Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (36 page)

The president didn't need to worry about Jerry Brown by this point. Brown's campaign had devolved into a sad joke. Thousands of his petitions in New York were disqualified because two-thirds of the signers were not registered to vote. Brown's name was thrown off the ballot. His manager resigned, noting the difficulty of “working without salary.”
³²

J
OHN
C
ONNALLY'S CAMPAIGN WAS
a mess as well. He was now on his third campaign manager: his son, John Connally III. Connally's newest spokesman, Bill Rhatican, quipped, “I would say right now John Connally is his own campaign manager.”
³³
Despite the whipping administered to him so far, Big John said, “I could turn this country around in the first 24 hours if I was in office.”
³⁴
The words “humility” and “Connally” had never collided in the same sentence.

Connally decided to make South Carolina his last stand with Reagan. He had won the support of both Senator Strom Thurmond—who had played footsie with
Reagan in 1976 but had never come out for him—and Governor Jim Edwards, who had supported Reagan in 1976.

When Bush found out that Connally was making a big effort there to stop Reagan, he changed the agreed-upon strategy, which had been to stay out of the Gamecock State. Bush overruled the vigorous protestations of his campaign and paid the $1,500 filing fee. Jim Baker told reporters that Bush was going to South Carolina because Howard Baker was there, but the candidate was really going in because he hated Connally.

Bush had won the endorsement of Harry Dent of South Carolina, a former Nixon and Ford aide who made a big footprint in the GOP South. Dent despised Reagan and told Bush that he could win South Carolina, since he surmised that Reagan and Connally would divide the conservative vote. Dent immediately began to spread rumors that Connally's campaign was being run by blacks and homosexuals.

Connally replied by calling Dent “the original dirty tricks man.”
³⁵
Yet another of his temporary spokesmen, Jim McAvoy, told the media that Connally would not quit, even if he lost South Carolina, and that his goal was to hold Reagan to under 40 percent.
³⁶
They were whistling past the kudzu.

B
ILL
B
ROCK'S
R
EPUBLICAN
N
ATIONAL
Committee was gearing up for the November elections. Brock had transformed the organization in just a few short years. The Republicans' house file list had grown to more than 650,000 names of proven givers—bigger, even, than it was after the 1964 Goldwater campaign—with an average return of $26 per name. The year before, the committee had spent $3.5 million on direct mail, which had impressively netted more than $9.5 million.
³⁷
The RNC had fourteen trained regional political directors whose experience in running campaigns was put to use by sending them constantly on the road to give ideas, support, and advice to GOP candidates, managers, and committees.

Brock had instituted an impressive outreach program to minorities, women, labor, professionals, farmers, and other interest groups. He produced several widely read publications that not only boosted morale but also spread the Republican message. In addition, Brock was making plans to run a multimillion-dollar “institutional” campaign to further spread Republican cheer while taking it to the Democrats. His overall budget for 1980 was more than $20 million, up 200 percent in just four years.

Brock also rolled out one of the funniest and most effective commercials of the season. An actor who looked suspiciously like House Speaker Tip O'Neill was accompanied in a Lincoln Continental by a nervous young aide. “The Speaker” was depicted weaving down the highway, oblivious to his predicament as he ignored
the aide's pleas to look at the gas gauge. Finally, as the car died on the side of the road, the comic faux O'Neill shrieked, “Hey, we're out of gas!” A voiceover intoned, “The Democrats are out of gas.”
³⁸

The commercial (which later won a Clio Award for excellence in advertising) was a brilliant indictment of a Democratic Party that many believed hadn't had an original initiative in years, had poor energy policies, and was led in Congress by a man who was trapped in a New Deal past.

W
ITH THE DEPARTURE OF
Sears from the Reagan campaign, all the old Reaganites began to come back into the fold. Lyn Nofziger, Marty Anderson, Mike Deaver, and others eventually returned to Reagan. The band was back together. A triumvirate of Meese, Casey, and Wirthlin was running the operation. The Californians, along with honorary new member Casey, were back. For the first time in a long time, Reagan was having fun again and there was joy in Mudville.

