Chapter 11

OUT OF THE CLEAR BLUE SKY

“Every week the columnists buried us. Every week we’d lose a primary and they’d say, that’s the end of that, and then the next week he’d come back and win one. I remember I said to the fellow from the Post, the next time you bury us, you better drive a stake through his heart, because he kept coming back. That was the thing that most impressed the people around Reagan—your father’s resilience. He was literally the last man standing. It was just—if you want to win, get George Bush. Reagan understood that.”

—Vic Gold

After Dad dropped out of the presidential race, Andy Card made plans with his family to go to the Republican National Convention that summer in Detroit. He had been chosen to serve on the platform committee with Dad’s friend from Texas, Senator John Tower—and after the convention, the Card family made plans to go camping for a week in Plymouth, Michigan. Andy’s wife, Kathy, and their three children had driven all the way out to Michigan from Massachusetts with a car full of camping gear.

“We had our Bush hats on, generating hoopla, floor demonstrations,” Andy remembers. Tonight, July 17, was the night Governor Reagan was going to announce his running mate, and there were reports that he was considering asking President Ford to be his vice president. Since they didn’t think Dad was going to get the job, Andy and a crowd of delegates—including John Volpe, former governor of Massachusetts, and Silvio Conte, the colorful Massachusetts congressman—were getting ready to leave the convention early to get a jump on the traffic. Dad was scheduled to address the convention that night, and as soon as he was finished, they’d head out.

Dad, meanwhile, was preparing to give his speech. As he walked over to the convention center with some of his staff, speculation about the number-two spot on the ticket was swirling. Back at the hotel, a group of staffers watched the news on a television set in a hallway.

“It was just about sunset when Ford was being interviewed by Walter Cronkite, and that’s where people first got the idea that, wait a minute, they’re trying to put a Reagan-Ford ticket together,” remembers Vic Gold, Dad’s speechwriter. “Suddenly, Cronkite said, ‘Would you consider a vice presidency?’ And Ford did not give a ‘no’ answer. See, Ford knew at the time negotiations were actually going on. Cronkite asks, ‘How would this be? Would you split the executive authority?’ And instead of Ford saying, ‘What are you talking about?’ Ford actually starts answering questions along that line.”

Vic continued, “I’m getting very angry because I said, what in the devil is this guy doing? He’s really holding out that he’d consider the vice presidency. Cronkite continued, ‘Well, would you take on foreign policy?’ And Ford said, ‘Well, you have to be delicate about matters like that. After all, Governor Reagan has some pride.’ There was a Washington Post reporter standing right behind me, and I’m talking to Pete Teeley, and I’m angry. I said, ‘Pride? What does that horse’s ass know about pride?’ The next morning on the front page there’s a story about the night in the Bush headquarters, and paragraph three reads: Vic Gold said, ‘What does that horse’s ass know about pride?’ Well, that finished me with Jerry Ford.”

(A few weeks later, President Ford was going to ride on the Bush campaign plane. Usually, Vic sat up front with Dad, but when he heard President Ford was coming, he began to pack up his typewriter and move to the back of the plane. Dad asked him where he was going. Vic explained he was moving to the back of the plane because he was sure Dad wouldn’t want him around President Ford. But instead, Dad said, “Stay right where you are.” So Vic stayed put, Ford came on, and everything was fine. When it was all over, however, Dad turned to David Bates and said with a smile, “Did you notice how quiet Vic Gold was?”)

Margaret Tutwiler remembers calling home to her parents, “perfectly furious” at the idea of Ford becoming vice president. “I went to a pay phone and I started crying when I called my father, saying, ‘This is wrong, this is horrible. I never want to work in politics again. I want a ticket home.’ He said, ‘Get ahold of yourself and stay put.’”

James Baker, the 1980 Bush campaign manager and 1976 Ford campaign manager, had actually flown to the convention on President Ford’s plane. “We were all very down because Ford being considered was a real story. You had people who had worked for Ford, like Bill Brock and Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan, out there lobbying Ford to do this. I just couldn’t believe that they were going to go with Ford. Only those of us working in your dad’s campaign were against it. We were a tiny band. I mean—what are you going to call him, Mr. President/Vice President or Mr. Vice President/ President? It was weird,” Mr. Baker told me.

Dad’s staff were all fervently praying that the governor would pick the man with the second highest number of convention delegates: George Bush. As they waited for Dad to be introduced for his speech, however, an ABC News reporter came up and said, “Hey, did you hear the news? Ford agreed to the deal. It’s a done deal.” Unfazed, Dad went out and gave his speech, one that earned him a big ovation. He kept it short, however, because it was Ronald Reagan’s night and Dad wanted to just go out there and show his support.

I was in Detroit for most of the convention, there in what Dad would say was a “straphanger” capacity—a reference to a person in the crowd just along for the ride. I do remember helping Jeb and Aunt Nancy make “Bush for VP” signs for use on the floor of the convention, but mostly I hung out with the staff and my brothers. On the evening of Dad’s speech, I remember wearing a lavender dress that I had spent entirely too much time picking out.

