Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976 - 1980 by Rick Perlstein
Rick Perlstein is a former Washington Post writer who has written four major examinations of the rise of conservative politics in the United States. This is a huge book - over 1100 pages and 3 pounds - so I’m going to talk about it over two weeks. You’re reading Part One which covers 1976 to 1978. Next week we’ll look at 1979 and 1980.
Perlstein, who would fit on the progressive/liberal side of the ideological aisle, tends to skewer anyone on his radar screen – liberals, conservatives, pundits, and media celebrities. I previously read Nixonland (2008), about you-know-who, which documented his ascendance between 1965 and 1972. Reaganland is as much about Jimmy Carter and the American culture of the late 1970s as it is about the rise of the 40th president of the United States. It’s important to remember that Perlstein isn’t writing about the actual tenures of his subjects; he’s telling us how they became president.
The book begins with President Gerald Ford being frustrated by the fact that Ronald Reagan, the man he defeated for the 1976 presidential nomination, was not strongly supporting Ford in his campaign to beat Jimmy Carter. Many observers thought that Reagan had come to the end of his political run with his failed 1976 campaign for the presidency. He was too old, and the Republican Party was increasingly irrelevant, said those in the know. On the other hand, the Democrats were in great shape, having nominated Jimmy Carter, a candidate of sweetness and light.
Watergate and President Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon had turned a lot of mid-1970s voters off. Six weeks before the 1976 election, one-third of the voters were undecided and 40% said that they weren’t planning to vote at all.
Ronald Reagan had charmed the conservative base with his campaign against Ford, and he continued to pump out right-wing positions during the campaign, just as Ford was trying to show that he was a reasonable guy.
Carter was running as an outsider which created its own set of problems. He disdained machine politics, which were the only politics in most Democrat-leaning states. Carter didn’t pay deference to elected officials and many of them were not enthusiastic about their presidential candidate.
Ford had his own problems in that his moderate politics generated little enthusiasm among conservatives. He also made a basic misstatement about there not being any Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, an unforced error which cost him the support of some ethnic voters.
Ford was behind for most of the campaign. He had to find some way to cut into Carter’s lead and he looked to religion as a way to get votes. Since Carter was a born-again minister/peanut farmer, it seemed that he should have owned the issue. However, some Christians were cooling to him. He had his famous Playboy interview about “lusting in his heart” after women. That did not sit well with evangelicals. He also wanted to legalize marijuana and give amnesty to Vietnam War draft dodgers, positions that did not endear him to religious people who tended to be conservative.
During the 1970s there was a revival of sorts in religious fervor in the country. Ford’s polling showed that over 70% of Americans read the Bible regularly and expected their leaders to pray before making any decisions. Ford pulled together a group of evangelicals and convinced them that he was worthy of their support. He was a regular church goer and he and his wife, Betty, did read the Bible. Even more to his credit with devout voters was that he, unlike Carter, refused the invitation to do a Playboy interview.
Ford closed the gap but Carter won. That set the stage for Ronald Reagan’s run for the presidency.
While Reagan did very little campaigning for Gerald Ford, he did a lot of campaigning for Republican candidates in 1976. Many of them won, including Orrin Hatch, who came out of nowhere to be elected Senator from Utah. Early on, Orrin figured out that supporting Ronald Reagan was the way to win with the emerging conservative sentiment in his state and the nation. Hatch’s electoral success was coincident with the rise of the New Right, a phrase coined by former Nixon administration official Kevin Phillips. This new political group was radical in its conservatism. They essentially wanted to upend the power structure in the country and get back to working for middle class people. The New Right saw the government, not big corporations, as exploiting the people. They tended to focus on public education as the exemplar of out-of-control Big Brother, with secular textbooks being a big problem. They also were increasingly concerned about the federal government using IRS law, especially the non-profit organization tax exemption, to stifle Christian schools that taught Creationism and did not abide homosexual teachers and spare-the-rod discipline.
New campaign wrinkles Before the mid-1970s, running for office hadn’t changed much since presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower took out TV ads in 1952. Candidates bought ads on TV and radio to get their message out, attended events, shook hands, gave speeches, and participated in debates. That was about to change.
Richard Viguerie figured out that direct mail solicitation was the next big thing in politics and set up his company to develop databases - called mailing lists back then - to directly communicate with like-thinking people and convince them to send money to beat back the secular threats to their lives. The letters railed on about foul language, permissive sex, adultery, forced busing, anti-God textbooks, homosexuals, and liberal judges, and the pitches worked to bring in lots of money.
Paul Weyrich had worked for Barry Goldwater during the 1964 campaign and he knew how to organize people. He was no-nonsense. Someone described him as “retaining the precise orderliness of his Teutonic forebears, but none of their rollicking good humor. His mien is that of a formal, slightly constipated owl.” He also was one of the first people to learn how to use direct mail lists to build strong field operations.
Another element that the New Right exploited was the loophole that essentially let “independent” political action committees (PACs) raise as much money as they could. This led to the founding of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) which to this day is a very powerful player in American politics.
1977
Jimmy Carter was sworn in on January 20, 1977. Two days later, the March for Life, a strident anti-abortion group, had its annual protest in DC. Instead of a few thousand people showing up as had been the norm, over 40,000 pro-life advocates joined the protest. As Carter took office, abortion was being teed up as a major issue separating conservatives from liberals.
David Brodeur, the Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator for the Washington Post, observed:“Of the four presidents who have served since Dwight Eisenhower (1953-61) went peaceably into retirement, one was assassinated, one was rejected by his party, one was forced to resign, and one was defeated for reelection.”
Carter had a simple, people-oriented inaugural. He thanked Gerald Ford for his healing service to the country. While Carter exalted the people, he ignored a lot of political figures, including US House Speaker Tip O’Neill, slights which would not help the new president actually govern. Carter’s White House staff, while young and earnest, was also inexperienced and clueless about how to get things done in Washington.
As was the case with Donald Trump’s election in 2016, in 1976 the country had voted for change, whatever that meant. Carter started off with very high approval numbers and all seemed to be going well. Carter the nuclear engineer analyzed each problem and came up with a way to fix it. Inflation was creeping up. Energy prices were skyrocketing. The president asked people to lower their thermostats. He promised to get them a $50 check from the government to help the economy. In April of 1977 Carter had approval ratings approaching 80%. He hadn’t done anything yet but he sure sounded good.
Meanwhile Reagan was gearing up. He put together a team of advisors including Michael Deaver, a Nancy Reagan favorite, and Lyn Nofziger, who was not as much a favorite. John Sears became the campaign director. Part of the brain trust’s job was to keep Reagan from going too far right, into Kevin Phillips land, which in 1980 would cost a lot of votes in swing states.
Besides forbidding abortion and keeping Christian schools independent of government interference, another big issue for the New Right was the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA had been kicking around since the 1920s, and in 1974, polling showed that 79 percent of the public approved of it. Many states had ratified it and by the time Carter took office, only three more state legislatures needed to support it for it to become part of the Constitution. During the middle and late 1970s many books came out in the conservative press, written by women and affirming the traditional role of females in their marriages, which was essentially to stay at home and support your husband and kids. Feminism was a serious threat to the lives they enjoyed with their families.
Phyllis Schafly came out of a broken home and was raised in six different households. She was an overachiever and brilliant. She also was wicked conservative and traditional. Even when she was one of the most famous women in the country, she always thanked her husband, Fred, for giving her permission to come to whatever event she was headlining. She was into conspiracy theories and saw communists and plots everywhere. She was too extreme for traditional Republican women’s groups so she went off on her own, railing against abortion and women in the workforce and the erosion of the obligation of men to support their women.
