The Myths Ands Electoral History of Ronald Reagan Part 5: The Disastrous Selection of A Running Mate

 

Reagan had never really cared for the traditional, midnight crash sessions to decide on a vice presidential candidate, and considering how fresh the memory George McGovern’s disastrous pick was in the memories of both parties, it was hard to argue with him. He chose John Sears and Paul Laxalt, the manager and chairman of his campaign to make a recommendation for him. Both these men were tacticians who believed in winning, not ideological purity as most conservatives clearly did. Their decision was not to worry about the south, but rather the hope that take could make inroads in the Northeast.

Sears started the process with the general election in mind: his first conversation was with William Ruckelshaus. Ruckelshaus had been Richard Nixon’s deputy Attorney General and was famous for being part of the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ when both he and Elliot Richardson had resigned rather than fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Ruckelshaus was from Indiana, and that states delegates were already committed to Reagan because of his victory in that state’s primary. The thought was that he might offset liberal hostility to the GOP ticket and perhaps exploit Carter’s weakness among Catholic voters. According to Ruckelshaus, Sears offered him a place on the ticket and never followed up because the camp realized they didn’t have the nomination wrapped up and he needed someone from the Northeast to help him win. Sears would later deny he’d made a firm offer to Ruckelshaus – perhaps to cover a decision he was considering that he knew would have appalled the South.

Apparently Sears’ first choice was none other than the lame duck Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. When asked what conservatives like Jesse Helms would have thought Sears said calmly. “They would have come off the ceiling in a day or two. “ He also thought Rockefeller would have liked the irony of it and considering his firm control of the New York delegation, the gambit very well might have worked.  Indeed, a Reagan-Rockefeller ticket very well could have prevailed in the general election against Carter. It would have unified the party in a sense that Ford seemed unable to do and at the time Rockefeller was far stronger in the North then Reagan was. The question would have been whether Reagan could have managed to hold his conservative delegation in the face of such a daring strategy. Considering how things played out, that’s a very good question.

The man Sears and Laxalt eventually agreed upon was the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania Stephen Schweiker.  Others considered Jim Buckley, the Conservative Senator from New York and Governor Jim Rhodes of Ohio. The latter was preferred as they thought he could carry the Ohio delegation for Reagan, but given his curmudgeonly and controversial reputation, no one thought he would be a good candidate in the general.

While Schweiker was not a ‘knee-jerk liberal’ as was considered by the conservatives later on.  While his voting record was liberal, Schweiker was opposed to gun control, abortion and the ‘Captive Nations’ argument. Furthermore, he was in the convention as a Ford delegate, so it might very well undermine the Pennsylvania delegation. Reagan asked simply whether he thought Schweiker would do it.

On July 24, the two men had their first meeting. The two got along fairly well. Schweiker told Reagan: “I’m no knee-jerk liberal.” And Reagan replied: “I’m no knee-jerk extremist.” The next three hours were spent planning how it could be done, how to make this the element of surprise that would undermine the Ford campaign.

The first sign that this would not go as planned for anybody was when Schweiker called Drew Lewis, a friend of his and a key member of the Philadelphia delegation. Lewis refused to go along with Schweiker’s decision.  The party conservatives were also shocked and angry, particularly in the Mississippi delegation. The problems got worse when the official announcement took place. When questioned on his position on the Panama Canal, a major bugbear among conservatives that had been one of the guiding forces behind Reagan’s primary campaign Schweiker bloviated for several minutes before admitting he had no position. In the eyes of the conservative caucus, this was viewed as a betrayal. Southern conservatives began to defect and the only way to ensure a rebound was to make movement about the Pennsylvania delegation that would trigger switches in New Jersey and New York.

It never happened. Lewis called Ford at the White House and assured him that he would hold at least ninety delegates for Ford on the first ballot.  The Ford campaign, led by Dick Cheney knew that they had to make a play for the Southern delegations. Their target was Mississippi where the Ford campaign had spent a lot of time and energy courting the head of the delegation Clarke Reed. The state had never been as solid for Reagan as the campaign had hoped, and the selection of Schweiker lit the fuse.  Reed ended up saying prior to the convention that he was bringing the 30 delegates to Ford. But nobody was sure.

