Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (44 page)

But the man had a set of brass ones. He brought sorely needed order and discipline to the Reagan campaign. He fired more than one hundred staffers, while others stayed without pay. Ed Meese said that Casey was “intelligent, exceptionally decisive, and easy to get along with.”
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But he was not always easy to understand. Reagan, Dick Allen, and Meese met Casey one day in the Midwest. After the meeting, in which Casey spoke in his trademark mumble, Reagan turned to Meese and said, “What the hell did he just say?”
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Some thought the mumbling was an act to get people to pay attention. The media missed their old friend John Sears, but there was a new sheriff in town and they might as well get used to it.

N
EW
Y
ORK AND
C
ONNECTICUT
would hold their primaries on the same day, March 25, a week after the Illinois contest. Up for grabs were a total of nearly 150 GOP delegates.

Bush was trying to pick up the pieces of his once-promising campaign, and Connecticut was a great place to start. The state was Bush country. He'd grown up there, and his father, Prescott, had once been a U.S. senator from Connecticut.

Newspapers used words like “shattering” and “crippling” to describe Bush's flagging effort.
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After the devastating loss in Illinois, one aide at Bush headquarters had grumbled, “It's over. It's all over.”
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Others had wept. Days before the Illinois primary, Bush was already bracing for a loss; he wanly told one crowd, “Nobody said it would be easy. Nobody was right.”
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But now Bush was back in his old stomping grounds, where he was warmly welcomed. He devoted six days of frenetic campaigning to the state, delivering speeches going after Carter and the scandals of the Democratic Party while touting his own tax-cut plan. He told reporters, “I'm not as far over on one side as Reagan is, and I'm certainly not as far over on the other side as John Anderson.”
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Bush was trying for a second introduction, this one centered on policy, not the “Big Mo.” He went so far as to say, “I'm the new guy that's talking only about
issues, not polls.”
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Bush realized too late that Jim Baker and other staffers had been right when they urged him to make that switch after Iowa.

Bush's chairman in Connecticut, Malcolm Baldridge, worked the state hard. He had an army of three thousand volunteers and coordinators in 150 towns and villages. Bush also had phone operations in six cities, attempting to call all 400,000 of Connecticut's Republicans.
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Reagan was under no illusions about his chances in Connecticut. The state had not held a primary four years earlier, but Reagan had been skunked at the Republican state convention that had been held instead. Now he was facing one of Connecticut's own. Reagan told reporters it was George Bush's “backyard.”
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Of course, he was inflating expectations for Bush. Reagan had some first-rate operatives in Connecticut, including state senator Nancy Johnson and former state Republican chairman Fred Biebel, and his campaign had assembled an impressive list of three hundred supporters that included many Italians and Roman Catholics, not to mention Andy Robustelli, the great former New York Giants football player.
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At the very least the Reagan campaign hoped to take a few delegates in the state.

Reagan went to Connecticut, a shot across Bush's bow. He boarded the 7:11
A.M.
commuter train in New Haven and rode along with the rest of the straphangers. It was a good media event for Reagan, especially because he took the train all the way into New York, where he was not at such a disadvantage compared with Bush. When he arrived at Grand Central Station just before 9
A.M.
he was met by a small but enthusiastic crowd.
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One rail user yelled out, “Win one for the Gipper!”
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Reagan smiled and later went to the New York Stock Exchange, where he received a “tumultuous welcome on the trading floor,” according to Peter Hannaford, who had accompanied him on the swing.
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Reagan was in better shape for New York's delegate-selection primary, at least as compared with 1976, thanks to longtime conservative operatives George Clark of Brooklyn and Roger Stone, Reagan's Northeast co-coordinator. Clark and Stone worked well together, despite the fact that Clark was as stable and low-key as Stone was colorful and controversial. Stone, though only twenty-nine, had seen a world of politics in his short life, including performing some junior-varsity dirty tricks for Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (“CREEP”) eight years earlier.

