Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (9 page)

Bush busily assembled a team of talented if eclectic political pros. Jim Baker came aboard as campaign chairman. Baker's assets included a very smooth relationship with the national media. He didn't play poker with them or drink with them like John Sears, but he always returned their phone calls and was a master at giving reporters much-needed background information.

Also signing on was Vic Gold as speechwriter, consultant, and body man, or personal assistant. Bush needed a peer whom he respected on the plane with him; Gold, an attorney, speechwriter, and novelist who had been Barry Goldwater's deputy press secretary in 1964 and Vice President Spiro Agnew's press secretary in the White House, filled the bill. Gold would have been more ideologically comfortable with Reagan, for whom he had worked in 1968. But the mercurial and hot-tempered Gold (Jim Wooten of ABC once said that the “working definition of insanity in Washington is Vic Gold”) would never have meshed with John Sears. For a time a young political knockabout, Karl Rove, worked for Bush, but before the campaign got going, Bush fired him for leaking to the media, according to Dave Keene.
⁵⁰

Another addition for Bush was Keene himself, who had been Reagan's southern political director in 1976. Keene had done a commendable job winning delegates and primaries for the Gipper, and the media had grown to like him for his candor, humor, and blunt talk. Bringing a prominent Reaganite over constituted a coup for the Bush campaign and advanced the case that Bush was acceptable to conservatives. Keene had angled to be the Reagan campaign's chief spokesman, which made some sense given his relationship with the national media. But Sears had other ideas. Keene had been seen by many as Sears's protégé in 1976, but as the native Wisconsinite became more and more prominent in Washington, he emerged as a threat to Sears's authority and a competitor for the media's affection. Sears offered Keene jobs either as head of coalitions or as the campaign's liaison with Capitol Hill—both of which Keene considered “ghetto” positions.
⁵¹

Sears then offered Keene up as tribute to some of the Californians around Reagan, who were suspicious of the campaign manager. But Keene had also run afoul of Mike Deaver by refusing to support Deaver's brief covert bid to replace Sears; this meant, by extension, that Keene was also in hot water with Mrs. Reagan.
⁵²
Deaver, who had tried to take Sears out, then joined forces with Sears to take Keene out.

Keene was furious with Sears for selling him out. Jim Baker of the nascent Bush operation caught wind of this and offered him a position, but Keene's old friend Lyn Nofziger tried to keep him in the Reagan fold. Nofziger arranged for a private meeting with Reagan, Keene, and himself at the Madison Hotel the next time Reagan was in Washington. They met after work and had a couple of drinks, and Reagan told jokes, quipping to the two conservatives that, between marriages, he'd been pretty randy in Hollywood, “but I got so tired.”
⁵³
Reagan never asked Keene to remain with his campaign, however, even after Nofziger told him that Keene would stay only if Reagan directly asked him. Keene signed on shortly after that with Bush.
⁵⁴

While the Bush and Reagan teams were jockeying for staffers, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas entered the race for the Republican nomination in late February 1979.
⁵⁵
In any other year, Dole would have been considered a more serious candidate. He was a wounded war hero who had struggled through years of painful therapy to regain partial use of his left arm and hand but virtually no use of his right. Dole worked his way through law school, was elected to the House and then the Senate, and had been Ford's running mate. He was well liked by both the media and conservatives. His voting record was conservative enough, without being off-putting to more moderate elements in the party.

But Dole was also a wisenheimer, leading some to conclude he was not serious. As a Kansan, Dole knew farm policy better than anyone else in the GOP. This should have made him more popular in rural states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Yet in Iowa he was only scoring 2 percent in the polls, tied with both Crane and Bush.
⁵⁶

O
N
M
ARCH 7,
R
EAGAN
filed his own campaign exploratory committee with the Federal Election Commission. The charade of the exploratory committee rather than a full-fledged campaign committee was chosen so Reagan could continue to earn income from his speeches, radio commentaries, and syndicated column.
⁵⁷

