Welcome to Whistlestop, a podcast of presidential campaign curiosities. I'm John Dickerson. Our Whistlestop today is Miami, Florida, November 20, 1975, and Governor Ronald Reagan is making his very first campaign stop as an official candidate for the Republican nomination. He's challenging his party's sitting president, Gerald Ford. Reagan started the day in Washington, DC. In resplendent fashion, he was wearing a purple plaid suit, a pinstripe shirt, a polka dot tie,
and a white silk handkerchief pluming out of his breast pocket. Reagan hadn't mentioned Ford in his speech by name, but he indicted the system that Ford had been a part of since 1948, when Ford was first elected to his 13 terms in Congress. Reagan said, in Washington, DC, our nation's capital has become the seat of a buddy system that functions for its own benefit, increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker who supports it with his taxes.
Today, it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us our problems. The Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business, and big labor. I don't believe for one moment that four more years of business as usual in Washington is the answer to our problems, and I don't believe the American people believe it either. Reagan had called Ford the day before, at the White House, to inform him of his decision,
saying that the campaign would not be divisive. Ford said to Reagan, how can you challenge an incumbent president of your own party and not be divisive? The two men were divided. It was a risky gambit for Reagan. An incumbent president had not lost his nomination in 100 years. That was the poor Chester Arthur, but that wasn't the most dangerous thing that
happened to Reagan on that first day of his campaign. After he spoke in Miami, Michael L. Carvin pulled what looked like a 45 revolver and approached Reagan and pointed it at him. The Secret Service agents who had been assigned a Reagan as a candidate for just a single day seized Mr. Carvin, wrestled him to the ground, and whisked Reagan and his wife off
to safety. The gun it turned out was a replica, though Carvin would be sentenced to 10 years for the stunt, which he had performed in the hopes of springing squeaky from from jail. Squeaky from had tried to assassinate President Ford. She was a follower of the Manson family. The scary event on Reagan's first announcement day would be an eerie foreshadowing of, of course, the real assassination attempt that took place six years later when John Hinckley
shot President Reagan outside the Washington, Hilton. This is the story of Ronald Reagan's near miss with the Republican Party's nomination. In 1976, he failed to unseat Gerald Ford, but in the loss Reagan gained so much more. He became a conservative hero who rescued the movement from goldwater's defeat in 1964. Goldwater had been pounded so badly that the theory among the elites and among Republicans was that these nutty conservatives had driven
the party into a ditch. But what Reagan did in 1976 was prove that there was an actual appetite in the country for these ideas, and he kept the conservative movement at the heart of the Republican Party, kept conservatives from going their own way and splintering into a third party. Rescuing that, those conservatives and keeping that bond would ultimately reinvigorate the party and create the coalition that exists today in the Republican Party.
In 1976, Reagan also gave hope to the legions of conservative candidates who would come after him, who would, despite loss after loss after loss in primaries and caucuses, nevertheless, willing to the idea that there was a silent majority out there waiting to vote for them if they just stayed in the race a little bit longer. In 1975, before this fight within the Republican Party, it's hard to properly put into context
just how messed up things were within the Republican Party. There, of course, had been watergate, Richard Nixon having to resign after being caught in a number of illegal schemes, abusing his power, abusing government, spying Ford, then pardon Nixon, which spread the sting even further. It hurt Ford and the Republican candidates took a pounding in the off-year elections
in 1974. The Republican National Committee was in such frantic confusion about how to revive the party's fortunes that they commissioned an advertising campaign aimed at improving the GOP's image. The RNC printed buttons that read, Republicans are people too, which gave you some sense of how deflated the beach ball had become. And then another ad asked, when has it been easy to be a Republican? Better perhaps than printing buttons that simply
said, hold me. And so there was a debate, moderate, and revive the party by placating the moderates who had fled after Nixon, or does the Republican Party side with the conservatives who had actually been skeptical about Nixon and his outreach to the Soviets and the Chinese?
You can see some parallels with the current state of the Republican Party. The RNC commissioned an autopsy after the 2012 losses, and that autopsy described the party as too much considered an old white male party, and a Republican ad maker unaware of his history made a series of ads in which the tagline was, you guessed it, Republicans are people too. Back to 1975, conservatives were fed up. Said Claire Booth lose a famously quotable conservative.
