Reagan's Revolution (28 page)

Not since Chester A. Arthur in 1884 had a sitting President been denied his own party’s re-nomination. Lyndon Johnson had been chased from the White House by Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire in 1968. In 1972, Democratic frontrunner Senator Edward Muskie of Maine had only narrowly won in New Hampshire over peace candidate Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. In both cases, the frontrunners in fact won but failed to meet expectations and thus “lost” New Hampshire.

Ford was staring down the barrel at a devastating defeat like his hero, Truman. His campaign braced for the worst. Manchester and the smaller outlying cities votes came in first, due to more efficient machine tabulations. They showed Reagan winning, but throughout the evening Ford kept creeping up as the small town and rural paper ballots were being slowly counted. At midnight, Reagan was clinging to a 1,500 vote lead and appeared before his crowd of supporters and the media at the New Hampshire Highway Hotel. While he did not claim victory, he was outwardly confident about the outcome. Ford had gone to bed, according to the White House, unsure of the outcome until the next morning.
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Lake went looking for a cup of coffee around 12:30 A.M. and bumped into Sears. He asked Sears how things were unfolding, and Sears replied, shaking his head, that “things are closing.” Lake then knew it was lost. Along with everything else Lake was handling on Tuesday, he also had to drive to Boston to pick up his wife, Bobbie. She was a tremendous fan of Reagan’s, but as they crossed the border from Massachusetts into New Hampshire, an omen came to her. She blurted out, “Reagan’s gonna lose today.” Lake looked at her and said “nonsense.”
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Spencer was just as uneasy as Bobbie Lake. “It was not good. We were nervous. I told the guys to hell with it, we’d done all we could so, let’s wait and see how it plays out, good or bad.”
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As it did play out, New Hampshire was good to Gerald Ford. Reagan had lost, even if by the slimmest of margins.

Reagan’s aides differed in their view of why Reagan lost in New Hampshire. When Sears was later asked, he observed, “The temperature at 5 P.M. in the afternoon was 60 degrees—in New Hampshire—in February!”
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When Lake was asked he said, “That $90 billion speech put us on the defensive for three weeks. We could never make that time up. Rather than coming into the state with the fanfare like from our announcement tour, we were on the defensive . . . it took the wind out of our sails. But another reason was someone told Thomson we were ten points ahead the Sunday before the primary . . . I think it was a leak of a
Time
magazine poll . . . and pulling away from Ford. Thomson went out and told the New Hampshire media . . . it energized the Ford people in the state and unnecessarily relaxed our people.”
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When Lyn Nofziger was asked, he said, “We never should have pulled Reagan out the weekend before the primary.” Reagan’s pollster Dick Wirthlin concurred with this opinion.
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Ford had campaigned in the state four days and Reagan campaigned all or part of nineteen days, but the margin was so narrow that just one or two more days may have made the difference. Spencer would concur years later with Nofziger and Wirthlin.
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When Marty Anderson was asked, he said, “It was those three extra Reagan electors, who siphoned off, by many estimates, as many as two thousand votes from Reagan if not even more.”
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Anderson had a critical point. Three people decided, under the antiquated election laws of New Hampshire, to run as Reagan electors, even when they were told the votes they received would not be counted in Reagan’s vote total.
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Thomson estimated that as many as five thousand votes for Reagan were discounted, though the New Hampshire Secretary of State disputed this claim.
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Confusing things even more, on the New Hampshire ballot, twenty-one delegates were listed on paper and in machines as “pledged” to Reagan. These were the twenty-one official Reagan delegates selected by the team of Lake, Sears, Gregg, and Thomson. Confusingly, also listed on the ballot as “favorable” but not “pledged” were these three additional delegates. Reagan’s campaign told New Hampshire primary voters to only vote for twenty-one, but as many as two thousand New Hampshire voters did not heed the rules and instead voted for all twenty-four, effectively disenfranchising themselves as their votes were ruled invalid.
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No amount of cajoling could convince those three unauthorized Reagan delegates to get off the ballot. All of those votes would have presumably gone to Reagan since each elector was clearly identified in the polling booth and on the voting cards as a Reagan elector. Adding those spoiled ballots to Reagan’s total would have meant a narrow win instead of a narrow loss for the conservative, and it would probably have spelled doom for Gerald Ford. Also, over one thousand Democrats had written in Reagan’s name, but since the primary was “closed” those votes were not counted in the Reagan total.
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When asked why Reagan lost New Hampshire, David Keene said, “The turnout model was all f—ed up. Something over 60 percent of Republican primary voters turned out. In most state Presidential primaries, somewhere between 20 to 40 percent turn out.”
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Actually, 65.5 percent of New Hampshire’s registered Republicans came out to vote, illustrating Keene’s point.
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All these opinions came from key Reagan staffers who all had differing opinions and they all were right. It was also one of the few times the Gipper had ever lost at anything, going back to his high school days. He didn’t like the feeling one bit.

The morning’s newspapers, having gone to bed before the counting was over in New Hampshire, all reported that the race was too close to call. But every radio station and every television station in America started the next morning carrying the news of Ford’s “upset” win over Reagan. Ford could not help but tweak Reagan the next day, telling a group of small town newspaper editors, “Some of those who didn’t do so well yesterday seemed to be satisfied with second. I never knew of any political campaign where running second was very beneficial.”
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Gerald Ford won the Republican nomination in Kansas City in August 1976 in large part because he won the New Hampshire primary the February before by a scant 1,317 votes out of 108,328 votes cast for the two contenders.
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Ford had come to the Presidency by way of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, the first President to arrive at this high office without once asking for or receiving the votes of the American people, as a Presidential or Vice Presidential candidate.

