What Keene hadn’t counted on was that Reed was just waiting for an excuse to do so.
38
Reagan called Reed to try to convince him that Schweiker wasn’t all that bad. But Reed didn’t buy it and brushed off Reagan’s arguments.
39
Sears believed that once the announcement had settled in and the initial shock had worn off, he could move ahead with his plans to capture uncommitted or wavering Ford delegates, mostly in the North. He had expected to lose between ten and twenty delegates, mostly from the South, but had hoped to pick up even more from Pennsylvania and New York.
40
Reagan also called Mounger, who colorfully told Reagan about the choice of Schweiker, “Governor . . . you gave me the biggest dose of Ex-Lax and you got all my insides . . . that is what this is like.” But Mounger assured Reagan he would stay put.
41
On Monday evening—just hours after announcing Schwieker—the leadership of the Mississippi Republican Party met at Mounger’s house to try to sort things out. Present were Mounger, Reed, Pickering, Executive Director Haley Barbour, and several others. None was happy about the pick of Schweiker, but none was about to bolt from Reagan, except Reed.
42
Reed informed the group he was switching, using Schweiker as his excuse, and they argued with him to hold off. After much haranguing, Reed promised the group he would wait one week before taking any public action. The very next morning, Dent started in on Reed again, badgering him to endorse Ford. Yet Reed resisted again because of his promise the night before and because of his commitment to Keene and Mounger months earlier.
On Tuesday evening, in yet another phone call, Reed told Keene that all the Mississippi delegates were switching, and he would too. But Keene had already made other calls to Mississippi and knew Reed was exaggerating. As Sears predicted, the initial shock over Schweiker was wearing off with the other delegates. They spoke one last time, late in the evening.
43
The conversation did not go well. When Keene held Reed to his promise of backing Reagan, Reed told him he’d made other promises, too. “Well, screw them, not me!” Keene told him.
44
Years later, Keene would say, “Look, Clarke was going one way or the other. He’s been making noises about going long before we picked Schweiker. If it hadn’t been the excuse of Schweiker, he would have found another.”
45
Reed, weary of the corner he was backing himself into, promised Keene that he would wait another twenty-four hours before taking any action. That is, until the very next morning, when the pressure came from another source: the President of the United States.
46
Dent wrote,
I called Cheney and gave him the solution to the Reed reluctance: “You’ve got to play the big card—get the President on the phone to tell Clarke to come and come now, today. Tell the President not to be his nice self—to push for a certain time and not to hang up till he gets it. Clarke won’t back up on his word to the President.” . . . So on Wednesday morning the President made his call to Reed. Every time previously when I took a delegate or delegates in to see the President he had not asked them directly for their vote. However, this call was different. He pressed for a Reed commitment and got it. Then he insisted Reed come over that day—Wednesday. And again, Reed agreed.
47
Ford was close, very close to the nomination. The hope was that Reed would declare for the President and thereby bring other Mississippi delegates, as well as undermine Reagan’s position in other states. As rumors swirled around Reed, Ford’s men were calling uncommitted delegates in other parts of the country, telling them that Reagan could not even hold on to his base in the South. Dent’s bluffs were working.
Reed finally capitulated to Dent’s orchestrated pressure and began writing a statement announcing his decision to endorse Ford. Dent called Reed repeatedly, asking for the statement. In the meantime, Reagan, Mounger, Keene, and Barbour all were calling Reed, trying to bring him back into the fold.
“Finally, Reed read me the statement about 5 P.M. He said he was calling it to Barbour to be released through state headquarters. I was anxious to get the announcement on the network news that evening—under strong pressure from Cheney. However, I ran into difficulty with Barbour, who was for Reagan and knew what I did not: His boss was breaking a Reagan commitment,” recalled Dent.
48
Dent leaked word to CBS’s Walter Cronkite, who reported it that evening. Reed, who had broken yet another promise to Keene, rationalized that while he had not waited the full twenty-four hours he had pledged to Keene, he had at least waited until the end of the day.