But Sears, Lake, and Black would not remain silent long. After their firing they had holed up in a Boston hotel to steer clear of reporters who were inundating them with interview requests, but they soon returned to Washington. Two days later they held a ninety-minute press conference at the National Press Club. The trio wanted to make it clear that they had not resigned. “I was fired,” Black said, and the others concurred.
³⁹

The three avoided any personal criticism of the Gipper, but they portrayed the Reagan campaign as “an operation plagued with incompetence, internal rivalries and an indecisive candidate, unprepared on the issues and insulated from the problems on his staff.”
⁴⁰
Sears, of course, had been in charge of that operation. He and Black had hired much of the staff they now suggested was incompetent. And Reagan didn't look very indecisive when he participated in the scheme to fire them in New Hampshire.

Sears and Black both nervously smoked cigarettes as they sat during the press conference. Sears admitted that the financial mess was entirely of his doing, but he blamed Nofziger, Meese, and Deaver for sundry misdeeds. He also said Reagan had been poorly briefed, which is why he did not participate in the Iowa debates, a decision that Sears said was Reagan's decision, not his own.
⁴¹
This was true—in a way. Sears had recommended that Reagan not go and Reagan had acceded to the recommendation of the man in whose hands he'd put his career.

Bitterness sometimes crept into their comments. Black said, “If this [press conference] gets Gov. Reagan bad publicity, then I'm sorry. But we will not sit here and fail to tell you the truth.”
⁴²

In character, Nofziger fired a salvo back from Los Angeles, saying that Sears
was “paranoid, has been for a long time. He can't stand to have anybody disagree with him.”
⁴³

The experience was terribly hard on the three men, as they had invested more than five years of their lives in Ronald Reagan, going back to 1975 as part of Citizens for Reagan. They had many friends there, and each had spent untold hours with Reagan on planes, in cars, in hotels, and over meals. It was clear that this was hardest on Black, the young conservative. For him, the campaign had been an ideological mission, much more so than for Lake and Sears. Reagan later told reporters that Black didn't have to resign.

When it came to Sears, Charlie Black put it best: “Reagan would never have become president had he not hired John in 1975 … and fired John in 1980.”
⁴⁴
There was wisdom in this observation. Sears was the only national GOP political operative in 1974 and 1975 who thought Reagan had what it took to be president. The other major GOP players—especially Easterners and moderates—thought Reagan was a certified yahoo, a shallow former B-movie actor who was the George Wallace of the Republican Party. To a person, by the time of Reagan's death in 2004, they would profess their love and devotion to Reagan and claim they were there from the beginning in 1974, which was a load of horse manure. The only one there was Sears, leading a small group of Californians, conservatives, and junior-varsity operators willing to take on the GOP establishment and Gerald Ford.

It was Sears who talked the Reagans into challenging the incumbent Ford. It was also Sears who came up with the idea of selecting Senator Dick Schweiker as Reagan's running mate before the 1976 convention, which kept Reagan's chances alive going into Kansas City. If Reagan hadn't run in 1976, he never would have run in 1980; he would have lived out his last years giving an occasional speech and spending his days at his ranch with Nancy and the horses.

Sears also understood better than almost anybody what was at stake in 1980: “I can tell you this particular election is more important than any I've seen before.”
⁴⁵

The firings of Sears, Black, and Lake created bitterness on all sides. But over time, some of those wounds healed. Indeed, Black and Lake eventually became fixtures in the Reagan White House and on the 1984 campaign team.

