Reagan’s near miss and Ford’s defeat at the hands of Jimmy Carter in the 1976 general election made Reagan the leading contender for the Republican nomination in 1980. It also left him with his pick of opportunities. He turned down an invitation to deliver conservative commentaries on the CBS Evening News, then the most powerful news platform in the country, on the theory that people would get tired of looking at him. Instead, he resumed the daily radio commentaries he’d begun writing after leaving Sacramento until declaring his presidential candidacy in 1975. Combined with giving speeches, this was a way for him to earn money and continue influencing the Republican Party at a time when it controlled no branch of the government. Most important, a syndicated radio presence ensured that he would remain a political force at an age when many dismissed him as too old to contend again for the presidency.
Reagan’s commentaries were eventually carried on 286 stations and ran as a column in 226 newspapers across the country, reaching a combined audience of 20 million people. Well into the era of its eclipse, he grasped the persistent power of radio. Reagan understood the intimacy of the invisible human voice and the way it let listeners fill in a picture with their imaginations. His future secretary of state George Shultz recalled once having the president mark up a foreign policy speech he had written. “You’ve written this so it can be read.… That’s perfectly appropriate,” Reagan said to him. “But I talk to people—when they are in front of me, or at the other end of a television camera or a radio microphone—and that’s different.”
The handwritten drafts of those 1970s radio commentaries refute the stereotype of Reagan as an “amiable dunce.” They show him to be intellectually engaged and serious-minded, if narrow in his frame of reference, which relies heavily on the conservative press. They also provide the clearest answer to the question of how Reagan moved from being a candidate of the far right to uniting the Republican Party around an ideology whose main features endure to this day. At the heart of the commentaries is Reagan’s view of the “good natured, generous spirit that has been an American characteristic for as long as there has been an America” and its conflict with growing state control, represented by “the road our English cousins have already taken.” Reflecting on his presidential campaign in his first commentary after the election, he notes his belief “that if government would someday quietly close the doors; if all the bureaucrats would tiptoe out of the marble halls, it would take the people of this country quite a while to miss them or even know they were gone.”
Many of the commentaries concern American military vulnerability and, while cogently argued, often contain nonsense he had accumulated from right-wing sources. “Apparently the Russians have a laser beam capable of blasting our missiles from the sky if we should ever try to use them,” Reagan says in a May 1977 commentary seemingly drawn from his Brass Bancroft movies. He attributes to “Nicolai” Lenin the claim that “it would not matter if ¾ of the human race perished; the important thing is that the remaining ¼ be Communist.” (When I visited the Reagan Presidential Library in 2015, this quote was stenciled onto one of the walls, still a passed-along fake, but now correctly misattributed to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.) But if Reagan discussing the Soviets sometimes sounded like Goldwater on shore leave, in one curious respect he did not. He thought it possible, as he wrote in an October 1975 commentary, “that they will see the fallacy of their way & give up their goal” or that “their system will collapse.”
It’s his repetition in that commentary of that word collapse that signals Reagan’s departure from conventional right-wing thinking. Reagan saw communism as an “incompetent and ridiculous system” that ultimately couldn’t withstand a full-throttled moral and military challenge from the United States. He made a hobby of collecting jokes expressing the dissatisfaction of Soviet citizens with their system. The Commissar came to the collective farm to see how the harvest was doing and asked a farmer. The farmer said, “Oh, comrade commissar! If we took all the potatoes, they would reach the foot of God.” “Comrade farmer, this is the Soviet Union. There is no God.” “That’s okay, there are no potatoes.” Some journalists covering Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign assumed he anticipated nuclear war with the Soviets. In fact, he envisioned an American victory without war, a view going back to his Hollywood experience of licking the Communists without getting his clothes dirty. He thought Soviet totalitarianism could be pressured to succumb in the same way.
