Destiny And Power - Destiny and Power Part 11
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Destiny and Power Part 11

Did the Republican Party of 1980 want to nominate a clear conservative (Reagan) or someone closer to the center (Bush)? Asked by reporters whether he was "to the left" of Reagan, Bush replied, "I'm perceived that way. If you had to choose between right and left [in relation to Reagan], I suppose it'd be left." Like Gerald Ford, Bush favored an Equal Rights Amendment; Reagan did not. Bush did not favor a pro-life constitutional amendment; Reagan did. Bush was not a big tax-cutter; Reagan was.

Reagan's most effective argument in the primary was that Bush was not a true man of the right; it was a case that Reagan, who resented Bush's use of the age issue, took up happily, linking Bush to the Carter administration with a broadside against a familiar conservative target: the Trilateral Commission. Reagan announced, ominously, that no fewer than nineteen current or former key members of the Carter administration had belonged to the Trilateral Commission. As, of course, had George H. W. Bush. Asked to clarify why membership in the group was a bad thing, Reagan adviser Edwin Meese III said that Trilateral thinking had led to a "softening of defense" because Trilateral Commission members believed, Meese said, "that trade and business should transcend, perhaps, the national defense." It was not a convincing argument, but Reagan's purpose in raising the whole matter was less to persuade the undecided than to motivate core supporters who had long been suspicious of the circles in which men like Bush moved.

With little more than two weeks to go before New Hampshire voted, and with tempers rising, the two men headed into two scheduled encounters in the third week of February: a seven-candidate debate in Manchester on Wednesday, February 20, 1980, and a one-on-one event in Nashua three days later, on Saturday, February 23.

- The first debate, at Manchester Central High School, produced little of substance, except that it featured Reagan's return to the heart of the race. Bush was determined to play it safe. "You don't win one of those things with seven candidates, but you can lose it," Jim Baker told the press.

The winner in many ways was Reagan, who complained that he was the victim of his own success in moving much of the party to the right. Given the generally conservative tone of most of the candidates' answers in Manchester, Reagan experienced the debate as a ratification of his own vision. "I kept hearing so many of my own positions over the years coming back at me that by the time it got to me," he said of the debate format, "I was worried there wouldn't be anything left to say."

In Reagan's steady performance in Manchester, Republican voters apparently saw what they wanted-and needed-to see. He went into the Manchester event a point behind Bush but surged after that first debate. In his pollster Richard Wirthlin's surveys, Reagan had a nearly two to one lead in New Hampshire as the weekend arrived. The highlight of the last few days of the race: the one-on-one debate between Reagan and Bush on Saturday, in Nashua.

- Reagan had initially agreed to the debate with Bush, their rival Phil Crane said, because the former front-runner was "hurting" and needed the debate to regain his standing. Post-Manchester, with Reagan's numbers shifting, the Reagan camp, led by John Sears, sensed an opportunity in Nashua. The plan in the forty-eight hours after Manchester: to surprise Bush on Saturday by announcing that Reagan wanted the debate thrown open to the whole field, depriving Bush of the stature that would come with a one-on-one contest.

If Bush agreed to the change, then he would be relegated to just another face in the crowd. Nashua would be Manchester all over again, with Reagan more likely to win the larger show with lower risk than in a two-man debate. If Bush resisted, then he would be seen as exclusionary and perhaps, in keeping with the anti-Bush arguments Reagan had been making, elitist. For Reagan, it was a win-win scenario. The other candidates-Baker, Dole, Anderson, and Crane (Connally was campaigning in South Carolina)-had objected to being excluded in the first place, and the Federal Election Commission agreed that the sponsoring newspaper, the Nashua Telegraph, could not underwrite a two-man debate. The two campaigns could, however, and the paper suggested that the Reagan and Bush camps split the bill.

In the hectic hours between Manchester, the scheduled event in Nashua, and the actual primary on Tuesday, the Bush campaign was uncertain about the wisest course to take. For two years Bush had longed to be seen as the best-and only-alternative to the aging Reagan. A one-on-one debate was perfect. But in a significant miscalculation in the chaotic run-up to Nashua-after Iowa but before Reagan surged post-Manchester-the Bush camp had briefly held the view that Reagan needed a debate with Bush more than Bush needed a debate with Reagan. Thus the Bush campaign's decision that if Reagan wanted the debate, then he should pay for it. Reagan had agreed, and, at midafternoon, he took the offensive, announcing that the debate should be open to the other candidates. Bush replied that he would abide by the previously set "rules" and would participate only in a one-on-one forum.

Backstage at Nashua High School that evening, Bush was waiting in one classroom; Reagan and the other candidates were in another. The Reagan camp decided to send New Hampshire senator Gordon Humphrey, a blue-collar conservative who had long disliked Bush, as an emissary to Bush. Humphrey pressed Bush to open up the debate for the sake of "party unity," a homily that infuriated Bush, who refused.

