Free Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America by Craig Shirley Page B

a glorious campaign. She took a bottle of Courvoisier to the headquarters and, with some friends, got drunk. 59

    Within days of the election, Reagan was being zinged in the pages of the conservative newsweekly Human Events under the headline “Mixed Reviews forReagan Transition Team.” A five-member team of “coordinators” had been created to begin the process of staffing the new government. It was headed by Bill Timmons, Reagan's 1980 political director, whom conservatives held in suspicion for his longtime association with moderate Howard Baker. Of the members of the group, only Loren Smith, Reagan's 1976 and 1980 general counsel, was considered a “movement conservative.” The paper also ran a sidebar item in which it quaintly noted that “many talented conservatives from around the country have in the past shown little interest in relocating in Washington. We hope, however, that the November 4 election may have changed their thinking.” Human Events solicited résumés from conservatives and promised to send them along to the Reagan transition team. 60

    But out west—in the heart of Reagan Country—billboards materialized overnight after the 1980 election proclaiming, “Welcome to the Reagan Revolution.” 61

    Fearing Reagan, while also contemptuous of Carter, the Ayatollah released the hostages—only after the fortieth president replaced the thirty-ninth president.

    The stock market was also pleased with the Reagan tide. The day after the election was the second busiest day of trading in the market's history, and stocks soared. 62 And while scholars since the death of JFK had lamented that the job of president was “too big for one man,” all that talk stopped abruptly after the election of Reagan.

    Solzhenitsyn's three young sons, Ignat, Yermolai, and Stephan, were among those pleased by Reagan's victory—though they paid a price for it. By this point they had settled in Vermont with their parents after their father had been exiled from the Soviet Union. On the day after the 1980 election, their teacher was mourning the election of Reagan, referring to the “dark night of fascism descended under the B-movie actor.” When the teacher asked his students whether any disagreed with him, the three Solzhenitsyn boys raised their hands. Outraged, he sent the children out into the cold November morning without their coats, under an American flag that had been lowered to half mast. The boys saw the bright side; the hour they spent shivering “was a relief from sitting in the auditorium listening to the party line.” 63

    Then, of course, there were Reagan's legions of devoted followers across the country. He had plenty of fan clubs, and not just from his movie days. Muriel Coleman, a devoted conservative and Reagan staffer, told of the hundreds of “R. Clubs” that dotted the Midwest. For an annual fee of $50 or $100, you became a member and got a little pin. Muriel said many people were buried wearing their “R. Club” pins. 64

    During the campaign, Jeb Bush discovered Reagan's extraordinary appeal to Americans—and found out what it was like to play second banana to the Gipper. In North Dakota, eight thousand people filled a hall, rabid for Reagan. When young Bush went on the stage to make a pitch for his father, there remained only about “two hundred people in the room.” 65

     
    T O BE SURE , R EAGAN had a different view of the GOP from the country clubbers. He often said that the GOP was “not the party of big business and the country club set, but the party of Main Street, the small town, the shopkeeper, the farmer, the cop on the beat, the guy who sends his kids to Sunday school, pays his taxes, and never asks anything from government except to be left alone.” 66
    What kind of conservative was Reagan then? He flirted with liberalism in his youth, but after seeing the government take up to 90 percent of his income in the 1940s, and the efforts of thuggish Communism provocateurs in