Reagan's Revolution (51 page)

Minnesota’s GOP had changed its name the previous fall to the Independent-Republican Party in an attempt to burnish its image after the battering Republicans had taken throughout the previous several years.
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Sears and David Keene had negotiated an agreement with the local GOP forces that would not give Reagan a proportional number of delegates, but more than what they had expected until the national Ford staff moved in and terminated the entire agreement.
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Reagan’s forces threatened a “rump” convention, and Keene staged a frenzied scene in front of Rudy Boschwitz, an excitable Ford supporter, knowing he would fall for the ruse. Nancy Reagan walked in and, not realizing what was happening, thought Keene and his people were “crazy.” The fight finally came down to one delegate, which Reagan’s forces won by choosing a nineteen-year-old activist, sensing the convention would view this as sending a good message to young voters across Minnesota. As Keene said, “They thought it would be ‘cute’ to send this kid to Kansas City.”
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One dark cloud occurred for Ford when the 1,985 state delegates voted to formally endorse Ford, but fell short of the required 60 percent.
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Good news for Reagan came from New Mexico, Idaho, and Montana where he completed a near sweep of the delegates available at the three state GOP conventions that same weekend. In New Mexico, Ford’s forces had proposed the very same proportional proposal they had shot down in Minnesota. But it didn’t work. Reagan was awarded all twenty-one delegates available. “They didn’t give us anything in Minnesota,” Sears told the
Washington Post
as justification for killing the Ford proposal.
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Andy Carter had dispatched Kenny Klinge to New Mexico, Carter’s home state, with a blunt message for the conservatives there: “Get off your asses or I’m coming back.” They did.
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And in a surprise to absolutely nobody, Reagan took all twenty delegates in Montana.
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He had already won the state primary on June 1 over Ford, 65 percent to 35 percent, so the convention was a pro forma affair. Still, Reagan paid a quick visit to the state to speak to the convention and meet with delegates. Once again, the “fairness” issue came up, but Reagan told the assembled Big Sky Republicans, “Every vote counts. Now if we’re going to suddenly be told at this late day in the game we should in the sprit of fairness start dividing up delegates, I will agree to that if we go all the way back to New Hampshire. . . . Because if the delegates had been distributed proportionally to vote in every contest so far, I’m the winner.”
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A Ford supporter who was also a notorious Reagan-basher, Skip Watts, told the
Post
his take on the fight in Montana: “The Reagan people in the state were willing to compromise but Sears and [Frank] Whetstone have insisted on a political bloodbath.” Whetstone was a tough conservative operative from Montana, where he published a newspaper in the town of Cut Bank.
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He had opposed all “fairness” initiatives and would not allow even one uncommitted individual in the delegation.

The
Post
forecasted yet another dramatic reduction in Ford’s delegate lead over Reagan after the weekend. Its tabulations showed Ford with a razor thin lead of only 49 delegates, 1,037 to 988.
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But the
New York Times
had the race even closer, with Ford at 1,052 and Reagan at 1,018, a margin of only 34 delegates.
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Following the weekend’s conventions, at a Republican National Committee meeting in Washington (in the name of “reform”), a proposal was put forward and approved that would require delegates in Kansas City to vote according to the will of the primary voters in their state and prevent “Trojan horse” delegates.
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The move was a clear attempt by the pro-Ford Republican National Committee to keep conservative delegates who were pledged to Ford from breaking with the President to vote for Reagan in Kansas City. Republicans traditionally eschewed mandates to the states, unless they served their own purposes.

The gathering of the national committee also selected Senators Bob Dole and Howard Baker as the Chairman and keynoter of the Kansas City convention. Only Texas GOP Chairman Ray Hutchinson objected, noting they were both Ford supporters. Given the closeness of the race, Hutchinson argued the party should have picked two uncommitted individuals.
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Dole and Baker, along with Senators Bob Griffin and John Tower, had been involved in lengthy secret meetings with Gerald Ford to try to find a way to revive his flagging campaign, as reported by Evans and Novak. They told the President that his campaign was “dangerously outclassed by Ronald Reagan’s superior organization at the delegate-selecting state conventions.”

