Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (68 page)

Hooks was given twenty minutes to speak. He was received politely if not wildly, and the delegates even interrupted him several times with a smattering of applause. Hooks—given the fact that Reagan had skipped his conference—could have justifiably leveled Reagan, but he decided to take the high road. When asked by reporters whether Reagan had written off the black vote, Hooks dismissed the idea: “I don't believe he has written off any vote.”
⁶⁰

Prime time had ended hours before. So convention planners were forced to move Vander Jagt's keynote address—again. The Michigan congressman had already been bumped from Monday night, the traditional slot for the keynote address. Now he would be pushed back to Wednesday.
⁶¹
While the GOP was showing more unity than it had in years, the convention was not turning out to be the smooth operation that the Reagan campaign had imagined. And the woes would quickly intensify.

More worrisome for Reagan than the schedule changes was the incessant prattling about a Dream Ticket, with Gerald Ford starring as Reagan's sidekick. In the movies, Reagan had often been the classic sidekick who critics said never got the girl—although the Gipper sometimes complained that this characterization wasn't true: he almost
always
got the girl. Now some, including Reagan, thought that he ought to try to get the former president.

Yet what would start out in Detroit as a “dream” would end up very quickly as a nightmare for Dutch Reagan. Reagan was about to be reminded of the old saw “Be careful what you wish for.”

“
We heard from Senator Schweiker that Senator Laxalt told someone else who then told Senator Schweiker that it would be Gerald Ford.
”

A
fter the 1924 Democratic convention, which notoriously went to 103 ballots over sixteen days before choosing John W. Davis of West Virginia, satirist H. L. Mencken had had enough and wrote, “There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging. It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it's hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the
gluteus maximus
, and yet it is somehow charming. One sits through long sessions wishing heartily that all the delegates were dead and in hell—and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour.”
¹

On Wednesday, July 16, 1980, the Republican National Convention put Mencken's disparagement of conventions to shame, though no one would be sitting on his keister this day. You couldn't gossip sitting down.

The grand old man of the
Wall Street Journal
, the wonderfully named Vermont Connecticut Royster, reflected the widespread sentiment that the GOP convention had so far been a dull affair. There were no fights like in the old days over rules or platforms or “over the vice-presidential choice,” he wrote. But Royster, a perceptive political observer who had won two Pulitzer Prizes, noted toward the end of his column that it was possible Reagan “could shoot himself in the foot with his vice-presidential nominee.”
²

A
S THE SUN ROSE
over Detroit's boarded-up slums and shuttered factories on July 16, the buzz was growing about the Dream Ticket of Ronald Reagan and Gerald
Ford. The gossip had been stoked by a Bill Plante report on CBS several nights earlier. Plante ran through the list of prospective running mates and concluded, “Everyone does agree … around here, that the Dream Ticket would have been Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. And that rumor surfaced again today.”
³
A pretty young Reagan aide, Michele Davis, wrote in her diary, “We are all abuzz about the Ford rumors.… I think it's nuts.” As it turned out, she was way ahead of the gray heads at the convention. (She also had strong opinions about the “fatcats” she had to babysit there, calling them “obnoxious, boorish assholes.”)
⁴

The Reagan team let it leak that morning that Howard Baker could help Reagan more by staying in the Senate. Loosely translated, it meant Baker had been officially dumped from consideration. Actually, Baker had appeared on
Face the Nation
several weeks earlier and disavowed any interest in the job. Within the Reagan campaign, Senator Baker already had his opponents, notably including Paul Laxalt; it was rumored that the two senators did not get along. After the
Face the Nation
appearance, Reagan called his old friend Baker to tell him he was taking him at his word, and Baker assured Reagan that if he was asked, he'd join the ticket, but otherwise, he wasn't interested. Baker had begun to gently close the door and Reagan helped him do so. Word never leaked out—astonishing in politics—until the convention.
⁵

Throwing Baker over the side was a tactical mistake by the Reagan forces. With Howard Baker out, conservatives such as Jesse Helms could concentrate their fire on George Bush. Even Helms now said—amazingly—he could “live with a Reagan-Ford ticket.”
⁶
Helms went even further, saying he preferred that pairing to a “Reagan-Helms” ticket.
⁷

That was it. Reagan's men got the ideological cover they needed to seriously negotiate with Ford. Reagan was seeking “a good reason to pick somebody else,” not Bush, according to the
Washington Star
, and that somebody else was starting to look like it could be Ford.
⁸
Among Reagan's men, there had been no consensus candidate save maybe Jack Kemp, and this vacuum also sucked people in toward Ford.

