Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (54 page)

Bush did not back down from his accusations that Reagan's campaign was behind the brochures. In fact, Ernie Angelo had previously sent a memo out to his Reagan team across the state telling them to stop distributing this material if, indeed, they were.
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Angelo got in a lick when he said of Bush, “George isn't given to taking criticism too well.”
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Reagan said he wished Bush “would accept my word that we don't know anything about this Trilateral issue.”
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Bush wouldn't let it go, calling the material “vicious.” Yet when he appeared on the Houston television station KTRK immediately after Reagan had told the station that Bush's claims were a “desperation gambit,” Bush—informed that Reagan was on camera elsewhere—suddenly backed down. Now he said the pamphlets were “not a big deal, frankly.” Bush's backpedaling came “to the surprise and disgust of the Reagans,” as Lou Cannon later reported. Nancy Reagan asked pointedly, “If it's no big deal, then why does he keep raising it?” Later, Reagan told aides, in confidence, that Bush “just melts under pressure.” Ominously, he said this in response to a suggestion about Bush going on the ticket with him. He also dismissed Bush as lacking “spunk.”
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Bush was getting more pressure from the groups calling for him to drop out of the campaign. He was getting agitated. He also told reporters how proud he was of one of his sons for almost getting in a fistfight with someone who had questioned their father's patriotism. Bush did not say which of his four sons was involved in the dustup. He became angry in front of a crowd in Austin, saying he did not “need any lectures” about getting out of the race. “Hell with 'em. We're in this thing to win.”
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Reagan was equally angry, but at Bush, for mischaracterizing his beloved Kemp-Roth plan. Bush was telling crowds it would cost $90 billion in the first year alone. “I am not out here in left field all alone with some cockamamie proposal,” the Gipper stormed to the press.
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This episode in the Bush-Reagan range war only confirmed that relations between the two men were a dead letter.

Despite all this, Jim Baker and the Bush troops did a good job keeping expectations low. All the media bought the line that Bush would be happy with 40 percent of the popular vote and just twelve delegates. Some of Reagan's undisciplined zealots, on the other hand, were predicting that Reagan would get seventy-five out of eighty delegates and 60 percent of the GOP vote.
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A
LTHOUGH
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ED
K
ENNEDY NEEDED
big wins if he was to have any chance of ripping the Democratic nomination from Carter, he made only a cursory pass through Texas. Meanwhile, Mrs. Carter and other surrogates worked the state for the president. That legwork paid off for Carter, who stomped Kennedy on
primary day in Texas, 56–22 percent.
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It was, however, only an underpublicized “beauty contest,” with no delegates chosen. Ominously for Carter, 19 percent of Texas Democrats pulled the level for “uncommitted.”
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The Bush-Reagan contest in the Lone Star State was surprisingly close. Bush won an impressive 47 percent of the vote to Reagan's unimpressive 51 percent.
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None of the early polling had predicted such results, nor had the state's GOP county chairmen, 70 percent of whom were supporting Reagan.
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Bush's team had played the expectations game perfectly. Even though he lost, he got a media boost from the unexpectedly tight contest. He would live to fight another day. After the results were counted, Bush said that his narrow loss wasn't “much of a downer,” because no one had expected him to perform well in Texas.
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He lamented that if he'd had another week in the state, he might have won. Given his rise in the polls, he may have been right.

But it was Reagan who had won. He offered his take on why Bush had lost Texas despite having lived there for thirty-one years: “Maybe it's because the people of Texas are aware that he has also run as the native of three other states.”
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For Bush, such swipes were not nearly as big a problem as the fact that, because of the manner in which Texas's delegates were apportioned, Reagan had taken the lion's share of them, with sixty-two to only eighteen for the Houstonian.
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This was the second primary in a row in which Bush had performed well in the popular vote but not received anywhere near a proportional share of the delegates. Reagan must have understood Bush's frustration, having experienced it in 1976. Reagan had arrived at the Kansas City convention actually having won more of the popular vote in the contested primaries than did Ford, but because of bossism, mistakes by his campaign, and the vicissitudes of politics in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio, he got nowhere near his proportional share of delegates.

If Reagan empathized with Bush's position in 1980, he did not show it. After Texas he told reporters that Bush “has no mathematical excuse for continuing.”
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Ford had taken a similar approach in 1976, telling Reagan to get out. Back then, Ford had overplayed his hand, and now Reagan was doing the same with Bush. In each case, the calls to drop out of the race created a more fearsome, more resolute challenger. Bush tartly replied to Reagan's comments, “I'm going to stay in this race all the way … because I believe the country deserves a choice.”
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It was a statement eerily reminiscent of what Reagan had said four years earlier to Lyn Nofziger when the Gipper was being badgered to get out.

Reagan increased the pressure on Bush when he picked up another eighty-five delegates in weekend conventions in Missouri, Oklahoma, Arizona, Minnesota,
and Guam.
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Moving on to North Carolina, Reagan was welcomed like a son of the Confederacy. Everywhere he went, adoring fans mobbed him. He met with Billy Graham, and aides said with a straight face that the meeting had nothing to do with politics. Reagan also spoke before 15,000 devoted Amway distributors in Charlotte. Kenny Klinge, one of Reagan's more talented fieldmen, said of the Amway rally that he'd never seen a crowd so frenzied, nor had he ever seen so many bouffant hairdos.
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North Carolina had a special place in Reagan's heart. It was where his dead-in-the-water campaign came back to life in 1976, as he stunned Ford after losing the first five contests.

