The End of the Ride

As Ronald Reagan and Richard Schweiker sat side by side in the Governor's Kansas City hotel suite watching the presidential roll call, they looked almost as uncomfortable as they had three weeks before when they announced their partnership. There with them was TIME National Political Correspondent Robert Ajemian. His report:

Now freshly combed and suited up for a triumphal appearance they would never make, they still seemed an implausible pair. Ronald Reagan was surrounded by his gleaming staff of Californians, and so the anguish of the moment in which he finally lost the nomination was somewhat obscured. But Richard Schweiker was alone; without friends and sycophants, he showed his dismay.

The realization that the ticket was a bust had been evident to Schweiker for at least 24 hours. As soon as Gerald Ford won the vice-presidential rules fight the previous evening, Schweiker had telephoned Reagan with an offer to resign. It was shortly after midnight, and an aide told Schweiker the Governor had gone to sleep. Schweiker urged him to check the bedroom because he had something important to say. He was asked to wait until the next morning, and at breakfast he finally told Reagan, who quickly declined his offer to withdraw. "I'm not going to leave this convention with my tail between my legs," he told the Pennsylvanian, "and neither are you." But the disillusionment with Reagan that exploded when he chose Schweiker was there to the end. The previous afternoon a Northern Governor pleaded with Reagan to drop Schweiker from the ticket--with the Pennsylvania Senator sitting right beside them in the limousine. "I couldn't live with myself," Reagan answered him. Either way, it was clear the move had badly backfired: Reagan was unable to hold his support in the South, and Schweiker was unable to deliver additional delegates from the North. Reagan probably would have lost the nomination anyway, but in picking Schweiker he had taken the risk of destroying his own reputation.

For Reagan the danger of the decision had always been personal: that he would lose his cherished credibility. He had at first described the Schweiker move as a way to broaden the party's base for the fall campaign. Now, with the nomination decided, he explained the deal somewhat differently. "We were dead in the water," he conceded. "We had to get some motion, get some delegates."

In Reagan's suite on the last night, Schweiker seemed a rather forlorn figure. He gamely tried to laugh along with some of the inside staff jokes about the Reagan campaign just ended, but mostly he gazed silently into the TV screen. He and Reagan had little to say to each other; there was not a great deal more familiarity between the two men than when Schweiker's name was first proposed and Reagan did not even know who he was. It had been a ruinous mismatch.

Reagan seemed relaxed in a defeat he had been anticipating for at least a day. The fight was over, and he is not an ideologue who broods over lost causes. As one Ford speaker on TV praised the President's courage in doggedly saying no to the Congress, Reagan piped up: "Yeah, but when's he going to say no to that budget?" A reference to Ford's widespread popularity around the world brought another Reagan gibe. As the large states of New Jersey and Ohio sang out their tallies, Reagan indulged in some arguable hindsight: if only he had gone into a few of the larger Northern states, he said, he could have won them. When New York's Dick Rosenbaum, his bald, sunburned head rising above the crowd, bellowed out with obvious pleasure a huge majority for the President, Reagan tried to perk up the mood: "That guy is going to turn me against Kojak."

But it was the Pennsylvania tally that brought total silence to the room. When Schweiker's fellow Senator Hugh Scott proudly shouted 93 votes for Ford--more than anyone had anticipated--it was clear in the end that Schweiker had not delivered a single extra delegate from his home state. It was a deflating performance, and Reagan noted the moment. "That's the one that did a it," he said. Muttered Schweiker defensively: "A lot of people took a walk."

Near the end of the roll call, as West Virginia put Ford over, Nancy Reagan reached her arm around her husband's neck and said loud enough for the dozen or so people in the room to hear: "I don't care, honey, we did what no one else ever did." There was a pause, and then Reagan thanked the staff for their hard work. "The long ride is over," he said quietly. When he turned his attention back to the screen, his chief aide Mike Deaver spoke from across the room and suggested the Governor might also want to thank Schweiker for all he had done. Reagan quickly realized the oversight and told Schweiker it had taken courage for him to join up. "Well," said Schweiker, looking grateful for any recognition, "the country is the loser."

Reagan got up to prepare himself for the President's arrival; both men had agreed two weeks earlier that no matter how it ended the winner would come in person to call on the loser. Another agreement that was reached that very afternoon: Ford would not raise the subject of Reagan's availability for the vice presidency at the meeting. Reagan wanted to maintain any leverage he could on Ford's final choice the next day. Schweiker was not invited to stay for the meeting and was ushered out with the rest of the staff.

The next day Reagan's emotions began to show. He almost came to tears in a private appearance before the California delegation. Then a few minutes later--with Schweiker at his side--Reagan was downstairs in front of his workers. He spoke movingly of rejecting expediency and not compromising on principles. A nonparticipating observer could not help wondering about these appeals, for Reagan was standing right next to his most blatant expedient choice. "Don't get cynical," he told them, some of whom by now were crying. "Look at yourselves and realize there are millions of Americans out there who want it to be a shining city on a hill." Nancy Reagan began to weep openly and turned her back on the audience for several minutes until she regained control of herself.

Back in his suite, Reagan spoke about the future--and, as always, of his credibility. "I still consider myself a nonpolitician, no matter what people think of the Schweiker selection," he said. Now it seemed an almost absurd claim. "My concern through this whole thing," he went on, "has been to retain my credibility." Reagan thought he had done that, but others saw it differently. Said a longtime political supporter in California: "He's lost his place as the high priest of the right. After Schweiker, all he can do is preach unity, not purity." Reagan intends to start up his preaching immediately; he will resume broadcasting his radio column the first of September. He plans to support Ford this fall and will pay no heed to the conservative third-party movement which meets this week in Chicago. "It may give some shelter to conservatives," he said, "but I don't believe in third parties on the eve of an election."

If the Republicans lose in November, however, Reagan wants to be active in any regrouping of the party. He believes this may demand a whole new approach, a coalition of different constituencies, perhaps even a new party name. He expects to be at the center of it. "I didn't compromise any of my principles," he said. "Look at that platform. It's pure Ronald Reagan."

But a platform whose planks would mostly be forgotten in the first few weeks of the campaign seemed like a small prize. No matter how rosily Reagan looked to his own future, he was finished as a large political power in the country. And no matter how much credit he and the others around him took for waging a campaign without compromise, they had fallen back on expediency--and it had not worked. Reagan had shown an opportunism that really had tarnished the glitter of the goal he so often invoked: his shining city on a hill.

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