She started the Eagle Forum, a right-wing group that was focused on defeating the ERA which she saw as “a violation of God given feminine instincts.” She aligned with many local religious groups that gave her organizational heft. While she railed against the ERA, many observers wondered why. The amendment really wouldn’t change much. A lot of what 1920 women wanted when they wrote it was already incorporated into the law. Anyway, Phyllis said that the ERA would destroy the family, encourage homosexuals and lesbians, and encourage abortion. A lot of Americans agreed with her.
Homosexuality was an affront to good Christians. It was also a bedrock belief of the movement. Many people believed that homosexuals actively recruited young people to become gay, and that gay teachers would pose a danger to their students. During the early 1970s there was a lot of overt anti-gay activity, including brutal attacks on individuals as well as burning down churches that allowed homosexuals to attend services. Anita Bryant, a former beauty queen and current spokeswoman for the orange juice industry, was rallying people in Miami to reverse a gay-friendly ordinance that banned discrimination. In her world, homosexuals were destroying young children and invading the beaches, doing unspeakable things to each other in public.
Jimmy Carter was against discriminating against gays, which wasn’t an extreme position in 1977. However, he did attract the attention of the New Right who went after him at every opportunity on the issue.
Ronald Reagan was always on a speaking tour around the country. He wasn’t a candidate for anything so he was paid a hefty fee for each speech. His presentations were precisely choreographed and rehearsed. After all, he was an actor. While his speeches were well delivered, they were full of misstatements and facts that he just made up. He said that 164 different federal agencies regulated hospitals, which added $35 a day to the cost of being sick. That was wrong. He asserted that there were 151 taxes on a loaf of bread, also made up. His handlers tried to get him to get his facts straight but often he didn’t. People loved his stump speech so he stayed with it. One of his lines about inflation was that “You can’t order a chuck roast anymore - you have to call it Charles.”
Carter was finishing up his first hundred days and was still popular. He gave a major speech pledging to work to improve human rights around the world. Reagan made fun of the speech and said that you had to negotiate issues first and then worry about improving the world. As usual he made up facts and figures about the number of political prisoners in sketchy countries where Carter wanted to exert positive pressure. Reagan’s fans loved it, inaccuracies and all.
Given Carter’s relative early popularity and the belief among liberal journalists that Ron Reagan was a joke, some observers sounded the death knell for the Grand Old Party. The Boston Globe’s editorial staff led the way on this, writing that, at best, we had a “one-and-a-half party” system now. <strong>
Emerging Issues
Gun rights Historically, the National Rifle Association (NRA) had not been a political advocacy organization; it was a gun safety and recreation club. But in 1977, that changed. There was a major shift in leadership and mission. The organization was taken over by members who were concerned that Big Government was about to restrict gun ownership and that some groups (homosexuals) were taking our children away and turning 120,000 of them into sex slaves. That year also featured the Son of Sam murders in New York City and Ted Bundy’s apprehension for multiple slayings of young women. People needed guns to defend themselves against these predators. The NRA was seen by shrewd political organizers as a great vehicle to motivate conservative Americans into taking political action against the bedrock culture issues of the day - gays, abortion, the ERA, casual sex.
Gays While over two-thirds of Americans were against discriminating against gays, the same percentage was against having gays teach in the public schools. Thus, the New Right went all in against gays in schools, making a mountain out of the proverbial molehill, since there was virtually no evidence that gay teachers - almost all of whom were closeted - tried to “recruit” students to their sexual orientation.
Back in Florida, Anita Bryant’s work flipped the electorate and led to the overwhelming repeal of the anti-gay discrimination regulation in Miami. She had called gays “human garbage”, and a lot of the voters apparently agreed.
Abortion Rowe v. Wade, </em>which legalized abortion, was decided in 1974, and there were strong feelings on both sides about where the Supreme Court had come down. In 1977, the Hyde Amendment passed, which outlawed the use of federal dollars to pay for abortions. While pro-life supporters were happy that their tax dollars would not be used for the procedure, they were still adamantly opposed to taking the life of the unborn no matter when. Tensions were high on both sides.
Capital punishment The death penalty was another touchstone issue. In 1977, Son of Sam and other graphic murderers convinced the California legislature (and many others) to reinstitute capital punishment, over the veto of Governor Jerry Brown and the editorials of the <em>Los Angeles Times</em>. Ronald Reagan, a former California governor, was all in on the death penalty, again pleasing his supporters and the emerging New Right. In the 1979 New York City mayor’s race, Ed Koch, a relative unknown, moved way up in the polls when he came out for capital punishment. The presumed frontrunner, Mario Cuomo, was on the opposite side of the issue. Koch won.
The Panama Canal Treaty Jimmy Carter was committed to negotiating a deal with Panama to give that country control of the canal. Panamanians were getting upset at the United States heavy presence in their country and wanted to control the waterway. President Carter, and many others, didn’t think that being in charge of the canal was important in the grand scheme of things. Many on the New Right disagreed. Ronald Reagan hadn’t formed a firm opinion on the issue. His true believer conservative advisers wanted him to reject the treaty ceding control to Panama. His more mainstream consultants, including campaign director John Sears, didn’t think that the future of the canal was a big deal.
Ronald Reagan asserted that since we built the canal, we owned it. That wasn’t quite right, but it fit the gestalt of the New Right quite nicely. Richard Viguerie, the conservative direct mail wizard, thought that he could raise a lot of money around the issue and he was right. Giving up the canal would be just one more example of how America was bowing before tin-horn, third-world countries. Again, a lot of people agreed.
Women’s issues There was a rise in feminism in the late 1970s but there was also a rise in anti-feminism among many traditional women. The book out of Boston, Our Bodies Ourselves, was at the top of progressive women’s reading lists. Stay-at-home moms were in to What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women, a self-help book by Dr. James Dobson, famous for his guidance on how to “cure” homosexuality.
November 18, 1977 was the date of the first National Women’s Conference, held in Houston and organized by former Congresswoman Bella Abzug of New York City. The four-day conference was built around the belief that “all women faced the same problems and needed similar solutions.” That turned out to be wrong.
Organizers held state conventions to elect delegates to send to Houston, and there was a special effort made to represent a diverse swath of females along class, race, and sexual orientation lines. There was no thought about reaching out to conservative women and that turned out to be a big problem. Conservative ladies did attend the state sessions but were generally ignored in what some said were sham elections of delegates from narrow all-liberal slates.
The conservatives tape recorded some of the speeches which were pretty strident, calling for teaching sex in the early grades and going beyond pro-choice to sharp pro-abortion stances with which much of the country did not agree. These recordings were used as tools to recruit housewives to get involved in fighting the ERA and other threats to their lifestyles.
Anti-feminists were nothing if not organized. In a bit of jiujitsu, they appealed to the conference’s organizers to allow same-day registration at state delegate selection sessions which was granted. As a result, hundreds of non-feminists showed up at these sessions and made the votes interesting, although feminists tended to end up as the delegates. What was helpful to Phyllis Schafly and crew was this access to the inner workings of the emerging feminist movement, which was very anti-traditional marriage, pro-gay, pro- casual sex, anti-church, and anti a lot of things traditional women held sacred. Conservatives used material from these delegate selection meetings throughout their campaign against the ERA. It was effective.
The conference finally started. It didn’t get great coverage, mostly confined to the Style pages of daily newspapers. The <em>Houston Post</em> did assure its readers that not all attendees were lesbians, and that a few first ladies were also in attendance. The delegate split was 80%-20% feminists/anti-feminists so most resolutions passed easily.
Phyllis Schafly saw a chance for great press so she hastily organized a “pro-family” counter conference across town at the Houston Astrodome, a weird place to hold a meeting. She got 15,000 people to show up with very little notice. Bella Abzug’s women’s conference accomplished a lot in moving the feminist agenda ahead, but conservatives also did well, developing a playbook to push back on the progressive women’s movement.
