Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked (2 page)

When we switched from Air Force One to the presidential helicopter that election morning, I couldn’t help thinking about the vanquished candidate sitting right there ahead of me in
Marine One.
He looked so rigid as to be frozen, or even, as it gruesomely occurred to me at the time, to be in the early stages of rigor mortis. Yet at that moment, he was still the president of the United States and so, despite everything, was being briefed by staff on matters unrelated to the situation he was now having to face. Couldn’t such a business-as-usual exercise have at least been put off, if nothing else, for decency’s sake? As I’ve often told people over the years, that helicopter ride into Plains was like being inside a giant bird, one that was dying.

As we headed low over the swirling grass, the reality of small-town Georgia suddenly came into view. Then a scratchy voice sounded over Secret Service chief Jerry Parr’s walkie-talkie: “Dancer’s on the ground.” Mrs. Carter was there, waiting. Plains was where they were from, and it was where they would soon be headed back. On the ground, I walked past the train depot where, four years before, Carter had appeared on the platform to be applauded and cheered after winning the presidency. Passing the little station building, through the window I glimpsed two people alone in the room—Jimmy and Rosalynn. He’d asked to tell her himself. Just the two of them were now standing there. The long journey he’d convinced her to take with him was ending in defeat.

• • •

There were those in the Carter White House who believed that Ronald Reagan—a popular governor of California who’d made his name and fame originally in the movies, and later on TV—was the “best” Republican candidate our man could face in his reelection campaign. To them, Reagan seemed a handsome, likable lightweight, reliant on feel-good rhetoric and upbeat platitudes. However, by the fall of 1980, with the race in full swing, the Carter staffers saw the exorbitant price of this mistake.

For my part, I was about to experience from a punishing vantage point just how hard it was to beat Ronald Reagan.

It’s not that there hadn’t been warnings from those who’d previously made the mistake of underestimating him. Former California governor Pat Brown, denied a third State House term in 1966 by a Reagan landslide, had dropped in at the White House back in the spring specifically to pass on those lessons he’d learned the hard way.
“You’re going to say he’s an actor and it won’t work,” Brown explained to Carter communications director Gerald Rafshoon. “That
he’s not really that smart and it won’t work; that he’s lazy and it won’t work.”

What he was describing with earned exasperation was the difficulty of getting any contempt, scorn, insult, or even past position to stick to Reagan. Under attack, the man was a master. However, having seen him lose the Republican nomination to Gerald Ford only four years earlier, we knew Ronald Reagan wasn’t invincible. The trouble in the fall of 1980 was, he could well be something far worse: inevitable. The main asset any Republican candidate brought to this race for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was that he
wasn’t
Jimmy Carter.

Reagan had already proved to be more than that. Beaten by George H. W. Bush in the Iowa Republican caucus in late January 1980, he rocketed back five weeks later with a decisive win in New Hampshire. There he not only disarmed the local voters but captivated the entire country when he sharply rebuked the moderator of the candidates’ debate who’d asked to have Reagan’s microphone switched off during a dispute.
“I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green,” he reminded the fellow. Which was quite true—even if the man’s name was Breen, not Green—since the Reagan campaign treasury was indeed footing the bill for the event.

It was the perfect moment for a man who’d picked and long perfectly played the role of a lifetime: the heroic citizen-politician. Yet his nifty retort up in New Hampshire also made for an homage to Reagan’s own Hollywood past, appropriating brilliantly a line from Frank Capra’s 1948 political drama,
State of the Union
. At the end of the movie, Spencer Tracy’s character, vying for the Republican presidential nomination, must also fight for his right to speak. “Don’t you shut me off, I’m paying for this broadcast,” he threatens.

Still, despite such warnings as Pat Brown’s, Carter staffers continued
to pin their hopes on Reagan securing his party’s nod. With his right-wing foreign policy, his old notions about making Social Security contributions “voluntary,” and his early crusading against Medicare, Ronald Reagan appeared a more obviously vulnerable target than a serious contender like Bush or Gerald Ford (had he jumped into the fray). Looking back, I’d have to say certain Carter people were in a state of denial as we watched this guy keep on coming.

