[Callaway] didn’t think that was funny. In fact, as I discovered eventually, he didn’t find humor in any of my notes. During the summer [1975] when he was looking for a Campaign Press Secretary, he told one reporter, who later told me, “I want someone to do to them what Nofziger is doing to me.”
47
Nonetheless, Callaway would have to take a “leave of absence,” which was widely interpreted as his dismissal from the campaign. All that was left was the actual execution. At Callaway’s last meeting with Ford, Cheney, and Campaign Press Secretary Peter Kaye, Kaye had a written statement announcing Callaway’s departure in hand. Callaway was gone shortly thereafter.
48
The powers that be would not even let him write his own statement of defense.
Callaway had his detractors and second guessers, but he was the only manager for Ford to go undefeated against Reagan in 1976. Overlooked in all the sniping, backbiting, and second-guessing of Callaway’s performance was the fact that he won all five of the primaries against Reagan he was responsible for. He was eventually replaced by “Rog” Morton, who had been at the White House as a Presidential political advisor to Ford. The position of Campaign Manager for Ford had been offered to Spencer, but he wisely turned it down.
49
Ellis continued to shape the North Carolina effort, despite the fact that all polls showed Ford with a comfortable lead over Reagan. At one point, in frustration, Ellis threatened to Sears that he would quit unless he got total control in North Carolina. Sears acquiesced.
For the last two weeks before the primary, unbeknownst to the national media and the President Ford Committee and the White House, Ellis’s efforts in North Carolina were hitting on all cylinders. Mail was going out, phone calls were being made, volunteers were doing “lit” drops and Reagan was aggressively campaigning anywhere and everywhere. Helms also dropped everything and hit the road on his own—sometimes with Reagan, but often times alone—tearing into Ford, Kissinger, and company, with even more zest than Reagan himself. Reagan devoted the last week of the primary to campaigning exclusively in North Carolina, traveling with Laxalt, Mrs. Reagan and his old friend, Jimmy Stewart. Jim Burnley, who was trying to build the GOP in Gilford County, could only watch with amazement as Ellis and his forces mobilized for Reagan at every level in the state.
50
Ellis and Finkelstein directed Wrenn to produce a list of Republican primary voters in the state, a tactic unheard of at the time. With no records computerized, volunteers were sent out to county courthouses and other offices, in order to dig through old files and attics to gather a list that would eventually be used for mailings and phone calls. The final list of approximately eighty thousand names would be key to the Californian’s last-ditch effort.
51
According to Black, the fundraising efforts in North Carolina were going well and Ellis was raising anywhere between ten and twenty thousand dollars per day. More important, the “résumé” strategy favored by Sears had been thrown out the window. The North Carolinians were running the ideological holy war that Sears had wanted to avoid.
The day of March 23 dawned warm and clear—perfect for an incumbent with a soft base of support, and terrible for a challenger with a small, but more determined group of supporters. A higher than expected turnout could spell defeat for Reagan, just as it did in New Hampshire several weeks earlier. Ellis, Wrenn, and Helms were nervous, thinking even one day before the election that they might very well lose. But they were satisfied they had done everything necessary they could to secure a much needed win for Reagan.
Reagan departed North Carolina that day for Wisconsin. Ellis, mindful of the way Reagan had left New Hampshire too soon at the behest of Hugh Gregg, kept Reagan in the state until the last minute, in order to squeeze out as much media coverage of him as possible. Ford had only made one stop in the state and it had not gone well.
That night Reagan and his team were in La Crosse, Wisconsin, as he delivered a speech to Ducks Unlimited. Frank Reynolds, covering the campaign for ABC, approached Hannaford and Marty Anderson and asked if they had heard any of the results of North Carolina. The answer from the two depressed aides was “no.”
“Well I have,” Reynolds said, “and your man is winning.” The Reagan staffers were dumbfounded.