As Bush walked into the gym and took his seat on the stage-there were still chairs only for him, Reagan, and the moderator, Telegraph editor Jon Breen-he was unsure who would be following him to the dais. So were Reagan and the other candidates, who were all in the holding room. As Nancy Reagan recalled, someone from the Telegraph arrived with a message. "Mr. Bush is already on the stage," the Telegraph representative said. "If Mr. Reagan does not appear within five minutes, the debate will be canceled and Mr. Bush will be declared the winner."

There was some hesitance in the room, and the minutes were ticking by. Then Nancy spoke up: "Why don't you all just go out?" Already angry over the Telegraph's threat to call the whole thing off and give Bush an unearned win, Reagan, following his wife's sound counsel, led the others onto the stage. He briefly shook Bush's hand and tried to speak amid the noise of the crowd. Bush sat stonily, declining to look at Reagan, who asked if he could make a statement. "No," Breen said, further infuriating Reagan. The agreement had been for Reagan and Bush to debate and, like Bush, Breen was trying to stand by the original rules.

Reagan's face was flushed, his eyes fierce. Bush, by contrast, seemed, in the words of William Loeb, to be a "little boy who thinks his mother may have dropped him off at the wrong birthday party." Reagan insisted on being allowed to speak, remarking, "I am the sponsor and I suppose I should have some right." Breen, trying to assert some control over the proceedings, raised his voice and ordered the sound technician to turn Reagan's microphone off. "I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green," Reagan said. His misstatement of Breen's name was lost in the rising cheers of the crowd.

In Nashua, with the polls opening in roughly sixty hours, the audience was with Reagan, and Bush remained silent. "He froze," a Bush staffer told Newsweek. "It was a crisis, and our man failed to respond."

"Are you through?" Breen asked Reagan. "Have you concluded your remarks?" After another moment of tumult, Anderson, Baker, Crane, and Dole left the stage. "I'll get you someday, you fucking Nazi," Dole whispered to Bush. "Jim Baker," Dole said to Bush's campaign manager offstage, jabbing a finger into Baker's chest, "you'll regret this."

What was Bush thinking? "Of course, I looked terrible, no question," Bush recalled. "But I had accepted a set of rules, and I'd given my word, and I was going to keep it. Some of my father there, I think, and Mother, too: Play by the rules." There was also something else. The Reagan emissary at Nashua High, Gordon Humphrey, was one of the last people on the planet Bush was inclined to listen to. To Bush, Humphrey epitomized the right-wingers who seemed determined to oppose him at all costs for all time. The encounter with Humphrey would have been strained in any event, but the awkwardness was exacerbated by the circumstances. Because of the back-and-forth over who was to debate, things were running late-twenty-five minutes, by Bush's reckoning. The Telegraph organizers wanted to get on with it and had summoned Bush to the dais.

"On the way to the stage, after this long delay, I was stopped by a prominent Reagan supporter"-Humphrey-"who has been attacking me all across the State of New Hampshire," Bush later wrote Anderson, Baker, Crane, and Dole. "He asked me to have a joint meeting with you and the others and lectured me on the Republican Party."

In retrospect, Bush wrote, he should have taken the time right then to meet with Reagan and the other four, if only to make clear that the newspaper, not he, had made the rules. "A lot of misunderstanding might have been avoided," Bush wrote. Propelled by urgency from the Telegraph's staffers and angered over what he believed to be Humphrey's presumption in questioning his party loyalty, however, Bush did something he rarely did: He decided not to see things from the other guy's point of view. It was uncharacteristic-usually he took pains to talk things out personally before a situation could slip out of control-and he paid for the slip. "The producer was signaling me to the stage, the commitment that I had made [to the Telegraph] was on my mind, and the emissary was not exactly the ideal choice," Bush told the others later. He came to see that his poor showing at Nashua was rooted in his failure to be true to his lifelong instincts. "I wish we had been in personal touch," Bush told the others. "I'm certain that much of this unpleasantness could have been avoided."

Reagan considered the evening a failure of will on Bush's part. "I don't understand it," Reagan remarked. "How would this guy deal with the Russians?" Bush's ambition (for the head-to-head confrontation with Reagan) and his pride (unbending in the last, critical moments before Reagan's star turn) hurt him, deeply, at Nashua. "I looked like a fool," he recalled. "Not my finest hour, to say the least."

- The voting on the following Tuesday was a blowout for Reagan, who carried the primary 50 percent to Bush's 23 percent. "Congratulations, sir, you beat the hell out of me," Bush told Reagan in a concession call.

Beyond New Hampshire, Bush kept after the front-runner, arguing that Reagan was too far to the right to win in November. "If somebody asks, 'Are you more moderate than Reagan?' the answer would be very clear," Bush said. "Reagan has gone the far-over route." As Newsweek noted after New Hampshire, Bush "is hoping that voters will perceive him as more 'reasonable' than Reagan, not simply more liberal."