Reagan’s superbly delivered quip, however, wasn’t the only legacy of his New Hampshire victory. On the eve of that triumph he made the decision to reshape himself politically.
Choosing a new campaign manager, conservative Irish-Catholic William J. Casey, who headed the OSS—the predecessor to the CIA—in Europe during World War II, he moved his base of operation off the West Coast. The man who spent his free time with the newly wealthy of Southern California was going gritty, forging a connection with the kinds of voters he’d not previously courted. Whatever roles Reagan had chosen to play in recent years, on and off the screen, he was now pushing further back into his life’s repertoire.

It had been in 1940 that Reagan, then twenty-nine years old and only three years into his movie career, had been cast as George “the Gipper” Gipp in the film
Knute Rockne—All American
. It was the part of the stricken Notre Dame football hero whose famed deathbed words, “Win just one for the Gipper,” would years later rally Notre Dame to a comeback victory. It now offered the presidential hopeful an evocative nickname. It would be one that spelled votes.

Forty years later, the surviving “Gipper” began aiming his campaign directly at those disaffected Democrats—the Irish and Italians and Polish-Americans, and other hardworking, proud, but frustrated citizens who just didn’t “get” Jimmy Carter, who were
furious at the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, enraged at our flags being burned and trampled on by bearded militants from a place we didn’t want to hear about—who were more than ready to hear his message.

Reinventing himself, Reagan was no longer the Hollywood guy, the hunk in swim trunks or jodhpurs. Instead, he’d morphed into if not quite an Irishman’s Irishman then certainly a recognizable fellow ethnic. He was entitled, of course, being descended on his father’s side from immigrants who’d left County Tipperary behind in the mid-nineteenth century. But it also amounted to more than that. Like the cowboy stars who
became
their characters—John Wayne, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry—Reagan would smoothly sand over where reality began and scripts left off. Now he wore the aura of a Notre Dame hero, though one who’d never actually attended Notre Dame, and became a beacon to its “subway alumni” across the country. They, plus millions of other folks just like them, soon would be known by quite a different name: “Reagan Democrats.”

Along with the other Carter speechwriters, I watched Reagan dominate the Republican convention that summer. You couldn’t help admiring a guy who would come up that summer with such a neatly confounding bait-and-switch as this: “
The president lately has been saying that I am irresponsible. And you know, I’ll admit to that if he’ll confess he’s responsible.” What’s the answer to that? You only dig yourself in deeper with every attempt.

And not only was Reagan, once anointed his party’s choice, putting the blame for the country’s seemingly sorry state on the man in the White House—which is standard operating procedure for any opposition candidate—but there was something about his reach that struck me as truly audacious. What he seemed to be implying was that everything wrong in the world was now the fault of Jimmy Carter. His taking such an approach forced his rival, for his
part, to defend absolutely everything voters didn’t like—
absolutely everything
—beginning, not ending, with the humiliation of having our flag trampled on every night by scruffy, hateful Iranians.

Reagan had a mischievous way of sticking Carter with this burden of all things bad. “
Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, ‘Well done’? Can anyone compare the state of our economy when the Carter administration took office with where we are today and say, ‘Keep up the good work’? Can anyone look at our reduced standing in the world today and say, ‘Let’s have four more years of this’?” He was forcing voters to imagine themselves as cheerleaders for a gridiron squad that again and again kept fumbling the pigskin.

Throughout the summer, the polls remained too close to draw any conclusions. Then, on Labor Day, came the first sign of real trouble. My wife, Kathleen—we’d gotten married that June—and I were spending that holiday Monday enjoying Georgetown. Toward evening we stopped by a Wisconsin Avenue college bar to check the news. I’d written Carter’s big campaign kickoff speech, which he’d given earlier that day at a picnic he was attending down in Alabama. After he’d read my draft, he told me right there in the office—talk about an unusual occurrence!—how much he liked it, making me eager to see how it played on the networks. Suddenly on the TV screen above the bar appeared a tanned Ronald Reagan looking happy and relaxed, in his shirtsleeves. Standing, attractively windswept by the harbor breezes, the Statue of Liberty to his back, he spoke about our country and the hopes it stood for. His punch line was that the Democrats had betrayed those hopes.

