CHAPTER

SEVEN

The Inevitable Reprise: Reagan Buries Mondale in 1984

Ronald Reagan was bound to win a second term in 1984 as certainly as anything can be certain in politics. His reelection was a foregone conclusion long before the ballots were cast. But the odds against the Democrats did not keep them from battering each other for the nomination to run against the president. Reagan’s own campaign was not a work of political art, but it didn’t have to be. He was the commanding campaign presence despite the suspicion that as president he didn’t really run the show, he just starred in it. The Reagan revolution had shifted the agenda to the right as the president led the government and campaigned against it as the same time. His trademark line hadn’t changed just because he was in charge—government was the problem, not the solution. Not that the president was making the government smaller, he was making it different. He expanded the defense budget and establishment, subtracted what he could from the social programs of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, and shaped political attitudes to fit his conservative ideology. He’d joked to photographers at the end of his 1980 campaign that he’d have plenty of time to autograph the pictures they took because after he’d done away with Social Security and started a war, what else would he have to do? He’d chosen the right forum for that sarcastic comment about the image his detractors were pinning on him. The photographers didn’t tell, and the remark didn’t surface until long after the election.

Reagan succeeded in putting the national debate about government and politics on his terms. That was the real Reagan revolution. The assumption that new federal programs and Washington answers were the way to cope with national problems no longer applied. It had been part of the thinking even during the Republican years of Richard Nixon, who calculated that he could buy himself room to maneuver on foreign and defense matters with compromises on domestic policy. Nixon signed off on such new agencies as the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency. Reagan changed the attitude, although he didn’t really make a dent in the federal establishment, for all his talk of cutting agencies and payrolls.

Watching it all, I thought the Reagan operation had the flavor of a sound and light show, mixed with some sleight of hand magic. Just watch the man in the spotlight and enjoy the display. Never mind the mundane details—the soaring budget deficits, the tax increases that nibbled at Reagan’s big tax cut, or, worse, the casualty rate of enforcing administration foreign policy, the terrorist massacre of Marines in Beirut. The economy was up for most Americans, despite nagging unemployment. The great communicator was just that. As he said, America was back—from the fading mess of Watergate, the torment of Vietnam, and the muddled term of Democratic rule that followed Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s brief succession. Americans wanted to believe in themselves again, and for the vast majority, that included believing in Reagan.

At seventy-three, Reagan was the oldest man ever to run for president. So his age and his ability to handle the pressures and decisions of the office for another four years were potential campaign problems. But he had come back from an assassination attempt in which he was shot and gravely wounded by a deranged young man outside the Washington Hilton Hotel little more than two months after his inauguration in 1981. The White House told us how game he was, wisecracking to his wife that he forgot to duck and to his surgeons that he hoped they were all Republicans, and we did not know at the time how close to death the president had been. Reagan’s resilience was remarkable; he was back at the White House only eleven days after the shooting. The day he was shot was the most memorable in my seven years as chief of the AP bureau in Washington. White House correspondent Mike Putzel saw it happen, and had his tape recorder running. It recorded the gunshots, pops on the tape, and then Mike’s voice in the tumult that followed, telling himself what to do—get to a telephone. He did, inside the hotel, and dictated his bulletin. Grabbing a pay telephone was part of the competition to deliver the story first in that era before cell phones. Reporters’ pockets jingled. When I started I always made sure I had an ample supply of dimes for pay phones. Later, of course, dimes wouldn’t do; my pocket clanked with quarters.

The Democrats couldn’t make age an issue in 1984 without risking a backlash, given Reagan’s popularity and the fact that he didn’t look as old as he was. He quipped about his age, brushing the topic away with jokes.

He said his last movie had been Hellcats of the Navy, and his next one would have to be The Old Man and the Sea. He said Andrew Jackson was in excellent shape when he left office at the age of seventy and “I know because he told me so.” A faltering, halting debate performance made age a troublesome issue for Reagan late in the campaign, but only briefly. He wisecracked it off the agenda.

There was no misreading the outlook against the Democrats. Conventional wisdom before the 1984 campaign was that Reagan would win unless something disastrous happened. Something disastrous did occur, more than once. But it didn’t matter. Crises that would have been the undoing of a less venerated politician flowed off Reagan as though he’d been a bystander to casualties abroad, deepening debt at home, and ethics shadows over appointees. Reagan’s foes said he was a disengaged president who let his lieutenants run things in his name. One Democratic crack was that they knew he’d run for a second term because he had left a wakeup call for 1984. But the best lines the opposition could manage were no match for Reagan’s winning, self-deprecating showmanship. “What’s all this talk about a breakdown in White House communications?” he asked. “How come nobody told me?” Well, Reagan said, he’d fix that. “From now on, about anything that happens, no matter what time it is, wake me, even if it’s in the middle of a Cabinet meeting.”

