Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (64 page)

Weighing down Carter politically was that fact that more than fifty Americans were still being held hostage in Tehran. The ayatollah had still released only one American, who was very sick. The others continued to languish with no hope in sight.
¹⁴

M
ARTY
A
NDERSON WAS LOOKING
after Reagan's interests as the GOP gathered in Detroit to write the document spelling out the party's philosophy. Anderson was a slight, bookish type with an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth and a Ph.D. from MIT. He certainly had the rumpled, slightly disheveled look of an academic, complete with papers under one arm and a briefcase in the other hand. Anderson was a passionate conservative who got along well with the other Reagan insiders. And with his charming, unassuming manner along with his heavy campaign experience, he could reason with Republicans and conservatives outside the Reagan inner circle. He was the perfect choice to calm the stormy waters of the Republican platform fights.

The platform battle royal kicked off over the pro–Equal Rights Amendment plank, which had been in the party's platform since 1940. In the subcommittee, it easily went down to defeat, 11–4.
¹⁵
Watered-down language making vague promises about equality for women was substituted, which pleased neither side. Still, it was a small victory for conservative grassroots activist Phyllis Schlafly and her legions of women supporters, who had wanted a strongly worded denunciation of the amendment.

A plank supporting a Human Life Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was easily adopted, though a majority of GOP delegates to the convention opposed the measure, according to a partial survey by the
Washington Post
.
¹⁶
The platform committee also approved language opposing federal funding for abortion. Pro-choice and pro-ERA supporters made noises about bringing their positions to the
full convention for its consideration, but they could not muster the twenty-seven signatories among the full platform committee members needed to file a minority report.

RNC cochair Mary Dent Crisp was photographed dissolving in tears as her beloved ERA was cut from the platform. Crisp had not been removed from her post, but she was not running for reelection the following week, as she knew she would have been in for a crushing defeat. The convention scene only heightened speculation that she would bolt the party and endorse John Anderson.
¹⁷

For the past four years, Reagan had gotten one report after another on Crisp's nasty comments about him, to the point that even his good manners were tested. “Mary Crisp should look to herself and find out how loyal she's been to the Republican Party for quite some time,” he said tartly.
¹⁸

The controversial Crisp left Detroit several days before the beginning of the convention to the catcalls of her conservative enemies. The Reagan forces moved quickly to nominate a successor to Crisp: Betty Heitman, chair of the National Federation of Republican Women. Heitman, from Louisiana, was a conservative, a Reagan fan, and a team player who was popular at Republican headquarters.
¹⁹

Crisp's departure wasn't enough to mollify some conservatives. Senator Jesse Helms and his followers were unhappy with the “compromise” on women's rights and wanted punitive language on the Panama Canal, Taiwan, and other foreign-policy matters in the platform. One plank offered by the Helms forces called for the resurrection of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the controversial commie-hunting group of the 1950s.
²⁰
Helms, unwittingly, was serving Reagan's purposes. In taking such hard-line stances, he was moderating Reagan's image with the media.

Other subcommittees adopted language supporting Reagan's tax cuts and billions for a defense buildup, as well as military superiority over the Soviets. Conservatives and Reaganites rammed through one initiative after another.

Ted Kennedy was having far less luck on the Democratic side. His proposed planks to allow the delegates already pledged to President Carter to be freed essentially to revote at the Democratic convention were going down in flames, one by one.
²¹
Carter's men had a hammerlock on the platform process.

T
HE FINAL DRAFT OF
the 1980 Republican platform was approved on Thursday, July 10. It might as well have been lifted from Reagan's commentaries and speeches over the previous four years. The platform dealt with pro-life judges, the decontrol of oil and natural gas, more domestic exploration, repealing the national 55-mile-per-hour speed limit, busing, gun control, new defense systems,
and increased pay and incentives for the American GI and military reserves.
²²
It called for rejection of SALT II and for “military superiority” over the Soviets. It was the most conservative and most specific platform in the history of the party.
²³

The 1980 Republican Party platform was clear and unequivocal: “Mr. Carter must go! For what he has done to the dollar, for what he has done to the life savings of millions of Americans, for what he has done to retirees seeking a secure old age, for what he has done to young families aspiring to a home, an education for their children and a rising living standard, Mr. Carter must not have another four years in office.” When the final draft was offered to the committee for passage, Representative Ed Bethune of Arkansas offered a floor amendment to add the exclamation point at the end of the first sentence. The motion was carried unanimously, to the cheers of the members of the platform committee.
²⁴
The final sentence of the preamble presented to the full committee read, “Let us now together make America great again, let us now together make a new beginning.” Mrs. Patric Dorsey, a delegate from North Carolina, proposed that the sentence begin, “With God's help,” and this amendment, too, was accepted.
²⁵

The final GOP document, a tough denunciation of all things Carter, all things Communist, and nearly all things liberal, would have been even harsher had not Marty Anderson and other Reagan men been on watch to prevent the hard-liners from inserting even stronger verbiage. Jack Kemp had been one of those deputized by the Reagan forces to mollify Helms and his team so as to keep the platform from lurching too far to the right. Kemp had helped dial back the more assertive members of the platform committee, so much so that he joked that he looked “like a Communist.”
²⁶

E
VEN WHILE CONSERVATIVES WERE
fighting over the Republican platform, they had stayed focused on the issue of Reagan's running mate. Richard Viguerie's
Conservative Digest
devoted most of one issue to making the case against Howard Baker. The magazine's cover ruthlessly portrayed Senator Baker wearing a yellow dunce cap.
²⁷
Human Events
, no slacker in the ideological wars, was still running its own jihad against Baker. The newspaper was championing Kemp as Reagan's running mate.
²⁸

