In the same interview, Ford awkwardly attempted to criticize Reagan saying, “Some man who is running for office can use words to express how he’s going to meet a problem whether it is domestic or foreign and that [is] . . . sometimes totally unreal when you have to deal with the actual problems that come to this desk.”
52
Unlike Ford, Reagan was having no problem putting one word in front of the other, as he charged that the National Education Association wanted a “federal educational system, a national school system. . . . I believe this is the road to disaster.” Reagan further made the historical analogy to Hitler’s Germany, saying “where they had a nationalized school system . . . when [Hitler] said burn the books, they burned the books.”
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Reagan refused to retreat from these comments.
Sensing the resurgence of the Reagan campaign, the Ford campaign wisely began to tamp down expectations—especially in New Hampshire and Florida where Reagan was drawing big crowds and media attention.
Still hanging around the sidelines was Rockefeller, who once again said publicly that he might jump into the Republican Presidential contest if Reagan knocked Ford out in the early primaries. “I withdrew as Vice President,” he said cryptically.
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Now it was Ford’s turn to hit New Hampshire again, just seventeen days before the primary. Reagan had departed for the sunnier climate in Florida. One Ford insider summarized the closeness of the race for the
Boston Globe
: “The President can’t screw up, but neither can Reagan. There’s no room for it.” According to the same story, only 10 percent of New Hampshire’s Republican primary voters were undecided, and when they were “pushed” they split evenly as well.
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With the exception of scattered hecklers, Ford was warmly greeted in New Hampshire. He campaigned at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and at a junior high school in Concord, where he presented charts and graphs to 250 invited local officials and took questions from the friendly crowd. Again, Ford had trouble holding a crowd as dozens streamed for the door at an event at the University of New Hampshire before he had finished his address.
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At an address to the Nashua Chamber of Commerce, an advanceman’s nightmare came true: Ford wound up presenting a civic award to Sam Tamposi, a high-profile Reagan supporter.
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The awkwardness of the moment did not stop Ford from taking the Reagan challenge head on. Although he claimed Reagan would be acceptable as a Vice President, he also charged Reagan did not have the experience and “hasn’t had to make those hard decisions.”
Mrs. Ford and their daughter, Susan, also stumped the state. One woman told the
Boston Globe
, “I don’t care for her husband, but she’s terrific.” Unfortunately, Betty Ford was not on the ballot.
58
Ford was slowly, slowly becoming more comfortable at campaigning. He continued to struggle with a prepared text or a teleprompter speech, but was improving with improvised remarks. At one stop, he relayed a conversation with his daughter Susan about skiing in New Hampshire. She said, “Dad, you do all the falling and I’ll do all the skiing,” to the delight of the crowd.
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At another stop, he met a teenage boy, Tommy Boyd, who was wearing a cast on his left arm. Ford asked the boy how it happened, and the boy replied, “I fell.” Ford replied, “I fall a lot, too,” before signing the boy’s cast.
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Ford’s campaign scrapped previous plans for door-to-door canvassing in favor of the more efficient phone surveys, mailings, advertising, and national media coverage of him doing his job as President, which was key for Ford. However, it was former Senator Norris Cotton, the Honorary Chairman of Ford’s New Hampshire effort, who bluntly told reporters that Ford “has a bad organization” in the state. The old man had made a career speaking his mind, and he was not about to change now. Cotton elaborated, “The President is in trouble because he doesn’t have a well organized campaign.” He blamed the “young kids” who lacked supervision.
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Never one to mince his words, Cotton also told reporters that although he supported Ford, he was philosophically more in tune with Reagan. The Ford people grumbled in private over Cotton’s frankness. He was an asset at the end of the day, but he also came with headaches, just as Gregg, Loeb, and Thomson did for Reagan.
