Reagan's Revolution (68 page)

Of course, we will never know. What we do know is that Reagan, in 1976, helped complete a process of redefining the Republican Party by turning it from elitist to populist. Reagan took the GOP from a Tory style conservatism in which power flows downward to an American brand of conservatism, where power flows upwards. “The Reagan campaign has been a struggle against the seedy Republican establishment by spirited outsiders, nourished by belief in their more elevated devotion to principle,” wrote Rowland Evans and Robert Novak in July of 1976.
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The
New York Times
also grasped this phenomenon the day after the Kansas City convention ended, writing, “For the Republican Party, after the catastrophe of Watergate, the candidacy of Ronald Reagan was an understandable response. . . . Governor Reagan responded . . . by mounting a campaign based on the most fundamental interpretations of the party’s creed.”
⁵

A letter to
Time
magazine on August 30, 1976, summed it up: “The Republican Party, from national to county level, supported an unelected President. How on earth Governor Reagan did so well with all the odds against him is a tribute to the man.”
⁶

Through no fault of his own, the GOP was evolving away from Ford and his brand of Republicanism.

Ford was a good man who served his country well in World War II, in the Congress, the Vice Presidency and, finally, the Presidency. In August of 1974, there were thinking people who truly believed that America might not survive the Watergate crisis—that our great experiment in self-rule, wisely created by our founding fathers, was teetering on the brink of oblivion. Ford’s calming presence in the moments after Richard Nixon departed Washington did much to restore Americans’ belief in their system of government. “Mr. Ford is a decent man. His White House aides, whatever their merits, are free of arrogance. His Cabinet includes persons of the highest quality who would clearly resign if asked to undertake anything improper. At best, Jimmy Carter’s jibe at the ‘Nixon-Ford’ Administration is campaign sophistry,” wrote columnist Joe Kraft on the eve of the Republican National Convention.
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Ford served America well in a time of great national crisis. But he was not a visionary, he was not a leader, and he was not Ronald Reagan. Ford was a transitional figure and was a product of the past. Reagan was a transactional figure who was a product of the future.

Ford was made by the times he lived in; Reagan made the times he lived in.

Reagan always saw the best in his fellow Americans. And they, in turn, always saw the best of America in him. Reagan knew what the sophisticates and elites did not—that the American people were thirsting for leadership and to be told that it was okay to cherish their children’s future. Indeed, Reagan knew it was the responsibility of all Americans to believe that the fundamental values he articulated were timeless, and that Americans had an obligation to pass them along to their children and grandchildren. This was America’s—and Reagan’s—“rendezvous with destiny.”

Leadership was no mystery to Reagan. One observer in 1980 said that if you asked Carter what time it was, “He’d tell you how to build a watch.” And if you asked Reagan what time it was, “He’d tell you it’s time to get this country moving again.” Reagan always knew where he was going and where he wanted to lead the American people.

Peter J. Rusthoven, writing for the
The Alternative: An American Spectator
in October of 1976 summed up well what Reagan meant to America, to conservatism, to our collective past and, most importantly, to our collective futures in the 1976 campaign. Rusthoven’s words are nearly prescient and totally eloquent. This author blushes at his prose. He reached into the hearts and minds of conservatives everywhere in his piece.

Purely as a political story, it was a fascinating tale, and the most suspenseful in many years. Not since Robert A. Taft and Dwight D. Eisenhower fought it out over delegate seating credentials in 1952 has a convention begun without one candidate having enough firmly committed delegates to ensure a first ballot nomination. . . . Out of a total of 2,259 delegates, he fell only 60 short of victory. . . .

The closeness of the final outcome led many to speculate that only slightly greater effort in the industrial Northeast might have pushed Reagan over the top. The defeated candidate himself wondered out loud whether a few more days in Ohio—which went 91-6 for Ford at the convention after a primary in which Reagan, with almost no campaigning, polled well over 40% of the vote—might have made the difference. . . .

