Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (24 page)

Everybody was now thoroughly confused. Ironically, Reagan said, “We need to send the Soviet Union an unmistakable signal, one that they can understand.”
³⁹
Unfortunately, Reagan wasn't even sending his own supporters a message they could understand.

Yet another precious day trying to get back on the offense was lost. The defensive posture was especially frustrating to Reaganites given that Carter had told a group of reporters, absurdly, that the Soviets posed no military threat to the Caribbean—this despite the fact that the Soviets had been aiding Cuba for years and had begun funding the Communist government of Nicaragua. Carter had further said that he would not promise to use the U.S. military to defend the Caribbean if the Kremlin did have designs on it. Reagan called Carter's comments “incredible,” but the story was lost in his own controversy.
⁴⁰

R
EAGAN GOT A LITTLE
good news—the first in weeks—when he took six of twelve of the initial delegates selected in Arkansas, even though he had not campaigned there. Howard Baker took four Arkansas delegates. Bush surprisingly got only one delegate despite having committed serious resources to Arkansas. His aides had confidently predicted that their man would do well. It was their first real tactical mistake in an otherwise error-free campaign. Bush petulantly complained to UPI, “It's obvious to me that the Reagan and Baker people sided up against me.”
⁴¹

One delegate of the twelve remained uncommitted. This meant that John Connally had been skunked in Arkansas, even after he had spent thousands there to fete party officials. He went through yet another campaign shake-up, as manager
Eddie Mahe was kicked upstairs to handle “policy and strategy.” If Connally had listened to Mahe from the beginning, he might have been in better shape.

Reagan's campaign moved ahead, albeit in a desultory fashion. He made a three-day swing that ended up in Minneapolis, but not once in that time did he emerge from his cloistered compartment in the front of the plane to meet the press. His flight out of Minnesota was delayed because of weather and Reagan finally came out of seclusion, but only to stand off in the corner of the airport and talk with some starry-eyed young staffers about Hollywood, being a lifeguard, and growing up in the Midwest. As the “gentlemen of the press” headed for the bar, Reagan instead reenacted a scene from an old movie to the delight of the young Reaganites. “Mouth twisted into a grotesque half-grin, eyes out of focus, he lurched forward, slurring his words as if drunk,” one reporter recounted.
⁴²

A long piece in the
Los Angeles Times
was filled with wistful observations about Reagan and his faltering effort—as if his campaign were all over. The feeling of excitement in a presidential campaign, the
Times
reporter wrote, “does not last.… At least, not on the Reagan campaign trail.”
⁴³
The Gipper's campaign was spiraling down, as was his battered mood. In Florida, Reagan dejectedly told a crowd, “Way down deep inside me … I believe one of my advantages is that I'm not running for reelection … to hell whether there's a second term.”
⁴⁴
The room was filled with embarrassed silence.

One saddened supporter at the event said, “I just wish he wouldn't stand there and tell us he might drop dead.”
⁴⁵

The bastards had finally gotten to Reagan.

Even he now seemed resigned to the prospects of his advancing years. He'd publicly laughed the issue off, tossed off jokes, released medical reports, and looked and acted to all like a man years younger. But his enemies wouldn't let it go, chewing on Reagan's age like a mongrel dog on a soup bone. “Reagan dyes his hair,” “Reagan uses makeup,” “Reagan had a facelift” (curious because his enemies also went out of their way to point out his wrinkles), “Reagan is hard of hearing”—all the lies and mean-spirited venom, emanating from his own party, had undermined the Gipper.