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Both campaigns, however, were reluctant to reveal too many of their tactics. Both were receiving matching funds from the FEC and therefore were required to comply with the ceiling set for New Hampshire of $200,000. It was also the first Presidential campaign where candidates also received Secret Service protection when they qualified for matching funds. By the time of the New Hampshire primary, two Republicans and six Democrats were trudging through the snow, complete with their own personal phalanxes of body guards.
At a GOP conference in Arlington, Virginia, leaders from thirteen states gathered to hear Ford. Reagan could not attend, so Sears went in his stead, still beating the “Reagan can govern better than Ford” drum and then oddly added, “Reagan would go further in that direction [changing the government] than Ford would, but I certainly could endorse them both.”
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It was a curious thing for such a high-ranking Reagan campaigner to say. Of the differences between the two men, the
Wall Street Journal
editorialized,
Some months ago, with tongue in cheek, we coined the phrase: Reaganism is extremism in defense of Fordism. We could as easily have said that Fordism is pragmatism in pursuit of Reaganism, for either phrase suggests two men with common philosophies of government, but with differences in their approach to implement the same.
Of the two, President Ford seems by far the more uncertain, appearing to shift back and forth . . . [Voters] are no longer sure they can trust Mr. Ford’s pragmatism, which at times becomes extreme.
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Rockefeller and Callaway also attended the conference, where Callaway once again proclaimed that Ford would win both New Hampshire and North Carolina. Callaway may have known something that no one else did in the Ford camp because the
Boston Globe
had released the results of its own survey of 849 New Hampshire Republicans. The poll showed that Reagan’s team had been far more effective in making contact with their voters. Indeed, of those voters who had heard from one campaign or the other or both, Reagan’s team had been in touch with 81 percent while Ford’s campaign had only been in touch with 27 percent of New Hampshire’s Republicans.
The survey did not ask preferences but did develop some fascinating data:
On today’s important issues . . . agreeing with Ford, 35 percent; agreeing with Reagan 42 percent.
Opinions on the Reagan proposal [to transfer services back to the states] were divided, but tended to be favorable despite the feeling [that it would result in higher taxes.] Overall, Republican voters, by 44 percent to 31 percent, think Reagan’s proposal is a good idea, even though 58 percent think it would result in higher local taxes.
65
Reagan was also seen as a better speaker and more polished than Ford (58 percent to 8 percent), but buttressing Callaway’s claim and buried in the data were two critical findings: by a margin of 46 percent to 30 percent, Republican voters thought Ford would win in New Hampshire, and by a margin of 22 percent to 18 percent, the former thought that Reagan could not win in New Hampshire.
66
In a new nationwide Gallup poll, Ford had fallen into a dead heat with Reagan, 44 percent to 43 percent. Another bit of good news for Reagan came from a straw poll of the statewide convention of the Florida Junior Chamber of Commerce, the “Jaycees,” in which Reagan beat Ford by an almost three to one margin.
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It was a seesaw battle with each camp claiming a lead as the two candidates squared off in New Hampshire, although never in person. To the delight of the media, most of the tougher barbs came from their surrogates. For example, former New Hampshire Governor Walter Peterson called Reagan nothing but a “trained performer.”
68
Having almost exhausted the political benefits of putting Reagan on the defensive over his “$90 billion” speech, the Ford campaign seized more aggressively on Reagan’s statement on Social Security, when he suggested investing the trust fund in the stock market. At a breakfast meeting with reporters at the White House, Ford proceeded to call the idea something that “someone dragged out of the sky.” Going further, Ford said Reagan was a “stranger” to Washington.
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Also, Ford challenged Reagan to release his recent financial records, hoping to dredge up a scandal like the one that erupted years before, when it was discovered that Governor Reagan had paid no federal or state income taxes in 1970.
70
Reagan capitulated and released his records, which showed over two million dollars in real estate holdings alone, between his home and two ranches. Compared to Reagan, Ford’s financial worth was meager. The returns also showed that Reagan had “paid his fair share of taxes” after 1970. In fact, the Ford team’s accountants disappointedly noted in a memo that the Reagans probably paid more than necessary in 1975.