There's not the slightest chance in my view that the GOP can win in 1976, or for that matter, ever again. She thought a new party was needed since both parties, she said, were dominated today by a small band of liberals whose domestic and foreign policies are bringing the nation
to ruin. Paul Wyra, who became an influential conservative activist, said the Republican party is not billed on principles, it's a tradition maintained by a feet gentleman of the north eastern establishment who played games with other feet gentlemen who called themselves Democrats. The only solution then was for all the conservatives to take their marbles
and go home, or more precisely to create a third party. William Russia was the publisher of the National Review, spearheaded this idea of conservatives taking, going and forming a third party, and then appealing to the silent majority on the left, the voters who were supporting George Wallace. His argument was if you take the right of the right and the right of the left, you could unite them all behind Reagan and but I'm saying you'd win
the presidency. How did Reagan become the guy who would do this? Well, Reagan's big moment for conservatives was a speech that he gave in support of Barry Goldwater. It's often referred to as a convention speech, but the speech was actually a televised address before the convention and it was called a time for choosing.
But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago a judge called me here in Los Angeles, he told me that a young woman who'd come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning she revealed her husband was a laborer earning $250 a month. She wanted the divorce to get an $80 raise. She's eligible for $330 a month and the aid to defend the children program. She
got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who'd already done that very thing. Yet anytime you and I questioned the schemes of the do-gooders, were denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we're always against things whenever for anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant. It's just that they know so much that
isn't so. Now, then Reagan had been governor of California for two terms and as governor he'd taken on the welfare cheats and the student radicals and then he had a syndicated radio show and newspaper columns and he gave speeches and so he became the kind of cheerleader for the conservative cause and of course he was an attractive ex-actor. So he was the answer to what they thought was the gold water problem, which was not the ideas but the gold water
was this grumpy person and Reagan was this sunny, attractive fellow. If they could just get him out there talking about these things, it would be great news for conservatives. But this posed a huge problem for Republicans because if the conservatives left the party and the moderates left the party, then there wouldn't be anybody left to turn the lights on at the RNC. So meanwhile, Gerald Ford is president and he's got to get some Republicans
to come vote for him in the 1976 election. At this point in 1975, he doesn't think Reagan's much of a threat but he thinks losing conservatives actually really is a threat. Ford's big problem was that he had angered conservatives by putting Nelson Rockefeller in his administration as vice president. It's hard to conjure how much conservatives disliked Nelson Rockefeller. What made Rockefeller so irritating was not only his positions on the budget and foreign
policy but that he had been actively attacking conservatives for the last 20 years. Treating them as imbosels saying that supportive conservatives would ruin the Republican party forever after Goldwater lost in 1964, Rockefeller spent a bunch of time doing grave dancing and saying how it was total proof of everything he'd said that conservatives were nuts and that they were going to ruin the party. So all the conservatives hated Rockefeller and
then Ford named him his vice president. So that was a huge problem. So Ford had to engage in a series of activities that were meant to get right with the right as no one called it at the time. The first thing he did was he reneged on his pledge to support legislation that would have enlarged the right of unions to pick it at construction sites. As Laura Coleman writes in right star rising, Ford was facing not just a revolt from conservatives,
but a new kind of pressure from conservative techniques. The new conservative technique was the rise of direct mail. And there was a man named Richard Vigory who you will still see often quoted in stories about civil war within the Republican ranks. What Vigory was a pioneer and was basically targeting and learning how to contact conservative voters. Stories at the time showed his 3000 rolls of magnetic tape that had encoded on them,
the names of 15 million people. Now these people were all conservatives and politicians were used to reading the polls or counting up some letters they might get at their office. What they started to do, what they started to learn was that they could see something in the polls that said the country felt one way. But then the 200 people who had been prompted by Vigory's direct mail and whipped into a lather about whatever the issue was,
were the ones calling the office and writing and blanketing the member of Congress. And those kinds of people were the ones that would do more than just talk to a pollster. They would go out and vote against that elected official in the next election. So the conservative right was angry and it was mobilized, which meant it had found a new way to make its power
felt over lawmakers. And we should pause just for a minute and remember in 1952 when we talked about the battle inside the Republican Party, Eisenhower was the one, the moderate, coming from the outside breaking up the inside game. He was building a grassroots movement against the conservative taff to control the inside game. Now the situation is totally reversed. Conservatives are building an outside power through direct mail and through harnessing
their like-minded folk. And they're now trying to bust up the establishment that's associated with the moderates and that's associated with the people in power in Washington. Then Ford tried another gambit. He orchestrated a staff shakeup on November 4, 1975. That was no one knew it at the time, but that was three weeks before Ronald Reagan would announce.
