Reagan's Revolution (11 page)

Although Reagan turned them down, the conservatives did not stop. They proceeded to meet with Wallace and then John Connally about a third party bid. Each of these men also turned down the third party advocates, and the idea ended there. Reagan told Deaver later, “Mike, you shouldn’t have worried so much. I told them I was a Republican and if I am going to run . . . it will be as a Republican.”
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Nonetheless, the conservative grassroots were eager for change. The emerging “New Right” was more middle class, more sophisticated politically, and more interested in winning than the old elements of the Republican Party or even the “Old Right.” They were as disgusted by Nixon’s abandonment of conservatism as by his abandonment of respect for the rule of law. Nixon’s resignation from office was not met with joy by the New Rightists, but with the knowledge that they knew Nixon was a fatalist and his ignoble departure was bound to happen sooner or later.

Nixon had won an overwhelming re-election effort in 1972, but it was entirely personal. He rarely campaigned as a Republican and almost never appeared on the same dais with Republican candidates running for lesser offices. As a result, the GOP saw minimal pickups in the House and actually lost ground in the Senate.

“Even more important, he had paid some heavy prices to ensure this victory,” penned Michael Barone in
Our Country
. “Lingering controls on energy prices and rents in big cities would distort the workings of the economy and exact heavy costs by the end of the 1970s . . . the Social Security increases and the double cost-of-living adjustment . . . the Soviet wheat deal propped up a rotting Soviet economy and produced a boom-bust cycle in the American Farm Belt.”
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Wrote Lewis Gould in his landmark book,
Grand Old Party
,

Of all the Republican Presidents in the twentieth century, Richard Nixon is the most complex and controversial. . . . So activist was his Presidency on environmental matters, welfare reform, and Native American issues of tribal rights that Nixon has been called, with a touch of irony, the last liberal President. In many respects, Nixon was a Republican moderate, to the left of his mentor Dwight D. Eisenhower on a number of social and economic questions.
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The party had come a long way since its first nominee, the great explorer John C. Fremont, ran on the platform of “Free men, Free soil, Fremont” in 1856. Unfortunately the Republican Party stood for less, over a hundred years later, than it did at its inception. In fact, no one really was sure what the Republicans represented. Lengthy columns were written and scholarly papers presented predicting the death of the Republican Party, much like their forefathers, the Whigs, who had died out in the 1850s because no one seemed to know what they stood for anymore. Consequently, the party’s source of grassroots funding dried up, as its once vibrant list of proved donors to the party—developed from Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964—had shrunk to nothing.

Regardless of whether they would ultimately form a third party, conservatives realized that they would need to challenge the Republican establishment by fielding a candidate who shared their convictions. Although Reagan continued to deliberate about challenging Ford, plans were already well underway to announce “Citizens for Reagan” in July of 1975. As far as impatient conservatives were concerned, frustrated and furious with the slow pace of his decision, it could not come soon enough.

3
FORD FOLLIES

“I’m damn sick and tired of a ship
that has such leaky seams.”

I
n September 1975, what should have been a huge political windfall dropped into Gerald Ford’s lap with the bankruptcy of New York City. In the 1970s, the “Big Apple” was rotten to the core with graft, corruption, organized crime, and kickbacks. The city was horribly run, dirty, and dominated by extreme left-wing Democrats. In his 1977 Academy Award winning movie
Annie Hall
, Woody Allen speculated that the rest of America thought New York City was overwhelmed with “left-wing Communist Jewish homosexual pornographers. I think of us like that sometimes, and I live here.”

New York City was $4 billion in debt and city fathers appealed to Washington for a bailout to prevent the city from default. Other major cities were also run by corrupt political machines, one example being Richard Daley’s Chicago, but he and his fellow Mayors knew that voters would tolerate “honest graft” only as long as essential services like law enforcement, fire protection, trash removal, and public education were efficiently provided. New York City had forgotten this important political lesson, and the city was turning into a cesspool from frequent strikes by garbage men and the growing filth that lined the streets. In 1975, New York’s hopelessness was the butt of Johnny Carson’s monologues.