“I’m here
because
it is the home of Democrats,” he said in explaining his presence in Liberty State Park. “In this country,” he went on confidently, “there are millions of Democrats who are just as unhappy with the way things are as all the rest of us.” He was celebrating
those millions of immigrants that New York’s harbor has welcomed over so many decades. “They didn’t ask what this country could do for them, but what they could do to make this refuge the greatest home of freedom in history. . . . Today a president of the United States would have us believe that dream is over, or at least in need of change.”

Ronald Reagan grasped the deep-running need shared by Americans to feel positive about their country and themselves. He himself believed completely in the brighter, shinier world of which he spoke, and his conviction was infectious. Jimmy Carter, a decent and honest man, had notoriously gone on national television the year before, offering a somber speech that faced the present and the future squarely but was barren of the blue skies Reagan now reminded Americans they had coming as their birthright.

Carter was never to live down the fallout from that speech, and with a reelection campaign looming on the horizon such a downbeat address had been far from strategic. Carter certainly had ample cause to share his concerns—about energy consumption, and each citizen’s personal role in energy conservation—with his constituents. Yet he broached these subjects without suspecting how unpopular they would eventually make him, convinced that telling difficult truths would itself rouse the country to its time and its historic tasks. During that broadcast, now known as the “malaise speech,” Jimmy Carter hadn’t actually even used the word
malaise,
yet in speaking to the press, his pollster-advisor Patrick Caddell had framed the speech’s themes that way, thus tarring Carter with its doleful stoicism.

Jimmy Carter was, it turns out, too much the smartest guy in a small town, a governor whose great virtue back in 1976 had been that he wasn’t incumbent Gerald Ford and that he was untainted by proximity to Nixon, Watergate, or Washington. His current rival,
also originally a small-town boy, and a two-term governor, appeared to be a figure out of a different solar system, and not only because he’d been a Hollywood star. The much-anticipated, long-awaited debate between the two, when it finally came, took place in the political eleventh hour, just a week before Election Day. It happened in Cleveland, and was a game-changer, though not to the incumbent’s advantage.

By the next afternoon after that debate, traveling with the president I could assess the very visible lack of excitement at upstate New York Democratic rallies. It amounted to negative reinforcement, telling me what I didn’t want to know about the results. Next to Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter hadn’t, with all his sincerity and earnestness, been able to seize a single advantage during the debate. There, at the Cleveland Convention Center, it had been Ronnie’s evening from beginning to end. He’d been calm, confident, and even a bit condescending.

This time, the line of his that passed into history was the humorously reproachful
“There you go again.” Triggered by prim Carter statements characterizing Reagan’s sometime stands on Social Security, Medicare, and the possibility of universal national health insurance, it said nothing and everything at the same time. Just four words, and it was all he needed to convey his message when it came to Carter’s own problems. The challenger was putting the incumbent in his place, and the effect was devastating.

For Jimmy Carter, Iran had become a political wild card. When, at daybreak a year earlier, the American Embassy in Tehran had been stormed by militant students, with more than fifty diplomats and staff taken hostage, his calm handling of the crisis had initially brought strong public support. The effect, in this early period after the standoff began, was to make him invulnerable to the challenge to his renomination posed early on from the left by Senator Edward
Kennedy. But as the months began turning into an entire year and the hostages remained in the control of their captors, the stagnant situation and the American powerlessness it came to symbolize became a reflection on Carter himself.

It was hard to argue otherwise. The fact is, the Iranian government had given its support to an act of war committed against the United States. According to the State Department,
“any attack on an embassy is considered an attack on the country it represents.” What could be clearer? For most Americans, the situation in Tehran was just one more example—along with rising OPEC oil prices and the then increasing domination of the American auto market by Japanese competition—of how our country was getting kicked around. But if there was an alternative to Carter’s course it wasn’t visible then and hasn’t revealed itself since.