Cover

Prologue
A NEW BEGINNING

“I believe this generation of Americans today also has a rendezvous with destiny.”

July 17, 1980

Ronald Reagan stood before the multitude of cheering Republicans in Detroit's Joe Louis Arena, at long last master of all he surveyed.

Millions of his fellow Americans watched on television. Most had little choice, as the three networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—dominated the airwaves and promised gavel-to-gavel coverage. Cable was in its infancy. The upstart Cable News Network, only five weeks old, also was covering the Republican convention, but with its tiny audience and seemingly quixotic mission of providing twenty-four-hour news coverage, most political pros regarded CNN as Ted Turner's folly.

A tiny, hidden fan blew lightly on Reagan's face at the podium to keep him from sweltering. Several strands of his forelock wafted gently in the stirring air. Reagan, sixty-nine, was dressed handsomely and impeccably in a dark suit, every crease sharp. With his aging but still handsome movie star profile and aw-shucks grin, he appeared to be an oasis of cool in the oppressive summer heat.

Everybody on the floor, however, was sweating heavily. Convention planners failed to appreciate that the thousands of gesticulating, dancing, partying, delirious Republicans packed into the arena—far more than official capacity of twenty thousand allowed—would raise the temperature and overwhelm the air-conditioning system unless the facility was precooled for hours ahead of time. A heat wave had ravaged the nation for three weeks; Detroit's daytime temperature had topped out at 97 degrees on the second day of the convention. Nobody on the floor seemed to mind the sticky conditions, though.

Fortunately, fashion had changed dramatically since the last time Republicans had gathered to nominate a president. Sensible summer suits for men in 1980 were made of breathable, lightweight cotton, wool, and poplin, more loosely tailored and with narrower lapels. They had replaced stifling, tightly woven polyester suits, with garish colors and wide lapels that made every man look like a John Travolta wannabe. Women, too, had gone from the suffocating and unflattering synthetic pant suits of 1976 to cooler, more comfortable natural-fiber dresses and skirts. Long hair had also gone out of style, for both men and women.

Times they were a changin' in both style and substance.

Conservatism in 1980 no longer meant a calcified status quo—it represented change. For the first time since Reagan's boyhood hero Franklin Roosevelt transformed the political landscape, conservatism posed a serious challenge to the reigning liberal orthodoxy. The conservative “movement,” of which Reagan was the avatar, was changing the way Americans viewed their government and their world. Conservatism was leading the sprint away from the 1970s, one of the most dispiriting decades in the history of the American Republic. Reagan, the maverick populist, had wrought a fusion between the “Social Right” and the “Sociable Right,” and the moderates in the party would have to get comfortable riding shotgun in the new GOP.

As the Wall Street Journal aptly put it, “What was extreme conservatism 16 years ago, now is politics with mainstream appeal.”¹

After two generations in which FDR's New Deal coalition dominated American politics, Reagan had emerged as the Republican answer to Roosevelt: a larger-than-life father figure who would bring his party out of the wilderness and demoralized Americans into the sunshine.

His opponent, President Jimmy Carter, was increasingly seen as a latter-day Herbert Hoover, a hapless incarnation of do-nothing incompetence. The great campaign biographer Theodore White said of Carter, “Approach him with pity. He has been caught up and crumpled by the hand of history more cruelly than any president since Herbert Hoover.” Of Reagan, White said, “Approach him with self-protecting skepticism. He is the most instantly charming and likeable candidate for the presidency since John F. Kennedy.”²

Reagan's new GOP had discarded “détente,” the slow-motion surrender of the West to the Soviets. Tax cuts and reductions in the size and scope of government had replaced balanced budgets as the centerpiece of the party's economic policy. On social matters, Reagan espoused a muscular yet spiritual message: the power of parents over that of the “nanny state.” It all emanated from Reagan's devotion to freedom as the organizing principle of his new Republican Party.