Human Events
was not alone in backing Kemp. Many conservatives and most of the GOP's delegates wanted the former quarterback on the ticket. The independent group Republicans for Victory, organized by Jim Roberts and Bruce Eberle, had already raised $70,000 for its draft-Kemp effort, which included distributing bumper stickers, posters, and free copies of Kemp's book.
²⁹
The group even
opened up a storefront in Detroit to tout the young congressman for the ticket. Kemp worried that the grassroots effort might actually backfire and hurt his chances. He must have been surprised, then, when Bob Dole, a longtime skeptic of supply-side economics, spoke up in favor of Reagan's selecting Kemp for the ticket.
³⁰

Reagan liked Kemp a lot, and intellectually he was most comfortable with the New York congressman. Maybe it was their unusual backgrounds: as a former movie actor and pro football player, respectively, each man had to deal with those who doubted his intellectual capacity. Perhaps as a way to compensate for being thought of as a lightweight, both Reagan and Kemp read everything under the sun, especially on economics and political science. After the platform committee passed the huge tax-cut plan, Kemp proudly proclaimed, “This is a radical plan for us. Republicans can no longer be called conservatives. We are radical and I am proud of it.”
³¹
Only a few, including the Gipper, understood the significance of what Kemp was saying.

Although Kemp was rumored to be a Reagan favorite, an insider told the
Washington Post
that the former quarterback was “too immature” for the ticket. George Bush, meanwhile, did not appeal to the Gipper himself—according to the insider, Reagan didn't think the Texan was “presidential”—but he was drawing the eye of many other Republicans.
³²
Surprisingly, a handful of southern state Republican chairmen came out for Bush as the best choice for Reagan. Bush also got support from an even more unexpected quarter. The American Conservative Union held hearings in Washington to review the merits of potential running mates. Afterward, the attendees were surveyed, and Bush tied conservative favorite Bill Simon at 25 percent, one point ahead of Jack Kemp. It boded well for Bush that he had made so much headway with some in the Old Right and the New Right.
³³

Other candidates were in the mix. More and more attention was centering on the respected Richard Lugar of Indiana, a moderate-to-conservative senator who offended no one but whose public-speaking style put people to sleep. The joke running around in Reagan circles was “Most people think Lugar is a pistol, not a senator.”
³⁴
Lugar was also laboring with a millstone hung around his neck some years earlier, when he was mayor of Indianapolis: Nixon's henchmen had let it be known that Lugar was Nixon's “favorite mayor.”
³⁵
Lugar was still trying to recover.

On the eve of the convention, a leak to the
Los Angeles Times
said that Reagan had suddenly ruled out his old friend Paul Laxalt for the second slot.
³⁶
It appeared that Reagan, despite his and his wife's affection and high regard for Laxalt, recognized that choosing the Nevadan would bring little if any political benefit to the
ticket and could actually hurt in the general election because of his state's legalized gambling and prostitution.

Even with Laxalt out of the running, a number of prospects were still under consideration. One thing Reagan steadfastly refused to do was to have the prospective candidates trudge up the long road to his ranch in Santa Barbara for an embarrassing dog-and-pony show the way Carter had put everybody on his short list through an awkward display in Plains, Georgia, four years earlier. One of Reagan's goals was to maintain dignity for all.

Reagan insiders fretted over the seemingly slim pickings for the number-two slot. One told the
Washington Star
, “Is that all there is? There's got to be something better out there.”
³⁷

Reagan himself betrayed doubts over at least some of the candidates. Stu Spencer saw this firsthand. It was just before the convention that Spencer came back aboard the Reagan campaign. Spencer noted that after all the old fights and animosities, the Reagans simply picked up the friendship where it had left off five years earlier. Reagan, though, was anything but pleasant when Spencer raised George Bush's name. “He just looked at me like I hit him in the stomach,” Spencer later recalled. “He spent fifteen minutes jumping on George Bush.”
³⁸

Spencer made a case for picking Bush, given the conservative nature of the platform, Bush's second-place finishes, and his impressive foreign-policy credentials.

Reagan only replied, “Hmmm, interesting, interesting.”
³⁹

O
N
S
UNDAY
, J
ULY 13
, Reagan, Nancy, his key staff, and several journalists flew into Los Angeles before his passage to Detroit the next day. As the plane nosed its way through the clouds, Reagan sat down to chat with the traveling reporters. One tried to bait him, asking whether he still believed, as he had charged years earlier, that a “progressive” income tax was the vile contrivance of Karl Marx. Reagan didn't bat an eye: “Well, it was. He was the first one who thought of it.”
⁴⁰

Some of the newer members of the Reagan team were at cross-purposes with their boss. They kept telling reporters that Reagan was really “compassionate” and “kinder and gentler,” but Reagan kept talking about Godless Communism and faceless bureaucrats. Confronted with the conflict, Reagan's new adman Peter Dailey suggested that it was simply a matter of trying to “change the speeches.” Even at this late date, some of those around Reagan still thought he was an empty suit.
⁴¹
These underlings did not understand him.

Reagan's campaign staffing problems continued. Bill Casey had an organizational chart in his office that showed the lines of communications flowing from
staff through himself to Reagan, but everybody knew it was nonsense. Dick Allen, Marty Anderson, Lyn Nofziger, Dick Wirthlin, Mike Deaver, Peter Hannaford, and a couple of the others inside the bubble had direct access to Reagan. When they wanted to talk to him about something, they just stopped by his hotel suite or office, called him at home, or wandered up to the front of the plane. Some had this relationship with Reagan going back years and they weren't about to put up with some damned organizational chart.