Some of the blame centered on Donald Rumsfeld, for not taking Reagan’s challenge to Ford more seriously beginning in the summer of 1975. A proposed solution to Ford’s problem-plagued campaign was to replace Morton with Republican Congressman John Anderson, according to the two columnists. But Anderson had no national political experience and his outspoken liberal attitudes offended many conservatives in the party. The columnists also took a shot at Dick Cheney, calling him a “neophyte.”
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Then there was the basic question of whose machine worked better. One Ford insider wryly told the
New York Times
, “politically, we’re not very ept.”
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The Reagan campaign leaked less often, possibly due to the fact that most in the media got along well with the Reagan campaign’s leadership. Nor did the campaign view the media as adversaries. Morale, too, was almost always higher in the Reagan office, than at the President Ford Committee.

These underpaid and overworked conservatives arrived early, worked late, and socialized after hours with each other. They were an ideological band of brothers and sisters engaged in a cause they believed in and working for a man they adored. To a person, they all would have walked through fire for Ronald Reagan.

However, the camp was not without its moments. One example was when Sears brought in a new Comptroller, Darrell Trent, to get a handle on the money management at Citizens for Reagan.
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Trent often offended the hardworking staff, sometimes suggesting that workers and vendors were not being truthful in their expense vouchers and billings. He gained an unpopular reputation as a result. In one legendary confrontation, Trent questioned the expenses of a full time volunteer, Peter Monk, whom Dave Keene had recruited to the campaign to help with advance work in the South.

Monk wanted his money. Trent wouldn’t give it to him. Monk told Trent that if he didn’t get his money by the same time tomorrow, he would punch Trent out. The next day, Monk walked into Trent’s office and demanded payment, but Trent still said no. Monk calmly took off his watch, reached over the desk, and punched Trent right in the nose, sending him sprawling. “I didn’t mean to hit him as hard as I did. I busted his nose open and he fell to the ground. The whole time, Keene was standing there, packing his pipe.” Monk received a standing ovation from the staff when he walked out of Trent’s office. He was paid the next day, and despite the rocky start, the two men became close friends years later.
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Monk was “Indiana Jones” before the movie. He worked in Africa, South America, and other far-flung regions. It was not unusual for Monk to disappear for months or even years, traversing the world in search of adventure and fortune. He was also handed the unenviable task of producing a radio commercial with John Wayne, at Wayne’s insistence. Wayne was out on his yacht, which was a converted PT boat. Monk waited two days for Wayne to return. When he did, Wayne spent another considerable length of time, “drinking and bashing Bill Roberts and Stu Spencer. ‘That son of a b— betrayed my friend Ronnie Reagan. I’ll get him some day,’” Monk recalled The Duke saying. “The radio commercials were worthless.”
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The final round of state conventions would be held in Utah, Connecticut, North Dakota, and Colorado. On paper, Reagan was assumed to be strong in three of the four, with only Connecticut seen as a sure bet for Ford.

One bit of bad news that would eventually bode ill for Ronald Reagan was a rumor coming out of Mississippi that its delegation was not as solidly in support of him as everybody had assumed. Ford campaign officials at first dismissed the gossip. After all, Mississippi had long been known to be a hothouse of conservative sentiment. Reagan had visited the state many times for the Republican Party, and had campaigned there just the year before for “Gil” Carmichael, who had run for Governor and lost, albeit narrowly.

