Reagan's Revolution (47 page)

While Ellis Island was opening up for tourism and Northern Virginia was looking into banning the SST Concorde from landing at Dulles Airport, Nelson Rockefeller was making some noise of his own, when he told a breakfast group of reporters that Ford’s move to the right was “very dangerous” for his prospects in the general election. He also told the media that he felt it was “inconceivable” that Ford would pick Reagan. Reagan’s forces, of course, shared that sentiment— but for different reasons than Rocky’s. Rockefeller also said he would not accept a request from Ford at the convention to run with him. But this would have been highly unlikely; Rockefeller had been a loose cannonball rolling on the decks of the
USS Ford
for nearly two years. Everybody in the White House and the Ford campaign was sick and tired of his antics, despite his help with the New York delegation.
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Washington was starting to settle into yet another long, humid and hot summer. Polyester leisure suits were selling at Raleigh’s Department store for $55 and three custom-made shirts for men could be purchased at a tailor in Alexandria for $40.
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Delegates to the conventions would be wearing their “finest,” including the Ohio-labor special, “Full Cleveland” at the Democratic convention. The ensemble consisted of a white leisure suit, white shirt, white socks, and white patent leather belt and shoes. Though Democrats tended to dress more proletarian, both conventions were nonetheless braced for the worst their sartorially challenged delegates could throw at them.

And Washington was atwitter at the revelation that Congressman Wayne Hays, one of the meanest and most powerful men in Congress, was keeping a mistress, Elizabeth Ray, on his payroll, and paying her fourteen thousand dollars a year, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Ford’s photographer, David Hume Kennerly, worried that his mini scandal might come back to haunt him again, now that she’d become “famous.”
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The FEC finally began to release matching funds to the Presidential candidates. Citizens for Reagan received $349,138, but it was far below the nearly two million the government agency owed the campaign.
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The commission also fired a warning shot across the bow of conservative groups supporting Reagan in the primaries, especially the American Conservative Union. Jim Roberts, who headed the ACU’s efforts to support Reagan in the primaries, told the Commission that the ACU had spent over $230,000 in thirteen states to support Reagan, but no laws against coordination had been violated.
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A charge had been made against the ACU that it was soliciting contributions in excess of the five thousand dollar federal limit for an individual giver to the group, but no evidence against the organization was presented to the FEC. Roberts denied any wrongdoing. Still, the admonition against the conservative group was seen once again by Reagan’s forces as an attempt by the Ford White House to play politics with the FEC.
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Cheney had attempted to better coordinate the White House and the Ford campaign, but he was not always successful. Reagan’s effort also was somewhat disorganized—but nothing like Ford’s. While Ford went through three Campaign Managers, Reagan kept Sears the entire time. The President Ford Committee went through two Press Secretaries, two Finance Directors, and made other innumerable staff changes. With little exception, Reagan had the same team in 1976 that he had started with in 1975 and earlier. Morale was also higher at Citizens for Reagan than at the President Ford Committee, where staff came and went and campaign tactics seemed to shift from day to day.

On the subject of the vagaries of two campaigns, the
New York Times
opined, “Another factor favoring Mr. Reagan is his superior political staff. Even when events were going badly for their candidate in March and early April, the Reagan staff remained united. President Ford’s much larger and less cohesive amalgam of White House aides, election committee staff, and ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ had displayed inexperience and confusion.”
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The discord in Ford’s ranks continued when he fired his advertising man, Peter Dailey, and hired, for a time, James Jordan, a Madison Avenue type. Jordan was president of a run of the mill New York City firm that cranked out tasteless commercials featuring little men in people’s toilets or actors complaining about the merits of various shampoo products and which did a better job of getting rid of dandruff. Jordan came at the recommendation of his old crony, Don Penny, one of the two joke writers on the White House payroll.
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Jordan tried to “sell” Ford to the American people using actors portraying housewives, one named “Ellie,” doing a comparison shopping routine of Ford, as if they were noting the price difference of frozen peas in a supermarket. The commercials bombed, and Jordan was sent packing back to New York. Dailey, a talented and politically savvy ad man, was restored to the campaign.
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The good news for Ford was that around the same time, a more talented and thoughtful individual than Jordan joined the President Ford Committee: James A. Baker III. He would prove to be an extraordinarily effective political operative, despite the admonitions of his grandfather to stay away from politics if he was going to build the family law firm. Baker had been a close friend of George H.W. Bush since the early 1960s. The young attorney, only in his thirties, was mourning the tragic loss of his wife due to cancer. His tennis partner, Bush, suggested he needed a distraction in his life to take his mind off his sorrow and got him involved in Texas Republican politics.

