THE TEXANS’ LAST STAND
“A chess tournament disguised as a circus.”
-John Connally
July 13, 1980
Detroit Plaza Hotel — Detroit, MI
We just need an open convention, he thought to himself.
If we can open the convention, I can be the nominee. The former president believed it in his heart of hearts, and that was precisely why, on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Gerald R. Ford was calling friends and supporters — and delegates. Ford was on the phone with Congressman Dick Cheney, his one-time Chief of Staff, asking him if he thought there was a path to the nomination.
“Frankly, I don’t know,” Cheney said. “Right now, Bush and Connally have this unnatural alliance, but it seems to be holding. There’s a lot of skepticism about Reagan right now — people feel like he blew his lead and can’t be trusted to win against Carter. Maybe he does have an electability problem. You, on the other hand, closed on Carter during a tough campaign. But, Reagan will say you’ve already lost to him once before. So will Bush and Connally.”
The president nodded. “But are people really okay with Bush or Connally as the nominee? Do they really see either of them sitting behind the desk? I figure we get their delegates and some of Reagan’s.”
Cheney wasn’t quite sure where the 38th president was getting his math, but he had an idea.
Wishful thinking. “I don’t know if it’s that easy. Again, I think there’s a path — especially if we’re deadlocked after a ballot or two. There’s a path for you to come in as the elder statesman and save the party from the in-fighting. But I think we need to be deadlocked first.”
Ford nodded in understanding, but he did not intend on taking Cheney’s advice. He removed his pipe from his mouth, thanked the Congressman for his time, and turned to Betty. “I think I have to do this,” he said. His wife agreed.
Ford’s next calls were to Dean Burch and John Marsh. Both men had advised Ford as he weighed a 1980 campaign last year. Both men agreed that if Ford wanted the Republican nomination, he would have to go through the primary process. Now, he was calling them to say he was going forward with it anyway. “There’s no clear nominee,” he explained, “and I think the people see that Reagan can’t win this thing. They want someone else. And who are they going to pick? Reagan’s people hate Bush because he’s too moderate, and they hate Connally because he’s a snake. I’m the unifier,” he explained.
There was wisdom to the former president’s assessment of the field, but at his core Gerald Ford was a politician — a man who had tasted the powers that come with the Oval Office. The thirst for that power could distort a man’s thinking — allow him to overlook reality, like the fact he’d be starting without a single pledged delegate, and ignore the animosities against him, like believing not a single Reagan delegate could prefer Bush or Connally to him.
Burch and Marsh, loyal to the end, agreed to sign on.
• • •
Four floors up, on the sixty-ninth floor of the hotel, Ronald Reagan and his team were going over their strategy once more. The candidate himself couldn’t quite believe the situation he was in.
How did it all gone so wrong? He had started the race as the clear frontrunner, and somehow, bit by bit, his lead evaporated. People thought he was too dodgy, they thought he couldn’t win — this bothered him the most.
If they’d just pull the lever next to my name, I’d be the president, he thought to himself. With all of these frustrations mounting, the candidate was — above all — tired. He had been here before, just four years earlier, and the nomination had escaped his grasp. He would not let history repeat itself. He would be the Republican nominee for president.
There were two hopes for denying Reagan the nomination. His team was working to close out both avenues. The first way was through convincing enough of the uncommitted delegates to vote for Bush or Connally on the first ballot to deny Reagan the nomination. Then, the Convention would head to a second ballot where delegates were mostly free to vote for whichever candidate they wanted — even a candidate to whom they were not pledged.
The second hope for the Bush/Connally faction was to challenge the rules. Ironically, the rules had been changed four years earlier by Ford and his team when they were worried about a drive to Reagan on the floor. The Bush/Connally faction hoped to remove the provision of the 1976 rules that required delegations to be recorded in accordance with the primary results of their states, thereby allowing delegates to be free to vote for the candidate of their choice. [1] Reagan’s team wanted to shut that vote down in order to ensure they held onto all of their delegates. Because of his lead with the pledged delegates going into the roll call, Reagan would only need to win over a smaller portion — thirty-two of the 115 unpledged delegates. If Bush and Connally succeeded in their mission to allow for an open convention, then the Reagan team would have to start from scratch and delegates weary of the fact Reagan had been unable to wrap the nomination up on his own might jump ship for Bush or Connally — or even for Gerald Ford, as some rumors suggested.
The Reagan delegate operation was missing a crucial figure: A national political director. The Reagan campaign, in the post-Sears era, had left the important position open. Regional political directors, who came to take on the role of delegate management, were not reporting to a central figure who had the candidate’s ear. Some were out on their own, inventing and then following their own dictums. Some reported to Casey, others phoned Meese or Wirthlin. The Reagan camp — the “fellows” as Reagan called them — were just learning how costly that vacancy might become.
“How are we on the Rules question?” Casey asked.
At the same time, Meese and Wirthlin provided different answers. Meese was worried, he said, because of some difficult reports out of the Southern delegations. Reagan had taken Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee, but Connally had fared better in the earlier Southern states: South Carolina, Alabama, and Florida.
“I just got off with Tommy,” Meese explained, referring to Tommy Thomas, the Reagan team’s lead guy in Florida, “and he told me that Connally’s been working them hard. Took them all out to a big fancy dinner and told everyone our guy was running out of steam.”
Wirthlin brushed it aside. “We did better in the later states when Connally’s path closed off. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t matter. People are worried because we didn’t wrap this thing up on our own and we’re back here at another divided convention. They feel like this was our campaign to lose and we lost it.”
Michael Reagan, the candidate’s adopted son, spoke up. “Who isn’t being loyal? Let’s call ‘em. I’ll talk to them and remind them why they’re on this campaign. Maureen can, too.”
Maureen agreed. She wanted to get all of their delegates together again before the vote tomorrow for a rally to keep them energized. She volunteered to introduce her father — her speeches during the campaign had been widely praised and some wondered if she might have her own political future ahead of her. Casey didn’t think the idea was necessary, and he was worried it would make the Reagan campaign look scared — insecure.
“I think it sends the exact right message: That we have the most delegates. We have the energy. We have the momentum. And if all our delegates are unified, we don’t have to worry about this rules challenge, and then we only need thirty delegates to wrap this up.”
“Thirty-two,” Casey corrected. Maureen nodded. She should have been more exact.
Reagan’s staff was not particularly worried. There were 115 delegates out there. Reagan needed less than a third of them, and given he was the only candidate within striking distance of the nomination, it seemed unlikely these unpledged delegates would go Bush or Connally’s way and force a second ballot. No Republican Convention had gone to a second ballot since 1948, and if the 1980 convention became the first in 32 years, it would devastate the party in its match-up with Jimmy Carter.
The candidate, however, remembered his confidence about the nomination in 1976, and he did not want to take anything for granted now. He could not afford to lose. Standing up from the circle of advisors, he gave plain directions: “Tell me who I need to call, and I will. Tell me who needs attention, and they’ll get it. If someone on the ground says we should be worried, we should be. I’ve had this stolen from me once before, but it won’t happen again.” There were no real directions in his statement, and the circle around him sort of nodded. But something in Reagan’s gut told him he couldn’t be sure of the outcome. He had this nagging feeling that it was all slipping away, that the guys in the room didn’t understand the urgency, and that he needed a fighter to get the campaign organized.
“Get me Roger Stone,” he said.
• • •
George Bush wasn’t sure what to make of the whole situation. He was holding on to 573 delegates — too few to win the nomination outright on the first ballot, and probably even on the second ballot. For that reason, he was nervous about the stalking presence of Gerald Ford, the former president who somehow believed that the presidency would find him once more by accident as it had the first time. He had just listened to his son, Jeb, explain the dynamics at play.
