Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (14 page)

Yet as well as Sears could read politicos, he had become insensate to the needs, desires, and wants of many Reaganites, including those in the grassroots. Sears had been forced out of the Nixon White House early on because Nixon's old friend, Attorney General John Mitchell, was fearful of the influence the young and moderate Republican would have over the Oval Office.
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Now Sears was behaving
just like Mitchell, forcing out the conservatives whom he feared had more influence over Reagan than he.

Years later, Sears compared the job of campaign manager to that of an orchestra conductor trying “to get everybody to sit in their chair and play their instrument.”
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The problem for the Reagan campaign was that not everybody was singing from the same sheet, and many did not even know which instrument Sears wanted them to play. Asked about the growing friction, Sears simply shrugged his shoulders, recalling, “There was a lot of pushing and shoving and that is normal.”
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Peter Hannaford, speaking for Reagan's Californians, dismissed Sears as “paranoid.”
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Another observer said that since 1976, “Sears had changed. Self-effacement had turned to arrogance, brilliance to egomania, self-mockery to aloofness and shyness to secretiveness.”
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Reagan was dropping in the national polls among GOP primary voters. The candidate acted as if wrapped in gauze, because Sears would not allow him to campaign too often or too aggressively. Over cocktails, political journalists mocked Reagan's slow-motion effort, calling him the “front-walker” rather than the “front-runner,” which also implied that Reagan was decrepit.
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The campaign's finances were a disaster, too. In September of 1979, it leaked out that Reagan's campaign was, incredibly, more than $500,000 in debt, even with former Democrat and now Reagan booster Frank Sinatra helping him raise money. The Reagan for President Committee was taking in around $300,000 per month but spending around $500,000 per month.
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Sears's profligate ways had not changed since 1976. His splurging included renting a $1,700-per-hour private jet for Reagan. When asked about the indulgence he sniffed, “When you're a front-runner you must go in style.”
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A young aide, Doug Bandow, wondered why he and others in Reagan's entourage would stay in expensive hotels like the Waldorf in New York and not even “double up on rooms.”
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Morale bottomed out. Internal strife was high among the survivors as they were engaged in a death struggle, battling for the soul of the campaign. Would Sears and his ally Deaver prevail along with a more “moderate” Reagan, or would the campaign get out of Reagan's way so he could follow his natural ideological instincts? The argument not only was insulting to Reagan, but demonstrated that even his own people often underestimated him. He had always known where he was going and how he would get there.

Sears's temporary alliance with Deaver was just that. Only several days before Reagan's announcement, Sears and Deaver got into a screaming match as Mrs. Reagan “sobbed in the background,” according to Robert Scheer of the
Los Angeles Times
. Reagan and Paul Laxalt “joined in the shouting.” Laxalt took Deaver's side and Reagan was yelling for a truce. But Sears got his way.
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The campaign had grown to more than 150 staffers, plus innumerable consultants, and Sears was hiring more. Many on the staff were new to Reagan. Lyn Nofziger, recently departed from the campaign, worried that Reagan was ignoring old friends and supporters, and that there was an ongoing effort to “repackage” Reagan.
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Every conservative knew what that meant. Nofziger, Jim Lake complained, was “sowing seeds of discontent with the right-wingers.”
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Some of the new advance staff offended Reagan's old friends by keeping them at arm's length. They became known as “Reagan's SS.”
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With all the intrigue, much of it caused by himself, Sears quit. “Fuck it, I can't work here anymore.”
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The Reagans had to call him back from the ledge.