The Carter agenda By late 1977, Jimmy Carter’s presidency was in trouble. Getting approval for the Panama Canal Treaty was not a sure thing, and conservatives were rallying against it. His energy plans were going nowhere. Bert Lance, one of his most trusted advisers who was running the Office of Management and Budget was about to get indicted for lots of shady financial dealings in Georgia. The economy was sliding downhill. In November Carter tried to rally the country through a major speech which wasn’t great. The Boston Globe called it “the moral equivalent of Sominex.” Ouch.
The 1970s were a period when people began to distrust big business. A major reason for the shift in opinion was the erosion of consumer buying power. That began to slide in the early part of the decade as we began to run a trade deficit. In addition, real income for middle class Americans began its steady decline and stagnation which is still with us today. Ralph Nader appeared on the scene and spearheaded the drive to create a consumer protection bureau. It went well initially but eventually stalled, despite having strong support from President Carter.
1978
When presidents are having trouble at home, they often go overseas and act presidential. In early 1978, Jimmy Carter visited Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran. as part of an eight-nation trip. Carter asked the Shah to back off on his brutality to his enemies and offered some neat weapons as an inducement to be nice, but not much changed. \
Carter returned to the White House to prepare his State of the Union speech. Things were rough. The economy was sluggish, and the Dow Jones average hit a two-year low. Carter developed a tax proposal that was pretty hard to understand but no doubt made sense to him, a nuclear engineer. Political veterans increased their criticism that the Carter team had no idea how to work in the government to actually get things done. The Blizzard of 1978 struck and, while it was a big deal all over the Northeast, it really hurt New York City which was verging on bankruptcy. The cost of removing a lot of snow was a major blow to the budget.
Ronald Reagan had his contract to write columns in dozens of major newspapers extended for two years, and he continued to produce his extensive radio commentaries across the land. He was the prohibitive favorite among party loyalists to get the 1980 presidential nomination. He whacked teacher unions for getting away from fact-based education and came out strongly against having states fund urban school systems that did not have a strong property tax base to pay for the schools. The argument was that increased state funding would lead to a decline in local control, which was sacred to many Republicans. Much to the chagrin of his handlers, he kept making up facts about stuff, but he was definitely on a roll.
Reagan’s people set up a political committee, Citizens for the Republic (CFR), and hired pollster Dick Werhlin to figure out how Reagan could hone his message to win swing districts and get elected president in 1980. CFR also developed contracts with direct mail companies to deliver the message and raise money. Reagan continued his energetic speaking schedule in key states. He made 200 speeches in 1978 for a fee of $5,000 a pop, with a discount for Republican political functions. He was 67 years old.
Reagan was against letting Panamanians operate the canal. He did a series of debates and exchanges with famous conservative thinker William F. Buckley who was for the treaty. Buckley was constantly amazed at how routinely Reagan mangled the facts but looked great getting just about everything wrong.
Republican operatives, led by high-level consultant Paul Weyrich, regularly held how-to-get-elected classes for congressional candidates. They learned a lot: how to frame approval of the Panama Canal treaty as opening up the door for Soviet domination of the Caribbean; how to convince voters that forced busing was undermining American education; and how to spread the word that homosexuality was a threat to innocent children.
Jimmy Carter continued to have problems. Hamilton Jordan, his trusted advisor, was reported to be a cocaine user, a wild partier, and a groper of women. Abortion clinics were being attacked around the country in what many described as domestic terrorist activities. Cooler heads on both sides of the issue tried to get a summit meeting to calm things down, but that never happened.
The economy got worse and Carter was forced to amend his fairly nebulous tax reform bill that wasn’t going anywhere anyway. He took to scolding the American people – they should take lower pay increases to help the economy. He quoted columnist Walter Lippman who said, “You took the good things for granted. Now you must earn them again.” These were not uplifting words. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan went to countless dinners and conferences and gave his speech that said that Americans could accomplish anything we wanted to, and that he could lead us in solving our problems. While Carter called for sacrifice, Reagan saw the nation as having unlimited opportunities, a much more compelling message.
Increasing polarization Back in 1978 we could see the foundation developing for the polarized political situation that exists today. The New Right was very organized in going after what it saw as liberal members of Congress. Where for most of our history, the two parties had honest disagreements about issues and worked to find compromise solutions, the New Right was asserting that any disagreement on what policies conservatives wanted “could only be explained by something sinister in our motivation,” not a legitimate disagreement of what was the best way to go, as Senator Tom McIntyre of New Hampshire observed. McIntyre, a Democrat, pointed out that anti-Vietnam War protesters on the left were just as inflexible in trying to understand the other side. McIntyre gave a major speech on this that did the equivalent of going viral today: it was reprinted in many newspapers and received praise from many quarters. Despite that brief, shining moment, McIntyre lost the election to a New Right candidate, Gordon Humphrey.
Senator McIntyre presented an interesting contrast to his state’s governor, Meldrim Thompson, a hard -right zealot who on Good Friday ordered that state flags be flown at half-mast to honor the death of Christ. The courts told him he couldn't do that. Two weeks later he ordered that the flags be lowered to protest the possible loss of the Panama Canal if the treaty was passed.
More Americans than ever were watching Christian TV stations - 28% in 1978 compared to 12% in 1963. Oral Roberts and Pat Robertson expanded or started new church networks which were well received. These media outlets were fertile grounds on which to root the conservative orthodoxy. There was a lot of ERA bashing on these networks. Most Americans liked the amendment but there was little progress being made to get the state approval needed to enact it. In May of 1978, over 50,000 believers attended the largest ecumenical gathering in US history at Giants Stadium in New York City. This was notable because, for the first time, Catholics joined their Christian colleagues at the session, united by their opposition to abortion, gay rights, the ERA, and secularism. This was important because evangelicals and Catholics historically distrusted each other and would not work together on anything.
Carter got a rare win. In April, the Panama Canal Treaty passed by one vote. Author Perlstein documents Carter’s last-minute lobbying for the treaty, which actually ended up costing him a vote or two, but 68 senators - you need a two-thirds majority for a treaty - voted for it.
The nation was getting more conservative. In Massachusetts, pro-life and anti-tax Democrat Ed King defeated liberal incumbent Michael Dukakis for governor in 1978, and US Senator Edward Brooke barely survived a Republican primary against a conservative talk show host, Avi Nelson, by only 4 points. In Georgia, Professor Newt Gingrich, who had failed to get tenure at his college for spending too much time on politics, decided to run for office. He’d be elected to Congress in 1978. Proposition 13, which mandated a sharp reduction in California property taxes was about to pass with 65% of the vote, supported by a surprisingly broad coalition, including public sector workers who were increasingly unable to pay their rising real estate taxes. That win led to many similar tax-reduction proposals passing in many states over the next few years.
Perlstein writes that in the spring of 1978, “Tax rebels were mad as hell. Pro-lifers were mad as hell. Opponents of gay rights were mad as hell.” That anger boded well for conservatives and Ronald Reagan going towards 1980.
In the summer of 1978, Jimmy Carter’s approval rating was down to 38%, with 20% of Democrats wanting him renominated and 44% preferring Ted Kennedy.
Christian schools were popular in the South. Many of these were opened to give whites a place to educate their kids without having Black students in the classroom. Some were supported by local taxes – pretty sketchy legally – but all took advantage of the IRS’s non-profit organizational tax exemption to operate. President Carter’s IRS Commissioner made some noise about investigating schools that were racially discriminating and possibly disqualifying them from preferential tax treatment. At a minimum, he was looking to develop new guidelines as to what was in fact a tax-exempt school.
The New Right jumped on this to charge that the Carter administration was developing new tax policy that would make Christian schools hire homosexual teachers, make abortion counselors available in the school, and get rid of separate boy and girl school organizations like choirs and theater groups. These were silly assertions but they gained traction with the faithful.
Camp David Accords Jimmy Carter had been expanding his outreach to the Middle East. He gave out lots of foreign aid, sold weapons, and had visited a lot of countries in the region. In the fall of 1978, he brought Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to Camp David in Maryland to work out a peace treaty. Each leader had fought hard for his country’s independence, and each faced a lot of opposition at home for even meeting with their historic enemy.
