The grassroots also criticized Reagan’s staff, claiming they were not political enough, they were not pushing Reagan hard enough to run and that they didn’t understand conservatism. The fight between Sears and his conservative critics continued right up to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City and even after, with Sears arguing that the nomination of a divided party would be meaningless as it had been in 1964 and conservatives arguing that you can’t run in the fall unless you win the nomination in the summer.
Ford’s forces responded to the Laxalt announcement with a low-key statement that made no mention of Reagan. It said, in part, that Ford’s “philosophy in politics has always been to . . . run on his record, and to do his best to convince first the delegates, and then the voters, that they should vote for him. The President has never based his campaign plans on what somebody else might or might not do.”
25
In order to satisfy the requirements of the new Federal Election Commission, Reagan needed to officially distance himself from his campaign committee as the Presidential effort was announced. In a bizarre kabuki dance, Reagan had to write a letter to Laxalt acknowledging the creation of Citizens for Reagan, without formally endorsing it. But the critical final portion of the letter was all the anxious Reaganites needed to know: “The committee must file with the Federal Election Commission as working on my behalf. I trust this letter will suffice as my consent for purposes of allowing you to do so.”
The letter was signed “Ron.”
26
In response to Watergate, the FEC had been created by the Democratic Congress, but the new campaign laws were a mystery to all. “It was the ‘Wild, Wild West’ when it came to the campaign laws. No one really knew what was legal or illegal,” according to Donatelli.
27
But Loren Smith, General Counsel for Reagan’s committee, knew one aspect of the law well: if it was clear that Reagan had formally announced his candidacy, the FEC would have ordered him to give up his radio commentaries. Equal time provisions would have required radio stations give the same time to Ford (and maybe all the Democrats running as well), for free, that they were devoting to Reagan’s commentaries.
Furthermore, as an officially declared candidate, Reagan would have been forced to forego his lucrative lecture and column fees. But Reagan’s disclaimer to Laxalt protected his financial and political interests. Citizens for Reagan could undertake the necessary preparations of developing a direct mail house file for funds, recruiting supporters, hiring staff and beginning to make the case against Ford, Rockefeller, Kissinger and company. Under Smith’s guidance, Reagan could have the best of all worlds: while his campaign got underway, he could continue to receive fees as he spoke his mind on public policy issues.
Over the summer and fall of 1975, formal complaints flew back and forth across Washington as both campaigns sought to use the FEC regulations to their advantage. Smith filed a complaint charging that the Republican National Committee should not pay for the travel expenses of President Ford since Ford was, in fact, electioneering and not traveling on official White House business.
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The Ford campaign retaliated by filing its own complaint against Citizens for Reagan, charging that Reagan was indeed a candidate for federal office and, therefore, subject to the same laws as any other individual running for a federal office including the “equal time provisions.” Smith’s counterpart in the Ford campaign was Bob Visser, who argued that “Governor Reagan attempted to distinguish between his becoming an ‘active Presidential candidate’ from being a technical candidate under the Act, it is now apparent that he has authorized a committee to collect and expend funds on his behalf in connection with his seeking the nomination for the Presidency and is a ‘candidate’ for purposes of the Act.” Also, a complaint was filed by James Horowitz, the president of Burbank Publication Inc., raising questions about the legality of the sponsors of Reagan’s radio commentaries.
29
Even with the announcement in July of 1975 of the organization Laxalt was leading, Reagan continued to proceed cautiously with an actual challenge of President Gerald Ford. It was one thing to oppose or criticize the Administration’s policies. It was quite another to actually challenge Ford in the primaries. Reagan had always been ambivalent about challenging a sitting member of his own party.
Reagan’s loyalty to the Republican Party had been evident throughout the scandals that it had witnessed in the years immediately prior to his decision to run. When he heard that Agnew had resigned the Vice Presidency after taking kickbacks in the White House, Reagan was furious and threw a ring of keys that actually hit Mike Deaver in the chest. Still, for all his private frustration, Reagan could barely bring himself to criticize Agnew. Furthermore, Reagan was one of the last Republicans to call for Nixon’s ouster.
