CHAPTER 29

The Birth of CNN

ROWLY AND I had been without a television connection all through 1979 when that autumn we received a phone call from Ed Turner, our old patron at Channel 5 in Washington, that would alter my career and my life.

Ed informed us he had a job with a venture being launched by the eccentric Atlanta entrepreneur and yachtsman Ted Turner (no relation). It was to be an Atlanta-based all-news TV national cable network. Ed was vice president for news, and he asked us to join political figures and journalists he was signing up for the Cable News Network’s start of broadcasting in 1980. Rowly and I had some sharp arguments over money with Ed back in the Metromedia days, and he informed us now sternly that his offer was nonnegotiable. Every commentator he signed would tape five commentaries a week and would be paid $10,000 ($25,000 in 2006 money) a year—and not a cent more. Rowly and I would split the commentaries and the money—$5,000 apiece. It was take it or leave it, and we took it: $5,000 was money I could use, and I was glad to be back on TV.

Cable was foreign to us. Major cities, Washington, D.C., included, were not yet wired for cable. I still thought of cable as a way to bring television to rural areas.

Ed Turner was the only CNN executive we knew, and the new venture was so unimportant to our world that neither Rowly nor I thought it necessary to make a special trip to Atlanta to get acquainted. But I was going to be in Atlanta the night of January 3, 1980, in my addiction to University of Maryland basketball, to watch the Terrapins play Georgia Tech, and I called ahead to see CNN brass that afternoon. I was given appointments with all its executives—including Ted Turner—at CNN’s first headquarters, a run-down former Russian Jewish country club.

Robert Edward Turner was a hard-drinking, womanizing, southern playboy, age twenty-five in 1963 when his father committed suicide. Ted restored to health his father’s Atlanta billboard company. In 1970 he took Channel 17, the humdrum UHF (ultra-high frequency) station WTBS in Atlanta, and turned it into the Turner Broadcasting System (TBS), the first national cable network. Turner operated at low overhead by running old movies, cartoons, and sports, seemingly a worshiper of the almighty dollar who couldn’t care less about quality broadcasting.

That stereotype crumbled in 1979 when Turner conceived CNN. To raise capital, he sold a profitable UHF station in Charlotte, North Carolina. Turner told me he figured CNN would lose two million to two and one-half million dollars a month for the foreseeable future. “This could ruin me,” he said. I asked why he was risking everything. “I’ve made a load of money by putting out a lot of bad movies and other crap [on WTBS],” he replied. “I think I owe the country something of value, and that’s what I’m going to give it on CNN.” He was true to his word so long as he maintained control of CNN.

         

TEDDY KENNEDY AND I both were in Iowa on January 7, 1980, two weeks before the caucuses. I stood a few feet from Teddy and his wife, Joan, seated side by side in Oskaloosa at the county courthouse to take “town meeting” questions. “Senator, I wonder if I might ask something about Mrs. Kennedy?” asked an elderly man. “What is she interested in?” The expression on the face of each Kennedy can be described as devastated. Joan opened her mouth after several seconds of silence. Just as she was about to speak, Teddy intervened: “Why, Joanie, you’re into music, aren’t you?” She nodded, but said nothing. Her husband mercifully called on another questioner. We all knew that Joan was an alcoholic, that Teddy had a severe drinking problem, and that the marriage was doomed. But nobody, myself included, wrote about those things. Political reporters then were less into psychodrama than their next-generation successors. At that poignant moment in Oskaloosa, I became certain Edward M. Kennedy would lose in the Iowa caucuses. I also was pretty sure he could not win the Democratic nomination. And I strongly suspected he never would be president of the United States.

         

GERALDINE PROBABLY always wondered why every four years I would leave her and the children for extended periods in snowy Iowa and New Hampshire. I don’t believe I could have appreciated the gravity of Kennedy’s dilemma in Iowa had I not seen his rural tour firsthand. Similarly, when I attended a Republican “candidates night” in Janesville, a small town in east central Iowa, I gained insights into the Republican presidential contest that I reported in an Evans & Novak column:

The principal speaker…was George Bush. Sen. Howard Baker’s daughter Cissy was present. So were campaign leaflets and posters for Bush, Baker, Connally, Crane and Dole. But there was no sign of Reagan—not a campaign button, not a poster, not a word—in Reagan’s rural heartland.