Sure, there were problems as he began his 1984 campaign, but the economy was okay and while unemployment persisted as a problem, the rate was coming down. Reagan’s quick answer to that issue was to point to the columns of help-wanted ads in the newspapers as evidence that there was work for people who really wanted jobs. The voters heard a man they liked and ignored the critics who talked about picky details like the fine print that showed most of the ads were for jobs that required skills beyond those of the people in the unemployment lines. There had been an economic slump at the beginning of Reagan’s first term, but the arrows were pointing upward as he neared the end of it, the perfect situation for a president seeking reelection. He said his 1981 tax cuts fixed the ailing economy, and when pestered with questions about the deficits that had increased fivefold over Carter-era levels he had denounced, Reagan said that was because of the Democrats. They forced too much spending, he said, skipping past his own Pentagon spending burst. Besides, he claimed, the Democrats had slowed the Reagan recovery by approving a 25 percent tax cut instead of the 30 percent he’d campaigned on in 1980 and delaying the date it took effect. That ignored the fact that he pushed most of what he wanted past a Democratic Congress with minimal compromise.

As president and as candidate, Reagan’s performance was worthy of any sound stage and the Democrats had nothing to compare. The most memorable line of the campaign for the Democratic nomination was borrowed from a hamburger ad. And the most memorable act of Reagan’s challenger was to choose Geraldine Ferraro for the vice presidential nomination, making her the first woman ever to run on a major party ticket. Walter F. Mondale’s gamble didn’t pay off; Reagan still got a majority of the women’s vote.

From the sidelines, Barry Goldwater, back in the Senate, groused about what was happening to presidential campaigns. “We’re selling the presidency like we’re selling a bar of soap,” he complained. “You have a man to arrange your tie or a girl to make sure you don’t have a shine on your forehead and make sure your hair is just right. That’s no way to elect people.” Besides, he said, campaigns cost too much and went on too long. They did, but there was no way to change the trend. The price of politics was going up, and for a politician with the White House on his mind it was never too early to start pursuing the goal. They’d seen the way that worked, notably for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and the trend was to longer, pricier campaigns, not abbreviated ones.

My perspective on the 1984 campaign was different because I watched much of it at a distance, with little time on the campaign road I’d traveled since 1960. My bosses at the AP promoted me to the upper realm of management. I became executive editor of the AP, stationed at headquarters in New York, off the road and off the bus for much of the campaign year. But that didn’t get in the way of my candidate watching. Indeed, since I wasn’t assigned to report on any one of them, I could watch all of them at once. It was part of a day’s work in the new job because I was responsible for overseeing AP political coverage.

As usual, the 1984 sequence began with the assumption that Ted Kennedy could be the nominee should he choose to run, but the senator announced late in 1982 that he would not be a candidate. That opened the field and, at the same time, made former Vice President Mondale the Democrat to beat. Before the campaign year began, seven other candidates tried to do so.

Their points of entry varied. Senator Alan Cranston of California, a balding liberal with a somewhat cadaverous look, tried the Carter-tested straw polls, won the first of 1983 at his home state Democratic convention, and drew Mondale into a costly, meaningless prelude in a half-dozen states. Cranston turned into a turkey after the straw counts and got out early. Senator Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, who shared the nickname Fritz but not much else with Mondale, made a career of campaigning in New Hampshire, where his deep drawl sounded like a foreign language. That may be why so few Yankees voted for him in the primary. His share of the primary vote worked out to fifty-one ballots for each day of campaigning, so he quit, too. George McGovern was back, with enough visibility to be assigned Secret Service protection in 1984. But the agents outnumbered his traveling campaign team so he dropped them. “I felt ridiculous and conspicuous,” he said. Senator John Glenn of Ohio, the former astronaut with Robert Kennedy connections but centrist credentials, looked promising but turned out to be a bland turnoff as a presidential campaigner. “I may be dull but I’m not boring,” he insisted. Actually, he was both during his futile presidential campaign. Glenn limped through the early primaries and yielded, but not before he had run up a campaign debt approaching $3 million. He took it personally, as a matter of honor, to pay back the debt in full instead of writing it off on a defunct organization as losers often did. Glenn worked at fund-raising to repay his 1984 campaign bills for years after his futile bid for the White House was a faded memory. Jesse Jackson came to the campaign as a candidate who could not be ignored, because of his influence among black voters vital to the Democrats and because he started with a triumph of personal diplomacy. Over New Year’s, he went to Damascus to seek the release of a captured Navy flyer, Lieutenant Robert O. Goodman, navigator on a plane shot down over Lebanon early in December. The Syrians released the black lieutenant to Jackson, who escorted him home. Even Reagan, whose administration had chafed at the freelance diplomacy, could only applaud. Jackson campaigned all spring, complaining that the Democratic rules were rigged against black voters and therefore against him, and kept sniping at Mondale after his nomination. “I’m not really aboard,” Jackson said. “I’m not part of the inner circle.” Defeated rivals seldom are. Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young was more quotable on the Mondale operation, saying it was being managed by “smart-ass white boys.” That made for a different sort of campaign button.

