Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (85 page)

Corbin was not the only old RFK retainer who wanted to help Reagan defeat Carter. Adam Walinsky wrote a six-page memo to Casey on how Reagan could score points in a debate with the president.
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Walinsky later met with Casey to discuss the campaign.

A later news report said that Jim Baker had a hand in bringing Corbin into the Reagan campaign.
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But the fact was that Baker never liked Corbin. Keene had introduced the two in 1979 after a lunch in which Corbin and Bartlett gave Keene “advice” for his candidate, George Bush. “In Kennedy's case, we just put a girl on the plane,” the two men told Keene. “That gives us a much better candidate. And we think you need to do this with Bush.” Keene told them, “I made a deal with Jim Baker that he's in charge of the campaign and I'm in charge of the political organization. And it seems to me that this would fall within his domain rather than mine.” So Keene, who liked a good joke, called Baker and suggested he meet with Corbin and Bartlett. Baker agreed to the meeting, and shortly after the two men departed, he yelled at Keene, “You son of a bitch, you could have at least told me!”
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Keene was proud of his little prank.

According to Keene as well as Adam Walinsky, it was also Corbin's idea to convince Pat Lucey, once Ted Kennedy was out of the race, to go on the ticket with John Anderson so as to bleed more liberal votes away from Carter.
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Lucey
didn't need much convincing, as he loved Kennedy and despised Carter and his aides.
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This approach fit the two-step plan that Corbin was formulating: The first step was to defeat Carter to exact revenge. The second was to mount a second campaign by Ted Kennedy in 1984 as a way to restore Camelot.

Corbin's work for the Reagan campaign was, of course, crucial to ensuring that the first step of the plan was achieved. Corbin first visited the Reagan-Bush headquarters in Arlington on September 29, meeting with Jim Baker and then with Bill Casey. He would make at least three more visits, signing in on October 11, October 25, and November 3.
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On October 25, Corbin signed in at 9:35
A.M.
, gave his destination as “Casey,” and picked up a check for $1,500. It was just three days before the big debate between Reagan and Carter.
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On November 3, the day before the election, Corbin picked up a second and final check from the Reagan campaign, this time in the amount of $1,360.
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He also spent nearly two hours meeting with Casey. The report that the campaign filed with the Federal Election Commission said that Corbin received this check for “professional services and telephone” (with $160 of the final $1,360 covering reimbursement of phone expenses).

Corbin's invoices claimed that he produced research reports on Florida for the Reagan campaign. He did go to the state, but no evidence of his doing any work there for the Gipper surfaced. No one at the campaign recalled ever seeing a report from him. The idea that Corbin would put anything in writing was absurd. He certainly wasn't breaking a sweat for Reagan while in Florida. In the back of his rental car were several boxes filled with Reagan-Bush campaign materials, but he asked a friend to throw them in the trash as a favor.
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P
RESIDENT
C
ARTER'S DEBATE BRIEFING
books had been assembled and copied in the White House starting the night of October 23 and finishing around 11 o'clock the next morning. A White House aide, James Rowland, stood at a copying machine to prepare the briefing books for Carter and his debate-prep team.
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There were actually three books: one on domestic policy, one on foreign policy, and a third for Vice President Mondale's perusal.
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Jerry Rafshoon, in charge of President Carter's media, recalled seeing Corbin around the Carter White House late in the 1980 campaign and thought it odd that this Kennedy man and Carter hater would be there.
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He had no idea at the time that Corbin was covertly working for Reagan.

Copies of the Carter briefing books arrived at the Reagan campaign's headquarters not long after the White House had put them together. Reagan adviser
David Gergen later recalled a package arriving at the Reagan-Bush campaign on a rainy Saturday, “probably October 25.”
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October 25 was indeed a rainy Saturday in Washington.
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It was also the same day that Corbin met with Bill Casey at Reagan campaign headquarters.

