Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (6 page)

If Reagan was too old, he certainly didn't show it. He appeared to be the picture of health, at least ten years younger than he really was. He was 6'1'', tanned, and broad-shouldered, with a crinkly smile and a ready handshake. The only signs of age were the blemishes on the back of his hands, a few wisps of gray in his temples, and the fact that he was hard of hearing in his left ear. He drank moderately and exercised daily, not including the heavy outdoor work at the ranch. He had quit smoking years earlier, using jelly beans to replace his nicotine craving. He hadn't lost a step, and actually appeared much more self-confident when speaking about national and global affairs than he had been just a year earlier. The
Washington Post
's David Broder described him as “inexhaustible.”
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Reagan prepared better than most for his speeches, which he often wrote on his own. He was a perfectionist when it came to researching, writing, practicing, and delivering a speech. He was so superior in his speaking abilities that it was actually news when he turned in a poor performance.

Reagan had worn contact lenses in public and glasses in private for years, as he was extremely nearsighted. Before he gave a speech, he would pop out his right contact lens to read the text and keep the left one in so he could see his audience and their reaction to him. Deaver and Hannaford often asked the governor if he just wanted to show up, make his speech, and then leave, but Reagan rarely took them up on this option. He liked to settle in, have dinner, and observe the other speakers, but especially the crowd, to judge its mood and temperament. He also hated missing out on the after-dinner dessert. Years later, as president, he was quickly hustled out of a CPAC dinner speech and later complained to an aide that he didn't get to stay long enough to have the apple pie à la mode that was being served that evening.

A
S THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT
accelerated its upward trajectory, the “New Right” was developing new ideas on policy, politics, and, most especially, tactics.
What distinguished the New Right from its progenitors was an attitude, a belief in ideas, and a “take no prisoners” approach. These Young Turks became a formidable new force in American politics thanks to their impressive use of technology, such as direct mail, Quip machines (the precursor to the fax machine), telephones, and computers; their ability to raise money; and their sophisticated approach to public relations. Unlike previous conservatives, who despised the “liberal media” and thus shunned reporters and columnists or, even worse, denounced them, these conservatives courted the media, knowing controversy and action were two favorite topics of national political reporters.

No New Right meeting of the era would have been complete without the presence of Paul Weyrich, head of the awfully named Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress and one of the leading theoreticians in the New Right; direct-mail impresario Richard Viguerie, “Godfather of the New Right”; Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus; and Phyllis Schlafly, “First Lady of the Conservative Movement” and author of the groundbreaking bestseller
A Choice, Not an Echo
, published in the days leading up to Barry Goldwater's nomination in 1964.

Weyrich had come up through Wisconsin politics and radio, and ended up in Washington as a speechwriter for Senator Gordon Allott of Colorado. Seated next to him in the senator's office on Capitol Hill was a talented young conservative writer, George F. Will. In 1979
Time
magazine selected Viguerie, who raised many millions of dollars for conservative causes, as one of the “Fifty Future Leaders of America.” Others on the list were Bill Clinton, Ted Turner, and Jesse Jackson. He was more libertarian in his outlook than the others, and was known to enjoy a good game of poker and Jack Daniel's whiskey. Phillips was one of the original signers of the Sharon Statement, the founding document of Young Americans for Freedom, written at the Connecticut estate of William F. Buckley. Phillips had traveled a long ideological road; in 1960, when he was running for student council president at Harvard, one of his biggest supporters was a hyperkinetic liberal named Barney Frank.
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Schlafly had gone back to college to get her law degree while still a homemaker raising children, and became a leading voice against what she called “radical feminism.”

These New Right leaders began to flex their muscles, same as Reagan. They no longer feared rejection at the hands of the GOP establishment, because there was little of a GOP establishment to speak of anymore. They'd put up with a lot over the previous thirty years, from Wendell Willkie to Tom Dewey to Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and finally Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. All, at one time or another, had insulted or ignored conservatives. These moderate Republicans were now gone and the party was an embarrassing shell of itself.

The conservative movement was far more consequential and important than the Republican Party itself. The conservatives would lead. They would dictate policy. They would bring the party to them rather than the other way around. Woe to the Republican officials who deviated from conservative orthodoxy, because the New Right delighted in making an example of them. In punishing heretics, the True Believers could be ruthless.

The New Right eschewed the traditional alliance between the GOP and big business. Congressman Jack Kemp, a rising star in national politics, told a seminar at Harvard that “the movement needs a visible break with big business. Big business has become the handmaiden of big government.”
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Kemp was a trumpeted addition to the New Right's growing panoply of young and articulate leaders. He had movie-star good looks and had been a pro football quarterback, first with the San Diego Chargers and later for the Buffalo Bills. With his keen devotion to economic theory, he had become a close friend and devotee of the economic theories of
Wall Street Journal
columnist Jude Wanniski and economist Arthur Laffer. In 1976, impressed with their presentation on supply-side economics, Kemp introduced a “jobs-creation bill” providing for large cuts in income taxes across the board for all Americans, as an idea to jump-start the economy while producing greater revenue for the federal treasury.

Though Kemp had been a Ford delegate in Kansas City (mainly because of a personal relationship with Ford from their days together in Congress), Reagan did not hesitate to get behind the young congressman's tax-cut plan. After his initial radio commentary on Kemp's bill in the fall of 1976, Reagan did another five-minute broadcast endorsing Kemp's idea in late March 1977. It was a “tax plan based on common sense,” Reagan said, reminding listeners of the success of the Kennedy tax cuts of the early 1960s.
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B
Y THE SUMMER OF
1977 Reagan had emerged as the most high-profile and vocal critic of the Carter administration, scoring it on policy and politics and hypocrisy.