Mondale’s toughest tormenter was Gary Hart of Colorado, a lanky, youthful senator, who came on as a new face in an old crowd. Hart wasn’t all that new—he’d been in the Senate for ten years after learning the presidential campaign trade as McGovern’s manager in 1972—but the image served well. Hart was a fascinating figure, especially for those of us who had traveled with the McGovern campaign and had known him as a friend on the road, at expense-account dinners and at late-night parties. The line between reporter and political manager was always there, but with Hart, a contemporary to many of us, it blurred a bit. Not with Hart the candidate, though. The reporters who had been his pals twelve years before were harsh interrogators, with nagging questions that were a problem for him in 1984 and his undoing when he tried again in 1988.

I marveled at Hart’s mastery of the expectations game, the familiar exercise of the challenger setting up the front-runner, the better to claim victory in losing. Mondale won the Iowa caucuses with 49 percent of the vote in a crowded field. Hart ran thirty-two points behind him—a landslide defeat. But Hart came in second, better than expected, he said, and the media oddsmakers agreed. Hart claimed a major boost, which I thought was a stretch, but he said Iowa showed that he was Mondale’s real challenger, since all the other candidates had done even worse. It worked, and suddenly Hart was on the move. His argument was that he was the candidate with new ideas, while Mondale stood for the old ways the voters already had spurned. Hart and the rest of the Democratic field hacked at Mondale as beholden to organized labor, minorities, and interest groups. Those blocs by any other name were the Democratic coalition, the party’s base for fifty years. Mondale’s rivals made his support among them a liability that Republicans would use in burying his ticket. Hart’s “new ideas . . . new generation” theme worked beyond any expectations in New Hampshire, where he upset Mondale in the primary by a twelve-point spread. “Sometimes a cold shower is good for you,” Mondale said after taking a bath in New Hampshire. There were colder showers coming, primary defeats a front-runner was not supposed to suffer, or survive. Mondale did, with dogged determination and the support of a party establishment wary of Hart. “Somebody told me this morning that this is character-building,” Mondale said after Hart beat him in Maine. “I think I’ve got more character already than I can use.”

Mondale’s problem was that he was plain vanilla and Hart was the new flavor of the season. Mondale had union leaders on his side. Hart had movie and TV stars—Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, Mary Tyler Moore, Jack Nicholson, singer Jimmy Buffet, and a dozen more. Mondale had Paul Newman, the actor with his own salad dressing label. Hart’s was the star-filled salad. The Hart campaign finally appointed a “celebrity coordinator” to keep track and try to make use of his star power, valuable as a fund-raising draw.

Mondale was seasoned, experienced, a solid senator from Minnesota before he became Carter’s vice president. So he gained points for experience, but lost them because of his tie to an unpopular administration and the defeated 1980 ticket. Besides, he was dull, and even his best political friends said so. “He comes over kind of plastic,” said Tip O”Neill. In a convoluted comparison, New York Governor Mario Cuomo likened Mondale to a flavorless, cornmeal mush called polenta. And that came from politicians who were supporting him. Joan Mondale said her husband’s style was part of his Scandinavian heritage. “They don’t run around telling funny jokes or wearing funny hats,” she said. “They’re just very stable, hardworking, honest people. That’s what he is. We call it Norwegian charisma.” Mondale was never going to win an election on style points, and he didn’t pretend otherwise. Nominated that summer, Mondale said he was taking a campaign break. “I’ll sit down and read some of my old speeches because I want to get a nap as quickly as possible,” he said. After his wipeout loss to Reagan, Mondale said the presidential candidates of the future would have to be better television personalities than he was. “I think, you know, I’ve never really warmed up to television and . . . it’s never really warmed up to me,” he said.

Mondale was not the candidate with whom to have a fling; Hart was. His fans saw a bit of John Kennedy in him, and Hart promoted the comparison. Kennedy, he said, “represented hope and promise, a chance for peace and progress. That’s what got me into politics and that’s why I’m here today.” There also turned out to be just a bit of mystery about Hart. He’d changed his name from the family name, Hartpence, and he was a year older than his campaign biography said. No big deal, he said when those oddities made the newspapers, but the disclosures set off a media frenzy, most damaging on network television when commentators began asking who this newly formidable candidate was, and political reporters started questioning what he really proposed to do as president. Mondale had been asking questions like that and now it was all over the newspapers and TV.

Mondale grilled the argument down to a fast-food hamburger ad. Debating Hart in Atlanta, Mondale told him, “You know, when I hear your ideas, I’m reminded of the ad, ‘Where’s the beef?’ ” A catchy quip, particularly coming from Mondale. “Fritz, if you’d listen just a minute, I think you’d hear,” Hart replied when he could make himself heard over the laughter, but that was no antidote for a three-word gibe. Mondale had a slogan, quotable and handy for TV use, and he milked it. It was no ad lib. A campaign aide claimed to have suggested the line to the candidate. Actually, Lane Kirkland, the president of the AFL-CIO, campaigning for Mondale, used the line before the candidate did. “You can apply the burger test to Hart,” Kirkland said. “It’s a big bun, but where’s the beef?” Whatever the political authorship, Mondale had it ready when he debated Hart. It was trivial but telling, an apt trademark for a campaign that was more about maneuver and image than issues that meant something to the average American.