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But Ford was now forced to deal with the announcement by the government of Communist China inviting former President Richard Nixon to visit Peking. Nixon had decided to go and would arrive in China the morning of the New Hampshire primary. Ford’s campaign strategists privately debated what to do, including seizing the plane the Chinese sent to California for Nixon, as reparations for debts owed the United States’ citizens for property seized by the Communist government there.
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In the end, they decided to take a pass for fear of exacerbating the problem. Yet behind closed doors, more than a few expletives were used to describe Richard Nixon. They accused him of ingratitude and thought he was trying to help Reagan win the nomination and embarrass Ford. Senator Richard Schweiker, a Ford supporter from Pennsylvania, charged Nixon with deliberately trying to sabotage the Ford campaign to grease the skids for John Connally to enter the ring.
73
Also in Pennsylvania, the filing deadline of February 17 came and went without Reagan’s campaign filing one delegate slate in the state, effectively conceding all 103 delegates controlled by Ford’s State Chairman Drew Lewis to the President.
74
More important to the direction of the campaign was a speech, written by wordmeister Peter Hannaford, that Reagan delivered at Phillips Exeter Academy, an exclusive private boarding school for boys. For the first time since announcing his candidacy, Reagan took off the gloves regarding the failures of America’s foreign policy under Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Although he never mentioned Kissinger by name, Reagan said,
One wonders if we even have a foreign policy, for it is impossible to detect a coherent view . . . our foreign policy in recent years seems to be a matter of placating potential adversaries. Does our government fear that the American people lack willpower? If it does, that may explain its reluctance to assert our interest in international relations.
[The] Soviet Union has now forged ahead in producing nuclear and conventional weapons, we can afford to be second to no one in military strength, not because we seek war, but because we want to ensure peace.
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The media briefly seized on the speech as new material but the audience of fidgety boys was all wrong and the campaign felt this speech had not “taken.” Reagan did not pursue this line of attack again until he was campaigning in Florida.
The
Boston Globe
’s Benjamin Taylor, who covered Reagan’s New Hampshire foray, concluded, “Reagan finished his campaign swing with an evening appearance at the University of New Hampshire Field House, where President Ford had made an appearance Sunday night. Reagan drew about half as many as the 3,500 people who came to see Mr. Ford, and the President was given a much warmer reception.”
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The full power of the Presidency would be brought to bear, once again, in the Granite State. Ford’s campaign decided to send the President into the state one more time, several days before the February 24 primary. During Ford’s previous trip, he had announced he would sign legislation establishing America’s coastal fishing boundaries at two hundred miles, thereby rebuffing the Soviets who arrogantly pilfered good fishing grounds up to twenty miles off U.S. shores.
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Ford’s announcement was especially pleasing to the fishing communities of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, both of which just happened to be holding Presidential primaries.
But with the power of the Presidency came the headaches. For instance, in a nakedly crass political move, a Democratic-controlled subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee announced it would investigate Ford’s pardon of Nixon.
For the last ten days of the New Hampshire campaign, the Ford campaign and the national media threw at Reagan everything they could. Elliot Richardson labeled Reagan “gimmicky” and told Ford supporters that a Reagan Presidency made him worry. He also disparagingly referred to Reagan’s supporters as “right-wing, ultra-conservatives.”
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California Congressman Pete McCloskey, a liberal Republican stumped for Ford and attacked Reagan with relish in the state. As in the case of Wilson’s comments, Reagan’s supporters thought McCloskey was hitting below the belt: “When you have the right wing of the Republican Party in charge, they do not just disagree, they tend to see liberal and moderate Republicans as almost traitors to the party.”
79
Speaking to the Stratford County Republican Club, McCloskey said Reagan was “not a serious student of government . . . and almost a shame as a Presidential candidate.”
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