Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (5 page)

P
OSTELECTION
, P
RESIDENT
F
ORD SUMMONED
Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, former Texas governor John Connally, and Reagan to discuss the future of the GOP. The time for the meeting was changed at the last minute and Reagan had to scramble to make it. He later confided in a letter to an old friend, former senator George Murphy of California, “Do you suppose they were hoping I wouldn't come?”
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One of the key issues involved the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee (RNC). Ford and Rockefeller were quietly supporting James A. Baker III, Ford's skillful delegate hunter in the spring and summer of 1976. Baker had done more than anyone in the Ford operation to secure Ford's nomination, thwarting Reagan. Reagan objected, saying that Baker would be unacceptable to Sun Belt conservatives. The meeting was inconclusive—except for the fact that when the old curmudgeon of the Republican Party, Mr. Sun Belt himself, Barry Goldwater, caught wind of the meeting, he pitched a fit for not having been invited, said it was an “insult,” and vowed never to raise money for the party again.
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By then, however, Ronald Reagan had eclipsed Goldwater as the conservative leader in America.

In mid-January, the GOP's state chairmen and national committee members gathered to vote for a new national chairman. It was the first time anyone could recall an RNC chairman being chosen in such a fashion. Prior, the chairman was either handpicked by an incumbent Republican president or chosen by party elders. Ford pushed Baker, perhaps too overtly, as it caused a number of the more conservative Republican committee members to support former Tennessee senator William Brock or Reagan's choice, the little-known Dick Richards of Utah. Baker quickly dropped out of contention and Richards did not engender much enthusiasm. Brock won on the third secret ballot.
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Brock was the Republicans' “third way”: choosing him provided neither Reagan nor Ford with bragging rights. The choice was vitally important for the party, as Brock, despite his distaste for Reagan, would become one of the most effective chairmen in the GOP's history, credited with bringing it into the modern political world.

Such modernization was crucial for the fate of the Republican Party, for at that point the party's very survival was in doubt. “Back in the 19th century,” the
Washington Post
noted in 1976, “a Minnesota legislator described a mule as a creature
that has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity. The legislator was talking about the Democratic Party of his day, but his definition would fully apply to the Republican Party.”
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The mule is, of course, the hybrid offspring of a donkey and a horse. Sterile at birth, it cannot create a breed of its own, so it literally has no past and no future. Much like the Republican Party, it seemed then.

Among voters less than thirty years of age, identification with the GOP stood at a humiliating 11 percent in 1977. The party was seen as corrupt and just plain worn-out. Despite the Republicans' famous “Southern Strategy,” after the wipeouts of 1974 and 1976 the GOP controlled only 10 percent of the state legislative seats in the eleven states of the Old South.
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Such was the ruinous political legacy of Richard Milhous Nixon.

In Reagan's view, the Republican Party could stage a comeback only if it made itself a home for conservatives and conservatism. To that end, in late January 1977 he formally announced his political action committee, Citizens for the Republic (CFTR), through which he would “promote conservative Republican candidates and promote conservative views.”
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The CFTR headquarters was set up on the second floor of a nondescript office building in Santa Monica, California. Reagan tapped Lyn Nofziger to run the operation. One of Nofziger's first employees was Cindy Tapscott, a chatty young woman from Oklahoma. In her interview, Nofziger asked Tapscott two questions. “Do you smoke?” She did. “Do you drink?” She did. Tapscott was hired.
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Nofziger himself was partial to a cigar and a dry martini—no olive, and no vermouth. Aide Jim Stockdale said the group around CFTR in those days resembled “adult juvenile delinquents. I don't think we took ourselves as seriously as the crowds that followed us.”
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A young follower, Fred Ryan, was a college student at nearby USC, and would frequently drop by the CFTR offices to pick up Reagan literature to pass out to his classmates.
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The operation was not slapdash, however. Some of Reagan's able aides, including Nofziger, Deaver, Hannaford, and Ed Meese, who was Governor Reagan's chief of staff, began meeting over coffee one day a week, usually on a Friday morning, at the Bicycle Club restaurant to coordinate matters. CFTR also had substantial funding, starting out with a budget of nearly $1.5 million left over from the 1976 campaign committee, Citizens for Reagan (though at year's end about $600,000 would be returned to the Federal Election Commission because it represented unused matching funds).
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As Reagan was the most in-demand conservative in America, Deaver and Hannaford expected the governor's personal income from his syndicated column, radio commentaries, and speaking fees to range between $400,000 and $750,000
per year. The demands kept Reagan perpetually in motion. His young aide Dennis LeBlanc recalled that as they flew together, Reagan was either reading or writing, making the most of his time. Nancy Reagan remembered the same: “But all the time he was writing. He would always fly first class. He'd sit by the window, and I'd sit in the aisle next to him. It didn't matter whether or not there was a movie being shown and all the lights were out—he'd turn on his reading lamp and would constantly be writing.”
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J
IMMY
C
ARTER MOVED AHEAD
quickly with his first address to the nation after becoming president, appearing on television less than two weeks after his inauguration. Dressed in a light-colored cardigan sweater in front of a roaring fire in the White House, Carter followed his populist instincts and took on the Washington establishment, vowing to bring the federal government to heel by freezing federal hiring and cutting regulatory red tape, and also the oil companies and utilities, calling on them to sacrifice.