Jackson said Mondale was a relic and Hart was a fad. Sometimes it all sounded like a word game, but it was a numbers game, too, and Mondale had the advantage there, gaining votes for the nomination that kept him ahead in that bottom-line competition for delegates even when he was losing primaries. He got his biggest break on what should have been his worst day, when he won two states while losing six to Hart. Somehow, the TV commentators translated that into a solid showing for Mondale because Hart had been denied a sweep, a strange reading of the outcome based on inflated expectations the same commentators had created. It was a gift to Mondale, who was able to make the beating sound like a comeback even before he gained a real one in the industrial states where his labor allies were strong. He limped in—Hart won eight of the last twelve Democratic primaries—but he limped in ahead. Still, it was a near thing for Mondale, and there always was a risk that his lead would unravel.

Mondale declared that he would have a delegate majority to clinch the nomination before noon the day after the final primary in California, where Hart won. To make his claim stick, he and his people spent a frantic three hours telephoning uncommitted delegates to coax them aboard. Mondale collared the last handful and claimed victory. “It is clear I am the winner,” he said. “This is a very hard count. Every one of these delegates we are claiming we know to be there.” That was overstated; the Mondale people were not that certain. But they were certain that letting the clock strike noon without claiming victory on June 6 would have put all their vulnerabilities in damaging display. So Mondale declared himself the winner. He couldn’t have done it without a New Jersey delegate sweep, and that probably wouldn’t have happened but for Hart’s own blunder in the campaign there. He joked that his wife was campaigning in California where she got to hold cute animals while he drew New Jersey “and I got to hold samples from a toxic waste dump.” Insulting an entire state while asking its people to vote for you flunks elementary politics. The toxic waste line became the story of the week in New Jersey, and Hart sank without a delegate there. He acknowledged that Mondale had nominating numbers but said he would campaign on into overtime, trying to pry loose enough delegates to overtake him.

While Mondale was declaring Democratic victory, Reagan was showing why it would be hollow on election day. That June 6 was the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, and Reagan was in Normandy, his performance overshadowing anything a challenger could manage. In a political aside that day, Reagan said his strategy for handling the Democrats would be to “pretend they’re not there.” He did. The television coverage didn’t go quite that far; Mondale got his mention, but he wasn’t the lead. Reagan dominated the screen, from a stage near the cliffs overlooking the World War II landing zone. No TV producer could have devised a better setting, and Reagan was in his element as he looked out at an audience that included sixty-two veterans of the Army Rangers force that had attacked and captured German artillery emplacements on D-Day despite riddling casualties. “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” he said of the old soldiers. “These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.” Reagan sometimes had an off day, but not this one, and when he was on, there was no matching him.

The next act was Mondale’s. Having declared himself the nominee, his strategy was to validate the claim by acting the part. He began a public shopping expedition for a vice presidential candidate to run with him. The prospects were called to his home at North Oaks, Minnesota, and although the meetings there were private, the comings and goings were anything but. The interview process was not unlike that Carter had conducted in 1976 before choosing Mondale as his running mate. But Mondale’s interview list was something else. Carter had talked with prospective candidates who fit vice presidential tradition—men with records, credentials, and constituencies that might help the ticket. Mondale’s interviews were with three women, two blacks, one Hispanic, and one white male senator. We’d heard hints all spring about a woman for the ticket, but that was familiar stuff. Nominees always said their tickets were open to all Americans—women, blacks and other minorities included. That was customary and it was window dressing. The vice presidential choices that emerged had always fit vice presidential history: reliable types and usually predictable names. This one was different. The hints about a woman on the 1984 ticket became suggestions and then pressure. The National Organization for Women threatened to challenge Mondale’s nominee at the convention unless he chose a she, which irked the candidate. He was tending that way but didn’t need a new installment in the opposition’s argument that he was too beholden to too many interest groups.

Tip O’Neill said the vice presidential nominee should be Geraldine Ferraro, three-term congresswoman from Queens, New York. Ferraro said a woman’s place was on the ticket and she’d take that place if asked. By the old rules, she wouldn’t have been. She was not nationally known. While her district was solidly Democratic, she did not have a statewide constituency to bring to the ticket in New York, and there was no evidence that a woman nominee was going to improve the long odds against Mondale. Hart would have made more sense in traditional political terms. He’d won half the primaries, he had strengths to balance Mondale’s campaign weaknesses, and although he had not yet folded his challenge for the nomination, he would have agreed to run for vice-president in 1984. He already was looking ahead to another presidential bid in 1988, assuming Reagan’s reelection in 1984, as almost everyone did. But that very assumption created a situation in which Mondale could break the mold and choose a woman for his ticket, a gamble on which he had nothing to lose.

So the cautious candidate put caution aside and chose Ferraro. “I looked for the best vice president, and I found her in Gerry Ferraro,” he said. “We made history today.” The latter claim was true, but there was no case to be made for the former. Ferraro would say later that she had not been chosen only because she was a woman. Not so. A backbench House member from Queens with neither a state political base nor a national reputation certainly would not have been chosen had she not been a woman. The Ferraro nomination did strike sparks for the Democrats. They already were assembling for their national convention in San Francisco, dispirited even before they got started, but you could sense a mood swing when Mondale made his move. At least something different was happening, something exciting and, just possibly, something that could change their bleak outlook against Reagan.

