Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (31 page)

The “Nashua Four,” as they quickly dubbed themselves—Dole, Baker, Crane, and Anderson—had come onstage to the cheers of the crowd, which was now a mob scene. They were photographed with Reagan, hovering over the scowling Bush. They all shook hands with Reagan, but not with Bush.

Reagan had completely outmaneuvered Bush. It didn't matter that after several unpleasantries hurled at Bush and pleasantries aimed at Reagan, the excluded candidates agreed to leave the stage—meaning that Bush got his two-man debate after all. According to Witcover, the incident in Nashua created the “perception” that “Bush had the backbone of a jellyfish.”
⁷¹

After this grand confrontation, the debate itself was anticlimactic. Reagan was on fire, though, as he showed his mastery of detail and great humor. When a questioner asked Reagan about raising the mandatory retirement age for Social Security, the Gipper joked, “Don't you think I have a conflict of interest on that issue?” Reagan's voice was strong and clear. When someone asked him about the toll the presidency takes on a man and how Carter had aged in the office, Reagan retorted, “It's the way you do the job. The way Carter does it, of course you would age.” Reagan had the crowd eating out of his hand. When the issue of Vietnam arose, he parked it: “We should never let young men die in a war that their government is afraid to let them win.”
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The crowd responded with a one-minute round of applause. Breen petulantly threatened to stop the debate if they did not cease clapping.

Bush was asked by someone in the audience whether he thought Reagan was too old to be president, and he replied that he did not. Given a chance to reply, Reagan smiled and said, “I agree with George Bush.”
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The audience roared. That was the only nice word Reagan had for Bush this night. Reagan went after Bush for underestimating Soviet intentions while serving as head of the CIA. They also sharply disagreed over the size of a tax cut, Reagan favoring the bigger and Bush the smaller. Reagan got a standing ovation from the entire crowd when he sharply declared that the United States could never again abandon a “small country to Godless Communist tyranny.”
⁷⁴
Reagan tired a bit toward the end, but his people were completely energized.

Standing at the back of the hall, taking it all in, were Jim and Patti Roberts. Jim said later, “You had a feeling that history was being made there.”
⁷⁵

F
OLLOWING THE CONFLAGRATION, THE
parking lot outside the school was littered with Bush campaign stickers and posters that Bush volunteers, called “Bushwhackers,” had discarded.
⁷⁶
After the debate, Teeley told Bush, “The bad news is that the media is playing up the confrontation. The good news is that they're ignoring the debate, and you lost that too.”
⁷⁷
Sears, proud of the riot of which he was the architect, stood off to the side and sardonically told a reporter, “We're just trying to be party unifiers.”
⁷⁸
For a politico like Sears with an appreciation for high drama, it didn't get any better than this. Hannaford said Sears was “smiling like the Cheshire cat.”
⁷⁹

The Nashua Four retired to the school's Band Room, where they were met by a mob of media and joyously bashed Bush. Dole was the ringleader of the exiled four. Bush “wants to be king,” Dole said. “I told him onstage there'll be another day.”
⁸⁰
Actually, he had leaned into Bush and loudly whispered, “I'll get you someday, you fucking Nazi!”
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Dole had also jammed a finger in Jim Baker's chest, promising retribution. Speaking to the media, he said that Bush “better find himself another Republican Party.”
⁸²
He even compared the hated Bush to the “Gestapo” and “Hitler's Germany.”
⁸³
Phil Crane made similarly dark references, intoning, “Shades of the beer-halls.”
⁸⁴
John Anderson joined in the Bush-bashing fun, saying, “He's awfully easily embarrassed for a man who aspires to sit in the Oval Office and deal with the leaders of the world.”
⁸⁵
Reporters had never seen the normally placid Howard Baker so mad. The four excluded candidates praised Reagan even though he hadn't asked for their participation until a few hours before the debate.

