Reagan's Revolution (33 page)

On March 16, 11,321 voting machines opened at 6 A.M. to allow the 5.8 million voters of Illinois the opportunity to vote for their choice for President from a narrowing field of Democrats and an already narrow field of Republicans. Crossover voting was allowed in both primaries. Reagan actually did slightly better than the 40 percent he had predicted—he gained 40.9 percent of the vote. However, Reagan’s low-balling of his chances in Illinois afforded him no bounce with the media or political prognosticators. It was a smashing win for Ford, his biggest yet.

Ford clobbered Reagan 450,812 to 307,305. Reagan eventually came away with only fourteen delegates, fewer than the modest twenty his campaign had publicly said they hoped he would win. Ford took eighty-six delegates from Illinois.
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Ford won across the board among GOP primary voters, regardless of income, ideology, or region. He also benefited from the belief that the economy was improving.

Another of Reagan’s supporters in the state, Phil Crane, had not helped things when he had told the
Washington Post
back in January that Illinois would be “pivotal” for Reagan.
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Crane inadvertently made sure that Reagan would lose the expectations game. The
New York Times
wrote, “[T]he former California Governor has actually made an impressive showing in the two primaries in which he has actively campaigned. Running against a President who is personally well-liked and at a time when the economy is improving and the country is at peace, Mr. Reagan polled 49 percent in New Hampshire and 47 percent in Florida.”
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Almost immediately, the White House increased the drumbeat for Reagan to leave the race for the good of the party. Ford, Rockefeller, Morton, Callaway, and others issued statements or spoke to reporters. They also began backdoor communication to the Reagan camp, suggesting help with Reagan’s debt if he got out soon. A more heavy-handed effort was also initiated, involving elected Republican Party officials including the National Conference of Republican Mayors, to publicly call on Reagan to get out of the race. Others in the GOP would join in to pressure Reagan, but to no avail. Reagan issued a statement from California, saying,

We appear to have met our goal with something over 40 percent of the vote. I have never been under any illusion that our grassroots campaign could successfully buck both the Illinois Republican organization and the promises being issued so bountifully by the White House.

However, the fact that I have won something over 40 percent of the vote in this organization-dominated state once again indicates there is major dissatisfaction in our party with the kind of leadership it has been receiving.

I look forward to the North Carolina primary next week.
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So did Gerald Ford.

As a small consolation, Reagan would have expectations working to his benefit because he could not do any worse in North Carolina than he had in Illinois. It was the only silver lining he could take comfort from as he left behind the state of his birth. As Sears was fond of saying, “The times you get in trouble are when you’re not moving. Motion is what you need in politics and when you don’t have it, you have a problem.”
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And Reagan had a problem.

8
NORTH CAROLINA

“I’m not going to quit!
I’m going to stay in this until the end!”

R
onald Reagan had been beaten in five successive primaries. Morale in the conservative challenger’s camp could not have been lower. The losses in Massachusetts and Vermont were expected since Reagan had not campaigned there, but John Sears’s front-loaded strategy was being heavily second-guessed in the media and conservative circles—and by Reagan.

Sears’s plan had always been to “upset” Gerald Ford in New Hampshire and then finish strong in Florida. Sears believed that Reagan’s conservative appeal would work well in these early states. If Reagan won these states, Ford would withdraw from the race. Unfortunately for Reagan, his campaign was not unfolding as Sears planned.

Reporting for
ABC News
while traveling with Reagan in North Carolina, Frank Reynolds said, “The odds against him are very long now and because he is not a dreamer, Ronald Reagan must know he is on the edge of defeat. . . .”
¹

In his landmark book,
The Conservative Revolution
, Lee Edwards wrote, “Reagan’s showing [in New Hampshire] against a sitting President was undoubtedly impressive but it could not erase the fact that he had been expected to win.”
²
Even Stuart Spencer later confided to James M. Naughton of the
New
York Times
, “If we didn’t win those two, we were going to be out of the ball-game.”
³
But now it was Reagan who appeared to be headed for the showers, not Ford.