The Gipper regarded most of the strange new people around the campaign with bemusement and often simply nodded his head and then cocked it and smiled without saying a word. He would always listen to reason, but he was not about to alter his philosophy or ideology. Reagan was a master pragmatist when the need called for it, but he also had an utter belief in his abilities to lead people. Reagan was keeping his cool for the most part—and his sense of humor. He explained his reason for running to one reporter: “Well, there was an old saying in show business. If you don't sing and you don't dance, you'd better be able to do something else.… I don't sing and I don't dance.”
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He also had a standard one-liner about Jimmy Carter that drew laughs every time: “A man who tells you he enjoys a cold shower in the morning will lie about other things too.”
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Publicly, Reagan continued to defend his beleaguered campaign manager, but he was deeply unhappy that old hands Nofziger and Marty Anderson were gone from the campaign and that money was being spent willy-nilly. At times, he was forced to apologize to old friends and supporters for Sears's decisions. Wooing moderate Republicans, Sears approached Governor Bill Milliken of Michigan, who had been a major Reagan basher in 1976; when Reagan's Michigan chairman, conservative state senator John Welborn, called Milliken a “skunk” to the media, Sears dismissed Welborn.
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Reagan had to write a letter to a friend in Michigan apologizing for Sears's shabby treatment of his “good friend” Welborn and saying that Sears was “trying to moderate my views or make me less conservative.”
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Reagan was becoming more and more uncommunicative with his campaign manager. Nofziger, years later, explained how he knew when Reagan did not like someone: Reagan would just clam up. The Gipper was far too polite to be overtly rude, but he would simply nod his head and smile and try to avoid direct engagement with the person. Peter Hannaford, another old Reagan hand, agreed that freezing people out was how Reagan dealt with people who got on his nerves. Increasingly in late 1979, this was how the Californian was acting with Sears.
When Reagan and Sears did talk, Reagan did most of the listening, often looking grim.

Archconservatives on occasion also got on Reagan's nerves. Some cited the fact that Reagan had not yet come out against Jimmy Carter's SALT II treaty as evidence that he was being “moderated,” but Reagan was studying the document carefully. There would be no doubt that he would eventually oppose it if he deemed it a one-way street favoring the Soviets, but he wasn't going to be cowed into opposing something as important as an arms agreement if he hadn't reviewed it. In early October 1979, Reagan did indeed take a public position against the treaty, because it did not halt the spread of nuclear weapons. “SALT II is not a strategic arms limitation, it is strategic arms buildup,” he said.
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Reagan's measured response did not satisfy some of the most avid Cold Warriors in the conservative movement, but he knew that if he was to become the fortieth president of the United States, he needed to lead more than the grassroots conservatives who had rallied to his side in 1976. He wasn't interested in leading another lost cause. He would campaign as what he was most comfortable being: a responsible conservative who knew the world he lived in.

O
NE BRIGHT BIT OF
news for the Gipper came when the California GOP decided to retain its winner-take-all primary. It was widely assumed that Reagan would swamp everybody in his adopted Golden State and take all 168 delegates bound for the national convention in Detroit. But California's primary was in June, months after Iowa and New Hampshire; the way things were looking to some in the Reagan camp, his campaign could be washed out to sea long before the June 3 primary. As of late September 1979, Phil Crane had campaigned in New Hampshire all or part of forty-five days, Bush had been there twenty-four days, Bob Dole twenty-one days, and John Anderson fifteen days. Reagan? He'd been to New Hampshire just once in two years, thanks to Sears's play-it-safe strategy.
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Reagan did make a rare trip to Indianapolis to address the National Federation of Republican Women (NFRW), a decidedly conservative organization with real grassroots strength. Its power and influence was such that all the announced or to-be-announced candidates had agreed to speak to the 2,500 women gathering in Indiana. When Reagan appeared, camera flashes went off continuously and some middle-aged women jumped up and down like teenyboppers, as many of the members were fans of Reagan from his movie days. “We all have sort of a love affair with Ronald Reagan,” said one woman present.
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Still, Reagan's reception was not as overwhelming as it had been in the past. James Dickenson of the
Washington Star
wrote that the women behaved as if Reagan had once been a “favorite boyfriend” but
now they were “being wooed by all the good-looking guys in town.”
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Indeed, all the GOP candidates received warm welcomes from the gathering, including the newest suitor among them, General Alexander Haig. John Connally arrived via a two-blocklong parade that included girls on rollerskates and a high school marching band.