Many Arabs hated Israel because the small Jewish state had emerged victorious in various conflicts in 1948, 1967 and 1973. Israel had been attacked by the Arabs over its brief history and knew that most Arabs questioned Israel’s right to exist. The first meetings with President Carter did not go well, with both leaders yelling at each other. Several times, Sadat and Begin got up to leave but President Carter kept convincing them to stay one more day. On the fifth day, a frustrated president had his staff developed a draft outline for a plan. On the thirteenth day, the three world leaders emerged with an agreement in hand. Carter’s leadership on the accords was perhaps the highlight of his tenure.
In California, Proposition 6, a law that would ban gays from teaching in public schools, was gaining momentum. Many municipalities had passed various anti-gay ordinances over the past few years but this would create a state prohibition on gay teachers.
The New Right was militantly homophobic. Ronald Reagan reflexively hewed to the party line - no gay teachers, no relaxing the criminal laws against sodomy - but he had been a Hollywood actor and he had lots of gay friends. He also sat down with some gay activists and heard them out on the issue of Proposition 6’s blanket ban. Wouldn’t a state law be a usurpation of local control of schools? They had a point in terms of classic Republican governing philosophy - the best government is the one closest to the people. Reagan was thinking about it. He finally came out against the initiative, joining Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and California Governor Jerry Brown in opposition. Public opinion shifted in the course of the campaign and it was defeated.
The end of 1978 was bizarre. In November, San Francisco minister Jim Jones had taken his People’s Temple religious cult to Guyana in South America where three hundred followers committed suicide by drinking poisoned Kool Aid. A few days earlier, Jones’ people had killed California Congressman Leo Ryan and members of his staff who were on a fact-finding mission to the commune.
In late November, San Francisco Supervisor (city councilor) Dan White killed well known gay activist and Supervisor Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. Right around the same time, people started to notice that there was a lot of cancer and sickness among the people who lived in the Love Canal area of Niagara Falls, NY. In Iran, the Shah’s government was struggling against massive street protests. Only a few weeks before, the CIA assured the Carter administration that the Shah’s position was secure.
1979 was shaping up to be a very interesting year.
Bob’s Take
This is a fascinating book that reflects upon a period in American history that had a lot going on. It is long and very detailed, but reading it does bring you back to the tumultuous late 1970s, assuming that you were alive then. Rick Perlstein is a gifted author who must have an extensive stable of researchers and fact checkers to cram so much into one book, even an 1100-page one.
Several points jump out.
A new definition of conservatism The book documents the rise of a major force in American politics, the New Right, which was less genteel than the traditional right and much more focused on cultural and lifestyle issues. Today, the Republican party has embraced much of what the New Right had prioritized 45 years ago.
An ideologically diverse women’s movement While we think of progressive politics when we think of women’s political activity, there was another side to it. Phyllis Schafly was brilliant at organizing the pro-family, anti-feminist women in the country. Their support helped elect many conservatives to office back then and still does today.
Religion intertwined with politics There was a leap of faith, or at least more interest in organized religion, in the 1970s. That was when televangelists like Pat Robertson (The 700 Club) and Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker (Praise the Lord Network) took to the airwaves and greatly increased their viewership – and wealth – during the decade. Their religious message was often tied to secular issues – abortion, gay rights, feminism, the preservation of the traditional family – and their work boosted conservative candidates.
Changes in campaigning Direct mail, the ongoing use of polling to ascertain public opinion in order to shape effective fundraising and electoral campaigns, and the development of sophisticated data bases – all matured in the 1970s. Republicans were way ahead of Democrats in utilizing these new tools to their benefit.
Polarization of politics The late 1970s was a time when disagreements on policy could get nasty. If you’re not with me on (pick the issue), you’re not just wrong. You’re also stupid and evil. Each side often defined its own truth, which may or may not have had any connection to the real truth.
Weak presidential skills set Jimmy Carter was a very decent man and, as a nuclear engineer and peanut farmer, was probably the brightest person in any room, but he had no idea how to govern as president. His hometown team of advisors were overmatched by Washington politics, and his own sense of always being right did him no favors. When you alienate Tip O’Neill early in your tenure and continue to ignore him, you have a problem in getting anything done. Even the Democrat-leaning press grew frustrated with Carter very early in his term.
That’s all for now, folks. Tune in next week to get the inside scoop on the end of the wild and crazy 1970s.
Part Two of the summary of Reaganland: America’s Right Turn, 1976 - 1980 by Rick Perlstein. Rick Perlstein is a former Washington Post writer who has written four major examinations of the rise of conservative politics in the United States. Last week covered 1976 to 1978. This week, in Part Two, I’ll look at 1979 and 1980. This is really long but a lot happened.
1979
Perlstein describes 1979 as “the year when everything, right out there in the open, just started going wrong.” In January, police in Los Angeles arrested the Hillside Strangler who had murdered a dozen women. In late January, Nelson Rockefeller died alone of a heart attack while working in his Manhattan office on his art collection. That wasn’t quite accurate. It turned out that Rocky (the governor, not the cat) died in his luxurious apartment, naked and surrounded by take-out boxes of Chinese food and Dom Perignon champagne, and in the company of his 25-year old “staff assistant” Megan Marshack. Tough luck for Nelson, but one potential Republican presidential candidate was off the board.
The economy continued to slide. Real income continued to drop and people started charging a lot of living expenses on their credit cards, unheard of a few years earlier. Carter’s State of the Union speech in January was focused on the need for austerity to get us through these troubled times and on the need to cut federal programs. That did not sit well with Speaker Tip O’Neill who said that “I’m not going to allow people go to bed hungry for an austerity program.”
Carter was trying to get an arms limitation treaty with Russia and to smooth his relationship with many congressional Representatives and Senators who were upset that he had recognized mainland (communist) China while severing ties with Taiwan, which had been our ally. Carter also was getting nervous about increasing problems in Iran. While the Shah had modernized much of the country, his reign was repressive and he had imprisoned most of his critics. Religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, who was living in Paris in exile, was beginning to exert influence among clerics in Iran. The Shah continued to arrest people, and in January of 1979, the Iranian Parliament essentially fired him, at which point he left the country. A few weeks later, the ayatollah returned to Tehran to a thunderous welcome. He proceeded to arrest and/or execute members of the previous regime as he declared an Islamic Republic. On Valentine’s Day, 1979, angry “students” invaded the US Embassy but the ayatollah’s government convinced them to leave quickly. Things had calmed down - for the moment.
Ronald Reagan was not the only Republican running for president. Former Texas governor John Connally, who had been a Democrat, was in the mix. He had a solid political resume and looked like a leader. He had been Richard Nixon’s treasury secretary and managed to get indicted for extorting $10,000 from a lobbyist. He got off, further enhancing his reputation. Connally announced for president in January and got some very positive initial press. Gerald Ford was very interested in another run but was taking his time in figuring out what to do. Tennessee Senator Howard Baker was also considering becoming a candidate. And George Bush of Texas was in the running.
1979 was a good year for conservative Christians Their TV networks grew to the point of having ratings as good as commercial offerings like the Merv Griffin afternoon show. Christian books and music were gaining in popularity. Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour was seen on 327 stations. Falwell wasn’t as strident on TV as some of the other tele-preachers, but he was certainly as conservative. He was against giving Black’s equality and argued that the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision outlawing separate-but-equal schools was plain wrong. He was virulently anti-gay.
He made a fortune preaching and managed to get into trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission about a $6.6 million bond drive that was a tad sketchy. Falwell was at the center of the Christian schools’ movement, including founding his own Liberty University.