It got the president’s attention. Reagan suggested that the Ferraro nomination was tokenism and reminded women that he’d put Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. But Reagan’s advantage was unshaken and Mondale was leading a battered party for the campaign against him. “I’ve paid my dues,” he told black delegates the day before he was nominated, which was true but no help in the fall campaign. Lines like that made him sound like a captive of Democratic bloc politics, which was exactly the picture his opponents wanted to paint. Hart wasn’t through sniping at him, saying that the nomination was “not a gold watch to be given out for faithful service” and that nostalgia was not a program. It was a final installment in the Democratic infighting Mondale described later as a year of party bloodletting. “I hated the whole process,” he said after the election. “I think it left scars that I carried with me through the rest of the campaign.” Still, conventions are celebrations, and the new-look ticket gave the Democrats something extra to celebrate. It wouldn’t last. While Mondale taunted the Republicans as a party of “drowsy harmony,” he could only envy it. Their act was set. His was still a work in progress.

The Ferraro nomination wasn’t Mondale’s only campaign gamble. He also risked candor. He supposedly dug his political grave by promising to raise taxes, although that is not quite what he said in San Francisco. He said a tax increase was inevitable to deal with swelling deficits, no matter which candidate was elected, and he was right. “Whoever is inaugurated in January, the American people will pay Mr. Reagan’s bills,” he said. “The budget will be squeezed. Taxes will go up. And anyone who says they won’t is not telling the truth . . . Let’s tell the truth. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.” The Republicans described that as a campaign pledge to raise taxes. I heard Mondale’s words that night in San Francisco not as a campaign promise that was supposed to get votes but, rather, as a description of tax medicine Americans inevitably would have to take to deal with deficits after the election. It was an accurate forecast; that’s what happened, but not until the Republicans had spent a campaign using it as an issue against Mondale.

Still, that high-risk topic was not a new one for Mondale, who had proposed a deficit-curbing tax increase early in his campaign for the nomination. He wanted one on Democratic lines, to raise tax rates on the top brackets that had benefited most from the 1981 Reagan cuts. Reagan danced around the question, saying he had no plans for a tax increase, the classic hedge for a politician who might have to do something distasteful but doesn’t want to say so. He tried calling Mondale a tax-and-spend liberal. “For him, raising taxes is a first resort,” Reagan said. “For me it is a last resort.” That was hedged, too. Then he said taxes would be increased “over my dead body.” Taxes were raised over his live body in bills he signed into law, although the overall personal tax load when he left office was marginally lower than when he began. And federal deficits were monumentally higher. When the national debt passed $1 trillion during his first term, Reagan made a big deal of it, staging a White House show in which he blamed it on the Democrats and the ways of the past. He did not hold an anti-debt rally when it hit $2 trillion; that would have reminded everyone that it happened on his presidential watch.

Mondale’s supposed blunder on a tax increase led at first to a fumbling Republican response. Reagan tried to say no on taxes without saying never. Vice President George Bush said maybe, a discrepancy that became troublesome. Questioned about it, Bush said he was not going to say anything further on the subject, adding, incomprehensibly, “zippedy-do-dah.” Serious subject, nonsense words.

But no big problem, because while they were stumbling over taxes, Reagan’s Republicans got another windfall from the Mondale camp, a controversy over Geraldine Ferraro’s family finances. They’d had to pay back taxes, which she said were due to inadvertent filing mistakes. Ferraro had promised full financial disclosure, but then said her husband, John Zaccaro, a New York real estate man, wasn’t going to release his own tax returns because they were separate and he wasn’t the candidate. That boiled up into a flap, and even when he relented, the critical questions persisted. To settle it, Ferraro hired a hall at a Queens hotel for what turned out to be a marathon news conference. First her accountants went over the couple’s finances and taxes. Then she answered questions for an hour and forty minutes, all televised. In Dallas, where the Republicans were opening their cut-and-dried convention, it was the only show on all the TV sets installed for delegates and reporters.

Republicans started speculating that the financial controversy might force Ferraro off the ticket. “Wishful thinking,” she said. It was. She said she had violated no trust, that she and her husband had nothing to hide, and that their disclosures proved it. But it had been a ten-day distraction, the last thing the trailing Democrats needed, and it took the bloom off the new-look ticket. She was the first woman nominated for vice president, but she was not the first politician snared in controversy over personal finances.

It seemed that Mondale couldn’t buy a break, while Reagan slid past almost every glitch.