Some of Bush’s New Hampshire delegates — who had been Ford delegates at the Convention four years earlier — heard that the ex-president was considering a campaign from the floor. Dean Burch had called the delegate directly, and — as Jeb had heard it — implied that the nomination would soon be Ford’s for the taking. So the logic went:
The challenge to the rules was doomed to fail and so the only hope would be to stop Reagan on the first ballot. It could be achieved, but at that point the unholy alliance of Bush and Connally would cease, and the Bush delegates would never vote for Connally and the Connally delegates would never vote for Bush. Therefore, a new unity candidate was needed or Reagan would be nominated anyway. If Ford got into the race and the Bush delegates ran to him early, he could sew up the nomination on the second ballot.
Bush rubbed his crinkled forehead. “How, exactly, does he think he’ll win over Ronald Reagan’s delegates?”
Jeb shrugged. “That’s not clear.”
Bush ground his teeth together.
How could Ford be this stupid? The fate of the Republican Party is hanging in the balance, Bush believed,
and Gerald Ford is about to drive the ship into the iceberg all in the name of vanity. It had been a long road to Detroit and now, staring at the finish line, the improbable candidate, once described as an asterisk, looked around the room. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked helplessly.
James Baker resumed control. “We have a plan, and we stick to it.” The plan had always been to open the Convention. They had to convince conservative delegates that it was worth turning on Reagan in the name of electability. The Bush camp was guilty of its own wishful math. Would Reagan delegates really come to him on a second ballot, even if the convention were opened?Nonetheless, Baker reminded the room in case the plan had been forgotten: “We open this convention.”
The campaign manager provided no further explanation and left the room. He could be forgiven for his hasty departure — he had an important meeting.
Ten minutes later, Baker was sitting in a car outside a different hotel waiting for someone to come out the front door. Baker looked anxiously out the window. Then, he spotted him: Young with thick black-framed glasses and a receding hairline. It was Eddie Mahe. Connally’s campaign manager climbed into the car.
“Jim,” he said.
“Eddie. We’ve got a situation.”
“What’s going on?”
Though their candidates could hardly have held such a cordial conversation, they were both paid to deliver a victory — and that meant making deals and amassing the information needed to get across the finish line. In a divided three-way Convention, Eddie Mahe and James Baker needed each other.
“Ford’s thinking about getting into this thing.”
“Jesus Christ,” Mahe said, rolling his eyes. “What for?”
“He thinks our delegates will never unite and that the only way to beat Reagan is to put together a united front from the start.”
“You know we need the open Convention as much as you do,” Mahe responded. It was a lie. Connally needed the Convention opened
more than Bush did. If he had any chance of getting the nomination, they needed to steal at least 100 Reagan delegates out of the gate. They thought they could do it, too, if they could just win the procedural vote.
“You’ve got to get your men in line,” Baker barked. “There’s no room for error on that first vote.”
Blood boiled under Mahe’s skin. He didn’t need the reminder — he knew full well what was at stake. “I’ve got it, Jim. How about you keep your guys from creaming their pants over Jerry Ford? Can you do that?"
Baker didn’t appreciate that kind of language. They may have been making sausage, but it was for the highest office in the land. This was a dignified process, and there was no room for such analogies.
“We’ll handle Ford. Make sure your people stay in line. If we can remind our delegates that yours also want the open Convention, we’ve got a real fight on our hands. How are you doing making inroads with the cooks?” It was Baker’s term for the leaders of the Religious Right.
“You know John’s never sold them that he’s a true believer, but I think some at the top realize that Reagan’s damaged goods.”
“Well, good. Sell ‘em on it.”
Again, Mahe resented the implication that he needed any training. Some had viewed the Connally campaign as a disappointment, but Mahe thought he’d pulled off the unthinkable: Positioned Connally as the compromise candidate at a brokered convention just a few years after his party switch all while his candidate harbored a reputation as an ethically lax Texan six years removed from Watergate. He didn’t need Jim Baker’s advice.
• • •
Perhaps, with his 248 pledged delegates, John Connally was the only one who thought he could emerge from the Convention as the Republican nominee for president, but his confidence had trickled down to his loyal cadre of staffers, among them: Campaign Manager Eddie Mahe and Haley Barbour, the Southern coordinator who had risen to become one of Eddie Mahe’s most trusted men on the staff. He was helping to coordinate the national delegate effort for Connally as Republicans gathered in Motown to choose their nominee.
John Connally was no easy boss during that 1980 campaign. He cussed at his staff and demanded a lot of them. Barbour didn’t mind it one bit. To him, Connally was just the same as his football coach back home in Mississippi had been. He liked Connally and thought he’d make a damned good president. [2]
So when Haley Barbour got news that his delegates were hearing some things about John Connally and the kind of campaign that Jimmy Carter would run against him, he wasn’t afraid to go to the candidate himself to learn how to proceed.
It all started with a phone call that Barbour received from one of the Connally delegates in Louisiana. The delegate had been out at a bar with a number of his colleagues when one of the Reagan guys approached him and said that the Connally delegate should “stay put” on the vote of opening the convention and oppose it. Why? The Connally delegate had asked innocently.
Apparently, the Reagan guy said they’d gotten word from a reporter that there were “more questions than answers” about that 1974 trial Connally had faced when he was accused of accepting a bribe to fix the price of milk. “And the Carter guys have all of the details,” the Reagan man had told this delegate. Naturally, the insinuation made the Connally delegate nervous and so he asked what else was out there. He didn’t get a straight answer. But it seemed to him that if he opened the Convention, the Reagan guys would release whatever they had about Connally — or maybe the reporters would do it themselves — and then any hope of a conservative nominee might be dashed as delegates rallied around Bush as the safer option. And no Connally delegate wanted the nomination to go to Bush.
Barbour sensed immediately what was happening. The Reagan camp knew that while the Bush and Connally camps had a mutual desire in denying Reagan the nomination, they would each rather see Reagan win than the other guy. If the Reagan camp could convince the Bush delegates that opening the floor would help Connally more than Bush, and if they could convince the Connally delegates that opening the floor would help Bush more than Connally, they could keep everyone where they were and concentrate on winning the thirty-or-so delegates they needed on the first ballot.
Barbour laid it out for Mahe and the candidate.
“Sonofabitch,” Connally muttered. “I mean seriously, fuck him.”
Barbour nodded. It was a dirty trick. “I’m sure Roger Stone is behind it,” Barbour said, correctly identifying the mysterious “Reagan man” — or at least, the guy who had given the Reagan man the instructions.
“Fuck him, too,” Connally said. Stone should always have been on his team. He was the true heir to Nixon, not Reagan.
“How do we want to proceed?” Barbour asked. “I think we’ve got to reassure our delegates of our path to the nomination if it goes to a second ballot or an open convention.”
Connally waved him off. Maybe part of him knew that this was all for not. Maybe part of him just wanted to see it all burn.
“He’s a B-list Hollywood actor, and he’s going senile. How about we remind folks of that?”
It wasn’t really a direction, and Barbour looked nervously at Mahe. What was he supposed to do with that? Connally answered the question.
“Get me a list of delegates. Start with mine — the ones who are waffling. And then get me some of his.”
As soon as Barbour was back with the list, Connally sat down and started calling: “Let me level with you,” he told one of his delegates from Texas, “we don’t have to worry about Bush. When this thing goes to the second ballot, I’m going to pick up all of Reagan’s people. They see it, too. He’s losing his goddamn mind. One of his staffers called Eddie the other week and said he didn’t even recognize his own daughter. What? Who? No, not Maureen. The other one. Yeah. Anyway — they’re scared shitless that he might actually win this thing. Stick with us, and we’ll have a spot for you in Washington. Yep. Alright. Thank you.”