It was hard to believe that just four years earlier, in the wake of the Watergate scandals and the Republicans' devastating electoral losses, the punditocracy was giving last rites to the GOP.

The bloodbaths that had dominated Republican conventions for the past forty years were over, or at least masked over. Even the liberal Republican senator from New York, Jacob Javits, a chronic Reagan critic, was a Reagan delegate in Detroit.

Wall Street, too, was learning to love the populist Reagan. When he had announced his candidacy the previous November, the Wall Street Journal wrote in an editorial, “For political packaging, we do not need to turn to a 68-year-old man.” The paper conceded eight months later that Reagan had “learned something.”³

Now the man of the moment stood astride the new GOP, high above the convention floor. In large white letters below the nominee, across a blue half circle, the theme of the convention read, “together … a new beginning.” Hundreds of red and white carnations adorned the rostrum.

On either side of Reagan across the large stage were the many and varied leaders of the revived Republicans. Congressman Jack Kemp of New York; party chairman Bill Brock; Senator Bob Dole of Kansas; Ambassador George Bush, Reagan's running mate; House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Arizona; and of course, according to homey political tradition, the Reagan and Bush families, including Barbara Bush, a bored-looking George W. Bush, and a beaming Nancy Reagan.

Unfortunately, the most important Reaganite of all, Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, the national chairman of Reagan's campaign, was missing. He had left the night before, after nominating his old friend Ron. Rumors held that Laxalt was dismayed over the last-minute choice of Bush, a Connecticut-bred Brahmin, for VP.

BY 1980 TELEVISION HAD become the nation's fully dominant cultural force. Network reporters were firmly affixed atop pedestals in American culture as paragons of knowledge—despite their frequent fatuity, as when rising star (and future tragic figure) Jessica Savitch of NBC asked a GOP operative later in the year how it was that the delegates at the Republican convention could then go to the Democratic convention and be just as enthusiastic.⁴ Some complained that TV reporters were too intent on making news rather than simply reporting it, as in the case of the “co-presidency” debacle between Reagan and former president Gerald Ford the night before in Detroit. What had started as idle gossip—a Dream Ticket—had become a full-blown imbroglio, much of it fed by ill-informed TV correspondents.

Many print stories in 1980 were devoted to the reporters, the anchors, and the resources the networks invested in the national conventions. In addition, a new trend featuring network anchors interviewing network reporters about network coverage of conventions was inaugurated in 1980. Television reporters increasingly beheld themselves like Narcissus transfixed with his own image. This phenomenon would only accelerate in coming years.

Yet all of these trends were mere eddies in the face of the mighty political currents at work in Detroit in 1980. A tsunami was beginning to crest over America.

Jack Kemp—football star, college phys-ed major, self-taught historian and economist—understood this better at the time than almost everybody else. In speaking to the GOP convention two nights before Reagan's speech, Congressman Kemp had said, “There is a tidal wave coming. A political tidal wave as powerful as the one that hit in 1932.”⁵

The 1932 election was one of the few profoundly meaningful elections in American history. Most elections are only breezes that gently buffet the ship of state. Several, though, have been torrential storms, dramatically changing America's course. The election of 1980 would prove, like those in 1800, 1860, and 1932, to be one of the most consequential in American history, radically altering the future and giving rise to a new generation of conservatism.

BILLY JOEL'S ALBUM Glass Houses topped the charts and his hit “It's Still Rock and Roll to Me” was the number-one single in the country. The number-four album in the country was the movie soundtrack to the Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, a sentiment that could have been the theme for the resurgent Republicans this night.

The mood of the rest of the country, in contrast, was dark, brooding, and apprehensive. Americans faced the second-worst economic calamity in the nation's history, behind only the epochal Great Depression.

Gasoline—when it was available—had nearly doubled in cost over four years, rising from 77 cents to $1.30 per gallon and more.

Taxes, not including Social Security, had gone up 30 percent, but income had risen only 20 percent.

