Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (28 page)

I
N THE FIRST WEEK
of February, the newly active Reagan zipped through seven states in the South and the East. He gave a major foreign-policy speech in Macon, Georgia, in which he leveled Carter for the high number of members of the Trilateral Commission in his administration, including Zbigniew Brzezinski. Though he never mentioned Bush, he didn't need to. Everybody in the conservative movement
knew by now that Bush had been a member of the commission but had resigned in preparation for pursuing the nomination.

William Loeb's
Manchester Union-Leader
beat Bush about the head and shoulders for this sin: “It is quite clear that this group of extremely powerful men is out to control the world.” Loeb also charged that Bush was using a Trilateral network of “banks, the media and oil companies” to steal the primary.
⁹⁶
Loeb even asserted that Bush's campaign was part of a CIA plot.
⁹⁷
Mr. William Loeb, meet Mr. Oliver Stone.

John Anderson was also a member of the commission, but he did not resign and brushed off the conspiracists as “just old biddies.” Bush finally was compelled to put out a statement on the Trilateral Commission saying any charges of a conspiracy were “absurd.”
⁹⁸

At each campaign stop Reagan was making proposals, making news, and thrilling audiences with thunderous speeches. While in Georgia, Reagan spoke forcefully to students at Columbus College: “No more Vietnams! No more abandonments of friends by the U.S.… We don't care if we're not liked! We're going to be respected!” His young fraternity brothers of Tau Kappa Epsilon raised a banner that read, “RON-TKE-AND APPLE PIE.” Two students performed a dance routine and Reagan joined them in a bit of soft shoe. He was having fun again, he wasn't soft-pedaling his conservatism, and he was back in motion.
⁹⁹

Also, in a nice redirection on his age and Bush's jogging for the media, Reagan told one individual who asked him about his years, “We don't elect presidents to run foot races. We elect presidents to display experience and maturity.”
¹⁰⁰

Charlie Black was comforted by the serendipitous early primary schedule. New Hampshire was five weeks after Iowa. “If New Hampshire had been the week after Iowa, we'd be in tough shape.”
¹⁰¹
But Reagan's poll numbers still had not recovered, and there were now only ten days left before the primary. Dick Wirthlin conceded that for Reagan to win, he'd have to “come from behind.”
¹⁰²
And Bush only added to his momentum when he won the Puerto Rico primary on February 17.

Reagan finally got his television ads going. Initially, a Madison Avenue firm that knew nothing about politics produced commercials of Reagan in a schoolroom, talking to children about energy in front of a blackboard while holding a piece of chalk.
¹⁰³
The spots were ridiculous.

Black then called the old Reagan aide Jeff Bell and asked him to look at one of the Madison Avenue commercials. “I told Charlie this was piece of shit,” Bell later recalled. Black concurred. The ads and the Madison Avenue empty suits were sent packing, and Bell was brought on to produce new ads for the campaign
in New Hampshire. Bell also called in Elliott Curson, who had helped produce Bell's 1978 Senate campaign ads, to help on the Reagan spots. Bell and Curson went to Los Angeles to make the new spots. There they encountered two immediate problems. One was that Reagan had forgotten his contact lenses. “He was blind as a bat without them,” Bell said. They had to make oversized cue cards that Reagan could see. The second was that Mrs. Reagan kept calling, telling Bell that “Ronnie” had to be home at 4 o'clock for a dinner party. Bell obediently followed Mrs. Reagan's urgent requests.