“They’re telling our folks some cockamamie story about the trial — you’ve heard it, too?” Connally asked another delegate, looking up at Mahe as if to say
Fuck Reagan. “Well, it’s horse shit. I want you to know that. It’s total horse shit. They’re desperate because they’re afraid they’re going to be the guys who throw this nomination to Bush — stick us with another New England Ivy League wannabe jock instead of getting us the conservative we deserve. Yeah, that’s right. Anyway, I’m just calling to tell ya what we’re hearing from Reagan’s folks: His people are ready to bolt. I’ve heard he’s called something like 100 or 150 of his delegates, and he ain’t got one name right yet. He’s totally losing it. Just gone. It’s sad, really. Anywho — I need you to be with me. Stick with me on the first two ballots and stick with me on the rules change. We’re gonna win this. Yep. Alright, thank you, and there’ll be a desk for ya in Washington. Okay.”
The sun started to set outside Connally’s hotel room, but the candidate kept planted in his seat and flipped to the next page of calls.
July 14, 1980
Joe Louis Arena — Detroit, MI
CBS’ coverage of the 1980 Republican National Convention began on July 14th with an interview of a Reagan delegate. He was from Ohio, and this was his fourth Republican National Convention as a delegate. His first had come 28 years earlier.
“What was that Convention like?”
“Oh, it was a lot like this one. I’ll tell ya that.”
“How so?” asked the reporter.
“Well, back then the powers that be got together and did everything they could to stop the conservative from winning at that Convention. Robert Taft. I was a Taft delegate. I was 35 then, and I’m telling ya: I’ve never forgotten what that was like.”
“And you’re with Mr. Reagan now?”
“You bet. I was four years ago, too, when the powers that be conspired against him. Well, not this time. We’ve got the votes.”
“Do you, though? There’s an effort to open the convention. What do you make of that?”
“If they rob Ronald Reagan of this nomination, I will never vote for another Republican again.”
It was an extreme example, but the Ohio delegate encapsulated a feeling many of Reagan’s people held. They’d been here before. Some of them had been there for Robert Taft. Some had been there for Barry Goldwater. Many of them had been there for Ronald Reagan in 1976. They weren’t willing to lose this time.
Connally’s team had overestimated the number of Reagan delegates who could be swayed based on logical arguments. Maybe they had a point that Connally had more fight in him, but Reagan delegates were quick to point out that it was Reagan who was less than 100 delegates shy of the nomination. Connally trailed Reagan by nearly 700 delegates. How was he the more electable candidate?
For many of them, it just didn’t matter anyway. Ronald Reagan was their man. Just like Robert Taft had been their man. Just like Barry Goldwater had been their man. When Ronald Reagan spoke, he spoke from their gospel. When he told them that he would make America great again — that meant something to them. It meant different things to each of them, but it meant something to every last one of them. Sure, Connally’s mention that a “desk would be waiting” in Washington meant something too to a few of them, but most didn’t care. They were Reagan’s people. And this was his moment.
Before they proceeded to the roll call, where the Bush and Connally campaigns would need to find delegates to deny Reagan the nomination, they would have their chance to open the convention. Combined with Howard Baker’s 32 delegates, Bush and Connally had 852 votes to throw it open — if all their people stayed in line.
So, now, Bush and Connally’s teams had until 2:00pm to get their votes counted and re-counted to make sure they could throw the Convention open.
Haley Barbour was on top of it for the Connally campaign. The candidate had done a number of calls the evening before to shore up his wavering delegates, and when Barbour checked in with them that morning, they assured him they’d be there for the rules vote. Now, he needed to reach out to his Southern Reagan delegates and convince them that opening the Convention was a good idea. He had a list of 30 or so whom he thought were on the fence. They’d been worried by the Gipper’s shaky performance and his inability to sew up the nomination. Barbour was ready to win them over, and he had permission to offer whatever was needed to get their votes.
At first, things went well for Barbour. He walked the floor and ticked through his list. Some of the Reagan delegates from Alabama were primed to switch to Connally so long as their kids could get a tour of the White House when he won. That wasn’t any problem. But when he reached out to one of his Georgia targets, he realized that the sonofabitch-good-for-nothing-idiot-of-a-son-with-the-stupid-name had thrown the whole thing to shit.
Barbour pulled aside his contact in the Georgia delegation, where he received the bad news straight from the source.
“Haley, listen to me, it’s done.”
The floor was loud with various conversations and backbench legislators giving speeches from the podium. “What?!” Barbour barked. This time, he’d actually heard the man, but he didn’t understand what he’d meant.
“Last night, at one of the Bush parties, some of the Bush delegates were with Jeb.”
“The son?”
“Yes, Jeb. The son. And Jeb told them that when the Convention opened, they had the votes to take the nomination.”
Barbour knew where this was going. Part of the complicated balancing act had been convincing the Bush delegates and the Connally delegates, both of whom would’ve rather seen Reagan emerge as the nominee over the other Texan, that only their candidate had a path to the nomination. And if the Reagan conservatives thought that opening the Convention would help Bush more than it would help Connally — well, then there was no prayer for Haley Barbour and his briefcase full of job descriptions.
“Listen to me,” Barbour yelled over the dull roar of the Convention floor, “there’s no way Bush can sew this up. You’ve got to listen to me. You’ve got to go back and explain it to these fuckers like they’re five goddamn years old. Okay? You tell them: After the first ballot, Gerald Ford is going to get into this thing, and you tell them that he’s goin’ to split the Bush delegates. Now, we’ve got a four-way fight on our hands, alright? And John Connally is going to emerge from that fight because he’s the only one who can take the Bush people, take the Ford people, and take the Reagan people. Nobody else can be a compromise candidate.”
“Ford is getting into this?”
“Yes. Ford will get into it if the Convention is opened. I’ve heard that.”
“From who?”
“From people close to Cheney.”
“God, Haley, now I can’t even join you. We can’t let that bastard be the nominee.”
“What?”
“I said, we can’t nominate that bastard again. There’s just no way to do this and make sure we nominate Connally.”
Barbour stamped his foot. “You’re not listening to me, damnit! If we hold the line — if we open this Convention — the delegates get split four ways. The only one who can bring them back together is John Connally.”
“What?”
“I said Connally is the compromise candidate on a second ballot or a third ballot. We win this thing if the Convention is opened.”
“But what happens if he doesn’t get it on the third ballot? What happens if everyone says ‘Fuck it, let’s go with Jerry. He only lost by a handful last time.’”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I’m asking: When it comes down to the third ballot, is Bush going to back y’all if you have more votes than he does?”
Barbour clenched his eyes shut. His head was pounding. They hadn’t thought of this. Somehow, in the weeks of planning and back-and-forth conversations, they hadn’t considered what would happen after the Convention was opened. And then Jeb Bush started running around shooting his mouth about how his Daddy would be president as soon as they opened the Convention. Well, fuck, the only thing these conservatives wanted to see less than a second term for Jimmy Carter was a first term for Poppy Bush. Goddamnit.
Goddamnit.
“I’ve got to go. I’ve got to talk to Bush’s people,” Barbour said, and he broke off and went to find Jeb Bush.
• • •
The rumors started as a murmur the evening before, but by the time the delegates arrived at the Joe Louis Arena that morning, many of them had heard it loud and clear: If the Convention opened, Gerald Ford would throw his hat in the ring. Dan Rather, had heard the buzz all morning, but he hadn’t been able to get a good enough source — until 11:45 that morning, when Senator Schweiker, the man who (some said) had cost Reagan the nomination in ’76, told him to his face that Gerald Ford was a candidate for president.
Walter Cronkite cut to a breathless Rather on the floor.
“Dan, what are you hearing about the possibility that former President Ford is going to get into this?”
“Walter, the situation here on the floor would give an aspirin a headache,” Rather started. “But I can tell you this: I’ve heard from Senator Schweiker that Congressman Cheney told someone else who then told Senator Schweiker that Gerald Ford will throw his hat into the ring if the Convention delegates vote for an open Convention when they start the roll call at 2:00 this afternoon.” [3]
“And what are you hearing from the delegates?”