“This is what we’ve been complaining about for months,” a local Reagan loyalist told us. “There is no visible Reagan campaign.” That absence, when compared with Bush’s painstakingly built organization, suggests Reagan could finish second to Bush at Republican precinct caucuses Jan. 21. Reagan’s overwhelming grassroots popularity, counted on to negate Bush’s organizational edge, has been undercut by the infrequency of his visits to Iowa, climaxed by his boycott of the Jan. 4 presidential debate.

Since Reagan’s campaign is based on invincibility and inevitability, losing Iowa would not be easily overcome. Thus, the cautious strategy of campaign manager John Sears undergoes an early critical test. If Dutch Reagan loses the state of his young manhood, the Sears strategy will be blamed.

My reporting from Iowa suggesting a Bush upset in Iowa put me ahead of my colleagues. My Iowa column on Monday, January 14, 1980, was a big story that the Washington Post put at the top of the op-ed page with this headline: “Reagan: Once Invincible, Now Invisible.”

         

THE JANUARY 21 Iowa caucuses proved a disaster for Kennedy, with 71 percent for Carter and 26 percent for Teddy. Now Kennedy had to go to his home territory to make a comeback in New Hampshire. Six months earlier, my mini-poll in ward 9 of Nashua, New Hampshire (selected by pollster Pat Caddell as a barometer precinct), showed a six-to-one advantage for Kennedy over Carter. Two weeks after the Iowa caucuses, I went back to ward 9 to see how hard times affected Kennedy among his base voters: middle-income white-collar and skilled blue-collar in New England. Our interviews revealed a new world in ward 9: Carter two-to-one over Kennedy. I found little enthusiasm for Carter but sudden, almost irrational animosity toward Kennedy.

Carter defeated Kennedy easily in New Hampshire by eleven percentage points on February 26. If Kennedy could not win in New Hampshire, where could he win? Kennedy loyalists thought Illinois was still Kennedy country, where the March 18 primary would begin Teddy’s comeback. I arrived in Chicago on March 10 and quickly found this was romantic nonsense. The curse of Chappaquiddick cut Kennedy as deeply among Chicago Democrats as it had in Iowa. Richard J. Daley was dead, and the Daley Machine was a shadow of its former self.

On March 18, Teddy suffered a humiliating defeat, losing the Illinois primary to Carter, two-to-one.

         

DESPITE SEARS’S BLUNDER in keeping Reagan’s profile so low in Iowa, he barely lost the caucuses: Bush 31.6 percent, Reagan 29.5 percent. Although Reagan’s Iowa defeat should not have surprised any reporter who really had worked the state, it was widely reported as an upset—magnifying its impact. Pollster Lou Harris showed that Reagan’s national Republican margin over Bush of twenty-six points disappeared overnight after Iowa and that Reagan and Bush were now in a dead heat. In New Hampshire, Reagan’s double-digit lead over Bush became a double-digit deficit.

Overjoyed by sudden good fortune, George Bush displayed a goofy side that would plague him the rest of his political career. Had the New Hampshire primary come just one week after the Iowa caucuses as it did two decades later, Bush likely would have won there and gone on to be nominated. But in 1980, New Hampshire would not vote until February 26, five weeks after Iowa. “I’ve got the ‘Big Mo,’” an ebullient Bush shouted when he got to New Hampshire the day after Iowa, looking silly.

I was in Nashua early the next morning for a packed Chamber of Commerce breakfast. The grinning Bush seemed dazed by his new status as putative front-runner. I wrote in an Evans & Novak column that Bush had “reverted to the fence-straddling that has plagued moderate Republicans.” I added:

The breakfasting businessmen at Nashua came to be impressed and left disappointed by Bush’s repetition, imprecision and refusal to take a hard position on issues ranging from child daycare to nuclear power.

The room cooled when Bush declared he didn’t know enough to have an opinion on the Seabrook, N.H. nuclear power plant. A consulting engineer from nearby Amherst told us before hearing the speech that he reduced the field to Reagan and Bush, but planned “to cement my choice for Bush today” because of “better experience and more smarts.” After the speech, the Yankee verdict: “Too much waffling. It’s back to Reagan.”