What impresses me the most in reflecting on his bid for the White House is that he spoke to the American people, with an eloquence and passion unmatched in our generation, about matters which go to the core of our being and our survival as a free Republic. . . . But now that Ronald Reagan has ceased—probably forever—to be a candidate for this nation’s highest office, I hope you will indulge me a few words on what in my view set his candidacy apart. . . .

He alone addressed a set of concerns that involve the fundamental role of this nation as a free Republic and as a constitutional moral order—in a world where Republics are few, freedom is scarce, constitutions are ignored, and morality is rarely seriously considered. Those who cherish the label “intellectual” are wont to dismiss conservatives as simplistic, unsophisticated, and decidedly unintelligent souls; and there can be no doubt that Ronald Reagan has, over the last nine months, borne the full brunt of this subtle and not-so-subtle scorn from most of the media and almost all of academe. . . .

We have witnessed in our lifetimes a steady erosion of those systems of government and philosophy which cherish the ideals of human dignity on which this Republic was founded; and today, governments which have slaughtered more human beings than Adolf Hitler ever dreamed of are thriving over half the globe.

Yet it was only Ronald Reagan—among a chorus of candidates seeking in various ways either to ignore this fact or assure us that it entailed no discomfiting possibilities for our own welfare—only Reagan who echoed the warnings of Solzhenitsyn, only Reagan who made it a point to impress upon his audience that the survival of human freedom involves burdensome global responsibilities for this nation. We have also witnessed in our lifetimes a steady erosion within this country of those institutions such as church and family which form the foundations of our own freedom and prosperity; and today, our perceptions on so basic an issue as the dignity of human life are sufficiently skewed that a hundred thousand unborn babies are tossed into the Hudson each year under the aegis of a newly discovered and supposedly Constitutional “right,” while we debate in language of subtle sophistication whether and to what extent that same Constitution permits the “barbarity” of executing convicted murderers. Yet it was Reagan alone—amid a score of Presidential aspirants who in vague and halting tones spoke at the periphery of such issues—Reagan alone who emphasized that such issues involved the center of our continued existence as a moral people. Reagan alone who made such issues a focal point of his campaign. And finally, though I deplore the present indulgence in apocalyptic rhetoric, I believe it is no exaggeration to state that the next quarter-century may well determine whether this nation in fact survives; yet it was Reagan alone, speaking just a few moments after Gerald Ford had just accepted the Republican nomination, who reminded the nation in the most graceful and elegant language of the campaign that the question of survival is precisely what confronts it. . . .

Richard Schweiker may well have been right in saying on the morning following Gerald Ford’s nomination, that Americans had lost their chance to have the best leader ever presented to this generation; and I confess to a certain wistful regret that Ronald Reagan will not be on the ballot this November. For Ronald Reagan spoke to this nation, with an eloquence that springs only from the deepest and most serious conviction, about those issues which I believe should be the first concern of civilized and responsible men. It is this which I hope to remember of the 1976 campaign; and it is this for which I personally wish to express my gratitude to the man my party chose not to nominate.
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Virtually everybody who left Kansas City was convinced that Reagan’s political future was over—his senior aides, maybe he himself, and certainly the political elites and the national media. The
New York Times
editorialized that “Mr. Reagan presumably grows too old to run again, the battle will have to be carried on with new leadership.”
⁹
Fortunately for all Americans, Rusthoven, Schweiker, and most everybody else was wrong about Reagan’s political future after his 1976 Presidential campaign.

One who did know of Reagan’s smoldering ambition was his old friend and counselor, Ed Meese. He said, “It [the 1976 campaign] made him a credible candidate. When he left Kansas City in 1976, he was still unsure about running again. But when the 1980 campaign began in 1978, he was ready to go. He learned more about other parts of the country, and Reagan was a person who learned from every experience he had. He learned the intricacies of national politics. He learned what his followers were looking for. He had a spiritual side to him that it was up to God whether it happened or it didn’t and was ‘OK’ with it either way.”
¹⁰

When the caisson bearing Ronald Reagan’s body arrived at the U.S. Capitol on June 9, 2004, Vice President Richard Cheney was there to greet him and Mrs. Reagan. In a moving speech, Cheney said that Reagan’s Presidency was “providential.” Perhaps it was.