William Safire, Nixon’s old speechwriter and by 1976 a columnist for the
New York Times
, penned, “Most Democratic strategists and most political analysts wish Ronald Reagan would pull out of the race for the Republican nomination. They attribute this wish to ‘most Republicans’ who are supposed to see the Reagan campaign—after five defeats—as ‘pointless.’” Safire’s column was somewhat of a backhanded compliment to Reagan, making the point that the Reagan challenge had shaped a flaccid Ford campaign and transformed Ford from a loser into a winner. However, Safire also correctly illustrated that it was Reagan who forced the Administration into a tougher stance against the Soviets. He forced Ford to stop using the phrase “détente” during the Florida primary, and he forced the Ford Administration to cancel the planned normalization of relations with Fidel Castro and Communist Cuba.
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Meanwhile, media reports from the Federal Election Commission showed that one week before the North Carolina primary, Ford had raised over two and one half times more money than Reagan for the month of February. Ford began March with nearly one million dollars cash on hand while Reagan had an overall debt of $250,000. Complicating Reagan’s financial woes was a recent one million dollar loan his campaign had taken from the National Bank of Washington. Reagan’s matching funds operation—mistakenly internalized—was not processing the incoming contributions fast enough to keep up with the campaign’s demands.

Reagan had the worst of both political worlds. He was seen, on the one hand, as Ford’s credible challenger. On the other hand, he was getting no credit for near wins in New Hampshire and Florida against the incumbent. He was an underdog who was not perceived as an underdog. The campaign had allowed expectations to get out of control and was now paying a heavy price.

By March of 1976, staffers were either laid off or working for no pay. Reagan would eventually lose his charter plane and was forced to fly commercial and the Reagan campaign offices in North Carolina had been closed to save funds. Prior to losing the plane, Peter Hannaford remembered waiting with Reagan on a chartered flight in Los Angeles that was headed for Salisbury, North Carolina. Hours passed and Hannaford asked what was the holdup. The reply was that the direct mail checks were being counted at the campaign headquarters to see if there was enough funds to pay for the plane.
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Laxalt later wrote in his memoirs:

Very early in the morning the Reagans were to fly to North Carolina for their final campaign swing in the Tar Heel State, their charter plane sat on the tarmac at Los Angeles airport, filled with the campaign team and reporters.

Time dragged on. The delay, it turns out, was necessary for the Reagan campaign staff in Washington to open the mail to see if there would be enough money to pay United Airlines for the flight. There was—barely.
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Nancy Reagan was deeply concerned that her husband would be made to look “foolish” if he did not get out of the campaign, and there were serious discussions in his camp about him quitting before the North Carolina primary. At one such “meeting,” she took Lyn Nofziger aside and pleaded with him to tell the Governor to drop out of the race. Nofziger was of no such mind and told Nancy that there were enough resources to continue through March 23, the day of the North Carolina primary.

Reagan walked into the room, overheard part of the conversation, and assumed that it was Nofziger telling Mrs. Reagan that he should get out instead of the other way around. Reagan yelled, “Lynwood, I’m not going to quit! I’m going to stay in this until the end!” Nofziger recalled, “Reagan was angry, but he could also feel something out there that we couldn’t. Finally, it seemed to him that his message was getting through.”
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Next to Reagan and perhaps Paul Laxalt, the two men who probably deserve the most credit for breathing life into the dying Reagan campaign were Tom Ellis, a controversial, but hugely effective political operative from Raleigh, and Senator Jesse Helms. Ellis was not a native North Carolinian, but you would never know it. He was born in California and attended Dartmouth College, where he played football in 1939. He once watched some classmates make an ice sculpture on the campus and later related to
North Carolina
magazine, “That darn thing was still there the next May, hadn’t melted a bit. I wasn’t really satisfied at Dartmouth anyway, and when I saw that block of ice hanging around for so long I knew it was time for me to get out.”
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By 1940, Ellis had transferred to the University of North Carolina and remained there. He liked the weather, the people and the politics. He became a shrewd trial lawyer, setting up shop in Raleigh and in 1972 had engineered Helms’s surprising victory for the U.S. Senate in a campaign that no one had given the conservative a chance of winning. Ellis knew his adopted state and his adopted people. He was no stranger to the “bourbon and branch water” hardball politics of North Carolina. He knew the voters would be susceptible to Reagan’s “no pale pastels” message.