52
They huddled with Reagan and Nofziger and decided not to meet the press. They remembered the egg Reagan got on his face in New Hampshire when he materialized too soon at the ballroom in the old New Hampshire Highway Hotel before his supporters and the media, appearing to claim victory.
After the speech, team Reagan boarded a plane for Los Angeles and learned in the air of their man’s eventual win. “We all had vanilla ice cream and champagne on the plane when he’d accepted that we’d won,” said Anderson.
53
Late in the evening, Reagan called Ellis and Helms at their hotel suite in Raleigh and once again, Black, whom Ellis had only recently let back in the state, ran afoul of the Helmsite. “I had told Charlie not to make any phone calls or take any phone calls, but when Reagan called, Black answered the phone and congratulated Reagan on his win. I was fit to be tied,” Ellis said. Black had a different take, saying he had been asked to call Reagan and inform him of the win. But this disagreement was not important. Reagan had his first victory in hand over the incumbent Ford, and everybody could claim a piece of the credit.
54
Also partying that night in Washington was a group of conservatives, aligned with the American Conservative Union and the Washington office of Citizens for Reagan. They gathered at the home of Becky Norton, a stalwart, take-no-prisoners activist. Evans was there as well and the good cheer, booze, and conversation flowed freely.
The final results in North Carolina were 53.4 percent for Reagan and 46.6 percent for Ford. Reagan received 100,984 votes to Ford’s 88,249.55 The next day, Reagan called the headquarters and spoke to each staffer personally to thank them for their hard work. Helms, Ellis, Wrenn, and the staff were deeply moved by Reagan’s gesture.
Winning North Carolina paid many dividends for Reagan, including some that were not immediately obvious. Prior to New Hampshire, Republicans had nothing invested in Ford, according to Sears, because they had never voted him into office in the first place. But when Ford won the first five primaries, Republicans nationwide took a closer look at him, and his stature began to rise. By losing North Carolina to Reagan, Ford hit the bottom again, and, even worse, it now became permissible and acceptable to vote against the incumbent President and leader of the Republican Party. According to Gerald Pomper in
The Election of
1976
,
The most vital asset of the Presidency, however, had already been lost: its aura of invincibility. When Ford began to move down in polls, primaries, and committed delegates, the majesty of the office was debilitated. . . . Once Ford began to slip, the Republican delegates no longer needed to fear the power of his office. Thus the President almost learned Machiavelli’s truth: “Any prince, trusting only in [men’s] words and having no other preparations made, will fall to his ruin.”
56
The week between the Illinois and North Carolina primary, no one knew this. Though few Republican Party operatives or voters knew who Machiavelli was and even fewer could quote him, all knew from experience about the psychological advantages of winning, especially against all odds.
Both Ford and Reagan had played college football in the 1930s and both knew a few tricks. Reagan’s contest against Ford in North Carolina in March of 1976 was no less shocking to the political world than say, if tiny Eureka College where Reagan played football, had beaten the much vaunted, much bigger, more powerful Michigan where Ford played college ball. Winning North Carolina for Reagan was not the entire ballgame, but it was like scoring a touchdown just before halftime. He was still behind, especially in the delegate count, but it was just the boost he and his conservative followers needed for the second half. Reagan was back in the game.
Going into North Carolina, Reagan’s campaign had been $2 million in debt and every day more and more Republican officials and political columnists were calling on him to retire from the field.
Had Reagan lost North Carolina, despite his public pronouncements, his revolutionary challenge to Ford, along with his political career, would have ended unceremoniously. He would have made a gracious exit speech, cut a deal with the Ford forces to eliminate his campaign debt, made a minor speech at the Kansas City Convention later that year, and returned to his ranch in Santa Barbara. He would probably have only reemerged to make speeches and cut radio commentaries to supplement his income.
And Reagan would have faded into political oblivion.
Conservative author and leader Stan Evans has asserted that the two most important primary victories in the history of the conservative movement were the 1964 California primary—when Barry Goldwater defeated Nelson Rockefeller, which propelled him to the GOP nomination—and Reagan’s victory over Gerald Ford in North Carolina in 1976. Given Reagan’s unexpected win over Ford in the Tar Heel state and the history that would eventually follow, few would dispute Evans’s assertion.