As in 1976, the plan was for Paul Laxalt to lead the campaign as chairman. Laxalt told reporters, “Reagan hasn't changed … but the country has. Not since General Eisenhower's first election almost 30 years ago has there been such a perfect fit between the man and the public mood as there is today with Gov. Reagan and the American people.”
⁵⁸

Four years earlier, Laxalt had held a similar press conference, but only a ragtag group of individuals had been willing to be associated with Reagan's challenge to Ford. Now the list of Reagan supporters was impressive, including four former members of Ford's cabinet. Indeed, fully 25 percent of the people on the list had supported Ford in 1976, including Caspar Weinberger.
⁵⁹

As long as Reagan remained the front-runner, John Sears would be safe, especially given his close relationship with Mrs. Reagan and Mike Deaver. But he was quickly making enemies inside the Reagan operation. He and Nofziger had been engaged in a four-year feud; Sears had accused Nofziger of leaking against him to muckraking columnist Jack Anderson, while Nofziger accused Sears of trying to “moderate” Reagan. Sears was making clumsy and unpopular personnel decisions. He was insulating himself from critics and driving out perceived competitors. He was beginning to load up the Reagan campaign with people whom Reagan had never laid eyes on and whose names he was not familiar with. By mid-February,
there would be seven Reagan staffers working in an office in Alexandria, Virginia, thirty-four in the Los Angeles offices, and another twenty-nine people working in the field—but very few people in New Hampshire, the site of the first primary just one year away.

At one point, Sears became angry with Reagan—so angry, in fact, that he refused to take his candidate's phone calls.
⁶⁰
Nancy Reagan took note of the change in Sears and wondered what had happened to him since 1976. She thought he had “become arrogant and aloof.”
⁶¹

Moreover, as 1979 progressed, Sears's decision to put Reagan on ice was becoming a problem. Reagan's nonavailability became such an issue that Peter Hannaford was forced to produce a memo showing how many interviews the Gipper actually gave between January 1979 and the end of October. All told, Reagan did 101 interviews or media availabilities—almost nothing compared with what the other candidates were doing.
⁶²
This monumental mistake, combined with Sears's fights with Reaganites and profligate spending, would nearly destroy Reagan's candidacy.

“
No one is big enough for the job.
”

T
he decade of the 1970s was winding down, and not a moment too soon.

The country's bicentennial in 1976 stood out as the only event in which America could take pride. Otherwise, it had been a miserable time of declinism, littered with lost jobs, lost national pride, lost dreams—and lost hope. It was one of the most uninspiring decades in the history of the American Republic. As 1980 approached, there was not much that seemed exceptional about America anymore.

The decade had begun with the sappy movie
Love Story
, acted woodenly by Ryan O'Neal and even more so by the pretty but maladroit Ali MacGraw. The poster for the movie carried the inane slogan “Love means never having to say you're sorry,” which was, as the
New York Times Magazine
noted, a “glossy reflection of the urge to be free of guilt and responsibility to anyone outside the self.”
¹
How this new Age of Narcissism would finish was unknown, but anything would be better than having to watch that dreadful movie ever again.

Advertisers were in a mad race to the bottom to appeal to the lowest common denominator. No one had ever accused any advertising agency on Madison Avenue of trying to appeal to Mensa members, but the counterculture's “If it feels good, do it” ethos had reached ridiculous and often scary extremes. From “It's your face, let Schick love it” to “At McDonald's we do it all for you” to Burger King's “Have it your way,” personal pronouns including “me,” “my,” and “I” had replaced the inclusive “we,” “us,” and “our” that had defined America for two hundred years. In the “Me Decade,” as Tom Wolfe tagged it, everyone was out for himself. Vanity license plates began to flourish.

The sexual and cultural revolutions of the 1960s were codified by the 1970s; what began as heady rebellion became the status quo. The consequences were dark. Trends that seemed novel during the Summer of Love in 1967 now came off as tawdry. The country had spiraled downward from the debauchery of Woodstock to the decadence of disco, from “harmless” grass to dangerous cocaine, from sexual freedom to the same old licentiousness. Love must have been “free,” because it seemed like everyone was giving it away. The aftermath was an American landscape littered with ruined marriages, broken homes, and drug addiction. The social fabric was in tatters.