The corrupt bargain between some in the media and Republican Reagan-haters had finally taken its toll. The whispering that had started two years earlier in the highest echelons of the Republican Party—over lunches, drinks, golf, tennis, and squash at their country clubs—was that the only way to stop Reagan was to destroy Reagan. They could not destroy Reagan's ideas or character but they could destroy Reagan the man. Bush aide Dave Keene, referring to the Gipper, brusquely told
Time
magazine, “He is a great old dog, but he won't hunt this year.”
⁴⁶

Reagan's enemies had tried the “he's too conservative” gambit but it hadn't taken hold. They had tried the “lightweight actor” bit but that hadn't worked either. In both cases, Reagan could not be typecast, because what people saw and heard from Reagan did not match the charges they heard from the GOP establishment. This was no “Bircher.” This was not a “dangerous” man. Listening to those speeches and commentaries, and reading those columns, they recognized a man who quoted Alexander Hamilton, Cicero, Churchill, and Thomas Paine. This was no lightweight. This was a scholarly, thoughtful, and solicitous man.

But his age—ah, now there was the opening for the Washington insiders to obliterate Reagan once and for all.

Going after Reagan's age—especially since Sears had pulled Reagan back from any real campaigning over the past year—played right into their rumor-mongering game. “See, Reagan is back at the ranch, relaxing,” they would say. “If Reagan were still alive …,” they'd say to sniggers and titters. “Reagan skipped all the debates because they were past his bedtime.” “Reagan doesn't jog like Bush.” “Reagan is lazy.” The slurs and innuendos took hold, like a virus, in the media and in Republican circles throughout 1979 and into 1980.

The Reagan campaign's poor organization and failures to prepare the candidate properly fed the ugly talk. As the
L.A. Times
noted, Sears and other Reagan advisers had been accused of “deliberately shielding their candidate from close public scrutiny for fear, as one reporter put it, ‘that he'll stick his foot in his mouth with some outrageous remark, probably about foreign policy, and scare people half to death.’”
⁴⁷
But Sears wasn't being overprotective of Reagan now; having gone AWOL after Iowa, he was being under protective. On a rare campaign appearance in New Hampshire, Reagan was stressing foreign policy and was embarrassed to be caught flatfooted when reporters asked him about an important development in the Iranian hostage crisis. No one in his campaign had bothered to tell him that the Canadian government had secreted six Americans out of Tehran.
⁴⁸

Sears, the venerable poker player, had had his pants taken off by the whist-playing Republicans and he didn't even know it. The campaign was out of money, out of morale, and out of steam because Reagan had been counseled to go against his own instincts by people who professed to know more about the American people and politics than he did. Reagan—who had crisscrossed the length and breadth of America for more than thirty years, who had spoken to millions and had met tens of thousands, who treated even the most common dirt farmer as if he were royalty—was listening to people whose view of America rarely extended beyond a barstool in Washington, D.C.

Reagan had suffered many indignities in his career—he had endured lies, gone though a divorce he didn't want, lost much of his movie career to World War II, lost his General Electric career to politics, lost the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 and 1976—but this was the worst it had ever been for him. The nomination had been within his grasp, and it was now slipping through his fingers. Washington insiders were proclaiming Reagan to be the William Jennings Bryan of the GOP, just another three-time loser. The country-clubbers of the GOP made fun of Reagan's movie career. Clinking wine glasses, they were toasting, “Bedtime for Bonzo and Reagan!”

David Prosperi, one of Reagan's young aides, suggested that at a campaign stop, a local band not play “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” but instead play the Bee Gees song “Stayin' Alive.”
⁴⁹
Black humor was running rampant in Reagan's waning operation.

All that was left was for Reagan to go through one more humiliating episode in New Hampshire, and then pack his bags and go back to his ranch in Santa Barbara.

Ronald Reagan was on the brink of political oblivion.

N
EW
H
AMPSHIRE WAS AN
anomaly among New England states. Far more conservative, libertarian, quirky, and blue-collared than their neighbors, New Hampshirites generally had more affinity for the Reagan model than for the Bush model. But Bush had been ceaselessly campaigning in the state, sending notes, going hither and yon, while Reagan had been absent, it seemed, for years. The “asterisk” of American politics was on the verge of vanquishing the leader of American conservatism.

