Reagan's Revolution (63 page)

Sears was greeted with less fanfare than the candidates, as the Platform Committee shot down his proposed 16-C amendment, fifty-nine to forty-four. The Ford forces, for a moment, thought they were out of the woods. Said Presidential confidant Dean Burch to the
Washington Post
, “We’re out of the procedural minefield now.” Another Ford supporter mocked Sears: “It’s not a right to know amendment. It’s a right to save a campaign manager amendment.”
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Sears had known all along that the Ford supporters had enough votes to defeat 16-C. But unlike Burch, he also knew he had more than the 25 percent necessary to bring his proposal before the full convention the following Tuesday.

Several more uncommitted delegates from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Illinois had announced for Ford. Reagan similarly had also picked up a couple more from Pennsylvania over the weekend. For the first time since 1952, Republicans would gather at a national convention not knowing who their nominee would be.

And while some merely smiled when Schweiker asserted on the ABC Sunday news show
Issues and Answers
that he and Reagan had hidden delegate strength and might pull in as many as fifty from Pennsylvania, no one could be sure.
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Of those states whose delegates were now frozen, Reagan actually had more delegates than Ford.

The contentious Mississippians caucused Sunday evening and came away without a decision on whether to support 16-C when it came to the floor Tuesday evening. The only thing they agreed upon was to support the eventual nominee, whoever that might be. They would also caucus again on Tuesday afternoon to decide whether or not to dissolve the unit rule. Also, Dent passed along a rumor to Reed that Sears was considering pulling a fast one by introducing 16-C first thing Monday morning, while there would be few delegates in the hall and while the convention was still being governed by temporary rules.
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Reed naturally overreacted, which was Dent’s intention in the first place. Sears was considering nothing of the sort, but Dent was playing Reed like a Stradivarius. Keeping Reed agitated against Sears meant keeping him on Ford’s side.

Although the rules and platform initiatives of both Sears and Helms lost in committee, they received sufficient support for 16-C and the nearly two-dozen separate ideological planks would be brought before the convention on Tuesday evening, but not sooner. Temporary rules would govern the convention on Monday, and the permanent rules and the platform would be adopted Tuesday evening.

Helms despised the proposed 16-C rule and thought it was ridiculous. Ellis told the
Washington Post
, “There’s not a whole lot of enthusiasm for it . . . it’s not such a great deal.”
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But Sears feared that the Helms-inspired ideological planks, while partially useful, could only lead to a Reagan nomination in a “runaway” convention scenario, which he believed would lead to a divided party and a disaster in November.

Years later, Baker would agree with Ellis and Helms that the tougher ideological planks might have been more effective. The more Ford was humiliated, the more likely it would have been that he would have had to fight the platform proposals, maybe lose those fights, and with them lose the nomination. When the argument of Sears’s strategy of winning without bloodletting was pointed out to Baker, he replied, “But to win in the fall, you have to win the nomination first.”
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Still, Sears brought most of the conservative grassroots supporters in line to support 16-C. “However gimmicky John Sears’s politics may be, it at least is giving a case of convention jitters to the President’s managers,” wrote Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.
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The Reagan campaign had put the finishing touches on its version of the “Morality in Foreign Policy” plank that was also to be offered Tuesday evening. Although it was tougher than the one adopted by the Platform Committee, it was not as tough as the one Ellis was holding in the wings, just in case.

Sears won a tactical victory when, sensing the problems 16-C posed for Ford, the President’s supporters attempted to amend the procedural rules to only allow such amendments if they had the support of two-thirds of the rules committee, instead of the previously agreed 25 percent. Having failed at this attempt, the Ford campaign reverted to the argument that 16-C, if passed, would prevent Ford from choosing Reagan. Still, Sears could safely proceed with his plan.