After Dad’s convention speech, we all returned to the Pontchartrain Hotel, which was not too far from the Joe Louis Arena. Jeb recalls stopping at the bar with Dad for a beer, and “it was okay until at the bar, the reporters were continuing to say that there were efforts to put President Ford on the ballot.”

Dad remembers Jeb saying it just wasn’t fair. “Jeb, what do you mean it’s not fair?” Dad asked. “You keep your head up, and we’re going to leave town. Let’s show a little class here. We can’t whine about not being picked for vice president. Nobody owes us that. We have to be good sports.”

They left the bar and went upstairs—Dad to his room at the end of the corridor, and Jeb to his down the hall. “I was very depressed,” Jeb said. David Bates joined Jeb in his room for a Scotch.

Meanwhile, James Baker told Pete Teeley to head downstairs to the press room and “put a lid on it for the night”—media talk, meaning no more news tonight. It was close to 11:00 p.m., and no one had heard from Governor Reagan. So Pete headed to the main floor of the hotel in the elevator.

Just then Dad says, “Reagan—out of the clear blue sky—called me.”

James Baker had just finished talking to someone involved in the Reagan-Ford negotiations and had heard that things might break down when the phone rang in Dad’s suite. It was the Secret Service calling to tell Dad they were two floors below him if he needed anything.

Dad was wondering what that was all about when the phone rang again. Baker picked it up and announced, “Governor Reagan is on the line.” Mom shooed everyone out into the hall. Someone ran downstairs to bring Pete Teeley back up.

“Hello, George, this is Ron Reagan,” the front-runner said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I wonder if you would be willing to be my vice presidential candidate.”

Dad said he would be honored.

Then Governor Reagan asked, “Is there anything about my platform or anything else that might make you uncomfortable down the road?”

As Dad later reflected, it was unusually thoughtful for the front-runner to ask if there was something about his positions that might make the number two man uncomfortable—but then Dad already had an idea that Ronald Reagan wasn’t your run-of-the-mill politician. Dad said he had no problems and expressed full confidence that they could work together as a team.

The crowd in the hall, meanwhile, had no idea what twist of fate was unfolding. Most were sadly predicting that Reagan was calling simply to inform Dad he had chosen Ford. Vic Gold, I recall, was doing push-ups, which is what he did when he was under stress. (Usually, he would announce that he was quitting as well, but this time he only did push-ups!)

Down the hall, someone knocked on Jeb’s door and said Dad wanted to see him. When Jeb entered the suite, he recalled, Dad looked sad. He glumly told Jeb that Governor Reagan had called. Jeb, very distraught, said, “Well, at least he had the decency to let you know that you aren’t the VP nominee.”

Dad paused, smiled, and then said, “He called to say he wants me to be VP!”

“He put on the big act,” remembers Jeb. “I couldn’t believe he did that. So then he brought David Bates in and Bates almost collapsed.”

Next was Vic Gold, also “having been set up the same way I was,” Jeb said. Vic actually started jumping and screaming before going back to his push-ups.

Next, Mom and Dad came to the hall door, very straight-faced, and bid good night to everyone who was standing out in the hall. The group, dejected, started to complain. “What? You can’t just say good night!” They wanted to know exactly what the governor had said.

My parents could not continue to keep straight faces, breaking into wide grins and announcing that Governor Reagan had asked Dad to be vice president. “Of course, then there was great rejoicing and backslapping and clapping and everybody was very pleased,” Dad remembers.

Shortly after that, there was a loud noise outside as the announcement became public on television that Dad was the VP choice. A big party started in the hallway outside Dad’s suite.

Out on the freeway, Andy Card’s car full of Massachusetts delegates heard the news over the radio and “we literally did a U-turn on the highway,” Andy recalls, and came back to the Convention Hall. “We stayed up all night making signs and posters and getting everything ready with a lot of volunteers.”

“I went to the Republican convention in Detroit knowing the vice presidency was a possibility, but I did not expect it,” Dad said, looking back. “No one was more surprised than I was when I answered the phone in my hotel suite and Ronald Reagan was on the other end of the line.”

Pete Teeley recalls hearing from the Reagan people what had been going on in their suite: “He was asking them if Ford would stand for this or stand for that. And there were a couple of key issues in which Ford was not willing to support Reagan . . . Ford wanted to be able to name certain cabinet secretaries, including defense, state, and treasury. Well, if you take those three, there was nothing else that Reagan could do. He might as well have stayed in California. And in effect what they were trying to do was get Ford to be president and have the power, and Reagan wasn’t going to go along with that . . . And apparently, Reagan got mad. And he looked at somebody and said, ‘Get me George Bush.’ And that was the best call he ever made.”

That night, the new ticketmates and their wives agreed to meet for breakfast in the morning and then appear at a joint press conference. Mom and Dad were a little nervous getting ready for the breakfast. They didn’t know the Reagans very well, and the heady developments of that night seemed surreal. But when they walked into the breakfast, The Reagans couldn’t have been warmer.

