Ellis and Helms also relished confrontation and were aided by Carter Wrenn, a large man whose huge appetites included bonded whiskey and cheap cigars. Together, they did not wait for permission from Sears as to what to do with the ailing Reagan campaign in North Carolina. They simply went to work.
Wrenn was a young conservative who became a confirmed “Reaganite” in 1975 after hearing Reagan deliver a speech at Chapel Hill. He had been scheduled to graduate one year earlier, but he took a volunteer job at Helms’s Congressional Club in 1974 stuffing envelopes and licking stamps. He became hooked on politics. When Charlie Black offered him a job making eight hundred dollars a month at the Club, Wrenn jumped at the chance and never went back to get his college degree.
Ellis thought Sears was a “genius” but he also made no secret of his disdain for him—even though the men had only met several times.
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He simply did not like Sears, his politics, his secretive manner, or his perceived apostasy when it came to the “red meat” conservatism that got the blood pumping of “True Believers” like Ellis. Wrenn would later say,
It would be an understatement to suggest that Ellis didn’t have time for Sears and the D.C. people. They wanted to run a character campaign versus an issue campaign. Ellis and Helms wanted to talk about the gospel and the message. It got very contentious, lots of arguing and fighting back and forth.
It culminated at a meeting in Helms’s office in D.C. Ellis basically laid out his strategy and Sears kept quiet, nodding his head. This took place before the New Hampshire primary. Ads had already started in New Hampshire and Ellis said, “You can’t say Ronald Reagan is more qualified than Gerald Ford.” Sears pointed out that Reagan was ahead in the New Hampshire polls.
And Ellis would say, “If you’re not going to do what I want you to do, will you at least make up some issue ads and keep them in the can in case you need them?” Eventually, they all weren’t speaking to each other.
David [Keene] was in a hard spot and [as] conservative as Ellis, but he had to argue the party line. Both he and Charlie [Black] got in the middle of it. Eventually, Ellis just told them he didn’t want to talk to them, didn’t want them around, [and not] to call.
17
One of the first things Ellis did was kick out of the state or simply ignore all the Reagan campaign people from the national headquarters—including Charlie Black and David Keene. But this occurred after a powder keg that Keene had warned Ellis about had exploded. Ellis’s efforts for Reagan in North Carolina stipulated that he operate with complete autonomy. He really had no use for most of the Reagan staffers, even though Black and Keene were personal friends.
Ellis had concluded that while the two young operatives were just as conservative as he was, it was Sears who signed their paychecks. Although he knew they would plead their case in North Carolina to Sears, they were getting nowhere. It was best they just get out from underfoot and let Ellis and his people do their jobs.
One close confidant of Ellis’s observed, “He had a remarkable talent for getting under people’s skin. He was intuitively a very smart man, not without his flaws . . . but his ability for single-mindedness was extraordinary.”
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Ellis did make one major mistake when his forces in North Carolina reprinted an article from a local newspaper speculating that Ford might pick Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts as his running mate. Brooke was a respected moderate liberal who had been elected in 1966. Brooke also was black and this was North Carolina in 1976. Keene told Ellis to destroy the flyers or, he warned, “Reagan will denounce them and you publicly.” Ellis complied and Mike Deaver ordered several boxes of the offending flyers put on the plane. In one town this message was not communicated and some of the copies made their way into the hands of the media. As Keene predicted, Reagan blew the whistle on Ellis and the flyers at a press conference. But when Keene was proven right, Ellis threatened him and furiously ordered him out of the state.
19
Reagan was especially sensitive to the “racist” label many liberals tried to hang on him and other conservatives during this era. Years earlier, while playing football for Eureka College, the team was making a road trip and several black members of the team could not stay at the local “whites only” hotel. The coach scrambled to make alternative plans for the players, but Reagan took his black teammates to his home to stay.
20
It must have touched Reagan deeply when the recently-appointed black Democratic Mayor of Gastonia, North Carolina, Theboud Jeffers, introduced Reagan at an event as “our distinguished next President.” When a reporter asked the new Mayor about his introduction of Reagan, Jeffers said, “I think he’s tremendous. I’ve always been an admirer of his.”