According to Dick Wirthlin, the idea of asking Ford was never meant to be a serious proposal. Wirthlin and Bob Teeter cooked it up, he said years later, as a sign of good faith on Reagan's part. Wirthlin and Teeter expected Ford to graciously turn down the offer, and that would be it.
⁹
Among Reaganites, the consensus was definitely against Bush. As Jim Baker saw it, it was “ABB—Anybody But Bush.”
¹⁰
Reagan's men were narrowing down the list quickly, and it seemed there were no good alternatives to Ford.

When the name of the arrogant and manifestly ambitious Don Rumsfeld came up in one meeting of Reaganites, Lyn Nofziger bitingly said, “Rummy would be
fine, but you realize we'll have to hire a food taster for Reagan!”
¹¹
Rumsfeld was winnowed along with Dick Lugar and Bill Simon.

Laxalt's name kept coming up, because the Reagans wouldn't let the idea go. But even Laxalt was leaning toward the Dream Ticket, telling Mary McGrory of the
Washington Star
, “I've been nursing this along for months.”
¹²
On Reagan's confidential schedule was an 8
P.M.
meeting in his suite Tuesday evening denoted simply as “PRIVATE.”
¹³

Time was running out for Guy Vander Jagt. He still hadn't given his keynote speech, and as the morning progressed, the networks were breaking into regular programming to speculate about the Dream Ticket.

Almost everybody who was awake and not too hungover in Detroit was talking about Reagan-Ford now. A mass self-hypnosis—or mass hysteria, depending on your point of view—began to take hold among the Republicans, so caught up were they in the romance of Reagan and Ford bringing the party together and putting Carter away in the fall.

Around 9:30 the night before, a half dozen prominent Republicans had joined Reagan for yet another private meeting in his suite on the sixty-ninth floor of the Detroit Plaza Hotel. The small group included Reagan's 1976 running mate and friend, Senator Dick Schweiker of Pennsylvania. The conversation turned toward Ford. The “how wonderful it would be” chatter piqued Reagan's interest.
¹⁴

Reagan and Ford met later that night, and Reagan made a gracious pitch to Ford to join the ticket. Ford was briefly touched by Reagan's sincerity. The icy relations between the two men seemed to be thawing.
¹⁵
Ford raised the objection that the Twelfth Amendment might cost such a ticket California's electoral votes because both men lived there. He was dubious that he could simply change his residency back to Michigan, but one report had it that Reagan was willing to make the race with Ford even if it voided the Golden State's forty-five electoral votes.
¹⁶

After a boat reception on the Detroit River later that evening, Ford met with a small group of aides to discuss the merits of Reagan's offer. Henry Kissinger, the doctor of hidden agendas, as much as said that for the sake of the country, Ford had to accept. The conversation in Ford's suite did not end until 3
A.M.
Ford had to get up in several hours for a live appearance on the
Today
show.
¹⁷

After his television appearance, Ford reluctantly sent his advisers off to negotiate on his behalf. One confidant said that though Ford was still unconvinced, “he was willing to let us talk to the Reagan people to see if we could give some meaning to the definition” of Reagan's offer. They met that morning with Reagan's negotiators—Ed Meese, Dick Wirthlin, and Bill Casey—and were pleased to
find that the two sides “very much agreed on the broad conceptual framework. There were no significant differences at all.”
¹⁸

The devil, as they would soon learn, was in the details. Reagan's men and Ford's men met again later that afternoon to try to hammer out an agreement about power sharing. Casey and Kissinger did most of the talking. “They discussed which cabinet appointments President Ford would control and what authority he would have,” recalled Casey's secretary, Barbara Hayward. “The more power Mr. Kissinger expected for Ford, the more annoyed I could see Mr. Casey getting.”
¹⁹

Wirthlin was with Reagan for much of the day and later remembered, “There was an assurance and calmness about Reagan that I think added a very sustaining influence to what we were trying to do, tactically, even in spite of the Ford thing.”
²⁰

When Wirthlin's family came by the suite to see the governor, Reagan took them into one of the adjoining bedrooms. He seemed as if he had something he wanted to share with somebody.