Carter’s IRS commissioner was still trying to develop some coherent regulations around private schools, including Christian ones. True believers rallied to support their schools and alleged that one of Carter’s goals was to “close down Christian schools unless they accept sodomites.” While most of these schools were white-only, some Black parents rallied around their own Christian schools which were founded because the local urban public schools were so bad.
“Secular humanism” was the umbrella term of derision about the lack of Christian content in public education. Christian believers argued that the state religion - secular humanism - had no place in it for the family and faith values of tens of millions of Americans. Some more traditional independent school operations - specifically Waldorf Schools, that had been around much longer than Christian schools, and parochial schools - also had some misgivings about having the IRS becoming too involved in regulating educational operations. As it turned out, the IRS changed little about its school oversight. If there were complaints about a school, there would be an investigation, but there was really no follow-up mechanism to actually change what the school was doing. The hope was that the school in question would take actions to fix anything that was problematic.
Despite the IRS’s essentially backing off, the New Right continued to pillory the federal government and the Carter administration for meddling in local schools, which was not the case. The movement had found a powerful issue – Christian values education – that it would continue to utilize going forward.
Ministers were starting to organize politically. Two in California founded Christian Voice as a platform for activist conservative ministers. The organization hired some sharp political insiders to help them connect with other conservative groups and increase their power to affect elections.
Abortion activists on both sides finally agreed to sit down and talk in February. The meeting opened up with several hours of productive conversation, at which point three women walked in to the front of the room, read a statement condemning abortion, and pulled back a blue receiving blanket containing an actual dead fetus. So much for constructive dialogue. Anti-abortion terrorism continued throughout the year as the issue continued to inflame emotions.
New Right guru Paul Weyrich reached out to the very popular Jerry Falwell to discuss starting a new values-oriented political organization. The minister was intrigued, especially when Weyrich explained that he wanted to organize the moral majority in the country. Falwell loved the phrase and the Moral Majority was born. Ironically, the four people who pitched Falwell were “three Catholics and a Jew” but it worked. The organization was active from 1979 to the late 1980s and exerted a powerful influence over American politics.
Throughout 1979, ministers and religious organizations held countless rallies and made their presence felt in elections all across the nation. Senator Jesse Helms sponsored legislation to restore prayer in schools, which went nowhere but was good theater. The Florida legislature once again failed to ratify the ERA.
Ronald Reagan was continuing his political work. As time went on, his campaign began to fray a bit. Reagan did lose one high-level operative to the Bush campaign and others drifted away, but the operation was in decent shape 18 months before the election.
Some of Reagan’s more conservative advisors chafed a bit at campaign director John Sear’s more nuanced approach. Sears figured that Reagan already had the conservative vote; he needed to reach towards the middle to convince those people that he’d be a good president. Reagan’s instincts were to go hard right, especially on foreign policy issues about which he was relatively uninformed. Periodically he would warn that the Soviets were about to attack us because they were willing to lose tens of millions of people in a nuclear war. Of course, there was no evidence of that but it played well to some of the conservative base.
Reagan was still leading the field for the nomination in polling of Republicans, with Ford second. One point that was clear in the surveys was that the overall electorate did not want an extremist as president, so John Sears had to keep watch over the candidate. The Reagan campaign had recruited some former Ford supporters which were trotted out as needed and helped present a more moderate candidate.
The Bush campaign was well organized and run by Jim Baker, a skilled operative. Bush had an impressive resume and seemed to have the personality and gravitas that people looked for in a president. He had no use for John Connally, a fellow Texan, and went after him hard in an early Republican candidate’s forum in Indianapolis. Connally narrowly beat Bush in the straw vote. Ronald Reagan chose not to attend, something many observers thought was a mistake.
President Carter had a moment in the sun with the signing of the Camp David Accords treaty in March of 1979. Even Tip O’Neill praised him.
Later that month, the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, PA, had an accident and almost melted down. It didn't, but subsequent investigations revealed lax oversight and human error at the plant. Carter, who was a nuclear engineer, downplayed the seriousness of the incident – no one had been obviously injured. There were some mental health issues among the plant’s neighbors, but life went on.
Gas shortages In Iran that spring, oil production had been cut and energy prices in the US were rising. Spot shortages occurred at gas stations, but 70% of the public thought that any threat of an impending gas shortage was an industry hoax. Carter asked us to conserve but since most people thought there was no problem, that didn’t work. By May, there were long gas lines in many places, particularly California. People panicked and queued up. Fire trucks often couldn't get by long gas lines to get to fires.
People were looking to the president to give us some hope as FDR did so often during the Depression. President Carter decided to issue a statement instead of giving a speech. He essentially said that we had a gas shortage now because we had failed to prepare for gas shortages earlier. He then detailed the reasons for the problem, most of which had nothing to do with our country. In responding to the crisis, Ronald Reagan said that the government had to back off in its regulations of the energy industry and that we needed more nuclear power, an interesting suggestion two months after Three Mile Island.
Some observers pointed out that we had a passionless president who was better at making lists than getting anything done. There was also criticism of his inner circle who were essentially “yes men” who would never push back on any decision he made.
Right about when gas was getting scarce in the Golden State, Dan White went on trial for the murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. The defense argued that the defendant had been brought up in trying circumstances, had served in Vietnam, and had a hard time adapting to the changing lifestyles of San Francisco. They said he had gotten depressed and ate a lot of junk food, including Twinkies. The defense cited some articles that said that too much sugar and junk food affected decision-making and that Dan White was not himself when he repeatedly shot the two victims. The local Nazis who came out in support of the defendant cheered on the defense’s arguments. It worked. White was convicted only of manslaughter and did five years in prison. Later, his comments indicated that these were hate crimes and that there were two other people he wanted to kill, a woman Supervisor and Willie Brown, a noted local politician and future mayor of San Francisco.
By late May, gas lines were forming across the country and Carter issued an executive order allowing governors to limit purchases and hours of operation at service stations. Experts started to believe that we were about to face even more serious gas shortages. By June, lines were forming everywhere. The price of gas had gone up 55% since January and 58% of all stations had no gas to sell. People blamed Middle Eastern oil producers, Carter’s deregulation strategy, and the greedy oil companies for the crisis. Carter’s approval rating was down to 29%, which is where Richard Nixon was after the Saturday Night massacre in 1974.
Long-term truckers went on strike in an effort to increase their charges in order to cover the higher costs of fuel. Truckers blockaded toll roads and delivery depots and caused a ruckus. Snipers fired at “scab” drivers who were ignoring the strike. Sometimes the shots found their marks and people died. Farmers had to plow under crops since there was no way to get them to market.
Trucker demonstrations often led to violence and things burning, which is what happened that summer in Levittown, PA, when truckers and an unruly crowd set lots of fires. There were more shootings of truckers all over the nation.
That summer, President Carter did conclude the SALT II (nuclear weapons limitations) negotiations with Leonid Brezhnev which was to the president’s credit, but most of the phone calls to the White House were complaining about the gas shortage. Governors deployed National Guardsmen to protect truckers. On June 20, the first driver was killed by a sniper. President Carter glossed over that and announced that people needed to turn up their thermostats on their air conditioning to reduce energy consumption. His advisors urged him to make a dramatic speech but no one could come up with anything memorable for him to say.
President Carter was out of the country for all of that, at a Tokyo economic summit. He was down to a 25% approval rating. Time for another speech. Another poll of likely Democratic voters indicated that Ted Kennedy was preferred to Jimmy Carter 6 to 1. Reagan was comfortably ahead of Carter in internal Republican polls.
The country is looking for leadership In April, Patrick Caddell, the president’s whiz kid pollster, had surveyed the nation and found that the citizens needed their trust restored. People were very pessimistic about their future and books like The Late, Great Planet Earth did not give them comfort. Caddell used his findings to write a 107-page guide to making people feel better and presented it to Mr. and Mrs. Carter who loved it. Vice President Mondale thought it was complete BS.