“Some of them are excited. They think Gerald Ford’s the perfect candidate to unite this party and take on Jimmy Carter. A lot of the Bush delegates are ready to jump ship.”
If Gerald Ford thought he could toss around the idea of another presidential campaign and the Republican delegates would come running to him, he was experiencing a very different reality now that news of a campaign-from-the-floor had broken. Just as his inner circle had told him back when he considered jumping into the primary fight, winning from the Convention floor was a retired tactic, and it was not likely to happen again.
Many of the Bush delegates were loyal to Bush, and they didn’t want to risk fracturing the moderate voting bloc when the alternatives were Connally or Reagan. Ford called many of them, and some were receptive to the ex-President’s message, but more of them politely said they weren’t interested. They had come here for Bush, and they were sticking with him. If Ford wanted to be president, he should’ve got into this thing awhile ago and helped the Party avoid the inevitable mess that would come with a Reagan nomination. That was his chance. Now, it was Bush’s.
After the news broke, Cheney called Ford directly to apologize for any confusion. He hadn’t meant to break the story. Ford said it was no bother — he was grateful the news was out there.
“Mr. President, with all due respect, I think you should go out there and say that I was mistaken. I think you should say you’re not interested in the job.”
“Why would I do that, Dick? I think we can win this thing.”
“I don’t think you can, and I think if you’re serious about stopping a Reagan nomination, the best thing you can do is enthusiastically endorse George Bush.”
Ford would hear none of it. He had a path to the nomination, and he wasn’t going to close it off to help George Bush. “I appreciate your advice,” he said curtly, and then he hung up the phone.
• • •
“Listen to me, the guy had Billy Graham and Jackie Kennedy testifying for him. There was no way that he was getting convicted, but if you honest to God think that John Connally wasn’t $10,000 richer after Jake Jacobsen got through with him, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”
“Jimmy Carter won in 1976 because he told everyone they could trust him. Now, we know he was full of shit, but if you stick him up against John Fucking Connally — the guy who barely got off for taking a $10,000 bribe, we’re looking at a 1972-style landslide for the peanut farmer.”
“Of course he took the bribe, and he probably spent it on hookers.”
With each delegate, Roger Stone’s version of John Connally’s 1974 corruption trial got more dramatic. By the time he got to the Wyoming delegation, he’d probably be accusing the former cabinet secretary of murder.
And George Bush? Oh, Roger Stone had a lot to say about George Bush — his family was close with Hitler, he fucked every secretary who ever worked for him, he funded Planned Parenthood. The last one may have been rooted in some truth, but for the most part, Stone wove a web of conspiracies that mucked the waters and raised serious doubts about George Bush and his family.
Now, wearing a bright striped shirt and flashy suspenders, Stone traveled the Convention floor meeting with delegates and remind them to stick with Reagan on the rules vote and the first ballot. He wasn’t worried about the second ballot. There wouldn’t be a second ballot.
It didn’t matter what he heard, Stone had an answer.
Ford was entering the race? On the second ballot, Connally would join forces with him, sign on as his running mate, and that would be it for Reagan and that would be it for conservatives’ one shot in years to win the White House.
Connally said Reagan couldn’t finish the race? Bullshit. Who had gotten this far? If it hadn’t been for Connally’s dirty tricks in South Carolina, this nomination would’ve been wrapped up months ago.
At 1:59pm, he phoned the top brass on Reagan’s team. “We’ve got 1,294 votes against the rule change. I got half of Connally’s guys and some of Bush’s. We’re fine.” He hung up the phone before they could say anything else. A minute later the roll call began.
Haley Barbour knew it was over from the very first state. Nineteen of Alabama’s delegates voted for the rules change. There should have been twenty-seven.
At the end of the roll call, Chairman Brock banged the gavel down — its thud reverberating throughout the hall. “On the question of suspending the rules and permitting delegates to cast their ballots freely on the first ballot, the ayes are 655 and the nays are 1,294. The motion fails.”
And with that, the Bush/Connally axis’ best chance to deny Reagan the nomination had failed. Now, they needed to convince the unpledged delegates to throw the Convention to a second ballot.
Jeb Bush, who had been on the ground of the convention talking to delegates, promising jobs in the administration, and courting the few wavering Reagan delegations, felt totally defeated. “It was just the most depressing moment of my life,” he recalled later. “I stood there in disbelief, and I really felt that the Republicans had just thrown away our best chance to defeat Jimmy Carter. I knew then that he’d be reelected.”
There’s no way to know what would’ve happened if the Bush and Connally campaigns had gotten their way. Had the convention been opened, Bush faced the longest odds. Though he’d come in second in the delegate count, he was the least likely to grab delegates from Reagan or from Connally. It was more likely that Connally delegates would go to Reagan, and that’s why a number of them turned on their man at the eleventh hour. The threat of a Ford challenge had scared enough of the more conservative delegates into voting to keep the rules. Better Reagan than Ford, they thought — it was the mindset that had frustrated Haley Barbour as he tried to whip the votes for the open convention for Connally. Some of Bush’s delegates were also worried that if the Convention opened and Ford got in, a lot of their fellow Bush people would jump ship, splintering the moderates and clearing the way for Reagan or Connally. They stopped seeing how an open Convention would help Bush. Perhaps if Ford had not teased the idea of a candidacy, Connally’s delegates would’ve voted in unison for the open convention. Maybe, too, the guarantee of not having Ford nominated would’ve encouraged some Reagan delegates to open the floor for a Connally nomination.
The Reagan camp’s triumphant victory on the first real test of its organization was a good sign for the campaign moving forward. Their delegates were in line, and that meant that after they left Detroit, they would head out to their homes — in Ohio and Texas, New York and Arizona, Florida and Montana — and knock on doors, call voters, put up yard signs, and campaign hard to make Ronald Wilson Reagan the 40th president. First, they just had to find those 32 delegates to put them over the edge.
• • •
Haley Barbour didn’t find Jeb Bush until after their dreams of an open Convention had been gaveled into oblivion.
“Jeb!” he shouted. “Jeb! Get your ass over here.”
Poppy’s son turned around and saw Barbour climbing over chairs to get to him. “Haley,” he said with a sigh. They’d come up short. “I can’t believe it,” he said.
“What the fuck were you doing running your mouth and telling every goddamn conservative South of the Mason-Dixon that we were going to make your Daddy president if the Convention got opened?!”
Jeb was flabbergasted. “Of course I told our people that we were opening the Convention to nominate Dad. Why else would they have voted for it if they didn’t think that was possible?”
“You said you had the votes. That’s not the same thing as saying, ‘We can get there in an open convention.’ My people heard you running your mouth and they said, ‘Fuck it, I’m not giving him that path.’ Now, we’re over here trying to find enough idiots to vote against Reagan on the first ballot.”
“Haley, settle down.”
Barbour’s face was red. “You just waltz in here and act like you’re some kind of political mastermind. Well, your Dad ain’t held a job he couldn’t get appointed to, and you’re not going anywhere either. None of you have any goddamn political sense. You should’ve let us take Texas so we had something to prove to the Reagan people on the fence. We ran ads in New Hampshire every goddamn hour against Reagan, and you people still couldn’t beat him. It was embarrassing, Jeb, and now you’ve fucked us both over.”
“Haley, we were never in the business of nominating John Connally. We’re in the business of nominating George Bush. And if you don’t understand that, then I don’t think you’re the political mastermind you think you are.”
