Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (19 page)

Connally's southern coordinator, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, said of the South Carolina primary, “This is the first crack we get at Reagan head-up, the first time these two go toe-to-toe with the others on the side.”
⁶⁰
The Connally campaign was convinced that if it could get into a “High Noon” showdown with Reagan, Connally would take Reagan out. South Carolina was shaping up as Big John's Alamo.

The FEC spending limit in the Gamecock State was around $423,000, but Connally, freed from those requirements because he had eschewed federal matching funds, would spend far more there. Governor Jim Edwards, who had been one of Reagan's strongest supporters in 1976 but had defected to Big John, would introduce Connally at rallies as “the most qualified man” in the race.
⁶¹
Connally had also gained the endorsement of another Reagan supporter from 1976, Senator Strom Thurmond. Internal politics had led Thurmond to flip to Connally. Reagan's new state chairman, the handsome young congressman Carroll Campbell, impoliticly let it be known that he wanted to run for Thurmond's seat in 1984, when the veteran senator was expected to retire. (As it happened, Thurmond did not leave the Senate until 2003, at the age of one hundred. Though Campbell, who did become governor, outlived Thurmond by two years, he died tragically of Alzheimer's in 2005 at the young age of sixty-five.)

Rather than lower expectations in the early states and especially in South Carolina, Connally's campaign staff openly bragged about the defections from Reagan to Connally. Ronald Rietdorf, Connally's in-state operative, said a “legion” of former Reagan fans were moving to Big John: “This kind of slippage is going on all over the state.”
⁶²
This would be the first GOP presidential primary ever held in South Carolina, so no one could be confident of anything, especially Reagan.

O
N THE RARE OCCASION
when he was on the stump, Reagan was getting an enthusiastic response from GOP crowds, but reporters were pressing him for the new proposals his campaign had promised. These had been delayed for weeks, another sign of disorganization in his operation. The plan all along had been to dominate the news and the other candidates with new concepts and ideas and to convince skeptical voters, especially in the East, that Reagan was not a “one-dimensional
conservative.” His overall schedule was still light, even at this late date. The plan was for Reagan to take a break over the Christmas and New Year's holiday from the little campaigning he was doing and start back up the second week in January.
⁶³

Bush, the only GOP contender whose campaign was not going off the rails, decided that he, too, might enter the South Carolina contest, despite a decision by Jim Baker and Dave Keene to stay out and let Reagan and Connally whale on each other while their resources bled.
⁶⁴
Standing in the wings, waiting for the outcome, was Bush's best option, they believed. If Connally surprised Reagan, then Bush might emerge as the last man standing between Connally and a wounded Reagan and the nomination. If Reagan won, then Connally was through and Bush would again be the last man standing. He would get—if he did well in Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts—what all the candidates had been maneuvering toward for two years: the opportunity to narrow the race to a choice between themselves and Reagan. Bush was a famously disciplined individual, but his loathing of Connally got the best of him and his better judgment.

Still, South Carolina was three months away. All eyes were on Iowa and New Hampshire—and on the hostages in Iran. Conservatives began to attack Carter, accusing him of hiding behind his “national unity” strategy.
⁶⁵
Implicit in the Carter diagram was a not-so-subtle message that to criticize the president was to be unpatriotic and the not-so-subtle suggestion that any reckless comments could get the hostages killed.

Carter had publicly ruled out the use of force to retrieve his fellow Americans, taking yet another arrow out of America's quiver to use against the ayatollah. The only action taken was to send the unctuous, super-pacifist Ramsey Clark to Tehran, leading even the most dovish men around Carter to gag. Americans were told to write postcards to the hostages over the Christmas season.
⁶⁶
In a public-relations “twofer,” Carter asked Americans to dim their Christmas lights in a show of unity—while also saving on energy.

