As his second term as governor wound down, Reagan broadened his message, returning to his favorite theme: America’s place as God’s chosen nation. In a speech to the first Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), in January 1974, he quoted John Winthrop’s invocation of the community of Puritans “as a city upon a hill,” an image picked up via an address of John F. Kennedy’s.
You can call it mysticism if you want to, but I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.
Government might be failing, but Americans, he insisted, were not.
Reagan’s appetite to lead was evident. But as he neared the age of sixty-five, it appeared that his political career might be over. He’d promised not to run for a third term as governor, and he wasn’t interested in a Senate race. He had remained loyal to Nixon through Watergate, saying that the president should be presumed innocent and describing those after Nixon as a “lynch mob.” But Gerald Ford’s ascent to the presidency upon Nixon’s resignation blocked Reagan’s path. Preparing to leave Sacramento, he wasn’t sure whether to retire to the big ranch he and Nancy had bought in the Santa Ynez Mountains, north of Santa Barbara, or challenge Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination.
Ford’s pardon of Nixon in September 1974 created an unexpected opening. The announcement dissipated the new president’s initial surge of goodwill and cost him twenty points in his approval rating. In 1975 the undignified American exodus from Saigon, revelations about CIA misdeeds, and two bizarre presidential assassination attempts in seventeen days all contributed to a pervasive sense of national dishonor and disarray. “I must say to you that the state of the Union is not good,” the unelected president declared in his first State of the Union address. Ford’s inadequacy to the moment was captured by his impotent chirp at inflation in the form of WIN (“Whip Inflation Now”) buttons.
Ford’s haplessness bred discontent on the right. Battered by Watergate and the resignations of Vice President Spiro Agnew and President Nixon, the GOP lost forty-three House seats and four Senate seats in the 1974 midterm election. One of the four governorships it lost was California’s, for which Reagan left no heir. After the rout, the Republican National Committee made buttons proclaiming, “Republicans Are People, Too!” Some thought the party was so discredited that it should change its name. Reagan rejected this hand-wringing. No longer checked by the need for compromise with Democrats, he shifted right, to the available spotlight. In another speech at CPAC in Washington, he declared that the GOP should raise “a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand.”
As with “A Time for Choosing” a decade earlier, this passionate address made Reagan a hero to conservatives, who were irked by Ford’s announcement of a summit with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, his amnesty for Vietnam draft dodgers, and a tax increase framed as an anti-inflation measure. Politically, Ford’s worst decision was passing over Reagan in favor of Nelson Rockefeller for vice president. As rebellion brewed, Ford tried to sideline Reagan by offering to make him secretary of transportation or commerce, or ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—all of which Reagan declined. In the fall of 1975, Ford’s campaign manager hinted that the president might dump Rockefeller from the ticket. Reagan was not appeased; he decried the “shoddy treatment” of the vice president, whom Ford pushed into withdrawing.
Reagan wanted to run for president, but without being seen as a politician or breaker of the Eleventh Commandment. He framed his decision around his doubts about whether Ford could win and his concern about the growth of the public sector. Claiming that 44 percent of national income went to government, he described a federal bureaucracy that had “become more intrusive, more coercive, more meddlesome and less effective.” The real figure was 30 percent, but the idea that Washington was thriving at the expense of a stagnating country resonated. “In my opinion, the root of these problems lies right here—in Washington, D.C.,” Reagan declared in his announcement speech at the National Press Club. “Our nation’s capital has become the seat of a ‘buddy’ system that functions for its own benefit—increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker who supports it with his taxes.” Reagan asserted that he was “not a member of the Washington establishment.” He was “a citizen representing my fellow citizens against the institution of government.”
On the campaign trail, he would tell the story of a Chicago “welfare queen” who became his emblem of the problem. “She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards,” he said. “She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.” This story was largely accurate, but rested on a mistaken assumption. Middle-class whites who believed that federal social spending meant transferring their tax dollars to minorities thought that the welfare queen was black, as did Reagan. Linda Taylor, the person on whom this story was based, was actually white.