Like Illinois, New York then held a “blind” primary, in which delegates remained undeclared. Many of Bush's delegate slates had been disqualified in the Empire State, thanks to Clark and Stone's challenges, so Reagan delegates would run unopposed in five congressional districts. The Gipper and Bush would go
head-to-head in another eighteen districts, while uncommitted slates were running in the remaining sixteen districts. Reagan was sure to add to his overall delegate lead, and his campaign hoped to take as many as 62 of New York's 123 delegates. The Reagan campaign passed out flyers and ran newspaper ads telling GOP primary voters who the Reagan delegates were. Also, a Reagan man of long standing, State Senator Fred Eckert of Rochester, declared himself no longer “uncommitted,” though no one ever thought he was anything but.

Stone, like his counterparts in other states for Reagan, operated with an enhanced autonomy after the departure of Charlie Black and the arrival of Casey. Black knew politics as well as any man alive in 1980. Casey had far less experience and thus was forced to depend on the regional and state political directors assembled by Black. Not only were they skilled in organization and media, they were all dedicated conservatives who had come of age starting in 1964, with the rise of Barry Goldwater.

Reagan took his campaign to upstate New York. In Syracuse, reporters confronted him with a letter signed by a small coterie of Californians critical of his claims over cutting spending there while serving as governor. Reagan, quite out of character, wondered aloud about the “obscene phone calls” one of the signers had apparently been charged with, but the candidate, ashamed, quickly caught himself, saying it was a “dirty trick” to have brought up the matter.
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Nancy Reynolds, an old friend, said that in all the years she had known him, she had “never heard him say a mean, unkind, vengeful word about anybody.” She did say he would get mad, but it would pass in a moment.
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L
IKE
B
USH
, T
ED
K
ENNEDY
was desperate to turn his campaign around in Connecticut and New York. Kennedy's ground forces in Connecticut had in fact organized very well for their beleaguered candidate. And despite Kennedy's awful performances thus far, the primary season was still young. It had been less than a month since New Hampshire and only a little over two months since Iowa. Two dozen primaries lay ahead over the next three months, culminating in no less than eight state primaries on June 3—including New Jersey, Ohio, West Virginia, Montana, and California—the “big enchilada,” as Reagan was wont to refer to it.

But by now almost no one thought Kennedy would last until June. To the boys on the bus, the Kennedy operation was a running joke. It became the theater of the absurd when he attended a press conference with five black leaders from Harlem who spent forty minutes in a mutual admiration society while never once mentioning or endorsing Kennedy, which had been the purpose of the event. Kennedy's plane was then forced to wait on the ground in New York while Air
Force Two, with Vice President Mondale aboard, was given priority. Kennedy finally landed in a torrential rainstorm in Syracuse, where he was supposed to receive the endorsement of the local congressman, Jim Hanley. In front of the media, Hanley stammered and spluttered. When an exasperated reporter yelled out asking whether he was endorsing Kennedy, Hanley replied that he would have to keep that vital information “private.” Everybody roared with laughter, including Kennedy, who put his arm around the befuddled congressman and said, “You can tell these guys, Jim, they won't tell anybody.”
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During a harrowing leg of the trip, reporters broke out kazoos and played the theme to
The High and the Mighty
, a movie starring John Wayne about an airplane that almost crashed. Kennedy's sleek jet, Air Malaise,
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had long since been grounded because of the cost, so his campaign had chartered a twin-engine old-timer from a regional airline, Air New England, nicknamed “Scare New England” by its terrified customers. The airline had a history of losing luggage—at five thousand feet, with suitcases landing in potato patches in Maine—and of losing propellers while in flight. The star-crossed airline would go out of business in 1981.

