Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (72 page)

But that didn't mean Reagan had defused all criticism.

Ed Rollins, a GOP consultant from California and a Nofzinger protégé, was in the command-post trailer when the phone call came down saying that Bush was the pick. “Fuck,” Rollins grumbled. Then he was told he needed to break the bad news to Paul Laxalt. Not wanting to deal with an angry Laxalt, Rollins turned to Frank Fahrenkopf, Laxalt's friend from Nevada, and told him, “It is going to be Bush. And they want
you
to tell Laxalt.”
¹⁴²

But before Fahrenkopf could reach his friend, Laxalt spotted Bill Timmons on the phone writing down names: “Baker, Kemp, Vander Jagt …” Realizing that Timmons was on the line with Reagan, Laxalt tried to speak to his old friend, but Timmons was saying to Governor Reagan, “You can't call them yet. You've got to call Bush.” Laxalt suddenly understood that Reagan had chosen Bush; Timmons was writing down the names of the men Reagan had passed over, who would need to be notified of the nominee's decision. Jack Germond and Jules Witcover reported that Laxalt “turned white” and grabbed the phone from Timmons, but found Ed Meese now on the line. Laxalt pleaded, “Ron, Ron. I've got to talk to Ron.” Meese replied, “He can't talk to you, he's on the phone to Bush.” Laxalt implored Meese to delay the announcement until the next day, but to no avail; Reagan had already left for Joe Louis Arena.
¹⁴³

Laxalt was “pissed off” when he found out about the Bush selection, as he acknowledged years later. “And then I was pissed off at Judy Woodruff, too, who was pestering the hell out of me.”
¹⁴⁴
It wasn't just that the conservative Laxalt had deep reservations about the Brahmin Bush; Reagan's old friend and adviser was especially angry that he hadn't been consulted on the choice after the Ford deal had fallen through.

When a reporter asked Laxalt about his feelings on Reagan-Bush, he gamely replied, “I think it's a winnable ticket.”
¹⁴⁵
Then he stormed out of the convention.

Laxalt wasn't alone in doubting Reagan's decision. One of Reagan's closest confidants—someone who had been with his campaign for six years—grumbled on background to a top political reporter, “This is the sorriest day in a decade for Republicans.”
¹⁴⁶

Reagan had to figure out how to turn this lemon into lemonade.

“
With a deep awareness of the responsibility conferred by your trust, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.
”

T
he Jazz Age American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.”
¹
He wrote those gloomy words in the immediate aftermath of World War I, when an entire generation of artists—a “Lost Generation”—looked with revulsion at the devastation wrought by the great powers. The “War to End All Wars” had snuffed out seventy-two million lives; it introduced the world to mechanized death, trench warfare, and gas attacks. The horrific carnage of that conflict ushered in an age of existential uncertainty and, in the view of Fitzgerald and his disillusioned and drunken peers, of mindless materialism.

Fitzgerald may have been right in his time, but his poignantly tragic aphorism didn't apply to Ronald Reagan—certainly not in Detroit. The Republican Party's convention in 1980, for Reagan, represented his third presidential act, after he had tried and failed to gain the GOP's nomination in 1968 and 1976. Considering his many successes, failures, and varied careers, along with his divorce and second marriage, Reagan had had many debuts, both triumphant and otherwise. Much like the protagonist Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald's novel
The Great Gatsby
, Reagan had chosen through sheer force of will to rise above his difficult roots and, in the classless and upwardly mobile landscape of the New World, invent himself, though without Jay's corrupt past or fallen future.

In this sense, Ronald Reagan was quintessentially American.

The question in the 1980 election was whether America itself would begin a new act, or whether the same troubling scene was unceasing. Rarely had two presidential candidates been so diametrically opposed on virtually every public
policy issue. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan disagreed on everything from the size and scope of government, to U.S.–Soviet relations, to military spending, to the conduct of foreign policy, to abortion, tax cuts, and the free market. “Make no mistake about it: the election of 1980 is one of those critical events that will shape this country's future for many years to come,” wrote leading conservative theoretician Irving Kristol as the Detroit convention was reaching it climax. He elaborated, “The Republican Party too is on its way to changing its character, and the nomination of Mr. Reagan … will ratify the permanence of this change.”
²

B
EFORE
R
EAGAN WOULD FACE
Carter in the fall, he had to first convince his doubting supporters of the choice of Ambassador Bush as the stand-in running mate, and clean up the mess left over from the day before over the whole co-presidency nonsense.

