Campaign Snapshots: Crushed Geraniums and Gay Caucuses

Ronald Reagan's greatest asset is his charm--something that flows naturally from him but that he can wield as effectively as a sharp rapier. I watched him charm a dinner table in June this year, a mixed group that included the coach of football's Dallas Cowboys and a Hollywood magnate as well as the guest of honor, Madame Jayewardene, wife of the President of Sri Lanka. She was very shy and ill at ease, but President Reagan, though tired from a day's travel, quickly sensed her anxiety and took it upon himself to entertain her. He talked of the handicapped whom he had just been visiting; she discussed Sri Lanka's problems with drugs. When she spoke of the perfumed forests of her island country, he invited her to crush in her fingers a Martha Washington geranium on the table and smell the perfume it left behind. He went on, fascinating us all, with stories of his Hollywood days. He spoke of how he did not like the heaving and panting sex in the new movies--too explicit. He preferred the way Ernst Lubitsch had handled the subject, by hint and suggestion--the hand of a bride dropping her nightgown outside the bridal-chamber door, then the door closing, leaving the rest to imagination. This conversation seemed pure entertainment. But Ceylon was important: it holds the harbor of Trincomalee that we want to use in case of war. Madame Jayewardene left, swathed in a friendship that might be essential to policy.

I watched him again in the closing days of the campaign at Temple Hillel in North Woodmere, N.Y.--a lovely synagogue in suburban Long Island. This time, Reagan was subdued, ministerial. Wearing a yarmulke, he promised that if ever Israel were forced to walk out of the United Nations, America would walk out too. He charmed and soothed the congregation. The cameras picked him up; they picked him up again at lunch, eating apricot kugel (a pudding) at the rabbi's home immediately thereafter. The television "bites" that evening warmed the hearts of thousands of uncertain Jewish voters in middle-class Long Island; the Jewish vote was essential if he was to carry New York.

Reagan can be decisive: I remember speaking with Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, just after the February decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Lebanon. Essentially there had been a conflict between State and Defense--Defense had wanted to get out of Lebanon even before the October massacre, while State kept insisting our presence was necessary. While preparing to watch Lauren Bacall perform in Woman of the Year Sunday afternoon, Feb. 5, Weinberger had been summoned to an immediate meeting of the National Security Council at the White House. The Republican politicians had long wanted out of Lebanon ("The forget period," said one of the President's men, "is about six weeks in American life. We have to be out before June"). Only Shultz had resisted a pullout ("A very stubborn man," said Weinberger). The emergency conference lasted two hours. Reagan decided that Sunday evening: pull out, now, as fast as possible. Then he was off for a vacation at his California ranch, and the decision had been made.

Mondale was always remote and elusive during this year's campaign, surrounded and walled off by staff. I had known him more than casually for years. We once met on vacation in the Virgin Islands, in 1978, and his conversation had ranged from the most serious (the Russian arms buildup and the need for countermeasures) to the funniest (his amusement at a Cleveland Democratic official who had been arrested for "mooning"--flashing his bare behind at passing cars from an open window).

I had seen him many times since. He would mutter, even during his incumbency as Vice President, at Carter's failure to offer leadership. And then, during the campaign, he surrounded himself with an iron ring of four or five people whom no one could penetrate except Mario Cuomo and Edward Kennedy. Not even Senator Moynihan of New York, the Democrats' leading authority on Social Security and intelligence matters, could break through at will. One would see Mondale on his campaign plane, exhausted, lost in solitude, cordial but removed. His acceptance speech at San Francisco was the best I ever heard him give; it had gone through 20 revisions, and expressed the man in all his sincerity. But, until the last week when he cut through with his own passion, he was captive of his staff and the leaders of the demographic blocs he sought to bring into his new coalition. They served him ill.

I remember vividly a scene in Washington in June. The Democratic Rules Committee, packed with reformers, was in session. Under debate was a resolution to make gays an official caucus of their party. This meant that, like the black, women's and Hispanic caucuses, they must be officially represented on every governing party committee, and that the party, by the doctrine of "outreach," must actively recruit them. A Puerto Rican delegate plaintively asked whether that meant his local party must actively seek homosexuals to join the party. The answer was yes. A delegate from Chicago protested that half of Illinois' Democrats were Catholics, the other half from the Bible Belt, and the resolution would offend them all. He was booed down. He complained, "Next thing you know you'll be including sodomy"--to louder boos. But the resolution passed. I checked later. Mondale's lieutenants on the floor had been unable to reach their candidate; they supported and threw their force behind the homo sexual resolution. Mondale might not have approved had he been informed. But it was a bench mark in the glide of manners and tolerances that had overtaken the Democratic Party.

Back in 1972, Governor Reagan was California chairman of the Nixon Re-Election Campaign. Nixon called to ask, "Who is this dumb so-and-so you've appointed chairman for Santa Barbara County?" Reagan put his hand over the phone, listening to Nixon, and asked someone else in the room: Who is our chairman for Santa Barbara? He didn't know. Ronald Reagan is uninterested in detail. He is much more interested in directions.

I have seen him appear moody only once: at a lunch with six writers after the Democratic Convention, when the polls had given the Democratic ticket a momentary up-flip. He was disturbed not by Mondale's nomination, but by Ferraro's. He pondered it aloud, then reverted to his past. "You know," he said, "she steps on her own lines. She can't wait for the applause moment."

Reagan in this campaign knew where his applause lines would come. He could reach the people and stir them. Mondale tried--but failed until too late.