Carter announced that he would give a major speech on July 5. He then went over the text which was primarily about addressing America’s psychic wounds. He compared it to Caddell’s memo and then cancelled the speech. He didn’t think it made any sense given our very real problems. Carter called a bunch of luminaries and elected officials to Camp David to figure out what should really be in the speech. The press was amazed that he had cancelled the first speech and that he was seemingly grasping at straws for the next one. Tom Wicker of the New York Times wrote that Carter had “reached the low point not only for his Administration but perhaps of the post-war presidency.”
After seven days of thinking, Carter met with a group of ministers who urged him to emphasize the spiritual to get America moving again. Mondale thought that was nuts; people wanted solutions not sermons. Newly elected 32-year old Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton told the president that he had been coming off too much like a “17th century New England Puritan.” Carter disagreed.
Around the same time, 8,000 independent service stations went on strike demanding that they get more gas to sell. Of course, there was no more gas. Coincident with that, President Carter re-emerged after 11 days of isolation, with some time off to drop into a family in Carlisle, PA, on a listening tour. He was ready to talk to the American people. He spoke on July 15, 1979, and started by saying that he needed to look for transformational as well as transactional solutions to our problem. He summarized what the dozens of elected officials had said to him during his stay at Camp David.
He then got to the meat of the speech. We suffered from a crisis in confidence. We need each other to get through it. People needed to “Stop crying and start sweating. Stop cursing and start praying. And, stop talking and start walking.” (I’m not sure what that last point means.) He then set out a six-point solution to our energy problems which actually made sense although they would not solve any short-term problems.
The speech worked and his approval rating jumped up by double digits. He followed up by making Hamilton Jordan his chief of staff. Previously Carter had none. One problem with the appointment was that Jordan had made headlines a month earlier for being investigated for cocaine use. The president then asked for resignation letters from his entire cabinet and fired half of them – Secretary of the Treasury W. Michael Blumenthal, Attorney General Griffin B. Bell, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph A. Califano Jr., Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Patricia R. Harris, Secretary of Transportation Brock Adams and Secretary of Energy James R. Schlesinger. These were the first firings of his presidency. This precipitous action, in the middle of a burgeoning energy crisis, did not sit well with citizens, media observers, or his fellow politicians. Within a few days, Carter’s approval rating had plummeted and he lost the positive bounce the speech had generated.
The New Right was busy that summer, raising money with a direct mail appeal framing the SALT agreement as surrendering to the Russians and using political action committees to fundraise to defeat liberal Democratic senators, including Frank Church, Birch Bayh, and George McGovern. The PACs played fast and loose with the “facts” in their ads, but they were effective. One of the anti-abortion direct mail pieces used against the three Senators mentioned the term “baby killer” 41 times.
Paul Weyrich was working to bring the New Right and the Christian Right closer together. He wrote an article that stated that “The family will be to the decade of the 1980s what environmentalism and consumerism have been to the 1970s and the Vietnam War was to the 1960s.” He was on to something. He conducted a detailed poll of ministers and their parishioners to find out what issues were important and, perhaps more significantly, to gauge how much support there was among the faithful to have their ministers get actively involved in the politics of supporting Christian policy positions. It turned out that the flock was clamoring for its shepherds to lead them (religious references!) in defeating secularism and in preserving family values. The people in the pews were also willing to pony up political contributions beyond their Sunday tithing to their churches.
As usual, Ronald Reagan skated on the being-a-devout-Christian issue. In the meantime, John Connally had flubbed an interview by not being enthusiastic in affirming his born-again status. Reagan didn’t go to church much and when a reporter asked him to comment on the book Born Again by former Watergate henchman, Chuck Colson, Reagan gave him a blank stare. The reporter was so taken with the rest of the interview that he didn't mention the Reagan’s shaky faith. The candidate was being interviewed by star minister Jim Bakker (described in Wikipedia as “American televangelist, entrepreneur, and fraudster.” Look him up.) Reagan answered one probing question by sincerely gazing at the minister and saying that if good people don’t act now, “we might be the generation that sees Armageddon.” Ronald Reagan was brilliant at playing to the moment and to the crowd.
Reagan was leading in the presidential preference polls but his people were concerned about a few things. The candidate was still giving the same stump speech he wrote about ten years earlier. Times had changed. He still mangled the facts. But he still was impressing audiences everywhere he went. Most concerning was Reagan’s consistent courting of some of the more extreme elements of the New Right. He periodically would take a position that was very out of the mainstream, a behavior that could cost him any chance to be elected president.
John Connally was doing well raising money since he was tied to a lot of Texas oil money. That would come back to hurt him since the one group universally reviled across the land in 1979 with our massive gas shortages was oil men. He also went freelancing to develop a Middle East peace framework that went beyond the Camp David Accords. He developed a plan and announced it in front of the National Press Club. It wasn’t a bad outline - Israeli security in the Arab world in exchange for a Palestinian homeland - but the Israel lobby and most American Jews hated it. Another problem was that the proposal really hadn't been cleared by Saudi Arabia and other major Middle East countries. The flawed plan cost him any momentum he had generated.
All across the country, homosexuals continued to be harassed and attacked, even in San Francisco where gay bars were frequent targets of arson and vandalism.
The economy and Paul Volker The American economy was not doing well in the middle of 1979. Inflation was at 13% and nothing the government did seemed to work. Carter’s newly appointed Federal Reserve Board Chair, Paul Volker, decided to do the unthinkable and put the country into a recession to cut inflation. He would use monetary policy – that’s what the Fed does – to aggressively raise interest rates in an attempt to choke the economy long enough to reduce inflation. It worked. Inflation dipped as did economic activity. Since the cost of borrowing money was so high, economic activity really stagnated. The result was a serious recession in 1981 but inflation was at bay. While this turned out to be a sound approach over the long run, over the short-term it hurt a lot of people and didn’t help raise Jimmy Carter’s popularity.
The Iranian problem Iran was going berserk in the late summer of 1979.The ayatollah was in power and his inner circle were coming down hard on secularism, a no-no in a theocracy. Many people were being arrested and judged guilty in five-minute “trials” based on the new concept of “obvious guilt.” It meant that since they were obviously guilty there was no need for a trial which meant the executions could be done expeditiously. The new regime banned music and restricted the press and shut down the Associated Press office. The new national assembly was to be made up of only regime loyalists, mostly clergy. Our country was blindsided. The US had virtually no reliable assets – spies – in Iran. For decades we had relied on the Shah for our intelligence and now he was gone. We had no idea what was going on.
The Shah, the most hated man in Iran, was in exile and wanted to come to America for medical treatment for a serious disease. Even our understaffed CIA knew that bringing him to the US would be the worst thing we could do to inflame tensions. President Carter initially got it. However, others, including Henry Kissinger, said that out of loyalty we needed to afford the Shah medical care. On October 22, 1979, the Shah entered the US. We assured the theocratic Iranian government that he was too sick to be able to mount a comeback. We thought we were about to open up diplomatic talks with the new government.
On November 2, a Sunday, young Iranians stormed the American Embassy. They thought that the ayatollah had approved their takeover but he never got word of it. At first, he was against the occupation but once he saw it on TV, he gave his glowing approval. The building was under siege and the US diplomats destroyed documents. The goal of the occupation supposedly was to return the Shah to Iran for trial which was not going to happen.
The US press devoured the story. ABC, the lowest-rated network, started a late-night news show, America Held Hostage: The Crisis in Iran, which soon became the highest rated program in its time slot, beating the venerable Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. As one wag wrote, “ABC has finally found someone who can beat Johnny Carson: Khomeini.”
Many Iranian students in the United States protested in support of the takeover of the embassy and for returning the Shah to Iran for trial and execution. Predictably, American demonstrators pushed back and fought the Iranians. Some people got hurt and many people were arrested. It was almost the holidays and one seasonal sign said “This Thanksgiving, roast an Iranian.”
