Reagan's Comeback

Four Weeks in Texas That Changed American Politics Forever

Gilbert Garcia

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781595341174
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Never before has the story been told of the dramatic turning point when Ronald Reagan found his voice as a presidential contender and overcame the Republican establishment. Reagan's Comeback is the story of how one state, one man, and one month changed national politics forever. Chronicling how Reagan’s political career nearly ended, this turnabout story is told by those who made it happen: campaign volunteers, financiers, political activists, and media observers. Positioning Reagan to win in 1980, the birth of the "Reagan Democrat” transformed Texas from Democratic stronghold to the reliably Republican powerhouse it is today, since producing five Republican presidential candidates and two Republican presidents, with more to follow. Reagan’s rise and victory against Ford in 1976 mirrors the current climate between the Tea Party movement and the GOP. With the 2012 election in sight, there is no better time to finally tell the whole story of how the Reagan Revolution found its launching point.

CHAPTER 1 TEXAS OR BUST

Until February 1976, Ronald Reagan had lived a charmed political life. After a short Depression-era stint as a radio sports announcer in Des Moines, Iowa, he built a three-decade career as a journeyman Hollywood actor, generally playing some variation on the amiable guy next door. A New Deal Democrat for much of his adult life, he steadily developed, over the course of six years as president of the Screen Actors Guild and a stint as a traveling corporate pitchman for General Electric, into a fervent—some would say rabid—Cold Warrior and crusader for the virtues of an unfettered, free-market economy. In 1962, with his acting career reduced to thankless, infrequent TV guest spots, Reagan officially joined the Republican Party.

His ideological transformation may have been gradual, but it was breathtaking nonetheless. The same man who had ardently supported Franklin Roosevelt would ultimately dismiss his former hero by telling Time magazine in 1976: “Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal.”

In politics, everything seemed to happen so easily for Reagan. Where other political aspirants paid their dues, dutifully collected IOUs, and slowly climbed the electoral-office ladder, Reagan—aided by the residue of goodwill from his long showbiz career—effortlessly sauntered onto the stage and skipped the first few rungs. In 1964, with Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid headed for a colossal defeat, Reagan provided the floundering campaign with its one unmistakable spark. His thirty-minute commercial address, which aired nationally on October 27, 1964, was called “A Time for Choosing,” but among Reagan supporters it became known simply as “The Speech.”

It’s remarkable to find, when talking to members of Reagan’s ’76 campaign team, how many of them trace their devotion to the man back to the exact same moment: the night they tuned in to see him make that speech for Goldwater. M. Stanton Evans, who would later become chairman of the American Conservative Union, remembers turning to his wife after watching the speech and saying, “That’s the guy who should be running for president.”

Reagan’s stump speech for Goldwater was essentially a prime-time infomercial for a pre-infomercial age, but Reagan used it to confidently lay out the broad themes that would constitute the conservative playbook for the next generation: government should be beholden to the people, not the other way around; arrogant elitists in Washington, DC, are determined to “trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state”; liberal appeasers are so determined to avoid war that they’ll tolerate any act of aggression from the Soviet Union.

After the ’64 election, a group of wealthy California businessmen who’d supported Goldwater talked Reagan into running for governor of California in 1966. Widely mocked for even pondering a gubernatorial campaign with no previous electoral experience, he shocked popular two-term incumbent Edmund “Pat” Brown—who’d become a Democratic hero by trouncing Richard Nixon in the gubernatorial race four years earlier—and won the election by nearly 1 million votes. Brown and his aides had actually hoped that Reagan would be the GOP nominee, because they viewed him as an ill-informed extremist who would alienate Republican moderates.⁵ This be-careful-what-you-wish-for episode marked the first, but hardly the last, time that Reagan would be—to borrow a malapropism later coined by one of his spiritual heirs, George W. Bush—“misunderestimated.”

Even Reagan’s coy, will-he-or-won’t-he presidential flirtation in 1968 enhanced his national stock. Although Reagan didn’t campaign in any primary states and didn’t declare his candidacy until the outset of the Republican National Convention, the huge margin of his favorite-son win in California meant that he actually netted more national primary votes than Nixon, the eventual GOP nominee.

Going into the 1976 presidential campaign, Reagan had never lost an election for which he’d actively campaigned. That changed on February 24, 1976, in New Hampshire, when Ford eked out a dramatic 1,317-vote upset win. Slender as Ford’s margin of victory was there, in the game of political expectations, it was huge. Reagan had entered the fray as a star, a proven vote magnet. Ford went into New Hampshire as the well-intentioned bumbler who’d never run for anything outside the narrow confines of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Ford followed up New Hampshire with four consecutive convincing wins, most notably in Florida—a conservative bastion thought to be in Reagan’s wheelhouse—and Illinois—the state where Reagan was born and raised.

