In My Time - Dick Cheney [51]
An unbroken string of early primary victories turned things around, and suddenly Ford was the clear front-runner. By late March we had won decisively in Florida and Illinois, and we were sure that if Reagan didn’t get a win of his own very soon, he would be out of the running. Sure enough, he dug in hard in North Carolina, borrowed money for a statewide TV broadcast, and came out six points ahead of us in the primary on March 23. With that victory under his belt, the contest was now moving into Texas, Georgia, and Indiana, and suddenly it was his turn to run the table. We stayed on our feet with a couple of narrow and much-needed wins—including Kentucky, thanks at least in part to the advice I received from John Sherman Cooper in Warsaw. All through the late spring and summer, and right up to the Republican convention in August, the nomination battle was being fought house to house and vote by vote, making us scratch and claw for every last delegate.
Whenever the president or I wanted to know how we stood in the hunt for delegates, the man with the answer was Jim Baker. Back then James A. Baker III was as new to national politics as I was. The Houston attorney and former marine had cut his Republican teeth in Texas working for his good friend George H. W. Bush. Jim is the kind of guy you want around when things get tense and complicated, and even in the mid-seventies, anyone watching him in action at the President Ford Committee could observe the calm and shrewd turn of mind that future presidents, including Reagan himself, would depend upon. As our man in charge of delegate hunting, Jim was part of a core group that also included pollster Bob Teeter, political director Stu Spencer, and admen John Deardourff and Doug Bailey. Jim was in charge of every detail and knew the precise state of play at any given moment; he knew who was with us and who was against us and who was uncommitted.
Being an uncommitted delegate had its benefits, including friendly notes and phone calls from the president, who was just checking in to see how you were doing. One afternoon we flew the entire Pennsylvania delegation down to Washington for cocktails with the president. A woman from Brooklyn, who kept switching sides, wanted a White House meeting with Ford, if that wasn’t asking too much. Too much? Why of course not, she was assured. And could she bring her whole family? By all means. The president was hoping she’d ask.
The quest for delegates was on everyone’s mind as we neared the Republican convention. One night a crazed intruder jumped the White House fence and raced across the North Lawn with a three-foot length of pipe in his hand. He ignored shouted orders to stop, disregarded a warning shot fired in the air, and left the Secret Service with no choice but to shoot to bring him down. In the ensuing chaos, as sirens from every corner of town converged on the White House, one of the older Secret Service agents was heard to say, “Gentlemen, if that fellow we just shot was an uncommitted delegate, we’re in deep trouble.”
I even did some delegate scouting myself a few weeks before the convention, including a trip to Mississippi to try turning a few votes there in Ford’s direction. Harry Dent, a longtime South Carolina politico and one of the key staffers who had organized the South for Nixon in 1968, believed we had a shot to take the Mississippi delegation. Mississippi operated under the “unit rule,” so if we got a majority of the votes of their delegates, we’d get the votes of their entire delegation. Not everyone on the campaign took Harry’s advice to heart, but I did, and