Unemployment was closing rapidly on 8 percent, but this statistic was deceptively low. Millions of despondent Americans who could not find work had simply dropped out of the job market. Some projections had joblessness rising to 9.4 percent by the end of the year.⁶

The economy was in negative growth, with factories shuttered across the country. But inflation continued, as it had for three years, in double digits—depending on the day and hour, 17 percent, 17.5 percent, 18 percent. A new word had been coined: “stagflation,” meaning a combination of inflation and stagnating growth, a worst-of-both-worlds scenario that economic textbooks said could not exist.

Few places were as bad off as the city in which the Republicans were gathered. Detroit had become an economic basket case, spiraling downward after the 1967 race riots accelerated “white flight” to the suburbs. The anemic state of the auto industry contributed to the city's decay. Still, Detroit officials had done their best to put on the dog. Almost three dozen decrepit buildings were razed, another fifty painted or boarded up. Junk cars were towed away and thousands of trees and shrubs were planted to spruce things up. Even outdoor water fountains that had not operated for years were turned back on. Joe Louis Arena itself had been built just the year before, at a cost of $57 million. More than two thousand cops were patrolling the city's streets to ensure that nothing befell the Republicans. Meanwhile the Coast Guard was standing watch on the Detroit River, and hundreds of sheriffs, state troopers, and Secret Service agents were also on hand.⁷

Along with economic disaster, a spiritual depression was afoot in the land. For the first time in the national consciousness, parents did not believe their children's future would be brighter than it had been for them. Many didn't feel good about their country anymore.

A malaise had descended upon America.

Conditions were equally bleak in the international arena. The America of 1980 was confronting a so-called Cold War, but with 55,000 young Americans killed in Vietnam and another 33,000 killed in an earlier quagmire on the Korean Peninsula, it was difficult to see this “long twilight struggle,” as JFK put it, as anything but a hot war.⁸

The Soviets were on the march after invading Afghanistan a year earlier and were arming anti-American guerrillas in Central America and Africa. The Soviet embassy in Washington was regarded as nothing more than a forward operating post for the KGB. America's military might was a thing of the past, and many GIs were on food stamps. The Eastern bloc was running amok and the West was losing. South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and other countries had fallen to Communism. NATO was withering, and Italy in the '70s had come within a hairsbreadth of voting into power a Communist government.

Dominoes were falling across the globe.

Yet despite America's troubles, and despite the low esteem in which Jimmy Carter was held, the odds were stacked against Reagan. Americans did not like to kick presidents out of office. In twenty previous elections dating back to 1900, only twice—in 1912 and 1932—had the American people found sufficient reason to boot the elected incumbent. More presidents in the twentieth century had left the White House feet first than had been given their walking papers by the American voter.

THE ROAD AHEAD FOR Ronald Reagan would be rough, but the road behind had been strewn with many hazards. In 1980 he made his third try for the Republican Party's nomination. This was his last chance, after he lost in 1968 to Richard Nixon and again in 1976 to Gerald Ford. The defeat in 1976 was particularly bitter. His fight against President Ford had grown nasty and had been carried all the way to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City.

Awful things had been said and written about Reagan, and not just by liberal editorialists. Some of the worst had come from the GOP establishment and self-appointed conservative leaders. Reagan was in many ways a libertarian, distrustful of the abuses of governmental power—including abuses by overzealous conservatives, some of whom viewed government as a weapon to be used against those who dared oppose them. Many in the New Right had opposed this candidacy, supporting other, more malleable contenders. They remained wary of him.

So, too, did many on the left. David Lucey was the son of Pat Lucey, the Democratic governor of Wisconsin who became independent presidential candidate John Anderson's running mate in 1980. The younger Lucey recalled in an interview, “People on our side of the spectrum in 1980, we thought [Reagan] was a nutcase.”⁹

Reagan's uphill climb, especially over the past four years, had been nothing short of remarkable. He had defied doubts about his age, his wisdom, his endurance, and his capacity—doubts not only from his political opponents but also from his own party and even top aides. He had also overcome a hostile media; a sometimes balky campaign operation; his own mistakes, gaffes, and indifference to the management of his last quest; and several bona fide heavyweight contenders for the 1980 GOP presidential nomination. His campaign had utterly collapsed seven months earlier after the disastrous loss in Iowa's caucuses to George Herbert Walker Bush. Only through sheer force of will did Reagan right himself and his campaign and turn it around to win the nomination.