I had gotten ahead of the pack by forecasting Reagan’s problems in Iowa, and now I tried to do the same with Bush’s difficulties in New Hampshire, where the front-runner would have to cope with Jeff Bell.

         

REAGAN HAD A secret weapon. He was for tax cuts, and Bush was not. Reagan’s treatment of the tax issue in New Hampshire is not reported in standard accounts of the 1980 campaign, and I did not learn the full story until after Reagan was elected president. But I am convinced that at this point, Jeffrey Bell saved the Reagan campaign and that the much maligned John Sears also should get credit.

Bell had no early connection with the 1980 Reagan campaign, but Sears reached out to him in December 1979 to produce supply-side spots for Reagan’s presidential campaign similar to those used for Bell’s own Senate campaign two years earlier. They would be narrated by Reagan himself just as Bell had narrated his 1978 ads. Three of them had Reagan on camera calling for tax cuts. In one thirty-second ad, Reagan invoked John F. Kennedy as a tax-cutter. A sixty-second spot concluded with Reagan saying: “If we put incentives back into society, everyone will gain. We have to move ahead. But we can’t leave anyone behind.”

This was Reagan’s version of Bell’s “Good Shepherd” ad promising not to “leave anyone behind.” In 1980, that concept seemed downright un-Republican, and that was why it appealed so much to Sears. I believe these ads won the New Hampshire primary and, ultimately, the presidency for Reagan, but that was not apparent at the time.

The conventional wisdom was that the February 26 New Hampshire primary was won in a final debate in Nashua February 22. Jerry Carmen, a New Hampshire Republican leader running Reagan’s campaign in the state, engineered a coup. Bush, stubbornly insisting on a one-on-one showdown, was maneuvered into being responsible for a two-man debate while Reagan came over as the good guy unsuccessfully trying to get the other four Republican candidates on the platform. In truth, thanks to the Bell tax cut ads, Reagan had passed Bush in the New Hampshire polls and was nearing a double-digit lead by February 22. In The Reagan Revolution, I wrote, “Bush was devoured in the debate, which once and for all underlined their differences on the tax question. Reagan flatly condemned Bush’s acquiescence in the Carter budget’s income tax increases, which Bush could not and did not deny.”

BY FEBRUARY 26, Reagan’s victory in New Hampshire was not a surprise. What came as a shock was his landslide with 50 percent against Bush’s 23 percent, a twenty-seven-point margin. The contest for the Republican nomination was over.

On the afternoon of the primary, Reagan surprised the political world by firing Sears, along with his deputies, Charlie Black and Jim Lake. Reagan’s early fascination with Sears had changed to personal dislike. Reagan was repelled by the power play the past November when Sears, Black, and Lake forced out longtime Reagan aide Mike Deaver. Nevertheless Reagan wanted to win so badly that he stuck with Sears so long as he looked like a winner. The Iowa defeat doomed Sears, but Reagan could not fire him at that point in what would look like scapegoating.

Getting rid of Sears meant that Deaver, Lyn Nofziger, and Marty Anderson would return to the campaign after being expelled by Sears. Sears’s nominal successor was sixty-seven-year-old William Casey, who as a young man during World War II ran secret agents in Europe and was to become President Reagan’s director of Central Intelligence. Casey, assigned to clean up the fiscal and administrative mess left by Sears, had little to do with strategy. That would be handled by Ed Meese, returned from Sears-imposed obscurity and on the road every day by the candidate’s side. John Sears had opened the Reagan door to the supply-siders. Would Ed Meese close it?

On Tuesday, April 15, 1980, I was following Reagan campaigning in Pennsylvania prior to the state’s primary a week later. The Reagan entourage, press, and staff, was in the dining room of the Howard Johnson Hotel in Scranton for an early dinner prior to that evening’s rally. Ed Meese motioned me over to sit with him at a table with other Reagan campaign staffers (and no other reporters).

This was the only time Meese approached me on the campaign trail, and I hoped he had called me over to give me a little news. Unfortunately, he had a question rather than an answer: “Do you think it’s too late for Governor Reagan to give up on the tax cut?”

