Reagan's Revolution (14 page)

“Many Republican party officials in Washington and elsewhere believe that former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California, who is not yet an announced candidate, is ahead of the President in terms of organization in several key Republican primary states,”
⁴⁰
wrote the
New York Times
, echoing the sentiments of political reporters and observers around the country. Reagan was running down the track and Ford was still at the starting gate. Recalled Mahe about the President Ford Committee, it “bumbled along . . . Ford had no control. I wouldn’t even go to their meetings. Always they were having meetings.”
⁴¹

An additional announcement on November 2 came from Senator Charles Mathias, a Republican from Maryland, who dropped his threat to run in the Presidential primaries as a “liberal.” Liberals in the party had become increasingly concerned that Ford, looking over his shoulder at the looming Reagan challenge, was moving too far to the right at the expense of his more moderate and liberal supporters.

But a day later, a liberal Republican of greater stature than Mathias would make an announcement that would once again stun a nation’s capital that thought the last three years had made it immune to shock and surprise. Though he retained his office until the end of Ford’s first term, Nelson Rockefeller took himself out of contention for the Vice President slot for 1976.

Rockefeller’s departure from the ticket also added to the sense of a White House out of control. “One White House source close to the President said that Mr. Rockefeller would have inevitably had to step aside because his presence had become ‘detrimental’ to Mr. Ford’s efforts to win the Republican Party nomination,” reported the
New York Times
. “The White House official said that Mr. Rockefeller had been unable to make his peace with the right wing of the Republican Party. He was, therefore, regarded as a liability by the President Ford Committee.”
⁴²

Rockefeller aides did not take the insult lying down and reminded the media of the “cold” nature of Rockefeller’s letter to Ford and the fact that he did not make any positive references to either Ford’s Presidency or to his nomination. The
New York Times
reported:

These aides also noted that the letter did not rule out the possibility that Mr. Rockefeller might run himself for President next year. They carefully avoided suggesting that Mr. Rockefeller would seek the Presidency but pictured him as disengaging to wait and watch for new power struggles within the Republican Party,

They also made it clear that Mr. Rockefeller’s friends consider the party to be in grave danger. One aide commented that the Vice President had been concerned about the “lurch to the right” and the letter to Mr. Ford was designed for “clearing the air and setting some counter forces in motion.”
⁴³

Peter Hannaford was traveling with Reagan in Florida—a key early state—on November 3. In Boca Raton, where Reagan was speaking at a community college, a reporter approached the Governor and asked him what he thought about Rockefeller’s announcement that he would refuse to be on the ticket with President Ford in the 1976 campaign. Would it alter Reagan’s plan? Reagan was stunned by the news but gained his composure quickly. Hannaford wrote:

In retrospect, Rockefeller’s move seemed to have been designed to appease conservatives in the Republican Party so that they could get behind Ford. If so, it was a miscalculation. While Rockefeller was unpopular with many grassroots conservatives in the party, they were motivated to support Reagan not so much as a result of Ford’s unacceptability, but because in Reagan they had the genuine article, a conservative leader.
⁴⁴

Rockefeller’s departure finally solved Ford’s problem, but the dynamics of who made the decision have never fully been explained. According to President Ford’s autobiography,
A Time To Heal
, Ford held his weekly meeting with Rockefeller in the Oval Office on October 28. The conversation inevitably turned to conservatives’ angst over Rocky’s selection as Vice President and the problem this would pose for Ford in the coming battle with Reagan.
⁴⁵

As Ford recounted, though Rockefeller had never officially been on the ticket, he offered to forego a run. Some assumed that Rocky would be on the ticket with Ford in Kansas City once Ford won the nomination. But standing between Ford and that nomination was Reagan and his angry army of conservatives. Ford recounted in his autobiography:

As we talked, I didn’t try to gloss over the fact that conservative opposition to him might jeopardize my own nomination. “There are serious problems,” I said, “and to be brutally frank, some of these difficulties might be eliminated if you were to indicate that you didn’t want to be on the ticket in 1976. I’m not asking you to do that, I’m just stating the facts.”

“I understand,” he said. “Well, it’s probably better that I withdraw. If I take myself out of the picture, that will clear the air. I’ll give you a letter saying that I don’t want to be considered as a Vice Presidential nominee.”
⁴⁶

Over the previous year, Rockefeller had traveled far and wide to meet with conservatives and unsuccessfully attempted to mend fences broken and re-broken since 1964. Conservatives felt Rockefeller had undermined Goldwater in 1964, and they would never forgive or forget his actions.

Both Ford and Rockefeller came to the Presidency and the Vice Presidency via the new Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, the first time this had ever happened in the history of the United States. Furthermore, neither Ford nor Rockefeller had a strong hold on Republican Party loyalty.

It was a testament to Ford’s lack of control over the GOP that he could not force conservatives to accept Rockefeller or his policies in the way Richard Nixon was able to force them to accept his liberal policies and appointments. GOP voters nationwide had invested several votes, starting in 1952, in Richard Nixon but had nothing invested in either Ford or Rockefeller. Thus they were more liberated to disagree with the President. Which explained why Reagan, when pressed by students in Florida on his intentions of challenging Ford, replied, “On a scale of one to ten, I’m at a nine.”
⁴⁷

John Sears, however, had a different recollection of Rockefeller’s abrupt departure than what was stated publicly by Ford and reported in the media. “Rocky was forced off the ticket. He was not the type to offer himself up for slaughter. He was a fighter, and it was Ford who asked him to step down—not the other way around.”
⁴⁸

During the heat of the upcoming campaign, Rocky would call Sears at his office to cheer him and Reagan on against Ford. To say the Vice President was bitter over his shoddy treatment was an understatement.
⁴⁹
But in Rockefeller’s defense, he never wavered publicly in his support of Ford, nor did his hand-picked lieutenant in New York, the estimable Richard “Rosey” Rosenbaum.