When the president talked about the power of prayer, Tip O’Neill noted that Reagan seldom went to church, and Reagan managed to make absence sound like a virtue. Reagan said he missed attending Sunday services but “I represent too much of a threat to too many other people for me to be able to go to church” because of security concerns. Besides, the whole congregation would have to go through metal detectors. Checking the sound level before a radio address, Reagan, who had spent years trying to get rid of his quick-trigger image, spoke into a microphone that was turned on to the pressroom and tape recorders when he thought he could be heard only in the room. What he intended as private banter became public. “My fellow Americans,” he said, “I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Just joking, he said when the gaffe was broadcast later, prompting a Kremlin protest. Embarrassing but, since it was Reagan, only a flap, not a major problem. “He screwed up,” Goldwater said. “We do it all the time.” When “we” means the White House, that is not usually an acceptable explanation, but Reagan was the Teflon president. Nothing stuck. Not the time he fell asleep during an address by the pope. Or the visit to Brazil where he raised a toast to “the people of Bolivia.” Or the day he greeted his secretary of housing, the one black member of his Cabinet, by saying, “Hello, Mr. Mayor.”

The gaffes were for nitpickers; he had his message and he stood by it. Even when he changed it. He’d once denounced deficit spending as the root of all economic travail, but by 1984 he found it no barrier to economic progress. He even disowned one of his most noted lines, denying that he had called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” when his phrase was on record and on tape. Later, reelected, Reagan changed tune and decided he liked the line, repeating it as evidence he hadn’t gone soft on Moscow when he negotiated arms reductions with the Soviet Union during his second term. He didn’t have to be consistent, he just had to be Reagan.

His campaign fare was a syrup of confidence and reassurance. It was morning in America, Reagan said, and he had a sparkling vision of even better times. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” he said. You didn’t see any specifics because Reagan ran on themes, not specifics. He avoided the questioning reporters who always wanted the fine print answers. He’d walk away, or cup an ear and say he hadn’t heard the question, or walk into the roar of the helicopter engines so nobody could hear anything. He wasn’t going to stray off message because some reporter asked a question, and besides, the tactics protected him against questions he might not have been able to answer. Never mind the details; Reagan’s staff could worry about that. Stars don’t have to concern themselves with scriptwriting and stage directions.

Before he defeated Carter in 1980, Reagan had charged that a faltering foreign policy emboldened Iran to take and hold the American Embassy hostages, and that he wouldn’t stand by and do nothing if they were still held when he got to the White House. He lucked out—the Iranians, in a last slap at Carter, released the hostages as Reagan was inaugurated so didn’t have to say what he would have done, let alone do it. But he did say that his administration would not tolerate such acts against Americans. What happened on his watch was worse. The fifty-two hostages came home alive in 1981, although eight American servicemen had been killed in Carter’s failed attempt to rescue them. The terrorist truck bombing of a Marine barracks near Beirut killed 241 American servicemen on October 23, 1983. “The United States will not be intimidated by terrorists,” Reagan said, resisting Democratic calls for an end to an ill-defined peacekeeping effort in Lebanon. He changed the orders two months later, moving Marines to ships offshore. “We’re not bugging out, we’re just going to a little more defensible position,” Reagan said defensively. In another month, that ended, too. The toll by then was 264 dead, 137 wounded.

Logically, that should have been a major issue and a damaging one against a president beginning a reelection campaign. For Carter, the hostage situation had been a constant campaign undertow. The deadly terrorism against U.S. forces in Lebanon did not register as a significant liability against Reagan, although Mondale tried to make it one. “The president told the terrorists he was going to retaliate,” he said when he debated Reagan. “He didn’t. And the bottom line is the United States left in humiliation and our enemies are stronger.” By then there had been another terrorist attack in Beirut, on September 20, an embassy bombing that killed nine people, two of them Americans. Reagan insisted that security had not been lax; he said safeguards were being built but hadn’t quite been finished. “Anybody that’s ever had their kitchen done over knows it never gets done as soon as you wish it would,” he said, offering an oddly homey explanation given the deadly circumstances. Mondale said that “being president and countering terrorists is a more difficult task than fixing up your kitchen.” He accused Reagan of “letting terrorists humiliate us, push us around and kill our people.” That sounded very much like what Reagan had said about Carter during the Iran hostage crisis. But Mondale couldn’t make it into a telling issue. What worked for Reagan against Carter flopped for Mondale against Reagan. Two days after the Marine barracks truck bombing, Reagan ordered an invasion of Grenada, an island speck in the Caribbean Sea, saying it was to protect about 1,100 Americans there from Communists who had seized power. “We got there just in time,” he told the nation. To the cynical, it looked as though he got there just in time to change the subject from losses in Lebanon to winning a mini-war.

But the administration still had the Middle East disaster to explain away. Vice President Bush said the Beirut killings were not comparable to the “humiliation” of the Iranian hostage taking when Carter was president because that involved a foreign government, not “wanton acts of terror by a shadowy group.” He said of the Beirut bombings, “I don’t think of those as humiliations, I think of those people as victims of horrible, international terror.” When Ferraro brought up Reagan’s inaction after the terrorist attacks in Lebanon, Bush tried roughly the same script—wanton terrorists in Beirut, government involvement in Iran. “Let me help you with the difference, Mrs. Ferraro, between Iran and the Embassy in Lebanon,” Bush began. Ferraro fumed, and when her turn came she shot back: “Let me just say, first of all, that I almost resent, Vice President Bush, your patronizing attitude that you have to teach me about foreign policy.” She was not almost resentful, she was angry and it showed. The substance got lost in the spat. That was fine with Bush.