The earliest evidence of Reagan’s belief in Soviet forfeit is a statement entitled “Are Liberals Really Liberal?” typed on his personal stationery and bearing his handwritten notation “Written around 1962.” After expressing skepticism that the Soviets would moderate their behavior based on American accommodation, he explained his alternative approach. “The other way is based on the belief (supported so far by all evidence) that in an all out race our system is stronger, and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause. Then a noble nation believing in peace extends the hand of friendship and says there is room in the world for both of us.” Reagan reused exactly those words in one of his commentaries. And what might prompt the Soviets to give up? In 1977 he picked up on the story of a discontented Russian shipyard worker who wanted to bring his family to the West for a better life. “Maybe we should drop a few million typical mail order catalogs on Minsk and Pinsk and Moscow to whet their appetites,” the old appliance spokesman proposed.
Reagan’s optimism about the Soviets could sound naïve, which is why he kept some of his views to himself after declaring his candidacy again in November 1979. The neoconservatives he began meeting through his foreign policy adviser, Richard V. Allen, also obscured his personal opinions. Reagan cited the movement’s most influential article, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which distinguished authoritarian regimes from totalitarian ones on the basis that the former, which respected property rights, could evolve toward democracy, while the latter could not. But Reagan himself believed something different: that while Communist regimes were indeed the worst, they were doomed as a violation of human nature.
And while he agreed that the United States was prosecuting the Cold War with insufficient vigor, he harbored doubts about its fundamental doctrines. Reagan didn’t accept containment because he wanted to reverse Soviet domination. He doubted deterrence because he didn’t believe it would keep America safe, and also because he thought the Soviets didn’t believe in it. He found the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) both morally repugnant and absurd, comparing it to “two westerners standing in a saloon aiming their guns to each other’s heads—permanently.” In July 1979 he visited the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the underground nuclear command center in Colorado. There he was dismayed to learn there was no way to defend against Soviet missiles except by launching a massive counterstrike. He left worrying that, as president, he’d have only two choices in the face of attack: “to press the button or do nothing.”
What might be the alternative? In a memo following up on the visit, his aide Martin Anderson suggested pursuing a “protective missile system.” Reagan liked the idea, but his military advisers wanted to keep him on the firmer ground of opposing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that Nixon had signed with Brezhnev in 1972. The logic behind the treaty was that the ability to defend missile silos against intercontinental ballistic missiles, which was largely conceptual at that point, could drive a new race to build multiple-warhead missiles able to defeat ABM systems. Reagan opposed the ABM Treaty, along with the unratified SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitations) Treaty, as reflections of a stability logic he doubted, and because of an overriding skepticism about arms control agreements in general. He frequently recommended a book by his friend Laurence Beilenson, The Treaty Trap, which argued that nations abide by agreements with other nations only so long as it remains in their self-interest, and that peace treaties never lead to peace.
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For the first several months, Reagan’s 1980 campaign was run once again by John Sears, who insisted on full control as the price of his participation. In 1976, Reagan had been the candidate of the right, but this time Sears wanted him to be a unity candidate, which meant emphasizing President Jimmy Carter’s failures rather than drawing distinctions with more moderate primary rivals such as George H. W. Bush, Howard Baker, and Bob Dole. Sears pushed out the old Sacramento loyalists he found threatening, including the two aides closest to Reagan, Ed Meese and Mike Deaver. But in the Iowa caucuses, Sears miscalculated by keeping Reagan aloof from voters and ducking a debate. After Bush won Iowa in an upset, Sears reversed tack, putting his candidate on a bus tour around New Hampshire and asking for a debate.