I assumed this was Meese’s way of tipping me off about a radical change in Reagan’s policy. It was not my business to be an unpaid adviser, but I had become dangerously committed on this issue and felt I must answer: “It’s much too late, Ed. How can you abandon the centerpiece of your domestic policy?” Meese gave no indication whether he agreed with me.

Prominent Republicans still found it hard to swallow anything as radical as Kemp-Roth and pressed Reagan to reduce its scope, stretch it out, or do both. That opposition was reflected by Meese feeling out my reaction. The tax cut was toned down in the Reagan campaign at times, but never abandoned.

         

TED TURNER’S CABLE News Network went on the air at six p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, June 1, 1980. Ed Turner had explained to me that CNN could not afford full-time staffers anyone had heard of—with one exception: Daniel Schorr, a contentious veteran of twenty-three years with CBS was hired as CNN’s chief Washington correspondent. Affordable, anonymous young men and women hired by the new network would put out the news product, but CNN needed recognizable faces in addition to Schorr for start-up promotions. That was the role played by commentators like Coretta Scott King, William Simon, Phyllis Schlafly, Joyce Brothers—and Evans and Novak.

I believe the plan was to let the commentators drift away once they had served their promotional purpose. Just about all left within a year, with the exception of Evans and Novak.

Rowly and I were saved by Ed Turner. He found an interviewing niche for us at CNN on a Saturday morning program (Newsmaker Saturday) hosted by Schorr. Sharing a one-hour interview every other Saturday was not much of a CNN role, but it was something.

         

AT NINE THIRTY a.m. on Monday, June 23, 1980, I had an appointment with Paul Weyrich in his Capitol Hill office—headquarters of a network of conservative activist organizations set up by Weyrich under the rubric of the “New Right.” A former newspaper and radio-television reporter, Weyrich was founding president of the Heritage Foundation (which was to become the premier conservative think tank). Weyrich was more interested in action than thought and left Heritage to develop his interlocking network.

When I met him that June morning in 1980 for the first time, Weyrich was thirty-seven and a rising political power. Weyrich told me a major political development was being overlooked. Born-again Christians who supported Carter in 1976 were disillusioned and ready to back Reagan. Weyrich was mobilizing Evangelical preachers, seeking to deliver the South and Christian conservatives against native southerner and born-again Christian Jimmy Carter. Weyrich offered to take me south the next week to watch it happening.

On June 30, I went with Weyrich to the huge Forrest Hills Baptist Church in Decatur, Georgia. There, by invitation-only, were two hundred Georgia preachers. I was the only reporter present. As leadoff speaker, Weyrich predicted President Carter would veto any school prayer bill passed by Congress. Dr. William W. Pennell, pastor of the host church, like most clergymen present had supported Carter in 1976. He assailed the president’s foreign policy: “I’ve had about all the born-again diplomacy I can stand.” That elicited laughter, applause, and shouts of “Amen, brother” from his fellow preachers.

In the Evans & Novak column of July 4 with an Atlanta dateline, I wrote:

The preachers feel Carter has betrayed them on the social questions they care about most deeply, as stressed in the Atlanta conference: abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, homosexuals (usually referred to as “queers” during the meeting) and school prayer. There was no talk about economics or taxes. While “socialism” was never mentioned, “humanism” was anathematized repeatedly….

Even before the Atlanta meeting, Georgia clergymen were passing out to parishioners a tract called “Ronald Reagan: A Man of Faith.” In it, Reagan supports private Christian schools and school prayer while attacking abortion and homosexuality. “The time has come to turn to God and reassert our trust in Him for the healing of America,” he says. That spells big problems for Carter among voters he cannot afford to lose.

This was a prescient column, perhaps my most important one in the seminal political year of 1980. Yet, none of my fellow political writers picked up on it. Inexplicably, through the whole year, I did not write another word about this development that was critical to finally breaking the Democratic Party’s lock on the South.

         

WHEN THE 1980 national convention of the Republican Party began in Detroit on July 7, CNN was five weeks old and not ready for prime time. The consensus of delegates showed a mild vice-presidential preference for Bush, runner-up to Reagan in the primaries. Reagan aides spread the word that their candidate did not care for Bush. That raised hope among supply-siders that Reagan, who liked Kemp personally and as a tax-cutting ideologue, might pick his former intern.