Ted Kennedy The elephant in the room concerning the 1980 presidential election was Massachusetts Senator Edward Moore Kennedy. In the fall of 1979, 53 percent of Democrats wanted him to be their nominee compared to 16 percent for Carter and 7 percent for California Governor Jerry Brown. Ronald Reagan beat Carter handily in a hypothetical matchup but lost to Kennedy.
Then the Roger Mudd interview happened. The program began with footage from the Kennedy dynasty and then looked at Ted’s career, including some tough reporting on the car accident on Chappaquiddick on Martha’s Vineyard in July of 1969 that led to the death of Mary Joe Kopechne. To many people, Kennedy’s explanation of what happened made no sense. He basically evaded any serious legal charges in the incident – which took place the same weekend in July of 1969 that Americans landed on the moon – but his reputation was tarnished. After the tough segment on the accident, the program showed a typical day in the Senator’s life which made him look great, even presidential. Then Roger Mudd threw a slow, fat pitch down the middle of the plate and asked Senator Kennedy why he wanted to be president. It turned out that he didn’t have a coherent answer. The interview seriously hurt his candidacy. His support in the polls dropped dramatically and many voters began to think that maybe he wasn’t the best person to be nominated.
New York City was still in financial trouble, especially the boroughs, but some of the swagger was starting to come back to Manhattan. There was still a lot of work to do, so developers were given inducements to develop distressed properties. Fred Trump and his son, Donald, jumped in and did some business. One item was to renovate the Commodore Hotel, which worked out well for the family. Trump’s lawyers struck a deal that resulted in a windfall for the Trumps and a financial mess for the city, which charged the developers with not keeping their end of the bargain and of using fraudulent numbers in the negotiations. Since the Trumps had absolutely no financial records, nothing could be proven. Around the same time Donald was starting to do the socialite tour, dating lots of foxes, as they used to say on Saturday Night Live. He bragged that he was worth $200 million, but it turned out that was his dad’s money. Donald made $24,594 in 1978.
Ronald Reagan was cranking up his campaign effort. Pollster Dick Wirthlin did an extensive poll of 2,000 people to find out what voters thought about the candidates and issues. He produced a 773-page summary with an 87-page index that sliced and diced the people’s opinions. It was by far the most extensive survey research ever done for a campaign.
It turned out that the voters did not share any of Reagan’s opinions about big issues. Reagan thought that government spending was the most important issue, but 53% of the people thought that inflation was, with 3% agreeing with Reagan about out-of-control spending. Voters overwhelmingly approved of the Equal Rights Amendment, and a solid majority thought that abortion should be an option in most situations. Those were counter to Reagan’s positions. Whoops! Time to get to work.
His handlers used some of the polling information to shape his announcement speech in mid-November in New York City. Most poll respondents thought that Reagan did not care about them so he softened his tone and told stories about his mother. He said nice things about illegal immigrants from Mexico, about how we should give them employment and open up a path to citizenship for them. He didn’t change his basic message on the economy, that spending was the problem and that if we cut spending inflation would go away. The speech was not reviewed well; it still seemed like the same old tired Ronald Reagan of the past few years to most observers. Others saw it as crafted by campaign consultants and not authentic.
Reagan went on the road, visiting cities all over the country, including giving speeches in reliably Democratic cities. Pollster Wirthlin had figured out that a lot of the people who liked Reagan were older blue-collar Democrats who were starting to believe that affirmative action was giving minority groups too many breaks they didn’t deserve. These voters also were wary of the ascendance of foreign cars in the American market, making them interested in an America First candidate, at least in boosting manufacturing. An irony here is that Jimmy Carter signed the Chrysler Corporation bailout bill that saved the company and thousands of good blue-collar jobs, but Reagan was seen as the candidate who would save the industry. This dynamic was similar to the attitudes that built Donald Trump’s winning 2016 coalition that included a lot of formerly reliable Democrats who felt that they were getting left behind in a changing country.
At the end of 1979, the hostages were still in Tehran and Iranians in America were often the victims of or perpetrators of violence as demonstrations raged on both sides. as some people took matters into their own hands. The Shah was receiving medical treatment in New York City as our diplomats were unsuccessful in trying to convince some country to take him off our hands. The inflation rate was over 13%, and, if you had to borrow money, you’d pay 13% in interest on your loan. Despite all of the bad news, Jimmy Carter had pulled ahead of Ted Kennedy in presidential preference polling. Kennedy was running a fairly incompetent campaign staffed by people who had worked for JFK 20 years earlier. A lot had changed since then.
At the end of 1979, Russia invaded Afghanistan in what the Soviets thought would be a very easy exercise that would be over in a few weeks. The US-supplied weapons to the mujahideen who were fighting the Soviets and the war dragged on and on.
1980
George Bush ran a pretty good campaign. He played up his experience and his record as a flyer in WW 2. He won the Iowa caucuses in January as well as some state straw polls. He jumped up 20 points in the polls and was gathering some momentum. John Connally was running a pretty bad campaign, despite having a lot of money. John Anderson, the Illinois congressman, was too liberal for the GOP but many media people found him interesting. Gerald Ford was in the wings, exploring running, and biding his time. In the polls, the former president had a big lead over Carter, something no other Republican had.
In February the US Olympic hockey team, in a huge upset, beat the Russians and won the gold medal. America went nuts and Carter's stock went up.
Ronald Reagan was campaigning in the early primary states and criticizing Carter for not using force to get the hostages back. Bush and Reagan were tied in New Hampshire so the Moral Majority and fellow Christians went to work accusing Bush of not really being pro-life because initially he didn’t support a constitutional amendment banning abortion. He did come around but the damage was done with right-wing voters. The Christian Right increased its support for Reagan as the campaign season got under way. His campaign fired its Madison Avenue ad agency and went with a smaller shop that basically used Reagan as the centerpiece of his ads. He would look into the camera and sincerely talk about an issue of importance to the Republican voter. He was a good actor and people believed him.
In the debate in New Hampshire, Reagan manipulated the situation so that, when he was interrupted by the moderator, he could use his famous line, “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!” (The man’s name was Breen but that didn’t matter.) That comment cost Bush the debate and his momentum. Reagan romped in the primary a few days later and was on his way to the nomination. At his victory party, the old actor yelled, “Let’s make America great again!” which was a line crafted by his fired Madison Avenue ad agency. In the later primaries in the South, Reagan romped, helped a lot by the support of the New Right. George Bush dropped out in late May.
One interesting point about the Bush-Reagan competition was that both candidates favored compassionate immigration policy. Each recognized that the economy needed more people to take jobs and that people from Mexico and other countries could supply that labor. Each candidate favored a path to citizenship. Things have changed in 40 years.
Reagan was now virtually assured of the nomination. He went on high-profile news shows and kept getting the facts wrong and was called out on his mistakes. It didn’t matter. He really did have the Teflon coating thing going. His representatives reached out to Wall Street and other American businesses to reassure everyone that Ron was up to the task of being president. The Christian Right kept sponsoring huge rallies to support Reagan, which was ironic in that he wasn’t a regular church-goer. It was similar to Donald Trump’s hold on evangelicals, despite the fact that he didn’t do the church thing either.
In April, an attempted Iranian hostage rescue effort ended tragically in a sandstorm with a plane and helicopter crashing into each other, costing 8 lives. Carter took full responsibility, but the incident cost him support.
Around the country, people did all sorts of patriotic things to support the hostages, including tying yellow ribbons around old oak trees. Carter kept a low profile but did leave the White House to campaign in the primaries and won most of them. He was going to be renominated.
Other things were happening across the land.
