Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (35 page)

Baker, for his part, believed that if Bush faltered even more, then he himself might emerge as the moderate alternative to Reagan.

Overlooked in all this discussion of Reagan's conservatism and the need for moderation was an extensive New York Times poll of voters nationwide, which found that 40 percent called themselves “conservative,” while only 22 percent said they were “liberal.”
¹⁰

About the only certainty in the Republican race was that Bob Dole was near to dropping out. He'd collected roughly 0.4 percent of the vote in New Hampshire—around 600 votes—and as a result, was disqualified from receiving any more matching funds from the FEC under its convoluted qualifying plan.
¹¹

Within the Reagan campaign, great uncertainty remained over the matter of John Sears, Charlie Black, and Jim Lake. Though the three had so far gone quietly, they had many friends in the national media and could make things very unpleasant for Reagan. They also had allies in Republican circles, including twelve members of the Reagan campaign who had resigned in protest over their dismissal, such as Nick Ruwe, the scheduling director. More angry staffers were rumored to be on the verge of resigning in protest over the firings. Some worried that they'd be tagged as being loyal to Charlie Black and not Reagan and would be fired as a result.

The Reagan team hastily called a two-hour meeting at Washington's Dulles Airport to avert a new staff crisis. Present were Reagan, Mrs. Reagan, Bill Casey, Ed Meese, and the field staff—Roger Stone, Herb Harmon, Keith Bulen, Frank
Donatelli, Frank Whetstone, Andy Carter, Kenny Klinge, Rick Shelby, George Clark, Ernie Angelo, Don Devine, Lou Kitchin, Paul Manafort, Dale Duvall, Don Totten, and others. Lee Atwater and Lorelei Kinder did not attend, but they were also part of this crew. This was the crème de la crème of GOP organizers in 1980, and perhaps the most impressive group of political operatives ever assembled. They had come to Reagan because of conservatism and eschewed silly, puerile tactics. Dignity for their candidate and their campaign was important. Reagan utterly agreed.

But Black had recruited many of these operatives, and some directly confronted Reagan over the shake-up. Black was their friend and the meeting grew contentious. Mrs. Reagan sharply rebuked several who challenged Reagan over the firings.
¹²
Whetstone, one of those who challenged the candidate over the firing of Sears, Lake, and Black, had something else he wanted to get off his chest: “Ron, when are you going to get a hearing aid so you can hear people?”

Reagan, momentarily stunned by the attacks, pulled himself together and addressed the group with a little pep talk, but he “got a little bit pissed off a couple of times,” Shelby recalled.
¹³

Then Casey stood up and gave them unshirted hell about whether the meeting was necessary, warning them about future budget and personnel cuts, essentially playing bad cop to Reagan's good cop. This group had seen that ploy before and they weren't buying it. They wanted to know whether they still had jobs, and Reagan assured them they did, that he'd made a mistake in Iowa. Klinge recalled that Reagan said, “I want you all around. You guys have done, and gals, have done, [a great] job for me.”
¹⁴
The meeting ended with the staff mostly satisfied; they had had their chance to blow off steam.

Lyn Nofziger was due to come back aboard the campaign in short order, but not before he wrote a long piece for the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
dumping all over poor John Sears. Nofziger then reprinted the article in the March newsletter of Citizens for the Republic, sending it out to tens of thousands.
¹⁵

Nofziger was the Michael Corleone of the conservative movement. He didn't want to wipe out everybody—just his “enemies.”

M
ANY IN THE MEDIA
wrote derisively that the new team taking over for Reagan was inadequate to the task. One Sears-smitten reporter, Loye Miller, wrote that Meese, Casey, and Dick Wirthlin were “junior varsity” and that the campaign would “float dead in the water” for a time without Sears and company.
¹⁶

The American voter in 1980 was becoming more aware of front-line political operatives. Political-operatives-as-celebrities were a new phenomenon in politics. It had taken off in 1976, starting with the media's love affair with Carter's
aides and certified characters Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell. The two made the cover of
Rolling Stone
. Behind the scenes were hundreds more, however, who toiled in anonymity for their candidates, including the personal assistants. Bush's was a pleasant young man, David Bates, who called himself a “gentleman's gentleman.”
¹⁷
David Fischer did likewise for the Gipper. Their jobs were critical, as it was up to them to make sure their candidate was where he should be and when. To ensure that their clothing was cleaned and pressed. To get them a glass of water, hold their coats, write down names, or get them a bite to eat when needed. It wasn't glamorous, it wasn't highly paid, but it was important. In later campaigns, they would become known as “body men.” They routinely put in eighteen-hour days and it wasn't unusual for the exhausted traveling staff to wake up not knowing what day it was or what city they were in.

