Ordinarily, NBC would not sell national network time to a candidate this early while the state primaries are still in progress. However, in view of the unique situation of the campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination, where Governor Reagan is one of two major candidates and opposes an incumbent President, NBC feels that an exception to its general policy is warranted.
37
But the other two networks stuck by their original decisions. Two Democratic Congressmen from Massachusetts, including a Kennedy family ally, Torbert MacDonald, complained to the FEC about the decision by NBC to sell time to Reagan.
In the background, another fight developed in the Reagan campaign, this time over how to pay for the national broadcast. Although the campaign had won North Carolina, it was still in dire financial straights and in debt by over $1.5 million.
38
Hundreds of thousands of dollars were stuck in the direct mail pipeline, and the FEC owed the campaign another $1.5 million. Loans had already been taken against the projected income and spent. No more bank loans were available to Citizens for Reagan.
Jimmy Lyons, a dedicated conservative, longtime Reagan supporter, and president of the River Oaks Bank in Houston, Texas, was approached about making a $100,000 loan to the campaign to pay for the national speech.
39
The first lawyer to review this loan was Reagan’s personal attorney, William French Smith in Los Angeles, who reviewed FEC law and said the loan was illegal. Sears then took the matter to the General Counsel for Citizens for Reagan, Loren Smith, who pronounced the loan legal.
40
Lyons sent the money, and a check was cut to the National Broadcasting Company, which understandably wanted the money up front, for a little over $104,000.
41
But first, Lyons called Bruce Eberle, who was handling the direct mail for the campaign, to see if he would be able to raise the money to repay Lyons for his loan. Eberle assured the banker he could do it.
42
In the meantime,
Washington Post
reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who had uncovered much of the Watergate conspiracy, released their much-anticipated second book on the Nixon Administration. Entitled
The Final
Days
, it became an immediate bestseller. A few remaining Nixon defenders charged the duo with reporting things differently than they remembered them, but the book held up under scrutiny.
43
Regarding differing recollections in 1976, a Reagan staffer recounted for an editorial writer at the
Washington Star
that one of the networks refused to sell Reagan the time for a nationally broadcast speech, saying that Reagan was not a national candidate. “If such an argument was in fact made, it ranks among the dumber statements to come out of televisionland,” opined the paper.
44
Reagan taped the speech the afternoon of March 31. The setting was tasteful and understated, but the message and the messenger were anything but subdued. That night, Reagan ripped into the “wandering” foreign policy of President Ford and the looming national deficits. Reagan charged that although Ford had previously dropped the use of the word “détente” and replaced it with “peace through strength,” the policies of the United States towards the Soviets had not changed. Reagan charged that “peace does not come from weakness or from retreat. It comes from the restoration of American military superiority.”
45
Reagan’s speech was nothing new for the media that had been covering him for the past several years. But for the American people it was electrifying and it galvanized Reagan’s campaign. Lou Cannon wrote for the
Washington Post
:
Earlier in the day, at a breakfast meeting with reporters, Reagan National Campaign Chairman John P. Sears had said that the former California Governor would use his speech to “redefine his candidacy.”
While Reagan did not do that last night, he did bring to millions of Americans for the first time the basic message he had been using since March 4 in Orlando—a message that his strategists believed helped him score an upset victory over Mr. Ford in the March 23rd North Carolina primary.
46
Peter Hannaford drafted the speech, and Reagan spent several days fine-tuning it. Mike Deaver supervised the building of the “set” in Los Angeles where Reagan would tape the speech.
47
That night, Reagan tore into his opponent. Referring to the account in a newly released book by former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt, Reagan hit Ford on signing the Helsinki Accords, saying they
put an American stamp of approval on Russia’s enslavement of the captive nations. Now we must ask if someone is giving away our freedom. . . . Dr. Kissinger is quoted as saying he thinks of the U.S. as Athens and the Soviet Union as Sparta. The day of the U.S. is past and today is the day of the Soviet Union.