And this staff shakeup that Ford initiated was called the Halloween Massacre. And he replaced a number of prominent moderate Republicans with conservatives in the post of National Security Adviser, Secretary of Defense, and headed the CIA. It was supposed to make Ford look like his own man until it was leaked that Donald Rumsfeld had come up with the idea, Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney both worked in the Ford administration. Gallup poll taken before the Massacre had
Ford head among Republicans, 58 to 36 percent. And then an NBC poll taken after the Massacre had Reagan up by a single point. So it didn't seem to work. Although those are two different pollsters, we're going to, for the purposes of this argument, say that it did not do what Ford had hoped, which was try to get conservatives on to his side. The biggest final thing that
Ford did to try to appease conservatives was kick Rockefeller off the ticket. But that didn't seem to placate the conservatives either because there was this national mood that was sour. And also Ford was a bit of a laughing stock. Usually when you're president and incumbent, which Ford was at this point, you have all of this wonderful national media who will cover
you. But Ford's pardoning him Nixon had soured the elites in the media. And there was this new force on the planet called Saturday Night Live with a comedian, Chevy Chase, who ran a parody news show. And in the parody news show, they often talked about Ford's latest mishap. It was a constant diet of laughter at Gerald Ford's expense. It's not clear when Ronald Reagan decided he wanted to run. As late as September of 1975, the Ford White House
was still didn't think that Reagan was going to run. Basically, they thought that he was a lightweight. That was the word Richard Nixon used in his memo to Ford about possible challengers and an internal political memorandum said, basically, Reagan, even if he did run, was just supported by a bunch of right wing nuts. But be that as it may, Reagan saw his moment. And so on the 19th of November, he called Gerald Ford. And he said, well, Mr. President,
I'm going to make an announcement tomorrow. And I want to tell you about it ahead of time. Ford said, I'm sorry you're going to do this. I believe I've done a good job and that I can be elected regardless of your good intentions. Your bid is bound to be divisive. Reagan said, I don't think it will harm the party. Well, I think it will. Ford said and hung up. Clearly, he's irritated, but Cheney told him Reagan slips every time he opens his
mouth because he doesn't have the background. And Ford made that claim publicly. It was a claim, basically, the same claim that Eisenhower had made against Taft, basically saying that he was totally unelectable. Here's a memo from the Ford campaign. Despite how well Ronald Reagan does or does not do in the early primaries, the simple political fact is he cannot defeat any candidate the Democrats put up. Reagan's constituency is much too narrow, even within
the Republican party. While not unmindful of his ability, he does not have the critical national international experience that President Ford has gained through 25 years of public service. The New York Times agreed there is one way it seems to us in which the Republicans could dig their own political grave for 1976 as surely as anything can be done in American politics. That is by capitulating to the far right wing of the party that forms the core
support of Governor Reagan in his quest for the nomination. To put it in the crudest political terms, the far right of the GOP has no place to go. Yet the nomination of Governor Reagan for President or for that matter, even the vice presidency on the Ford ticket, would surely alienate the most important centrist and liberal segments of the Republican party
without whose support it could not conceivably achieve national success. So just as you think back of the Republican party now, here you have the New York Times arguing that without moderates, the Republican party would be doomed. The next morning, Scottie Reston, the famous New York Times columnist, was thumbing his nose at the former California governor as well. The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken so seriously
by the news media and particularly by the president. It makes a lot of news, but it doesn't make much sense. If the elites didn't like Reagan, reporter Jules Whitcover saw something else when he visited Reagan on the stump in New Hampshire. He wrote, Reagan was taking not only the person's hand in his, but his or her eyes with his
own, holding the contact until the other person's glance fell away. Whitcover wrote, anyone who saw him at the Sheraton Wayfarer Hotel in Bedford, New Hampshire that night had to be convinced that Jerry Ford was going to have his hands full with Reagan. This is one of the many reasons Reagan is such a touchstone for conservatives because you hear the disdain with which the elites in the media and in the Republican party approached Reagan
and his ideas. It wasn't just that he didn't have a chance. It was that he was a joke and that the people who followed him were a joke and they were too small and puny even if they
did like him to ever really matter in politics. That went on for months and months. So Reagan's argument was, his strategy was, that there is a bigger group out there, that there are not these losers that the elites and the media think they are, but that there are actual conservatives, the silent majority out in the country and that those people would rally
around him. The two policy arguments he made was the A that the federal government was too big and that Washington insiders couldn't control it and that communism was on the march and this became an important argument that Kissinger, who worked for Ford, was too cozy with the Soviets and that they had taken their eye off the ball and let America fall behind in national security readiness. Here's a commercial from Reagan's campaign.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's not easy for me to say the things I must say to you today, but I've decided that matters of national security and defense are beyond politics. I'm deeply concerned about our defense posture. Despite the assurances of Dr. Kissinger and Mr. Ford, the United States is no longer the first military power.