“We tried to kick a little ass last night,” he told a union leader on the New Jersey docks the next day, and then realized there was a TV microphone picking up his words. “Oops, oh God, he heard me. Turn that thing off,” Bush said, too late. It was on tape. Reagan instinctively denied his vice president had said it. “I don’t know anything about it, but I would be inclined not to believe it,” Reagan said when he was asked about the Bush remark. Bush couldn’t deny it, so he defended it. “It’s an old expression and I stand behind it. That’s the way my kids talk. That’s the way I talk,” he said. “I just don’t like to use it in public.” More to the point, he didn’t like to be caught using it in public. After that episode he minded his campaign manners. So did Barbara Bush, who had described Ferraro as “I can’t say it but it rhymes with rich.” She later apologized and suggested that the rhyming word was “witch,” no compliment but more acceptable than “bitch.”

With a campaign month to go, the age issue Reagan had been deflecting suddenly got serious for him. While he’d always made a joke of it, his strategists had been wary of the question all year. I never thought his age was the real problem; it was his disengagement, the sense that he was out of touch, the face and voice of the administration but not its hands-on executive. In 1981, U.S. warplanes shot down Libyan jets that had challenged them off the coast of Libya. That underscored toughness in administration policy, but left questions about Reagan’s command of it when the White House acknowledged the president had been sleeping at the time and was not told of the episode for six hours

Mondale kept trying to stir the disengagement question. “I’m not sure which is worse,” he said, “the arrogance of Mr. Reagan’s isolation or his belief that the American people would let him get away with it.” Whatever the merits of the accusation, the belief was the fact. Except for Democratic partisans, people weren’t concerned about Reagan’s way of governing, and they liked his public, great communicator style. The Democrats said he wasn’t that good without a script, that he was a performer with prompters, using lines he knew by rote, with index card reminders always handy in case he forgot a point. A Mondale manager told me that if they could just shuffle those index cards, they’d have a chance to beat Reagan.

Mondale said Reagan had “detached himself from the details of the government.” He accused Reagan of “leadership by amnesia.” Reagan’s retort: “I’m surprised he knew what the word meant.” What it meant was that the Democrats were trying to plant the idea that Reagan was a faltering old man, not up to another term in the White House. He wasn’t that old; other men in other nations had been effective world leaders well past his age. But no American president had been elected at seventy-three.

Reagan saw the problem and tried to preempt it. He chopped wood at his ranch, rode horseback, signed a magazine piece about his physical exercise routine. And he joked about it. “I’ve already lived about twenty-odd years longer than my life expectancy when I was born,” he said. “That’s a source of annoyance to a number of people.” He said he didn’t think age would be an issue. “Somebody tried to make it one four years ago, and it didn’t work,” he said, “and I’ve tried to start a rumor that I’m not really that old, that they mixed up the babies in the hospital.” His friend and campaign chairman, Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada, said he couldn’t conceive of age becoming a problem because “he’s very responsive, he’s very direct, he’s not absentminded.” But it did become one, a month before the election.

The Democrats didn’t dare to push the age question overtly because the tactic might have backfired on them. Reagan’s age became an issue because his halting, confused performance in the first campaign debate with Mondale seemed to validate the subject. Reagan the communicator lapsed into bewildering numbers and befuddling sentences. He was defensive and not good at it. Reaching back for a way out, he tried his 1980 debate line to fend off Mondale’s accusations: “There you go again.” Mondale adroitly turned that against him, reciting what he said were broken promises of that Reagan campaign. When the TV moderator got the debate sequence out of order and offered Reagan extra time, he fumbled even that. “I’m all confused now,” he said. The moderator’s mix-up gave him reason to be, but Reagan’s words were an unintended self-summary of his bad night on camera.

Now the Reagan people had trouble. There’s no worse moment for a presidential candidate to mess up than in one of the great debates, which command wider audiences than anything else in a campaign. A candidate has to be quick enough to avoid the traps, and in that debate with Mondale, Reagan was not. He was supposed to be the master performer. Instead, he was a lousy one for most of ninety-plus minutes on television. Now the Democrats had a risk-free way into the age issue and the Republicans were on the defensive.

Two days after the debate, the Wall Street Journal put it into print with a lead story asking whether the oldest president was showing his age. David Broder wrote a Washington Post column on the question. That made it a safe subject for the rest of the media, and the television networks blared it in unison that evening. Age was on the campaign agenda. One of the valid complaints about political reporters is that we all clamor about the same stories. That happened on Reagan and the age issue for two reasons. The first is that none of us likes being beaten to a major story or issue. When that happens, we set about catching up and trying to find out more so as to write the next chapter and get ahead of the competition. The other reason was unique to the Reagan situation. There had been Reagan age stories all season, and even in his losing campaign four years before. I wrote one in 1976 when he turned sixty-five while campaigning in New Hampshire and became eligible for Social Security benefits, which he declined. But the idea that his age was a problem and that he was slowing to a point that might be debilitating in a second term was not so much a news story as an accusation. Reporters—at least conscientious, objective reporters—do not deal in accusations. That’s up to the candidates. More than once, campaigns tried to feed me damaging information about their opponents, seeking a way into print without fingerprints. I wouldn’t play. An accusation cloaked in objectivity is far more effective than one lodged by a rival candidate, and good reporters don’t let politicians use them that way.