Even in the past twenty-four hours Reagan had had to overcome big obstacles. He had picked Bush to be his running mate only at the very last moment. He so resisted the notion of choosing Bush, the obvious choice to some if not to the Reagans themselves, that the Gipper had seriously pursued the Dream Ticket with Ford. Just a day earlier, the entire assemblage in Detroit—the media, the delegates, the hangers-on, the operatives—was convinced that the two men would go under the gun and marry at the political altar. Negotiations between Ford's and Reagan's representatives didn't break down for good until near midnight. Having exhausted all options, Reagan only reluctantly called Bush.

Henry Kissinger, Reagan's old nemesis, was the Machiavellian behind the “co-presidency” idea. In the end, his presence and demands helped torpedo the deal. One Reaganite had the last word on the role of Kissinger's obstinacy in the negotiations when he said, “For the first time in my life, I felt sorry for the North Vietnamese.”¹⁰ Kissinger, who had negotiated Nixon's “peace with honor” end to the American military presence in South Vietnam, was interested in maintaining his own proximity to power, insisting on a major foreign-policy portfolio in any Reagan-Ford administration. It was a self-serving, behind-the-scenes role Kissinger had played in the past. During the 1968 presidential race, he had hedged his bets by relaying sensitive information to both the Nixon and Humphrey camps.¹¹ Realpolitik, indeed.

If politics was the art of the compromise, the art of the possible, the unlikely ticket of Reagan and Bush proved it. Both had to get over their mutual dislike and make possible a “team of rivals”—something many considered unlikely, if not impossible. Two years earlier Reagan had campaigned against Bush's son George W. in a Republican congressional primary in Texas, prompting U.S. News & World Report to write, “A Ronald Reagan–George Bush ticket for the Republicans in 1980? Party leaders who like the idea now say personal animosity between the two all but rules it out.”¹²

REAGAN WAS BORN IN 1911, only a few years after Teddy Roosevelt had used the presidential “bully pulpit” to exhort America. TR once said, “The only true conservative … sets his face toward the future.”¹³

Yet, rather than the old Rough Rider, it was another Roosevelt, a Democrat named Franklin, who was Reagan's favorite president and inspiration. FDR unveiled a new phrase at the Democratic National Convention in June 1936. The theme of his speech to his fellow Democrats and all of America was that the country had a “rendezvous with destiny.”

Roosevelt told the Democrats, “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations, much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”¹⁴ Though the nation was still struggling in the depths of the Great Depression, FDR was giving his fellow countrymen hope. In telling Americans of their “rendezvous,” he was revealing that they and their country had a future, something many did not believe possible.

FDR's words were prescient, as this “greatest generation” went on to defeat the Empire of Japan and Nazi Germany and then, with typical American magnanimity and generosity of spirit, rebuild those war-torn countries to get them back on their feet as prosperous democracies.

The phrase “rendezvous with destiny” had its roots in a poem about World War I by Alan Seeger, a young American who had volunteered to join the French Foreign Legion. His poem was entitled “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” That was unfortunately true, as Seeger was killed on July 4, 1916, during the battle of the Somme, at Belloy-en-Santerre, just days after his twenty-eighth birthday. His poem was published posthumously. John Kennedy so loved the romantic style of Seeger's poem that his wife, Jacqueline, memorized it and repeated it to him often.

