Bush to be Reagan's running mate

Last week you may remember in our exciting radio serial 'The Race to the White House', Ronnie Reagan, the California hot rod, was wondering whether he hadn't better have along as navigator Gerry Ford, the Michigan all-American who won the White House Cup, though by default, in 1974.

The problem here was that Reagan insists on staying in the right lane all the way and Gerry Ford has the same prejudice but to get to the White House you sometimes have to make left turns, so in the end Ronnie chose Georgie Bush – Andover and Yale – who, while he drives mostly on the right, can go for long stretches in the middle of the road, so that the crowd on the left can see him and think he's their boy.

Now read or, rather, listen, on! Well, in this week's episode, the captains of industry and the kings of the Republican party have departed from Detroit, having enriched the shopkeepers and hotel owners by several hundred thousand dollars and left its run-down black quarters and its unemployed automobile workers more or less as they found them.

A convention city, a week later, is like Wembley the week after the Cup Final. Looking over the exhausted balloons and the empty bottles, you marvel that this should have been the scene of so much carousing and panic and jubilant emotion. Everyone, including me, said that the Republican convention was going to be the dullest in years, a coronation ceremony in which the only conceivable suspense would be the choice of the heir apparent. But presidential nominating conventions, though timed and staged to the last spontaneous cheer, have a way of getting out of hand.

Well, until the third night at Detroit, there was so little genuine emotion, so little political sparring that the Republicans had to do something unprecedented to while away the hours. They put on what you can only call 'a rock review' – something that would not only have petrified such old party leaders as Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, but as late as 1964 would have horrified the entire convention. 1964 was the time in San Francisco when a famous Republican party bigwig from Illinois looked up at the fishbowls the television commentators sit in and, spotting the early mod outfits of the younger of them, thundered that what the Republic needed more than anything was fewer sideburns. It brought down the house of men in business suits and regulation 1940 haircuts.

However, in Detroit, it could be seen the Republicans, too, have succumbed to the 1980s – the early 1970s, at any rate – and the auditorium was bounding with rumps ensconced in polyester-tight pants and jeans and not one delegate in 20 was wearing a tie. The Republicans stop short only of beads.

Well, the first juicy hint of mischief, or of confusion in high quarters, was dropped on the third evening. It was dropped by Reagan's men who were on the floor and were close to the begging microphones of the TV network commentators. Every network has an anchorman or two in a fishbowl and a team of reporters wandering around the convention floor, grabbing anybody who might know anything. Now the interesting point here – which shows up a glaring change in what makes news at a convention – is that the entire episode of Reagan's negotiations with Gerald Ford provided a mounting drama for people chained to a television set anywhere from Florida to Alaska, but was quite unknown to the delegations on the floor and they are, after all, supposed to be at the heart of the matter.

In the days before television, before 1952 at the latest, a reporter was a newspaper man and from the first morning to the last midnight he wedged himself in to his assigned seat in the press section at the convention, dutifully reported the keynote speech, the nominating and (seconding) speeches and the rest of the formal mumbo-jumbo and that was the convention's story, except for one or two mavericks who roamed the hotel lobbies and buttonholed delegates and the party chieftains on their way to and from the convention hall.

Well, television has changed not only the reporting of the news, it has helped to expand and then massage it. Nowadays, there is absolutely no reason why a newspaper reporter should be in the convention city at all, except for the prestige touch of bylining his stuff from the proper place, but he'd do as well – in fact much better – if he stayed home with one or other of the TV networks. That way he gets as much as matters of the speeches, most of which don't matter at all, but he also has the luxury of being 20 places at once, hearing the television reporters catching key delegates on the floor, in their hotel rooms, in garages, bars, automobiles. The humble citizen sitting at home gets, of course, a lot of rumour, but he gets also a composite drama, a gathering plot that was beyond any newspaper reporter or team of reporters in the old days.

So, what happened? Well, during the early evening of that third day, we saw and heard chairmen of state delegations, Reagan aides, random delegates from dozens of states, giving their opinions on who would make the best vice-president, the best running mate for Reagan. The westerners were hot for Jack Kemp, a New Yorker who'd once worked close to Reagan and an uncompromising right-winger. A couple of New England delegations, where George Bush had run well or beaten Reagan in the primary, were still hot for Bush, and so on.