49
“The influential Chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party endorsed President Ford last night with a jab at the ‘cynicism’ of Ronald Reagan’s selection of Sen. Richard S. Schweiker of Pennsylvania as his running mate,” wrote Lou Cannon in a front page, above-the-fold story in the
Washington Post
.
50
Reed made it clear that his endorsement of Ford was “personal” and not on behalf of the state party or the delegation, but the damage was done.
Reed also attempted to justify his actions by complaining to reporters about Reagan’s selection of Schweiker, calling it “wrong and dumb. It was an act of desperation. It was a double sin inasmuch as it didn’t work.” This last sentence by Reed should have spoken volumes to Reagan’s campaign.
51
Even worse for Reagan, the paper reported, “Confirmation that Reagan has slipped badly in Mississippi came from a
Washington Post
survey of 58 of the 60 delegates, each of whom has half a vote. The survey, taken before Reed’s statement, showed 25 for Mr. Ford, 14 for Reagan, and 19 uncommitted. This was a change of 13 Reagan delegates to uncommitted and a gain of two for Mr. Ford, one from Reagan and one from the uncommitted category.”
52
A
New York Times
survey found that twenty-eight were supporting Reagan and twenty-six were for Ford. Keene himself estimated that even with some slippage, Reagan still had the support of thirty to forty of the sixty delegates and alternates.
53
As with other uncommitted delegates around the country, their answers depended on what time they were called and what mood they were in. Sometimes their hearts told them to be for Reagan. Sometimes, their heads told them to be for Ford. Sometimes, their egos told them to stay uncommitted.
In any event, Dent felt it now was safe to bring Ford to Jackson, Mississippi, to meet with the delegation. While some at the President Ford Committee expressed reservations over the trip, Ford and Cheney overruled them. Ford met with the delegates that Friday for over two hours and fielded, according to Dent, many “Birch-type questions.” Most of the questions surrounded Henry Kissinger, détente, forced busing, and his choice for Vice President. They were pointed, but respectful.
54
By all accounts, Ford acquitted himself well. He told the gathering he would poll all the delegates to the convention to seek their ideas on a running mate. And Ford was aided further in Mississippi when its two Republican Congressmen, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, also endorsed the President the day of the meeting. Although they were not delegates, Lott and Cochran were influential among their fellow Mississippi Republicans.
Another Reagan supporter who flipped to Ford was Tommy Giordano, whom Mounger had recruited to run a congressional district in Mississippi for Reagan. Although Reed’s duplicity angered many, Giordano’s behavior was just as infuriating. After the convention he drifted out of politics, largely because he had been ostracized, according to Mounger. Years earlier, Senator Gene McCarthy of Minnesota described a particular off-again, on-again political associate as, “the type of person who in a war would go out onto the battlefield and shoot our own wounded.” That description well summarized the Reagan team’s sentiments over Reed and Giordano.
Reagan and Schweiker flew in the next week and met with the delegation. Reagan, not known for rudeness, greeted Reed with an icy smile. Schweiker and Reagan took some tough questions, and some found their performance wanting. But despite the surveys conducted by the media, this meeting and Reagan’s relentless phone calls to individual delegates in the state had isolated the defection to only Reed. The rest, besides Shanks and Carmichael, would abide by their decision to go to the convention uncommitted.
Reagan and Schweiker also met with some nervous Alabama delegates to hold them in line. Still, their blunt talk to Reagan appalled Schweiker and his wife, who had accompanied them on the Southern swing. Keene remembered one Alabama delegate, Wallace Stanfield, who bluntly told Claire Schweiker that when he had heard of her husband’s selection, “I drank a pitcher of whiskey sours—and I’m not a drinker. I’d rather have the doctor call and tell me my wife had the clap.”
Of Ford’s tenuous position, James Baker told
Time
, “We’re a hundred votes ahead of them, and we’re still confident of victory, but there hasn’t been any spectacular development to resolve the thing once and for all.”
