Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [281]
On February 24, Ford beat Reagan by 1,300 votes out of 108,000 cast, and took seventeen of the state’s twenty-one convention delegates. Reagan, who had celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday in New Hampshire, called it a
“virtual tie.”77 But Paul Laxalt, who had spent the previous night with Ronnie and Nancy waiting to uncork the champagne, saw it for what it was.
“We couldn’t believe it,” he wrote. “Ron Reagan had never lost a race.”78
He lost three more states in early March, Massachusetts and Vermont on the 2nd, and a week later, more significantly, Florida, where his state campaign chairman had originally predicted a two-to-one victory—and where Ford beat him by ten points. But in his speeches around Florida he had found his issue, the Panama Canal, his bogeyman, Henry Kissinger, and his voice. In Winter Haven, on February 29, he accused the secretary of state of having a secret plan to give sovereignty over the canal to Panama, then ruled by a leftist military dictator, General Omar Torrijos. “If these reports 4 5 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House are true,” he asserted, “it means that the American people have been de-ceived by a State Department preoccupied by secrecy. They are due a full explanation. Presumably Mr. Ford has not been fully informed by the State Department, for if he were, I cannot imagine he would knowingly endorse such action. . . . When it comes to the Canal, we bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we should tell Torrijos and company that we are going to keep it!”79
He went even further in Orlando four days later, especially regarding Kissinger, whom he condemned as the architect of America’s retreat in the face of “Soviet imperialism” in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. “Last year and this, the Soviet Union, using Castro’s mercenaries, intervened decisively in the Angola civil war and routed the pro-Western forces. Yet, Messrs. Ford and Kissinger continue to tell us that we must not let this interfere with détente. We have given the Soviets our trade and our technology. At Kissinger’s insistence, Mr. Ford snubbed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the great moral heroes of our time. . . . Mr. Ford and Dr. Kissinger ask us to trust their leadership. I confess I find that more and more difficult to do. Henry Kissinger’s stewardship of United States foreign policy has coincided precisely with the loss of United States military supremacy.”80 Reagan’s attacks on Kissinger were so strident that Bill Buckley, whose National Review was enthusiastically “plugging for Reagan,” called him on Kissinger’s behalf and argued that the Panama Canal issue was more complicated than he was making it out to be.81
The day after Reagan’s Florida defeat, The New York Times reported that Ford’s campaign advisers were sending signals to Reagan “to end his insurgency—and perhaps join the Republican ticket as a running mate.” Dick Cheney was quoted as saying that the White House would not hold a grudge against the Californian for things said in “the heat of the campaign.”
With Nancy at his side, Reagan dug in his heels and told the press, “The incumbent in these first couple of primaries has thrown the whole load at us, he has shot all the big artillery there is, used everything in the incumbency he can, and we are still possessing almost half the Republican vote.”82
The following Tuesday, Ford took Reagan’s native state of Illinois, 61
percent to 39 percent. Ford declared “a great victory and another real clincher