Then the tom-toms sounded. Now, remember when former President Gerald Ford arrived in Detroit he repeated, with offhanded firmness, what he'd said at home in California, 'under no circumstances' would he run as vice-president. You may recall that many months ago he'd said publicly that Ronald Reagan could not be elected over Carter and this was taken, I believe correctly, as a strong hint that he knew somebody else who could – Gerald Ford – and the polls agreed with him. But Reagan had so organised the party and won so many primaries that, in prospect and in fact, the nomination was sewed up.

At that point, Gerald Ford suffered from two groups of friends. One told him to come out then and offer himself as a candidate for president. The other said, 'Wait till we all meet in Detroit and if the polls show that Reagan would come in a poor second to Carter, then tell the convention that you'll make the supreme sacrifice!' Ford must have guessed that the polls weren't going to go up for Carter. Indeed, they were going disastrously down, as they are still doing.

So, he listened to the first group and rushed in to say, 'Here I am! Take me!' (and) that was months ago. His bid was received with thundering apathy. He went back to practising his putting and resolved to be no part of the presidential campaign. But, by the time he got to Detroit, the party was already divided on the question of who'd be the best Reagan running mate between two sets of advisers round Reagan, those who said that if both Reagan and his running mate were right wingers, they'd alienate millions of voters and those who said the party always makes the mistake of tempering its conservatism at the last minute with a moderate and losing to the Democrats who are better at capturing the centre.

There were a couple of other close friends of Reagan who said the answer is neither an uncompromising conservative like Kemp, nor a conservative-to-moderate like Bush. The answer, they said, is Gerry Ford and they began to dream of a dream ticket. Reagan had his scouts beat the bushes of the convention and the word came back, 'Gerald Ford, the beloved former president as vice-president. What a noble sacrifice! What drama! What a ticket!'

By early evening on that Wednesday, the gathering plot came out over television. Walter Cronkite got Mr Ford in his fishbowl and Ford confessed that he might be amenable to the idea if he could have, as vice-president, and I quote him, 'a meaningful role' and, from then on, the rumours and the true issues, all mixed up, snowballed through the television sets, while most of the delegates on the floor were snoozing over speeches, waving banners, eating hot dogs or, as they say in the Midwest, 'visiting' with their friends.

The networks alerted their floor reporters to get hold of any and all the Reagan men and women, not the enthusiasts, but Reagan's floor managers. Television then achieved one of its most hectic but finest hours. Cronkite said Reagan was on his way to the convention with Mr Ford. It was not so. The rumours dissolved and snowballed again. Eleven o'clock went by and then an NBC reporter had the luck to be at the elbow of a very close Reagan crony, indeed. He caught him on the telephone to Reagan's suite and the crony put the telephone down and said firmly, 'It's Bush', thunderstruck. It was, indeed, so.

Next day, and the day after that, it all came out. Reagan and Ford had met many times, their staffs had met, they'd gone back and forth with proposals and counter-proposals like American and Russian delegations at a failing summit conference. In the end, it wouldn't work and it can be said now, it's amazing that Reagan and his men knew so little of the Constitution and how the presidency works to believe that it would ever work.

Every president since Eisenhower has solemnly announced that his vice-president would have extraordinary powers unknown to American history and every one of those blushing running mates has discovered that the vice-president, once in office, at once declines into a vice-president, not even an assistant and rarely an adviser. The cronies, the 'kitchen cabinet' so-called, they're the only close advisers. He becomes a bored official on the sidelines who attends all the best funerals in the world.

Ford luckily remembered this in time. After all, he'd been that sidelined figurehead. Yet, what he was proposing was a man sharing the executive power with the president. Mrs Thatcher and Mr Heath as joint Prime Minister? Well, the Constitution simply does not allow for such a grandee. Reagan and Ford might have made a dream ticket, come January they could have made a nightmare presidency.

Well, that's the end of the story of Ronnie Reagan and Gerry Ford. Next week, back to real life, back to Billy Carter.

Meanwhile, the 103 degrees in New York City has plunged to a delicious, seasonable 85. Hand me my gin fizz, son! Preferably in an air conditioner.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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