A defeat in moderate-to-liberal Massachusetts on Tuesday, March 4, 1980, then, could mean the end of the Bush bid. "We've got to win this primary," Bush told voters in Boston. Some on his own team thought everything hinged on it. On the evening of the New Hampshire loss, Jim Baker pulled Nancy Bush Ellis, who lived in Lincoln, Massachusetts, aside. "Now, Nancy, you all have to win Massachusetts," Baker said, "and I mean really win it." If Bush were to lose Massachusetts, said Silvio Conte, a Massachusetts Republican congressman, "Jerry Ford could and should enter the picture."

Ford stood ready. The former president summoned Adam Clymer of The New York Times to Rancho Mirage to make a startling pronouncement for the March 2, 1980, Sunday editions. Reagan, Ford said, could not prevail in November against Carter. "A very conservative Republican can't win in a national election," he said. Meaning, Clymer asked, that Reagan could not defeat Carter? "That's right," said Ford.

Credit 20.1 At what was to have been a one-on-one debate, Reagan dramatically insisted the other candidates be included; Bush sat stonily on stage. "Not my finest hour, to say the least," Bush recalled.

For Bush, the Ford interview was at once affirming and dispiriting. The former president's key point-that Reagan was too conservative to defeat Carter-suggested that Bush was fighting the right fight in his bid to win the moderates in the party and attract enough conservative support to stop Reagan. The problem was that Ford's remarks underscored Bush's own failure to defeat Reagan in New Hampshire.

Bush avoided disaster forty-eight hours later by winning in Massachusetts. To his supporters, Bush stood strong. "I wouldn't be deserving of your consideration if I got scared" of Ford, Bush said. "My plans are unchanged."

Little was going Bush's way. Ford loomed, and much of the rest of March was a misery for Bush as Reagan won South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Illinois. Late in the month Bush struck back, carrying Connecticut. Opponents fell away. Now facing only Bush and Anderson, Reagan swept Kansas, Wisconsin, and Louisiana.

In the middle of March, given Reagan's successes, Ford decided to end his flirtation with a campaign. "I am not a candidate," Ford told reporters outside his house at Rancho Mirage on Saturday, March 15, 1980. "I will not become a candidate." The hunger to avenge 1976 twice over-by denying Reagan the nomination and by defeating Carter-was deep, but Ford and his circle could not see a way to stop Reagan. "It uncomplicates our life in the George Bush campaign," Jim Baker said, gratefully.

The Ford withdrawal, however, was seen not as an opportunity for Bush but as the ratification of Reagan's success. "It's over," said Robert Hughes, an Ohio Republican leader. "Ford was the only guy with a shot at stopping Reagan." Indeed, nothing could change the fundamental calculus of the race after Reagan reasserted himself in New Hampshire. "I am discouraged," Barbara wrote on Monday, March 10. The next day she added: "It is bad to be on the road when your husband is losing." On the same day Ford declined to be a candidate, George W. telephoned his mother from Texas. "Young George called," wrote Barbara. "He's discouraged-like me!" Her main worries were personal, not political. "I feel we are very near the end of this long quest-Will I be able to cope with the letdown George will feel[?]," Barbara wrote. "Will I be enough? It has to really hurt."

Yet Bush would not surrender. "George is about the most competitive human being I have ever known," recalled Jim Baker. In the face of Reagan's primary victories, Bush reacted, Baker believed, with "the same determination he had shown at age eighteen, when instead of heading straight from prep school to Yale, he became a naval aviator in World War II." In Pennsylvania, he attacked Reagan's vision of lower taxes as a means to higher revenues as "voodoo economic policy" and "economic madness."

- The phrase "voodoo economics" originated with Bush press secretary Pete Teeley. Teeley had come across an editorial arguing that President Carter's economic policy seemed to have been put together by a group of economic "witchdoctors." It got Teeley thinking about how he might be able to use the metaphor against Reagan. What, he asked himself, do witch doctors do? "And then it hit me: They do 'voodoo,'" and I put it in Bush's speech," Teeley recalled. (Later, when the phrase continued to cause Bush trouble with the right, Bush said, "You know, Teeley, that's the only goddamned memorable thing you've ever written for me.") Bush prevailed in contests here and there. The race, he insisted after winning seventeen of twenty-one delegates in Maine in April, was "far from over." Overall, however, the math was close to impossible to overcome. Nine hundred and ninety-eight delegates was the magic number to clinch the nomination, and on the eve of the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, 1980, Reagan led Bush 577 to 109. Bush ran a pricey campaign in Pennsylvania, investing $1 million, a large portion of which paid for television time to broadcast "Ask George Bush" specials.

