In My Time - Dick Cheney [52]
He got me invited to two key events. The first was a meeting of the southern state Republican chairmen in North Carolina. I had the chance to meet them all and make a strong case that they ought to support Gerald Ford. Dent also advised me that it would be well worth my time to make a trip to Jackson, Mississippi, to attend a meeting of all the Mississippi Republican convention delegates. I had the chance to spend time with their chairman, Clarke Reed, and I spoke to the assembled group. As a conservative stronghold, Mississippi was leaning Reagan, and we wanted to show them we would fight for their votes.
When I got off the plane at National Airport back in Washington, I heard the news that Ronald Reagan had announced that if he were nominated, liberal Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker would be his running mate. Reagan’s selection of Schweiker had been a gambit to take Pennsylvania’s delegates away from Jerry Ford. I made a quick call to Drew Lewis, the Ford campaign chairman in Pennsylvania. He assured me I didn’t have to worry. He would deliver Pennsylvania for Ford. I knew we should take advantage of the moment and lock down Mississippi.
I went directly to the Oval Office and recommended that President Ford place a call to Clarke Reed. He did and the timing could not have been better. Clarke had just heard that Reagan had selected a northeastern liberal to be his running mate. Even in the anger of the moment, Clarke had trouble bringing himself to give up on Reagan. But Ford wouldn’t let him buy any more time and leaned on him hard until he got a commitment. Two days later Air Force One appeared in the skies over Jackson, and with a final direct appeal to delegates from the president himself, Mississippi was ours. We had managed to deny Reagan the extra delegates he was hunting in Pennsylvania and had nailed down our own additional votes in Mississippi.
Political historians still speak of the Schweiker move as a fatal miscalculation, although in retrospect, it’s probably closer to the truth that Reagan by then had already lost his chance at the nomination. The early announcement of a running mate merely showed a realistic understanding that desperate measures were in order. After that failed, the only options the Reagan people had left were more in the nature of throwing roadblocks in Ford’s path than actually adding to their own delegate total. Having made some serious mistakes going into the convention, the best they could hope for was to force us into committing some calamitous error of our own.
THE CONVENTION AT KEMPER ARENA in downtown Kansas City was the last one ever to begin in a state of genuine uncertainty about who would leave town with the nomination. Even the glossy programs hedged their bets, with pictures of both Ford and Reagan as the party’s “standard bearers,” to allow for either outcome. The numbers were holding for Ford, but at conventions back then you never knew what might happen on the floor before delegates finally got around to casting their votes on the third night. The Reagan camp was determined to stir up some last-minute drama, and their chosen vehicle was Rule 16-C.
Apparently dreamed up by Reagan’s campaign manager, John Sears, a bright guy who had kept us on our toes all year, 16-C would have required that before the balloting began, each candidate must declare whom he would choose as his running mate. On Ford’s team, we called this the “misery loves company” rule because the sole purpose was to drag Ford into the same no-win situation Reagan had created for himself by choosing Schweiker. No matter whom Ford chose for the ticket, it was bound to annoy at least some of our delegates, and if the choice turned out to be really controversial or unpopular, it might even inspire enough eleventh-hour conversions to tilt the convention toward Reagan.
The floor fight over 16-C created a real moment of exposure for us, and we treated the vote on it as a proxy battle for the nomination itself. When we prevailed on Tuesday night, everybody knew Ford would be the nominee.