Although the ACU had started its activities in Illinois one week before the North Carolina primary, it was not until North Carolina that the organization’s effort began in earnest. Helms noticed the ACU campaign and praised the group’s contributions in a letter to Evans two days after the primary. Helms wrote, “the ACU’s efforts were crucial in putting the Reagan campaign over the top.”
35
The second development before the North Carolina primary was that Ford, for a time, had moved past the “buffoon” representation that had plagued him throughout his Presidency. But the long-loathed image came back to haunt him in North Carolina where he gave what may have been one of the most insipid speeches in the history of the Presidency to a national convention of homemakers. He was then photographed in a Rockettes-like chorus line, kicking his leg up with a group of dancers in Spruce Pine. Ford’s Campaign Press Secretary at the time, the too-often-quotable Peter Kaye, later told Jules Witcover
,
“It was in North Carolina where Ford became a crashing bore.”
36
Ford’s campaign in North Carolina led by Governor Jim Holshouser, who had also won in 1972, albeit by a much narrower margin than Helms, never got its act together. Complicating things at the time was a bitter ideological, regional, and cultural fight between the Helms faction and the Holshouser forces. There was no love lost between the two, and, according to Jim Burnley, a Republican activist, “There were serious intra-party conflicts in the state.”
37
The third key factor in Reagan’s effort in North Carolina was turnout. Keene cited the turnout model in New Hampshire as what cost Reagan that primary. Indeed, over 65 percent of Republican primary voters turned out in New Hampshire. “It was in North Carolina that the turnout model returned to its normal pattern. About thirty percent of registered Republicans turned out.”
38
Actually, the turnout was closer to 40 percent, but Keene’s point was well taken.
Ellis took control. He personally supervised the Reagan speaking and campaign schedule, raised the money, and bought the television and radio time. Finkelstein wrote radio scripts and advised Ellis on tactics and strategy on a daily basis. Helms stumped daily for Reagan, sometimes together, sometimes alone.
Ellis left no stone unturned. Earlier in the year, he had attempted a statewide effort to encourage Democrats to reregister Republican so they could vote for Reagan. When that didn’t work, Ellis turned his attention to registering new voters, including many young people, and at this he was more successful.
But money was a major problem for the Reagan campaign from beginning to end. It was not that Reagan couldn’t raise it; he was a better fundraiser than anyone in the Republican Party at the time. The problem for Citizens for Reagan was not cash flow as much as money management. One major cause of this problem was a decision by Darrell Trent, the campaign’s new Comptroller, whom Sears had brought in to get the situation under control. Sears had hired Trent to replace John Magnotti, whom everybody agreed was a nice guy—too nice because he said yes to everything. This, coupled with Sears’s undisciplined spending, made for a financial mess.
Trent and Sears had met during the 1968 Nixon campaign. Trent insisted that the campaign not hire a “caging and batching” operation to handle the incoming flood of direct mail. As part of the growth of the political industry, such operations became invaluable to political direct mail fundraising. They could process the checks much more quickly and reliably than volunteers were able to. But Trent wanted to save money and use campaign volunteers who were unschooled in how to handle the mail. Trent’s decision slowed dramatically the process of depositing the checks and applying for the matching funds from the FEC.
39
Consequently, unopened bags of mail, filled with thousands of checks totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars littered the Washington offices of Citizens for Reagan. “We had fifty to sixty bags of cash and checks. We were trying out how to protect them. Initially we used guards. We used a taxi service to transport the money. Eventually, we set up a revolving line of credit with a bank that weighed the bags and estimated the amount in each around $55,000 per,” Smith said.
40
Ellis made a deal with Sears that whatever was raised in North Carolina was to be used in North Carolina, but Sears insisted that the national campaigns receive the matching funds. Ellis agreed to this condition. Each day in the weeks before the primary, Mark Stephens or Alex Castellanos, two youthful Reaganites recruited by Ellis, would board a plane from Raleigh and fly to Washington National Airport, where they would go to the Citizens for Reagan campaign headquarters and hand over the daily checks and cash to Angela “Bay” Buchanan, the campaign’s Treasurer. After the money was processed, Buchanan would cut a check for the young men and they would then fly back to North Carolina and give the check to Ellis for the day’s media and other costs associated with the campaign— minus the matching funds, however, that came from the money raised in North Carolina.
