Nation: They Thought They Were Better

The men beaten by Reagan reflect on the lessons of losing

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of a people. There are few men so foolish; hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.

—John Updike

As the Republican Party plays out the final ceremony of nominating Ronald Reagan this week, there will be supporting roles for the handful of men who fought against him and lost. The television cameras will again broadcast their images, they will make their speeches, and one of them might even become the vice-presidential nominee. They will all praise Ronald Reagan, but in their hearts they all once thought themselves his better.

These men—Howard Baker, George Bush, Philip Crane, John Connally and Robert Dole—spent years of their lives in their efforts. They used up tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money (plus a fair amount of their own), traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, gave tens of thousands of largely repetitive speeches, ate uncounted meals of numbing mediocrity, and largely abandoned their families and their usual pursuits. All in vain.

When the battle was over, they limped back to their other lives bruised and disappointed, and in debt. They had played not just for power and prestige but for a place in history. Now their failure is there for everyone to see; they are still a little touchy when asked to look back.

George Bush, who came closer than anyone else to catching Reagan, retreated quickly after his campaign to his summer home in Maine. There he revved up his 270-h.p. speedboat and raced over the waves at 40-knot speeds, as if fleeing the memory of his defeat. In an interview with TIME Correspondent Douglas Brew, Bush admitted: “I’m still a little grumpy. I just don’t want to talk about it yet. It’s too soon. I’m sorting out what the hell I’ll do with my life.”

Observes Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker: “I came out of it a different person than I went into it. But I haven’t sorted it out yet. You know, little flashes of insight here and there. But that is still too fresh to deal with.” Yet, with the exception of John Connally, who declined to speak about his campaign at all, the other four major challengers did agree to review their experience in campaigning for the presidency. Unlike other political experts, these men have actually lived through the process.

Each of them entered the race believing he had a reasonable chance of winning. Says Dole: “I have a really good record in the Senate as far as food stamps, handicapped, or nutrition or health care. I thought naively you could build a constituency with farmers and business people and health professionals and the handicapped and whatever, but we could not, did not.”

They were in many ways unprepared for the enormousness of their undertaking. Says Baker: “I just found I had a lot to learn. It doesn’t make any difference how well you prepare for it or staff for it. You never know how to run for President until you try to run for it.”

Echoes Crane: “People ask me, ‘What makes you think you are uniquely qualified to be President?’ I say, I have never thought that.’ The best qualified people, however, will never run for office in the first place. You know, how many people are willing to put themselves and families through that kind of an ordeal?”

Bush disagrees strenuously: “Who are they? Where are all of these shining knights out there? Why aren’t they willing to get in and run this course? Where’s their fiber? Where’s their strength? It’s fine to tell somebody he shouldn’t have been traveling around the country for twelve years, but where were they?”

For Crane, especially, it was an ordeal. He announced before any of the rest and suffered under the personal attack of New Hampshire’s sulfurous newspaper publisher William Loeb, who accused the Congressman of sexual excess and heavy drinking. Says Crane of his long campaign: “It’s like the old moron joke about the kid who was hitting himself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you quit. I told the folks back home everyone ought to do this once in his life, ideally as early on as possible, because every day after it’s over is a good day.”

After his campaign ended, Crane went on a vacation with his wife. Says he: “I had totally relaxed and decompressed, with one exception, and that was when I saw these fellows still out campaigning. You know, I would suddenly get a knot in my stomach. I would say, ‘Good grief, surely I have got to be packing because we’re going to be off and running at 6 a.m.’ Suddenly I realized how dreadful it had been. I mean, I hadn’t relaxed in two years. The times I thought I was relaxing, I wasn’t really relaxed. You know, you are always uptight because of the feeling that you can’t make that inadvertent remark or do this or do that because it might be misinterpreted and could be a political liability.”

Pressure from single-issue political groups was also a strain. “I regret even going to that gun thing,” Dole says of his appearance before a New Hampshire gun owners’ group, at which then Republican Candidate John Anderson was booed. “What I should have done, at least someone should have done it, was to get up and reprimand them for their treatment of Anderson. They were outright rude to Anderson because he had a different view . . . I resented, after I left, that sort of quizzing in public, trying to lock us in on every little detail that the National Rifle Association might promote. The right-to-life groups are pretty much the same. You have to take a litmus test every five minutes or you’re considered wavering. What we should have said in New Hampshire is, ‘Well, fellows, we understand your position. I think mine’s generally in accord. I’m running for President of the country, not the gun club.’ We were all running for President of the gun club that night. You get the same in farm groups, health care . . . The whole thing is sort of crazy.”

