So this is a side project that I started writing days after I was banned in January of 2021. I originally intended it to be it's own project, but I later merged it into my FLaG spinoff. So this is the
original Reagan '76 timeline I planned to write. I used the SPC format from his Kerry timeline a few years back, which I found was very fun.
The Spirit of '76.
August 1976.
Congressman Barber Conable (R-NY), Reagan's reluctant running mate.
[1]
The Republican National Convention was looming, and the nomination remained uncertain.
After a divisive primary campaign in which incumbent President Gerald Ford was challenged by former California Governor Ronald Reagan, neither candidate could command a majority of pledged delegates as the convention neared. The Republican Party, having weathered the storm of Watergate, now threatened to fracture along ideological lines in the vortex left behind by Nixon's downfall. As President Ford had largely continued the Nixonian foreign policy of detente abroad and consensus based "New Federalism" at home, the conservative Old Guard of the party was increasingly dissatisfied with the direction of both the Grand Old Party and the country itself. This dissatisfaction with the status quo was the fire that fueled Reagan's candidacy, with the California Governor pitching himself for the role as a outsider who could restore America's prestige as a nation.
After a long and arduous primary season, the road to Kemper Arena in Kansas City was nearing it's end. Neither Reagan nor Ford had emerged from the primaries with a clear majority of delegates, and it was impossible to tell exactly what would happen at the convention. In a desperate move to overtake the President in the last days of the primary campaign, Governor Reagan reached out to Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania to join him on the Republican ticket. It was quite the gamble - Reagan had never even met the Senator, who happened to be one of the most liberal Senators in either party. The campaign manager John Sears was bullish on Schweiker's nomination for the Vice Presidency, arguing that the Senator perfectly balanced the Republican ticket and could unite the party.
But word leaked from the Reagan campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, that the Senator was under consideration. When word of the rumored Reagan-Schweiker ticket reached the public by way of the press, there was immediate outcry from conservatives. Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Senator James Buckley (R-NY) both warned that they would withhold support from Governor Reagan on the convention floor should he move forward with the Schweiker nomination. Wavering Reagan delegates expressed bewilderment at the Schweiker selection, and the Governor's momentum heading into the convention seemed blunted. Inside the Reagan campaign, the former Governor's long time aides Mike Deaver, Ed Meese, and Lynn Nofzinger - "the Californians" - intervened, arguing that campaign manager John Sears (a Washington D.C. based fixer hired by Reagan to lead the effort) was becoming increasingly detrimental to his candidacy. However, it was Nancy Reagan's objection in the end that convinced Reagan that Schweiker's nomination was simply unfeasible.
And thus, Reagan was forced to scuttle his plan to name Schweiker as his Vice Presidential nominee. Though the Schweiker rollout had been a disaster, Reagan knew that naming a running mate before President Ford found a permanent replacement for Vice President Rockefeller would give him an advantage heading into the first ballot. Therefore, he continued to press his campaign staff to find him a suitable partner on the ticket. Congressman Barber Conable's name was eventually raised, and Reagan found himself intrigued by the New Yorker's resume. A longtime ally of Governor Rockefeller who seemed to straddle the fence between moderate and conservative, with a well known pragmatic streak and a solid academic background, not to mention a war veteran, Conable checked many of the right boxes. It took Reagan several hours before he was able to track Conable down at his home in Rochester, New York, where after one thirty minute "interview" of sorts, Reagan asked him to join the Republican ticket. Conable's nomination was well received by all quarters of the party when it was announced just days before the convention.
All the while, Vice President Ford had yet to name a Vice Presidential running mate. With Vice President Rockefeller making it clear that he would not stand again, speculation mounted that Ford was thinking of picking CIA Director George Bush, Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to join him as his running mate. Yet on the opening day of the convention, Ford had still not made an announcement. This generated a demoralizing sense of uncertainty and confusion among Ford delegates, which played out before the platform hearings. On the convention’s first day, Reagan’s delegates succeeded in passing several new additions to the party’s agenda, including a resolution that declared the GOP’s opposition to abortion and support for a “moral foreign policy,” a direct repudiation of Henry Kissinger’s vision of detente.
