Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (76 page)

Reagan and Bush met back up in Los Angeles toward the end of July with some staff to review their strategy for the summer and fall effort. But before battling with the Democrats, the two former combatants had to referee the battles between their respective staffs. Lyn Nofziger, now firmly ensconced as the campaign's spokesman and chief punster, said of merging the two campaigns, “It's a hell of a mesh, I'll tell you.” The Los Angeles meeting took place in the Tokyo Room of a Travelodge across the street from Reagan's original campaign headquarters. Nofziger said the room “would be a good place to orient people.”
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Some members of the Reagan staff were attempting to dictate personnel policy to the grafted-on Bush team—or what was left of it. Nofziger was gunning for Pete Teeley, Bush's press secretary, whom he didn't like and whose liberal politics he despised. Nofziger tried to supplant him with Jim Brady, who had come aboard after his candidate, John Connally, had nosedived. Nor did Jim Baker want Teeley back. But other Bush aides intervened and Teeley ended up staying on with Bush.
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Baker didn't want David Keene back either. Keene was long gone from the Bush operations, having earned the enmity of Mrs. Bush over his personal life and of Ambassador Bush for being a profligate leaker and for verbally abusing the campaign staff, according to sources. Keene had reportedly tried to rejoin the Bush campaign in Detroit after learning that Bush had been chosen for the Republican ticket.
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Mike Deaver, Keene's “
bête noire
within the Reagan camp” (as the
Washington Star
reported), was keeping him out of the Gipper's operation as well.
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Keene was regarded as having one of the best minds in Republican politics, but he'd dealt himself out of the high-stakes game of 1980.

The group assembled in Los Angeles included fifteen or so Reaganites, among them Ed Meese, Marty Anderson, Nofziger, and Peter Dailey, who had worked with the legendary Roger Ailes producing ads for Richard Nixon in 1972. The
meeting was light on Bush aides. Bush attended the meetings only with the beleaguered Teeley and Dean Burch, a gray eminence of the GOP who hadn't played a significant role in Bush's campaign. The rest of Bush's staff was three thousand miles away back in Washington, dry-docked. An aide on the Reagan plane, Michele Davis, dropped by the campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, which the Reagan team had taken over in a sublease from John Connally's long-expired campaign. Davis later confided in her diary, “Not too many happy faces around there.”
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She also noted that between the Reaganites and the Bushies there existed “a real ‘we’ ‘they' attitude.”
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Dick Wirthlin briefed the L.A. group on the fall campaign strategy. He had written a two-hundred-page plan titled the “Great American Team” that detailed the regions of the country he believed were ripe for Reagan, many of which had been only sporadically available to the Republicans before. One key step of Wirthlin's plan had already been taken: he had urged picking a moderate running mate at the convention in order to unify the party.
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Wirthlin was encouraged that Reagan-Bush could take all the states Gerald Ford had carried in 1976 with the possible exception of Michigan and would be very competitive in Carter's South as well as heavily Catholic states, including New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which Carter had carried in 1976. Wirthlin's larger strategy called for making the case against Carter in the Northeast, from New York across the Rust Belt to Illinois. That meant going after the blue-collar vote and shelving Reagan's past attacks on labor unions. “There will be no union baiting in this campaign,” said one campaign official. Wirthlin harbored no illusions that Reagan would get the 54 percent of the labor vote that Richard Nixon had in 1972 when the AFL-CIO sat on its hands. That was especially so because the AFL-CIO had issued an all-points bulletin to affiliated unions to turn up the heat on Reagan, and was expected to spend as much as $10 million in the campaign. Still, Wirthlin was confident that Reagan, the first major-party presidential candidate to hold an active union card, would get more than the 36 percent of the labor vote that Ford had four years earlier.
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Wirthlin thought Connecticut could be in play because of George Bush's roots there. No one in the campaign, however, thought Massachusetts, which George McGovern had carried singularly in 1972 and which Carter had won handily in 1976, was anything close to being up for grabs.
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Columnists Bob Novak and his partner Rowly Evans discerned something else though in the Bay State. They commissioned Carter's pollster, Pat Caddell, to focus on precinct 7-1 in Waltham, a blue-collar Catholic suburb of Boston. What they found was astonishing. Carter had carried the precinct in a landslide in 1976, but now, among the 79 registered
voters, Reagan was getting 37, John Anderson 22, and Carter just 12, with the rest undecided. By large margins, the voters of 7-1 favored the Reagan tax cuts, cuts in the federal government, and a military buildup. The columnists concluded that precinct 7-1 portended not just “another swing by supposedly volatile voters, but a basic revolution in American political attitudes.”
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Such attitudes were crucial to Wirthlin's plan to fight hard in Carter's South. The Reaganites understood that the South, though behaviorally Democratic, was nonetheless attitudinally conservative. Reagan had already proven in the primaries of 1976 and 1980 his crossover appeal in such states as Texas and South Carolina. The Reagan campaign therefore had high hopes for Texas, which Carter had carried by the skin of his teeth over Ford. Wirthlin assumed that with Reagan, hugely popular in the Lone Star State, and Bush, who had adopted Texas as his home, plus John Connally's help, they might win it.