Jeb may have been on to something. The Connally people were badly outnumbered, and while they provided a convenient ally for the Bush camp, there was never any reason to believe that Jeb Bush or Jim Baker or Poppy himself would’ve done anything to help Connally get closer to the nomination. Throw the Texas primary to him? Bush needed that just as much as Connally did. And Bush had a better chance of winning the nomination; he had more delegates. If Connally and Barbour and Mahe had been serious about stopping Reagan, they should’ve gotten behind Bush after Texas, not doubled down on this idea to throw open the Convention. At least the way Jeb saw it.
His dreams of sitting across from President John Connally in the Oval Office were fading quickly, and so — filled with frustration — Barbour didn’t respond with words. He just spat at Jeb Bush’s feet and glared at him, hostile breath cascading out of his nostrils.
“I’m going to find the votes.”
• • •
Nancy paced frantically behind him, gnawing at her fingernails, but Ronnie was relaxed. The nomination was his. As far as he was concerned, Bush and Connally’s best chance at throwing the Convention their way was to open it. Now, Reagan needed just 32 delegates to put him over the finish line, and who would want to risk this thing going to a second ballot? The grim reality of what a messy brokered convention might mean had begun to set in among the delegates, just like it had in 1976. There would be no second ballot.
Most on Reagan’s team did not replicate his easygoing demeanor. Instead, they were frantically calling their floor leaders and demanding updates. Ed Meese was on the phone with Roger Stone the entire time — the Northeast political director had predicted the rules vote exactly, and now he told Meese that he needn’t worry: Reagan would have more than 1,000 delegates on the first ballot.
On the floor, the Connally and Bush leaders were trying desperately to find the votes, but just after dinner, the roll call began, and things began to fall into place for Reagan. He clinched the nomination with 1,046 delegates.
When the gavel came down and the nomination was announced, he jumped from his seat with glee and embraced Nancy. They had finally done it. In 1968, they’d nearly hobbled together a coalition to deny Dick Nixon the nomination on the first ballot. Like Bush and Connally, however, the Reagan and Rockefeller camps distrusted each other too much for it to work. Eight years later, his own political miscalculations had made him fall short of the nomination, but at that Convention Ronald Reagan had positioned himself as the next leader of the Republican Party.
In one of those dramatic moments — the kind that live on in political lore — Gerald Ford, crowned the nominee after one of the bloodiest battles in modern Republican history, invited his recently-defeated opponent to the podium to deliver a speech. Like he had in 1964, Ronald Reagan electrified the audience.
He closed his speech with an anecdote. He had been asked, he said, to write a letter for a time capsule that would be opened in one hundred years — on the Tricentennial anniversary of America. As only Reagan could, he talked about riding along the coast and looking out at the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Ynez Mountains. He talked about the beautiful summer day. He asked the delegates to think about the assignment themselves. What would they write?
“You’re going to write for people a hundred years from now who know all about us,” he said. “We know nothing about them. We don’t know what kind of a world they’ll be living in. And suddenly I thought to myself, ‘If I write of the problems, they’ll be the domestic problems of which the President spoke here tonight,’ the challenges confronting us: the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democrat rule in this country; the invasion of private rights; the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy. These are our challenges that we must meet.’
“And then again there is that challenge of which he spoke that we live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive at each other’s country and destroy virtually the civilized world we live in.”
With a confidence not commonly held by a man who just lost a presidential nomination, Reagan pressed forward: “And suddenly it dawned on me: Those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge.
“Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, ‘Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom? Who kept us now a hundred years later free? Who kept our world from nuclear destruction?’” Dry eyes in that humid Convention hall? There were few.
“And if we failed,” he continued, “they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it.
“This is our challenge and this is why, here in this hall tonight, better than we’ve ever done before, we’ve got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that, we may be fewer in numbers than we’ve ever been, but we carry the message they’re waiting for.
“We must go forth from here united, determined. And what a great general said a few years ago is true: "There is no substitute for victory.” [4]
Immediately, Reagan was interrupted with the regretful cheers of a stunned Convention. The camera showed open-mouthed delegates, sitting with the weight of his words, as they rose from their seats (if they’d been sitting in the first place), and brought their hands together in rapturous applause for the Nominee Who Could Have Been. Now, he was Ronald Reagan: The Nominee Who Is, and once more, he had the unenviable task of uniting a divided Party.
July 15, 1980
Detroit Plaza Hotel — Detroit, MI
Briefly, a new question confronted the delegates. Who would they choose to serve as vice president? Reagan had floated the idea of throwing the nomination for vice president to the convention, but after the Bush and Connally campaigns pursued the open convention vote, they decided not to risk Reagan ending up on a ticket with either one of them. Some on Reagan’s team had insisted that he should choose Bush and get the whole thing over with, but Nancy Reagan would have none of it. She had felt so betrayed by Bush’s stubbornness — his unwillingness to concede defeat — that she wanted him nowhere near a Reagan administration. “When Ronnie wins,” Nancy told Ed Meese, “George Bush is going to have to find a nice corporate board to sit on.” The idea of locking Bush — a career public servant — out of the cabinet struck some on Reagan’s team as absurd. But Nancy would not entertain the idea of a Bush vice presidency, and so neither did her Ronnie.
The list of possible running mates was short, though. Bob Dole had run as Ford’s running mate four years earlier, and it had been a disaster. He was out. Crane had gotten too personal in his attacks on Reagan’s age during the primaries. He was also too ideologically similar to Reagan. He was out. Some in the Party hoped Howard Baker would join the Reagan ticket, but the candidate himself was skeptical, and Paul Laxalt was absolutely apoplectic about the idea. Baker’s support of the Panama Canal Treaties was automatically disqualifying, he believed. After all, the Treaties had been a defining issue for Reagan in the run-up to his 1980 campaign. How could he suddenly elevate the Republican who had worked hardest for their adoption? Besides, Baker didn’t want the job.
Interestingly, that logic was not applied to Gerald Ford, the former president, whom Reagan and his team considered for a potential running mate. With the rest of the list scarce, Reagan had authorized some on his campaign to begin negotiations with Ford’s people. Would the former president accept a spot as Reagan’s vice president? It would be a first, but Ford’s path to the presidency had been unelected in the first place, making him uniquely able to go back to the vice presidency without losing face. Running — and serving — together would require a unique arrangement, and that’s what the Reagan and Ford teams were discussing. For Ford, Henry Kissinger, Alan Greenspan, John Marsh, and Bob Barrett negotiated. Ed Meese, Dick Wirthlin, and Bill Casey negotiated for Reagan.
Three other candidates loomed in the background as the campaign entertained the Ford possibility. The first was Congressman Jack Kemp of New York. He’d become a poster child for the New Right thanks to the Kemp-Roth tax bill, which Reagan had essentially adopted as his platform. The bill provided for the most substantial tax cuts in modern American history as a remedy to the economic malaise Republicans insisted wasn’t getting better. Many Reagan staffers on the ground were eager to see Kemp join the ticket. Among them was Roger Stone, the political director for the New York/Connecticut region for Reagan. Kemp was also actively seeking the role. An independent group, Republicans for Victory, had raised $70,000 in an effort to draft Kemp onto the ticket. They distributed bumper stickers and copies of Kemp’s book. While the effort made the New York Congressman a bit uneasy, he didn’t intervene to stop their campaigning. [5]
But Reagan was hesitant. First, some on the campaign wondered whether or not Kemp provided enough ideological diversity to the ticket. And if they could get away with picking Kemp, why not just take Paul Laxalt? That was who Reagan really wanted after all. Laxalt had been by his side the entire campaign, and Reagan pined for that kind of loyalty in a running mate. But his team told him no: Laxalt was off the table.
There was also the matter of
the rumors. When John Connally had dredged up the allegations of a “homosexual ring” in Reagan’s gubernatorial administration, his team had spared one key detail: One of the young staffers who owned a piece of the lodge where the orgies had taken place was none other than Jack Kemp, then a quarterback for the Buffalo Bills, and the article made note of an “athlete” who had participated in the seedy affair.
