Back in Washington, Muhammad Ali defeated Jimmy Young at the Capital Centre in fifteen rounds. In Texas, Reagan and Ford were engaged in their own title fight, and Ford was desperately trying to keep his crown from his California conservative challenger. Fred Barnes, who was traveling with Ford through Texas as he stumped for votes, wrote in the
Washington Star
of the fresh problems for the President on the eve of the big Lone Star State primary:
During a stem-winding speech in Dallas on Thursday, President Ford boasted loudly that he would win. . . . By yesterday, however, he was not so bold, choosing for the most part to talk about “momentum” instead of victory over Ronald Reagan in Texas.
At an appearance Wednesday night in Houston, about 6,000 people showed up to see Ford. They listened to his brief speech, but then half of them streamed out of the auditorium as Ford went on for another 30 minutes answering questions.”
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Ford also lost an audience in Lubbock. As he spoke at an indoor mall, many people chatted loudly, ignoring the President until he introduced Dallas Cowboys’ football coach, Tom Landry, who was supporting him.
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Ford spent more time and money campaigning in Texas than any primary to date. It was also in Texas where he adopted his harshest tones against his opponent and attacked him by name. “When it comes to the life and death decisions of our national security, the decision made must be the right one. There are no retakes in the Oval Office.”
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This newest slight of Reagan’s previous career was duly noted by the candidate. Reagan had been asked by a reporter of he would be interested in being Ford’s running mate to which Reagan retorted, “Well, maybe he would like to have a Vice President that makes retakes and who is irresponsible,” reported the
Dallas Morning News
. Ford also called Reagan’s positions “simplistic” and “rash.”
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Nelson Rockefeller piled on, when he told the Associated Press that Reagan was “deceptive” and “misleading.”
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Reagan got a bonus when Henry Kissinger responded to Reagan’s attacks on his Africa policy, calling the Californian, “totally irresponsible.”
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The Ford campaign and his Administration were completely on the defensive. Wherever Ford went, he was forced to answer reporters’ questions about Reagan’s charges over détente, Soviet missile strength, Africa, Kissinger and, of course, the Panama Canal.
Nonetheless, reporters got “spun” badly by Ford’s people leading up to the May 1 Texas primary. For example, Barnes wrote a story that appeared on the day of the primary that Ford might have a chance to do well in Texas. The
New York
Times
reported the day before the primary, “Political leaders here believe that heavy, last minute campaigning by President Ford has cut substantially into Ronald Reagan’s early lead in Texas, turning tomorrow’s Presidential primary into a cliff hanger that they said was too close to call.”
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On primary day, Reagan won a crushing victory over Ford in Texas, taking all ninety-six delegates at stake and winning most of the twenty-four congressional districts by better than two to one.
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Reagan later took the four at-large delegates, making it a clean sweep of the state—an even hundred. The Reagan forces even denied a delegate slot to Senator Tower. Later in Kansas City, the Texas trio of Dear, Angelo, and Barnhart, who had engineered the Texas win, would attempt to prevent poor Tower from even getting a floor pass at Kemper Arena.
Turnout was extraordinarily heavy in both primaries, and long lines were announced at GOP polling places in Houston, Dallas, Longview, and elsewhere across the state. “‘They’re swamping us,’ said R. Douglas Lewis, state Republican Executive Director,” to the
New York Times
. The paper also reported that turnout in one Republican precinct in Waco was around eight hundred, as opposed to the last GOP primary when eighty-four people had showed up to vote.
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“Nancy Reagan called that afternoon and wondered how we were going to do. I told her we were going to win them all . . . all the delegates. And she said, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to get my hopes up,’” Angelo said.
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It was the worst primary defeat ever inflicted on an incumbent President.
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Ford had attended the annual White House Correspondents dinner that Saturday evening. Although he was braced for a loss to Reagan, he had been hopeful of salvaging as many as forty of the hundred possible delegates. Ford had invited Dick Cheney, Ron Nessen, and David Kennerly to the White House residence after the dinner to watch the returns. Ford won in Maine’s caucuses, as expected. But all eyes were on Texas.