In another critical move for Reagan in North Carolina, Ellis had been pleading with the campaign for months to give him footage of Reagan speaking to air on the state’s thirteen television stations. Just as Reagan’s staff had hesitated to involve Reagan’s Hollywood friends in the campaign without reminding voters of his acting career, for months they debated over how to put Reagan on television. Nonetheless, Dick Wirthlin claimed his polling showed Reagan’s celluloid career was an asset to the campaign rather than a detriment. Sears even went so far as to hire Harry Treleven, who had produced effective commercials for Nixon in 1968, to actually make “bad commercials” for Reagan’s early effort. The lighting was poor and the film quality was intentionally kept mediocre to prevent voters from remembering Reagan’s career in film. But the commercials themselves were ineffectual and Treleven quietly left the campaign.
Reagan used to plead with the campaign hierarchy to air him. Typically, the response was, “Governor, that stuff worked for you back in 1964, but this is different.” Nofziger later told Witcover in
Marathon,
“Everybody wants to do something their own way with Ronald Reagan. And the best way is to just let him talk. Nobody ever figures it out. Each time, you have to go through this whole hassle.”
41
Ellis threatened to broadcast Reagan’s 1964 speech on behalf of Goldwater. The campaign had been ignoring Ellis, and he called Laxalt in frustration and made a last ditch effort to get something—anything—to air. Miraculously, a thirty-minute speech by Reagan appeared. During the Florida primary, a television station in Palm Beach had offered thirty minutes to both Ford and Reagan. Ford had declined the opportunity but Reagan grabbed it. The film was of poor quality, and the set was a simple desk with a threadbare curtain behind Reagan. The lighting was terrible. And there were palm trees in the background. But it did not matter. References to Florida were deleted as were the palm trees, and the response was overwhelming and enthusiastic among North Carolina’s Republican primary voters.
Ellis, to this day, believes the unseen hand of Nancy Reagan was behind his finally getting the thirty-minute speech. He believes that Laxalt and Helms mentioned the problem to Nancy and she, in turn, told the campaign staff to get Ellis what he wanted.
42
And Reagan ripped into Ford on the stump. The Ford White House pulled all the stops when it came to announcing federal pork projects in the primary states, including the Tar Heel state. Attacking the federal largess Ford was handing out state by state, primary by primary, Reagan said, “When Ford comes to North Carolina, the band won’t know whether to play ‘Hail to the Chief ’ or ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town,’” recounted Black, who had run afoul of “Emperor Ellis.”
43
Reagan went after Ford on the Panama Canal especially hard. The canal, it was rumored at the time, was going to be turned over to the military dictator of Panama, Omar Torrijos. Although the Ford White House and Kissinger’s State Department denied it, the “giveaway” came to symbolize the frustration Americans felt in 1976 in the aftermath of losing the Vietnam War. Reagan, in speech after speech, would make his case for keeping the Canal, usually thundering, “It’s ours! We built it! We paid for it! And we should keep it!” Reagan was once again in motion, following the Sears maxim that “politics is motion.”
Ford and his campaign, meanwhile, were going nowhere. The President’s young Chief of Staff, Dick Cheney, worried that the campaign was making a serious mistake by backing away from Reagan, per the agreement between Sears and Morton. In retrospect, Cheney was right. Reagan’s comeback allowed him to continue the fight, refreshed with an upset win, that brought in new funds for his depleted campaign coffers.
Ford’s campaign still had its ongoing difficulties. Although he had announced back in July of 1975 that he would indeed run for President in his own right, the President Ford Committee had been often times a bumbling operation, riddled with inexperience, factions, power struggles and missed opportunities.