Kemp dismissed the assertion, and exhaustive investigations had failed to turn up any evidence that he was involved in the orgies that transpired at the lakeside cabin. In fact, he’d never even been to it despite owning part of it. Still, some on Reagan’s team wondered if rumors of homosexuality would be a bridge too far for their friends on the Religious Right. Wirthlin, in particular, was motivated to seal the deal with Ford so they could avoid the mess of a Kemp nomination.
Another possibility was Congressman Guy Vander Jagt. He was on the House Ways and Means Committee, giving him important access to the Party’s leaders and donors, and he was slated to give the Keynote address to the Republican Convention. The problem was he still hadn’t delivered it. The elongated rules vote and first ballot had delayed the entire agenda, and Vander Jagt was expected to give the speech in primetime on July 16th — and by then, Reagan and his men wanted a running mate. Without a boost from a nationally televised address, Vander Jagt was too unknown to join the ticket. Reagan wanted a running mate who would help him leave Detroit with an excited Republican Party behind him. Vander Jagt didn’t have that ability.
And finally, the Reagan campaign was considering Indiana Senator Dick Lugar, who occupied a coveted spot on the ideological spectrum — firmly between the Bush moderates and Reagan conservatives. In theory, his politics and his youth should have sealed the deal for Lugar, but the Reagans and the campaign staff had their doubts. During his time in the Senate, Lugar had developed a reputation for off-the-cuff remarks that could require the candidate to clean them up afterwards. The Reagan team was worried about Lugar making these same slip-ups on the campaign trail, distracting them from the fight against Carter.
For want of a better option, the Reagan team vigorously pursued the idea of a joint ticket with Gerald Ford.
July 16, 1980
Joe Louis Arena — Detroit, MI
Bill Casey had come up with the idea for a “Dream Ticket” — the unification of the Ford and Reagan wings of the Party. He was only more invested in the idea after it became clear that Reagan would not have time to unify the Party against Carter before the Republican Convention. Bush and Connally’s quixotic efforts to rob him of the nomination had wounded the Party and the Reagan team’s general election efforts. If Reagan could get Ford on board, he’d be able to unite the Party and drum up enough excitement and energy to come out of the Convention with momentum. The entire narrative of the post-Convention election would be turned on its head. Casey badly wanted to deliver the ticket for his boss.
Inside the room, however, the idea of the so-called dream ticket started to resemble a nightmare. Kissinger had a list of demands that would need to be satisfied in order for Ford to join the ticket. He wanted to control a number of cabinet appointments, including State and Treasury. (Kissinger would be happy to take State, and Greenspan would be the Treasury Secretary). Ford would oversee an “executive office” of the White House, overseeing the Office of Management and Budget and the National Security Council. As Greenspan explain it, he would oversee the day-to-day operations of the administration. For all intents and purposes, Kissinger and Greenspan envisioned a co-presidency. [6]
The whole thing got more complicated when word leaked out onto the Convention floor that Ford’s team was negotiating for a spot on the ticket. George Romney, who had served as a Bush delegate, was now on ABC News saying he thought Ford was the “best possible running mate” for Reagan. When Bush heard the comment, he seethed. He’d been trying to backchannel with the Reagan folks to let them know he was happy to come together and serve as the running mate, but they’d been blocked every which way they tried.
Jeb was stationed in the lobby of the Detroit Plaza Hotel, waiting for someone on Reagan’s team to come out, but the Reagan people were hunkered down on the 69th floor while the Ford people were one floor above. Nobody had any reason to head to the lobby. The younger Bush walked away disappointed after two hours.
The situation in the room was falling apart. Reagan’s people didn’t want to give Ford so much authority, and the Ford people kept cutting things off to run back and ask the ex-President what he thought of the latest offer. Time was ticking.
Reagan, however, had no idea how things were going up on the 69th floor, and so, as he walked into a luncheon that afternoon, reporters sought answers he wasn’t really in a place to provide. When one asked if he wanted Ford to be his running mate, Reagan smiled, “Oh sure. That would be the best.” Now, it had come straight from the top of the ticket: Reagan/Ford. [7]
Casey became less married to the idea of a Dream Ticket as the negotiations wore on. “It doesn’t matter,” he said about who Reagan chose. “They’re all the same. It’s not worth all of this.”
Dick Wirthlin disagreed, citing polling data that the only running mate who produced a tangible bump for Reagan was Ford. “We need him. We need him in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan — we need him.” Casey went back into the room to try and finalize the deal, reassured that they had to emerge with a Reagan/Ford ticket.
Casey didn’t like what he heard when he went back in the room.
“You’re asking for everything to go through him?” Meese asked.
“Yes,” Kissinger replied. “Information would flow through the Office of the Vice President and then through to the White House.”
“What about the West Wing staff? They would report to the Office of the Vice President?”
Casey couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
Reagan’s staff would report to Ford?
“That’s right. The Vice President would be aware of everything being discussed amongst the president and his team.”
“If we do that, can we get rid of the veto power over cabinet appointments?"
“No, that’s not negotiable. He would not need to make appointments for all cabinet positions, but he would like to retain a veto power over anyone disagreeable.”
Casey grabbed Meese and pulled him out of the room.
“What the fuck are we doing here, Ed? We’re signing away the whole fucking presidency. The only thing left for Reagan to do will be look at the schedule for the tennis courts!”
Meese frowned. Casey was right. This was turning into a Ford presidency with a Reagan figurehead.
Casey continued, “We don’t even know if Ford cares about half the shit these guys are asking for. It’s ridiculous. We can’t do it, Ed. We can’t give away the presidency like this.”
Meese went back into the room, but Casey didn’t. He needed to find another suitable running mate for Reagan.
That evening, Ford threw the whole thing into a chaotic tailspin when he said publicly, in an interview with Walter Cronkite, that he would be comfortable serving as Vice President with Reagan so long as “I would play a meaningful role, across the board. I have to have responsible assurances.” Ford and his wife both said they wouldn’t view going back to Washington in this way as a demotion. It was all part of being in public service.
That night, the negotiations took on a new feeling. Ford backed off on his demands to oversee the National Security Council, and Kissinger took himself out of the running for State. That meant President Ronald Reagan could name whoever he wanted to State (unless, that is, co-President Jerry Ford vetoed the choice). They were starting to make headway on a deal. Aides were typing and re-typing a power-sharing agreement. Wirthlin, excited that he was getting the nominee of his choice, leaked to the floor that the whole thing was “almost ready.”
Lynn Sherr of ABC News broke the story first. “An aide who is very involved in these negotiations has told me that the Reagan campaign is almost ready to announce Gerald Ford as their running mate, and that they will do so tonight here at the Convention.”
Well, Wirthlin had spoken too soon. When he came into Reagan’s suite to give the boss the good news, Reagan was eating jelly beans and staring at the television screen. “Ford just told Cronkite he wants a co-presidency,” he said. “The guy doesn’t want to be Vice President. He wants to be president again.” Wirhtlin was shaking his head.
Of course, he thought. Didn’t Reagan understand what they’d just been negotiating for days?
Then, Wirthlin listened as Sherr broke the news in front of Reagan. “Tonight?!” he yelled. “We’re doing this tonight?”
“I thought we were there,” Wirthlin said, without admitting he was the source of the leak.
“Get in there and hammer out a deal,” Reagan said, and Wirthlin went back into the room. Across town, a mournful Jeb Bush left his family’s suite to cry in his room — any hope of his father becoming Vice President now seemed over.
At 10:00 that night, Reagan had enough. “We said we were naming a nominee tonight,” he told his staff, as if the idea had originated with him. “We need one. Ask Ford if he wants the job. If he doesn’t, find me a new man.”
Casey took great pleasure into going back into the room with Kissinger and the rest of Ford’s men. “Mr. Secretary,” he said. “We’re done negotiating. Does the former President want to join the ticket or not?” Kissinger said he’d have to go ask Ford. He came back ten minutes later with his answer: No. There would not be a Dream Ticket.