Seeger's phrase “rendezvous with death” was adapted for FDR's convention speech by a member of Roosevelt's original “Brain Trust,” the famous—or notorious, depending upon one's point of view—Tommy “The Cork” Corcoran. A New Dealer since day one, Corcoran was FDR's political fixer and had virtual run of the White House.¹⁵ Corcoran was helping with Roosevelt's speech for the convention in Philadelphia when he paraphrased Seeger's poem, transforming it into “rendezvous with destiny.” Years later Corcoran, bent and aged, told his tale to author and Bush confidant Vic Gold.¹⁶

Listening to FDR that night in June 1936 was a twenty-five-year-old radio broadcaster at WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, known to his audiences as Dutch Reagan. The young man fell in love with the phrase “rendezvous with destiny.” To him there was something lyrical, something magical and heroic, about FDR's idiom.

At the time Reagan was a New Deal Democrat. He would not switch his registration to the GOP until much later in life, when he was fifty-one years old.¹⁷ As he progressed in life and politics, he retained FDR's idealism and would use the expression in all his important speeches, even as he evolved from a “hemophiliac liberal,” as he later put it, to a populist conservative.¹⁸

In October 1964, only two years after becoming a Republican, Reagan at the last minute was asked to give a nationally televised speech lauding the presidential candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater. Toward the end of the speech, Reagan told his studio audience and millions of Americans, “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We can preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.”¹⁹ Reagan's fiery remarks electrified conservatives everywhere. The speech was later released as an LP album entitled Rendezvous with Destiny.

But the GOP of 1964 was far different from the party of sixteen years later. The party in 1964—eastern-based and dominated by country clubs and corporate boardrooms—deemed Reagan's phrase unsophisticated and the man himself a vulgarian. Serious Republicans simply did not talk that way. It was tacky.

Reagan did not back away from the phrase. As the post-Nixon Republican Party struggled for relevance in early 1975, Reagan used it in a speech before the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. The speech was widely regarded as one of Reagan's most important to the conservative movement, as it laid down critical ideological markers.²⁰

Reagan turned to the phrase again in November 1979 when he announced his third and final attempt at the Republican Party's presidential nomination. This Reagan, more hopeful, also quoted his favorite political philosopher, Thomas Paine, telling the American people, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

SINCE THE TIME WHEN he was just a shirttail kid, Reagan had been infused with heroic dreams. He had read Horatio Alger's books as a youngster, books about poor but honest and brave boys who were rewarded in the end for their character. He had dreamt of being in the cavalry, leading the charge. He had come a long way from those small towns in the Midwest that novelist Sinclair Lewis derided.

Reagan sprang from those quintessentially small-town values that the worldly liberal Lewis mocked as parochial and philistine. Ronald Reagan was in fact born on “Main Street,” in an apartment above the local bank building in Tampico, Illinois. His father, John Edward Reagan, was an alcoholic Irish-American who, when working, sold shoes. Reagan's mother, Nellie Wilson Reagan, was a devoted member of the Christian Church who worked with the needy, sometimes even inviting released convicts to stay at their home.²¹

Reagan and his brother, Neil, had a comfortable relationship with their parents, so much so that as children, they called their parents by their first names. In turn, the boys were always called “Moon” and “Dutch.” As a baby, Reagan's father nicknamed him, exclaiming when his second son was born, “Why he looks just like a fat little Dutchman!” As the boy grew older, he refused to use his Christian name, Ronald, thinking it was sissified. After becoming president, residing in the upstairs quarters of the White House, Reagan would often joke that he was “living above the store again.”²²

It was from his mother that Reagan inherited his faith in the goodness of people. His humanitarian streak would surface throughout his life. Once in the 1950s he received a letter from a despondent woman, deeply worried about her young son, who was suffering from depression. Reagan was the little boy's hero. Reagan did not want to simply show up at the door, knock, and ask for the youngster, so he devised a plan to go through the boy's neighborhood, as if he were taking a survey for General Electric. He arrived, clipboard in hand, to interview the starstruck child. Reagan engaged him in conversation and gave him advice on life. The mother wept at Reagan's kindness. She and her son asked Reagan to stay in touch. He of course did.²³

By 1980, that world had changed completely. The verities of pre-Vietnam America seemed to be a thing of the past. Cynicism was not only rampant—it was fashionable.