Wirthlin asked Reagan how he felt, and the governor replied, “Let me tell you, I feel like the man who was walking along the beach and offered a prayer that he might be sustained. And as he walked along the beach, there were really two [sets of] footsteps, his own and that of the Heavenly Father. And as he turned around and looked at where he'd come, he saw just one at a time when he was under terrific stress. And he said, ‘Why did you leave me when I needed you so much?’ And the answer was, ‘I didn't leave you; I was carrying you.'”
²¹

A
T 8 O'CLOCK
W
EDNESDAY
morning, Bill Brock convened a meeting in his suite with some of the “wise men” of the party—Bryce Harlow, Howard Baker, Kissinger, Senator John Tower, Alan Greenspan, several governors, and other luminaries. The purpose of the meeting was to orchestrate a full-scale lobbying campaign for the Dream Ticket. One of the wisest men, Congressman John Rhodes, was the skunk at the party when he pronounced the idea “cockamamie” and stormed out. At 9
P.M.
, he had a meeting with Reagan, who asked Rhodes who should be on the ticket. Rhodes unhesitatingly told him Bush.
²²

By noon on Wednesday, almost all other leaders of the Republican Party were openly advocating the Ford plan, thinking it was brilliant. Brock and Howard Baker met with Ford and urged him to accept Reagan's offer. Then Dole, Governor Jim Thompson, and several others weighed in, telling Ford he needed to go on the ticket. Bob Teeter, even though he was supposedly working for the Bush campaign, urged his former client Ford to do it as well. Congressman Silvio Conte of Massachusetts was dubious. “Ford is not going to give up his gosh-darned golf game,” he said.
²³

That morning, a Reagan aide told Al Hunt and Jim Perry of the
Wall Street Journal
that the deal was “90 percent done.” The story picked up additional momentum when Ford began sending public signals in chats with reporters and politicos that he might, just might, be interested.
²⁴

Betty Ford told Barbara Walters of ABC that the idea was fine with her.
²⁵
Ford's extended entourage and sycophants were starting to spread the word that it was nearly a “done deal,” though they had never been given real knowledge or direct authority to do so.

Reagan was spotted around 2
P.M.
heading for a luncheon, accompanied by his protective detail. When Reagan saw two reporters he knew, he walked over to greet them. Naturally, they asked the governor whether the rumors about Ford as his running mate were true, and he replied, “Oh sure. That would be the best.”
²⁶

As the day progressed, a new rumor, that Reagan and Ford would make a joint appearance that night before the delegates, swept the Motor City.
²⁷
Two of the few in Detroit who thought the ticket was crazy were Stu Spencer and Dick Cheney, good friends from working together on the 1976 Ford campaign. Both were asked to help in the negotiations, but they made themselves scarce, instead going fishing for the afternoon on the Detroit River.
²⁸

Like Spencer and Cheney, Bill Timmons, one of the keener heads in the GOP, believed the idea was nuts. He was already running everything in Detroit, but he decided he'd better stay close to the situation to see whether he could lend some sanity and keep Kissinger, who was angling for the State Department and God knows what else, from grabbing too much power. Timmons only had a convention to run, a thousand staffers to supervise, eight thousand reporters who all needed babysitting, and more than four thousand delegates and hundreds of high-maintenance politicians to look after. The last thing he needed on his plate was some wacko idea about a co-presidency. He also got pressed into service because, as he later joked, “I was the only one who could type.”
²⁹
Paul Russo, the Reagan's campaign's remarkably patient congressional liaison, described Timmons as a “godsend” to the campaign.
³⁰