Eureka (30 page)

After laying out the format and the rules, she said to the vast television audience, “And now I would like to add a personal note, if I may. As Dorothy Ridings [president of the League of Women Voters] said [in her introduction], I have been involved now in four presidential debates, either as a moderator or as a panelist. In the past, there was no problem in selecting panelists. Tonight, however, there were to have been four panelists participating in this debate. The candidates were given a list of almost one hundred qualified journalists from all the media and could agree on only these three fine journalists. As moderator, and on behalf of my fellow journalists, I very much regret, as does the League of Women Voters, that this situation has occurred.”

For Mondale, the stakes were high. He figured his only hope was that something would happen during the debates to turn things around. He also knew Reagan, the front-runner incumbent, didn’t have to debate him at all. The debate imperative was not yet that established.

BUT REAGAN AGREED
to two debates in October, in the last few weeks before the election. One was in Louisville, Kentucky; the other in Kansas City, Kansas.

Mondale went into those debates with a hard, fast mission.

“I wanted to show presidential stature,” he told me. “I wanted to show mastery of the issues. I wanted to show that progressive dimension again. I wanted to show that I was more alert than the president, without being negative.”

The former vice president was also ready for Reagan’s signature line. In the first debate in Louisville, Mondale suggested that Reagan would propose a tax increase on low- and middle-income Americans after the election, leaving wealthy Americans largely untouched.

Reagan continued along these lines, and panelist Fred Barnes of
The Baltimore Sun
pressed him for details on his commitment not to raise taxes in his second term. Mondale, during his rebuttal, pounced.

Mondale happily agreed with the debate consensus that he had won the debate. But he said there was more to it than his prepared comeback. “The main thing, I think, that hurt him was he seemed to be ill-focused, seemed to lose his way, stumble, roam around in irrelevancies, and it was a pretty—it was an impressively unimpressive personal performance.”

Others had noted that Reagan seemed tired. I asked him about that.

“No, it wasn’t tired. I was overtrained…. I want to tell you, I just had more facts and figures poured at me for weeks before than anyone could possibly sort out and use, and I call it overtraining. When I got there, I realized that I was racking my brain so much for facts and figures on whatever subject we were talking about that I knew I didn’t do well.”

But two weeks later in Kansas City, things changed. Reagan said later he definitely did not go into that one overtrained. And panelist Henry Trewhitt of
The Baltimore Sun
asked a question that enabled him to turn a potential liability into a strength:

When I asked if he had been lying for that one, Reagan said it just came to him right off the top of his head.

Whether the line was preprogrammed on not, Mondale knew he had just taken a hit.

“Well, I’ll tell you, if TV can tell the truth, as you say it can, you’ll see that I was smiling. But I think if you come in close, you’ll see some tears coming down because I knew he had gotten me there…. That was really the end of my campaign that night, I think. That’s what I thought.”

That night?

“Yes, I walked off and I was almost certain the campaign was over, and it was.”

Did you say that to anybody?

“My wife.”

MY INTERVIEW WITH
Ronald Reagan took place five years after the 1984 debates in his Century Plaza office in Los Angeles. There was already talk that the former president was having memory problems and, in fact, one of his own aides suggested to me not to expect a full accounting of every little thing that had happened in every debate.

Reagan implied that himself as we chatted before the cameras started taping. It was clear that somebody had to force him to talk about the debates in the first place. Let’s just get it over and be done with it, his body language suggested.

Making small talk, Reagan mentioned that he had just autographed—for the makeup artist—an old copy of
Photoplay
magazine that featured him and Paul Muni on the cover. Reagan amused everyone by recounting how Muni had always insisted on standing on the left-hand side for all group studio stills, as it offered a “better angle.”

I brought up that just a month before, by chance, I had watched his 1940 movie
Santa Fe Trail
on television.

Reagan gave me one of those famous smiles and recounted with considerable detail how he had posed for a
Santa Fe Trail
group cast photo that included Errol Flynn, Raymond Massey, Olivia de Havilland, Alan Hale, and Van Heflin. Reagan played Custer; Flynn was Jeb Stuart.

He told me that Errol Flynn, “as always,” had insisted on posing in the front row in the most prominent position. Both were tall, but Reagan, behind Flynn, wanted to appear to tower over him. So he stood on a small box of some kind. Reagan held up his hands to show the size of the box and raised his head as he had to appear even taller.

He continued talking like that for several delightful minutes, and I think we both had private regrets that we had to move on from his movie memories to presidential debates.