Nearly all the contenders had their own reasons for not liking Bush long before the Nashua debate. This night only exacerbated the bad blood. With Dole, the problem was cultural; Dole had grown up poor and resented people born of wealth. With Connally, it was Texas stuff. With Baker, it was because Bush had usurped his moderate position in the race. With Reagan, it was ideological, but had also become personal after all the age innuendos.

At midnight, Reagan was still so steamed that he called Howard Baker into his hotel room to vent about Bush.
⁸⁶

Though the event had not been televised live, the networks and local news ran footage, repeatedly, of a frozen Bush and the booming Reagan. New Hampshire had 482,415 voters, and most of them probably saw the film at least once.
⁸⁷
Bill Loeb joyously editorialized that Bush looked “like the little boy who thinks his mother may have dropped him off at the wrong birthday party.”
⁸⁸

Bush never knew what hit him. Shell-shocked, he kept muttering, “I kept my commitment. I kept my word.”
⁸⁹

The next morning Senator Baker went on
Meet the Press
and called Bush “arrogant.” Going further, Baker said, “If he is the front-runner in this race, he's wearing his crown without much grace.”
⁹⁰
Bush's New Hampshire chairman Hugh Gregg said Senator Baker was “lying through his teeth.”
⁹¹

Sears later expressed his surprise that Bush froze under pressure so easily. Embittered years later, he also said he thought the reason Reagan was so charged up was that to him it was a “movie scene.”
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The comment was ludicrous on its face.

W
HILE THE
R
EPUBLICAN CANDIDATES
had brought a surge of excitement to the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic race had far less drama. A final poll just before primary day showed Carter smashing Kennedy, 55 to 30 percent. Brown was stuck in single digits.
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Kennedy's long-gone chartered 727, dubbed “Air Malaise,” had cost thousands of dollars a day to operate. He would henceforth travel by commercial plane, or small, cheap charters—or by bus. Dozens of staffers were taken off the campaign's payroll.

The only thing Kennedy seemed to have left was a sense of humor. At a sparsely attended event, he turned to the press and joked, “Record crowds!” His campaign bus's theme song was “Take It Easy” by the Eagles. Kennedy had no choice.
⁹⁴

On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Carter had more than $2 million cash in hand while Kennedy had less than $250,000.
⁹⁵
Carter had been helped by contributions from avant-garde artist Andy Warhol and media baron Ted Turner, who thoughtfully sent $2,000 even though only $1,000 was allowable by law.
⁹⁶

The media would not let Chappaquiddick rest. Voters in New Hampshire did not often bring up the subject, but a young high school student asked Kennedy how he could be trusted in a “crisis when he didn't report for nine hours his automobile accident.” The audience and media went dead. Kennedy paused in the embarrassing silence, then spoke in quiet tones about the many losses in his life. Afterward a reporter approached the student, Bruce Lary, for his response to Kennedy's answer. “I didn't think it was really an answer. I've been under a lot of stress, too. I've lost some family, too, but that doesn't make me qualified to be president.”
⁹⁷

Out of the mouths of babes.

“
They finally got Rasputin, didn't they?
”

T
here was a renewed bounce in Ronald Reagan's step after Nashua as he joyously hopscotched the Granite State in the final hours before the primary. Fresh in his mind was the lesson he had learned four years earlier, when he followed Hugh Gregg's advice to leave the state for the two days right before the primary and ended up losing by a razor-thin margin to Gerald Ford. “I'm not going to make that mistake this time,” the Gipper vowed to an aide.
¹

Reagan was as firmly planted in the state as a stout maple tree. Over the final thirteen days, he spent ten of those in New Hampshire.
²
The
Washington Post
's David Broder said it “was one of the most phenomenal pieces of personal campaigning I have ever seen.”
³
Reporters on Reagan's bus, exhausted at the pace of a man twice their age, hung a sign that read, “Free the Reagan 44.”
⁴

Incredibly, George Bush did no personal campaigning in the state for the last seven days other than to appear at the two debates.
⁵
Gregg, now running Bush's campaign, was afraid to change plans in the wake of the Nashua debate debacle, fearing it would look as though they'd panicked.