48
Reagan also seized on a quote attributed to Kissinger aide Helmut Sonnenfeldt that “the captive nations should give up any claims of national sovereignty and simply become a part of the Soviet Union.” Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported that Sonnenfeldt had made this remark to U.S. Ambassadors in Europe.
49
On the issue of foreign aid, Reagan assailed the Administration over a provision in a bill that would have allowed the United States to initiate a lifting of the complete embargo against Vietnam that Ford himself had signed into law the previous year after the fall of Saigon. The issue was tied to the POW/MIA argument, but few felt that Vietnam would show any good faith in helping to recover the remains or secure the whereabouts of missing Americans servicemen.
50
The response to Reagan was overwhelming. The offices of Citizens for Reagan were flooded with phone calls, according to receptionist Becki Black.
51
Eventually, over $1.5 million would cascade into the Californian’s campaign as a result of his speech. Nationally, Reagan received approximately a 20 percent “share,” meaning one out of every five television sets in America was tuned in to Reagan. The rating was considered excellent for a purely political show.
52
Viewers were encouraged to make a contribution to Reagan’s campaign by calling the phone number listed on the screen. Individuals who called eventually received a Western Union Mailgram restating the request for money that told the recipient when to send their checks to help Reagan.
53
The response to Reagan’s speech at Kissinger’s State Department was also overwhelming. Kissinger’s spokesman, Robert Funseth, denounced Reagan’s accusations, calling them “false” and “irresponsible.” The State Department issued a ten-page refutation of the Reagan speech titled, “The Reagan Speech and the Facts.”
54
It was all a tempest in a teapot, since few Americans had ever studied Greek history, much less remembered the wars between the two city-states, or that Athens has actually survived Sparta by several centuries. But the American people understood Reagan’s point. More importantly, Reagan had achieved a major hit against Ford, and now it was the Ford campaign’s turn to explain.
Campaigning in Wisconsin the next day, the President attempted a counteroffensive against Reagan’s speech, saying, “It’s a distortion; it’s a misleading statement for people to quote numbers without quoting what the military capability is. . . . It could alarm the American people, it could have an adverse effect on our allies and it could encourage our enemies.”
55
Initially, Ford called Reagan’s charges against Kissinger “a fabrication.” Ford attacked Reagan by name, saying his charges were a “rerun” of earlier statements by his opponent. Ford’s own script had been to stay above the fray and let surrogates attack Reagan, but that strategy was dismissed after their loss in North Carolina and Reagan’s nationally televised speech. Reagan did not want to alarm the American people, but he did want them to know his opinion about America’s foreign policy, which is exactly what he did. The trouble for Ford was that many in the GOP shared Reagan’s opinion and not Ford’s.
Reagan did not need a script to seize the political advantage, despite the “rerun” innuendo by Ford. In a Saturday morning press conference, he jumped right back at Ford, saying the President was “speaking rather loosely and in an unjustified way” when Ford attacked the Reagan speech. Then Reagan challenged Ford to a debate. He told reporters, his eyes twinkling, “It would seem we have touched a nerve.”
56
Six days after Reagan’s speech, on Tuesday, April 6, both Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford won their respective primaries in Wisconsin, as expected. Reagan won 45 percent of the popular vote in Wisconsin, but he did not take a single delegate. Ford swept the forty-five delegates at stake, both in congressional districts and at-large. But Ford received little credit from the national media, who saw his 55-45 percent win over Reagan as unimpressive.
57
The Reagan campaign issued a statement from Mike Deaver, saying that Citizens for Reagan was temporarily forced to give up its charter plane. But even this setback did not deter the now reener-gized Reaganites. Said Deaver, “This decision, while it may inconvenience the campaign and the news media and force some schedule revision, in no way means Governor Reagan’s campaign effort is being reduced.” Wisely, the campaign released the announcement the day before the primary, knowing the media would be swamped with other political news.