The first big contest, of course, was New Hampshire. Reagan's strategist thought they could win because he had support of conservative publisher William Lowe of the Manchester Union leader. You've heard his name lots of times. Reagan's plan was he was in a new Hampshire and then go and win in conservative Florida and then finish it off Ford in Illinois. It was important that he beat Ford early because Reagan was basically claiming that Ford
wasn't the incumbent. He hadn't been elected to the office. He fell into the job after Nixon's resignation and he'd been in a position to fall into the job because he'd been appointed to the vice presidency after Spiro Agnew had to resign because of bribery allegations. So Ford had never really been chosen by Republican voters to anything other than his seat in Congress.
So he wasn't legitimate and an early primary loss would prove that. And Ford was in trouble in New Hampshire and his own strategist knew it, but he seized on a speech that Reagan had made not during the primary, but before in which Reagan had argued basically that the budget should be cut by $90 billion and that all that responsibility from the federal government
should be shifted to the states. And so what Ford's men said repeatedly was, hey, in New Hampshire, when you shift all that responsibility to the states, the states are going to have to raise your taxes. And New Hampshireites, particularly conservatives and Republicans, jealous guard their low taxes. That tax plan ended up helping sink Reagan and Ford won the New Hampshire primary only by 1300 votes, but you can win in New Hampshire by a very little
and be considered a huge winner. And that was the case here because of expectations. Ford wasn't expected to win when he did. It was big news. And Ford gloated, they can't say I've never won any place outside grand Rapids anymore. Ford then went on to win Florida and Illinois. You remember they used to be part of the Reagan strategy. He'd won all
through these states where Reagan's general said Reagan had to win. And Ford was now on his way basically to the nomination, ratified repeatedly by the people in five straight victories. By the time Reagan and Ford get to North Carolina, nine Republican governors have suggested that Reagan withdraw to promote party unity. Reagan was hurting the party,
and all he was doing was was being a sore loser. And if he couldn't win North Carolina, he really should leave because with each successive loss Reagan had claimed, well, I'll do well in the south and the west. So this was a test in the south where if he lost, he should bow out, although they were saying he should bow out before the voting even started.
In North Carolina, Reagan really ramped up the attack on Ford's foreign policy. He'd mentioned it before, but now he started hitting Ford hard, saying that basically under Kissinger and Ford, the nation has become number two in a world where it's dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best. Reagan also brought up what he said were secret dealings to sell out the Panama Canal. We built it, he said, we paid for it and we're going
to keep it. Still, it looked so grim for Reagan on even the North Carolina primary that the New York Times headline days before read Reagan virtually concedes defeat in North Carolina. It said that Reagan didn't think six loss would doom his candidacy and that he still had a fighting chance. It conveys this idea that basically Reagan is done and admits as much. It was extraordinary because Reagan had been boosting the idea of a North Carolina victory
and how it was going to give him a first real chance to win. But the other great fact that nobody knew at the time, but that Reagan's campaign manager, John Sears, was already in tentative talks with the Ford camp about how to retire Reagan's $1 million in campaign debt. He was so convinced that it was over that he was already trying to figure out how Ford with his bigger bank account could help Reagan out of the money he'd accumulated,
the debt he'd accumulated trying to run for president. But then the voters spoke. In the end, Reagan trounced Ford in North Carolina. It was a huge surprise and it was only the third time in American history that an incumbent has lost a primary. Because Reagan had been close enough in other, those previous primaries that he had lost, it now turned out that Reagan with the huge dose of delegates from North Carolina was now ahead in the delegate count.