Despite the problems, Bell and Curson produced eleven commercials for $11,000 that were aired heavily in New Hampshire. Most touted Reagan's unvarnished support for tax cuts, and the effective ads helped bring the conservative base back to their hero.
¹⁰⁴
The spots were in jest dubbed “The Good Shepherd” because Reagan, at the end of the ad, said, “We have to move ahead. But we can't leave anybody behind.”
¹⁰⁵

Bush's commercials never got specific. According to Jim Baker, Bush canceled the long-planned issue ads in favor of continuing the “bio stuff.”
¹⁰⁶
Bobby Goodman, a man of indistinct ideology who had once written jingles for New York firms, was Bush's adman in 1980. The “bio spots” told the viewer that Bush had been a star baseball player at Yale and was a “legitimate American hero” because of his service in World War II. The five-minute commercial added that Bush offered “optimism and the promise of future accomplishment” but said nothing about what he would do as president. Goodman defended the spots, saying that “people vote for people they believe in as human beings.”
¹⁰⁷

The increased media scrutiny was clearly taking its toll on Bush, as the other candidates had begun attacking him, following Reagan's lead. At one point he complained to the press about attacks from fellow Republicans, saying that their consultants were telling them to “go out there and go after George Bush.”
¹⁰⁸

Cracks were beginning to appear in Fortress Bush. The New Hampshire primary was still more than a week away, and in politics a week is at least several eternities.

Anything could happen to front-runner George Herbert Walker Bush—Phillips Andover class of 1936, Yale class of 1948, hero pilot jock, and resident of Houston, Texas, and Kennebunkport, Maine.

And anything did happen.

“
I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!
”

M
edical World News
released health information on all the major candidates two weeks before the New Hampshire primary. The publication had solicited reports from each, and only Jerry Brown refused to comply. Jimmy Carter's was by far the briefest, with just a short statement from the White House physician, William Lukash, saying that the president was in excellent shape. Bob Dole may have once suffered from a “‘silent’ heart attack” based on his cardiogram, though his office strongly denied it. John Connally took medication for high blood pressure, Howard Baker recently had a CAT scan because of recurring headaches (which later went away), and both George Bush and Ted Kennedy had ulcers. Phil Crane's worst ailment was that his gums were receding.
¹

Ronald Reagan was in “remarkably good physical condition.”
²
His blood pressure was 130/80; he had a pulse of eighty beats per minute; and he stood 6'1” and weighed 194 pounds. The only minor notes were that he received occasional injections for his allergies and had a bit of arthritis in one thumb.
³
Lyn Nofziger always thought Reagan was one of those kids who were forced to change from a left-hander to a right-hander, which was not at all unusual at the time he began grade school. He wrote right-handed but chopped wood and fired a gun left-handed.
⁴
When the Gipper had been filmed smoking in his “Brass Bancroft” serials, he used his left hand.

Carter weighed but 155 pounds soaking wet; his blood pressure was 114/70 and he had an extraordinary pulse of only forty-two beats per minute. Unfortunately, it also came to light that he was afflicted with “chronic hemorrhoids.”
⁵
This
embarrassing tidbit became fodder for comics, notably in a cruelly funny
Saturday Night Live
sketch in which Dan Aykroyd, playing Carter, alluded to the president's indelicate affliction through a series of bad puns.

It was a new world in that Americans had previously known nothing of presidential health. Problems were routinely covered up—and some should have stayed that way, such as when LBJ vulgarly pulled down his pants to show the world a scar. Thomas Jefferson suffered from severe depression and migraines and sometimes rode off to be by himself for a good cry. Andrew Jackson had more maladies than could be listed, but to sum it up, though he stood six feet tall, he weighed less than 130 pounds. Abraham Lincoln had his bouts with melancholia. Woodrow Wilson, after a lifetime of sickness, was put out of action by a stroke. FDR not only had had polio that confined him to a wheelchair but also suffered from dangerously high blood pressure and possibly skin cancer. John F. Kennedy, despite his “vigah” and appearance, had Addison's disease and received regular cortisone shots for his searing back pain from an injury sustained when a Japanese destroyer sliced into his PT boat. More than one enemy in private conversation disparaged JFK as a “cripple.” Richard Nixon's psyche and heavy drinking were dissected in a million articles, books, movies, and plays—once he left office.

But as the Associated Press noted in 1980, “The ‘velvet barrier’ between public service and private behavior has been virtually eliminated.”
⁶

O
N THE NIGHT OF
February 20, Manchester Central High School hosted the only scheduled debate that included all seven Republican candidates. The contenders, including Reagan, sat at a horseshoe-shaped table, facing moderator Howard K. Smith of ABC.