58
Reagan was fortunate not to be forced to stand in line and wait for a boarding pass like every other traveler as he flew on commercial flights. His campaign ensured that he would have some privacy at an office in a given terminal before boarding the plane ahead of everybody else.
59
Despite this minor embarrassment, the campaign was looking forward to future contests. On the Monday before the Wisconsin primary, Reagan departed for Texas by commercial plane to barnstorm the state, aiming to win the GOP primary there three weeks hence. Sears conveyed to the
Washington Post
, “In a sense, Texas is like New Hampshire all over again. It gives us an opportunity for a new beginning and for the momentum which any campaign needs.” One hundred delegates were up for grabs in the Lone Star State.
60
On April 6, the New York primary also took place, and again Reagan forces had only filed a few delegate slates in the state. All the delegates would be technically “uncommitted.” But New York State Party Chairman Richard “Rosey” Rosenbaum, a Rockefeller protégé, would do everything in his power to ensure that Ford would eventually receive most of the Empire State’s delegates. Rosenbaum was impossible to miss in a crowd. He was a large man with broad shoulders but also had an unexpectedly high-pitched voice. Most noticeably, was he was completely bald and wore oversized horn-rimmed glasses. Rosenbaum had several nicknames, including “Dick” and “Rosey” to his friends and “The Iron Chancellor” to his adversaries. Rosenbaum was a liberal Republican and a fierce competitor, but if he was on your side, he would walk through fire for you.
61
Rosenbaum said publicly that he estimated as many as thirty to thirty-five of the 154 uncommitted delegates might be for Reagan. But he worried privately that Ford’s support could crumble, especially if he lost to Reagan in Michigan.
62
Rosenbaum would have preferred to switch to Rockefeller if Ford faltered, but the rest of the New York delegation was another matter.
New York’s Republican delegates in 1976 ran on the primary ballot with their name only, and they were not identified as aligned with any candidate. Running was logistically difficult, especially if a delegate/candidate did not have the organizational support or funding from the state. Local parties were, with few exceptions, all supporters of Ford. One of the exceptions was Brooklyn, which was controlled by George Clark, a staunch conservative and foe of Rockefeller’s machine in New York.
Reagan, however, received some good news in mid-April when Ohio’s Secretary of State reversed a previous decision, which allowed Reagan to appear on the statewide ballot in the Ohio primary on June 8. As a result, he was entitled to vie for twenty-eight at-large delegates, in addition to the sixty-nine delegates selected by congressional districts. Black once again pushed Sears to commit more money and effort by the candidate to the Buckeye State. But most of their meager resources were being thrown into the fights against Ford in Texas, Indiana, Georgia, and Alabama.
63
Another individual being second-guessed at the time was White House Press Secretary Ron Nessen, for his controversial decision to host
Saturday Night Live
. In 1976, campaign consultants and White House staff were not the “celebrities” they would later become. The rule more than the exception at the time was that staff should be seen and rarely heard from. The only star of the show should be the candidate. Nessen not only broke with the old tradition, but smashed it into a million pieces. Nessen was booed by the liberal audience, despite taking part in several skits that made fun of Ford’s intelligence and physical prowess and convincing Ford to tape three self-deprecating pieces for the show. It wasn’t just the audience; people everywhere—even in the Ford campaign—were scandalized. And on the heels of renewed questions about Ford in the wake of his defeat at the hands of Reagan in North Carolina, Nessen’s appearance could not have come at a worse time for Ford.
64
Hoping to prevent another loss like North Carolina, the Ford campaign started playing hardball in Texas, as hundreds of letters went to individuals running as Reagan delegates, stating, “Your activities raise serious questions under the law and may expose you and others involved to possible criminal violations.”
65
No one is less susceptible to intimidation than a conservative from Texas, and many fired white hot telegrams back to the Ford campaign, threatening lawsuits for “malicious slander” and accusing the campaign of “dirty tricks.”
66