C
HRISTMAS CAME A FEW
days early for the candidates as the first matching funds were issued from the FEC to Carter and Howard Baker. Carter received a little over $1 million and Baker just shy of $800,000.
⁶⁷
Reagan's and Bush's requests were still being processed. Connally had raised around $8 million and was bypassing the FEC.
⁶⁸

Almost forgotten in the field of GOP candidates was John Anderson, who was receiving scant attention from the voters and the media. He was convinced that he was the candidate of ideas, but so far his only ideas had been to slap a fifty-centsper-gallon federal tax on gasoline and to cut Social Security taxes by 50 percent.
⁶⁹
He subscribed to most liberal nostrums: abortion on demand paid for by taxpayers, the ERA, and reductions in the Pentagon's budget. Anderson was reputed to be one of the best speakers in Congress, although he wasn't saying anything the voters hadn't heard before. But in this new era of conservative Republicanism, the media decided here was a truly new phenomenon: a “truth-telling Republican.” Anderson eventually became the 1980 version of the “media's candidate,” as Carter was for a time in 1976 and Gene McCarthy was in 1968.

R
ONALD
R
EAGAN'S
N
EW
H
AMPSHIRE
state GOP chairman, Jerry Carmen, was whipping his operation in the Granite State into shape even as Reagan's national campaign was a mess. Carmen wasn't going to let happen to Reagan what Hugh Gregg had allowed in 1976. He worked out of a decrepit Victorian mansion in Manchester, just down the street from the
Manchester Union-Leader
, his biggest ally.

Unfortunately, Reagan was avoiding New Hampshire. Carmen was confident that all was being done to ensure a Reagan victory, but he was missing a candidate in a state whose voters prided themselves on not picking their candidate until they had talked to all the hopefuls personally. The state GOP would send a meager twenty-two delegates to Detroit, but its first-in-the-nation status gave those delegates an outsized importance.

New Hampshire was not a simple state to categorize. It was fairly homogeneous in terms of race and religion but it operated under separate spheres of influence from Massachusetts, Vermont, and, to a lesser extent, Maine. The southern area up to Manchester was still dominated by a slowly deteriorating textile industry, which had moved north from Massachusetts because the business climate was more favorable. At the same time, imports were destroying the struggling shoe and garment manufacturers. The area adjoining Maine was wooded, and many paper mills operated there, processing cedar, pine, and birch. To the West was farmland, much of it devoted to dairy. Dartmouth College, inspiration for the movie
Animal House
, was also here.

The seacoast region included the naval ship and submarine operations in Kittery and Portsmouth. The farthest northern region, rural, bordered Quebec, and many American citizens in the area spoke French more than English. The state was also famous for its skiing and clear, cold lakes and fall foliage. It was from top to bottom one of the most picturesque states in the nation. Longtime residents could smell an outsider a mile away, and woe to any politician who mispronounced the name of Concord or the northern city of Berlin. The state capital was not pronounced like the grape, but as “Conk-ahd,” as in a conk on the head. And
it was “BURR-lyn,” as in freezing cold, with the emphasis on the first syllable, unlike the German city.

Granite Staters had a proud heritage of self-reliance and respect for privacy. A strong libertarian streak flowed through the state. Reagan was their kind of politician. Trouble was, he wasn't spending much time there.

Reagan, when he was stumping, seemed to spend more time on planes and in limousines than in just plain old grip-and-grin campaigning, at which he was nonpareil. How to “handle” Reagan had been a subject of debate since 1966. Lyn Nofziger was one of the few who understood that Reagan, above all politicians of the era, had an uncanny ability to connect with voters. His charming candor, his self-deprecating humor, and his utter belief in the rightness of his ideas allowed him to motivate and connect with his fellow Americans in a manner that left his jealous opponents in awe.

Because his opponents could not compete with Reagan at this level, they rationalized that he was just a “performer,” like some trained seal. Reagan had worked his whole life to perfect his presentation, from asking for voice lessons while on the radio in Des Moines in the 1930s to the tireless work he put in on his speeches. But it wasn't just how he said it; it was what he said that got people's attention.