Despite reprimands and heavy pressure from Mayor Abe Beame and other supporters of the city, including liberal Republican Senator Jacob Javits and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Ford initially said no. The
New York Times
attacked the President’s initial refusal to bail the city out as arising from the basest of motives:

[Ford’s] strategy is to exploit New York as the Republican answer to Watergate. When the Democrats bring up Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandals, Mr. Ford and his fellow partisans will point to New York as horrible example No. 1 of Democratic misrule.

Only partisan political considerations make Mr. Ford’s approach comprehensible. If his real concern were to make sure that New York balanced its budget and followed a prudent fiscal course in the foreseeable future, he would have accepted the Proxmire-Stevenson bill, which would have achieved that objective while extending $4 billion in temporary assistance. But that bill would have prevented default—and default by the nation’s largest city is the spectacular event that Mr. Ford needs for his political purposes.

The default scenario has special advantages from the standpoint of the President and his political advisers. It enables him to appeal to the anti-Eastern bias once articulated by Senator Goldwater when he expressed the wish that it might somehow be possible to saw off the eastern seaboard and let it drift out to sea. Mr. Ford can now present himself as the moral avenger who stood up to the big city and told it off.
¹

Ford never told New York to “Drop Dead,” as the
New York Daily News
screamed in a headline, but he probably would have been better off if he had done so. “Ford has been wavering all over the lot on the issue of aid to New York City,”
Human
Events
reported.
²

While Rockefeller and Javits were pressing Ford from the left to help New York, Ronald Reagan was crowding him on the right. Reagan seized the political opportunity and made it clear that he would have told New York to solve its own problems. Ford missed his chance to exploit the issue and help himself with Republican primary voters. He was two months into his campaign and like comedian Rodney Dangerfield, was not getting much respect.

Ford formally announced his intention of running for the Republican nomination in an Oval Office address to the country on July 8, 1975. Ford was accompanied by a small group of people, including his Campaign Manager, Howard “Bo” Callaway, Finance Director David Packard, Dean Burch, head of Ford’s campaign advisory committee, and the campaign’s Treasurer, Robert Moot.

The President’s candidacy may have been the worst kept secret in Washington, since he had already filed papers with the FEC declaring his intention to run more than two weeks earlier, on June 20, 1975. Offices were opened at 1828 L Street, NW for the President Ford Committee and Callaway began assembling a staff. Once again, Ford was accused in some conservative quarters of completely reversing his position. As Bob Hartmann recounted in his book,
Palace Politics
, “I found Ford voicing the same sort of optimism in a pre-Christmas [1973] interview in
U.S. News and World Report
, under the heading ‘Why I will not run in 1976.’ He was pretty categorical, to the point of saying that even if he succeeded to the Presidency before 1976 he ‘would step aside and not run to stay in that office.’”
³

Ford further explained in this article that he felt he could do a better job as Vice President if he were not perceived as conducting a personal campaign. He named Reagan, Rockefeller, and Connally as the leading GOP prospects for 1976. It is important to note that when Ford spoke these words in December of 1973, he was only leading Reagan by five points in the Harris poll.
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While conservatives and Reagan supporters fumed at the slow start of the Reagan campaign, Ford continued to have his own problems, including what to do about Nelson Rockefeller. Callaway was delegated with the unenviable task of explaining to the media why, if he was such a great Vice President, Rockefeller was not running in tandem with Ford for the nomination.