Reagan took it all in stride. “That’s fine,” he said when Casey delivered the news. “Who else do we got?”
“I have Rumsfeld’s number,” Meese volunteered. Reagan shrugged. Rumsfeld seemed fine.
“Anyone else?”
“There’s always Bush,” Wirthlin said.
“George Bush will not be the running mate,” Nancy Reagan chimed in. That was the end of that discussion.
What about Connally? Casey jokingly thought to himself.
Roger Stone, the man who had counted the delegates exactly for the procedural vote, had snaked his way into the room here in an effort to steer them away from the Ford nomination. Now, he had his opportunity.
“Governor, I’ve been on the floor all day with these delegates, and your people have had one name that they’ve repeated over and over: Jack Kemp.”
Reagan thought about it for a moment. “I like Kemp. Anyone disagree?”
Wirthlin said he was worried that Kemp was too ideologically similar to Reagan — that he would cost them votes with independent voters. Stone brushed the concerns aside. “He’s a rough and tumble guy from Buffalo, New York. Working class folks love him.”
“What about the homosexual thing?” Lyn Nofziger, the communications man, asked.
“Will the press really cover that?” Reagan asked. “We can’t do that to Jack.”
“They won’t get into his private life,” Meese guessed. [8]
“Bill,” Reagan said to Casey. “Get me Jack Kemp.”
• • •
Just before 11 o’clock that night, the news had reached the Convention floor that the nominee would not be Gerald Ford after all. Instead, that night, Reagan would come down with a different nominee, who would be nominated and voted upon the next morning. Nobody could confirm who the new running mate was. When one Indiana delegate noticed that his home state Senator Dick Lugar had slipped off and hadn’t been around for the last hour or so, he pulled Lynn Sherr aside. “I think it’s Lugar,” he said. “Nobody’s seen him for the last hour.”
Sherr started asking around on the floor. Was it Dick Lugar? Had anyone seen Lugar? Nobody had seen him. In truth, he’d gone back to his hotel for dinner with his wife, but that didn’t stop the rumors from swirling. Sherr didn’t have enough to report the nominee was Lugar, but she had enough to raise the question on air.
“Ted,” she said, “we can’t say for sure who Governor Reagan is going to announce at the Convention, but I can tell you that just before word came down that it wasn’t Ford, Senator Lugar left the Convention Hall — possibly to take a phone call from Reagan. Nobody from the Indiana delegation has seen him for quite some time. We don’t what that means, but it’s very possible that Governor Reagan is preparing to announce Dick Lugar as his running mate.”
“That seems like conjecture, Lynn,” Ted said back. He was trying to be a voice of reason in an otherwise messy and chaotic evening.
“It’s all I’ve got to go on, Ted. The Reagan people haven’t let slip who the nominee will be.”
Then, she reported that Governor Reagan was “minutes away” from leaving for the Convention Hall. On the other side of the arena, Dan Rather broke more definitive news: The nominee would
not be George Bush, he said. He’d just gotten off the phone with a senior Bush aide who said that Reagan had not called Bush to offer him a spot on the ticket.
When word reached the floor that Governor Reagan was in the Hall, an eighteen-minute long euphoric demonstration gripped the delegates. “California, Here I Come” echoed through the arena and delegates blared their airhorns and chanted “We Want Reagan!” They got their wish. Just after midnight, Reagan stepped out onto the podium to an even louder explosion of cheers. Even the Connally delegates couldn’t control their excitement. Many of the Bush folks had left when they got word that Bush wouldn’t be the running mate.
The cheers went on for another twelve minutes before Reagan could speak. The whole time, he and Nancy stood at the podium grinning. When the euphoria died down, Reagan thanked the delegates for his nomination and confirmed he was there to name a running mate. Cheers broke out over the Hall once more.
The Indiana delegation was obnoxiously loud, blowing their airhorns and waving hastily-made “Reagan/Lugar” signs. All around them, other delegates were wondering if they knew something the rest of them didn’t.
When he could finally be heard again, Reagan continued, “I have asked, and I am recommending to this Convention, that tomorrow, when the session reconvenes, that Jack Kemp be nominated for Vice President of the United States.” Before Reagan could finish, the delegates had erupted once more. It was Kemp! An Indiana delegate reached over and grabbed his friend’s Reagan/Lugar sign. He reached for a sharpie from his back pocket, bit off the cap, and crossed out Lugar’s name. He shoved it back at his friend. It now read Reagan/Kemp.
The young New York Congressman walked out on stage and joined Reagan. More than 10,000 red, white, and, blue balloons descended from the ceiling as an hourlong demonstration took hold. The delegates danced and shouted. “RAY-GAN-KEMP” chants broke out among various delegations. They stomped and blew their airhorns some more. After a few minutes, Reagan and Kemp walked off stage, but the delegates carried on.
The next morning, they would meet again to formally nominate Jack Kemp as the running mate, but one Texan wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
July 17, 1980
Joe Louis Arena — Detroit, MI
John Connally was miffed that the whole conversation about a running mate never seriously included him. He’d been within a hair (he thought) of the nomination. Why wasn’t he given his due? And he wasn’t prepared to let the Reagan team get away with the slander around his 1974 corruption trial — the insinuations that he’d been guilty. It was all too much for him. He didn’t have any allegiance to this Party, and he was perfectly content to burn it all down.
No respectable reporter would’ve posed the question directly to Jack Kemp. Was he a homosexual? But the beauty of a nominating Convention is that Connally didn’t have to rely on reporters to get the word out for him — everyone who needed to know about the rumor was all packed into the same room. Once more, Connally called upon Haley Barbour to help.
Barbour had breakfast on Thursday morning with Robert Grant, the Chairman of Christian Voice. Grant had been solidly with Reagan throughout the primaries, but he’d always been cordial to Barbour, paying the Connally camp their due. While some, like Falwell, had dismissed Connally from the start and ignored the campaign’s calls, Grant had kept a line of communication open.
“Mr. Grant,” Barbour said, “I want to be very direct with you because we don’t have a lot of time. We’ve got to stop the Convention from ratifying the Kemp nomination.”
“I suppose you want Reagan to pick your boy?”
“Honestly, I don’t care who it is so long as he doesn’t choose Kemp. You see, I don’t know if you remember the whole scandal about a homosexual ring in Reagan’s office when he was governor.”
Grant looked at Barbour. He had heard the rumors, of course, and like most Reaganites he’d dismissed them. Barbour better have come with something better than this.
“Well, Mr. Grant, you’ll remember that while some of the accusations had been trumped up — rather unfairly, I might add,” Barbour said, as if he hadn’t played a part in exaggerating the charges, “we do know some things were true. There were homosexuals on the governor’s staff, and they did facilitate these — these — well, there’s no other word for it: these orgies. They facilitated them in a lakeside cabin —”
Grant cut him off. “I remember. What’s your point?”
“Well, Jack Kemp was on the governor’s staff at the time, and he was a part-owner of that cabin. And if you go back and read the initial column that started this whole mess, you’ll see that Pearson names an ‘athlete’ as a participant in the sexual acts.”
Grant choked on his steak and eggs. “Did Reagan look into this?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Grant, but I’m more than a little concerned about this. We can’t have a homosexual as the second most powerful man in this country,” Barbour said, “and who knows what would happen if word of this got out before the election. Certainly, your voters wouldn’t be able to vote for a ticket with a homosexual on it.”
Grant stood up from the table abruptly. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got to talk to Reagan’s men about this. Thank you, Haley. I won’t let them know it came from you.”
Haley nodded. He went back to his car where a young intern named Ralph Reed was waiting for him. “Did you get the flyers?”
Reed nodded at the backseat where several boxes were stacked up fresh off the printer.