STANDING ON THE DAIS in Joe Louis Arena, Ronald Reagan gave his remarks accepting the nomination of the Republican Party for president of the United States. Reagan used strong sentences and powerful prose to make his case against Jimmy Carter, against big government, and for his conservative approach, whose centerpiece was “family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom.” The nominee mentioned but three presidents: Lincoln and FDR warmly, Carter less so.

Reagan called on all his fellow countrymen, not just Republicans, to join his crusade. “I want to carry our message to every American, regardless of party affiliation, who is a member of this community of shared values.”²⁴ He made an open appeal to the young, considered a Democratic constituency. “They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems; that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities.”²⁵ He also appealed to labor and minorities. In reaching out to these groups, Reagan was asking for the support of staunch members of the Democratic Party's coalition who were being taken for granted by the incumbent Democrat; he was “breaking precedent,” as he had quipped the night before.²⁶

Like any good leader, Reagan knew that he needed to tell a story to make his case. As a Hollywood veteran, he realized that all good scripts contain three essential elements: introduction, conflict, and resolution. His landmark speech in 1980 reviewed the state of affairs in America—its awful conditions and his bold solutions.

Noting the thousands of Americans he had met on the campaign trail, Reagan observed, “They are concerned, yes; they are not frightened. They are disturbed, but not dismayed. They are the kind of men and women Tom Paine had in mind when he wrote—during the darkest days of the American Revolution—‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’”

The former Democrat then returned to FDR, saying, “Nearly 150 years after Tom Paine wrote those words, an American president told the generation of the Great Depression that it had a ‘rendezvous with destiny.’ I believe this generation of Americans today also has a rendezvous with destiny.”²⁷

Approaching his conclusion, Reagan told the assembled and those watching across America, “I ask you not simply to ‘Trust me,’ but to trust your values—our values—and to hold me responsible for living up to them. I ask you to trust that American spirit which knows no ethnic, religious, social, political, regional, or economic boundaries; the spirit that burned with zeal in the hearts of millions of immigrants from every corner of the Earth who came here in search of freedom.”²⁸ Many of the delegates wept.

As Reagan neared the end of his speech, he hesitated, as if debating whether to continue. He went ahead, albeit haltingly. “I'll confess that I've been a little afraid to suggest what I'm going to suggest. I'm more afraid not to. Can we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer?”²⁹

More than twenty thousand people fell silent.

Solemnity covered Joe Louis Arena, and only the mechanical sound of the air conditioning could be heard faintly in the background. Several moments passed. Reagan then lifted his head, looked out at the GOP convention, and ended the proceedings by saying, in a voice husky with emotion, “God bless America. Thank you.”³⁰

A roar erupted from the Republican faithful. Reagan's apotheosis was complete; his conservative crusade was officially joined.

LIKE HIS POLITICAL HERO, Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan had a clear vision of what he wanted to do if he got the job of president. He, too, had a rendezvous with destiny.

Reagan's first job was in 1926, as a lifeguard at the Rock River in Lowell Park, near his home of Dixon, Illinois. “I saved 77 lives,” Reagan proudly asserted many years later. The high school boy, tall, athletic, and good-looking, would notch a mark on a wooden log for every life he saved.³¹

His instincts as a lifeguard never left him. In 1967, at a poolside party, a little girl fell into the water and quickly sank to the bottom. No one noticed what happened except for Governor Reagan, who, while still in his suit, jumped into the pool and saved the child.³²

Now the former lifeguard sought the challenge of a lifetime.

Ronald Reagan was out to save America.

RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY

CONTENTS

Foreword

Prologue
A NEW BEGINNING

RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY

CONTENTS

Foreword

PrologueA NEW BEGINNING

Prologue
A NEW BEGINNING