These madcap campaigns were not for the faint of heart or connoisseurs of gourmet food. Staff subsisted on bad airplane food, greasy hamburgers, old coffee, and nicotine, and the evenings were fueled with too much alcohol. Most candidates avoided drinking on the road. Reagan had an occasional glass of wine; Bush, a martini; and Jimmy Carter, of course, was a near-teetotaler. Ted Kennedy, it appeared, was holding on to the wagon.

Reagan's favorite dessert was carrot cake, but he would devour any dessert put before him. Bush enjoyed granola and yogurt in the morning, while snacking on potato chips or popcorn on the campaign plane at other times. Jerry Brown nibbled on whole-wheat noodles and raw cauliflower. Bush ran each morning and Reagan worked out in his hotel room with an exercise wheel. Kennedy exercised infrequently because of his bad back, and he had to avoid ice cream and other rich foods, as he gained weight easily.

Food and drink in politics could be a delicate matter. George Wallace, stereotypically, filled his plane with MoonPies and Dr Peppers. John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy more sensibly stocked their planes with cartons of Campbell's tomato soup. In 1968 Nelson Rockefeller thoughtfully provided oysters and a man to shuck them for the traveling press. In 1972 Sargent Shriver, stumping in New Hampshire, went into a blue-collar drinking establishment in Nashua with a throng of media. Shriver sidled up to the bar and ordered a round of beer for the house, earning cheers—until he asked for a snifter of Courvoisier for himself.

Later that year, George McGovern was campaigning in a Jewish section of New York, where he ordered a kosher hotdog and “a glass of milk.”
¹⁸

T
HE DAY AFTER THE
big win in New Hampshire, Governor and Mrs. Reagan flew by commercial plane to Vermont, site of a primary in one week. Standing before
the media, Reagan was asked about the departed aides. He refused to say they'd been fired. Indeed, he praised each, calling them “good men.”
¹⁹
His campaign was doing all it could to avoid provoking Sears, Black, and Lake.

Reagan also took responsibility for Sears's profligate spending: “I went along with them too.” But the fact was that his campaign's finances were in shambles. The FEC allowed candidates to spend approximately $17 million over the thirty-odd primaries, but Reagan's campaign had already spent more than $12 million. Bush, on the other hand, had spent only $6.3 million to date and had plenty in reserve. Reagan's campaign had been spending more than $500,000 a month just on salaries.
²⁰

Dealing with this financial crisis was Casey's first task. This unlikely Reaganite—a product of the East Coast moneyed elites, who were supporting candidates like Bush or Connally but not populists like Reagan—set about paring the campaign to a bare-bones operation in order to save the Gipper's chances for the nomination. Under Casey, the payroll was cut in half, from $500,000 per month down to $250,000. Fully half of the campaign staff of 275 was laid off.
²¹

While Casey worked to get the operations in order, Reagan continued campaigning fiercely. He knocked the president hard on the hostage crisis, saying that Carter had “botched” it. He also said that by holding Americans, Iran was engaging in an “act of war.”
²²
Reagan hammered Ted Kennedy on Iran, too. Referring to Kennedy's proposal to set up an international tribunal to investigate Iran's complaints against Washington in exchange for release of the hostages, Reagan railed in his stump speech, “It's nice to be liked, but it's more important to be respected.”
²³

With Reagan suddenly back in front, Bush's campaign eyed a new strategy. Stung by the criticisms that Bush had been too “vague” on the issues, his team debated whether he should make a major speech on foreign policy. The staff also wrestled with taking the gloves off on Reagan's age, but the idea of an advertising assault was set aside. It could backfire by making Bush look mean; it would certainly make Reagan and Mrs. Reagan more angry at Bush than they already were; and it would doom any chance whatsoever for Bush to go on the ticket with Reagan in Detroit if the governor won the nomination.