30
Reagan went through an intense period of soul searching as to whether or not to challenge Ford. In contrast to the enthusiasm both Ronald and Nancy Reagan would show in deciding to run for President in 1980, they were less enthusiastic about making the race against Ford in 1975 than Sears, Nofziger, Walker, and conservatives around the country. In fact, Walker had run afoul of the Reagans earlier in the year when, frustrated at the slow pace, he took it upon himself to announce a forthcoming Reagan Presidential bid. Reagan was furious, partially because Walker’s unilateral effort put his fees at risk, and Walker was nearly booted from the entire effort.
On the one hand, Reagan truly wanted Ford to succeed. But he was deeply disturbed about the leftward drift of the Ford Administration, especially when it came to foreign policy. And Reagan was still miffed over the constant barrage of insults and rumors that emanated from Washington and the Ford White House. Further weighing on his decision was the fact that he was beginning to make better money than he had since his salad days with General Electric in the fifties.
While Reagan deliberated, his staff was already several steps ahead of him, securing office space and contacting individuals about their interest in working on the campaign. Initially, the offices of Citizens for Reagan operated out of Sears’s law offices, but they eventually established their own headquarters initially at 2021 L Street, NW in Washington, D.C. Becki Black, a tiny Californian and devoted Reagan fan, would eventually be hired as a receptionist for the committee. Sitting before a huge switchboard, she answered hundreds of phone calls each day from eager conservatives around the country wanting to help Reagan. She also supervised the volunteers, including a ninety-three-year-old woman who faithfully came to the office every day.
A skeletal campaign staff began to take shape with Sears, Nofziger, Keene, Lake, Smith, Roger Stone, Charlie Black, Patti O’Connor, Arlene Triplett, Joan Follick, and others. Black (no relation to Becki Black) had cut his teeth in YAF politics in the late sixties and with the successful Helms for Senate campaign in North Carolina in 1972. After the 1972 contest, he had gone to work for the new “Congressional Club,” which Senator Helms and Tom Ellis had formed to help other conservatives running for office in North Carolina and beyond.
Andy Carter had also come aboard as Director of Field Operations. He was a “bigfoot” and extended his opinion and advice in many areas. Carter, who had once run for office in New Mexico, was a self-made millionaire in cattle and oil and was a dedicated conservative and Reagan man. He also had a temper. Once, while staying at a Washington hotel, he did not receive the wake-up call he had requested and missed a meeting. Furious, Carter tore up the front desk and the terrified hotel clerk summoned the D.C. police. The Reagan campaign posted the bail money to spring him from jail.
Later, Chuck Tyson and David Fischer joined Dennis LeBlanc and Nancy Reynolds to handle much of the advance work for the campaign. An attractive Mississippian, Neal Peden was brought aboard to assist Keene, Black, and Carter. In an example of the effects of the committee’s shoestring budget, Loren Smith remembered that the office furniture was so scarce that he and Stone, the Youth Director, temporarily shared a chair and desk. Nofziger also recruited Pat Nolan, an attorney from Los Angeles to help out with their operations there.
“We worked long hours, but no one complained. We weren’t paid much, but we loved Reagan,” Peden would later recall. She also remembered getting on the elevator one evening only to have it fall several stories until the emergency brake took hold. And Loren Smith’s wife, Kitty, remembered the holes in the wall of the ladies’ room.
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Over the summer, Sears brought aboard Reagan’s gubernatorial pollster, Dr. Richard “Dick” Wirthlin, president of Decision Making Information. Wirthlin had briefly flirted with the idea of going to work for Ford before Reagan had decided to run. However, Ford’s Campaign Manager, Howard “Bo” Callaway, could not make a commitment to Wirthlin, who got caught in the crossfire of the ongoing feud between Hartmann and Rumsfeld. But when it was clear to Wirthlin that Reagan was going, he wanted to be along with his old friend.