Reagan did go on to win the Presidency over Jimmy Carter in a landslide in 1980 and won re-election over Walter Mondale by another landslide in 1984. In 1980, the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War. To many, it seemed only a matter of time before all was lost. America was in retrenchment at home and across the globe, but most of the elites continued to deride Reagan’s “simplistic” notions about freedom, restoring America’s morale, defeating Soviet Communism, and exporting democratic rule around the world as absurd. Yet Reagan knew something his critics did not: the future was not for the timid but for the brave.

Ronald Reagan left office in January of 1989 with a love and affection from the American people not seen since President Kennedy. Years later, Jack Kemp would movingly say of Reagan that he was “the last great lion of the twentieth century.”

Upon becoming President in 1981, Reagan changed the Republican Party, Reagan changed America, and Reagan changed the world—all because he came within an eyelash of winning his party’s Presidential nomination in 1976.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

B
efore I began to research and write
Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the
Campaign that Started It All
, I had come to the project with several preconceived notions and biases about some of the people involved in the momentous political events inside the Republican Party from 1974 to 1976.

I was wrong.

One of the people I interviewed, Jim Baker, Reagan’s first White House Chief of Staff in 1981 and Ford’s Campaign Manager in 1976, turned the tables on me and asked what I had learned in the course of writing this book. I told him I had discovered, with few exceptions, that there were no bad guys in this story. Everybody was pretty much a good guy, trying to honestly do his job. And I detected, again with only a couple of exceptions, little venality on the part of people in the Ford and Reagan camps. Baker agreed with this assessment.

Vice President Cheney said as much, except when I pointed out that one person who really did seem to have it in for Reagan was Ford’s aide Robert Hartmann. Cheney dryly said, “Hartmann didn’t like anybody.”

When I interviewed my old friend Phyllis Schlafly for this book, she said, “Now Craig, I hope you’re going to write what a disaster John Sears was!” Actually, some of my conservative friends will be disappointed, but I don’t think Sears was a disaster. He made mistakes and showed some bad judgment. But I also think some of his actions were brilliant, or could at least be justified. Sears was no manager, that is for sure. He would have been better suited to be the campaign’s chief strategist, which he was—but he should not have run the campaign. Other more ably suited people could have performed the mundane, but vitally important tasks of making the trains run on time for the 1976 Reagan campaign.

Even Sears’s friend Jim Lake said, “He had no management skills. He never pretended he had management skills.” Still, Sears had his unvarnished admirers, like Paul Laxalt who said, “Even his mistakes were brilliant.”

Of one fact there can be no doubt: had Sears not appeared on the scene in 1974, Reagan would not have run. Sears was the only person who explained to Ronald and Nancy Reagan how they could run a successful campaign. Both of them were deeply impressed with his grasp of politics.

Early in the interview process, I gave up on asking key Reagan campaign staffers to diagram an “organizational chart” for the campaign. Most simply rolled their eyes or let out a derisive laugh. As Peter Hannaford said, “There was no campaign chart. Everybody simply gravitated to what they liked to do best.” More important than any management chart, they were caught up in the swirl of history. The events they were involved in were bigger and more consequential than anyone knew at the time, save the principal character at the center of this maelstrom: Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Not everyone agreed to be interviewed, including Bob Hartmann and Al Haig. Not everyone could be interviewed, and some I decided not to interview, including Clarke Reed. I came to this conclusion after speaking to many about his actions in Mississippi and concluded that all I would get out of Reed would be “spin.” Reed broke his word to Reagan’s people, and no amount of discussion can change this.

The Republican Party was undergoing dramatic changes, some of which would have happened without Reagan. Nonetheless, he brought to the fore issues and a direction that would eventually change the party, the country, and the world. The GOP was being reborn as a political movement based on, as Reagan said in 1964, “maximum freedom consistent with law and order.” This was the essence of the “constitutional libertarian” philosophy.