But the debate and the Journal story had put the age issue into play. Now reporters could ask politicians about it, and we did. Laxalt acknowledged that Reagan had an off night, but blamed it on a wearing, overly intensive effort to brief him in preparation for the debate, not on “any physical or mental deficiency.” Even the denial added to the problem. I wouldn’t have used those quoted words in a news story until Reagan’s man did. Then they were part of the dialogue.

Mondale was trying to add fuel. He said Reagan might be “out of touch with the impact of his policies . . . Maybe he doesn’t understand what he has done. But we need a president who knows what is going on.” His allies worked the issue, too, including, remarkably, eighty-four-year-old Representative Claude Pepper of Florida, the political patron of all elderly causes. Pepper said Reagan was showing signs of old age. He said Reagan’s lapses in the debate “might well be attributed to his increasing years.” I guess it took one to know one.

The White House chose the week after the TV debate to release a doctor’s report saying the president’s health was fine. Coincidence, they claimed; the release had been planned all along. “I wasn’t tired” in the Mondale debate, Reagan said. “And in regard to the age issue and everything, if I had on as much makeup on as he did, I’d look younger, too.” Reagan said he had never worn makeup, “even when I was in pictures,” but we found makeup artists who recalled otherwise. There also was the persistent rumor that he dyed his hair to keep the gray out, which the Reagan people always denied. The cynical response around Washington was that he might just be prematurely orange.

Let Reagan be Reagan his followers said, complaining that he had been crammed with too many facts and figures to be himself in the debate. “I was overtrained,” the president agreed. Reagan’s team wouldn’t let that happen again. He’d be rested and ready for the final debate, two weeks after the first.

Mondale went in on the offensive, saying Reagan was out of touch. He questioned whether Reagan was “in charge of the facts” and exercising real authority over his own administration. Reagan fended him off until the debate got to the Question. “You are already the oldest president in history, and some of your staff say you tired after your most recent encounter with Mr. Mondale,” said Henry Trewhitt of the Baltimore Sun. “President Kennedy had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuban missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?”

“Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt,” Reagan said. Then, with one line, he shelved the issue. “I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” the president said. “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

That drew laughter from the audience and a smile from Mondale, who said long afterward that it was a smile through tears because at that moment he knew the election was hopeless.

Not that Reagan was a champion debater that night, either. His bumbling summation was as addled as anything he’d said in the first debate. He got his time frame confused and said voters had to decide whether they wanted to “return to the policies of weakness of the past four years,” which obviously was not what he meant to say about his own first term. Then he rambled through an account of writing a letter to be put into a time capsule, which made no sense literally or politically. I wrote that night that Reagan had not been at his televised best but probably had been good enough to avoid further debate damage and hold his lead. I underestimated the power of Reagan’s one best line, the comeback on the too-old question. With it, the president deflected and deflated the age issue. That helped him get past the more significant question of whether he was a commander in chief who had ceded real command to his committees, consultants, and advisers. There certainly were grounds for wondering about that, but it made no difference. “I know it will come as a surprise to Mr. Mondale, but I am in charge,” the president said, and voters took his word for it. Reagan was Reagan again, and that was enough. Fifteen days later Mondale was buried in a 59 percent Reagan landslide. He won only in Minnesota and the District of Columbia, the worst electoral vote drubbing in history. “My chance of winning disappeared at the end of the second debate,” he said. “The president sufficiently reassured Americans.”

Reagan won a mandate without a blueprint in his last, best landslide. So he had ample room to maneuver in his second term. The hawk didn’t go dovish, but Reagan negotiated for arms reductions with Moscow and boasted of “a satisfying new closeness” in relations. Still claiming to be the champion of tax cutters, he signed thirteen bills that raised taxes while insisting that he had opposed them all. Administration operatives traded arms for hostages in the Middle East and misspent the money the weapons brought. Reagan denied it, then had to admit it—but said even then that his heart and his intentions told him that what he was confessing wasn’t so.

When Reagan left office in 1989, he had the highest job approval ratings an outgoing president ever held, 68 percent. He was the first president in sixty years to turn the job over to an elected successor of his own party. His genius was not in the details but in avoiding them. In the sad retirement that took him from the stage as a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, the biggest federal office building in Washington was named for the president who had demanded smaller government. That was only the beginning of a naming frenzy led by conservative activists to get highways and government installations named for Reagan in every state. After the Republicans took control of Congress, they voted to change Washington National Airport to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. I thought George should have had his first name in there, too, but the nostalgia was for the fortieth president, not the first.

In an uncertain world, Reagan stood for certainty, I wrote as he left office. He was unwavering, absolute in his convictions, never more so than when he was changing them. His style not only succeeded, it triumphed.

“They call it the Reagan revolution and I’ll accept that,” Reagan said in farewell. “But for me, it always seemed more like the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.” Whether by revolution or rediscovery, Reagan had rewritten the agenda.