Bush won the April 22 primary there by a strong seven points-53 to 46 percent-and took great solace in the victory, believing it affirmed a new, if late, strategic shift. "Last January, he cultivated ideological fuzziness," wrote Hedrick Smith in The New York Times. "Lately, he has cast himself as the moderate against Mr. Reagan's conservative and has set out specific policy differences with the former California governor." Reagan acknowledged Bush's performance in Pennsylvania, but also said that he believed the contest was largely over. "I hate to tempt fate," Reagan said after the Pennsylvania balloting, but "I believe I am going to win the nomination."

Bush's win in Pennsylvania was followed by an equally impressive victory in Michigan on Tuesday, May 20, 1980. Yet when Bush turned on the news to savor his triumph, he found that two of the three networks were leading with a different story: that Reagan's same-day win in Oregon had put Reagan over the 998-delegate threshold. Was there any mathematical route for Bush to win the nomination? The answer, Jim Baker sadly concluded, was no. The only way to do it was for Bush to win the last big three primaries, all on June 3: New Jersey, Ohio, and California. Without all three the delegate numbers just weren't there. New Jersey and Ohio were doable, but California? Reagan's California? Competing there, Jim Baker remarked to reporters, would be "goddamn tough."

"If you can't do California, then you can't argue to people that you still have a shot [at the nomination] in terms of the numbers," Baker told David Broder and Bill Peterson of The Washington Post. "And once you concede that, why do you stay in?" The Post interpreted Baker's remarks as a de facto Bush withdrawal. Reporters in New Jersey, where Bush was campaigning, besieged the candidate. "Baker says you don't have anything going in California," came the question. "Does this mean you're dropping out?"

From a grim Holiday Inn, Bush got Baker on the telephone. According to Baker, Bush was "furious, and I [didn't] blame him." Bush had a question: What had Baker said, exactly? "I had only talked about not having enough money on hand to compete in California," Baker replied, "but I shouldn't have done it, I admitted, because it gave the impression that we had no choice but to pull the plug."

"George, I think it's time to get out of the race," Baker told Bush. The candidate didn't want to hear it. "No, Jimmy," Bush said. "If we can only get to California, we'll be able to turn this thing around."

"We just don't have the money," Baker said. "I wish to hell we did, but we don't, and I don't see how we can get it." The subject was too fraught, too complex, to decide on the phone. Would Bush come home to Houston for the weekend? They could discuss everything there.

Bush agreed. He would fly to Texas, and they would talk it all over.

- Jim Oberwetter, an old Texas political hand, was dispatched to Newark to bring Bush back to Houston on a private plane. "I picked him up, got him aboard, and he sat down with his back to the cockpit and the little bar there," Oberwetter recalled. "He usually had a glass of wine on a flight like this, so I poured him one at the front of the cabin and, as I was walking back, I looked over his shoulder. He was sitting with a writing pad on the table in front of him." In a bold, visible scrawl, Bush had written a note to himself: "I WILL NEVER GIVE UP. NEVER. NEVER."

In the sunroom looking out at the pool of their Houston house, the Bushes met through the weekend with Baker and other family members and advisers. "Look, we've got to fold this thing," Baker said. "We don't have any money; it's time. You've got to get out." The candidate was unimpressed. What about all the people who had worked so hard for him for so long? All the guys in New Jersey-Nicholas Brady, his chairman there, thought they could pull it out-and Ohio, and-well, and everywhere else. How could he quit on them after all they'd done for him?

Baker was direct. Every day Bush stayed in a mathematically unwinnable race, Baker argued, "would blow any chance" of earning Reagan's confidence and the second spot on the national ticket. Bush had been noticeably quiet about the possibility of becoming Reagan's number two, in part because Bush's own competitiveness did not allow him to contemplate life after defeat. He had been in it to win everything, and Baker recalled that Bush "always said privately that he wasn't sure if he was interested in being vice president."

That's what everyone said in the storm and strife of a presidential campaign, and everyone, including Bush, probably meant it when they said it. The fact of the matter, however, was that vice presidential nominees and vice presidents had a high success rate of becoming presidential nominees and presidents. Beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, who ran for vice president on the losing Democratic ticket in 1920, five of the eight presidents who served from 1932 to 1980 had been a vice presidential nominee or vice president (FDR, Truman, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford). If Bush were even remotely interested in being considered for the post, Baker said, he had to stand down now. "They have to start thinking who they're going to run with, and the longer you hang in if you don't have a mathematical chance of winning," Baker argued, "the more you're going to hurt your chances."

"I finally said, 'Okay, we're out,'" Bush recalled. "It hurt like hell."

Officially, the 1980 presidential campaign of George Bush lasted fifty-five weeks. Unofficially, he had been working toward the ultimate goal in American politics for nearly four years and had been thinking of it, in the abstract, at least since the mid-1960s. And still others-including Prescott Bush-had thought of it even longer ago than that. Dropping out was, Bush said, the "toughest decision of my entire life." Bush dispatched a congratulatory telegram to the uncontested nominee. "He was a superior campaigner," Reagan replied in a statement, "and I'm most grateful for his expression of support for my candidacy and his pledge to work for unity in the party."

