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!”
Helms, ever courtly, thanked me — and off I didn’t walk but
ran, darting around people, through the concourse, down escalators
and stairs, like a broken-field runner in a pick-up football game.
Arriving back at the page holding room, panting like a dog, I tried
to explain that I needed a floor pass for a message from Jesse
Helms. “Who’s Jesse Helms?” asked the functionary behind the desk.
Over-hyped up as only a 16-year-old can be, I decided I didn’t have
time for this foolishness. I spied one stray floor pass on the
functionary’s desk and, like a petty thief, snatched it and ran,
yelling behind me that “I’ll be back!”
Yes, I found my way to the floor; yes, I found Mr. Ellis among
the North Carolina delegates; yes, I convinced him that Helms was
indeed stuck in the balcony awaiting him; and yes, I hustled Ellis
through the crowds and back up to where Helms stood. And I still
didn’t know what any of this was about.
Waiting with Helms by that time was Maryland’s Rep. Bob Bauman,
then chairman of the American Conservative Union. And, nosey as
ever, I stood right close and eavesdropped as, right there in the
middle of the concourse, the three conservative leaders discussed
whether or not to launch a “Stop Bush” movement. The tentative idea
was to call a press conference for the middle of the next morning,
blast the choice of Bush, and call on the delegates to reject Bush
in favor of another nominee, probably Helms himself. Bush was
anathema to Helms because he had campaigned as being pro-choice,
because he had called the Reagan tax-cut plan “voodoo economics,”
and because, culturally, the patrician Northeasterner Bush could
not have been more different from the North Carolina son of a
small-town police and fire chief.
At some point as I eavesdropped, somebody scribbling notes asked
my name — at which point Helms looked up, saw that I was still
there, and thanked me profusely before making clear I was no longer
needed. (The scribbler was a reporter for the Detroit
News, which ran a front-page story about that
Helms-Ellis-Bauman confab in the next day’s late editions.) But I
already had a story, a huge story: A fight was a-brewing! A real,
honest-to-goodness convention fight!
I DIDN’T KNOW IT at the time, but the fight was not to be. Reagan’s
unexpected, ad hoc convention appearance just a few minutes later
was a masterful stroke. The Gipper somehow turned a fiasco into a
triumph, and made it sound as if the choice of Bush was a logical
and even brilliant way to carry the fight to the Democrats in the
fall. With the wild and enthusiastic reception Reagan received from
the delegates, it would have seemed like bad sportsmanship,
surliness, and a direct affront to Reagan for Helms and Company to
carry out their plan. Overnight, the idea fizzled, and the
Reagan-Bush team went on to victory in the fall over Carter and
then victory in the Cold War over the Soviets.
At the time, the whole experience, exciting as it was, soured me
on Helms’s judgment. Even if Bush were not the senator’s first
choice, I reasoned, it was just bad form, at the very moment that
Helms’s dreams of a Reagan-led ticket were coming to fruition, for
the North Carolina conservative to be raising a stink.
On the other hand, Laxalt — who was so angry that he left
Detroit without even waiting to hear his friend Reagan’s acceptance
speech — and Helms were absolutely right that the running mate
selection was of vast importance. They were operating on the
“Prince of Wales” theory, named after the next-in-line to the
British throne, which is that the running mate is the heir apparent
for the party’s next nomination. And they turned out to be not just
correct but doubly so. Not only did Reagan’s choice create an heir
apparent, but that successor bred, literally, a quite apparent heir
who inhabits the Oval Office today. For better or worse, then, here
we are 28 years after that momentous day in Detroit, still seeing
repercussions from Reagan’s choice that would never, could
never have happened had Reagan selected Kemp or Laxalt or even
Rumsfeld instead.
That’s all the more reason why John McCain should think
long-term when he picks his running mate — and why conservatives
ought to pressure McCain to choose a Reaganite, one under age 60,
to be the newest Republican Prince of Wales. In retrospect, I
learned something important from my chance encounters with Laxalt
and Helms that night: Vice presidential selections mean a great
deal. Without a good one in the hand, you can end up with two
Bushes.