55
Drew spoke to Reed several days later and described him as “uncharacteristically glum.” Second guessing himself, he remorsefully told the journalist, “More Mississippi delegates accepted this Schweiker thing than I thought would. The people who normally agree with me are sticking by Reagan, and the people that approve of what I did are not the people I’m normally comfortable with. Maybe I jumped too quickly . . . so I’m kind of lonely.”
56
Reed would still have to go to Kansas City, where he would be condemned and courted, feted and frozen out, before he would really begin to feel truly lonely.
As the days counted down to the convention and the possibility for discord was on the rise in Kansas City, Reed told the
New York Times
, “I’m a lot more worried about the possibility of chaos than I am about who the nominee will be.” History would show that it was Reed himself, who was the principal cause of the “chaos” in Kansas City.
57
“We come with our heads high and our hearts full.
We’re going to come here and do what we have to do.”
T
he word “convention” is derived from the Latin word
venio
, which means “to come.” When it is further linked to the word “convene,” combined they mean “to come together.” “Convention,” according to Mr. Roget, is alternately defined as “agreement,” “assembly,” and “treaty of peace.” The 1976 Republican National Convention was anything but a treaty of peace, as it forever altered the direction of the Republican Party.
The prevailing wisdom in 1976 about political conventions was echoed in a white paper issued by the Brookings Institution:
To the extent that conventions do have power, their capabilities for damaging their respective parties may be greater than for repairing or rebuilding them. Any convention has the power to degrade its party image even in victory or to lessen its popular appeal and make victory impossible for the time being; on the other hand, when the party has already been severely damaged by the preconvention campaigns, the convention has only limited capability to heal the breach.
1
Kansas City prepared for the invasion of the Republicans and hoped for a peaceful gathering. The city’s brand spanking new Kemper Arena would host the GOP convention and glistened white in the hot summer sun of 1976. Kansas City had spent millions to roll out the red carpet for the Grand Old Party. Even its “red light” district was festooned with red, white, and blue bunting, as dancing elephants were placed in the windows of several smut peddlers. The city’s Mayor even planned to cut up the mahogany gavel post from the podium following the convention, in order to sell pieces to souvenir collectors and generate even more revenue for the municipal treasury.
City fathers had also planned to float a giant gas-filled elephant named “Biggie” over the arena for the week of the convention. But plans went awry. According to one account, “Biggie, a 50-foot-long plastic elephant weighing three-quarters of a ton . . . didn’t work. Biggie became entangled in some nylon haulage wires, tore out its stomach, and never got off the ground.”
2
Sophisticates from New York and Los Angeles referred to the middle part of the country that divides the liberal salons in Manhattan from the liberal salons in Beverly Hills as “flyover country.” Kansas City was probably one of the last places in America they would ever contemplate visiting or vacationing in. Shows what they knew.
As a matter of fact, other than Biggie, everything was “up to date” in Kansas City. Its stockyards, which had made it famous as a “cow town” were mostly closed or were closing. Situated on the Missouri River, Kansas City was well run and clean. It had an excellent municipal services sector, libraries, parks, museums, healthy white-collar businesses, and a new airport that was the hub of a major airline, TWA. Direct flights were available to the city from Washington, D.C., New York, and other American cities. Farm trade was still a large part of the local economy, but it was far from the only source of revenue or jobs.
Its population of over five hundred thousand made it one of the larger cities in America
3
and its citizens cheered the fortunes of the Kansas City Chiefs, the Kansas City Royals, and the Kansas City Kings while enjoying plays coming in from New York. With St. Louis and Chicago, Kansas City had some of the finest restaurants in the Midwest. It was still the best place in America to get a steak.
One of the leaders of the Pennsylvania delegation complained that his accommodations, at a hotel near the airport were “like getting stuck in the middle of a corn field—you can’t walk to a bar or get a suit pressed.” Not so, as
Time
explained. “Though the Hilton plaza is eleven miles away from Kemper Arena, it is not in a cornfield, had four bars, swimming pool, tennis courts and one-day valet service,” reported the magazine. The hotel’s manager, Maurice Bluhm, threatened to cancel the reservations of the state’s entire delegation until the man apologized.
4