Within a short period of time, everybody in the Reagan-Bush campaign knew about the purloined Carter briefing books. Jim Baker knew about them. Stef Halper, the Bush research aide who by the fall was working for Ed Meese, knew about them.
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So apparently did the campaign's national political director, Bill Timmons.
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So did Gergen, a former Bush aide (although he first denied and then later admitted to Congress that he knew of the books).
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So did Congressman David Stockman of Michigan, who in Reagan's practice debates stood in for John Anderson and then Carter.
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So did Francis Hodsoll, who was coordinating papers for the debate prep with Reagan.
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Wayne Valis, a staffer at the American Enterprise Institute who was volunteering at the Reagan campaign, later recalled that pretty much everybody knew about the material through the grapevine.
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Nevertheless, the story of the pinched Carter briefing books did not go public during the 1980 campaign. On the day of the debate, October 28, David Stockman did make reference in a speech to the “pilfered” briefing books.
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Later, after Reagan's victory, a “collector of campaign memorabilia” searching for souvenirs found Carter campaign memos among the Reagan campaign's trash.
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But it would be another three years before the stolen-briefing-books story made national news, when Laurence Barrett of
Time
reported on the episode in a mostly harsh book about Reagan,
Gambling with History
. In a small item tucked inside the book, Barrett said that someone in the Reagan camp had “filched” Carter's briefing material, and insinuated that Jim Baker had an ethical problem because he had “looked the other way.”
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Right after publication of Barrett's book, former Carter press secretary Jody Powell wrote a column flaying the national media for showing so little interest in the story. Within days, Washington was engulfed in a “Debategate” inferno. A congressional committee was duly appointed to investigate the theft in the late spring of 1983.
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The congressional investigation headed by Don Albosta took ten months and cost $500,000.
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A number of figures came under suspicion but were never charged. The FBI accused Wayne Valis under questioning of sleeping with women in the Carter White House in order to get sensitive documents, to which Valis responded, “Gentlemen, when I sleep with women, it's not to get papers. Why do you sleep with women?”
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Reagan's national security adviser, Richard Allen,
told the Albosta committee that after the 1980 election Jerry Jennings, a staffer at Carter's National Security Council, was “seen associating” with Tony Dolan, an aide to Ed Meese at the Reagan campaign who was also close to Bill Casey.
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Jim Rowland, the White House aide who had photocopied the briefing books, came under suspicion because he had once worked for “the very conservative
Human Events
” and had been overheard criticizing the Carter administration, although the committee later cleared him.
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Of course, the committee could not fail to take note of Paul Corbin. With attention focused on the old Kennedy operator, the media began staking out Corbin's home. To avoid the press he would jump the back fence and walk into his neighbor's basement, and he would then put on a disguise and be sneaked out in a car. Corbin knew what it was to be stalked by federal investigators, as he'd once secreted accused GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone during the Watergate investigation.
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At the height of the investigation, Phil Gailey of the
New York Times
tracked down Corbin in Aruba, and Corbin denied knowing anything about the Carter briefing books. He did confirm that he had spoken with Casey about the matter, however. Casey ducked Gailey's repeated calls. The story revealed that Reagan White House counsel Fred Fielding had given the FBI a list of “secretaries and low-level employees who had worked in the Nixon and Ford Administrations and were held over by the Carter White House.”
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Corbin submitted a sworn statement to the Albosta committee, and in his interviews with the committee and with the FBI he was again full of denials.
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Frustrated, Congressman Albosta acknowledged his committee's inability to pin Corbin down, saying, “He denies everything … doesn't even know his own name. This leads people to suspect he had some effort and involvement.”
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Furthering suspicion was the fact that, as phone logs revealed, Corbin had called Bill Timmons at the Reagan campaign “on several occasions.”
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The Albosta committee reported that Corbin was informing Timmons of Carter's travel in advance, and noted that a memo by Reagan aide Jerry Carmen to a field staffer “proceeded to discuss President Carter's scheduled stops for two dates a week-and-a-half away.”
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The Albosta committee concluded that the Carter debate briefing books were most probably taken from either the National Security Council offices or the White House Situation Room, both in the West Wing and both with tightly controlled access.
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Albosta himself said in an interview years later that he thought the briefing books had been lifted from the office of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. “The papers were left on his desk,” Albosta recalled, “and this one night they … disappeared, and they became gone.”
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The Albosta committee's final report, in 1983, stated the committee's belief that there existed “organized efforts to obtain from the Carter administration, and from the Carter-Mondale campaign, information and materials that were not publicly available.”
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The investigators could not come to more precise conclusions, in part because the Carter White House—featuring many holdovers from the Ford and Nixon administrations who didn't like the Carter gang—leaked like a sieve. According to the final report, the investigation found that thirteen Reagan staffers had either received or were aware of Carter material that had come into the possession of the Reagan campaign.
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With so many possible culprits, Corbin escaped the noose. The investigators were forced to admit their failure, saying that the committee “was unable to state how Corbin may have obtained those materials himself.”
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Years later Congressman Albosta said he felt that he'd been hoodwinked, especially by David Stockman, though he did not elaborate.
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He was also frustrated that when his committee interviewed Bill Casey, they couldn't understand a word he said. The only thing that was clear was that Casey denied giving Jim Baker the Carter briefing books, as Baker had claimed in the media and to the Albosta committee.
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These counterclaims led to squabbling within the Reagan administration. Casey, by then the CIA director, challenged Baker, Reagan's White House chief of staff, to take polygraphs. Baker fretted that Casey, from his OSS and CIA experience, would know how to “game the polygraph” tests and hang him out to dry.
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Casey confirmed Baker's fear when he told his friend Bill Safire, “I know how to handle those things.”
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For days, the two Reagan aides engaged in public finger pointing. Paul Corbin's name was lost amid this high-profile spat.

At the height of the Albosta investigation, Baker received a call from Congressman Dick Cheney. Cheney told Baker that a member of his staff, Tim Wyngaard, confided that Corbin had privately acknowledged orchestrating the theft of the Carter briefing books and giving them to Casey.
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Corbin and Wyngaard, a former reporter, had known each other a long time, going back to Wisconsin politics. Wyngaard, the executive director of the House Republican Policy Committee, confirmed to Albosta committee investigators and to the
New York Times
that Corbin had claimed credit for lifting the briefing books.
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Regardless, Corbin, the old master, once again had left no fingerprints—in this case, literally. Although the FBI found both Jim Baker's and David Gergen's fingerprints on the Carter briefing books, they found none of Corbin's, or of Casey's for that matter.
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Corbin was too smart to make that dumb mistake. After all, how many Washington political operators had a downtown office with an unlisted phone number? Jim Baker despised Corbin but there was also grudging respect. He once told the
old man, “I got to say this about you Kennedy guys. You really know how to keep your mouths shut.”
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O
N
J
UNE 5, 1981—THIRTEEN
years to the day after RFK was shot in L.A.'s Ambassador Hotel—President Ronald Reagan awarded to the Kennedy family the Congressional Gold Medal commemorating the life of Robert Francis Kennedy. This was the very same medal that Jimmy Carter had refused to present, causing deep resentment among Kennedyites.