But Bush could not resist toying with the age issue. At a press conference in Florida, Bush denied that he was attacking Reagan for being sixty-nine years old but then said, “People are going to want a person who can be a president for eight years.”
²⁴

The dynamics in Florida for Bush changed immediately following New Hampshire. Bush's office in Miami had been inundated with phone calls in the days leading up to New Hampshire. The day after, the phones went dead. “I think,”
admitted Bill Schuette, the Bush director in the state, “that this [New Hampshire] will slow that momentum.” It was an understatement.
²⁵

Reagan's offices, which had been a lethargic operation, suddenly burst with new volunteers and contributors, according to his regional fieldman, Herb Harmon.
²⁶
Reagan had been in trouble in Florida for months. One of the few state leaders for Reagan from 1976 who had survived the purges in preparation for 1980 was Tommy Thomas, a car dealer from Panama City. Thomas had the build and tact of a bull—without the etiquette. Thomas said whatever he was thinking. He had one piece of advice for Reagan, which he naturally gave in public: “Quit being such a nice guy.”
²⁷

As Reagan's campaign began to take off, Bush's campaign struggled more and more. In Florida Bush was being dogged by newspaper ads, sponsored by the Florida Conservative Union and its chairman, Mike Thompson, detailing Bush's involvement with the Council on Foreign Relations, a right-wing bogeyman similar to the Trilateral Commission. Both—conservatives said—were bent on one-world government. The ads went after Bush and those members of his staff who had some sort of association with either organization.

As it happened, Bill Casey was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, but Reagan's new campaign manager was never attacked over this matter the way Bush was.

The pressures and frustrations seemed to be getting to Bush. At one Florida campaign appearance, pro-life demonstrators were heckling him. Bush walked over to their leader, a respected physician named Bart Heffernan, and whispered in his ear, “Go fuck yourself.” Rather than doing that, Heffernan instead put Bush's anatomical observations in his newsletter and it got into the hands of the national media.
²⁸

Dave Keene prided himself on never lying to his friends in the media. He could spin with the best of them, so when reporters asked him whether Bush had really said this to Dr. Heffernan, Keene replied, “Now, does that sound like something George would say?” The ploy worked and the media moved on.
²⁹

T
EDDY
K
ENNEDY LIMPED INTO
the South. He went to Alabama, where two dozen protesters heckled him at a speech at a steel mill in Birmingham. It was ugly. A handmade sign read, “How Can You Save the Country When You Couldn't Save Mary Jo?” Another steelworker yelled, “You're a murderer,” and a medical student taunted Kennedy, “You cheated on a test!”—a reference to Kennedy's expulsion from Harvard.
³⁰

Kennedy did his best to ignore them and finished his speech, in which he promised to fight for gun-control legislation. Because of such statements, the
National Rifle Association had only accelerated its “If Kennedy Wins, You Lose” campaign as the primary season moved south.
³¹

Although the president could claim only fifty-five delegates to Kennedy's thirty-six, Carter's team wondered how much more pounding Kennedy was willing to take. The national media had all but completely turned against Kennedy. They referred to his campaign as “The Bozo Zone,” a send-up of
The Twilight Zone
. Reporters got on the public-address system of the plane to broadcast bogus news reports about the stumbles of the candidate and the comic story that Teddy's campaign had become.

Carter had walloped Kennedy in Iowa and New Hampshire, and now the White House aimed for a knockout. Carter didn't just want to beat Kennedy, he wanted to crush him, humiliate him. It would be Carter's revenge against the smarmy liberals from Georgetown who made fun of him and his clan. Carter wasn't just using the hostage crisis to maximum effect; the full force of his campaign and the government were brought to bear on poor, unsuspecting Teddy. Early on, Carter's team had worried that a bandwagon effect would take place, that terrified Democrats would quickly endorse Kennedy and run away from Carter's reelection campaign. So the president's operatives had organized assiduously for months in the early states, especially in lining up early endorsements. First they went after the big-city mayors, reminding them of the federal largesse given them over the past three years. The mayors, with their machines to consider, reluctantly signed up. Other sheepish Democratic politicians quickly fell in line behind the president, albeit with tails between their legs. Carter poured it on.