Where Reagan ran into trouble was on policy matters. A young aide was assigned to draft a new stump speech, which the candidate debuted before a business group in Chicago. As an alternative to the forty-year trend of transferring taxes and authority to Washington, Reagan proposed a program of “creative federalism.” The federal government could save ninety billion dollars a year by turning welfare, Medicare, and food stamps over to the states. Ford’s campaign developed its own analysis, suggesting the plan would raise unemployment, deepen the recession, and drive states into bankruptcy. In New Hampshire, which had no sales or income tax, the implications of the ninety-billion-dollar plan put Reagan on the defensive. A political error exacerbated the policy one. When his autocratic campaign manager, John Sears, sent him off to Illinois two days before the vote, Reagan didn’t question the decision. He ended up losing the New Hampshire primary by 1,300 votes, and because his aides had been confidently raising expectations, the press counted his narrow defeat as a large one.
After the New Hampshire debacle, Reagan shifted his ground to foreign policy. Revisiting the illusory “missile gap” that John F. Kennedy had trumpeted in 1960, he charged that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union militarily, and that Ford was accommodating the enemy instead of confronting it. “Détente, isn’t that what the farmer has with the turkey until Thanksgiving Day?” he joked. Reagan held Secretary of State Henry Kissinger responsible for Ford’s refusal to meet with the exiled Russian Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and for signing the Helsinki Accords, which, along with many on the right, he viewed as ratifying Soviet domination over the “captive nations” of Eastern Europe.
Ford’s response of banning the word détente from his vocabulary was characteristic of a vacuous campaign. In one empty speech, the president boldly defended homemaking from its alleged enemies. Reagan, meanwhile, was an appealing underdog, trading in ideas that had been percolating in the pages of the National Review and Commentary. Out of money after losing in Florida, Massachusetts, and Illinois, he resurrected his campaign with another prerecorded half-hour speech that ran on fifteen North Carolina television stations. His upset victory in that state put him back in contention. Now Reagan was winning—Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, and California. But the delegate math was daunting, and at every stop reporters asked him when he was going to drop out.
The race came down to a delegate fight in the last six weeks before the Republican convention in Kansas City. Though the primaries finished with Ford shy of the magic number 1,130, he needed the support of only 37 of 136 uncommitted delegates to secure the nomination. But as the press was on the verge of calling the race for Ford, Reagan grabbed attention back by announcing that he would select Senator Richard Schweicker of Pennsylvania as his running mate. This was both a play for uncommitted Pennsylvania delegates and a delaying tactic. Meanwhile, Reagan’s allies were harrying Ford’s supporters on the platform committee by proposing a “morality in foreign policy” plank that praised Solzhenitsyn and attacked the Helsinki Accords. The Reagan camp found a wily adversary, however, in Ford’s young chief of staff, Dick Cheney, who had recently stepped in to fix the broken campaign. Cheney’s trick for defanging Reagan’s ideological attack was quietly to capitulate.
Once it became clear that Ford could not be denied the nomination, the convention turned to the question of a running mate. Reagan was the obvious, unifying choice but, playing hard-to-get, he told Sears he didn’t want to be asked. Sears, not quite reading his boss, passed along the request that Ford not raise the question with Reagan. Ford chose Senator Robert Dole of Kansas instead. Being passed over only reinforced Reagan’s status as the sentimental favorite at the convention. On the final night in Kansas City, Ford called him to the podium; Reagan made a flourish of resisting, and then yielded to deliver an ostensibly spontaneous address that he had privately rehearsed. Recalling a contribution he’d made to a time capsule, he wondered what the future would think about those in the room. “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 100 years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction’?” To most of his audience, he still sounded like the Reagan of “A Time for Choosing.” But the call to prevent nuclear catastrophe afforded a glimpse of a Reagan the world didn’t know yet: not the Cold Warrior of 1964, but the peacemaker of 1986.