As Nessen described the scene in his book
It Sure Looks Different from the
Inside
, “It was clear from the 11:30 P.M. TV specials that the Texas primary was a disaster for Ford. . . .The President was alternatively glum, silent, angry and profane. ‘G—damn it!’ he exploded periodically.”
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Nessen dejectedly told reporters that Ford had hoped to do better in Texas. Peter Kaye, the Ford campaign’s spokesman was even more forthright as he told the
New York Times,
“We were prepared to lose. We didn’t expect to lose this big . . . nothing is going to be easy from now on—anywhere.”
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The mood at the Reagan headquarters in Houston was unvarnished joy. Reagan called from Indianapolis and sang a few lines of “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” over a speakerphone to the cheers and delight of his supporters.
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The
Washington Star
called Ford’s defeat in Texas, “astonishing.” Reagan was so clearly controlling the agenda that each time he mentioned the Panama Canal, voters would inundate Ford’s campaign offices with phone calls, wanting to know why the President was giving it away.
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The Ford Administration denied it was going to “give away” the Panama Canal, but a congressional committee revealed at a particularly bad time for Ford that Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker was, indeed, working on that very issue. According to Witcover, a report released just before the Texas primary said that Bunker
was acting directly on orders from Ford to negotiate a turnover of the control of the Canal Zone to Panama “after a period of time” and the canal itself “over a longer period of time.” The testimony seemed to contradict what Ford had declared a few days earlier in a Dallas press conference, “I can simply say, and say it emphatically, that the United States will never give up its defense right to the Panama Canal and will never give up its operational rights as far as Panama is concerned.”
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The Ford campaign presented Barry Goldwater to criticize Reagan on the Panama Canal after Reagan’s big win, telling reporters that Reagan should stop talking about the issue since he did not understand it.
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However, Reagan was not about to give up on something about which he cared deeply and that was helping his campaign. Rockefeller also joined in the public criticism of Reagan over the canal, but he was the last person to whom conservatives would listen.
Reagan’s refrain was now all too familiar to the Ford team: “We built it! We paid for it! It’s ours, and we’re going to keep it!” Reagan’s reference to Panamanian strongman, General Omar Torrijos as a “tinhorn dictator” was another crowd pleaser. Torrijos did not help his cause when he hinted at a “Ho Chi Minh” strategy against the United States if it did not turn over the Canal to him. But the threat only illustrated Reagan’s point. He was not alone, however, as thirty-seven Senators also took tough public positions against any new treaty that would hand over control of the Canal Zone to Torrijos—enough to stop it from being ratified.
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In 1976, Reagan could have been talking about the Panama Canal, the Love Canal, or the Erie Canal. In some ways it did not matter. He was tapping into a deep-seated anger that had been building in the country over the losses in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, the national embarrassment over Watergate, Soviet advances, and a general feeling that America’s day was over. “Vietnam was a great disillusionment to most Americans . . . the failure to win militarily in Vietnam was a failure of the national will which they desperately want redressed. Reagan is making a potent appeal to these people,” Dickenson wrote in the
Washington
Star
.
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An unsigned memo was generated in the Ford White House, analyzing the Texas results. It came to the conclusion that of the primary voters, “the people coming to vote . . . are unknown and have not been involved in the Republican political system before; they vote overwhelmingly for Reagan.” It also went on to lay the “blame” for Ford’s defeats at the feet of Richard Viguerie, Joseph Coors, the National Rifle Association, and a plethora of conservative groups that were spending money outside the FEC limits. The memo concluded, “We are in real danger of being out-organized by a small number of highly motivated right-wing nuts.”
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The two candidates were now facing a faster and more furious primary and state convention schedule over the next two months. Four days after Texas would come three state primaries in Georgia, Alabama, and Indiana. The President Ford Committee once had high hopes for Georgia, as it was the home state of Bo Callaway. But he was long gone and Spencer and Morton harbored no illusions about either Southern state. Consequently, only one day of campaigning was devoted to Alabama for the President in the hope of drafting some delegates there.