The Carter family was having some problems. The President's brother, Billy, was under investigation for lobbying for Libya and getting paid a lot of money without registering as a foreign agent. The Justice Department worked it out with a plea deal that made him register after the fact. (Personal note: During the Blizzard of 1978, Susan was in Texas with her father who was having surgery. I was alone in West Roxbury, with only two six-packs of Billy Beer to drink. The president's brother liked beer - I had one with him at the 1976 Democratic presidential convention at Madison Square Garden in NYC in 1976 - but his beer was awful. That is indeed a snow emergency.)
Reagan was nominated at the Republican convention in Detroit and there was speculation about who would be his vice president. Reagan’s people wanted Gerald Ford to be a sort of co-president, but the former president was not interested. Ford convinced Reagan to go with George Bush, despite there being some serious bad blood between the campaigns.
Jimmy Carter was getting frustrated. His opponent kept stumbling and misstating things as a matter of course, yet he continued to run well in the polls. In what was probably an off-the-cuff statement, Carter attacked Reagan for being pro-war. While Reagan was more of a hawk than Carter, he wasn’t in favor of starting a war anywhere. Carter was labeled “mean” for his accusation. Reagan pivoted back to domestic issues and charged that Carter’s policies had wrecked the economy to the point where we had a Misery Index (combination of unemployment rate and inflation rate) of over 20%, almost double what it was under Ford. When Carter came back at Reagan, his tone was shrill, which reinforced the “meanness” charge.
The Christian Right intensified its political activity as the election drew near. This caused reasonable people to question the tax-exempt status of many religious organizations, which were not supposed to be political, but nothing happened. Abortion was cranked up as the key issue with Christians, and that hurt Carter.
The Shah died in October and there was some hope of getting the hostages back before the election, which would really help Carter. That didn’t happen although there were negotiations. As it turned out, the ayatollah was only interested in humiliating Carter so he gave a false impression of wanting to release the hostages before the election.
Carter’s campaign increasingly focused on Reagan’s fitness for office - his temperament and his frequent gaffes. Reagan was just too dangerous to be president. Reagan’s response was to do a series of biographical commercials, touching on his being a son of the heartland, a World War II veteran, a beloved actor, an effective governor, and a nice guy, the latter point being a reference to Carter’s alleged meanness and stridency.
Reagan got a lot of surprise late endorsements - the National Association of Police Associations, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association (that he would take on early in his term), civil rights icon the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Democratic Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski, and lots of other Democrats who were disappointed with Carter.
After a lot of silly posturing from both sides, the long-awaited presidential debate was held on October 28. President Carter’s people were delighted. Finally, they would get to show how unqualified Ronald Reagan was to be president. It didn’t work out that way.
Reagan did his thing. He used stories and gentle jokes to get his points across. He was pleasant and personable, and he did not misspeak. He said that he had witnessed four wars in his lifetime and that he did not want to see another generation of Americans go off and fight. He did get a lot of facts wrong, which Carter’s team thought the press would jump on after the debate. That didn’t happen. What did happen was that the public saw a calm, organized, articulate candidate who was totally non-threatening. That was just the opposite of the picture Carter had been painting of his opponent.
Carter talked about all of the decisions a president has to make and then went off to detail some of his more minute accomplishments. He also looked sour, some observers noted, and he seemed nervous. Again, he was no doubt frustrated that his opponent was not acting like a madman.
One of the things that the Carter people missed was that Reagan was a good speaker who had never lost a political debate. In 1967, he debated Bobby Kennedy on the Vietnam War and thoroughly trounced him. Another mistake by the president’s people was that they didn’t do any opposition research. Reagan had made plenty of gaffes during his career, but they weren’t documented and organized so that the incumbent could score points. Again, Carter, the Engineer-in-Chief, incorrectly thought that the press would do his homework for him here.
Polling showed that Reagan had greatly benefited from the debate, with a big increase in the percentage of voters who saw him as “a strong leader” and “presidential.” On election day, November 4, Reagan won 51% of the popular vote and romped in the electoral college, 489 to 49.
Post-election polling was interesting.
During the campaign, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, which was created by the New Right in the mid-1970s, was hard at work attacking incumbent liberal Democrat US senators. Their ads against incumbents were merciless, inaccurate, and frequent. Senators Birch Bayh, Frank Church and George McGovern all were easily defeated in 1980. This was the first time the newly independent political action committees had a major impact on campaigns, and it opened the door to untold sums of money being spent by these PACs to affect elections.
Bob’s Take
This is the biggest and heaviest (literally) book that I will probably ever read. It was massive, which is why the summary is so long, even for me. As I mentioned last week, Rick Perlstein is a great writer who puts the late 1970s into a helpful context. This was the most interesting book I have read and written about over the past year during the pandemic.
Reagan’s acting ability served him well. Lots of folks chide our 40th president as a B-movie actor. That was true, but that still placed him in the one-tenth of one percent of all people, including candidates for office. His teleprompter copy had stage directions embedded in the text. He thoroughly rehearsed his speeches, especially the ones where he would be working on and walking across a stage. He kept his cool at all times, which was especially helpful in the October 28 debate when Carter melted down a bit. He also was a joy for his ad agencies. He needed only one take to get the video for commercials.
The news back then was much more interesting than it is today. The book is chock full of interesting things that happened between 1976 and 1980 - Three Mile Island, Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, gas lines, Love Canal, Billy Beer, the hostage crisis, Jim Jones and his poisoned Kool-Aid, the rise of the women’s movement on both sides of the ideological aisle, the beginning of cable news with CNN going on the air in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s presidency and missteps, and the fascinating campaign of 1980.
Today’s news is not as intriguing. We have a few stories that are covered over and over again in dozens of media outlets - the pandemic, race issues, the pandemic, gender issues, the pandemic, partisan politics. They’re all important but there is a certain sameness to what’s in print and on the air today. The <em>Globe </em>covers a few stories with different headlines above the fold. We don’t even have sports stories today because our teams are not very good. Talk radio and cable news, be it NPR or Fox, cover the same things over and over and over again. I know that it works to get ratings as people routinely tune in to have their beliefs and biases reinforced, but it’s boring.
I am hopeful that once the pandemic goes away - soon I believe - we’ll have other stuff in the news.
Jimmy Carter was the Engineer-in-Chief. He did approach the presidency like it was a technical challenge to be worked out. At the beginning of the book, Perlstein talks about how, early in his presidency, Carter was both an engineer and a preacher, but as time went on, he lost the preacher and relied more on the engineer. That did not serve him well.
I enjoyed the campaign of 1980. I was a political consultant on Tremont Street in Boston - centrally located - and I did work for three of the campaigns. I knew Andy Card pretty well - he was a former client - and he asked me to design and produce some brochures for George Bush’s campaign. A state representative with whom Sue worked was one of Independent candidate John Anderson’s Massachusetts coordinators, and I did a print piece for him. Finally, a long-time associate asked me to do a newsprint tabloid for the Kennedy campaign. On a related note, earlier in 1980 I was assigned to follow Rosalynn Carter around Boston and take pictures. That wasn’t formally part of her husband’s campaign but it sort of was.
On Friday afternoons, before starting to drink with colleagues, I'd bring my office’s college interns around to the three campaigns so they could see politics up close. George Bush’s office ran like clockwork – lots of people were actually doing things to advance the campaign. John Andersons’s setup was a lot smaller, but it was full of earnest young people doing their best for their candidate. Ted Kennedy’s headquarters was different. It was the largest by far, and there were dozens of college kids on the phone, calling home and telling their parents how neat it was to be working on Ted Kennedy’s campaign. No one was doing anything constructive, but a good time was had by all. That Kennedy print piece was never produced. I balked when they wanted me to front the money to print it, a no-no in the political consulting business.
The election of 1980 was similar to the campaign of 2016. Sixty percent of the electorate was not excited by either candidate, with 43% of Reagan voters and 34% of Carter voters saying that they were just voting against the other guy, and not affirmatively for their candidate. That was a lot like the Hillary Clinton – Donald Trump contest where many if not most people were not happy with either candidate.