Baker eventually became Chairman of the Republican Party in Harris County and turned a moribund organization into one of the most powerful in Texas. Politics was now fully injected in his bloodstream, and he headed for Washington. He served first at the Commerce Department and later, as head of the Ford delegate operations. An old Ford crony, Jack Styles, was supposed to have run the Ford delegate operation. But Styles wrapped his car around a tree one snowy night in Michigan and the job fell to Baker.
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The Ford campaign had other personnel issues to attend. Henry Kissinger, for instance, was forced to distance himself from a
Parade
magazine article in which he suggested he would be willing to debate Reagan over America’s foreign policy. Kissinger also took the opportunity to counter rumors surrounding the abrupt cancellation of two long-planned speeches he was to give in California. Kissinger claimed that he had cancelled the speeches himself because of the nearness of the California primary. But most believed the White House was keeping Kissinger under wraps since he was such a lightning rod for conservative criticism.
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Kissinger may have been effectively muzzled, but Nelson Rockefeller, in the commencement address at the Air Force Academy, said America needed “détente” and “a better working relationship between the two superpowers.”
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At the time, a correspondent for Agence France Presse, Louis Foy, asked plaintively, of the discredited word, “Has this become a dirty French word?”
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Reagan’s campaign was confident of safely winning California. As a result, on the first weekend of June, Reagan went to Ohio to stump there, hoping his last minute effort might yield some of the ninety-seven delegates at stake.
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Unfortunately, his campaign had only filed in two-thirds of the twenty-three congressional districts. Three delegates would be selected from each of the districts and the balance at-large according to who won the primary.
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Before leaving California, however, the Gipper saddled up for a high profile media event and rode along with a group of cowboys and ranchers before attending a campaign event in Newport Beach, where he was introduced by John Wayne and Andy Devine. Reagan had some fun with the crowd, telling them, “May the all-seeing eye dwelling in the treetop of infinite knowledge bring its light of peace upon the tranquil meadows of the turbulent night of your hours of darkness.” The befuddled crowd looked at Reagan, wondering if the months of grueling campaigning had taken their toll until Reagan said, “You may wonder what this has to do with this barbecue. The answer is nothing. It’s just a bumper sticker I saw for Jerry Brown!”
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The crowd roared, accustomed by then to reading stories each day detailing new oddities about their Governor.

Determined not to be embarrassed in California, Reagan’s campaign spent over eight hundred thousand dollars (compared to Ford’s six hundred thousand). Furthermore, Reagan devoted considerable time to a state where he had run and won two times and where he had been a successful and popular Governor.
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Some thought his effort in California in 1976 was overkill and that his time and money would have better devoted to Ohio and possibly picking off a couple of delegates in New Jersey.
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But Nofziger, who had returned to California to run the primary, would not leave anything to chance. Reagan and Mrs. Reagan were bound and determined to not be embarrassed in their home state primary, which Reagan called “the big casino.”
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Even their offices were open all Memorial Day weekend, while the Ford offices in California were closed.
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In California, Reagan received a Father of the Year Award, but the
Washington Post
could not resist a taking a gratuitous shot by reporting that he would miss his son’s high school graduation, because he would be campaigning in Ohio.
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Reagan also speculated about losing the nomination for the first time since announcing his candidacy, as he suggested he would want concessions from Ford on the Republican platform in exchange for his full support in the fall campaign.
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Reagan also, for the first time, mused that either Senator Bill Brock or Senator Howard Baker, both of Tennessee, would be an acceptable running mate should he win the nomination. Reagan told the small group of reporters, “Neither one has ever taken philosophical positions different from mine. I’ve thought of them as philosophically similar to me.” Jon Nordheimer of the
New York Times
insightfully wrote, “There has been speculation throughout the campaign on the problems Mr. Reagan might encounter as nominee in the selection of a running mate since he has insisted that he would not want someone who did not share his conservative philosophy.”
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On Tuesday, June 1, Ford took all of the nineteen Republican delegates in Rhode Island’s primary. Although the state allowed crossover voting, the Reagan campaign had made only the most minimal effort there. While the delegates would be apportioned according to percentage, Reagan only received 31 percent of the vote, two percentage points under the threshold for proportional representation. Consequently, all the delegates went to Ford. The turnout was so small, less than twenty thousand voters, that even one mailing into the state for Reagan would probably have yielded him some of the delegates at stake there.
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Also on the first, the South Dakota and Montana Republican Parties held their primaries. Reagan was confident about both. Neither of the candidates had campaigned for the twenty delegates in South Dakota. But Ford’s brother, Tom— a Michigan businessman—and Mrs. Ford had both stumped there.
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Montana’s GOP primary was the first to be held in twenty years and although the results would be non-binding until their state convention on June 26, the delegates it sent to Kansas City were Reagan supporters.
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In fact, all twenty voted for Reagan’s nomination.
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South Dakota was a bit of a setback for Reagan, however, as he only took eleven of the twenty delegates available. Reagan had won two of the three primary contests, but the day came out as pretty much a wash between the two contenders.
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Unfortunately, this meant Reagan was not gaining on Ford. The
Post
tally had Ford with 802 delegates and Reagan with 650.
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Still, there were more than 800 delegates yet to be selected.

Reagan was also keeping his stump speech fresh, much to the joy of the traveling press. Reagan was never shy about speaking his mind and taking risks— sometimes to the dismay of his staff. But the candidate embraced the free exchange of ideas more than any other candidate running in 1976, and possibly in a generation. He wasn’t afraid to take on the established order, as when he spoke out forcefully against busing. But he also offered a solution for poor and inner-city parents when he advanced the idea of offering vouchers as a means of creating more competition in schools, thereby improving public schools right in the children’s neighborhoods.
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Vouchers were not a new idea. What was new was the presence on the national scene of a candidate who had the courage to embrace them openly, risking the ire of the status quo, as represented by the liberal media and the National Education Association. The federal government, Reagan said, “has injected itself increasingly into the local schools, interfering in their conduct, prodding, harassing, molding them according to bureaucratic ideas.”
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Reagan had been asked a hypothetical question about Rhodesia, where Soviet-backed revolutionaries were battling the white minority government. When pressed, Reagan speculated that possibly the United States and Great Britain might mediate a peaceful transfer of power to avoid a bloodbath there and possibly, possibly, both countries would send troops to preserve the peace and insure a democratic government in Rhodesia.
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The
San Francisco Chronicle
blared a headline that inaccurately stated, “Reagan Would Send GI’s To Avert Rhodesian War.” In fact, Reagan had said, “But I believe in the interest of peace and avoiding bloodshed, and to achieve democratic majority rule which we all, I think, subscribe to.” But his reasonable comments were all lost in the ensuing uproar, as Ford denounced Reagan as “irresponsible.” The new controversy dredged up other comments by Reagan over the course of the campaign that the national media deemed questionable.
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