Wirthlin had put together an impressive political plan. The problem for the Reagan-Bush team was that it had done little to assemble an operational campaign to marry up with the plan. Fissures soon began to appear between Reagan's “Californians” and the “Easterners,” and each side leaked to the media against the other. Skeptically, Nofziger said of the Bush staff, “It's a matter of bringing them into the Reagan campaign.”
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One GOP consultant, more sarcastically said, “We'll have to get along for only about three months.”
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Whether they could was open to question.

As a start down the road of internal reconciliation, the campaign hastily arranged a press conference in Washington to announce that Paul Laxalt and Anne Armstrong would be cochairs of the general-election campaign. It had taken a bit of cajoling to get Laxalt back after he'd left the convention ticked off, but the Nevadan wasn't going to miss this one last roundup with his old friend. Laxalt was one of the most easy-going and most forgiving men in politics. At the press conference he spoke up for Bush and said that conservatives upset over the choice of running mate would come back into the family. The Reagan team also took the opportunity to announce that Jim Baker had become a senior adviser to the campaign; the former Bush manager would assume a full-time if undefined position.
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A new poll by the Associated Press–NBC had Reagan opening up an eye-popping 55–24 percent lead over President Carter. John Anderson had dropped to 15 percent.
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In a Lou Harris poll, Reagan was leading by a whopping 61–33 percent. No one thought the margin would hold, but Reagan clearly got a better convention bounce than anyone had expected. More sober Reaganites remembered the gigantic lead Ted Kennedy had held over Carter just a year earlier, and, even more relevant, Carter's huge 62–27 lead over President Ford four years
earlier, following his convention.
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They knew that in politics, what went up must come down.

The truth was that the thought of going up against Carter's tough campaign operatives terrified the Reagan-Bush team. “We look at the Carter operation and we worry a lot,” fretted one campaign staffer. “On this stuff, they're big-leaguers. We're still babes in the woods.”
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This fear was real, even though Carter's approval rating had bottomed out at 22 percent yet again, just where he'd been in his “malaise” slump of one year earlier.
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Carter was a tough hombre, at least as a campaigner, and had all the power of incumbency at his disposal. Polling also showed the antiabortion plank in the GOP platform to be a drag with some voters. No matter what the early sampling said, this fight wouldn't be some walk in the park for Reagan—especially because Carter had yet to get his own convention bounce.