Bush left the stage with grace, inviting his traveling press corps over to the house. A drop-in turned into lunch: Paula Rendon, the Bushes' longtime housekeeper, performed miracles, feeding dozens of unexpected guests. Bush took off his shoes and put on canary yellow pants and a blue shirt to reminisce, barefoot, by his pool in the late Houston spring.

The next day, Douglas Kneeland of The New York Times came by the house for a follow-up story. Forcing himself into good spirits, Bush, Kneeland wrote, jokingly pointed to a Yale alumni magazine on the coffee table. "That's the first time we've been able to put that out for months," he said with his crooked grin. He then picked up a copy of National Review on an end table. "I guess we can put this away now," he said, smiling still.

He was only kidding, of course. But the joke provided the reporter with a useful illustration of Bush's political plight. He was too Ivy League for the GOP's new grass roots and too conservative for the still-sizable though embattled moderate wing. The former would have hated seeing the Yale magazine; the latter would have been unsettled by the thought that George Bush actually read National Review (which he did). This was now Ronald Reagan's political world. The question was whether there was room for Bush, essentially a man most comfortable with the style and the substance of the GOP of the 1950s, in the party of the 1980s.

- Jim Baker thought there was-or should be-and publicly made that case in the wake of the Bush withdrawal. A key step for Reagan, Baker argued to the press, was resolving "the dispute over the Vice Presidency, over whether to pick a member of the 'movement' or reach out for someone who might be more acceptable to the electorate." Saying that Bush had "obvious vote-getting appeal in the major states that you have to win," Baker noted that Bush, who was, in Baker's words, from the "moderate side of the party," would "put to rest" concerns about Reagan's Washington and foreign policy experience.

There were forty-nine days between Bush's withdrawal from the presidential race and the opening of the Republican National Convention in Detroit. Bush had two things on his mind in those weeks: raising money and Ronald Reagan. He spent much of his time in June and early July working to retire an unexpected campaign debt. "There again is my father-'You've got to do it, pay owed money,'" Bush recalled. As he paid off the bills of the past, he was consumed with thoughts of the future-specifically, whether Reagan would choose him to run on the ticket.

On Wednesday, July 9, 1980, in the tenth-floor conference room of the Reagan for President headquarters in Los Angeles, pollster Richard Wirthlin was explicit: Reagan needed a moderate for vice president. In June, a survey of Republican National Committeemen and state party chairs found that the GOP leaders thought Reagan should pick a moderate, and they favored Bush for the job. (Bush got 58 votes to Howard Baker's 22 and Jack Kemp's 17.) At a $200-a-plate New York State GOP dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, Bush won a convincing victory in a vice presidential straw poll. He ran first, Howard Baker second. An intriguing name placed third: Gerald Ford.

The Reagan campaign polled eighteen possible tickets to test the relative strength of suggested nominees. The only name that did better than Bush's did was Ford's, but the former president had told Reagan during a visit at Rancho Mirage that he did not wish to be considered. Stu Spencer, a California Republican strategist with ties to Ford and to Reagan, followed up with Ford, asking, "Want me to pursue it?"

"Hell, no," Ford said.

That seemed to take care of that. Bush and seven others made what was essentially a final round when they were asked to submit health and financial information to the Reagan camp: Howard Baker, Donald Rumsfeld, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, Congressman Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan, Congressman Jack Kemp of New York, and former Treasury secretary William Simon. (On the eve of the convention, two other names emerged: diplomat Anne Armstrong of Texas and Governor Albert Quie of Minnesota.) A Gallup Poll in early July among Republicans found that Ford led Bush as the preferred vice presidential nominee, 31 to 20 percent. Howard Baker polled 15 percent, and John Connally 12 percent.

The math was clear. If Ford were unwilling to join the ticket as number two, then Bush was the smart choice. Thoughtful conservatives had already begun to make their peace with it. "If you wish, come out for a Reagan-Bush ticket; that is probably what is in the cards anyway," National Review publisher William Rusher had written to the magazine's editors as early as January 1980. Yet many other conservatives were convinced that choosing Bush would amount to a kind of movement Munich-a capitulation to the moderates they had been fighting since the Eisenhower era. Ernest Angelo, Jr., a longtime Reagan supporter who would chair the Texas delegation at the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit, had several delegates who said they would walk off the floor rather than vote for George Bush for anything, much less vice president.

