Reagan's Revolution (66 page)

Several members of the staff had tried to bar Reed from the room, but finally relented because they didn’t want to cause a scene in front of the media. As Reagan departed and walked towards an elevator with Mrs. Reagan, Mike Deaver, Peter Hannaford, Jim Lake, Nancy Reynolds, and his Secret Service contingent, Reed rushed up to him and exclaimed, “Oh Governor, I’ve made the worst mistake of my life.” Sources vary on Reagan’s retort to Reed, but all agreed it was anything but warm. Lake remembered distinctly Reagan telling Reed, “It’s a little late now, Clarke.”
¹¹⁶
Billy Mounger, Reed’s lifelong friend, would never speak to him again.

Reagan had attended a unity press conference with Ford Thursday morning and spoke warmly about his chance against Carter in the fall campaign. Later that morning, Ford announced his choice of Bob Dole as his running mate. Dole and Ford had served together in the Congress and had worked together for many years. The delegates voted overwhelmingly for Dole as Vice President, with 1,921 going to the Kansan and 338 to others, including Reagan, Bill Buckley, and a smattering of Congressman and Senators. David Keene and John Sears also received votes for Vice President, and 102 delegates abstained.
¹¹⁷

Ford delivered his acceptance speech forcefully, and it was widely praised. His address was made memorable by his direct challenge to Carter to debate the issues. Dole had spoken previously, and he too was well received. Ford’s family joined them at the rostrum along with Dole’s wife Elizabeth and daughter Robin. Nelson Rockefeller also arrived, along with the rest of the meager leadership of the GOP. But one very important person was missing.

In their crowded skybox, Ronald and Nancy Reagan were joined by their family and some close friends, the Schweiker children, and campaign staff. Reagan was being interviewed by Brokaw and, in the melee, Mrs. Reagan was almost poked in the eye by Brokaw’s antenna. Brokaw asked Reagan if he was going to address the hall, and once again Reagan said, “No.”
¹¹⁸
Previously, after concluding an interview with Reagan outside his skybox, Frank Reynolds broke down crying. A deep affection existed between Reynolds and the Reagans. But he would not be the only person in tears before the night was over.
¹¹⁹

Reagan was utterly content to watch the proceedings with Nancy, sign a few autographs, and savor the rousing reception he had received earlier from the convention. Since their father would have no further role that evening, Michael and Maureen Reagan had left the arena earlier and returned to the hotel, where they planned to meet him for dinner. And the Secret Service wanted Reagan out of the building before the end of the proceedings. Nofziger had not even gone to the hall that night. He had gone to bed early at the Alameda Plaza.

Mike Reagan remembered that, before he and Maureen left, a very intoxicated RNC aide had come to Reagan’s skybox and asked Mike Deaver to please ask Reagan once again to reconsider the invitation to speak to the convention. But the aide was summarily dismissed. Later, Jim Lake received several phone calls from Deaver, who was furiously negotiating on Reagan’s behalf with Ford’s staff, who were pressing hard for Reagan to make an appearance at the podium. Minutes passed.

Ford then asked, before a national television audience and in front of the assembled hall, for “my good friend, Ron Reagan to come down and bring Nancy.” Reagan initially rebuffed Ford’s entrees. Waving and shaking his head “no,” he smiled and gave Ford the “thumbs up” sign.

Then Ford’s family joined the President, and they too waved for Reagan to come down to the podium. And then the convention hall weighed in, as the delegates began cheering and applauding and chanting “We Want Ron! We Want Ron! We Want Ron!” The delegates created an ever louder and louder din that rolled up to Reagan, urging him, pleading with him to go to the podium. Kemper Arena was shaking, as the delegates were stomping their feet and yelling for Reagan.

Reagan reflected for a moment.

Finally, a more senior and sober convention official, Bryce Harlow, showed up to once again ask for Reagan’s presence at the podium. But Reagan had already decided. He didn’t want to disappoint the Republican faithful. Reagan truly wanted to help his party. And he hated letting anyone down. And so, somewhat reluctantly, Ronald Reagan stepped out of his skybox.

And into the future.

15
REAGAN’S REMARKS

“There is no substitute for victory.”

T
hank you very much.

Mr. President, Mrs. Ford, Mr. Vice President, Mr. Vice President to be, the distinguished guests here and you ladies and gentlemen:

I am going to say fellow Republicans here, but those who are watching from a distance—all of those millions of Democrats and independents who I know are looking for a cause around which to rally and which I believe we can give them.

Mr. President, before you arrived tonight, these wonderful people here, when we came in, gave Nancy and myself a welcome. And that, plus this, plus your kindness and generosity in honoring us by bringing us down here, will give us a memory that will live in our hearts forever.

Watching on television these last few nights, and I’ve seen you also with the warmth that you greeted Nancy, and you also filled my heart with joy when you did that.

May I just say some words? There are cynics who say that a party platform is something that no one bothers to read and it doesn’t very often amount to much.

Whether it is different this time than it has ever been before, I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors with no pastel shades.

We have just heard a call to arms based on that platform. And a call to arms to really be successful in communicating and reveal to the American people the difference between this platform and the platform of the opposing party, which is nothing but a revamped and a reissue and a running of a late, late show of the things that we’ve been hearing from them for the last 40 years.

If I could just take a moment—I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our Tricentennial.

It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and issues of the day. And I said I could do so, riding down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa Ines Mountains on the other, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day.

