The Inside Story of the Reagan Campaign

“Make it new” was Ezra Pound’s advice to writers. Craig Shirley’s enthralling new history of the 1980 presidential campaign eminently fulfills that advice. Here is a story you’d think was as well-known as any in American history – and yet on every page, Shirley brings to light something important over which the dust has already gathered as thick as a pharaoh’s treasure.

One example:

Perhaps you remember the story of Jimmy Carter’s stolen briefing book? A dismissive Jimmy Carter had scheduled his one and only debate of the 1980 campaign very late, Oct. 28, exactly a week before voting day. Carter had assumed that he would crush the supposedly empty-headed Ronald Reagan and wanted the crushing to be remembered by voters as they headed to the polls.

Bad move: The “there you go again” debate broke open what had been till then a neck-and-neck race.

For years, many Democrats – including Carter personally – argued that Carter was defeated by a dirty trick. Here is Carter, as interviewed by National Public Radio in 2005:

“We found out later that one of Ronald Reagan’s supporters inside the White House had stolen my briefing book, my top-secret briefing book that prepared me for the debate. And a very prominent news reporter was the one who took the briefing book to Ronald Reagan and helped drill him on the things that I might say if he said certain things.” The “prominent reporter” is meant to be the columnist George F. Will.

So what actually happened? Shirley unravels the whole weird story. It starts in Winnipeg, Canada.

Winnipeg was the birthplace of Paul Kobrinsky, later Paul Corbin, a onetime labor organizer and police informant, hustler, fraudster, schemer, and habitual liar. Corbin held membership in the Communist Party USA and also worked as an investigator for Sen. Joe McCarthy. He strewed deserted wives and children across the landscape. An illegal immigrant to the United States, he gained citizenship after serving in the Marine Corps as a company cook in the Pacific. Later he expanded that experience, inventing stories of ever more extreme heroism to impress friends and clients.

Corbin drifted into service of the Kennedy family, becoming especially close to Bobby for whom he functioned as a political spy. I’m going to have to accelerate the story here of Corbin’s dirty work, but Shirley lovingly narrates every appalling detail.

(OK let’s pause for one: “Corbin himself later bragged to some poker friends that he had the goods on Democrat Al Gore. Joseph Sweat, one of Corbin’s associates in Tennessee, remembered that Corbin accused Gore, then a young congressman, of renting rooms in a motel in Cookeville to watch pornography. … Asked how he knew, Corbin replied, ‘The desk clerk, I paid him a little bit and he gave me the receipt.’” 434)

By 1980, Corbin was hanging around the Ted Kennedy campaign. After Kennedy lost, Corbin vowed revenge on Carter. He had a weapon at hand: a friendship with a White House aide who worked for Carter’s head of scheduling. That friendship translated into access.  “Jerry Rafshoon, in charge of Carter’s media, recalled seeing Corbin around the Carter White House late in the 1980 campaign and thought it odd that this Kennedy man and Carter hater would be there.”

The Carter briefing books were assembled in the Situation Room and photocopied on nearby machines. Corbin got hold of a copy of the material – very possibly stealing his copy off the desk of National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.  On October 25, Corbin personally delivered them to Bill Casey, former OSS man and Reagan’s campaign manager.

The story of the stolen books emerged in 1983 and excited a ferocious hullabaloo. A congressional committee investigated. Corbin was questioned and denied everything. Casey was questioned, but his famous mumble ensured (as the leader of the inquiry told Shirley) “they couldn’t understand a word he said.” We know the truth thanks to then – Congressman Dick Cheney. A member of his staff knew Corbin and the whole story. But nothing could be proved: Although the books were covered with fingerprints, Corbin’s were not among them. Anyway, what crime was committed? The incident faded into history, remembered only by an aggrieved Carter, convinced to this day that the theft cost him the presidency.

And so the story goes over Shirley’s pages, month by month, day by day, hour by hour.

Shirley loves and admires Ronald Reagan and believes in his cause – but he also retains few illusions about the workings of American politics. He writes very much in the spirit of the old Pennsylvania boss Matt Quay. When Quay heard that Benjamin Harrison attributed his narrow victory in the 1888 presidential election to Providence, he snorted: “Harrison will never know how close a number of men were compelled to approach the penitentiary to make him president.”

Shirley has the most detailed tick-tock I’ve ever read of the negotiations over the proposed Reagan-Ford “dream ticket” of 1980: “Some conservatives were frustrated [by the plan], including Reagan’s longtime friend and supporter Tom Winter, co-owner and co-publisher, along with Alan Ryskind, of Human Events. Reagan had been a faithful subscriber for years, corresponded with the two men, had dinner with them – and in turn the publication was devoted to Reagan. On the other hand, they reviled Ford. When Winter heard about the Dream Ticket he went off and got so sullenly drunk that he was later found by friends slumped in a chair, babbling incoherently.” (359) Shirley chronicles George HW Bush’s increasingly tense and snappish agony while waiting for Reagan to come to him, Reagan’s reluctance to approach a man he regarded as “unpresidential,” and the scheming, pleading, and even (in the case of Barbara Walters) weeping of reporters clawing to get the first interviews with the relevant players.

Shirley has a clear point of view on Reagan the man. Contra Reagan’s ill-chosen authorized biographer Edmund Morris, Shirley insists that it is

myth that Reagan was somehow ‘unknowable.’ I did not know the man well, but after working on his campaigns; after immersing myself in his writings, speeches, columns, diaries; after conversations with countless who knew him; and after reading hundreds of books and articles and monographs about him, I feel at least I understand him.

Reagan often said that he genuinely liked people and maybe that’s why they liked him. He was garrulous, chatty, could be very thoughtful, but when people disturbed him or got on his nerves, especially strangers, he’d simply clam up. (592)

And this, the books coda:

One month before the 1980 election, Scotty Reston, fabled liberal columnist for the New York Times, wrote that Reagan ‘hates races, even the tiresome race for the presidency. He may not have a sense of history but he has a sense of humor and knows he cannot reform the world.’” Shirley counters: “With the exception of the remark about Reagan’s wittiness, untruer words were never penned. (599)

But this book is full of true words, deep insights, long memories, and occluded details. In the years since 1980, American conservatives have divided over what to make of the Reagan legacy. But that grand hour of decision, that heroic triumph and redirection of American society – that still gives modern conservatism its outline and unity. Shirley summons that hour back to throbbing, vivid and immediate life.