The thinking was this: Why, at the movement conservatives' hour of triumph, elevate someone who was not one of them? As Jim Baker had seen in May, Reagan had to decide whether he wanted to anoint a running mate from the movement or from the more moderate precincts of the party-precincts that, while waning, could still help him in a significant way. Bush's victories in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Michigan proved that much. Bush, who was now enthusiastic about running with Reagan, was living for a call from the man who had bested him for the presidential nomination. Without the vice presidency, "I thought we were done, politically-finished," recalled Bush. He would go back to Houston, back to business. "It would've been tough-martinis and whose daughter was pledging Tri Delt, that kind of thing, but what the hell: We would've made a life. A different life than the one we'd had in mind, running as hard as we had been for the big job, but a life."

Bush was in the all-too-familiar position of having his fate in the hands of a man more powerful than himself. It had been this way with Nixon and with Ford and even, briefly, with Carter. Bush was always the supplicant, the man waiting on, rather than making, the call that brought clarity, place, and power. Almost exactly ten years had passed since his loss to Lloyd Bentsen had made him, it seemed, permanently dependent on the kindness of others. For a time-a glorious time-the presidential campaign had liberated Bush from his years of living or dying at the pleasure of bigger, more successful politicians. "I'd wanted to be president, no apologies for that," recalled Bush. "But 'Big Mo' didn't turn out to be so big after all."

The wondrous, happy frenzy of Iowa was irretrievably remote. Accustomed to motion, Bush was forced to be still-to bide his time, powerlessly. If Ronald Reagan wanted George Bush, then George Bush would be there, ready to fight to the last. If Reagan wanted him, Bush would give his all to the cause-he always did. If Reagan wanted him, Bush would be granted safe passage to the highest levels of the newly conservative Republican Party. If Reagan wanted him, all would be well.

Reagan, however, did not want him.

TWENTY-ONE.

Is George Bush There?

I thought we were done, out of it, just gone.

-GEORGE H. W. BUSH on a Reagan-Ford ticket in 1980 STU SPENCER, A REAGAN ADVISER since the 1966 California governor's race, could not remember the last time he had seen Reagan so worked up. On the flight from Los Angeles to Detroit, Reagan asked Spencer who he thought should be vice president. "I started out by telling him that I thought he had gotten the most conservative platform he could have hoped for, and that his base couldn't be happier or more enthusiastic," Spencer recalled. "So I said that, in my view, he should think about picking a more moderate guy, someone to reassure folks who weren't already with him. And the best man on that basis was George Bush." In response, Reagan "went off at Bush," Spencer recalled. "He was really pissed off at him."

"'Voodoo economics'-that did it," Reagan said.

Reagan talked more, unloading months of frustration with Bush. There was the age issue: The Reagans resented Bush's focus on physical fitness and stamina during the primaries, a focus that implied that Bush thought Reagan was too old for the White House. Then there was Nashua. The memory of Bush's freezing onstage that evening stuck with Reagan, a man for whom the telling image or anecdote was important. By staring straight ahead on the dais at the Nashua High School gym, a reaction that made Reagan's dramatic scene possible, Bush had cast himself, in Reagan's mind, as a spoiled child who turned petulant when things did not go his way, or, worse, as a man who didn't react well under pressure. That Bush had faced, and met, real tests of danger made no difference. It was monumentally difficult to dislodge something once it found its way into Reagan's imagination.

On the plane, listening to Reagan's diatribe, Spencer was puzzled. "This was very unlike Reagan, who almost never lost his temper the way other candidates do," Spencer recalled. "Bush had clearly gotten under his skin."

Spencer tried again. "Yes, Governor, but it's going to be to your pragmatic benefit to have someone who's more from the center, and that's Bush."

"You haven't been listening to me," Reagan said.

"No, I follow," Spencer replied, "but I also know you are a pragmatic guy, and Bush is the pragmatic move."

Reagan did not reply. He was tired of the subject. Surely there was some other answer.

- Movement conservatives arriving in Detroit had every reason to feel proud. The Republican Party was no longer what it had been in 1976, when the more moderate Ford had prevailed against the more conservative Reagan. For the first time in four decades, the Republican Party did not endorse the Equal Rights Amendment. The platform came out in favor of a pro-life constitutional amendment. It backed supply-side economics. And religious conservatives concerned about declining moral standards felt that, in Reagan and the Republicans, they now had a political ally in fighting a war to take American culture back from what organizations such as Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority saw as the excesses of the 1960s and '70s. "I feel this whole election is going to be won or lost here in Detroit by who is chosen for V.P.," an unnamed Reagan aide told The New York Times. "It's not that there's only one good choice. But there are some bad choices that could hurt us....The best choice is the one who most helps us win."

Presumably a "bad" choice would be a hardcore conservative who augmented Reagan's appeal to the right (New York congressman Jack Kemp was the chief example) rather than broadening his appeal to the center. "The message we want to get across," Edwin Meese told The New York Times on the eve of the convention, was that Reagan was "essentially a problem solver, that he is not rigid and doctrinaire."