Bush looked at the remaining primary schedule and claimed a new strategy to win the GOP nomination that would include beating Reagan in his home state of California. Everybody in politics knew that Bush's chances of beating Reagan in the Golden State were almost as good as Reagan's chances of being asked to join Yale's Skull and Bones society, which counted Bush among its members. Polls had Reagan ahead of Bush 7–1 in California.
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Still, Bush stubbornly announced that he would raise $1 million to campaign there.
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Bush certainly had the will and the resources to fight on, but the schedule ahead was anything but favorable. He had been able to outspend Reagan massively in recent primaries and was preventing Reagan from beginning the long process of consolidating the Republican Party. Not surprisingly, then, the Reagan campaign seemed finally, if reluctantly, willing to call off the dogs and let Bush get out gracefully. Angelo told reporters that Bush was “an articulate spokesman for the Republican philosophy” and predicted that Bush would drop out and endorse Reagan.
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Reagan was asked whether he thought the results in Texas might convince Bush to finally drop out and he said, gently, “It would ease my travel.”
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Reagan was well on his way toward the nomination, but the road before him would not be easy. Jimmy Carter likewise was on his way, but the cost of his journey had been high. As the primaries wore on, he was weakening politically. Though Kennedy's plan for a breakthrough against him was not coming to fruition, the president needed to start consolidating his party and making the case against the Republicans and especially Ronald Reagan. Vice President Walter Mondale was ready to be typecast as the heavy in this drama. “I'm confident this party will unite very quickly, particularly against Ronald Reagan,” Mondale said. “The country just isn't ready yet for an actor who in his first movie lost the girl to Gabby Hayes.”
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Carter could not rely on his surrogates forever, though. And now he made a pivotal announcement. For months, he'd been under self-imposed house arrest, saying that he would not actively campaign in the presidential race (though for
months he'd been burning up the phone lines calling supporters) “until the status of the hostages had changed.”
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His staff had badgered him to abandon the “Rose Garden strategy,” and Carter, because of his isolation in the White House, had been smirkingly referred to in Washington's drinking establishments as “the fifty-fourth hostage.”
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(Later the number of American hostages in Iran would be reduced by one, from fifty-three to fifty-two, after one hostage, Richard Queen, fell grievously ill and the ayatollah released him to the International Red Cross.)
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Now the president abruptly announced that the crisis was “manageable,” and Mrs. Carter said that in the wake of the failed rescue attempt the hostages' status had indeed “changed.”
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Carter would join the presidential race in earnest—never mind that the hostages seemed in greater danger than ever as a result of the Desert One fiasco. When told of Carter's decision, Reagan crisply said, “If he feels freed, I wonder if he thinks now that the hostages have now been somehow freed.”
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Deacon Carter was finally coming down from the mountain. The office had aged him visibly, as it did most presidents, but he was not about to relinquish the position to anybody. Carter had fought tenaciously for the job in 1976 and he was a tenacious man still.

Three other tough-minded men—Kennedy, Bush, and Reagan—were not about to give up either.

“
Well, I've got the delegates.
”

T
he oft-cited rap against George Bush was that he was a political journeyman who had held many jobs with little to show for it. He had a golden résumé but no gravitas. Something else he did not have was any Republican mayor in Indiana on the eve of its big primary, which came just three days after Texas. Every single one of the fifty-three city executives endorsed Ronald Reagan for president. Even Indianapolis mayor William Hudnut, who had previously supported Bush, jumped ship to Ronald Reagan.
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Dejected, Bush withdrew from the Indiana contest.

Texas had only briefly reinvigorated his campaign. On May 6 there would be primaries not only in Indiana but in Tennessee, North Carolina, and the District of Columbia as well. Reagan had a hammerlock on all but the nation's capital, where he was not on the ballot. With Reagan poised to grab most of the 146 delegates at stake, Bush said somberly the day before the primaries, “I'm not looking forward to tomorrow.”
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But he vowed to keep fighting until June 3, when eight GOP primaries would take place.

Jim Baker spelled out Bush's Hail Mary effort: It would require Bush to split the Ohio and New Jersey primaries with Reagan, win California, and raid state delegations that were only pledged and not mandated to vote for Reagan. It was a tall order, especially the California notion, but it was not harebrained. California was a winner-take-all primary. Months earlier Bush supporters had strongly objected to this setup as giving Reagan an advantage and had tried to have the rules changed. Now they saw that it could help Bush. He had the money to contest the Golden State and Reagan's budget was exhausted.

It was political trench warfare. Reagan aide Keith Bulen spoke for many about the months-long political process when he said, “I'm tired, the campaign's tired. It's a ridiculous sort of thing.”
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Bulen was a tough, chain-smoking operative who had a core of devoted political allies, despite his reputation for angry outbursts. In Bulen's native Indiana, Reagan's team was working tirelessly—and trying to set limits on the press. Reagan's advance schedule in the state directed staff that when the candidate was in a church while on the road, reporters must be told “to remain outside unless they wish to worship.”
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Republican National Committee high priest Bill Brock was reluctant to declare the race over. Reagan aides, especially Lyn Nofziger and Jerry Carmen, had been openly dismissive and suspicious of the moderate Brock. They began to eye hungrily Brock's well-financed fiefdom at 310 First Street in Southeast Washington, where almost three hundred staffers were laboring for the party. They were whispering in Reagan's ear that Brock was no friend and that the establishment Republicans thought Reagan and his followers were déclassé. “They wondered who this interloper was from the West,” Ed Meese later said. “He was not the Establishment guy.”
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Brock's ace in the hole was Senator Howard Baker, his friend and go-between with the Reagans.

While looking over his shoulder at his conservative critics, Brock burrowed into the planning of the national convention. The first announcement was that former president Ford would open the quadrennial gathering on Monday, July 14. Congressman Guy Vander Jagt, also of Michigan, would give the keynote address the following night. The idea of having Ford and Vander Jagt speak had come not from Brock but from Reagan's men, who pragmatically wanted to show a unified GOP face to the world.