But late Wednesday afternoon, July 16, word leaked out of Reagan’s suite in the Detroit Plaza Hotel of the most startling development in my national convention experience since JFK’s selection of LBJ in 1960. Principals of Reagan and former president Ford were in serious negotiations about a Reagan-Ford ticket, contemplating an expanded vice presidency for Ford as would befit a former president.

Interviewing Ford on the CBS evening news that Wednesday, Walter Cronkite asked whether Reagan could accept “something like a co-presidency.” “That’s something Governor Reagan really ought to consider,” Ford replied. The evocative “co-presidency” exposed an unpleasant reality about the “dream ticket.” If Ford were more than a vice president, Reagan would be less than a president.

Reporters covering the story (including me) were less interested in this dangerous equation than reporting whether Reagan and Ford really had a deal. My sources told me the Reagan-Ford ticket was a done deal, and I went on the air live to say this, as a CNN reporter interviewed me on the convention floor early Wednesday evening. Correspondents for the broadcast networks were saying the same thing. My home paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, got the story from its own reporters and put out an extra revealing the “dream ticket.”

That evening, Tom Korologos pulled me aside on the convention floor. Korologos, a big-time Washington lobbyist and Republican insider, had been my source for years. “It’s over,” he whispered in my ear. “The deal fell through. It’s going to be Bush. Trust me. It’s over.” Korologos, who had been helping coordinate the Reagan-Ford negotiations, had been one of my sources reporting the Ford vice presidency for CNN and maybe he thought he owed me a rapid heads-up that the news had changed.

I had a clear exclusive to beat the rest of the country. But how was I going to report it in real time on television? I was on the convention floor with CNN credentials, but I was only a commentator—electronically naked, without microphone or camera, lacking even the mobile telephone that was still rare in 1980. I rushed all over the floor seeking a CNN reporter. I finally found one, and my “scoop” immediately went on the air. Too late. The substitution of Bush for Ford had been revealed to the world a few minutes earlier by NBC floor reporter Chris Wallace, the thirty-two-year-old son of CBS superstar Mike Wallace. He was covering his first convention, and he had its biggest story.

         

ON THE CONVENTION floor Thursday night before Reagan delivered one of the best acceptance speeches in my experience, I talked to Lyn Nofziger. Three days earlier he had advised me that Kemp was a strong possibility to be picked. That had impressed me because Nofziger never was enthusiastic about Kemp. So I asked Lyn what had sunk Kemp. “It was that homosexual thing,” he replied. “The governor finally said, ‘We just can’t do this to Jack.’” That homosexual thing! I could hardly believe it.

It went back to 1967, Reagan’s first year as governor of California. The Virgin Islands hosted the National Governors Conference that autumn aboard the SS Independence, cruising in the Caribbean. (I was aboard, and I believe I was the first to call it the “Ship of Fools.”) During the voyage, columnist Drew Pearson in Washington was about to reveal the existence of a homosexual ring in Reagan’s office involving key aides.

Two of Reagan’s top assistants resigned, and several other Republican political operatives were involved. None ever returned to politics. Pearson’s column also mentioned “an athlete” in the homosexual ring, and the word was spread aboard the Independence that he was referring to Jack Kemp, then star quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. Neither I nor the other reporters aboard the ship ever had met Kemp. Nobody reported Kemp’s name in public, but it repeatedly was whispered as the years went by and he became a nationally prominent Republican.

In 1978, the untraceable rumors became partly traceable for me. I learned that the usually noncombative Democratic National Chairman John White had told a reporter that there was no need to worry about the Kemp-Roth bill because Kemp was a homosexual. About the same time, Andy Glass (then a reporter for the Cox newspapers) told me Carter aide Hamilton Jordan had said not to consider Kemp a presidential prospect in 1980 because he was a “queer.”

