expounded on the merits of freedom. Rather than being “anti-abortion,” Reagan was “pro-life.” To a degree, Reagan's message was a reaction to Carter's politics of scarcity, but it was also indicative of Reagan's own intellectual maturation.

The effervescent Bush was in motion, directly challenging Reagan. The Gipper was always at his best when challenged.

A
FTER
R
EAGAN'S DISASTROUS LOSS
in Iowa, a young conservative activist received a call from Bob Heckman, founder of the Fund for a Conservative Majority (FCM). Heckman, who had worked for Citizens for Reagan in 1976, had started the political action committee three years earlier. He brought in John Gizzi, who would later become a longtime editor for
Human Events
, and another young conservative, Ralph Galliano, to help with the day-to-day activities. The three met with the young activist, who had knowledge of communications and New Hampshire politics, to discuss the faltering Reagan campaign.

It was quickly decided that Reagan desperately needed help. FCM had $750,000 on hand to assist Reagan. FCM hired the young conservative and he spent hours in a decrepit studio in the Georgetown section of Washington listening to tapes of Reagan's many speeches. Finally, thirty- and sixty-second radio spots were produced and he bought all the broadcast time available in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Illinois.

Checks were sent along with reel tapes. In 1980, radio time was relatively cheap and in a state like New Hampshire, where television was expensive, it was the medium of choice. FCM bought time adjacent to news, weather, sports, and the farm reports. Flyers and newspapers ads were also prepared. The group spent tens of thousands of dollars in the Granite State alone. As an independent federal committee, FCM faced no limits on how much it spent on pro-Reagan activity.
There is no way to quantify its impact, but there can be little doubt that FCM's independent expenditure helped at the Gipper's most desperate hour, as Reagan was reeling after Iowa, with his campaign in disarray and heavily in debt.

With Reagan's astonishing loss in Iowa, his enemies and opponents came at him with all guns blazing, focusing of course on Reagan's age. In a CBS poll, half opposed a president who would turn seventy while in office.
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A Carter official told reporters a joke that a farmer told him: “We wouldn't have these problems if Ronald Reagan were still alive.”
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A Carter factotum lamented to Lou Cannon that Carter campaign aides had thought they were going to face Reagan, but “now we are going to face Bush.”
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Others piled on, telling the media that Reagan had slowed down, he'd gotten markedly older, and his voice wasn't as strong. Bush's New Hampshire director, Hugh Gregg, stuck a big needle in, saying the issue wasn't “age,” it was “stamina.”
⁸⁸
A renewed debate ensued over whether Reagan took daily naps. Cannon said the age issue was starting to bother Reagan. “He got really down on himself for a while,” the scribe said.
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Sears was insisting to anyone who would listen that Reagan could snap back in New Hampshire, but Reaganites asked the obvious question: Why did Sears put Reagan in the position where he would be forced to “snap back” in the first place?
⁹⁰
In a postmortem, one Iowan complained that Reagan “doesn't seem to want to say anything. I remember when he could lift the roof right off this place. The old fire doesn't seem to be there now.”
⁹¹

Lyn Nofziger thought he knew the reason why. “They have him so intimidated, so convinced that he shouldn't speak out for what he believes that he's not Ronald Reagan.”
⁹²
Nofziger was right in part: Sears wasn't letting Reagan speak out. But he was wrong about something else: Ronald Reagan was never anything but Ronald Reagan.

Reagan had been here before. His 1976 campaign had begun tepidly and he lost the first five primaries. It was only after he tore up Sears's script and went after Gerald Ford on ideological grounds that he got back in the race and almost beat Ford for the nomination.

After Iowa, Reagan, the model of self-confidence, was filled with doubts. And anger, mostly at Sears. The campaign manager tried to tell Reagan he could not articulate his pro-life position. Patronizingly, Sears said, “That can be your private opinion, of course.” Reagan stormed, “Damn it … I am running for president of the United States! You're not! Got it?”
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The capstone bad metaphor for Reagan post-Iowa was that “Bobo” went AWOL.

Who was Bobo?
⁹⁴

Bobo was a battery-powered, cymbal-clanking toy monkey that was a mascot of Reagan's Secret Service detail. Each time the Reagan entourage landed somewhere, Bobo was turned on to shriek, bang his cymbals, and celebrate. When he went missing, well, everyone went “bananas.” The agents made T-shirts that read “Free Bobo.”
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They might have been better off if those T-shirts had read “Free Reagan.”

After the Iowa caucuses the GOP county chairman in Marshall, Sheryl Readout, tartly summed up the situation: “Reagan was thumbing his nose at Iowa. Iowa has done the same thing to him.”
⁹⁶

The question now was whether New Hampshire's Republicans would also thumb their noses at Reagan.