As Witcover recounted in
Marathon
,

Callaway, meanwhile, determined to get off on the right foot, instead stuffed it in his mouth from the very start. The morning after Ford’s announcement of candidacy, he held an open house at the temporary headquarters of the President Ford Committee, an office several blocks from the White House. For more than two hours, he sipped coffee with visiting reporters and conducted what amounted to a floating press conference. A single topic—the future of Nelson Rockefeller—was raised and dealt with repeatedly, until there were as many variations to Callaway’s answers as there were reporters, always a dangerous public-relations situation in a political campaign. The committee, Callaway took pains to emphasize, was a vehicle for nominating Ford, not Ford and Rockefeller, and the group’s name expressed that fact.
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Witcover documented that there were, indeed, historical facts to support Callaway’s claims. In 1956, Dwight Eisenhower’s campaign committee was designed to get him re-nominated—not him and Dick Nixon. In 1972, Agnew was not named as Nixon’s Vice Presidential running mate until just before the Miami Convention in August. Although these were more usual circumstances, the events of the past several years were anything but usual for the GOP or, for that matter, the country.

In Callaway’s defense, he had been handed a hot potato that had already been heated by Press Secretary Ron Nessen’s comments at a White House press briefing. Nessen had informed the assembled media that the campaign committee would not be a “Ford-Rockefeller” committee, just a Ford committee.

Witcover wrote, “Ford’s declaration of candidacy, however, was made against the backdrop of his political agents’ effort to keep Reagan out of the race. It was suggested, unofficially, in fact, that Reagan might be Ford’s running mate.”
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Meanwhile, the Washington parlor game of “What to do about Rockefeller?” was the Ford campaign’s tar baby. The more they pushed at it, the more the controversy about Rockefeller stuck to them. Ford tried the diplomatic approach saying that it should be left to the delegates at the convention—he was confident the delegates would choose both him and Rockefeller. However, as a conservative mindful of the looming Reagan challenge, Callaway told Witcover, “A lot of Reagan people are not supporters of Rockefeller, and I want it clear to them that we want their support [for Ford] whether they support Rockefeller or not.”
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Callaway was later accused by some of following Donald Rumsfeld’s and others’ orders in the Administration to try to push Rockefeller off the ticket. Callaway’s heavy-handed handling of the situation was widely criticized when he suggested in a meeting of reporters that Ford might need a younger running mate. But what caused the Georgian the most trouble with the White House was his description of Rockefeller as his “Number-one problem.”

In Raleigh, Reagan deplored the “shoddy treatment” of Rockefeller. Going further with reporters, Reagan said “It’s embarrassing—it must be—for a man who has served his country in a number of capacities for many years to now be held up as if he were at auction.”
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The next morning, Rockefeller called Callaway and gave him unshirted hell. Also, Rocky’s supporters weren’t taking Callaway’s criticism without fighting back. In the White House they were using Callaway’s performance as a way of getting back at Rumsfeld, who had personally chosen the Georgian to head the campaign. So it came as no surprise that news leaks revealed that Rumsfeld, not Hartmann, would be Ford’s liaison with the President Ford Committee. Apparently the news did surprise the White House.

John Casserly wrote of the campaign,

In the White House, there are “inside” misgivings about President Ford’s campaign. Bob Hartmann and others believe Bo Callaway has made some serious tactical bloopers . . . Callaway is blamed for “messing up” the Rockefeller situation. That is shorthand for saying Callaway was to placate conservatives by suggesting that Rocky would have to “prove” himself for a place on the ticket, as the President would have to win the nomination in his own right.
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Casserly, and others on the Ford staff, believed that Callaway had gone too far by suggesting that Rocky was a “liability,” which set off Rockefeller. He, in turn, badgered Ford for a public vote of confidence, which put Ford right back where he started, and all he had was the public mess to show for it. Ford, for all his efforts to distance himself from Rockefeller, was still held in low esteem by many conservatives in the party.

The southerners are thus holding out for Reagan. Three recent developments strengthen their unity; the President’s “snub” in not seeing Alexander Solzhenitsyn; his trip to Helsinki and suggested “sellout” of Eastern European nations in behalf of a dubious détente; and Mrs. Ford’s unfortunate television comments in which she appeared to adopt an easy attitude toward abortion and premarital sex.
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