With the exception of Ford, who brought the most strength to the ticket in polls, the numbers argued for Bush. According to Richard Wirthlin's surveys, 68 percent of voters thought that a congressional background was important for a Reagan vice president, and 58 percent believed it should be someone between the ages of forty-five and fifty-five. (Bush, the former congressman, had turned fifty-six in June.) The surveys found, too, that a running mate would preferably be "somewhat alike" to Reagan on the issues, but not "exactly like." Bush himself was running "well among 'soft' Repubs & Indeps and in Industrial States."

Sensing momentum toward a Reagan-Bush ticket, conservatives were hard at work in the corners of the convention to try to protect their victory. In Detroit, Ernest Angelo, Jr., the chairman of the Texas delegation and a Reagan supporter, went to a meeting in Jesse Helms's suite. He found the right-wing North Carolina senator and his circle plotting to put Helms on the ticket with Reagan. Phil Crane was also trying to whip up support for himself. Angelo wanted Reagan to choose Jack Kemp, and he realized that impractical intramural right-wing agitation was only going to divide the conservatives and possibly open the way for a moderate. "If Senator Helms and Phil Crane don't stop trying to be the VP themselves," Angelo told the group, "you're going to ruin Jack Kemp's chances, and George Bush is going to wind up on the ticket."

The others were furious. "They nearly threw me out of the room," Angelo recalled. "It was not well received." But it was sound counsel. Moderates were upset with the platform, increasing the chances that Reagan would reach toward the center rather than toward the right on the vice presidency. Or so went the chatter. No one yet knew what Ronald Reagan was going to do-including Ronald Reagan.

- The Bushes arrived in Detroit aboard Delta flight 860 just before nine o'clock on the morning of Sunday, July 13, 1980, and checked into the Hotel Pontchartrain on Washington Boulevard. It was going to be a long week. Reagan was expected to reach a final decision on a running mate on Tuesday night at the earliest. An announcement would not come until Wednesday; Thursday, the day of Reagan's acceptance speech, was also a possibility.

As Bush looked over his schedule for the next few days-three simple typewritten pages-he saw a list of receptions, caucus and delegation meetings, luncheons, and dinners. If nothing changed-if Reagan chose someone else as vice president-then Bush's last commitment was to address the convention at the Joe Louis Arena at eight P.M. on Wednesday. After that, there was only white space, and the story, Bush believed, would be over.

The front page of Monday's New York Times had a suggestion of good news as Bush prepared for a day of meetings in Room 15 on the Terrace Level of the Hotel Pontchartrain with Bush delegates. President Ford had "told associates that he thinks Mr. Reagan's smartest choice politically would be Mr. Bush," the Times wrote. "The sources said that he was planning to advise the former California Governor to pick Mr. Bush" during a meeting on Tuesday.

Cheered by such reports, Bush began the emotionally taxing work of releasing his delegates from their commitments to him. Hour after hour on Monday, he thanked his supporters and then asked them to make Reagan's nomination unanimous. It wasn't easy. Every face Bush saw, every hand he shook, every small cheer he heard carried him back to the primary trail, to the months and months of hope and toil. Yet it had to be done. They came all day, one after another, beginning with Alabama and Arkansas at eight thirty in the morning and ending with New Jersey, New York, and Tennessee at six in the evening.

Meanwhile, as Reagan arrived in Detroit on Monday, July 14, he remained committed to what Jim Baker called a strategy of "ABB-Anybody But Bush." That afternoon the Reagans called on the Fords at the Detroit Plaza. (The Reagans were on the sixty-ninth floor, the Fords the seventieth.) Reagan brought his old rival a gift: an Indian peace pipe. Ford appreciated the gesture; the tension of 1976 was becoming more manageable. Ford, after all, was a creature of a congressional culture in which it was generally counterproductive to hold grudges. One might not forget, but one could forgive, or pretend to, as new circumstances arose and alliances shifted.

The former president who had said "no" to Reagan at Rancho Mirage and "hell, no" to Stu Spencer on the subject of the vice presidency went over to address the convention at the Joe Louis Arena on Monday night. "Some call me an elder statesman," the former president told the cheering delegates. "I don't know. I don't mind telling you all that I am not ready to quit yet....Elder statesmen are supposed to sit quietly and smile wisely from the sidelines. I've never been much for sitting. I've never spent much time on the sidelines. Betty'll tell you that. This country means too much to me to comfortably park on the bench. So when this convention fields the team for Governor Reagan, count me in."

Reagan was struck by Ford's words. The next day, Tuesday, Reagan chose to believe that a Reagan-Ford ticket was possible. Reagan's motivation was basic. He had an election to win, and his pollster had told him that a Reagan-Ford ticket would be the strongest against Carter in the fall. The distance between possibility and reality was great, and Reagan began his bid to close that gap in a meeting with Ford in the Reagans' suite in the early afternoon. Bush was finishing a session with his Pennsylvania delegates at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn when Reagan and Ford sat down together at the Detroit Plaza. "I know what I'm asking," Reagan said to Ford, "and I know that you've made it plain already that you didn't want anything of this kind, but I'm asking, will you please reconsider?"