So he went from thinking it was over, figuring out how to get rid of his campaign debt to Rogers Morton who was managing the Ford campaign suddenly started talking about how the Ford campaign was stuck with having to rearrange deck chairs on the deck of the Titanic. The next big dose of Reagan success came in Texas. Right before the Texas primary, there was a famous tamale incident that is often repeated among political hacks as they're telling
tales from the trail. Gerald Ford was at an event at the Alamo in which there was a plate of tamales. The West was, of course, Reagan territory. And nevertheless, Ford was trying to make his case for why he was really in sync with the people of the West and how he understood their lives before the speech reached for a tamale. Took the tamale wrapped as it is in a husk and took a bite out of it, not knowing as the locals did that you were supposed
to unwrap the tamale first. Well, this, of course, was captured by a photographer. And it became a symbol for Ford being just kind of hapless, this fellow who's falling, being lampooned on TV. He's now being trashed by this crazy governor and Ford is just completely out of sync with every moment he is in forced to kind of chew his way through a corn husk. After North Carolina and victories, Reagan kept winning in the Indiana, Georgia, Alabama,
and things kept getting uglier. Reagan was going to win the California primary, but Ford in the few days before the vote tried to capitalize on Reagan saying that the US would have to send troops to Rhodesia. So an ad ran in California that said, when you vote on Tuesday, remember, Governor Ronald Reagan couldn't start a war. President Ronald Reagan can. By the time the voting was over, Ford was ahead by a small number of delegates, but as both men head
to the nomination, Ford did not have it locked up. They were going to Kansas City and there were about 90 or so, anywhere 90 from 120 delegates who were up in the air, who either man would have to woo to be able to actually get the nomination. Neither of the two had the nomination. Ford had a tiny lead in the delegates, but what was so interesting about this and what like that direct male piece that we saw coming online here and being a vehicle for
conservatives to influence the Republican Party. We see Reagan taking advantage of a rule change in Republican delegates that would also change and increase the power of conservatives in the Republican vote. There were more primaries that Reagan was able to use in which the delegates were bound to the primary result. In other words, you know, in the old days, if Reagan
had won a primary, the delegates might have been able to slosh around. And so the inside party guys could have weedled and fixed things and particularly used the power of the presidency to argue with those delegates and get them to basically switch from being Reagan man to Ford man. But the number of pledge delegates, bound delegates had increased. There were 85% of the delegates were bound in 1976. In 1968, just 48% of them were bound. And Reagan
had the majority of the bound delegates. So there were these delegates who were up for grabs, the bound delegates to Reagan. And then Ford had a mix of bound and unbound. Presumably, Reagan could convince those who were unbound to come over to him. So as the whole caravan moved into Kansas City, both candidates showing up early to try and woo these uncommitted
delegates. That was the scene. One candidate was a sitting president. One candidate was a movie star, but as the Chicago Tribune put it, the real stars were the not sayers, the uncommitted delegates. They're not saying Ford and they're not saying Reagan. They will be the stars of part two of the 1976 GOP nomination fight next time on Whistle Stop. We'd love to hear what you think of Whistle Stop. Send us an email at podcast at slate.com.
Or even better leave us a review on the iTunes store. It helps us spread the word. Head over to iTunes.com slash slate podcast. Our producer is Mike Vuelo. Our managing producer is Joel Meyer and our executive producer is Andy Bowers. Whistle Stop is part of the Paneple Network. Check out the entire roster of podcasts at iTunes.com slash panel play. Our Whistle Stop Cracker Jack researcher is Brian Rosenwald, who had a bit part in bedtime for Bonso as
the lovable neighbor Mr. Sniggles. I'll be back in two weeks with part two of the 1976 Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party. Here on Whistle Stop. I'm John Dickerson. Hi, I'm Gretchen Ruben, the host of Happier. And in the latest episode, we'll talk about why sometimes it's a good idea to indulge in a modest splurge and how to cope with other people's bad moods. You can subscribe to us in iTunes.com slash panel play.