While Ford’s early successes reflected his organizational superiority, they could also be traced to the curious ambivalence that Reagan brought into the race. After Richard Nixon was reelected in 1972, Reagan looked like an obvious bet for the 1976 race. He’d be leaving the California governor’s office in January 1975, and would have plenty of time to mobilize a campaign and devote his full attention to it. But Watergate, and all its collateral damage, threw everything out of kilter for 1976. Vice President Spiro Agnew, another likely ’76 contender, faced charges related to a kickback scandal during his time in Maryland state politics, and resigned in disgrace in 1973. Ford, the US House minority leader, best known for his presence a decade earlier on the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy, was picked by Nixon to replace Agnew.

Nixon famously viewed Ford as someone so blatantly ill-equipped for the nation’s highest office that he would provide a form of “impeachment insurance” as the Watergate travesty played itself out. While sitting in the Oval Office in the spring of 1974, he reportedly sneered to former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, “Can you imagine Jerry Ford sitting in this chair?”⁶ Ford, after all, was the man Lyndon Johnson cruelly suggested had spent “too much time playing football without a helmet.”

When Nixon resigned in August 1974, Ford initially saw his role as that of a humble, almost apolitical statesman trying to heal the nation’s collective wounds. Even after a few months in office, he gave little indication that he might seek a full term in 1976. He had good reason to pause before jumping. By the blunt reckoning of his own staffers, Ford was an inept campaigner and a stilted public speaker with a high propensity for mangling English syntax. He also had to contend with stubbornly high inflation—for which his most conspicuous reaction was wearing a WIN (Whip Inflation Now) button on his lapel—and sluggish economic growth, which led to a palpable sense of unease in the country as 1976 approached.

Like Reagan, Ford was a fiscal conservative at heart, a man who believed in a restrained government, low taxes, and personal self-sufficiency. But the motor of the federal government in the mid-’70s was still being fueled by the momentum of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Even after voters implicitly rejected Johnson’s ambitious programs by electing Nixon in 1968, neither Nixon nor Ford considered dismantling Johnson’s handiwork. Unlike Reagan, Ford was no passionate ideologue. He didn’t seek to revolutionize the function of government. He simply wanted to hold it in check.

For that reason, Ford was tolerated by most, but embraced by few. Within the Republican Party, his base was a mile wide, but barely an inch deep. The party’s ardent right-wingers viewed him as a blandly compromising career politician and regarded détente—the policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union adhered to by Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—as a fancy word for appeasement. The party’s old Northeast liberal wing, which had been fading in power since Barry Goldwater wrested the 1964 presidential nomination from Nelson Rockefeller, didn’t hold much enthusiasm for him either, sensing in him a corn-fed Midwestern jock of limited intelligence and vision.

Even Ford’s one indisputable asset—the public perception that he was, as the Houston Chronicle put it, “a clean and decent man”—took a major hit a month after his inauguration, when he pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed during his time in office. Ford would spend the last thirty-two years of his life insisting that he had not cut a prearranged deal with Nixon, but his mid-’70s detractors were not easily convinced.

Despite all these warning signs, however, by early 1975 Ford began to develop a strategy for the ’76 race, all the while looking over his shoulder and hoping that Reagan would resist the temptation to run. For his part, Reagan now found himself in an awkward position. With Nixon out and Ford in, Reagan’s presidential prospects depended on his willingness to tangle with a Republican incumbent, no minor consideration for Reagan, who had once coined what he called the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shall not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”

Reagan’s California aides enlisted John Sears, a young Washington, DC, lawyer and political hotshot who’d worked on Nixon’s successful 1968 campaign, to persuade their man to take the plunge. It wasn’t an easy sell. “Sears convinced the rest of us that Ford would be unsuccessful, but Reagan really was reluctant,” a Reagan aide told Washington Post political reporter Jules Witcover. “He didn’t have that burning, that gut desire to be president that Jimmy Carter or Richard Nixon has.”⁷ Ultimately convinced that Ford was neither a committed conservative nor an electable candidate, Reagan fought through his reluctance and announced his candidacy on November 20, 1975.