“Let’s go,” Barbour said.
• • •
“What the fuck is this?” Roger Stone asked. He was staring at a bright pink printout with a photo of a young Jack Kemp on it. In bold black letters the flyer said: ASK JACK KEMP ABOUT HIS LAKESIDE CABIN. Stone looked around in disbelief. There was one on every chair. Half of the delegates were already holding them and murmurs were sweeping the floor. What did it all mean?
Stone knew well what was happening. Someone — the Bush folks or the Connally folks — had latched on to the rumors about Kemp’s sexuality. It was disgusting.
Ronald Reagan had already been confronted with the news when his first phone call of the day was from Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Helms, a darling of the Religious Right, was concerned about Reagan’s pick. “Governor, I don’t know how to ask you this, but did you pick a homosexual for a running mate?”
Not this again, Reagan thought to himself. He told Helms the rumors were bogus — that no investigation had ever turned up evidence that Kemp was gay. “We did a whole internal review after that mess,” Reagan explained, “and there was never any evidence that Jack Kemp participated in those parties.”
“Well, this is bigger than me now,” Helms admitted, “but I’ll do my best to keep our people in line.”
What did Helms mean? Was Jack Kemp in danger of losing the nomination vote?
Reagan’s team was thrown into chaos. Bill Casey was barking at Stone on the Convention floor, telling him to count votes and get his people in line. Ed Meese was phoning the delegation leaders and telling them they had to hold the line. Wirthlin was thrown into it, too, walking the floor and trying to find out if there was a draft movement taking hold for a different candidate.
Comically, Jeb Bush thought this might be his father’s chance to win the nomination and so he ran down to the floor to try and round up votes, but the archconservatives who were afraid of accidentally nominating a closeted gay man were not interested in nominating George Bush. Instead, they had another name in mind.
“Hey, where’d you get that?” Bush said, grabbing the young Ralph Reed as he ran by.
“What?”
“That button?”
Reed looked down at his button: Reagan/Helms. “Oh, they’re everywhere!” Reed said before he continued on.
The vote on the running mate was supposed to begin at 10 o’clock. By noon, it had been delayed twice, and the networks had no choice but to report the newest drama: Reagan didn’t have the votes for Kemp.
“Well, Walter, all I can say is put on a pot of coffee, this won’t be over for awhile. It seems that this morning concerns about Jack Kemp’s personal life took hold of the delegates. Twice now, the Party officials have delayed the vote on a running mate. We’re not sure if that’s because Reagan doesn’t have the votes, or if he’s reconsidering his nominee. It’s a mess.”
Neither conjecture was entirely true. Reagan was sure he had the votes to get his running mate approved, and he wasn’t interested in reneging his offer, either, but his staff couldn’t get ahold of Jack Kemp. They wanted to make sure he was still up for the job.
Finally, at 12:45pm, Kemp called Reagan and apologized for the whole mess. Reagan offered his own apology and made clear he still wanted Kemp on the ticket. The Congressman said he would be honored, and that he was looking forward to the campaign ahead. That was enough for Reagan. Nancy had a pit in her stomach — she wanted Reagan to call the whole thing off and go with Lugar or Rumsfeld. Reagan would have none of it. He’d made his choice, and he wasn’t going back now.
By 1:30pm, the vote on a vice presidential candidate had begun, and when it was over, 1,733 delegates voted for Congressman Jack Kemp of New York. Two hundred eleven delegates voted for Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, eighteen delegates voted for George Bush, and one voted for Anne Armstrong. Kemp had won comfortably, but the number for Helms was noticeable.
That night, Ronald Reagan accepted his Party’s nomination after one of the most dramatic Conventions in modern history. There had been a fight over the rules, the possibility of a second ballot for the nominee, rumors about a co-presidential ticket, and, finally, an effort to stop Reagan’s choice of a running mate because of rumors of homosexuality. There would never be another convention like it. Weary from the last four days, Reagan took to the podium uncertain about the race to come.
Reagan quoted Franklin Roosevelt and trumpeted an elongated version of his campaign slogan to make America great again. He closed:
“Can we doubt that only a Divine Providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe freely: Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain, the boat people of Southeast Asia, of Cuba and Haiti, the victims of drought and famine in Africa, the freedom fighters of Afghanistan and our own countrymen held in savage captivity.
“I’ll confess that I've been a little afraid to suggest what I'm going to suggest — I’m more afraid not to — that we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer.” [9]
John Connally cursed at the screen in his hotel room. That sonofabitch.
Crusade! That was Connally’s word.
>>>>>>
[1] It’s a little difficult to know exactly what the OTL convention rules were, but I was able to base my understanding on the possibility for an open convention based off of
this July 1980 Washington Post article. Of course, the context is different ITTL. While IOTL, Reagan wanted the rule changed so that Bush and Anderson delegates could go to him on the first ballot, he would want to keep his contingent together ITTL while Bush and Connally would want the open convention so they can have a fighting chance at the nomination.
[2]
The Lone Star, 576.
[3] This is a little bit of a play on Lynn Sherr’s breaking the news that the ticket IOTL would be Reagan/Ford: “We heard form Senator Schweiker that Senator Laxalt told someone else who then told Senator Schweiker that it would be Gerald Ford!”
[4] This is the closing of what might be Reagan’s greatest speech, his 1976 Convention address:
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreagan1976rnc.htm.
[5] Per OTL, according to Shirley’s
Rendezvous with Destiny (329)
[6]
Reaganland, 805.
[7]
Rendezvous with Destiny, 352.
[8] The
recent POLITICO article about gay men on the Reagan campaign had me seriously thinking about if I should use that to blow-up the Republican National Convention. The thought of Connally getting his hands on the notes McCloskey had in an effort to deny Reagan the nomination was just too good, I thought, to pass up. But ultimately, part of
Jimmy Two is meant to show the defeat of Reagan just as much as it is to show the victory of Carter, and it seemed difficult to imagine how Reagan would survive that, or, if he did, it seemed all but certain that he would not choose Jack Kemp as a result.
So, ultimately, we can say, if you believe the entire article, that the events preceding the Convention unfold differently enough that McCloskey does not put the pieces together in time to bring them to Connally — or the
Washington Post — before the Republican National Convention.
In OTL, Kemp was dismissed in part due to the concerns about his sexuality. ITTL, he obviously still makes it on to the ticket. Some may ask if this is too forced, but I don’t think so. The haphazard process that was Reagan’s running mate selection inspires very little confidence in the operation. It seems that even when he was the presumptive nominee weeks ahead of the convention, Reagan’s team had done little actual vetting or had few discussions about a running mate. Keep in mind that ITTL, there would be even less attention paid to the idea of a running mate because they’d have to make sure the nomination was sewed up first. It’s possible that this might’ve led to an earlier negotiation with Ford about his joining the ticket, but nonetheless, that part stays similar to OTL.
So, Ed Meese makes a mistake. The clock is ticking. Ron and Nancy have ruled out Bush because of how bitter the primary contest got — dragging out this long. Something about not rewarding bad behavior and all the rest. Without Bush, there’s no real obvious option. The idea of putting Baker on the ticket is flawed, as pointed out, and so the choices are Rumsfeld, Lugar, and Kemp. They go with Kemp here. Just as IOTL, it could easily have been any of them. Such was the way Reagan handled his veep selection process.
Some were probably nervous about if rumors of his sexuality would come up, but they needed a running mate and he didn’t seem any worse than Lugar, with his history of gaffes, or Rumsfeld with his ruthlessness and cunning — so why
not Kemp? Besides, they were told by their delegate-counting savant that there was an energy on the floor for Kemp (regardless of how reliable that report was). So, we get the ticket: Reagan/Kemp.
[9] From Reagan’s OTL address:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/doc...on-the-republican-national-convention-detroit