In the month of June alone, Reagan made thirteen major policy speeches in New York, Washington, and other locations while keeping up with his daily radio commentaries and his twice-a-week column. He went after Carter over détente and his desire to recognize Vietnam, which Reagan charged with “holding an estimated nineteen million people in forced captivity, including some in concentration camps.”
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He also hit Carter on the forthcoming Panama Canal treaties,
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for which the Carter White House had scheduled a signing ceremony on September 7. During the 1976 primaries Reagan had come out strongly against any agreement that gave
up U.S. control over the Panama Canal, decrying such a move as a “giveaway” of the canal to Omar Torrijos, the military strongman of Panama. In fact, Reagan's near-successful comeback against Gerald Ford had been due in large part to his exploitation of this issue. If Ford never heard again Reagan's refrain from 1976—“We built it! We paid for it! It's ours! And we're going to keep it!”
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—it would be too soon. The Carter White House attempted to persuade Reagan to support the documents it had negotiated, but after considerable contemplation he demurred. He returned to the theme he had sounded during the campaign, citing his concern that the United States would surrender the “rights of sovereignty we acquired in the original treaty.”
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Not every conservative sided with Reagan on the canal issue. Most notably,
National Review
editor William F. Buckley Jr. and actor John Wayne, both friends of Reagan's for many years, publicly supported the treaties. The fight over the canal came to define the resurgent conservatives and the growing New Right. Reagan talked about the issue so often, he opened up one radio broadcast by saying, “Would it shock & surprise you if I did a little talking about the Panama Canal? I hope not because that's what I'm going to do.”
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He called Carter's efforts to rally support “a medicine show, a wave of propaganda.”
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At the end of every commentary came his signature signoff, “This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.”

Although the Panama Canal treaties would still need to receive the votes of two-thirds of the U.S. Senate—by no means a certain proposition—the Carter administration went ahead with an extravagant signing ceremony featuring Torrijos and Carter on the White House lawn. The media and the liberal establishment were startled to see large crowds of protesters mobilized that day on Capitol Hill and outside the White House.
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Conservative groups in Washington were meeting, often daily, to coordinate their grassroots lobbying, advertising, public relations, and direct-mail efforts to stop the treaties. Reagan gave a speech to the National Press Club in early September blasting Carter over the issue; he cut more radio commentaries on the subject; he also testified before the Senate outlining his opposition.
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Meanwhile, a letter went out under Reagan's signature on behalf of the RNC, asking for money to help stop Carter's initiative. “I'm convinced the only way to defeat the Carter negotiated treaty is to conduct a full-fledged campaign to alert citizens to the dangers Republicans see in this treaty,” Reagan wrote. “Believe me, without your support, the canal is as good as gone. I've read this treaty carefully from cover to cover, and in my honest opinion, it's a line by line blueprint for potential disaster for our country.” The mail response to Reagan was overwhelming and the RNC raised, by its estimate, more than $1 million.
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Problem was, RNC chairman Bill Brock had no intention of using a dime of the money to actually stop the treaties. Brock would not go against his old friend Gerald Ford, who remained a supporter of the documents. Nor did he want to create an uncomfortable situation for another old friend, Howard Baker, the minority leader of the U.S. Senate. Brock and Baker were former Senate colleagues, both from Tennessee, and Baker was equivocating his stance, one of the few remaining Republicans not to take a position on the matter. Reagan staffer Charlie Black recalled, “What Brock was really worried about was embarrassing his close friend Howard Baker.”
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Reagan graciously issued a statement attempting to paper over the disagreement with Brock: “I am concerned that some reports have given the impression that [RNC] officials and I are in disagreement and that I have withdrawn my support of the party. This impression is mistaken. To the extent that there is any difference, it is limited to the ways and means by which to best oppose the proposed … treaties.”
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Lyn Nofziger and Paul Laxalt, the national chairman of Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign, knew better. They would have liked to tie a millstone around Brock's neck and drop him in the nearest pond. Later that day Laxalt got into the act, as he announced that conservatives were going to the mattresses against Carter without Brock and the RNC, telling reporters that Brock's decision “reaffirms my feeling that if we are going to be effective as conservatives, it will have to be outside the RNC. It's obvious they're not sympathetic to our goals.”
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After speaking with the fuming Laxalt and Nofziger, Reagan reversed his course a day later and told Brock in a letter that his name was not to be used in any more fundraising appeals for the RNC for any issue, especially the Panama Canal. In snapping tones, Reagan told Brock, “My credibility is involved in this.… Letters with my name on them have gone all across the country asking for money to help fight the treaties. Now we discover that money raised by the letters will not be used for that purpose. And worse than that, we discover that the national party has no plans to campaign against the treaties.”
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Brock ducked reporters' calls about the angry Reagan and a spokesman for the committee lamely said, “The party does not provide money for groups unaffiliated with the party except for cases approved by the party's national committee.”
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It would not be the last run-in involving the antiestablishment, conservative populist Reagan and the moderate, toast-of-the-establishment scion of the candy company bearing his name, Brock.

I
N THE MIDST OF
Ronald Reagan's very public crusade against Jimmy Carter and the Panama Canal treaties, he and his wife sat down for a long interview in Los
Angeles with Al Hunt of the
Wall Street Journal
. “Ronald Reagan's political juices are rising again,” the respected journalist noted in his piece. But Hunt accepted at face value the argument that Reagan did not hunger for the White House, concluding that “many Reagan insiders think the farther he gets from his 1976 campaign, the less he may want to try again.” Hunt quoted former Reagan aide David Keene to buttress his point: “He isn't all consumed by the desire to be President the way … Carter or … Nixon were.”
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