Ford said when he became President in August of 1974 that he was beholden to no man and indebted to only one woman. It was a nice line at a terrible time in our nation’s history, but it also meant no one, outside of one congressional district in Michigan, had anything invested in Gerald Ford.

But by winning New Hampshire, Ford began the process of forcing Republican voters to make an investment in him and view him through a more legitimate prism than before February 24, 1976. Ford had not simply won, and he had not just beaten anyone; he had beaten one of the most popular Republicans and certainly the most popular conservative in America—no small feat. It was the first time the old football lineman from the University of Michigan had driven back the old football lineman from Eureka College. It would not be the last.

7
AGAINST THE WALL

“Politics is motion.”

R
onald Reagan’s loss in New Hampshire was devastating. The race was tight, but Washington’s political community and those across the country were buzzing with the news of Reagan’s unexpected loss. Few thought he would fail to pull it out in the end. “It was probably the first time Reagan had lost anything,” said Martin Anderson.
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The post-mortems and Wednesday morning quarterbacking started in earnest. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak cited a last-minute campaign poll showing Reagan ahead by 8 percent that was leaked to the media via Governor Mel Thomson and others on the campaign. This information led to the final, unrealistic, and sky-high expectations for Reagan to win big in New Hampshire. “More important,” they wrote, “that seemingly comfortable cushion persuaded the Reagan high command not to retaliate in kind against the President’s surprisingly cutting anti-Reagan remarks.”
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More knowledgeable “pols” knew of the power of incumbency and that the race in New Hampshire had tightened considerably, but for those who were not following it so closely, having only seen network footage of Reagan’s big crowds while campaigning there or hearing that Reagan had opened with a big lead, Ford’s win was shocking, especially to the Gipper himself.

Even
Human Events
, after taking a turn at putting some “editorial English” on the New Hampshire results, said,

Reagan did not win in a state in which the political environment was favorable toward his candidacy and the polls showed that the people favored his stands on the various issues. . . . There is no question but that this has been a setback to the ex-California Governor’s political strategists who were hoping to blow Ford out of the water with two quick, convincing knock-out blows in both New Hampshire and Florida.
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The weekly conservative publication, often described as Reagan’s favorite, concluded that Florida was now crucial for Reagan and that he needed to take the fight far more aggressively to Ford. Circumstances in 1976 were entirely different from 1958 and 1968, the other elections in which challengers chased incumbents from the political scene by just coming close in New Hampshire.

The narrow loss ate at the former California Governor. Reagan was a man who had made winning a habit. He had already had three successful careers—four if you count his turn as a political commentator. He had been the captain of his swim team in high school, class president at Eureka College, a successful radio broadcaster, five-time elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, a successful movie star, a successful Governor, a multi-millionaire, a loving father, a devoted husband who was deeply religious, and a man with millions of conservative fans. New Hampshire was the first time he had really lost anything since Jane Wyman had filed for divorce from him twenty-eight years earlier.

Worse, a kind of paralysis set in. This was serious trouble, because as John Sears was noted for saying, “Politics is motion.”
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For once, Ford was in motion and Reagan was not.

Reagan was forced to put the best face on the New Hampshire loss, telling reporters that he “couldn’t be more pleased” while in Concord, but no one believed him. On the other hand, no one in national politics, save possibly Hubert Humphrey, had as much bounce and resilience as Ronald Reagan. He told a reporter, “One primary doesn’t a summer make. It remains to be seen.”
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At an impromptu press conference before he left New Hampshire, Reagan tried to suggest that it was a virtual tie if the discounted Democratic write-in votes were added to the mix. Frank Reynolds of ABC said to Governor Reagan, “Bo Callaway says they whipped you in one of your best states.” Reagan replied by shaking his head and saying, “Oh, Bo Callaway. Sometimes I think I’m running against Bo Callaway.”
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It fell to Robert Healy of the
Boston Globe
to accurately summarize the results of the New Hampshire primary: “[I]t looks like a long season for the Republicans. No matter who ultimately wins in New Hampshire, the winner can only claim an escape from defeat and the loser can claim he wasn’t stomped.”
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Ron Nessen and Dick Cheney slept on couches in their White House offices waiting for the final returns to report from New Hampshire. President Ford went to bed without knowing the results and learned of the news from a 5:30 A.M. radio broadcast. Later that morning, Ford walked into a staff meeting unannounced, where he was treated to a standing ovation.

At that morning’s White House briefing, Nessen was a little worse for wear having been awake nearly all night. He crowed about the Ford victory as he pre- dicted more wins to come, ultimately ending in a first ballot victory for Ford at the convention. Nessen specifically cited the blunder of Governor Mel Thomson, who had predicted a 5 percent win for Reagan, as a key element in the Ford triumph.
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Even better for the Ford campaign, Bob Teeter’s exit polling in New Hampshire showed the Nixon trip to China had no effect on people’s decision to vote for Reagan or against Ford, as Stu Spencer had feared.

The morning after the primary on February 25, all of America’s newspapers, having gone to bed hours before, proclaimed the race was “too close to call.” But both camps had known hours earlier about the outcome and were doing their best to exploit or explain it. Peter Kaye, the principal spokesman for the Ford campaign, told reporters that Reagan was “now viewed as something of a political opportunist, a vacillator,” and that Reagan’s downward spiral was a result of the “essentially negative campaign we’ve been running. We’ve cast considerable doubt on his competence to campaign and by implication on his ability to govern.”
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The Ford campaign, looking down the road at the next crucial bout in Florida, did not let up on Reagan. Ford continued his assault on his opponent by implying that he might destroy the “integrity” of the Social Security system. He said, “[Reagan] suggested from time to time” that the system would work better if it were made “voluntary, not mandatory.” Ford told reporters, “I believe in the firm integrity of the Social Security program.”
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