"I don't think there's any chance of it," Ford replied.

Would Ford think about it overnight? Reagan asked. There was still time. Reagan had decided to schedule a press conference for eleven o'clock on Thursday morning to announce his running mate. The choice would then be ratified by the convention before Reagan's acceptance speech that evening. Ford remained overtly skeptical but said he would consider it.

After the meeting with Ford, Reagan encountered some reporters on the way to a meeting with delegates. Asked about his conversations with the former president-word was out that Reagan was wooing Ford-Reagan said, "I just sought his counsel and advice. We just discussed all the people who are presently under consideration. He made no recommendations. He analyzed and gave his thoughts on everybody."

He made no recommendations: The man who had been said to be ready to recommend Bush to Reagan had failed to do so. For Bush this was a discouraging sign. Ford could have told Reagan no (again), made the case for Bush, and gone about being an elder statesman. Yet the pull of power was strong, the desire to exact retribution against Carter great. Ford was a politician, and the allure of politics had not faded-that much was clear from his prolonged flirtation with seeking the presidential nomination. The vice presidency wasn't everything, but it was something-and it was possible that Ford, as a former president, could make it into something even more.

While Ford returned to his rooms to consider the conversation with Reagan, Bush was taking part in a panel discussion hosted by the Youth for Reagan delegation at the Ford Auditorium on the riverfront. The subject? "America: The Next Decade."

Back at the Detroit Plaza, Reagan advisers Bill Casey, Ed Meese, and Mike Deaver met with Henry Kissinger to see if the former secretary of state would help them make the case to Ford to accept a place on the ticket. Late Tuesday night, Kissinger, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Ford adviser Jack Marsh met with the former president. According to political writers Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, Kissinger and Greenspan suggested exploring "the possibilities for Ford to have a significant role in policy"-at which point Ford "didn't cut off the discussion."

Ford rose early on Wednesday, July 16, 1980, for an interview with Tom Brokaw on NBC's Today show. "I know it must be very hard, once you've been President, to be Vice-President of the United States," Brokaw said. Asked whether pride would keep a former president from returning to Washington as vice president, Ford said, "Honestly, if I thought the situation would work, if all the other questions could be resolved, the problem of pride would not bother me in any way." Left unspecified was what, exactly, "all the other questions" were. Figuring that out-or trying to-was the business of the coming day. Advisers to Reagan and to Ford sat down to explore how a Reagan-Ford administration would work. Which meant, in translation, what would Reagan have to promise Ford to draw the former president onto the ticket?

Possibilities included a Vice President Ford serving as a kind of super White House chief of staff with a mutual veto over key appointments; control of the paper flow into the Oval Office; and an expanded, if unspecified, role with the National Security Council. Another would have had Ford serving simultaneously as vice president and as secretary of defense and national security adviser. There was also talk of a scenario that included Kissinger returning as secretary of state and Greenspan coming in as Treasury secretary.

Dick Cheney, the former Ford White House chief of staff who was now representing Wyoming in the U.S. House, was in a meeting with some other Ford allies on Wednesday when Bill Casey, Reagan's campaign chief, walked in with the Reagan team's initial and provisional response to the Ford camp's suggestions about an expanded vice presidential role. "It was mind-blowing," Cheney recalled. "Major role on the budget, major role on foreign and defense policy. Ford had asked for a hell of a lot, and they'd agreed to a hell of a lot."

- The Reagan-Ford rumors were being dissected everywhere-including inside Jimmy Carter's White House.

Despite the polling that showed Reagan-Ford as the strongest ticket against the incumbent in the fall, Carter's high command liked what it was hearing out of the enemy's convention. Jerry Rafshoon, the president's communications director, discussed the Detroit chatter with Carter chief of staff Hamilton Jordan.

"We thought this could be a break for us," Rafshoon recalled. "The view on our side was that Reagan-Ford would probably work in our favor because it played right into our arguments that Reagan couldn't be trusted with the presidency. If the Republicans nominated Ford to be vice president, then it would look as though even Reagan's own party didn't think he could handle the big job without supervision, without somebody around to make sure he wasn't too quick on the trigger."

- Back in Detroit, one key figure was never convinced that a Ford vice presidential scenario would work under any circumstances. Always protective of her husband, Nancy Reagan "thought the whole idea was ridiculous." Her view: "I didn't see how a former president-any president-could come back to the White House in the number-two spot," Mrs. Reagan recalled. "It would be awkward for both men, and impractical, and I couldn't understand why that wasn't obvious to everybody." She told her husband so directly. "It can't be done. It would be a dual presidency. It just won't work." Yet as the Wednesday evening session of the convention drew near, the talks continued.