Kennedy moved on as best he could. He told reporters in Rochester that even if Carter got enough delegates for a first-ballot nomination, he still wouldn't drop out of the race. With polls putting him behind Carter in New York by a 2–1 margin, more and more prominent Democrats were urging Kennedy to call it a day.
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John White, the respected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, admonished Kennedy and those liberals who said he should not get out, calling them the “masochist fringe of politics.”
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The prolonged fight, White knew, was not going to be helpful to the party in the fall. Carter had pulled way out in front of Kennedy, with 615 committed delegates to Kennedy's 192.
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Kennedy was a young man selling old wares. The country was moving dramatically to the right. He'd been on the national scene for twenty years and was trapped in a time warp. He favored wage and price controls, though they had failed miserably under Nixon; he favored more government programs, though Americans now believed that government was the problem and not the solution and that Washington was mostly corrupt. He favored social activism and massive redistribution of wealth. When Chappaquiddick was added to the mix, it was just too much for too many Democrats.

He was undeterred. Teddy ran his staff ragged, turning in one sixteen-hour day after another. The only time he showed the wear and tear of the campaign was each evening, when a whirlpool machine was placed in his hotel room so Kennedy could treat his bad back.

Kennedy's campaign showed its first sign of life in weeks when a New York Times/CBS News poll indicated that he had actually gained on Carter nationally. Kennedy was still miles behind, of course, but Carter's national approval numbers, from Iran to the economy, continued to plummet. Carter's dive was the biggest one-month drop in the history of the poll. His approval rating had gone down 13 points from 53 in February, and 21 points since December, when he was at 61.
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The media were becoming fed up with Jimmy Carter and his arrogant White House. Michael McShane was a young advance man in Mondale's office. McShane remembered that many Fridays after work, White House employees would meet up for cocktails. He saw Carter staffers laughingly dig into their pockets and pull out thick wads of phone messages left on pink slips of paper, competing with one another to see who had returned the fewest calls that week.
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Even worse, Carter's chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, was facing a grand jury probe into alleged cocaine use at Studio 54.
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(Jordan was later cleared.)

None of this was any help to Jerry Brown's quest. He was almost out of biofuel. Brown had never gotten beyond the caricature of himself as a California flake. As governor, Brown refused to live in the new executive mansion, built for the Reagans to replace the old Victorian firetrap in which Mrs. Reagan had refused to live. Brown instead threw his mattress down on the floor of a $275-a-month walk-up apartment near the state capitol building. The man who had once trained to be a Jesuit priest was spotted on occasion loitering around the California Zen Center in Marin County. At the Gridiron Dinner in Washington, reporters depicted him as a Hare Krishna wearing robes of saffron. He was clearly an intelligent man but wholly undisciplined and given to flights of rhetorical inanity. He pledged to keep going with his faltering campaign even if he had to hitchhike, which only fed the image of him as some freeloading, itinerant hippie.
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His campaign hadn't gotten to that point of having to stick its thumb out, but it was close.

J
OHN
A
NDERSON WAS A
Harvard man, but he was nonetheless well received by the Yalies when he spoke there in search of votes for the upcoming Connecticut primary. One thousand kids jammed Battell Chapel and another thousand waited outside, whooping and cheering his call for austerity and environmentalism. He pounced on Reagan, saying, “He thinks in terms of a holy war against Communism.”
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Several days earlier, Anderson had mocked Reagan on a college campus in Wisconsin, charging, “You would think … that there is a sweeping red tide of Communism engulfing the globe and that he [Reagan] has been somehow destined to lead the charge against it.”
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Anderson, even in his sarcasm, was right.
Soviet Communism was on the march around the globe and Reagan did believe it was his destiny to defeat it.

Bush, a Yale boy who made good, was treated to a less-than-hoped-for welcome by the undergraduates there. They supported Anderson and accused Bush of misrepresenting Anderson's positions. Bush lost it: “For months, I let that character sit around and call me a Ronald Reagan in a J. Press suit.… I've got real differences with him! And I will support the nominee of the Republican convention, instead of sanctimoniously holding myself above the party!” Bush did get the kids laughing when he listed his rules for political survival. They included “Being a Yale graduate has certain political disadvantages” and “Never let your opponent pay for the microphone in a political debate.”
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