Gregg was known for his temper but also a wry sense of humor. He once published a book titled
All I Learned About Politics
; all of the pages were blank. It was a joke, but the anecdote should have been a cautionary tale for Bush. Bush might also have taken note of the fact that Gregg had lost seven successive elections as either a candidate or a manager.

Instead, Bush took Gregg's advice—he left the state after the Nashua debate and went back to Houston for the Sunday and Monday before the primary. He was imprudently photographed jogging in shorts, in the warm Texas sun, while
Granite Staters were shoveling snow off their driveways and sidewalks, or shivering in their cold cars awaiting some heat.
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The contrast was anything but helpful for Bush.

While Reagan tried to stay above the fray, joshing that the Nashua debate had been “kinda a fiasco,” the other candidates didn't mind taking the low road against Bush.
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Bob Dole, never at a loss, said that Bush “treated us like dirt under his feet.”
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From Chicago, John Connally piled on and said that Bush had displayed “pettiness and immaturity” in Nashua.

Gregg angrily told reporters, “It is obvious to me that this was a calculated strategy engineered by Ronald Reagan to embarrass George Bush.” What was less obvious was why Bush's men let their candidate fall for the “calculated strategy.” Reporters, smelling fresh ink, carried Gregg's charges to Reagan after he'd gone to church, and he did not disappoint: “Mr. Gregg must be feeling very desperate right at this moment because Mr. Gregg knows that this is a lie.”
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Gregg had been snookered by Jerry Carmen to an extent, but also by his own stubbornness. The afternoon of the debate, Carmen went to Gregg and told him that Reagan was going to open the forum unless Bush put up half the money. Gregg told Carmen to go to hell. In doing so, Gregg gave the Reagan team the moral fig leaf it wanted to invite the four excluded candidates.

Years later, Carmen said that the Bush team had attempted a bluff of its own. The Bush people had hoped that Reagan would not go onstage if he couldn't bring the other four candidates into the debate, and that Bush would win the night and the bragging rights. “I think they thought we weren't coming in,” said Carmen. If Reagan had backed off as he originally wanted, “it would have been a disaster,” he added.
¹⁰

The
Nashua Telegraph
attempted to draw some fire away from Bush by issuing a statement saying that even if Bush had agreed to allow the others to participate, the paper would have halted the event.
¹¹
But Jon Breen had said just a day earlier that Bush's people had told him they would be comfortable with a change in the format.
¹²
Gregg also issued a terse, two-page, singled-spaced chronology of his version of events. Bush released a letter at a press conference in Houston explaining to the Nashua Four his version of events and apologizing to them. “Reagan … never had the courtesy to contact me. Frankly, I feel he used you to set me up.”
¹³
The
Telegraph
, heavily invested on Bush's side, ran an unflattering photo of Reagan, and its account of the actual debate said that the two men had disagreed on little.
¹⁴
One had to wonder whether the reporter had covered a different debate.

Not even John Sears could have scripted that Bush would have frozen like a cigar-store Indian or that Reagan would respond so forthrightly. If Bush had
been more nimble, he could have easily trumped Reagan by simply welcoming the other candidates. He would have earned points for his magnanimity. Bush's blunder was serendipitous for Reagan, who had up to this point been on a long streak of bad luck. It could not have come at a better time for the Gipper. Just that morning, Tom Wicker, in his
New York Times
column, confidently predicted that Bush would win the New Hampshire primary unless “Reagan mortally wounds him in their … debate tonight.” What Wicker didn't foresee was that Bush might just mortally wound himself.
¹⁵

Gregg whimpered that all the other candidates were ganging up on Bush. Bush himself said Monday morning on ABC's
Good Morning America
, “I'm worried about Reagan. I think he sandbagged me frankly.”
¹⁶
John Anderson called Bush's charges the “petulant response of a spoiled child.”
¹⁷
Of Bush's post-debate comments, Reagan said grimly, “I thought better of him.” Red flags should have gone up in Bush's campaign at this statement by the Gipper.
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