Slowly, Cheney would begin to assert more control over the activities at the White House and the campaign. Problems would continue, but Cheney’s placid presence and conservative instincts did much to begin solving Ford’s governing and political fortunes in the fall of 1975.

Unfortunately, Cheney’s powers couldn’t stop the bad personal press Ford continued to receive. The national media gleefully reported each Presidential head bump, errant golf swing or dog leash entanglement. Even worse for Ford, “Physical clumsiness was subtly translated into suggestions of mental ineptitude. Such ridicule in the press and on television undermined public respect for Ford as a leader and damaged his chances in the 1976 election,” according to Nessen. “Ford was depicted, literally, as Bozo the Clown in a retouched photo on the cover of
New York
magazine,” Nessen wrote. Meanwhile, a young, upcoming comedian named Chevy Chase built a career imitating Ford on NBC’s new comic series,
Saturday Night Live
.
⁵⁰

As just one example of the media’s low opinion of Ford, early in his Administration, Tom Brokaw of
NBC News
asked him, “I have a question that isn’t easy to phrase, so I will just bore straight ahead with it. As you know, I’m certain, because I have been told that you have commented on this before, but it has been speculated on in print not only in Washington but elsewhere and it crops up in conversation from time to time in this town—the question of whether or not you are intellectually up to the job of being President of the United States.”
⁵¹

Ford dutifully answered Brokaw’s insulting question, but the question itself pointed to two problems that continued to plague Ford. First, reporters had the temerity to ask Ford such questions. Second, Ford’s continued image problems invited them to do so. And many of Ford’s problems stemmed from his own staff, who told the media on background that they had to teach him about governance and foreign policy.

Ford seemed to never catch a break. While on a foreign policy trip to Salzburg, Austria, he slipped on the rain-soaked stairs while descending from Air Force One and fell to his knees and hand in full view of the international community. Later that evening, Ford again slipped, twice this time, while on the balcony of the palace in Salzburg. Typically, the media overreacted and turned the incidents into world-shattering affairs. In fact, while Ford was star-crossed throughout his Administration, these two incidents can be attributed to bad knees from his football days at Michigan.

With all of Ford’s bad press and woefully operating White House and campaign until late 1975, it should have followed that his poll numbers would have headed downward. In fact, they were all over the place at any given time, but a memo to Ford from Cheney on October 23 summarized Ford’s standing with the electorate at the time. Most of the national polling surprisingly had Ford besting all Democratic comers at the time and he was also beating Reagan in the famous California Field Poll, 54 to 45 percent among all voters.
⁵²
In addition, a Darden poll of the South showed Ford doing better than either Reagan or George Wallace. Ford’s national approval ratings had stabilized, for a time, at 47 percent approving and 37 percent disapproving—a dramatic increase since his numbers had tanked in August.
⁵³

Ford was also presented with a detailed, ninety-page campaign plan in late August and an advisory committee of tough GOP veterans had been assembled, including Dean Burch, Ray Bliss, Kansas Senator Bob Dole, Bryce Harlow and Congressman John Rhodes of Arizona. Moderates who were brought aboard included Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, Mel Laird, who had left the White House to join
Reader’s Digest
, and former Pennsylvania Governor Bill Scranton. The plan was prescient in some areas yet naïve in others. A key phrase throughout the document was “discipline”—a concept previously unknown to the Ford White House. It also said, “In 1976, we find a public which is politically turned off by Watergate and related activities. It seeks a President who is honest, has a high level of integrity and who deals with the American people in a straightforward manner.”
⁵⁴

Yet Reagan’s team had polling data from Dick Wirthlin that showed that honesty and integrity had fallen from the list of the top priorities of the American voter, according to Sears.

They had been politically battered for years by JFK’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, Vietnam, Johnson, Watergate, Agnew and a thousand other political scandals that never even made the national news, but they saw and read about in their states and towns. It’s no wonder they had little use for politicians and certainly didn’t trust them.
⁵⁵

The plan was correct, however, in identifying that, “The public is becoming increasingly concerned about bigness—big business, big government, big labor. There exists a perception that with these institutions becoming so large, the identity and needs of individuals will be submerged in the needs of the organization.

Ford’s campaign plan did not identify his message, his integrity, or his ideology as his best strengths. It was his incumbency, pure and simple. To be sure, all Presidents use the power of the Presidency to run for re-election—or in Ford’s case, for election—but therein was his problem. Republican primary voters saw Ford differently than they would have had they actually voted for him. Indeed, Ford’s own polling showed that when he went into a state to campaign, his “numbers” would rise in that particular state, but they would fall nationally. It was a unique paradox that Cheney, Spencer and Callaway would have to reconcile.

But this section in the campaign plan on his incumbency did a commendable job in cataloging most of the advantages Ford would enjoy over Reagan, including command of the national media and his simple “newsworthiness” as President. He was the “automatic frontrunner” and had “at his command all the resources of the federal government to provide him with research on issues, economic analysis, and approximately 2,000 non-career governmental officials who are constantly selling and defending his Administration to the general public.”

The documents also listed the disadvantages of incumbency, including the responsibility for decisions made by the President and members of his Administration.

The President, as the leader of his Administration, shares the responsibility for the acts of his subordinates in the Administration and the campaign. Should one or more of those individuals exercise bad judgment or explicitly commit a wrong, the actions of that individual reflect directly upon the President.
⁵⁶

As evident in the campaign plan, many members of the Ford campaign and the White House took little heed of Ronald Reagan’s intentions or appeal in 1975. The authors of Ford’s campaign plan, to their credit, did. They coolly and crisply reviewed the assets and deficiencies of the Californian.