Reagan and Bush, the two front-runners, agreed to debate each other without the other, more marginal candidates on the Saturday before the primary. When Dole complained to the Federal Election Commission that this would constitute an illegal contribution to the two campaigns by the Nashua Telegraph, which was sponsoring the debate, the Reagan campaign agreed to foot the cost of the event. Sears then played a trick on Bush, inviting the four excluded candidates to show up at the event. When they all walked onto the stage, Jon Breen, the editor of the Telegraph, was incensed. Standing by the prior agreement, he ordered that Reagan’s microphone be shut off. “I paid for this microphone, Mr. Green,” Reagan testily insisted. Bush, pretending to ignore the commotion and staring straight ahead, was memorably described looking like “a small boy who has been dropped off at the wrong birthday party.” Nothing else said at the debate mattered. Three days later, Reagan beat Bush by a wide margin.
But Reagan’s inner circle had lost confidence in the authoritarian Sears, who expressed blithe unconcern about the campaign’s precarious finances. It was Nancy Reagan who finally stepped in to get her husband to deal with the situation. On voting day in New Hampshire, before the results came in, Reagan fired Sears and two of his close allies. Deaver and Meese were back in charge, along with a new campaign manager, William J. Casey, a Wall Street lawyer and former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In contrast to Sears, the philosophy of the old Sacramento hands was to “let Reagan be Reagan.” He more or less locked up the nomination by mid-March, though Bush did not concede until late May.
Bush was the logical running mate, providing both geographic and ideological balance. But Ron and Nancy considered him whiny and, based on what they’d seen in Nashua, a poor performer under pressure. Reagan wanted former president Ford in the supporting role. He flew to Ford’s golf course office in Palm Springs to sound him out. Ford couldn’t get comfortable with Reagan, describing him astutely as “one of the few political leaders I have met whose public speeches revealed more than his private conversations.” He told the presumptive nominee he wasn’t interested. But when Ford delivered a rousing speech to the Detroit convention that seemed to indicate interest, Reagan went back to him, and Ford didn’t shut the door.
Wooing Ford to join a “dream ticket,” Reagan aides got carried away and stumbled into proposing a kind of copresidency. This interested Ford, but was less appealing to Reagan than sharing an office with George H. W. Bush. Reagan pulled his offer to Ford and extended one to Bush, who eagerly agreed. Reagan’s acceptance speech the following night promised a balanced budget, lower taxes, and a reinvigorated military. He quoted Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 Democratic Convention pledge to reduce government and make it solvent, without any recognition of the irony that, faced with the irreconcilability of his goals, Roosevelt in office had embarked on a massive expansion of the federal government.
In September, polls showed Reagan and Carter running neck and neck. But Carter had emerged from the Democratic convention damaged by Ted Kennedy’s vigorous primary challenge, much as Ford had been damaged by Reagan’s in 1976. Liberals were disenchanted with Carter. Many in the center, meanwhile, were swayed by John Anderson, a liberal Republican congressman running as an independent. On the right, by contrast, an energetic movement was united behind Reagan. Neoconservatives, free-market economists from the Chicago School, and less reputable supply-siders generated a stream of ideas. Dozens of conservative publications popularized and promoted them. A new type of Washington institution turned them into policy proposals. The old model of the Washington think tank, the Brookings Institution, was neutral-liberal. The new model was activist-radical. Its avatar was the Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 with funding from the conservative tycoons Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife.
Another component of Reagan’s coalition was newly politicized southern evangelicals, who had voted mostly Democratic in previous elections. Their nominal leader was Jerry Falwell, who founded the Moral Majority in 1979. A religious revival had been gathering force, in reaction to the cultural transformations of the 1960s. Recreational drugs and sexual freedom, the pursuit of self-realization and self-expression, were still somewhat elite phenomena in the 1960s. They hit home for middle-aged and middle-class Americans in the 1970s, with an explosion in divorce rates, conflicts between parents and children, and an overwhelming sense of social disorder. Reagan spoke to an idealized vision of the time before that social revolution took hold.