Baker is similarly resentful, but he provides “only one quick story to illustrate it, and then I am going to shut up before I get in real trouble.” Baker addressed a group of lawyers in Florida and then offered to answer questions. “The first question was from somebody who stood up with a smirk and said, ‘Senator Baker, do you have any idea how tired we get of these presidential candidates traipsing through Florida?’ And before I could stop myself, I heard myself saying, ‘Do you have any idea how tired we presidential candidates get of people like you?’ Fortunately, there was a huge roar of laughter that went up in the room, and that is all that saved me.”

Just the same, campaigning for President can have its rewards, at least until the losing starts. Says Bush: “I learned a hell of a lot. I don’t care what kind of speech you make, you have questions and answers in every little town hall and you learn from exposure to people.” Baker elaborates: “It is the freest form of personal communication I know of. When I am campaigning and I go into a town, I feel as much at home there as I do anyplace else. I am free of the emotional baggage that goes with the ordinary encounter with a new place or with new people. I see people not as a stranger but as a candidate for President who has a right to be there, who is expected to speak on the issues. The first thing that happens to you is you realize it is a great big country with almost endless variations. And it is an attractive country; it is an attractive people who make up the country. And you can be enthralled by it, fall in love with it. And that is really sort of what happens in a presidential campaign.”

Crane found civilized receptions from college students a great pleasure and enjoyed the head-to-head confrontation in the debates. But his best moment came when he met Ethel Collins, a volunteer in his New Hampshire campaign. Recalls Crane: “She is a real pioneer woman. She chops all of her own kindling. She has no running water. She melts snow in the winter. No electricity. Lives all by herself. She is 77. One evening, she gave me an envelope, which I put in my pocket. I opened it later, and she had made a $500 contribution to my campaign. And in it she had said, ‘Phil, I budget my affairs very carefully. I had thought of visiting Hawaii, but I decided this was more important.’ I got really filled with emotion over that because there was nothing in it for Ethel except that she loves the country dearly. A dear, dear soul.”

The losers feel that in various ways, big and small, the process of campaigning for the presidency is flawed. Baker firmly believes the process takes too long, perhaps because he waited too long in the Senate before joining the process full time. Says he: “I saw the entire Canadian government fall and then reconstitute itself completely with a new election and a new Parliament while I was campaigning in New England.” Baker has been exploring a series of proposals to shorten the campaign, perhaps with regional primaries, perhaps by limiting the time during which private contributions will be matched by federal funds and limiting the time when the federal funds can be spent. Baker also believes the endless campaign puts officeholders with other obligations at a disadvantage, while those without jobs can devote years to the campaign. Dole agrees, lamenting that he felt obligated to spend much of his time in the Senate. Says he: “I could have left the Senate. But you can’t have it both ways. I learned that.”

“I don’t believe we were propelled into the race,” says Dole. “I think we just sort of kept trudging along, probably feeling right along that we would take a stab at it, hoping that Reagan wouldn’t run.” Unable to travel fulltime, Dole believes, he failed to get enough attention from the press and from television, and thus failed “to hit a home run” in the early caucuses and primaries. His, he thinks, was a failure caused by circumstance, not his own flaws. Says he: “I don’t think I was ever really rejected, because I was never out front to be considered.”

Crane too was frustrated by the cycle of inattention. He blames the “liberal inclination” of the press, and he proposes that candidates who appear on television interview shows be forced to assign “a dollar value” to those appearances, which would count against total spending limits.

Bush, on the other hand, basically supports the existing system. “The campaign was exhausting, and it was an awful letdown,” says he, “but that doesn’t lead me to the conclusion that since I lost I’m going to get out into the forefront of those who think the system is all screwed up. I give Carter and Reagan credit. One for using the incumbency to demonstrate that he’s hard as hell to beat. And Reagan for persistence and hanging in there for twelve years and grinding down people like me.”

Bush rejects the notion that having a full-time public responsibility is a handicap, since public positions can be used to gain the all-important exposure. Says he of Dole and Baker: “They were out there in Iowa a lot too, plus they had a spotlight out of Washington that a person like me didn’t have.” Restricting early campaigning, he thinks, would “infringe on a person’s fundamental right to seek the presidency.”

Despite all the problems of the system, the hardships of campaigning, these men, whether out of “madness or goodness,” did take the risk. They showed courage, along with their huge ambition.

And while they may eventually profit from their experience, they are now left mostly with the disappointment. Concludes Bob Dole: “It’s hard to convince yourself, even now, when you think you probably know about as much or more than somebody responding to a question— it is hard to understand why you’re not in there. First, you’re not in the big three. Then, you’re not in the second three. Pretty soon it’s embarrassing so you don’t want to hang around much longer.”

—By John F. Stacks