A cultish faction sprang up in Los Angeles and on college campuses called the “human potential movement,” but no one seemed to quite know what it was. Loss of trust in public institutions, politicians, and societal leaders had sent young Americans scurrying off to find their own slice of heathen. “We're afraid to believe too much in anything or, anyone,” one undergraduate at American University whimpered.
²

Reality seemed to touch these affluent brats only when inflation jacked the cost of their drugs. At the University of Michigan, an ounce of marijuana rose from twelve dollars to fifteen dollars, and at Boston University, Quaaludes went up from thirty cents per tablet to as much as three dollars.
³
Prescription drugs were readily available for stressed-out parents, and now they, too, wanted to “ask Alice” about the white rabbit. The era was not graceful, but it was slick. No-fault divorces came into vogue and Catholic priests found their parishioners coming to confession less and less for one simple reason: they no longer felt guilty.

College students of the late 1970s may have inherited the 1960s commitment to rutting, anonymous, casual sex, but they were, unlike their older brothers and sisters who marched in the 1960s, indifferent to politics and the world around them. With the Vietnam War lost and the draft over, students found new ways in which to occupy their leisure time. Rather than bomb ROTC buildings, male undergraduates at Wake Forest took turns fluff-drying themselves in coin-operated dryers. “It sounds kind of dumb,” one said. “But after a few beers, it seems like an entirely reasonable thing to do.”
⁴
Fewer than half of college students bothered to register to vote.
⁵
The eighteen-year-old vote had seemed so important just a few years earlier. Now no one could remember what the fuss was all about.

American women had gone in a few short years from “Earth Mother” to “Disco Mama.” Hair care was back in style, as was personal hygiene. Indeed, as men's hair got shorter, women's seemed to get longer. Women also took to wearing makeup once again. As if to compensate for their older sisters' disdain for cosmetics, some of the disco women of the 1970s appeared to apply it with a trowel.
Young men were borrowing their mothers' blow driers and hair spray and nobody thought twice about it. Then they headed out to the discos in their double-knit leisure suits.

In those discos—which were little more than petri dishes for gratuitous sex and “recreational” drug use—young Americans did their bump-and-grind dance routines to the beat of “YMCA,” a celebration of young homosexuals meeting in public bathhouses, and “Bad Girl,” in which Donna Summer sang admiringly of prostitution. Virtually every song of the 1970s was about sex, sex, and more sex, as in the case of “Afternoon Delight” and “Shake Your Booty,” which left little doubt as to their subject matter. People listened to it all on eight-track tapes, the bulky plastic cassettes that had become all the rage, and AM radio, which dominated not with political talk but with rock 'n' roll and “bubblegum” music. Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones began the first of their “farewell” tours. Thirty years later, the band was
still
on a farewell tour. “You get what you need”? You bet.

In 1973, the stock market topped out at 1,050 and then fell for the rest of the decade. No one in America was investing in the future anymore. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow there will be no tomorrow became the idealized philosophy of America in the 1970s.

In the spring of 1979, the famous Russian dissident and Nobel Prize–winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn saw the decay of the West and eviscerated it in a commencement speech at Harvard. He deplored the “TV stupor” and “intolerable music” along with the “spiritual exhaustion” evident in America.
⁶
To be sure, he hated the Soviet Union, where he had been imprisoned and beaten, leading him to write the internationally acclaimed book
The Gulag Archipelago
, but Solzhenitsyn could not bring himself to call the culture of the West superior to that of the collectivist state he'd left behind. When a demonstrator in the crowd held up a sign that said, “You Can't Fight Stalinism with Fascism,” Solzhenitsyn departed from his prepared text to angrily condemn the protester, saying that only those who had never been held captive in a Soviet labor camp could have the audacity to call him a Fascist.
⁷