Reagan’s Campaign Manager was operating as he had for the last year. He hated meetings, hated writing memos, and kept information to himself. He would plot the strategy without input from the rest of the staff and then meet with them to persuade them of the merits of his newest initiative. No one besides Sears knew what the next steps would be after introducing 16-C and the foreign policy plank. It was sometimes maddening to the rest of the campaign, even to those who defended his decisions. Dick Wirthlin later wrote, “Sears is one of the most complex persons I’ve ever met. He is at once one of the most talented, undisciplined, manipulative, creative and insecure people I’ve ever met.”
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Monday, August 16 dawned early for the warring camps. Outside the Kemper Arena, two trailers had been set up as the command posts for Citizens for Reagan and the President Ford Committee. Each was similar in having televisions to monitor local and network coverage and telephones connected to each of the delegations on the floor of the convention. From here, Sears and Nofziger would direct their floor lieutenants, as would Timmons and Baker. Ford’s floor team was better organized and wore yellow or red baseball caps so they could be easily spotted. They also had walkie-talkies, runners, and assorted other accoutrements. The Reagan people gloated that while the Ford trailer only had one air conditioner, they had two. By week’s end, the trailers were littered with overflowing ashtrays, food wrapping, and other assorted trash.

After their inconclusive meeting over the weekend, Dent had suggested a compromise to the Mississippi delegation: to dissolve the unit rule and split the delegation down the middle, with each side getting fifteen votes, thus changing their vow to stick to the previous agreement.
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Some of the delegates, weary of the protracted and unresolved fight, were listening to Dent. Others were not. Meeting under the Mississippi placard, Mounger and Dent got into a heated discussion, and reporters started squeezing in trying to catch a few choice words for a story.
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Humorously, the Executive Director of the party, Haley Barbour, began to loudly recite the Mississippi counties backwards to interfere with reporters’ ability to record the brouhaha.
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As the convention opened, Buckley withdrew his nascent campaign. It had become clear that no delegates had expressed any interest in supporting him over Ford. He had also been subjected to a flood of phone calls and enormous pressure to end speculation about running for President before he hurt his own re-election chances in New York.

A nasty situation developed when Ford’s Chairman in Illinois, former Governor Dick Ogilvie, charged that the Reagan campaign had attempted to bribe two of his delegates. He offered no evidence, and Reagan promptly denounced the charge. Reagan accused the Ford campaign of dirty tricks and was personally insulted, especially since he and Ogilvie had become friends while serving as the Governors of their respective states. Reagan’s Illinois point man, Don Totten, was forced after the convention by local law enforcement officials to take a lie detector test over the altercation. The officer who administered the test told Totten he was the only politician he had ever tested who passed.
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Reagan and Ford both spent Monday meeting with delegates and groups of delegates, cajoling them to either support or oppose 16-C the next night. Meanwhile, delegates, in minute spurts, were declaring and undeclaring their preferences. Only the Ford campaign claimed the President had enough votes for a win Wednesday evening. In addition to the delegates, Ford also spoke to a group of boisterous young supporters, including a pretty brunette from Arizona named Zorine Bhappu, called “The Presidentials.” They were the Ford campaign’s answer to “Youth for Reagan,” and they would “spontaneously” appear at every Ford public appearance to cheer the President. Still, when Reagan encountered the group on several occasions, they were respectful.
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Reagan had lunch at the Alameda Plaza Hotel, the headquarters for his campaign, with a dozen conservative leaders, including Helms and beer magnate Joe Coors. The group was cautiously optimistic about Reagan’s chances for the nomination. Hollywood celebrities showed up for the convention, as Pat Boone, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., and others stumped for Reagan. Cary Grant also showed and spoke out for Ford.

The high point of the first evening, before the proceedings got down to business, were the competing welcome demonstrations for Nancy Reagan and Betty Ford. An agreement between the two camps to minimize any embarrassing competition had melted under the television networks’ watchful eyes, and long, prolonged cheers greeted Mrs. Reagan, whose welcome topped Mrs. Ford’s.