What Ellis did not know—and what no one in the Reagan camp knew—was that John Sears had been in ongoing discussions with Rogers “Rog” Morton, Ford’s Campaign Manager, about engineering a graceful exit from the race for Reagan. According to some sources, including Ford campaign staffers, Sears initiated the conversations. But Jim Lake and Sears both agreed that it was the Ford camp that was hounding the Californian’s Campaign Manager for Reagan to get out of the race.
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It is unclear who really introduced these discussions, which were ultimately inconclusive. But all agree Reagan would have been furious had he known about them.

Sears said, “Morton was calling me at least once a week. Just before the North Carolina primary, I told him, ‘Look, this public humiliation of Reagan is backfiring. Get off his back and leave us alone until Texas. If we lose Texas, we’ll get out.’” Sears later chuckled that, in fact, the President Ford Committee did indeed call off the dogs where Reagan was concerned, which helped him get off the mat. He also recalled having bluffed Morton, since the Reagan forces did not have the resources then to contest anything as big as Texas.
¹⁰

Initially, the Ford campaign thought it would be a good idea to have surrogates publicly pressure Reagan to get out of the race. At one memorable press conference in North Carolina, reporters badgered Reagan with questions about how much longer he would stay in the race, citing statements and press releases from leading Republicans, including a handful of his fellow Governors.

Reagan was usually slow to anger. In fact, for a national politician, he was unusually cool under pressure. Some might ascribe it to his actor’s polish, but many would say that he just had it. But this time, he barely concealed his temper in front of the assembled media saying, “For heaven’s sake fellas, let’s not be naïve. That pressure to quit the race is being engineered from the same place that engineered pressure for me not to run in the first place—the White House! I’m not getting out! I’m not going to pay any attention to them now when they suggest that I should quit. Why doesn’t he quit?” After yet another question on the same topic, Reagan replied, grimly, “I’m not talking about this subject anymore.”
¹¹
After several uncomfortable seconds passed, Reagan walked away from the microphones.
¹²

Any chance that Reagan would get out of the race before the North Carolina primary— and with it any semblance of the Eleventh Commandment—went out the window because of the heavy-handedness of the Ford campaign. At the end of a hard day on the campaign trail, Reagan and Laxalt were surprised when a messenger delivered a telegram to the motel that was signed by GOP elected officials telling Reagan to get out of the race. Laxalt recalled in his memoirs, “Instead of intimidating him, the message had just the opposite effect. In profane terms, which he rarely used, he told us what the Republican politicians could do to themselves.”
¹³

Once again, the Ford forces had misunderstood and misplayed Reagan. They had insulted him and virtually all political observers agree that had Reagan withdrawn or lost in North Carolina, his political future would have been over. By provoking him again, the Ford forces awoke the more aggressive Reagan, who, up until Florida, had only begun to gain some traction on his message— especially when it came to the Panama Canal, Henry Kissinger, the Soviets, and America’s national defense posture.

“The people in the White House seem to think I should be withdrawing,” Reagan told a crowd of some three to four hundred people gathered at the Raleigh airport. Answered by shouts of “no” and “stay in,” Reagan said, “You took the words right out of my mouth. . . . I’m not walking away from this.”
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“Reagan was never more energized than when confronting opposition,” Dick Wirthlin would later write. “His enthusiasm would soar, his sights would focus and his passion would stir. He was one of the few leaders I’ve ever known who actually derived pleasure from confrontation.”
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