21
Reagan had also been especially proud of his record in California of appointing more than 250 black public servants to office, “more than any other Governor in California’s history.”
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Another thing Ellis did was call in Arthur Finkelstein. A polling and tactical genius who did not always play well with others, Finkelstein was a man of enormous talent and ego whose libertarian roots dated to years before at Columbia, where he once shared a college radio show with philosopher, novelist, and libertarian iconoclast Ayn Rand.
Finkelstein had cut his teeth working for the legendary Bud Lewis, head of survey research for
NBC News.
In 1969, he wrote a long letter to Jim Buckley, brother of William F. Buckley Jr., telling him how he could win the U.S. Senate election in New York in 1970, running only on the Conservative Party line. Buckley had run for and lost the seat in 1968. He was intrigued, so he invited the brash young man to lunch. Although Finkelstein could not read the menu at the French restaurant, after some follow-up meetings and phone calls, he acquitted himself well with Buckley. Buckley entered the race and hired the legendary F. Clifton White and his protégé, Finkelstein, to do polling and campaign strategy.
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White and Finkelstein were among the growing breed of fulltime political consultants. The political consulting industry had come far, and many people earned a good living by consulting, polling, fundraising, and working the media. Previously, most Campaign Managers and campaign staffers worked other “real jobs” and would take leaves of absence to work on political campaigns. But politics had changed as races became longer, more expensive, and more sophisticated. The consulting industry changed along with it. White had guided the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and helped organize Reagan’s late-starting drive for the GOP nomination in 1968.
Buckley won in 1970, defeating the Republican candidate, Charles Goodell, a moderate who had been appointed to fulfill the unfinished term of Robert Kennedy, as well as the Democratic nominee, Congressman Dick Ottinger. After Buckley’s stunning victory, Ellis reached out to Finkelstein to seek his help with Helms’s campaign in 1972. Shortly after Helms’s big victory, they created the Congressional Club, which became Helms’s vehicle to conduct permanent campaign activities, including helping Reagan. Ellis brought Finkelstein in to help in 1976, and his efforts for Reagan in North Carolina and Texas would prove crucial to the campaign.
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By 1976, White had been shunted aside by Sears and the Reagan folks, and he ended up working for Ford.
Reagan threw himself into the desperate effort of North Carolina. Laxalt was now traveling with Reagan fulltime and told the old performer to get rid of the now famous “4x6” cards, which Reagan used for his stump speech, and just speak from the heart. The response from the crowds in North Carolina immediately improved. “He was like a little kid when he got rid of those cards,” Laxalt said later. “He told Nancy he was so excited when he gave speeches for a whole day without his cards.”
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He was also sick with a cold. Judy Sarasohn of the
Raleigh Times
remembers interviewing Reagan, hunched over in the backseat of a tiny car, “sucking on smelly lozenges.”
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Furthermore, the campaign had eschewed any mention of Reagan’s Hollywood career, fearing it would make voters think Reagan was “play acting.” Nonetheless, the grave condition of Reagan’s campaign before the North Carolina primary called for a change in tactics. Laxalt remembered, “So we go down to North Carolina and we’re at the edge of the precipice waiting to be pushed off and I forgot who thought about it . . . maybe Nancy . . . she didn’t often offer suggestions but when she did they were very good. She said we were trying everything else and nothing’s working. Maybe it’s time to call some of our Hollywood friends and we, very tenderly, had an event with Jimmy Stewart and had many more show up later.”
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But there was little time or money to bring in the big Hollywood guns. Sometimes they were invited for an occasional appearance with or for Reagan. Other times they were asked to stop by the campaign offices in Washington and around the country to boost staff morale. But for the most part they were kept at arm’s length until later in the primary season.
Laxalt also suggested to Reagan that he bring in his “Hollywood buddies” to help the campaign in North Carolina and beyond. For months, Jimmy Stewart, Pat Boone, John Wayne, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Lloyd Nolan, Jack Webb, Ken Curtis (who portrayed “Festus” on the popular show,
Gunsmoke
), and other actors had offered to assist their old friend, who had led them as president of the Screen Actors Guild and befriended all of them at trying times in their lives.