Tensions grew high as the day continued, with both campaigns aggressive courting the ~100 or so delegates who were uncommitted. On more than a few occasions, these incidents escalated into physical confrontations; in one particularly memorable skirmish, an enraged Reagan delegate walked to the predominately pro-Ford New York delegation’s section and ripped a phone out from the wall, resulting in Vice President Rockefeller angrily confronting the delegate. The two men had to be separated by Secret Service agents, and Rockefeller proudly displayed the ripped out phone to the cameras later on in the afternoon. The Rules Committee hearings were also a raucous affair, with proceedings twice interrupted by squabbling delegates in the audience. Ultimately, Reagan’s delegates are successful in passing Rule 16C, which requires President Ford to officially name a running mate before his name could be put into consideration for the first ballot. Conservative delegates taunted Ford supporters, chanting “where’s our Veep?” in the wake of the contentious vote.
That night, under increased pressure and with fleeting time to spare, President Ford announced his intention to name Senator Dole as his running mate. Though he had spoken with Dole at length about it in the leadup to the convention, the Senator was promised a chance to sleep on it. That is why the Senator was surprised to find reporters knocking on his door after midnight, when the Ford campaign preemptively announced that Dole would indeed be Ford’s running mate. Though the confused Kansas Senator publicly agreed to join Ford on the ticket, the fact that he was caught seemingly unaware only furthered the narrative that the botched rollout was the latest sign of a campaign in crisis.
The following morning, on Wednesday, August 18th, the first ballot is conducted; by a margin of 1,133 (50.2%) to 1,125 (49.8%), Ronald Reagan is nominated in a stunning upset victory over President Ford. The convention hall erupted into chaos as the Governor was pushed over the majority, with supporters cheering in jubilant disbelief as President Ford watches on in a stunned silence. Afterwards, President Ford and Senator Dole address the media at a press conference in order to concede the nomination to Governor Reagan. The Kansan Senator takes his name out of consideration for the Vice Presidency, and Congressman Conable is nominated by a vote of acclamation shortly thereafter. Congressman Conable delivers his acceptance speech at the end of the evening, bringing the convention’s most decisive day to a quiet end.
The convention closes on the night of Thursday, August 19th, with Governor Reagan delivering an electrifying speech to the convention before being joined on stage by President Ford, who offered his full and complete endorsement for the Republican ticket.
Governor Reagan addresses the convention.
[2]
Mr. President, Vice President Rockefeller, Congressman Conable, friends, delegates, and fellow Americans:
I was going to say fellow Republicans here but those who are watching from a distance including all those millions of Democrats and independents who I know are looking for a cause around which to rally and which I believe we can give them. Mr. President, before you arrive tonight, these wonderful people, here, when we came in, gave Nancy and myself a welcome. That, plus this, plus your kindness and generosity in honoring us by bringing us down here will give us a memory that will live in our hearts forever.
Watching on television these last few nights I've seen also the warmth with which you greeted Nancy and you also filled my heart with joy when you did that. May I say some words. There are cynics who say that a party platform is something that no one bothers to read and very often doesn't amount to much. Whether it is different this time than is has ever been before, I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors with no pale pastel shades. We have just heard a call to arms, based on that platform.
And a call to us to really be successful in communicating and reveal to the American people the difference between this platform and the platform of the opposing party which is nothing but a revamp and a reissue and a rerunning of a late, late show of the thing that we have been hearing from them for the last 40 years.
If I could just take a moment, I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our Tricentennial.
It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write about the problems and issues of the day. And I set out to do so, riding down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa Ynez Mountains on the other, and I couldn't help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day.
And then as I tried to write-let your own minds turn to that task. You're going to write for people a hundred years from now who know all about us, we know nothing about them. We don't know what kind of world they'll be living in. And suddenly I thought to myself, If I write of the problems, they'll be the domestic problems of which the President and I have both spoke of here tonight; the challenges confronting us, the erosion of freedom taken place under Democratic rule in this country, the invasion of private rights, the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy. These are the challenges that we must meet.