As the Reagans and my parents rode down in the elevator to a convention event, the topic of what they were wearing came up—whether their similar ties were color-coordinated.

“That reminds me of the man who passed away and his wife went to the funeral parlor to check on how he’d look for the funeral,” Governor Reagan said. “The funeral director showed the woman her husband. She said, ‘He looks great. The only thing is, I really always thought he looked better in a blue suit. Is there anything we can do about that?’ And the funeral director thought for a second. Then he picked up the phone and said, ‘Charlie, can you change the heads on 13 and 14?’”

Thus began a tradition of joke-telling Dad had with President Reagan that continued throughout their White House partnership and beyond. Dad loved collecting jokes, often doing a last-minute sweep for jokes from the staff, to share with President Reagan.

“From there on, I saw this wonderful, warm side of Reagan,” Dad said of the 1980 convention. “He was wonderful to work with. I hadn’t really known him that well. And he couldn’t have been nicer to me.”

During the fall campaign, he added, the national campaign staff would give the Bush staff the message of the day, “but Reagan himself never tried to rein me in or rein me out. He never tried to say, ‘You’ve got to try to do this more, or don’t do that as much.’”

After the convention, Dad invited the key members of his team to Kennebunkport for the weekend to discuss the fall campaign, along with a group of advisers, and Andy broke the news to his family that the camping trip was off. Within an hour, he packed everybody up into the car and drove east all night long. Kathy, his wife, dropped him off at the gate at my parents’ home on Walker’s Point.

On a Wednesday in August of that summer, I was in Kennebunkport and decided to join a few friends for a picnic in Stage Harbor, borrowing Dad’s boat to get there. Dad was out of town, and so I asked Pierce O’Neil, who worked at the local boat club and whom Dad trusted with the boat in the past, to take a group of us out on the water. On the way home, however, we hit a rock which bent the propeller.

“I had that feeling you used to get when you threw a baseball through your parents’ living room window,” Pierce remembered. He scrambled to find a replacement prop by the time Dad arrived on Friday for the weekend. The best he could do was Saturday at noon, and so on Friday afternoon, he waited on the porch to break the news to Dad.

Sure enough, Dad arrived and, moving quickly, asked Pierce to accompany him while he changed clothes and headed out to the boat. “The butterflies in my stomach were swarming,” Pierce said, and he broke the bad news about the prop to Dad. Without a pause, Dad asked, “Is everyone all right?” and then, “How about if we play some tennis?”

“I couldn’t believe it! I had broken the man’s boat and not one angry or scolding word,” Pierce said. “The situation taught me a lesson I have remembered ever since and tried to keep in mind when interacting with my kids and others: keep things in perspective, don’t overreact, and think of others.”

The next week, while Dad was away, Pierce volunteered to strip all the varnish off the trim of the boat and refinish it—and says he “enjoyed every minute of it!”

That fall, Jim Baker became a senior adviser to the Reagan campaign, and Dad’s friend Dean Burch was assigned to the vice presidential campaign. Mom and Mrs. Reagan campaigned together but soon decided they could cover more ground separately.

Throughout it all, Mom was confident of victory, but the moment it crystallized for her was when she was alone in Michigan, watching television. President Carter was on TV denying that he had called Ronald Reagan a racist, but then they played the sound bite of him standing in an African American church suggesting as much.

“That’s how I knew,” she said. “I said to myself, ‘Of course, we’re going to win.’ I mean, there he was, caught on television. Ronald Reagan was no racist.”

On election day, a crowd of young staffers and my brothers played touch football while we waited for the news. That night, Reagan and Dad made a joint appearance at a big campaign party in Peoria, Illinois, the kind that has an oversized map of the United States and a guy on a ladder posting the results. Then Reagan flew to California and Dad to Houston to watch the results.

The final tally: 489 electoral votes for Reagan-Bush and 49 for Carter-Mondale. Seven states went Democratic in 1980. The popular vote was a little less lopsided, with Reagan-Bush at 50 percent of the vote, Carter-Mondale at 41 percent, and John Anderson at just over 6 percent.

That night, Ronald Wilson Reagan was elected the fortieth president of the United States, while my father was elected the forty-third vice president of the United States.

Of course, by this point in his career, Dad had already distinguished himself as having held a series of nationally and internationally significant posts, appointed by two Republican presidents. Along the way, he had also occasionally been mentioned as potential VP material—but that call had never come. Now, thanks to the opportunity afforded him by Ronald Reagan, the 1980 election marked the first time Dad had participated in a national election—the first of four in which he would personally partake. The year opened with him reaching for the top rung on the political ladder; and though he had fallen short of that goal, the year closed with him just a single rung shy. It was an amazing twist of fate that had brought him this far, into the uppermost reaches of the U.S. government.

Just as “the Gipper” had paid his Hollywood dues behind leading actors such as Errol Flynn, Dad too would learn to play a supporting White House role to the main character striding toward the center of the world stage in January 1981.