Wayne was especially difficult, not because he was hard on the staff or demanded too much of Reagan, but because he hated the media and made his disdain clear anytime a reporter came near him. Wayne had hosted a fundraiser for Reagan at his home in California and proceeded to have a few cocktails. When a reporter for
NBC News
approached him and asked why he would support Reagan over Ford, Wayne replied, “Because Jerry Ford is too f—ing dumb to be President.”
28
Reagan’s Hollywood friends would be very prominent later in the campaign as they traveled with him, met with wavering delegates, and talked to the media in Kansas City.
Three important factors would come into play in the crucial North Carolina primary. The first was that Stan Evans, Chairman of the American Conservative Union, persuaded the organization’s board to approve an independent expenditure campaign on Reagan’s behalf in Illinois, North Carolina, and Texas. The ACU spent tens of thousands of dollars in North Carolina alone on newspaper and radio advertising that touted Reagan’s conservatism and hammered Gerald Ford.
The ACU effort itself stirred up a small controversy after the North Carolina primary when Ron Nessen, in a daily White House briefing, incorrectly charged that while independent groups like the ACU could raise or spend as much as they liked to support Reagan’s bid, they were not required to report to the Federal Election Commission. “Perhaps some places 80 percent of the advertising for former Governor Reagan is paid for by groups which say they are unauthorized or unofficial and, therefore, they don’t have to report their spending,” Nessen said.
29
Nessen was rebuffed shortly thereafter in a memo from President Ford Committee General Counsel Bob Visser, who explained that all independent groups must report all expenditures to the FEC. “First, any ‘unauthorized’ groups . . . would be required to file quarterly reports with the FEC,” Visser wrote. But he also went on to charge in his memo that such independent groups were, in fact, coordinating with the official Reagan campaign. “The fundamental basis of our objection to such so-called unauthorized activities is that such expenditures which were actually conducted with the advice, consent and/or cooperation, direct or indirect, of the Citizens for Reagan Committee would not be reported by the
Reagan Committee
as campaign expenditures, and, therefore, directly chargeable to its expenditure limitations.”
30
Visser also reiterated that he had urged Ford Campaign Manager “Rog” Morton to file a complaint with the FEC against the Reagan campaign and the ACU. Visser sent a copy of his memo to Morton, perhaps to stir the pot one more time. Visser kept up the drumbeat against the ACU, as he sent another detailed memo to Ford strategist Stu Spencer, this time complaining about a letter sent by Evans to ACU contributors asking them to send “earmarked” contributions to the organization’s “Reagan Project.”
31
But the President Ford Committee never acted upon the memos. The dam- age that the ACU did to the Ford campaign in North Carolina and later in Texas would be done. Stan Evans later asserted that it was impossible for the ACU to coordinate with Sears because, “Sears wasn’t doing it right.”
32
There was a minor FEC investigation of the ACU after the election, but the organization was cleared.
The ACU’s effort in North Carolina for Reagan, organized by Jim Roberts, included running 882 radio commercials on major stations and thirty-three newspaper advertisements. The activity could not have done anything but help Reagan and hurt Ford. The ACU’s newspaper ad was a detailed, side-by-side comparison of Ford and Reagan on the issues, including Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, the Panama Canal, and busing. The accompanying photos showed a smiling, jovial Reagan and a less-than-flattering shot of Ford.
33
The radio ad was equally hard hitting:
Gerald Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller as Vice President of the United States. He appointed Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State, and fired a Secretary of Defense who disagreed with Kissinger’s “détente.” . . . Ronald Reagan, by way of contrast, says he would fire Henry Kissinger and is committed to a balanced budget. Ronald Reagan would not cave in to Castro, and says American sovereignty in Panama must be maintained. The choice for North Carolina Republicans is clear: continued deficits and the weakness of “détente” or Ronald Reagan’s new initiatives in freedom.
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