On Thursday morning, just hours after the drama of the announcement, the Bushes headed to the Reagan suite in the Detroit Plaza Hotel for a private breakfast.
³
It was the first time Reagan and Bush had been together since their contentious debate in Houston several months earlier. They hit it off fine, but when network cameras were invited in to record the meeting, Reagan did not yet look altogether comfortable with his last-minute choice. Mrs. Reagan seemed even less comfortable with the Bushes. The fact that both she and Barbara Bush had attended Smith College did little to break the ice between the two women.

Some conservatives in Detroit shared Nancy Reagan's doubts about George Bush. The Texas delegation was in near revolt. But Reagan's state director, Ernie Angelo, told the delegates they would be “nuts” if they cut and ran on Reagan on the very first decision he made as the party's nominee. “I don't want one negative vote on the floor,” Angelo warned. The room went silent, and that night the entire delegation voted for Bush.
⁴

Weeks before the convention, a number of New Rightists, such as Richard Viguerie, had given signs that while Bush would not be the conservatives' ideal choice, he was acceptable. That was then. Now that the choice was official, many were openly displeased. Almost all the leading members of the New Right endorsed a plan to try to draft Jesse Helms as the vice-presidential nominee. On Thursday, seventeen conservatives met with Senator Helms, who called Bush “unpalatable” and “unacceptably liberal.”
⁵
Other conservatives wanted to stage a walkout at the convention. Helms buttonholed a young convention page, Quin Hillyer, to go find Tom Ellis, his chief political aide, to discuss the draft or a walkout.
⁶

Terry Dolan, head of NCPAC, fired a salvo at Bush: “For 30 years the Republicans have tried to convince people they aren't a party of country clubs and prep
schools. I find it ironic that the party is now nominating an absolute stereotype of that image.”
⁷
Dolan, from the wrong side of Connecticut, would make himself a
bête noire
to Bush.

One group pleased with the messy selection of Bush was the Carter White House. The notion of a Reagan-Ford tandem had terrified Carter's people, even though it would have been the oldest ticket in American history. The Democrats were relieved that Ford was out of the picture, though one aide to Carter got it right when he told the
New York Times
that a Reagan-Ford ticket “would have been a disaster. It would have all fallen apart within two days because of turf battles, ideological upheavals, even fights between Nancy Reagan and Betty Ford.”

Regardless of the merits of a Reagan-Ford pairing, Democrats were excited by what had happened in Detroit, especially because the no-deal/deal/no-deal spectacle had played out on national television. They believed that Reagan had badly flubbed his first test as presidential nominee.
⁸
The Democratic National Committee produced talking points bashing Reagan for almost choosing Ford—points that were almost precisely the same as those that some Republicans had made the night before in opposing the ticket, including doubts about the constitutionality of a “shared-power arrangement with Ford.”
⁹

Lyn Nofziger, during a morning briefing on Thursday, tried to turn aside doubts raised by the events of the day before. He said with nearly a straight face that George Bush was the only one Reagan had asked to be his running mate and that the campaign was “a very well-run operation.”
¹⁰

Many in the press, perhaps defensive about their own appalling performance the day before, pronounced that Reagan had blundered. Jack Germond and Jules Witcover of the
Washington Star
started right in: “Ronald Reagan has managed to achieve the worst of both political worlds by his off-again, on-again handling of his decision on a vice-presidential nominee.” They lambasted Bush as a “wallflower” and Ford for “his own penchant for seizing the limelight.”
¹¹
James Dickenson, also of the
Washington Star
, turned in the most creatively descriptive prose about the events of Wednesday, calling it “a fiasco that made [Reagan] and almost everyone else prominent enough to get on television look like people who should be wearing caps and bells and hitting each other with inflated pig bladders rather than posing as saviors of the Republic.”
¹²