Then, as I tried to write—let your own minds turn to that task. You’re going to write for people a hundred years from now who know all about us. We know nothing about them. We don’t know what kind of a world they’ll be living in.

And suddenly, I thought to myself as I wrote of the problems, they’ll be the domestic problems of which the President spoke here tonight; the challenges confronting us; the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democrat rule in this country; the invasion of private rights; the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy. These are our challenges that we must meet.

And then again there is that challenge of which he spoke, that we live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive in each other’s country and destroy virtually the civilized world we live in.

And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge.

Whether they had the freedom that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom; who kept us now a hundred years later free; who kept our world from nuclear destruction? And if we fail, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it.

This is our challenge. And this is why we are here in this hall tonight. Better than we’ve ever done before, we’ve got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we’ve ever been. But we carry the message they’re waiting for.

We must go forth from here united, determined, that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory.
¹

Every conservative who was old enough remembers where he or she was on the night of August 19, 1976, when Reagan gave his speech at Kemper Arena.

Lou Cannon said, “In a sense, it wasn’t a great political speech saying to vote one way or the other . . . it wasn’t political in the sense of dealing with strategy . . . but it was Reagan’s heart . . . it set him apart from other politicians and political figures at the time.”
²

“From that day forward, I think American politics changed,” said Al Cardenas, Reagan’s Dade County Chairman, who had driven from Florida to Kansas City to volunteer for the campaign. He was so poor at he time that he had to borrow cash from some of the Reagan staff just to pay for the gas to drive back home.
³

Jack Germond of the
Washington Star
made the analogy between Reagan in 1976 and John Kennedy in 1956, when Kennedy lost the nomination for Vice President. “He’d made a strong showing at the convention and you could see right then that he’d be a hell of a player in 1960.”
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All across America, men and women, most of them decades younger than Reagan, were moved and motivated to “get involved.”

At a seafood restaurant on Cape Cod, a nineteen-year-old waiter and bartender was mesmerized as he watched Reagan’s speech on the television in the cocktail lounge and vowed to “get involved” when he got back to college.

Two thousand miles away on a wheat farm in eastern Colorado, a fair, red headed twelve year-old girl, who had spent the day helping her father in the fields, came in for the evening. After supper, together she and her family watched Reagan’s speech. She too was moved to “get involved.”

Literally thousands of other young men and women across the country were compelled by Reagan’s speech, and they too decided to “get involved.” They would descend on campaigns and Capitol Hill, work in the state parties and state houses, intern for conservative organizations and publications, or start their own companies and organizations. Some would become writers while others would run political campaigns. Whatever form their efforts took, these young men and women would become the soldiers and captains and generals in Reagan’s Revolution.

16
THE END OF THE BEGINNING

“One of ours.”

T
here is a well-known phrase among conservatives that serves as a treasured pass or a secret handshake, as in any fraternity. Beginning with the 1976 Reagan campaign and ever after, when one conservative is talking to another while discussing or introducing a third, he or she is referred to as “one of ours.”

Although the phrase was originally the title of a book about World War I—
One of Ours
, written in 1922 by Willa Cather, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize—Michelle Laxalt says it was the Reagan people who started to use the phrase in 1976. To be referred to as “one of ours” was better than any endorsement inside the conservative movement. And the “ours” were growing and extending their influence, as things began to move very quickly inside the conservative movement and the Republican Party by early 1977.

The conservative movement was pouring its new ideas and energies into the empty vessel that was the Republican Party. “Above all, more than a few Republicans were beginning to wonder out loud whether their party had any long term future. ‘We’re staging a political dance macabre,’ muttered one middle-of-the-road delegate during the pre-convention maneuverings. ‘It’s the dance of death for the Republican Party.’”
¹
That was true enough in August of 1976. But out of the ashes of the old Republican Party would arise a new political movement.

Groups like Terry Dolan’s National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) and Bob Heckman’s Fund for a Conservative Majority (FCM) sprung up and would go on to run vitally important multi-million dollar independent expenditure campaigns in House and Senate races in 1978 and 1980, as well as for Reagan in 1980. Several years earlier, Dolan had battled it out for Chairman of the College Republicans with Karl Rove and had lost. Both went on to make significant contributions to American politics.

Reagan had signed a direct mail letter for NCPAC in 1977, and the contributions poured in. Similarly, Stan Evans founded the National Journalism Center in 1977 to train a new generation of conservative writers and editors. Heckman had worked on the 1976 Reagan campaign before starting his new organization. FCM alone spent over $750,000 in the first six primaries on radio and print ads in 1980, lending critical help to Reagan at a time when his campaign was nearly broke. At his and John Gizzi’s direction, this author produced the pro-Reagan radio spots and bought the time on the stations.

Paul Weyrich began hosting important weekly meetings of conservatives at his offices at “Library Court,” which became the name of the meeting. Senators, Congressmen, and conservative leaders all attended to listen, learn, coordinate and plot strategy. Howard Phillips’s Conservative Caucus also was part of the vanguard of the Conservative Movement. Phillips was yet another who had traveled the ideological road from liberal Republican to conservative activist. He was a large man with a booming voice whose organization helped train candidates for office while also lobbying against liberal initiatives.

Many of these conservative organizations were aided in their important fundraising by the Richard A. Viguerie Co., known as “RAVCO,” and Bruce Eberle and Associates. But other conservative direct mail firms would also spring up shortly.