I have tried to convey to your countrymen the constrained breathing of the inhabitants of Eastern Europe in these weeks when an amicable agreement of diplomatic shovels will inter in a common grave bodies that are still breathing. I have tried to explain to Americans that 1973, the tender dawn of détente, was precisely the year when the starvation rations in Soviet prisons and concentration camps were reduced even further. And in recent months, when more and more Western speechmakers have pointed to the beneficial consequences of détente, the Soviet Union has adopted a novel and important improvement in its system of punishment: to retain their glorious supremacy in the invention of forced-labor camps, Soviet prison specialists have now established a new form of solitary confinement—forced labor in solitary cells. That means cold, hunger, lack of fresh air, insufficient light, and impossible work norms; the failure to fulfill these norms is punished by confinement under even more brutal conditions.46
To Reagan, this complaint was exactly on the mark. Such statements brought him enormous respect for Solzhenitsyn—one that Solzhenitsyn showed was mutual.47
Not surprisingly, Solzhenitsyn’s jailers disrespectfully disagreed with him and Reagan. And it was during this period that the “California cowboy” drew the full wrath of the Soviet press and became a household name in the Kremlin, as all of Reagan’s remarks were agonizingly reported throughout the Soviet press.48 Commentator-propagandist Valentin Zorin, in a statement issued by the Moscow Domestic Service, screeched that Reagan was seeking to “poison the atmosphere” and “sow doubts about” and even “wreck” détente. He had demonstrated “complete irresponsibility” in suggesting that only the USSR profited from détente, at America’s expense.49
Separately, a well-sourced Izvestia report on the coming 1976 Republican convention, sarcastically titled, “Reagan Applies the ‘Corrective,’” tied together clips from the U.S. media, as well as interviews by its own correspondent, in showing how Reagan had influenced Ford. Izvestia dubbed the morality plank “the Reagan amendment,” and derided its “bombastic, pompous title: ‘Morality in Foreign Policy.’” While this harsh language was scathing, it was by no means unique. Indeed, any Reagan talk of morality drew particular ire from the Soviet Communist press, which viewed such statements with a highly inflammatory eye.50
AUGUST 19, 1976: THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION
All of this came to a head on August 19, 1976, when Republicans held their convention at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City, where Reagan, in the end, did not get the nomination. Amid the letdown, Reagan’s boosters did not realize that the events of the convention had positioned their man as the Republican front-runner four years later. This was not simply because he had come so close to winning in 1976, but also because of his dramatic performance in Kansas City that evening.
President Ford had just finished speaking, and as a gesture of reconciliation and goodwill, he waved from the podium to the Reagans, seated in a skybox. He beckoned Reagan to come down to speak. The Republican faithful exhorted, “Ron! Ron! Ron!” They chanted, “Speech! Speech! Speech!”
None of this had been rehearsed for the cameras. A blushing Reagan had not planned to speak. He refused, gesturing his hands downward, pushing delegates to sit down and shut up. “It’s his night,” he muttered to friends, deferring to Ford. “I’m not going down there.” Ford graciously pressed on: “Ron, will you come down and bring Nancy?”51 National television audiences watched in anticipation, as ABC, CBS, and NBC news anchors peered through binoculars with moment-by-moment commentary.
Reagan turned to Mike Deaver: “But what will I say?” He eventually obliged. As he trotted down the corridors on his way to the podium, he said to Nancy, “I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m going to say.”52 This cluelessness was evident in the way he began his remarks. He offered salutations and thanks, to the Fords, to Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and others. He then offered a couple of rambling, disjointed, customary sentences of appeal to voters, stammering something unmemorable about party platforms. Then a thought came to him. “If I could just take a moment,” he began, taking a pause as he at last decided what he was going to say:53
I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our tercentennial. It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something 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… (pause) let your 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 a world they’ll be living in….
[W]e live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, that can, in a matter of minutes, arrive in 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 have the freedoms 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 our world from nuclear destruction?”… This is our challenge.54
It was an extemporaneous speech—no text, no cards, no teleprompter—and a compelling one. Always believing in the power of a story—the right story, which is not always an easy choice when trying to appeal to the broadest segment—Reagan had found one. Official biographer Edmund Morris later wrote: “The power of the speech was extraordinary. And you could just feel throughout the auditorium the palpable sense among the delegates that [they had] nominated the wrong guy.”55
Despite last-minute second guessing, Republicans had made their choice. The race for the GOP presidential nomination had come down to the wire, and Ronald Reagan had just ended a remarkable run at the presidency. He had tried something extremely difficult: Usually a loyal party man—his “eleventh commandment” was “thou shall not speak ill of another Republican”—he had attempted to take the nomination from the Republican incumbent, President Gerald R. Ford. He fell frustratingly short, missing by only 117 votes, grabbing 47.4 percent of delegates in an 1,187 to 1,070 contest. The winner needed 1,130.
Three months later, Gerald Ford lost the presidency to Jimmy Carter. Michael Reagan recalls that August 1976 evening vividly: “We were upstairs. We just found out that Bob Dole had been picked as the vice presidential nominee. I asked my dad if he was disappointed. He said that what disappointed him the most was that he would not get a chance to look a Soviet leader in the eye and say, ‘Nyet.’”56
Michael’s sister Maureen never forgot a separate response from her father. Maureen described herself as “just devastated” by the defeat, and said she cried for two days—“I just couldn’t stop.” She remembers how it was traumatic for everyone but her father, who smiled at her and asked, “Are you still crying?” He pulled her aside and shared with her some of Grandma Nelle’s theology: “There’s a reason for this…. Everything happens for a reason…. [T]he path is going to open up.”57