Much of the controversy centered on the eminently likable Howard “Bo” Callaway. Callaway had been a member of Congress from Georgia who literally had the Governorship stolen from him in 1966 when he won a plurality of the vote, but the matter was sent to the Georgia legislature as prescribed by the Georgia state constitution. The legislature was dominated by “yellow dog” Democrats who would “rather vote for a yellow dog” than allow a hated Republican, albeit a conservative Republican, to occupy the Governor’s mansion.
Callaway always had his problems with the press simply because he trusted people. And he sometimes had a problem organizing his thoughts before he spoke publicly. During the 1968 campaign, he caused a minor brouhaha when he suggested publicly that George Wallace and his supporters be encouraged to join the Nixon forces. More sophisticated political observers knew what Callaway meant, but the media jumped on it with glee in an attempt to smear the Nixon campaign as appealing to Southern racists.
44
Callaway’s judgment was also sometimes called into question, as when he paid a courtesy call to John Sears at his law office in Washington in June of 1975, trying to encourage him to join the Ford campaign. Sears had already signed on for the forthcoming Reagan campaign and was hard at work, along with Jim Lake and Lyn Nofziger, organizing the Citizens for Reagan press conference which would be held the following month.
On March 12, 1976, the
Denver Post
and
NBC News
carried a bogus report that charged Callaway with using his position as Secretary of the Army to meddle in Forest Service affairs, arranging for the expansion of a ski resort investment in Colorado that he and his brother-in-law referred to as “Crested Butte.” As President Ford recounted in his autobiography,
A Time To Heal,
As soon as he heard the allegations, Cheney spoke to Bo, who insisted that the charges were untrue, that he had done nothing illegal. Yet the appearance of impropriety seemed to be there: Bo had met in his Pentagon office with two officials of the Department of the Interior (the parent agency of the Forest Service) and discussed Crested Butte’s expansion plans; in the post-Watergate atmosphere, such an appearance could be very damaging to my campaign.
45
To Ford’s credit, he asked for Callaway’s side of the story in person. On Air Force One the next day, Callaway explained that he had spoken to the Interior officials two days after he had resigned as Secretary of the Army. And both of the officials were old friends. Callaway’s story was the story of all businessmen who had to deal with governmental red tape and petty bureaucrats. He and his brother had applied five years earlier for an approval or rejection of their expansion plans. They simply wanted an answer, one way or the other. He had exerted no pressure and the two Interior officials confirmed Callaway’s story.
But this was the era of the crusading investigative reporter, and every reporter was a wannabe Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. This was the era in which ink-stained wretches were heroically portrayed by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman on the silver screen. It created an atmosphere of report first, ask questions later. Woodward and Bernstein were the toast of every liberal in America at the time for using a single, unnamed source (“Deep Throat”) in bringing down the odious “Tricky Dick” Nixon.
In Callaway’s case, his “Deep Throat” was the liberal Senator from Colorado, Floyd Haskell, who hated Republicans with a passion. Using sources that would later be discredited and trumped up congressional hearings, Haskell completely abused his power in trying to undermine Callaway and, by extension, the Ford campaign. Callaway was later exonerated in an article in
Harper’s
in 1977, “The Persecution and Character Assassination of Howard ‘Bo’ Callaway as Performed by Inmates of the U.S. Senate Under the Auspices of the Democratic Party.”
46
But it was no use. This was the post-Watergate hothouse of Washington, and some of the Ford forces saw the silver lining in forcing Callaway out of the campaign. For months, his management style had been the subject of criticism inside the White House, and his memos were the butt of jokes. Overlooked in all this, of course, was the fact that under Callaway’s management, Ford had defeated Reagan in the first five primaries of 1976, and the Ford campaign was financially much better off than the Reagan campaign. For all of the media’s love affair with Sears and its open disdain for Callaway, the courtly Georgian had pasted the smooth New Yorker five times in the kisser.
Meanwhile, Nofziger had been sending the beleaguered Campaign Manager little missives over the course of the campaign. He took the opportunity to once more needle Callaway by sending him a note stating that his career with the Ford campaign had “crested.” But Callaway was in no mood at the time for Nofziger’s jokes. As Nofziger later recounted in his autobiography,