Mrs. Reagan arrived first, and the band struck up “California Here I Come.” The noisy demonstration lasted well into the time of Mrs. Ford’s scheduled arrival. When she did arrive, there was no song to greet her for several minutes, and the Ford campaign was furious with the band director, Manny Harmon. They took steps to ensure this embarrassment would not be repeated Tuesday evening. “The Ford people were extremely upset,” according to Brad Minnick, who was an aide to Senator Griffin, Ford’s Floor Manager.
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The temporary Chairman of the convention, Senator Robert Dole of nearby Kansas, opened the proceedings, and two old antagonists spoke that evening: Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater. Both were greeted warmly by the crowd. All three excoriated the Democratic nominee, but Dole had the best line, citing Jimmy Carter’s flip flop on an important part of the Taft-Hartley bill that permitted states to have right to work laws, known as 14-b. Dole said that first Carter supported 14-b, then he opposed it, and “now Carter thinks 14-b is his shoe size.” Also speaking that night was Senator Baker, who had been introduced by Senator Buckley who had been reinstated as a speaker after dropping his threatened candidacy. He got his own zinger in when he parodied the Democratic nominee by telling the delegates, “My name is Jimmy Buckley, I’m running for Senator.”
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Unmentioned and unnoted in Kansas City was former President Nixon. His name had been completely deleted from the platform, and his photos appeared nowhere. It was as if he had been a Soviet official who had fallen out of favor and was then erased from a photograph atop Lenin’s Tomb. However, present at the convention but also unnoticed by a party that had left him behind years before was another once “boy wonder” of the GOP, former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen. At one time Stassen had been a real hope of the party.

Some GOP leaders tried to gloss over the differences between the Ford delegates and the Reagan delegates. In many respects, they were right. But unlike the Ford supporters, the Reagan delegates were more ideological and more optimistic about their candidate. The
Washington Post
measured this interesting phenomenon, showing that of Reagan’s supporters, 86 percent thought he had a good chance of beating Carter. Only 67 percent of Ford’s followers thought the same of their man.
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“It was a day of madness in the news media, as the thousands of reporters in Kansas City scrambled to record the erosion of the uncommitted delegates. For the first time in the memory of long-time convention-goers, obscure individual delegates held news conferences for national reporters to disclose their first ballot votes,” wrote the
New York Times
.
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If there was any doubt as to the competing makeup of the Ford and Reagan delegates, it was confirmed Tuesday afternoon in the showdown over Mississippi. Once again, Clarke Reed would be at the center of a controversy that was entirely of his own making. The Reagan forces needed the Mississippi delegation to keep its unit rule intact, if they were to have any hope of winning that night on 16-C. But several days before, Baker had become more confident of Ford’s delegate strength. At this point, he was content to add to his counts going into Wednesday night’s nomination balloting with several of the Mississippi delegates, providing the unit rule was dissolved, rather than none of them. That day, the
New York
Times
finally projected Ford as having barely enough delegates for the nomination, but the
Washington Post
still had him short by four votes. And Ford still had to negotiate the thicket of 16-C and what would follow if the amendment were to pass.
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Reed was being pulled in every direction—by David Keene, Billy Mounger, and Charles Pickering for Reagan and by Harry Dent, Doug Shanks, and Dick Cheney for Ford. He kept telling both sides what they wanted to hear on 16-C and the unit rule, and neither side trusted him.

The Mississippians finally got together in a room at the Ramada East Hotel to decide once and for all whether or not to support the unit rule and 16-C. Dent had previously arranged for some of the uncommitted delegates, including Reed, to meet privately with Ford. But Dent clearly remained worried about his flip-flopping friend, who had gone on national television earlier to say he would support 16-C only shortly after assuring Dent he would oppose it. After meeting with Ford, John Hart of
NBC News
reported that Reed would now oppose 16-C. Reed called Cheney to upbraid him for the audacity of trying to keep him to his word, but Cheney did not back down, telling Reed, “Look, Clarke, we expect you to do what you told us.”
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