While the threat of a Reagan challenge had sent shudders through the White House for months, at least one prominent Republican believed Ford had nothing to worry about. A September 26, 1975, memo from presidential aide Jerry Jones to fellow aide Donald Rumsfeld and Ford’s chief of staff, Dick Cheney, reported that Richard Nixon had privately expressed the view “that Reagan is a lightweight and not someone to be considered seriously or feared.… He therefore recommends that we take it easy and not build up Reagan in any way through our actions or our words.”⁸

Those words sounded fairly prophetic in the early months of 1976, as Reagan consistently failed to find his campaign footing. Either because of an adherence to the Eleventh Commandment, or the false sense that Ford would be easy to beat, he spoke in generalities about the virtues of limited government and pulled his punches against the president. “We [the American Conservative Union] were not real impressed with the way the Reagan campaign was being run,” recalls Evans, who openly backed Reagan in the race. “The Reagan campaign was being run as a kind of above-the-battle, don’t-get-too-engaged-in-the-issues thing, as if Reagan were already president. We felt there was no way you were going to beat the incumbent president without giving people a reason to vote against the incumbent.”

When Reagan did indulge in policy specifics, the results could be disastrous. His New Hampshire campaign was mortally wounded by his suggestion—in a September 1975 speech—that the federal government could save $90 billion a year by shifting responsibility to the states for programs such as Medicaid, welfare, housing, food stamps, and revenue sharing. The obvious, unanswered question was: How would the states cope with these new burdens? The Ford campaign picked up on the $90 billion speech and made it a big issue in New Hampshire, where voters were panicked at the thought that their state taxes would have to go up to absorb a host of expensive federal programs. (Later in the campaign, Reagan scared uncommitted voters in the Deep South by suggesting that he would “look at” the idea of having the government sell the Tennessee Valley Authority to private interests. This gaffe almost certainly cost Reagan the Kentucky primary.)

As the March 23 North Carolina primary approached, Reagan’s campaign was nearly $2 million in debt. Nine Republican governors called for him to step aside and help the party unite behind Ford. On March 20, Sears—without Reagan’s knowledge—quietly began preparing for that eventuality by meeting with Rogers Morton, Ford’s campaign manager, to discuss how the two campaigns could be brought together after Reagan dropped out. Even Reagan’s wife, Nancy, had given up hope and begun privately prodding Lyn Nofziger, the campaign’s chronically disheveled press secretary, to persuade her husband to quit.

Reagan’s surprise win in North Carolina put a temporary halt to all the when-are-you-quitting? questions he’d begun fielding on a daily basis, but his task remained overwhelming, particularly after Sears decided to ration the campaign’s negligible resources and concede Wisconsin, New York, and Pennsylvania to Ford. Handing Wisconsin to Ford was particularly painful, because it was the first of the ’76 primary states that allowed voters to cross over and vote outside their party. Reagan believed he could lure disgruntled Democrats into his fold, but his aborted campaign in Wisconsin would fail to prove anything.

Coming out of North Carolina, the Ford and Reagan forces agreed on one key point: Everything hinged on Texas. In late March, more than a month before the Texas primary, Sears told Washington Post columnist David Broder that “[Reagan] will survive until Texas, but if he doesn’t win there, he’s out.”

An April 7 memo from Ford campaign lieutenant Bruce Wagner to Morton—sensing the chance for a knockout punch—argued for an aggressive, all-out, attack-dog strategy from Ford. “The Texas primary offers us the opportunity to cut the Reagan candidacy down once and for all,” Wagner wrote. “He must be stopped in Texas. A loss in Texas will most likely end his challenge.… A win in Texas will most likely allow him to go into [the] Kansas City [convention] via California with momentum.”⁹

Pat Buchanan, a conservative political columnist who’d served in the Nixon White House, similarly argued that Texas was Reagan’s final hope for a beachhead in the campaign. “The importance of the Texas primary is difficult to overestimate,” Buchanan wrote. “Texas is the heart of the sunbelt. It is conservative country and Reagan is right on the issues: defense, détente, and energy. If he loses decisively in Texas, he will have no credible claim to the nomination.”¹⁰ Privately, Reagan and Sears agreed that anything short of an outright victory in Texas meant that Reagan should drop out of the race.

When Reagan landed in Texas, twenty-six days before the primary that would define his political future, he did so on a commercial flight. On arriving in Dallas, he conceded to reporters that he’d been forced to give up his red, white, and blue private jet in order to save his cash-strapped campaign $50,000 a week in rental expenses.

He would also find himself relying on a zealous bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Texas or Bust
• 2 Favor for a Favorite Son
• 3 The Two Rays
• 4 Lyon’s Gambit
• 5 The Truth Squad
• 6 Big John’s Quandary
• 7 One-Party State of Mind
• 8 The Great Tamale Incident
• 9 Senator in Exile
• 10 Ron Paul’s Gold Standard
• 11 Stretch Drive
• 12 A New and Intransigent Regime
• 13 Kansas City Dreaming
• 14 What If?
• 15 Standing in the Shadows
• 16 Oil, Water, and Tea
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author