“
I just wish he wouldn't stand there and tell us he might drop dead.
”

“I
wouldn't say he … was overrated, maybe I've been underrated,” the new front-runner, George Bush, told reporters about his fading opponent as he raced across New Hampshire.
¹
Bush was talking as if Ronald Reagan's campaign was over, and many in fact thought it was. One wag said that Reagan had been called the “front-runner” so many times over the past three years, some might have thought it was his real first name. No more. Ladbrokes, the giant London bookmaking house, installed Bush as the odds-on favorite to win the GOP nomination at 5–1. Reagan was behind even John Connally, who was installed at 6–1. The Gipper was going off at 7–1.
²

Reagan was now running behind Bush by 16 percent in New Hampshire, according to Dick Wirthlin's polling, and his campaign staggered into the state—sans candidate.
³

The day after the Iowa caucuses, Bush was in Keene, New Hampshire, with a large complement of national media in tow, while Reagan was still in California, at his home in Pacific Palisades. Reagan held an abbreviated press conference, where he was described as “crestfallen.”
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Bush had appeared on all three network morning shows before jumping into his sleek Learjet and heading for the first primary in the nation. He had already stumped more than fifty days in the Granite State over the past year, while Reagan had barely set foot there in more than two years. Ebulliently, Bush told a crowd, “There's no stopping me!”
⁵
Smug Bush staffers produced buttons proclaiming “FBBI”: “For Bush Before Iowa.”
⁶

Reagan's campaign had no plans to get him into New Hampshire anytime soon, even with the primary just five weeks off. Almost everybody knew this
was tomfoolery. Reagan's loss in Iowa “calls for a massive change in strategy,” said Wyoming congressman Dick Cheney. “It makes New Hampshire critical. I don't think he can lose the first two and remain viable.”
⁷

Lyn Nofziger bluntly assessed the startling loss in Iowa. “He [Reagan] comes through to the voters as arrogant, rude to old friends. To get back [in the running] he's first got to eat a little humble pie.”
⁸

Reagan was doing anything but getting back in the running, as he defended his languid campaign style and restated his opposition to attending any “cattle shows” of GOP aspirants. On the days when Reagan was campaigning, often he didn't start until 11:30 in the morning. Mike Deaver talked hopefully of Reagan's supporters being shaken out of their complacency. Though both he and Nofziger had been thrown overboard, they were still rooting for the Gipper.

Yet this did not stop Nofziger from calling Dave Keene in the Bush camp the night of the Iowa caucuses and telling him, “Thank you for one of the most enjoyable evenings of my entire life.”
⁹
Nofziger was mainlining schadenfreude, delighted at his enemy John Sears's growing discomfiture. For several days following the caucuses, Reagan had difficulty getting Sears on the phone, as he was holed up in a hotel room, brooding.

Howard Baker had come in a poor third in Iowa, and Bob Dole, John Anderson, and Phil Crane were being winnowed out. The race was quickly becoming a two-man contest. The scenario Reagan's opponents wanted—to emphasize Reagan's age, stop any thought of inevitability, and get him into a one-on-one contest—had come true for Bush. But Reagan and Sears could not even agree on this simple point. Sears was saying publicly it was a two-man race and Reagan was more wisely saying the other candidates were still “viable.”
¹⁰

Bush's campaign had exceeded even its greatest expectations. The goal of Bush advisers had been simply to come close to Reagan in Iowa, but they never imagined they would actually defeat him. In doing so, Bush accelerated the demise of all the others, save Connally, who was now basing his campaign on a last-ditch “stop Reagan” effort in the upcoming South Carolina primary. Reagan's campaign knew that sooner or later it would boil down to two men, but as George Will aptly put it, “Not even in their worst nightmares did they dream that it would begin the day after Iowa.”
¹¹
Giddily, Bush told a press conference that if he won the New Hampshire primary, Reagan's campaign would “unravel and unravel fast.”
¹²

Reagan's own supporters were mentioning his age, unprompted, in Wirthlin's polling. Some people frankly admitted to the media that the only reason they turned out at his speeches was that they were curious to see how he looked and handled himself. It didn't help that Reagan would turn sixty-nine on February 6.
The campaign, however, did not try to downplay the event, fearing that doing so would only make a bigger issue of Reagan's age. Instead, at the suggestion of a devoted Reagan aide, Lorelei Kinder, the campaign planned a very public celebration—a big fundraising party in Los Angeles with old friends Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. Reagan quipped about birthdays, “They're OK—especially when you consider the alternative.”
¹³
The campaign raised a much-needed $90,000 at the party.

But the campaign's problems were real—so real that Reagan convened an emergency meeting of his high command in Chicago. There, Nancy Reagan—once described as a “Metternich in Adolfo dresses”
¹⁴
—sternly pulled his advisers aside and demanded to know what had happened.
¹⁵
Before the strategy session, the plan had been for Reagan to visit New Hampshire for a half day the week following Iowa, and then to conduct an abbreviated four-day tour of other primary states before going back to Los Angeles. Incredibly, at this meeting the campaign altered nothing about the plan.