CHAPTER 8

WHEN HE RAN FOR president a second time in 1976, Ronald Reagan made New Hampshire a strategic focus from the get-go. With popular former governor Hugh Gregg running his campaign in the state, the conservative challenger to incumbent President Gerald Ford held what were dubbed “citizens’ press conferences” around the state, in which Reagan would first read from a prepared script and then take questions from the crowd, early precursors to the town hall meetings that John McCain would make famous in the 2000 campaign. New Hampshire Republicans were largely impressed with the two-term former California governor, whose sunny demeanor and hard-line principles made for a potent combination on the stump. But what may have cost Reagan victory in New Hampshire that year—and, ultimately, the GOP nomination—was a January speech he delivered in Chicago, in which he appeared to come out in favor of cuts to federal spending that would increase tax burdens on the states. The Ford campaign pounced, contending that Reagan wanted New Hampshire to impose a general sales and income tax on its residents for the first time—a charge that was roughly akin to a presidential candidate in Wisconsin being accused of wanting to ration beer and cheese. Gregg and the rest of Reagan’s New Hampshire team tried to keep expectations low, but when Ford ended up eking out a win on Primary Day by less than 2,000 votes, the president’s narrow victory was all he needed to claim the momentum.

Four years later, Reagan, by then the front-runner for the Republican nomination, didn’t work New Hampshire on the ground as extensively as he had in 1976. The initial 1980 blueprint for his campaign was in keeping with Reagan’s overall efforts to remain “above the fray”—a strategy that has worked about as well over the years in New Hampshire as the “prevent defense” has in the NFL.

The reality check came on January 21, 1980, with Reagan’s unexpected defeat in Iowa at the hands of George H. W. Bush. Reagan’s campaign team had for the most part kept the candidate far away from Iowa. He had even spent the night of the caucuses at his home in Los Angeles, rather than demonstrating any urgency to win what he derided (accurately) as a “straw vote.” That tactic proved to be a massive mistake. Reagan’s defeat in Iowa was a stunning upset and a major setback for his chances. Working in his favor was the unusually long thirty-five-day period that year between the Iowa and New Hampshire votes, during which he could try to save his candidacy. Still, the task before Reagan was an especially daunting one, as his own New Hampshire internal polling showed him losing to Bush by twenty-one points. It was time to get into the thick of the fray.

The most famous moment of Reagan’s 1980 primary campaign transpired inside the Nashua High School gymnasium three days before the February 26 primary. What went down there amounted to one of the all-time great political setups. The Nashua Telegraph had agreed to sponsor a one-on-one debate between Reagan and Bush, which would have excluded four of the other major Republican candidates in the race, who were in the state at the time: Illinois congressman John Anderson, Illinois senator Howard Baker, Kansas senator Bob Dole, and Illinois congressman Phil Crane. But when the Federal Election Commission ruled that the newspaper’s sponsorship of such an event would have amounted to an illegal campaign contribution to Reagan and Bush, the Reagan campaign agreed to settle the matter by paying for the forum itself. At the last minute, Reagan decided to invite the four other GOP contenders to the debate—clearly, in retrospect, an attempt to goad Bush. It worked. Bush, quite understandably, was livid. These weren’t the rules to which he had agreed.

Just before the debate started, with Bush already on stage, a confident Reagan entered the gym with the four newly invited candidates in tow. Bush was visibly irritated, and so was the forum’s moderator, Nashua Telegraph editor Jon Breen, who also wanted to host the one-on-one debate to which the Reagan and Bush camps had agreed. When it was announced that the other four candidates would not be allowed to participate, an irate Reagan began to protest in front of the already riled-up 2,000 or so spectators in attendance. Then, in a last-ditch effort to reestablish his authority, Breen ordered the sound technician to turn off Reagan’s microphone after the candidate asked to address the crowd.

“I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green [sic]!” Reagan shot back.

Breen was not persuaded. Eventually, the four other candidates agreed to leave the stage, and the one-on-one debate that Bush called for went forward. As far as the impact of the moment, that Bush ultimately got his way mattered about as much as it did that Reagan got Breen’s name wrong. What actually counted was that Reagan had shown himself to be a man who took charge and got what he wanted—not anything like the pedantic and publicly apprehensive Bush, who couldn’t even summon the courage to look his opponent in the eye, as he whined about the rules. For the next three days, the “paying for this microphone” clip ran on local and national news shows over and over, helping to cement Reagan’s tough-guy image and the perception that Bush probably would have been more comfortable on the croquet court than he would staring down the Soviets. Reagan ended up winning the state by a previously inconceivable twenty-seven-point margin. It wasn’t just an iconic sound bite from the 1980 campaign—it was the moment that turned around Reagan’s political career and launched him to the presidency. That, at least, has long been the popular interpretation.