T
HE NATIONAL ECONOMY WAS
now in a full-blown recession. Inflation was galloping along as prices rose 1 percent in December alone. Inflation for 1979 was once again in double digits. Gas and oil prices were up, as were interest rates and housing costs. “Growth” was a feeble 1.5 percent annually, but this was negated by inflation.
⁷⁰

R
EAGAN WAS AHEAD IN
all the polls among GOP voters, but none of the questions about his age, stamina, and conservatism had been answered. Could he take a licking and keep on ticking? George Bush was making headway, and the others, especially Connally and Baker, weren't about to leave the stage now, when the pressure or a gaffe or an ill-timed show of Reagan's age might destroy his candidacy. They were all banking on this, plus his inept campaign apparatus. Reagan's man Charlie Black laid it on the line when it came to Iowa: “I think we have to finish first to avoid getting hurt.”
⁷¹

“
George has the momentum now.
”

G
eorge Bush had achieved the unimaginable. The “asterisk” of the Republican Party had come out of nowhere to bloody the front-runner, Ronald Reagan, in the Iowa caucuses. On a cold and blustery January 21, 1980, Bush defeated Reagan, 31.5 percent to 29.4 percent.
¹

The folks of Iowa had known Dutch Reagan for more than forty years. They had known George Bush for forty days. In the past year, however, Reagan had campaigned in their state for only forty hours.
²
It was a watershed moment for Bush. It appeared that his anti-Reagan tide might swamp the Gipper's last try for the GOP nod.

To his moderate supporters, St. George of Brooks Brothers had slain the conservative dragon. The fact that Bush wasn't really all that moderate, at least politically, didn't seem to matter. In politics, perception is everything. When Bush was in the Southwest, he emphasized his “roots” in the Texas oil industry and spoke with a drawl. When he was in New Hampshire, he reminded folks that he was born and raised in Connecticut, had a summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, and was a blueblood product of Phillips Andover and Yale. In the South and Southwest, he conspicuously ate pork rinds. In the Northeast, he ate tuna fish with Tabasco. Bush was a chameleon. On his wrist was a preppy striped watchband; on his feet, depending on the region, cowboy boots or loafers. His audience saw what they most wanted to see. Reagan, on the other hand, was always … Reagan.

“If we blow it, we have no one to blame but ourselves,” Paul Laxalt had told the media several months earlier.
³
Reagan had indeed blown it. Headlines across
America blared “Upset” or “Stunning” when describing Bush's big win over Reagan. In private, Laxalt berated Reagan, saying that he'd screwed up by “sitting on your ass.” He also had some choice words about John Sears.
⁴

Sears had told the media that Reagan would do very little meeting and greeting with Iowa's Republican voters: “It wouldn't do any good to have him going to coffees and shaking hands like the others. People will get the idea he's an ordinary man, like the rest of us.”
⁵
Iowans, especially old friends, got the idea that Reagan didn't care about them anymore. John Maxwell, a native Iowan and GOP consultant who was working for Senator Roger Jepsen at the time, knew scores of people who remembered Reagan from the old days, when they “went out to have a beer with him after he got off work or … listened to him broadcast the Cubs games.”
⁶

Maxwell was more impressed with the Bush operation run by Rich Bond than with Reagan's. When Bush's phone operation called Maxwell, the woman on the other end of the line told him, after he said he supported Reagan, “I've always really liked Reagan, too, and I think of George Bush as being a younger Ronald Reagan.” Tens of thousands of Iowans were being told this very thing by well-trained Bush callers. Several times Maxwell warned Reagan operatives Peter McPherson and Kenny Klinge about what was happening. The two took his concerns seriously enough to go to Iowa to try to salvage the Reagan campaign there.
⁷

The inner circle of Sears, Jim Lake, and Charlie Black had agreed that Reagan could not be stopped. To a man, they were wrong. Revealingly, Black said of Iowa, “Hell, I didn't know it was gonna be a
primary
.”
⁸

Sears had violated his own maxim, “Politics is motion.” Reagan hadn't been in motion for nearly a year, with the exception of his somewhat lackluster announcement tour. Sears wasn't letting Reagan say or do anything interesting. Truth be told, it was not all Sears's fault. It was Reagan's, too. He'd read the polls that showed him still out in front, and he had put himself on cruise control.