Thomas Mallon: Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years

But even in China they’d not been able to get completely away from the news back home: Goldwater — a crackpot-turned-pseudo-elder-statesman — had suggested that Nixon do everyone a favor and just stay over there. Imagine being told back in 1960 that he’d end up having more stomach for Nelson than Barry!

He returned his attention to the TV. Rockefeller was going on too long about Dole: He has that quality of candor, of openness, of forthrightness, so needed in our times… No, he doesn’t. Dole is strong, but he’s a shifty s.o.b. and won’t play well on the tube this fall. What is picking him going to accomplish? They don’t think they can carry goddamned Kansas without him?

Jerry, and the party, could have done a hell of a lot better, and that’s why he’d been on the phone pushing Connally late last night, once Ford had eked out this pathetic victory. He’d made two separate calls to the president’s hotel, but Cheney, the boy chief of staff, made sure he never got through. Well, this ticket was finished. Reagan might be going home the loser, but Ford didn’t realize that the poison of the primary season would kill him in November.

Several months ago, Nixon hadn’t given Reagan a chance. There’d been talk in February that his own return trip to China should be postponed — lest Ford be hurt in New Hampshire by the sudden reappearance of his evil benefactor all over the front pages. (He should still have that much influence!) Ford had managed a win up there, though not by much. The real surprise had been seeing Reagan stick it out after that, through loss after loss, until he finally started winning in the South and West, forcing Ford into the death struggle that had ended only last night.

He suspected that Reagan’s wife, terrifying little Nancy, had made him stay in the race until things turned around in North Carolina — the state where things had turned against Nixon back in ’60, when he smashed his knee on that car door and wound up in the hospital, losing days he just didn’t have to Jack.

Christ , in another ten years the campaigns will all be blending together, to the point where he won’t be able to tell one from the other. Well, there’s no need to rush senility by getting half in the bag on a weeknight. Put a little more water in that, pal . He set down his drink.

Nixon’s eyes found Reagan in a framed grip-and-grin photo across the room. Yes, he’d shown something like grit, staying in as long as he had, scrounging for the last uncommitted delegates, even throwing a long ball and announcing a running mate — that liberal asshole from Pennsylvania — weeks before the convention. Nixon had always considered Reagan the luckiest son of a bitch since Coolidge, though there’d been bits and pieces, here and there, that he’d admired. The students at Berkeley had never rattled Reagan— he’d rattled them— whereas the kids on campus and in the streets had driven Nixon up the wall. He didn’t need his papers to remember that part of 1970!

Ford’s people would have a hell of a time conciliating Reagan’s. Agreeing to one minority platform plank was hardly going to do the job. “Morality in Foreign Policy”! Jesus, as if all Reagan’s human-rights griping amounted to a damned thing. His people were trying to make Ford and Henry look like Chamberlain just because they’d agreed to whatever meaningless crap Brezhnev had wanted at Helsinki. Did Reagan really object to “nonintervention” in the Soviets’ internal affairs? Well, if the world blew up, the gulags would blow with it, and the prisoners still wouldn’t be free to vote or go to church; they’d only be free to be dead.

At least Ford was willing to let Kissinger remind him that the larger world was important. When Reagan heard somebody mention Canton or Cairo, he thought of Ohio and Illinois. He had no more vision than he had realism, and God knows he didn’t have the wit to understand that those two things went hand in hand.

The TV cameras had just cut away from Nelson, for only a second, to show Henry taking his seat in the convention stands, next to his Nancy — a smart gal, even if she does smell like a tobacco barn. Now the two of them could catch the end of their old patron Rockefeller’s remarks, and try to ignore the boos with which Reagan’s forces had greeted their arrival.

Maybe not just Reagan’s people, either. Maybe some of Ford’s were booing, too, because even now Henry brought with him memories of You Know Who, the man who’d been on five of the last six tickets to come out of a goddamned Republican convention, and whose name had yet to be spoken at this one.

It was no surprise that these days he and Henry spoke as little as they did. He’d no more expected their “friendship” to endure than he had the Paris Peace Accords. All the cracks had gotten back to him (“our meatball president”), and he’d had to keep himself from puking when he first asked, last summer, for Henry’s permission to travel to China — and been told to wait until after Ford went in the fall. Of course, once he did make the trip, Ford’s people had been happy enough to have his report.

Christ, Rockefeller was still at it, quoting Truman now: Bob Dole is a man who can pass the test once put out by that great and beloved Missourian from Independence, who said so aptly: “If you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen.”

Well, thought Nixon, I’m now the only ex-president you’ve got. He’d buried all the rest of them — Ike, Truman, and Johnson — during his own time in the White House. And he was still determined to make the most of his singular status, however prematurely it had been conferred. And when Ford became an ex, as he surely would five months from now, you could damn well be certain that Nixon would find a way to outshine the competition.

He looked at the pink phone messages from last night, noting one from Peter Cox. Same last name as his son-in-law, whose political career looked to have stalled out before it started. Too bad Tricia didn’t have the drive of Ron’s little frau! This Cox, from Dallas, was a Reagan man, he recalled; but he also took care of Connally’s interests. And he must know that Nixon had done all he could in the last few days to advance John’s prospects. Was it a thank-you call? Nixon fingered the pink square of paper and wondered.

Nelson had at last surrendered the microphone to some blind woman delegate from Iowa, who was assuring everyone that poor battle-mangled Bob Dole would soon be building wheelchair ramps for the disabled all over America. This was the sort of penny-ante stuff that had always bored him while he’d governed the country. NBC must be bored, too: they were cutting away from the speaker to show a film clip of Reagan, who’d yet to arrive in the hall. The footage came from earlier in the day, when Ron and Nancy had had to thank their crushed supporters.

As Nixon watched it, the usual mixture of feelings stirred in him. He could never quite make up his mind about the man. Reagan had been too smart to let Ford lure him into the cabinet; you had to give him that. But he’d always had it too easy, especially with the goddamned Republican Party in California. Usually so lazy, they’d gone all out for him in ’66 and made it possible for him to do what Richard Nixon, an ex — vice president, hadn’t been able to four years earlier: send Pat Brown packing from Sacramento. (Christ, Brown’s kid Jerry had moved awfully fast! Now the governor at thirty-eight. Really, what the hell is wrong with Tricia’s Ed?)

But this is the end of the trail for Reagan. If Carter gets in, and he will, there won’t be a reasonable shot for Ron until ’84—the country hadn’t thrown out an elected incumbent since Hoover — and at that point Reagan will be older than Eisenhower was when leaving office.