A new Boston Globe poll had Bush's lead in New Hampshire growing over Reagan, 45 to 36 percent.
⁵⁰
Reagan had fallen well below the 49 percent he'd taken in 1976.
⁵¹
Dick Wirthlin's polling in New Hampshire had it even worse for Reagan. According to Carmen, Reagan had fallen 21 points behind Bush.
⁵²
Bush's polling in August 1979 had shown Reagan with a commanding 53 percent of the primary field. That was all gone now.
⁵³

Bush moved in for the kill. At a town hall meeting in Lebanon, New Hampshire, a man in the audience asked, “Do you think 69 years old is too old to be president of the United States?” Bush cleverly answered, “Let the voters make that determination,” and then dropped his anvil on Reagan, saying, “I am fit. I feel 35. I am 55.”
⁵⁴

Reporters on the campaign plane got into a competition to see who could make the most vicious jokes at Reagan's expense.
⁵⁵
One said Reagan's brain would be the most valuable for a transplant because it had never been used. When Reagan
was tardy one morning, a network reporter got approving laughter by saying, “They're still rubbing life into his legs.” Among themselves, they wondered which other campaign they would be assigned to cover once Reagan was driven out of the race.
⁵⁶

Reagan was sinking not only in New Hampshire but across the country. Just weeks earlier he had held a lead of 26 points over Bush among Republicans nationwide, but now an ABC News–Harris poll showed Reagan and Bush tied at 27 percent apiece.
⁵⁷
Bush was handily ahead among moderate and liberal Republicans. Reagan led among conservative Republicans by only a 5–3 ratio.
⁵⁸

Worse for Reagan, Bush was ahead by 10 points in the East. Sears had obsessed about the East for Reagan since 1976, but it had come to naught.
⁵⁹
And now the primaries in Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts were looming soon after the New Hampshire vote. Each of these states was believed to be more hospitable to the moderate Bush, a former New Englander, than the conservative Reagan, a westerner. “With his shaggy good looks, Yale diploma and Ivy League wardrobe that give him the aura of an aging preppie,” the
Nashua Telegraph
noted, “Bush feels at home in New England.”
⁶⁰

Where Reagan was once confident of sweeping the southern GOP primaries, he was now talking guardedly about his chances there, saying, “I'm sure going to try.”
⁶¹
Bush's pollster, Bob Teeter, ran the numbers in Florida and his man had vaulted to a 4-point lead there over Reagan, 35–31 percent, in the span of just a few days.
⁶²
Among those Sunshine State Republicans who expressed a second choice, Bush was even stronger, while Reagan's support was soft. “This confirms Bush can increase his vote further in Florida,” Teeter wrote. Potentially, Bush could defeat Reagan in Florida by a 2–1 margin, according to Teeter.
⁶³

It looked to everybody like it was all over but the shouting.

Reagan's campaign had collapsed.

“
Reagan is a loser.
”

R
onald Reagan finally got angry.

Reagan was always at his best, most resolute, and toughest when he was angry. He hated losing. Losing Iowa, losing his national issues to the other candidates, and losing his old aides were more than he could stand. The lies and personal attacks by his political enemies only sharpened his anger. Hugh Gregg, Bush's New Hampshire coordinator, said, “I'll tell you, when Reagan gets tired, he's no good.”
¹

The ridicule from some in the media was also contributing to Reagan's wrath. Political columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover described their poker buddy John Sears, the presumed puppet master, as “the man whose lips move when Ronald Reagan talks.”
²

Reagan furiously put his foot down. He impatiently told Sears that he would “campaign the way I like to campaign.” That meant going to every corner of New Hampshire and not leaving the weekend before the vote, as he'd done in 1976.
³
It also meant speaking his mind and articulating his concerns to the American people, especially on the Soviet threat.

The Californian unveiled the “Reagan Doctrine,” which was a complete refutation of the bipartisan Cold War containment and détente policies embraced by the intellectual classes of the previous four decades.
⁴
The Soviets were marching across the globe, with the acquiescence of much of the West. “Not so fast,” said Reagan. His approach was, in essence, “What's ours is ours and what's yours is negotiable. Let's debate your ill-gotten territories.” The elites hated it but the American people loved it. Reagan had found his voice.