Here’s what actually happened. Reagan had already begun gaining ground in New Hampshire weeks before what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre” in Nashua. As it did in 1976, the Union Leader endorsed the former California governor. Loeb provided editorial cover in his typical manner. The cantankerous publisher denigrated Bush simultaneously as both “an oil man from Texas” and a pawn of the “entire Eastern establishment.” (Reagan would end up beating Bush in Manchester itself by a margin of 74.8 percent to 9.4 percent.)

Loeb’s backing helped, but Reagan also lifted himself. Most notably, he learned from the mistake he’d made in Iowa when he acted as if stumping vigorously was somehow beneath him. From the moment the campaign moved to New Hampshire, Reagan determined that he would go all out and make himself available in face-to-face interactions with as many voters as possible—as he’d done four years earlier—even if it was his birthday.

Fewer than three weeks removed from his crushing Iowa defeat and more than two weeks before the “Saturday Night Massacre” had all but sealed his New Hampshire victory, the Gipper wasn’t in a mood to spend much time celebrating sixty-nine candles on February 6, 1980. He had a packed schedule of retail events around New Hampshire on a seasonably cold day, and he wanted to get closer to real people than was generally possible. A major nuisance for Reagan at that time was his Secret Service detail, which frequently kept him at much more than arm’s length from New Hampshire voters—a maddening physical obstacle for the gregarious candidate. But with the slaying of Bobby Kennedy in 1968 and the attempted assassination of George Wallace in 1972 still fresh memories, early and stringent Secret Service protection for serious presidential candidates had become de rigueur. Reagan had been assigned a detail even before he announced his candidacy in November of the previous year. On the final stop of his birthday swing through New Hampshire, however, he was determined not to let the Secret Service get in the way of making some personal connections.

It was well after dark by the time the candidate and his substantial Secret Service and staff entourage arrived at the University of New Hampshire’s campus in Durham and made for the Tau Kappa Epsilon (TKE) fraternity house. Reagan had become a TKE member himself while attending Eureka College all the way back in 1929, and he was warmly greeted by the newest generation of brothers at UNH. After he made some informal remarks about what the fraternity had meant to him, it wasn’t long before someone offered Reagan a beer, the purpose of which—it was explained flatly—was to wash down his slice of birthday cake. Then, as now, there were few more enticing social achievements for a college kid than getting a famous person to drink their terrible beer.

Ever the polished performer, Reagan knew when it was time to call it a night. After about ten minutes of handshakes and photo-ops, the candidate and most of his support staff bid the fraternity brothers a fond farewell and headed for the airport. But for a group of campaign advance men and Secret Service agents who were now off the clock, the party was just getting started. Paul Young, who was president of the UNH chapter of TKE at the time, still remembers what transpired.

“The Secret Service agents are showing us their guns, they’re getting hammered. They’re smoking dope with the advance people. They get them hammered. At the time, we had fire extinguishers hanging on the wall. They took them and sprayed down the girls who were there with water.”

After a few more hours of collegiate revelry, Reagan’s advance men decided they’d best head out. Things turned particularly hairy at this point, when a carful of boozed-up Reagan advance staffers drove directly into a stone retaining wall. Unable to restart the engine and out of clear options for how to rectify their predicament in the pre–cell phone era, they took off on foot. The next morning, as Young recalls, the cops made a cursory call to the fraternity to try to get an idea of what had happened, but nothing ever came of it. “That was campaigning in the old days,” Young said.

Knowing what we do now about the extracurricular activities of some Secret Service agents in recent years, it might not seem particularly astonishing that a few of the men who were tasked with guarding the life of a future president once used their downtime between shifts to put on an impromptu wet T-shirt contest on a college campus before engaging in some—at best—questionably sober driving. But when you stop to consider that Reagan was a man who, a little more than a year beyond the event in question, would barely survive an assassination attempt, it is quite a bit more jarring.