Reagan's goal that night was to highlight the dissimilarity between himself and Bush. He had spent time with his staff prepping for the debate by having Ed Meese and others throw questions at him while he honed his answers. The day before the debate Bush had sequestered himself in a remote cabin owned by Hugh Gregg and fielded question from Jim Baker, research director Stef Halper, and Pete Teeley. Reagan and Bush approached debates differently. Reagan looked at them as a chance to bring new people into his fold while Bush regarded debates warily, simply looking to survive them.

Bush was expecting the other candidates to gang up on him, but they mostly ganged up on Carter and the Soviets. Everybody was looking for a contretemps between Bush and Reagan, but in this they were disappointed. The only real confrontations came when Bob Dole repeatedly stuck it to Bush. Years earlier, in
1972, President Nixon had unceremoniously dumped Dole as RNC chairman, replacing him with the more suppliant Bush; Dole still hadn't gotten over it.

Reagan was only partially successful in his attempt to set himself apart from Bush. One account, in fact, described his debate performance as “lackluster.”
⁷
But he did enough to counter the charges that he'd become too old to be president. The expectations going into the debate were so low that all he had to do was show up to prove he still had the vim and vigor. Writing of Reagan's performance in the
Washington Post
, Martin Schram acknowledged, “Tonight he showed that he could indeed debate the issues.” Reagan responded “no more or less memorably than all the rest,” wrote Schram, but that was all the candidate needed to do.
⁸

Behind the scenes, Reagan's aides were attempting to revive the one-on-one confrontation with Bush that the FEC had squelched when it canceled the Nashua debate. The FEC finally ruled that a debate could go forward if it was funded by the two candidates, not the newspaper, and if it was not televised live, since showing the two candidates would trigger the FCC's equal-time provisions. Therefore, the debate would have to be covered as a news event by the networks' reporters and not broadcast in real time.
⁹

To satisfy the FEC, the
Nashua Telegraph
suggested that the two campaigns split the $3,500 cost of the debate.
¹⁰
Bush's campaign balked. At this point, Bush's men really didn't want a debate with Reagan, hoping to nurse their lead home. “If they want to debate, let them pay for it,” Hugh Gregg sniffed.
¹¹
Jerry Carmen called Gregg's bluff and said that Reagan would foot the entire bill. Once again he did so without ever consulting anybody at the campaign.
¹²
Though it has been in dispute for years who really wanted to debate whom in Nashua, the Bush campaign confirmed that the push came from the Reagan camp, when Pete Teeley said, “We were challenged to a debate by Reagan and we felt if they wanted to debate then it is incumbent on them to pick up the tab.”
¹³

With the financial question settled, the debate was finally reset for Saturday, February 23, in the gymnasium of the Nashua High School.

T
ELEVISION ADS WERE NOW
blanketing New Hampshire. Ted Kennedy hammered President Carter on the economy. Carter's spots emphasized that he was a family man. He was also running radio ads that had him reciting a portion of the Sermon on the Mount. As the
Miami Herald
reported, “The narrator says in the tones of a voice from Heaven: Vote for President Carter—peacemaker.”
¹⁴

On the Republican side, John Anderson's ads peddled “the Anderson difference.” Bush continued with the bio spots, running commercials that emphasized his war record. Reagan played up his record of tax cuts as governor of California.
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The Republican race was quickly coming down to a two-man competition. Dole by now was simply going through the motions. His friends and family were telling him to get out and concentrate on being reelected to the Senate. Howard Baker was mired in third place. He was getting excellent press coverage, but did not have a sharp enough message for the GOP faithful. Not much of an elbow thrower either, he had no real story to tell except that he was a fresher face than Reagan and that he'd been elected more recently in Tennessee than Reagan had in California and Bush had in Texas—it wasn't rhetoric that would make the typical GOP voter's heart go pitter-patter.