John Sears offered his own take on how his old boss Reagan would be affected by all the confusion over his VP process: “He's shot himself in the foot.”
¹³

In the wake of the Ford affair, questions were being raised about Bill Casey's capacity to run the fall campaign. Casey had been an instigator behind the co-presidency idea. Rumors of friction between Bill Timmons and Casey were already
making the rounds, and it was an open secret that Casey was disdainful of Bush, thinking him “too liberal and his character too soft.”
¹⁴

Reagan knew he needed to rewrite this script. On Thursday morning, he and Bush, together with their wives, held a press conference. The first six questions, not surprisingly, were about the failed “Treaty of Detroit.” Reagan spoke warmly about Ambassador Bush, saying that he wasn't his second choice but only that the Ford opportunity was “so unique.” Bush, for his part, was touchy about the nonsense of the day before: “What difference does it make? It's irrelevant. I'm here.”
¹⁵

The Reagan campaign was sufficiently worried about the reaction to the Bush selection that it sent out emissaries to plead with various delegations to support the ticket. Helms sequestered himself in his suite with Congressman Bob Bauman of Maryland, head of the American Conservative Union, and Phyllis Schlafly, longtime conservative leader and organizer. Bauman made his displeasure with moderate Republicans such as Bush well known, saying, “They are elitists. They are out of touch with the supermarket counters. Their view of Communism is that it is a market to be sold to, not a system that may destroy their children's freedom.”
¹⁶
Helms then appeared on ABC and seemed to stick to his guns, saying, “We are still holding the option of … having my name placed in nomination tonight.”
¹⁷

But in the end, Helms countenanced no official effort on his behalf or an organized walkout over Bush. Helms was given a prime-time speech at the last minute as a reward for calling off his troops. In it, he announced to the delegates that he would not permit the VP draft to go forward, because Bush had pledged to support the entire platform. One more disaster was averted. While a small cadre of hard-liners continued to deliberate offering Helms's name for the vice-presidential nomination, to do so would require negotiating a thicket of rules, which included getting a certain number of state delegations to support such a floor action. In the end, conservatives pulled back their threats and reluctantly supported the ticket. Frankly, Helms didn't have enough time or the troops to mount any real insurrection. He could, however, have embarrassed Reagan, which Helms never would have done. He'd been a close friend for too long, a conservative soldier in arms with the Gipper.
¹⁸

Far more Republicans openly endorsed the Reagan-Bush pairing. Even Jack Kemp, who had been subjected to all that malicious old gossip and then passed over for the number-two spot, pronounced the ticket to his liking. He pointedly said that Bush was an asset to Reagan.
¹⁹
If Kemp was bitter about being passed over or the generally rude treatment he had received from some of the Reaganites, he
didn't betray it. Reagan aide Paul Russo said years later that much of the fanning of the womanizing and gay rumors against Kemp had been by Ford operatives.
²⁰

Kemp was a team player, but his assessment also happened to be accurate. Bush was the best choice for Reagan, as Jim Baker had asserted all along.
²¹
He'd come in second for the nomination, had deep roots in the party, was more moderate than Reagan, had more foreign-policy experience than Reagan, and in the primaries had won several big industrial states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan. With the possible exception of Kemp himself—who was, of course, far less experienced—Bush was the best choice to unify the convention.

In fact, the last-minute pick of Bush was already proving beneficial to Reagan. A new Gallup survey, taken the weekend before and testing hypothetical running mates for Reagan, showed that the addition of Bush increased the Republicans' advantage over the Democrats. Running alone against Carter, Reagan was ahead 38–32, but the ticket of Reagan-Bush versus Carter-Mondale was leading 43–34.
²²
Another poll, by the Associated Press and NBC, showed Bush helping Reagan more than Gerald Ford did.
²³
Though the margin was small, the irony was deep: much of what had spurred the frenzied momentum behind the Dream Ticket was an early poll by Dick Wirthlin that showed Ford helping Reagan more than anyone else.