Sears might have similarly worked his way back into Reagan's good graces. All he had had to do was pick up the phone and call and the forever-forgiving Reagan would have welcomed him warmly. Mrs. Reagan maybe less so, but she still would have been gracious. But according to Sears, after his firing in Manchester he never spoke with the Reagans again. On one or two occasions he saw Nancy at a Washington function, but they only waved from afar.
⁴⁶

Years later, Sears was philosophical about being dismissed. “I had already used my credibility and I was too controversial and they needed someone else. You go into politics … you're going to accumulate some shit. When you are in there too long, you should get out. It's a far nicer life when you are out.”
⁴⁷

John P. Sears, campaign maestro extraordinaire—at only thirty-nine years of age—never again worked in national politics.

T
HE CAMPAIGN MOVED ON
to the University of South Carolina, where four of the contenders met for a mostly civil ninety-minute debate moderated by Jim Lehrer of PBS.

Reagan was by now supremely confident at these “cattle shows” he had once derided. George Bush was forced to spend time on more mea culpas over Nashua. Senator Baker said he was no longer mad at Bush—which everybody knew was a fib. Connally lashed out at Bush, saying he must be a liberal, “because they are all for him.” Bush replied weakly that “labels are not important.”
⁴⁸

But Connally saved his hottest fire for Reagan, saying he had been running for president since 1964 and that he'd led the very liberal labor union the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan testily replied that he'd successfully fought off a Communist takeover of the union.
⁴⁹
Big John had swung and missed.

The subject of the participation of African-Americans in the GOP came up. The other three candidates gave mostly stock answers about how many minorities were on their staff. Reagan said as much but then went much further than the other candidates did: “But what I think the Republican Party has to do today is recognize that the Democratic Party for years has humiliated and demeaned these people by saying the only way to approach them is by an offer of more government handouts.… We're coming to you because … we're Americans … with the same hopes and dreams. You want dignity … you want an opportunity to educate your children. We want you to have that and we believe the Republicans offer that more than the Democrats do.”
⁵⁰

Reagan was also asked whether he supported counting illegal aliens from Mexico in the upcoming census. He replied that he was foursquare opposed, although he did express his opposition to a “nine-foot fence along the border,” preferring instead an agreement between the two countries whereby citizens could cross the border legally, “with permits.”
⁵¹

Unlike the Nashua debate, the event at the University of South Carolina produced no dramatic confrontations. It certainly did nothing to allow George Bush to shift the momentum. Bush had to focus on Massachusetts and Vermont, which would hold their primaries on March 4, four days before the South Carolina vote.
These New England states were perceived as Bush's “firewalls”; they might halt Reagan's momentum after the Gipper's win in New Hampshire. Expectations remained high for Bush in the two states. Bush had the organizational jump on Reagan there. Besides, he had been born in Massachusetts and of course, there was Andover, and his list of supporters included some of the most prominent Boston Brahmins—Hatch, Lodge, Saltonstall. Recognizing these advantages, Reagan took only a cursory pass through the Bay State and made it clear that he expected Bush to win there. Polling seemed to confirm Reagan's point of view: a Boston Globe survey taken a month earlier had Bush up over Reagan by an incredible 61–16 margin.
⁵²

But after Reagan's big victory in neighboring New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont had become “must-win” states for Bush. Bush's Bay State manager was the thirty-two-year-old Andy Card. Neither Card nor his assistant, Ron Kaufman, was anything like the Brahmins with whom they worked. Kaufman, who was Jewish, had grown up poor; his father once had a little shoe store where he made baseball cleats for Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. Kaufman was a self-described “underachiever”; he never went to college and had worked as a grocery clerk until he got involved in local politics and found out he was pretty good at it.
⁵³
A tough kid, he'd once had the stuffing kicked out of him working on Election Day in South Boston. “Southie” was widely regarded as the roughest neighborhood in Beantown, intolerant of blacks, Jews, and Republicans, but Kaufman had made his bones and was ready for more action.
⁵⁴

Card had run into opposition from Jim Baker about hiring Kaufman as his deputy. Baker said, “Kaufman is wrapping lettuce for a living; he's not ready for politics.” Card protested and finally Bush's manager relented.
⁵⁵