Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America Read Online Free PDF Page A

naked power in the Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York primaries, along with betrayal in Mississippi, that had cost their man the nomination.

     
    S ETTLING INTO HIS AIRPLANE seat for the flight back to California, Reagan looked quietly out the window, holding hands with Nancy. During the flight, Marty Anderson, the Gipper's key policy adviser, asked Reagan to sign his convention hall pass and Reagan wrote wistfully, “We dreamed—we fought and the dream is still with us.” 10
    Peter Hannaford, Reagan's soft-spoken, talented aide, was also on the plane. “I was right behind the Reagans. The seat-belt sign went off and the governor stood and said, ‘Well, fellas, I guess we've got to get back to work.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, your first taping is two weeks from Wednesday and your column is due.'” Reagan looked at him and jokingly said, “You didn't think I'd win, did you?” Hannaford replied, “Yes, sir, but you always have to have a contingency plan!” Everybody laughed, especially Reagan. 11 Later, the Reagans walked up and down the aisles, Nancy hugging sobbing staffers, Reagan philosophically saying, “We do not know the reason, but someday we will.” Michael Deaver, another young aide, said everyone was “devastated.” 12 Frank Reynolds of ABC did a touching story that evening, closing with a shot of the Reagans' plane flying off into the western horizon as Reynolds was saying, “So long, Rawhide. See you later, Rainbow.” “Rawhide” and “Rainbow” were of course their Secret Service code names. 13

     
    R EAGAN WAS EXHAUSTED AFTER ten grueling months on the campaign trail. From the time of his announcement in November 1975 until the end of the convention in August, he had been on the road continuously, traveling perhaps one hundred thousand miles or more, eating on the run, sleeping in hotels, getting up early, going to bed late, shaking hands with thousands, giving innumerable interviews and speeches. He needed to recharge his batteries, and nothing did that for him like being at Rancho del Cielo—his “Ranch in the Sky”—with only Nancy and his horses for company. The ranch covered nearly seven hundred acres high in the Santa Ynez Mountains, thirty miles outside of Santa Barbara. There, for days on end, he woke early, rode, cut trees and underbrush, erected fences, rebuilt the 1,200-square-foot main building, tended the horses, soaked up the sun, and thought. At night, he'd relax with a book, write letters, go for long quiet walks with “Mommy”—Reagan's nickname for Nancy—and talk, as always, about the future.
    He quickly set to work, however. As Hannaford had promised, Reagan needed to return to his nationally syndicated column, which King Features distributed to hundreds of newspapers twice a week. He also started recording five-minute radio commentaries that began broadcasting on September 20. The commentaries went to more than five hundred radio stations with a combined audience of around forty million people at any given time. One of Reagan's early radio segments touted the tax cuts in a bill offered by a young Republican backbencher in Congress, Jack Kemp of Buffalo. It was a revolutionary concept; tax cuts had been a Democratic issue, not a Republican one. John Kennedy had cut taxes, and the GOP was the balanced-budget, green-eyeshade party. Giving people back their money fit into Reagan's pro-growth optimism and evolving political framework. Tax cuts, which empowered individuals and lowered their dependence on government, were a critical part of the development of Reagan's new conservatism; his optimism involved much more than just a sunny personality.

    In September, Reagan gathered the core of his defunct campaign staff, some members of his “Kitchen Cabinet”—a group of wealthy Californians who had advised him to run for governor back in 1964—and a handful of other friends and aides at his home in Pacific Palisades for a “seafood salad served on avocado