Reagan’s first major speech after the convention seemed to play to the worst aspect of this nostalgia. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964, he spoke in favor of “states’ rights,” a term associated with segregation. Reagan prided himself on his lack of prejudice and hadn’t been the one to choose the location. So when Carter accused him of bigotry, the charge backfired, making the president appear nasty. His continuing attempts to portray Reagan as a warmonger boomeranged in a similar way. Whatever harm they did to Reagan was outweighed by the damage they wrought on Carter’s image of decency and restraint. The personal attacks also riled Reagan in a way that made him a better campaigner. In response, he cast the incumbent as weak and incompetent.
That shoe fit. Carter was beleaguered by the Iranian hostage crisis, an energy crisis, and a deepening recession. Over the summer, the inflation rate was 14 percent, which, combined with an unemployment rate of 8 percent, added up to a “misery index” of 22. The interest rate on thirty-year mortgages crested above 16 percent. At a moment when the country needed strong leadership, Carter mainly expressed doubt. He was uncomfortable with the ceremonial aspects of power, carrying his own luggage and banning the playing of “Hail to the Chief.” He was a micromanager, a grappler with uncomfortable truths, and a confronter of unpleasant realities. On 60 Minutes, he gave his own presidency grades of B and C on foreign, domestic, and economic policy. In a nationally televised address in July 1979 that become known as his malaise speech, Carter spoke to the nation about a crisis of confidence “that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will” and of “the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives.”
Reagan, by contrast, believed that America’s best days were ahead. “I find no national malaise. I find nothing wrong with the American people,” he declared on the eve of the election. Reagan said that Carter should be reelected “if he instills in you pride for your country and a sense of optimism about our future.” Reagan’s confident patriotism overlooked national failings in favor of past triumphs, future opportunities, and enduring virtues. This combination of nostalgia and optimism expressed his cultivated myopia. Events that were farther away in time often seemed more real to him than those close at hand. Reagan’s nostalgic nationalism led him to focus on the pending “giveaway” of the Panama Canal. “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we’re going to keep it,” he liked to say. Panama was ruled by a right-wing military dictatorship, not a left-wing one, but the issue expressed the idea that America was being played for a global patsy.
Reagan sometimes made trouble for himself with the antigovernment factoids he picked up in the conservative press, or in letters from his admirers. He was ridiculed for his claim that the eruption of the Mount St. Helens volcano produced more sulfur dioxide than ten years of driving; that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had 144 regulations about climbing ladders; and that the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare spent three dollars on administration for every one dollar it gave out in payments. But at least one of his gaffes was a calculated provocation. At a Teamsters convention in Ohio, he referred to “the Carter Depression.” When challenged that the country wasn’t experiencing a depression, he parried, “If he wants a definition, I’ll give him one. A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”
The League of Women Voters invited all three major candidates to participate in head-to-head debates. Carter would agree to participate only if Anderson were excluded, and several of Reagan’s aides thought a debate without Anderson was too risky. But after debating Anderson on his own and performing competently, Reagan agreed to a single debate with Carter, which was scheduled to be held in Cleveland, a week before Election Day. Expectations were against Reagan, which meant he only had to hold the stage to be judged the winner. In fact, Reagan’s debating skill was considerable. His focus was on countering the Democratic accusation that he was dangerous. “I’m only here to tell you that I believe with all my heart that our first priority must be world peace,” he said in his first answer, going on to use the word peace again and again.
Where Goldwater challenged a New Deal that had given hope to the country, Reagan trained his objections on later antipoverty programs that didn’t serve the white middle class. He cast himself as the candidate of change, ready to abandon efforts that weren’t working. He made Carter into the bureaucratic conservative trying to preserve the federal Leviathan even in places such as the desolate South Bronx, where its failures were most evident. At one point Carter pointed out, accurately, that Reagan began his political career opposing Medicare. In response, Reagan delivered one of his most memorable lines. “There you go again,” he said, shaking his head. In his closing remarks, Reagan framed a question:
Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was four years ago? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago?
This was his father’s salesmanship, and his gift for simplification at its finest. In a wonderful Freudian slip, Carter thanked the people of Cleveland “for being such hospitable hosts during these last few hours in my life.”