Nancy Reagan was sometimes on the stump for “Ronnie,” speaking and taking questions from audiences and reporters alike. In 1976, she had done some campaigning, but she would be more involved this time around, acting as Reagan's own “palace guard.” She was on the lookout for people who were simply trying to use her husband; she knew all too well that this was Ronnie's last chance.

And she was becoming more and more concerned about Sears.

T
OWARD THE END OF
September, Reagan improved his financial situation by raking in more than $175,000 in one fell swoop at a dinner in New Jersey organized by Ray Donovan, owner of a construction company.
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Donovan went on to become Reagan's beleaguered secretary of labor, but that would come later. For this one night, Donovan was a champ.

Reagan got an unexpected boost when his onetime aide Jeff Bell came back aboard the campaign. Bell, who had worked with Reagan from the early '70s right through the 1976 campaign, had been nursing a bruised ego since 1978, when Reagan refused to endorse him in his New Jersey Senate primary bid, which he won. Bell, in a fit of pique, refused Reagan's offer to come to New Jersey to campaign for him and asked Ford to do so instead.
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Bell lost the general election, hooked up with a New York think tank, and became a charter member of the “supply-side mafia” of Jack Kemp, Art Laffer, Jude Wanniski, and Bob Novak. Now all was forgiven and Bell was back with Reagan. Bell would eventually take on a difficult and challenging part of the campaign, one that would help Reagan at a time when it looked as if all was lost.
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Although November 1 had tentatively been declared as the day of Reagan's formal announcement, the date was pushed back to November 13. The campaign had hoped to have a cash stockpile of around $4 million by the time of the declaration, but those plans were now inoperative. Just as bad, all three networks had turned down Reagan's request to purchase a half hour of broadcast time for the night of his announcement. It wasn't clear that the campaign could afford it anyway. The campaign had no recourse, as the networks had also turned down President Carter's similar request. The unwritten rule was to not sell any time to candidates before 1980.
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Although Reagan had lost the Iowa straw poll by a wide margin, amazingly he did not show when the Hawkeye State's GOP held its annual fundraising dinner
in October. Every other candidate did. Sears told reporters, “The obligation of a frontrunner is to keep moving ahead. They can't hurt you as long as you're moving.”
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Many observers thought Sears's strategy was ridiculous, and some saw it as dangerous. Reagan had deep roots and many friends in Iowa. In the 1930s, he'd become a local celebrity in Des Moines broadcasting on WHO radio and had returned many times to speak, including while he was on the “mashed potato” circuit. The Gipper had as much a claim on Iowa's Republicans as anybody—more than most—but he blew the chance to romance four thousand hard-core activists attending the box dinner.

George Bush won yet another Iowa straw poll, impressively, garnering almost 36 percent of the vote. Connally was a poor second at 15 percent. Bob Dole came in third, just behind Connally, though he had purchased hundreds of tickets for his “supporters” and should have gotten a far higher vote total. Reagan was a poor fourth, with 11 percent.
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Bush's showing seemed extraordinary to everyone … except Sears and those in the Reagan high command. Bush was throwing a right hook and Reagan was about to lean into it.

Bush's young organizer in Iowa, Rich Bond, was exultant, gloating over Bush's win and Reagan's loss. Only twenty-nine, Bond was a brash, intense New Yorker and a huge fan of Bush's. In fact, Bond had started a scrapbook about Bush after meeting him seven years earlier. The young man was providing for his new wife, Valerie—a widow who had been married to Bond's closest friend—and for Valerie's four-year-old son. To save money, Bond lived in Ames, forty miles outside of Des Moines.
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Bond had been hired by Dave Keene. When Bush campaign manager Jim Baker had expressed cultural and ideological qualms about the liberal Republican from New York City, Keene said, “That's true … He also is so ambitious and hungry that he would kill his mother for the main chance and Iowa is the main chance.”
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