I wanted to report this rumormongering as reprehensible behavior, but I couldn’t because of at least the possibility that the rumors were true. After eleven years, I finally had to find out for sure. I started by calling Lyn Nofziger, who in 1967 as a Reagan aide had leaked the homosexual scandal aboard the Independence as a preemptive strike against Drew Pearson’s column. Now he told me he had no reason to think Kemp was a homosexual. He suggested I check with one member of the homosexual ring (let’s call him “Jones”) who after his exposure had disappeared from public view. Nofziger said he was sure “Jones” would tell me the truth—if I could find him. After weeks of searching, I located him in San Francisco, totally removed from politics. I had used “Jones” as a source before the scandal broke, and he agreed to see me.

Late in the summer of 1978, I met “Jones” for drinks at the cocktail lounge off the lobby of San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. He was adamant that Kemp was not part of the homosexual group that reached into Reagan’s office. His denial was all the more credible because “Jones” was a liberal Republican who did not like Kemp or his politics.

I still did not want to be the person who revealed to the world the slander against Kemp. Jude Wanniski solved this problem for me. Jude felt these rumors would dog Kemp all through his political career and block his path to the White House unless they were disposed of now. Kemp and his political high command thought it was madness to spread this calumny.

Wanniski, who never accepted advice from anybody, acted on his own. The occasion was an interview with him by New York Times reporter Martin Tolchin for an article about Kemp that Tolchin was writing for Esquire. Wanniski told Tolchin about the homosexual canard and urged him to look into it. In the Esquire of October 24, 1978, Tolchin quoted Kemp as saying: “There is absolutely not a shred of evidence. There is nothing, and there was nothing.” Tolchin himself concluded: “Everyone who has looked into the case has come to the same conclusion.”

Although Wanniski was satisfied, I thought Tolchin’s verdict was a little ambiguous. I wanted to write a more definitive conclusion, plus the revelation of the White and Jordan slanders, once I pinned down one remaining allegation: a supposed police file relating to homosexual conduct by Kemp. The result was an Evans & Novak column of December 29, 1978, that named John White but at Andy Glass’s request, referred to Hamilton Jordan only as a “White House aide”:

When we checked the story with White, he seemed genuinely apologetic; he said he had heard the rumor from another newsman and was merely passing on what he had heard. The White House aide, informed later by the reporter [Glass] that there apparently was no substance to the story, asked the reporter to forget about it and to be certain not to disclose his identity….

After considerable checking, we can now report that the rumor comes as close to being disprovable as any personal slander ever is. For example, contrary to one recurrent part of the rumor, there never was any police file on Kemp; he was not investigated.

One principal in the 1967 case [“Jones”] whom we tracked down with some difficulty to his new job and his new life said he never had known or been told of an illicit association between Kemp and those who resigned under a cloud. Indeed, the sole source of the rumor that has haunted Kemp’s career for 11 years is the fact that he traveled, on an official basis, several times with one of the Reagan aides who later resigned. That, and nothing more, is the “case” against Kemp

With the Republican convention winding up Thursday night, we had one more full Evans & Novak column with a Detroit dateline (for Monday’s newspapers). I wanted to write about the resurfacing of the homosexual issue; Rowly, wisely, talked me out of it.

         

PAT CADDELL had told me Carter would clinch the election once he got Reagan one-on-one in a televised presidential debate, without independent candidate John Anderson around to muddy the waters. Reagan finally agreed to a one-on-one debate in Cleveland on Tuesday, October 28, with Anderson excluded.

I had never before attended a presidential debate, in 1960 and 1976 watching on TV with the rest of America. But I wanted to be there for this late campaign event that might decide a close election. Rowly and I both went to Cleveland and got good, nonpress seats in the Cleveland Convention Center Music Hall.

From that vantage point, the debate looked to Rowly and me like a clear Reagan win on style, substance, and debating points. Compared to the composed Hollywood actor beside him, Carter was ill at ease. I counted the president reaching for his glass of water eleven times during a ninety-minute debate. Although neither candidate committed a blunder to compare with Ford’s gaffe about Poland four years earlier, Carter came close when he pursued his theme that Reagan was a menace to world peace: “I had a discussion with my daughter Amy [age thirteen] the other day before I came here, to ask her what the most important issue was. She said she thought nuclear weaponry and the control of nuclear arms.” That looked to me like Carter at his worst: weak and silly.

Polls later showed the debate was a disaster for Carter, with Reagan carrying undecided and independent voters, two to one. The election was over, though few people were ready to acknowledge it.