Another of the first people hired by Sears was Jeff Bell, who had gone to California to work on Reagan’s behalf at the Republican State Party headquarters in Sacramento. Bell was a bright, thirty-one-year-old conservative who was as dedicated to Reagan as he was to his principles. After Reagan left office in January of 1975, he went on Reagan’s personal payroll, serving as a “utility infielder”: acting as Reagan’s liaison to the Right, giving political advice, doing advance work, and pitching in to write Reagan’s columns. Bell worked on research and speeches, but he also explored—and sometimes advocated—the third party option for Reagan. His third party advocacy was understandable since his patron at the time was Bill Rusher. But the decision had been made by Reagan and the people around him: If he were to run for President, it would be as a Republican—and not some quixotic effort that might leave him as a political joke and footnote in history.
One of Bell’s first assignments from Sears in the summer of 1975 was to develop a new stump speech for Reagan. On the lecture circuit, Reagan had been saying much of the same thing—or so critics charged—since 1964. The themes of Reagan’s public comments over the preceding twelve years had fallen into a somewhat predictable framework: less government, more freedom, the dignity of the individual, the dangers of the welfare state, the Communist threat, and other conservative ideas. But his speeches, debates, press conferences and public pronouncements were always rich in detail, variety and humor.
“The government in Washington is spending some seven million every minute I talk to you. There’s no connection between my talk and their spending, and if they’ll stop spending, I’ll stop talking,” Reagan would like to say in his speeches. Other times, his humor was more pointed: “It’s been said that if you put Ford and me together in a dark room, you can’t tell us apart philosophically. Well, if you turn on the light, you can.”
Sometimes he would quote Cicero or Winston Churchill or Douglas MacArthur or a variety of cultural and spiritual leaders, but the “new political bosses” in the media, as Sears was wont to refer to them, demanded something new out of Reagan. Sears directed Bell to get to work on something original for Reagan to say.
Thus the so-called “$90 billion” speech, as it became infamously known, was born. Bell researched, drafted, and polished the new speech over the summer with help on the side from his friend, Stan Evans, Chairman of the American Conservative Union.
Bell finished the initial draft of the new Reagan speech, titled “Let the People Rule,” and shipped it off for review by Reagan and others on staff. It followed Reagan’s standard conservative, federalist themes of reducing the power of the centralized government and returning both that power and its accompanying revenue to the states. Bell’s draft was reviewed and vetted by nearly all of Reagan’s senior staff including Sears, Keene, Deaver, Hannaford, and Nofziger. All were enthusiastic about the speech and no one objected either to its style or substance.
Reagan delivered the speech in September to the Chicago Executives Club. It caused such little commotion that Reagan gave nearly the identical speech to the thirteenth anniversary dinner of the New York State Conservative Party less than one month later. Reagan’s proposals were not all that controversial. Decentralization had been part of conservative orthodoxy over the years, and Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had complained privately and publicly about the unwarranted concentration of power in Washington at the expense of the states. Reagan himself was very enthusiastic about the speech and Sears suggested that Bell get to work on a series of “Reagan’s vision” speeches. It was the num-ber—$ 90 billion—and the specific Washington programs Bell and Evans recommended to be returned to the states that would later create so many headaches for the Reagan campaign. Had the transcript of the speech given to the press not included Bell’s addendum, it probably would not have been such a contentious issue in the forthcoming New Hampshire primary.
In both versions of the speech, Reagan opened by quoting Thomas Jefferson: “A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”
Warming to his topic, Reagan continued,
Government at all levels will have absorbed 37 percent of the Gross National Product and 44 percent of our total savings. This absorption of revenue by all levels of government, the alarming rate of inflation and the rising toll of unemployment all stem from a single source: the belief that government, particularly the federal government, has the answer to all our ills, and that the proper method of dealing with social problems is to transfer power from the private to the public sector, and within the public sector from state and local governments to the ultimate power center in Washington. This collectivist, centralizing approach, whatever name or party labels it wears, has created our economic problems. By taxing and consuming an ever-greater share of the national wealth, it has imposed an intolerable burden of taxation on American citizens. By spending above and beyond even this level of taxation, it has created the horrendous inflation of the past decade. And by saddling our economy with an ever-greater burden of controls and regulations, it has generated countless economic problems—from the raising of consumer prices to the destruction of jobs, to choking off vital supplies of food and energy.