The American Spectator

Streetcar Line

Dream Ticket Memories

By Quin Hillyer on 8.28.08 @ 12:07AM

This article appears in the July-August 2008 issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click here.

July and August ought to see speculation about John McCain's vice presidential choice reach a fever pitch -- and it is not just a political game. Instead, vice presidential selections can be among the most consequential decisions in American history. Running mates are so often chosen with only short-term, purely political considerations in mind, so that even the presidential contender making the selection rarely realizes just how much he might be shaping long-term history.

Consider how little Dwight Eisenhower knew about the ramifications of choosing for his veep a man who had been in public office for fewer than six years. Fifty-six years later, even from the grave, Richard Nixon is shaping Republican politics still. It was Nixon who took a particular shine to three 1960s-era congressmen, making two of them his personal choices as chairmen of the Republican National Committee and the third one a high administration appointee. The names Bush, Dole, and Rumsfeld will surely ring a bell.

It was 28 years after Ike chose Nixon -- and 28 years ago this summer, perhaps meaning that the time is exactly due for another momentous veep selection -- that another GOP presidential nominee made a choice that would shape his party long, long after he left office. It also happened to be probably the wildest, most dramatic decision in modern convention history. All week long in Detroit in 1980, as conservatives celebrated their long-awaited takeover of the Republican Party via the presidential nomination of Ronald Reagan, speculation had been growing inside the convention hall and on the public airwaves that Reagan would choose former president Gerald Ford as a running mate. Never had a former president run on a national ticket again as a deputy to someone else, but Ford was more popular out of office than he ever had been in office, and he seemed sure to reassure voters worried (wrongly) that Reagan was too ideological for the job.

Longtime conservative activist and writer Craig Shirley this fall releases a book that will include the single best moment-by-moment, insiders' account of how Reagan and Ford went right up to the very brink of a historic ticket, only to reject the idea at the very last moment, so late in fact that national media already were reporting it as a done deal. But what Shirley describes happening at the highest campaign levels in his book Rendezvous with Destiny was matched in excitement at the lowest level of the convention also, outside a holding room for convention pages, one of whom was the then 16-year-old Yours Truly.

THE SITUATION WAS THIS: The convention hall earlier in the week had been all but on fire in support of Rep. Jack Kemp for vice president, while Ambassador George H. W. Bush, who had run a strong second to Reagan in the primary season, was seen as a logical choice but one who would be a bitter pill for many conservatives to swallow. Rumsfeld was somewhere in the mix as well, and Ronald and Nancy Reagan themselves really wanted Sen. Paul Laxalt of Nevada, their good friend, on the ticket, but Laxalt was seen as adding almost nothing to the ticket geographically, philosophically, or otherwise politically. And some hard-line conservatives, appalled at the idea of either Ford or Bush, were agitating for Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina. All day long, though, the "dream ticket" negotiations went on between Reagan and Ford, with Ford even going on TV with Walter Cronkite to describe what commentators began calling a virtual "co-presidency."

But sometime nearing midnight, it all fell apart. Reagan and Ford pulled the plug -- and because some of Reagan's key aides still doubted whether a Reagan/Kemp, actor/football player ticket would sell in a general election, the Reagan team settled on Bush, the primary runner-up, almost by default. Laxalt was one of the first to get the news, on a telephone in a trailer just outside the VIP back entrance to the convention hall. Laxalt was no Bush fan. He was angry and so stunned that he looked white as a ghost as he entered the convention hall. That entrance happened to be right next to the page holding room, where I saw the senator and approached him in hopes of getting an autograph.

A random reporter got to Laxalt just as I did. "Senator, senator," he shouted, "please tell us about the Ford arrangement; is it true that Reagan is giving Ford total control of foreign policy?"

Through clenched teeth, Laxalt said, "It's not Ford; it's Bush."

"Huh? What, whaddya mean it's Bush? We all know it's Ford," the reporter spluttered.

"Not Ford, Bush. Not Ford, Bush," the senator repeated. "That's all I know. It's Bush!"

And with that he pushed through what suddenly had become, out of nowhere, a huge throng of reporters and, somehow with me in tow, crossed into a private hallway closed to the Fourth Estate but not to pages. A convention official who had materialized must have assumed I was an aide to Laxalt, because he hustled me along right beside the senator. I just kept following, for another 30 yards, hoping somehow to hear Laxalt explain to somebody, somehow, the meaning of what seemed to be utterly unbelievable news. Finally Laxalt looked down at me, as if to say who are you? and he and the convention official ducked into some office, finally leaving me behind. But not before, somewhere along the line, I had heard somebody say something about Reagan himself coming to the conventional hall.

This was bizarre. This was Wednesday night, only the second-to-last night of the convention. Nominees never made convention-hall appearances until the evening of their acceptance speeches, the final night of the gathering. But now, at midnight no less, the nominee-to-be was headed to the hall to address the delegates. Reagan figured he just had to put the Ford rumors to rest and announce the Bush selection before the Cronkites of the world could sign off for the night with the "dream ticket" being the last word. Reagan would have looked no longer in control of his own convention, and 250 million Americans would have awakened to headlines announcing a Ford selection that just wasn't so.

A YOUNG REAGANITE to the core, I of course wanted desperately to hear Reagan's impromptu speech. But only eight pages at a time (out of about 200) were stationed on the convention floor, with another few passes available for specific messages. I already had used up all of my floor time, so I hotfooted it around the bowels of the convention hall to the other side of the building, where I at least could go up to the balcony "guest" area -- with many more seats than the convention floor itself -- to try to secure a spot. Even walking fast, it was a good 10-minute journey. Finally up in the balcony concourse, my brisk walk through growing crowds of returning conventioneers was interrupted by a polite but insistent voice: "Page. Page! Excuse me, page, would you come over here?" Amazingly enough, I found myself looking up to see that the voice belonged to none other than Senator Helms. He seemed distressed.

Long story short, he had given up his floor pass for the evening, but he desperately wanted to summon Tom Ellis, famed director of the Helms-affiliated Congressional Club, from the North Carolina delegation for a meeting. I first told Helms I had no floor pass, but his distressed look made me reconsider. "I don't know how I'll do it, sir, but wait right here!" I said. "I'll get the message to Mr. Ellis -- but it might take 20 minutes to get there and back!"

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