         

STU SPENCER, who in 1968 pledged to me he would do anything to keep Reagan from the Oval Office, in 1980 came aboard the Reagan campaign plane as senior adviser. Reagan, not a man to hold grudges, accepted Spencer without a second thought as the best director to finish shooting this movie. Spencer brought with him James Baker, who until now had always opposed Reagan. The third man in the front compartment of Reagan’s chartered jet was Lyn Nofziger.

Late in the campaign, Spencer, Baker, and Nofziger, with the help of nominal campaign chairman Bill Casey, forced a change in super-cautious campaign tactics. On October 27, the day before the debate, weeks-old TV spots attacking Carter’s credibility finally went on the air. On Thursday, October 30, two days after the debate, Reagan himself finally addressed Carter’s competence from a New Orleans airport hangar. I was there and wrote about it in the last Evans & Novak column on the campaign (to be published on November 3, the day before the election):

Recalling Carter’s 1976 campaign promise of a government as good as the American people, Reagan told the New Orleans rally: “He only gave us a government as good as Jimmy Carter, and that isn’t good enough.”

That and other applause-getting lines were brand new. Ken Khachigian, a 36-year-old California public relations man who once wrote speeches for Richard Nixon, months ago applied for a job with the Reagan campaign, which turned him down as too expensive. Three weeks ago, with Reagan’s rhetoric and poll ratings sagging, it was decided no price was too high. Thus, Khachigian’s prose became Reagan’s rhetoric in New Orleans and across the country.

Reagan’s revived oratory coincided with post-debate good news…Reagan forging ahead in traditionally Democratic Louisiana and swing state Missouri and no worse than even in overwhelmingly Democratic Arkansas.

My November 3 column’s dateline was Des Plaines, Illinois—a Chicago suburb where Reagan spoke to high school students on Friday, October 31. The Des Plaines youngsters clapped and yelled when Reagan promised: “Not just one 10 percent tax cut, not just two 10 percent tax cuts, but three 10 percent tax cuts—30 percent over three years.” It was Kemp-Roth, and Reagan recited that chant the last two weeks in Khachigian’s speeches. The connection of Reagan’s emphasis on tax reduction to his late campaign surge was lost on reporters covering the Republican candidate.

One of them was Walter Isaacson, a twenty-eight-year-old Time correspondent. The former Rhodes scholar, in his second year with the magazine, was given the plum assignment of covering Reagan. On the campaign trail that last week, he introduced himself to me and started a conversation about Reagan’s and my tax-cutting views. He said he believed I was the only journalist he knew who actually supported Kemp-Roth, which accurately reflected the political press corps’ mind-set. “I just wonder if you could explain to me how you got there,” he said. Walter sounded like a modern scientist encountering somebody who believed the earth was flat.

My Des Plaines column concluded with speculation that Reagan may have changed too late. Had it “started eight weeks earlier,” I wrote, it might “have produced a GOP landslide.” The Washington Post’s headline on the column: “It Could Have Been a Landslide.” That column and headline subjected me to never-ending postelection chiding because it was a landslide.

         

REAGAN WON BY a commanding ten percentage points, with an electoral vote landslide, 489 to 49. Republicans gained twelve Senate seats, transforming a seventeen-seat deficit into a seven-seat advantage, unexpectedly giving Republicans control of a House of Congress for the first time since 1953–54. Republicans picked up thirty-three House seats, reducing the Democratic margin to fifty-one seats—amounting to control by the conservative coalition.

At long last this heralded realignment, impeded by Watergate, Vietnam, and Republican mindlessness, had arrived. Except for his own Georgia, Carter lost every southern state. The Senate’s southern caucus was no longer solid (eleven Democrats, ten Republicans, one conservative independent). Southern Democrats still prevailed in the House, seventy-two to thirty-seven, but that was illusory because so many conservative Democrats would help Reagan.

Commenting for CNN on election night I thought I concealed my glee—but apparently not from Daniel Schorr. Making no effort to hide his discomfort with the election’s outcome, Dan told me after midnight: “Well, with your people in power, it will be a little hard for you to be a critic, won’t it.” “Not a bit, Dan,” I replied, and I meant it.