In Indiana, they felt they would win, and so did the national media. After all, a statewide poll taken months earlier had shown Ford leading by twenty-five points over Reagan in the Hoosier State.
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In fact, two days before the Indiana primary, a headline in the
New York Times
blared, “Ford and Carter Favored in Indiana Race Tuesday.” Indiana state GOP Chairman Thomas Milligan told the paper that he thought Ford would receive 55 percent of the vote. Ford’s own State Chair, Donald Cox, hinted that Ford’s margin of victory might go even higher. Now it was Reagan’s turn to manage his own expectations—and Ford’s— as he told a local reporter, “This is a very uphill fight because I think the party establishment here is with the incumbent.”
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In Indiana, three delegates were selected from each of the eleven congressional districts, and twenty-one were at-large.
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Again, Ford had the support of the entire party infrastructure, including Governor Otis Bowen. Ford had campaigned in the state, but another glitch seemed to summarize the renewed problems of his campaign. A large balloon drop at a rally in Ft. Wayne failed to happen, and Ford was furious, threatening to drop his lead advanceman, Red Cavaney, from a ceiling the next time balloons did not drop when they should. Ford also encountered some unusually nasty questions from the crowd, and Nessen suspected they were Reagan plants. One questioner asked the President, “Do you plan to continue to lead this country to full socialism?”
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One bright spot for Ford happened while campaigning in Indianapolis. In an advanceman’s dream, Ford was asked by a little girl to sign her excuse from school since she was attending his rally, which he gladly did. The local and national media loved it. However, at another campaign stop before what was supposed to be a friendly crowd, Ford was booed when he reiterated his support for his beleaguered Secretary of State.
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Under Dave Keene’s guidance, Reagan won big in two of the three contested primaries, taking all of Alabama’s thirty-seven delegates and all of Georgia’s eighty-five delegates. Reagan received an astonishing 71 percent of the vote in Alabama and 68 percent of the vote in Georgia. But the sweetest victory of the evening, orchestrated by Charlie Black, was Reagan’s upset win in Indiana, winning with 51 percent and taking forty-five of the fifty-four delegates at stake there. The win in Indiana was particularly welcome for the Reagan team, since it was the first non-Southern state in which he won.
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Sears had introduced Black to Keith Bulen, an influential GOP leader in Indiana. Bulen had been somewhat tarnished by Watergate, so he opted to help Reagan behind the scenes despite having told Sears and Black—over cognac at four o’clock in the morning—that he thought Reagan was “a right-wing nut.” But Bulen recruited the Indiana Chairman for Reagan, Dr. Denny Nicholas, a county coroner who thought he was really for Rockefeller until Bulen told him he was now for “that actor” Reagan.
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On May 4, the night of the three primaries, the President Ford Committee invited reporters to its D.C. headquarters to watch and report on the results and ply them with alcohol. As the results came in, the Ford staff became more and more despondent. When the returns were final and reporters were clamoring Morton for a comment about the Ford campaign, he blurted out, “I’m not going to rearrange the furniture on the deck of the
Titanic
!” It may have been the most unfortunate comment in the history of American politics.
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Morton was also photographed looking askew in front of a table filled with half-empty bottles of liquor, which was sent on all the wires and published in both the
Washington Post
and the
Washington Star
.
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The photo was unfair, as the media, according to Jules Witcover, had consumed most of the booze.
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Black, with his ever-present Winston cigarettes, was a tall, lanky North Carolinian whose quiet manner belied a tough and agile political mind. Only Sears surpassed Black in his persuasive abilities, but Black could also do it without making unnecessary enemies. Although Black was as conservative as the rest of the Reaganites and a disciple of Jesse Helms, he was liked by everybody in the GOP. He considered himself a “soldier in the conservative movement.”
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