Taking on the oil companies was easy. They were unpopular and were already a favorite whipping boy in Washington. Taking on the entrenched bureaucracy was quite another thing. Shrink government? Since when did any Democrat advocate this? Moreover, in telling the American people that their future would be one of scarcity and sacrifice, Carter was making himself and his party the skunks at the garden party. The Democrats had owned the future since 1932, being the party of hope, but now Carter was ceding the political battleground of the future. The sour speech set the tone for Carter's presidency.

Fittingly, the first movie aired in the Carter White House was
All the President's Men
. but Carter fundamentally misunderstood the consequences of Watergate. He made symbolic gestures, including taking limousines away from the White House staff, banning the playing of “Hail to the Chief,” carrying his own suit bag slung over his shoulder (though rumors were rampant that the bag was empty), wearing dungarees, and other “depomping the presidency” efforts. He thought the American people wanted their next-door neighbor to be president.
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Carter, like Ford before him, confused the dignity of the office with the character of the individual occupying it. The American people wanted somebody with a common touch, but they also wanted somebody with uncommon dignity. They didn't mind—indeed, actually liked—a little bit of pomp; what they objected to was pomposity.

A
New York Times
story three weeks after Carter had taken office reflected Americans' skepticism about the Carter emphasis on “showboat populism.” “I want my President to have some class,” one American complained. Carter “carrying
his own suitcases” put another off. “That's going too far.”
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Even Carter worried in his diary that he'd gone too far with the whole “depomping” thing.
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Carter's peripatetic pollster, Pat Caddell, wrote, “We must devise a context that is neither traditionally liberal nor traditionally conservative, one that cuts across traditional ideology.”
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Carter's instincts were already in this direction, but he was governmentally tone-deaf.

R
EAGAN'S METHOD OF TAKING
on the status quo was far different from Carter's. In the opening months of 1977, he addressed important conservative organizations to explain his vision for a “New Republican Party.” First, in January, he addressed the annual dinner of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and then in early February he spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Reagan told his young listeners to look beyond the simple math of the two parties and instead focus on the disparity between self-identified conservatives and liberals. During his CPAC address he noted that “on January 5, 1977, by a 43–19 plurality those polled by Harris said they would ‘prefer to see the country move in a more conservative direction than liberal one.’”
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Reagan called for bringing into the Republican fold those Democrats concerned with “social issues—law and order, abortion, busing, quota systems—[that] are usually associated with the blue-collar, ethnic, and religious groups.”
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In short, he proposed a fusion between those mercantile and economic interests long associated with the GOP, who were mostly concerned with government regulations, and social conservatives, who believed the fabric of society was also threatened by big, intrusive government.

He told the conservatives to join him in creating a “new, lasting majority. This will mean compromise. But not a compromise of basic principle. What will emerge will be something new, something open and vital and dynamic, something the great conservative majority will recognize as its own, because at the heart of this undertaking is principled politics.”
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Then Reagan took on the GOP, telling his CPAC audience that the party “cannot be one limited to the country-club, big-business image that … it is burdened with today. The ‘New Republican Party’ I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat.”
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He closed his groundbreaking speech by telling the assembled conservatives:

Our task is not to sell a philosophy, but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see that modern conservatism offers
them a political home. We are not a cult; we are members of a majority. Let's act and talk like it. The job is ours and the job must be done. If not by us, who? If not now, when? Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society.

Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, galloping inflation, frustrated minorities, and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite.

Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people. Any organization is in actuality only the lengthened shadowed of its members. A political party is a mechanical structure created to further a cause. The cause, not the mechanism, brings and holds the members together. And our cause must be to rediscover, reassert, and reapply America's spiritual heritage to our national affairs.

Then with God's help we shall indeed be as a city upon a hill, with the eyes of all people upon us.
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Reagan received a resounding ovation from the young conservatives gathered at CPAC. The “True Believers” understood Reagan's call. The former governor was not only taking on the established order in Washington, he was also continuing the fight against the dug-in and hostile interests inside the GOP. His followers understood that Reagan was distrustful of the concentration of governmental
or
corporate power. Reagan believed in a “natural aristocracy” of men who climbed to their highest ambitions without the heavy-handed aid of nobility or government connections. He was defining a new ideology of optimistic and enlightened conservatism that was unsettling to the powers-that-be that ran the Republican Party. They didn't understand it, so how could they possibly support it?

He showed off both his literate side and his sense of irony as he told the young listeners, “I have seen the conservative future and it works.”
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Of course, Reagan was paraphrasing Lincoln Steffens, a Communist sympathizer from America who uttered this line, minus the word “conservative,” upon returning from the Soviet Union in 1919.

In the early days of 1977, the conservative movement was growing and extending its power and influence. These conservatives had aggressively explored a third-party option for the past several years, but now they concluded that the better option was to take over the feeble GOP. It was a practical decision: the
two-party system was favored by the new federal campaign laws, which enhanced the ability of the two major parties to mail at lower rates than other political entities. It was at this CPAC where conservatives began to refer to themselves as “The Movement.”

T
HOUGH
R
EAGAN WAS ENERGIZING
conservatives, he more and more had to contend with the burgeoning “age issue.” American Conservative Union staffer Jim Roberts spoke for many when he told Lou Cannon of the
Post
, “If he was four years younger, we'd be off and running right now.… But there is a nagging feeling that he may be too old.”
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