Cannon observed, “North Carolina was the turning point of Reagan’s political career. It kept him in the race to Kansas City, and it made him the presumptive Presidential nominee in 1980. At all times after North Carolina, Reagan was a legitimate, full-fledged candidate.”
57
In North Carolina, expectations were finally working for Reagan. He was making his comeback and would score more than a few upsets in the second half of the contest before the August convention in Kansas City.
9
CITIZENS FOR REAGAN, TAKE TWO
“I’m not going to rearrange the furniture
on the deck of the
Titanic!”
B
uoyed by his upset win over President Ford in North Carolina, Ronald Reagan began to find his stride and his swing. Finally, he was neither on the defensive nor explaining himself. Reagan was in motion, having stumped for twelve aggressive days in the Tar Heel State compared to Ford’s two passive days.
1
Senator Paul Laxalt told people it was the best he had ever seen Reagan as a campaigner. Elizabeth Drew wrote at the time, “Reagan looks good. His cheeks are rosier than when I saw him earlier in the year. He is successful now and it shows in his looks and his demeanor.” She attributed the shift to two things. Reagan “got more confident and he got angry.”
2
Mike Deaver told Drew that he could cite the exact day when Reagan’s demeanor and self-assuredness changed. “The real turning point in his mind was the day the Ford people had the Mayors calling him to get out, the Governors calling him to get out, and then the President suggesting he should get out. That was it for him. . . . He became more aggressive, more confident.”
3
James Dickenson of the
Washington Star
wrote the morning after the North Carolina primary,
All the experts laughed every time Ronald Reagan sat down to bravely argue that his early primary losses to President Ford were not fatal because he would do much better in the later primaries in the South, Southwest and Far West, more favorable political turf for him.
4
No one was laughing now. “There are very few candidates who have that kind of utter belief in themselves and that would have hung in there,” Reagan biographer Lou Cannon said.
5
Even more forebodingly for Ford, Dickinson noted, “Ford’s defeat marks the first time an incumbent President has been beaten in a primary in which he campaigned.”
6
Dickenson was right. Harry Truman had lost in New Hampshire to Senator Estes Kefauver in 1952, but Truman never put one wet foot in the state. In 1912, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt beat President William Howard Taft in twelve Republican primaries, but as in the case of Truman, Taft never campaigned in any of those states.Virtually everybody in Ford’s camp, Washington’s political circles, and the national media had expected him to win in North Carolina. Many in Reagan’s own camp had expected Ford to win—including Reagan himself. Tom Ellis, who along with Senator Jesse Helms had engineered the come-from-behind win for Reagan, told Mary McGrory of the
Washington Star
that although he knew Reagan was moving up in the polls over the last week he “wouldn’t have bet a dollar” on victory.
7
The Reagan haymaker had flattened Ford and his campaign. Ford’s staff was stunned. They had beaten Reagan in five successive primaries, and they were expecting Reagan to throw in the towel as soon as the President chalked up another win in North Carolina. Little did Ford and his supporters suspect that California’s “Comeback Kid” would do just that. Stu Spencer worried about North Carolina and that the Ford campaign did not understand Reagan’s toughness and resolve. “I said this guy’s for real . . . he’s here to stay . . . he ain’t getting out.”
8
Reagan’s rhetoric on the stump was getting sharper too, as he lacerated Ford on the Panama Canal, détente, Angola, government regulations, and spending. Liberals did not escape his attention either as he attacked Ted Kennedy’s national health insurance plan. Reagan warned,
What the nation does not need is another workout of a collectivist formula based on an illusion promoting a delusion and delivering a boondoggle. It is up to the private sector to provide answers in the onrushing health care political battle. If not, nationalized medicine will represent one more instance of surrendering a freedom by default.
9