When the convention finally began, Sears played one last card. He was determined to force Ford to show his hand on the vice presidential nominee before the convention. He decided to propose what amounted to a floor fight over what would be called Rule 16-C and if it worked, it might undo whatever momentum Ford still had. The problem was the rule didn’t sit well with conservatives. As Jules Witcover pointed out with some irony: “they did not look favorably on an upset to the status in any regard, even if it was to the benefit of their candidate.”

Again everything came down to Mississippi and Clarke Reed, who was having second thoughts again. Reed’s haphazard personality kept everybody guessing through the next few days. Finally after three days the Mississippi delegation of sixty (thirty of them were alternates) finally voted: 31 to 28 against 16-C. That was the final battle; the actual role call was anticlimactic.  Later that week, Gerald Ford was nominated with 1187 to Reagan’s 1070. (Ford’s eventually running mate would be Kansas Senator Bob Dole, who ironically had thought before the convention that he’d had a better chance of being nominated alongside Reagan.)

In retrospect Reagan losing the presidential nomination in 1976 was the best thing for his career. Even the most loyal Reaganites acknowledge that had he won the nomination, he very likely would have lost to Jimmy Carter in the general. Reagan’s strength during the primary campaign had been almost exclusively in the South: aside from California, the only big state he had carried was Texas.  Reagan would no doubt have done well in the South but probably not as well in the Northeast.

The bigger problem would have been the fact that Reagan winning the nomination would have meant that he had defeated a sitting President.  It is hard to imagine a world where, after the embittered primary fight and convention battles that had just occurred, Gerald Ford would have spent the fall campaign in an enthusiastic matter for the man who’d defeated him.  In fact, it would have given Carter and the Democrats a better issue to campaign on in the fall then they did before. While no one ever truly believes in the idea of party unity after a convention, the entire party could have easily pointed out the primary campaign and shown that the Republicans had already torn each other to pieces and that they couldn’t pretend they were unified. Throw in the fact that the last eight years had been a Republican administration anyway and there’s little chance Reagan could have overcome all of that to win the White House that November. And if that had happened Reagan would have been ostracized from the party leadership and the movement would have had to look for a new leader – assuming that two separate defeats from the conservatives had not led to them being purged.

Then again, you can’t rule out anything. At the end of the Republican convention, Ford was trailing Carter in the polls by 38 percent. By election day, he had nearly completely erased that margin and some actually thought might be able to pull off an upset. As it was Carter’s win was a very narrow one: 297 electoral votes to 240 for Ford, and he only won the popular vote by less than 2%. Had there been a difference of 38,000 votes gone from Democrat to Republican in Ohio and Mississippi, Ford would have won reelection.

That too would have dealt a blow to any prospect Reagan had for winning the Presidency in 1980. Even though the party was under Reagan’s spell, Reagan would have lost a lot of the drive for a 1980 run.  There’s a very real likelihood if Ford had been reelected, all of the domestic problems that fundamentally destroyed Carter’s presidency would have done the same to Ford’s second term: he would also have been crippled by having to do so with overwhelming majorities for Democrats in both Houses of Congress and no real reason for the conservatives in the GOP to help him anyway.  A large part of Reagan’s pull in 1980 was the disaster of a Democratic administration. If a Republican was in the White House at the time, Reagan would have been in the bind of having to campaign against the President – and someone who had no reason to boost his fortunes.

But Carter did defeat Ford in 1976 and his administration so isolated both members of his own party and the press that he had few friends by the midterms despite his triumphs in foreign policy.  Far worse were the problems with inflation and the economy that Carter could not seem to solve.  By the middle of 1979 Democrats were yearning for the restoration that would come with Ted Kennedy. By that time Reagan was moving toward his run for the nomination again in 1980 – and so were many other Republicans.

In the final article in this series, I will deal with Reagan’s primary struggle to win the 1980 Republican nomination and how his electoral landslide didn’t look like a sure thing for most of 1980.