Then again there is that challenge of which the President also spoke of, the reality that we live in a world in which the great powers have aimed and poised at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive at each others country and destroy virtually the civilized world we live in. And suddenly it dawned on me; those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge.
Whether they will have the freedom that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom? Who kept us now a hundred years later free? Who kept our world from nuclear destruction?
And if we fail they probably wont get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom and they wont be allowed to talk of that or read of it.
This is our challenge and this is why were here in this hall tonight. Better than we've ever done before, we've got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we've ever been but we carry the message they're waiting for. We must go forth from here united, determined and what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory!
Limping out of the convention divided and down in some polls by upwards to 30 points, the pundits hailed Jimmy Carter as the impending President-elect. The Reagan campaign faced an uphill climb as the lingering shadow of Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal haunted the Republican Party like a ghost. After eight years of Republican rule, a cynical and beleaguered nation was ready for a change. And inside the Reagan campaign, so were many staffers.
Throughout the primary season, Reagan’s campaign’s bumbling messaging had been a problem. The former Governor’s top political allies and most trusted aides, all of whom originated from his time as California’s chief executive, were increasingly disillusioned with the campaign’s direction under the leadership of John Sears. Though the Republican nominee was hesitant to fire Sears, the Californian “troika” of Mike Deaver, Ed Meese, and Lynn Nofzinger again enlisted Nancy Reagan in their effort, and subsequently Sears was dismissed just days after the convention’s conclusion. Replacing Sears as campaign manager is Bill Casey, the former head of the Export-Import Bank and a key fundraiser for Reagan. The anti-communist Casey is a fierce conservative who immediately sets out to reorient the listless Republican campaign.
Casey decides to put Reagan on the offensive against Carter in the south, in the hopes of undermining the Governor’s strongest base of support and put him on the defensive. The Republican nominee kicks off his general campaign with a speech at the Nashoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town where civil rights workers had been famously murdered in the 1960s. His speech, which uses the phrases “welfare queens” and “state’s rights,” immediately comes under fire from critics who claim it is racially charged. Reagan and his running mate Congressman Conable both deny these allegations, with the former Governor later addressing the National Urban League Convention where he publicly voiced his opposition to segregation and vowed to maintain the Civil Rights Act.
The Korean Axe Incident highlighted foreign policy concerns during the early stage of the campaign.
[3]
But race relations quickly became a backburner issue when an incident in Korea garnered headlines; after American soldiers attempted to chop down a tree obstructing their view across the DMZ, a swarm of North Korean soldiers charged them, violently beating them before hacking them to death with their own axes. The incident horrifies Americans and is the most recent escalation of the dormant Korean conflict. With the nation still battered and traumatized following the Vietnam War, there was little appetite for further military conflict. Thus, the President ordered a more measured response – the following day, hundreds of American troops, supported by helicopters, tanks, and jets, arrived to complete the job of cutting down the tree; this time, the North Koreans did not intervene.
August concludes with the Democratic ticket of former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter and Senator Walter Mondale holding their strong lead over the Reagan/Conable ticket. But the Reagan campaign’s new leadership is optimistic that their candidate can win if given the chance to get his message out. Thus, it came as a surprise to nobody when the telegenic former actor agreed to join Governor Carter for three televised debates to be held in September and October. The first of its kind since the 1960 election, the impending debates immediately generates anticipation while the Vice Presidential candidates are also slated to debate on another for the first time ever. In an effort to boost his polling and possibly force his way onto the debate stage, former Senator Eugene McCarthy – who has been running a quixotic independent campaign – announces he has selected Native American activist LaDonna Harris as his running mate. The wife of former Senator and presidential candidate Fred Harris, LaDonna Harris’s addition to the ticket strengthens McCarthy’s progressive credentials but otherwise has no impact on the election.
1976 Presidential Election (Gallup – Nationwide):
(D) James Carter: 53%
(R) Ronald Reagan: 29%
Undecided/Not Sure: 16%
(I) Eugene McCarthy: 1%
Other: 1%
[1] Taken from
The Democrat & Chronicle.
[2] Still taken from a
YouTube video (Face the Nation)