Problems began to mount for the Reagan campaign. Bush was continually asked why he was the second pick for the second slot. Ten days had passed since the convention and the stories still hadn't died down about the “co-presidency.” The
Wall Street Journal
ran the distracting headline “Reagan, Bush Start on Fall Campaign, Haunted by 'dream Ticket' Nightmare.”
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A headline in the
Los Angeles Times
blared, “Nettled by Rumors …,” and the story reviewed the discord inside the merged Reagan and Bush operations.
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Still under fire, the Reagan campaign announced that it would produce its own account of what really happened with Ford and release it to the media, then abruptly changed field and said it would not release such a report.
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A new story surfaced in the media, bizarrely claiming that Reagan “had encouraged Bolivian military officials in what turned out to be a successful overthrow of the Bolivian government a week ago.” Lyn Nofziger had to go out and knock it down, saying, “We are not that dumb.”
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Another rumor claimed that Ford had been offered both the vice presidency
and
defense secretary.

These stories had no sooner cooled down when the media turned their attention to a fresh controversy: Would Reagan release his income-tax statements, and if so, when?

Yet another media frenzy resulted when Reagan went to get … a haircut. “Did he or didn't he?” had been a running question for years—did he dye his hair, that is. Now under constant press scrutiny, Reagan was trailed by reporters when he stopped in at Drucker's barbershop, where he had been going for forty years.
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On at least one occasion reporters actually took the cuttings from the floor of the barbershop to have them tested. The samples came back proving that Reagan was telling the truth and did not dye his hair, but that didn't stop reporters from
continuing to speculate on why Reagan had so few gray hairs. Actually, he only shampooed with Head & Shoulders and then used a little dab of Brylcreem along with copious amounts of water. Before this campaign was over, however, Reagan would accumulate a few more grays, as would Bush.

A story buried in the
New York Times
in late July casually mentioned an invitation Reagan had received to attend the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi in early August, just one day after a planned speech to the National Urban League meeting in New York. The Urban League speech was part of an effort by the Reagan campaign to make amends for skipping the annual meeting of the NAACP. The paper ominously described the region of Mississippi where Neshoba was as “a setting that was once a favorite stumping ground for segregationist politicians.”
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Dick Wirthlin tried to talk Reagan out of going to Neshoba. Alone in Reagan's bedroom, the pollster made his case that he thought it was a mistake. He must have pushed the issue too hard, because, as he later remembered, Reagan “got so mad at me, he threw his speech papers at me and scattered them all over the bedroom.” When Reagan calmed down, he said, “Dick, I've already given a commitment on it. I'm not going to disappoint these people.”
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N
ATIONAL
D
EMOCRATS BECAME MORE
vocal with their concerns about nominating either Carter or Kennedy. A small group of Democrats, convinced that neither could beat Reagan, had met quietly in Philadelphia to create the Committee for an Open Convention. Its purpose was to investigate the possibility of the party's turning to either Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, formerly a senator from Maine and Hubert Humphrey's running mate in 1968, or Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, two of the most respected men in the Democratic Party.
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Forty members of Congress lent their names to a move to find an alternative candidate. Vice President Mondale had already had his tires kicked, but he was a loyalist and said “no way.”
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Some saw the move as a ploy by Kennedy forces. Kennedy was hundreds of delegates behind Carter in the count, yet an odd sort of hopefulness took hold in his campaign and in the media that, somehow, he might still win the nomination. Kennedy's plan rested on a slim reed: that a sufficient number of delegates would vote to suspend Rule F(3)c. According to the rule, delegates were required to cast their first roll-call votes for the candidate to whom they were pledged. The open-convention scheme necessitated a suspension of that rule so that those committed to Carter could reverse field, presumably on the basis that Carter had so badly faltered in the last primaries. In short, Kennedy wanted a new deal of the delegate cards. It was not likely to happen. Already a majority of Democratic state
chairmen had called on Teddy to give up the ghost. But the rumors of a “Dump Carter” movement grew.

T
HE SHAH OF
I
RAN
passed away in late July. He'd been suffering from cancer for months. Carter refused to send any representative from Washington to the funeral and said nothing publicly. His administration's only acknowledgment of the shah's passing came in a statement released by the State Department—which went out only after both Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, reviewed the draft personally. Reagan, in contrast, called the shah a “loyal and valued friend” and said that his death “reminds us of the value of remaining true to our friends.”
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