At the center of the brewing controversy was Clarke Reed, the GOP’s National Committeeman and State Chairman. Reed was a through and through conservative, but as Keene said, “He was weak and he was sloppy.”
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In fact, Reed was never the head of the Reagan operation in Mississippi; Billy Mounger, a successful banker from Jackson was. But the Reagan operatives often deferred to Reed rather than Mounger when it came to in-state politics. Mounger sometimes bristled at being bypassed. The incoming State Chairman, Charles Pickering, a dedicated Reaganite, shared Mounger’s sentiments.
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In an attempt to mollify the moderates in the Mississippi GOP, Reed had put many of them in the delegation as delegates or alternates at the state convention in April. Mississippi had a “unit rule” (which ironically was prohibited by the rule of the national party at the time) that called for the delegation to vote as a bloc.

There were thirty delegates and thirty alternates, and each had one-half of a vote. The rumors from the state centered on some Ford supporters who were intent on breaking the unit rule and casting their votes for the President. The idea behind the unit rule was the notion that it gave the Mississippi delegation more leveraging power. In 1976, this is precisely what happened. Reagan had recently paid a visit to the state to meet with the delegation, but this was widely interpreted as a “watering the garden” visit, and not some sort of salvage operation.
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As yet another example of the image problems of the Republican Party, Senator Henry Bellmon of Oklahoma, a nice man of indistinct ideology, proposed that the federal government begin to collect a 15 percent withholding tax monthly, as it already did with paychecks, from dividend checks, stock bonuses, interest on saving accounts, and the like.

No wonder only 20 percent of Americans thought Republicans were worth a damn in 1976.

As plans for the convention in Kansas City were proceeding, a new controversy emerged when it was learned that the Republican National Committee planned to allocate 388 rooms in the city to the Ford campaign, but only 100 for Reagan. The convention was also planned to give Ford 650 gallery passes, and only 300 to Reagan.
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Similar actions over the course of the previous year by the national committee had been a source of consternation to Citizens for Reagan, especially their hard-charging General Counsel, Loren Smith, and Senior Aide Lyn Nofziger.

Smith fired off a letter to the party’s Chairman, Mary Louise Smith, charging the committee with violating the Federal Election Committee laws in treating the two candidates differently and, in the opinion of Smith, unfairly.
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The actions by the RNC and Smith’s swift response only served to underscore the animosity between the warring camps.

Ford’s problems in the state conventions were beginning to spill into New York and Pennsylvania. The Associated Press had previously reported that 119 delegates from the Empire State were supporting Ford. But a later count had eight delegates moving back to an uncommitted status. And in Pennsylvania, AP had reported that eighty-eight delegates had gone from uncommitted to supporting Ford. But the later AP assessment had eighteen now moving back to uncommitted.
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Ford’s frontrunner position was becoming increasingly tenuous.

Baker, Ford’s delegate headhunter, had his hands full with the possibility of Ford delegates slipping away due to Sears’s “raiding parties.” And he still had to contend with wooing 159 uncommitted delegates in the meantime.
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But he was prepared. Baker had a large staff of fulltime workers and volunteers. Each was assigned a state and the delegates from that state.
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According to one Baker aide, Peter McPherson, detailed profiles of each delegate were developed. These profiles included ideologies, jobs, spouse’s names, ages, hobbies, religions, and people who influenced the delegate. Baker then assigned a priority to each, as solidly Reagan, soft Reagan, uncommitted, soft Ford, or solidly Ford.

All files were updated almost daily, and Baker sent phone logs daily to the White House for Ford to personally make calls.
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Also, some delegates were supporters of Ford but were bound under their state party rules (if they had been elected as Reagan delegates) to vote for Reagan on the first ballot. Nonetheless, these delegates would be free to vote their personal preference after that.
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Baker needed to track these delegates as well. All parties were rapidly concluding that, in all probability, neither contestant would have enough delegates in August for a first ballot nomination.

Baker and his staff, including one young volunteer, Brad Minnick, spent countless hours on the phone staying in touch with delegates, listening to their gripes, doing favors for them, and on and on. Minnick said years later, “We were, in effect, political babysitters.”
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Even the shift of one delegate, as in the case of Salvatore Tortorici of Brooklyn, from Reagan to Ford, earned national news coverage.
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