Ford, Reagan, and the 1976 RNC | The Reagan Era
Whistlestop: Presidential History and Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2015
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Slate's bite-sized podcast about presidential campaign history, chief political correspondent John Dickerson offers up Part Two in his look at Ronald Reagan's rise to power in the conservative movement. As detailed in our first installment, Reagan boldly challenged President Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination.
Today, Dickerson describes the political maneuvering that took place at the Republican National Convention that summer. Ford secured the party's nomination, but Reagan ultimately won the hearts of Republicans for decades to come.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of Presidential Campaign Curiosities. |
| 0:08.0 | I'm John Dickerson. |
| 0:10.0 | Our whistle stop today is August 18th, 1976 and we're in Kansas City, Missouri at the |
| 0:18.5 | 1976 Republican Convention. |
| 0:21.1 | Incoming President Gerald Ford is drawing on his pipe in his hotel |
| 0:25.6 | room while he looks over a Xerox sheet in front of him. On it are the states he's |
| 0:30.3 | counting up to see if he's going to win the nomination against Gerald Ford. |
| 0:34.0 | Also in front of him are three televisions. |
| 0:37.0 | He's watching the reporting on the convention delegate voting. |
| 0:40.0 | And then on the other side is an open briefcase and on the other side of that is a miniature elephant made of banana leaves that conceals a microphone picking up the president's words for a campaign film being shot by a cameraman who is capturing every moment. |
| 0:55.0 | Finally, the vote tally is red and he goes over the top. |
| 0:59.6 | He has beaten Ronald Reagan in what has been a bloody and protracted fight. He stands up and shakes the hand |
| 1:04.8 | of an aid saying, I guess we don't have to change that speech. |
| 1:08.8 | This is the story of the Convention of 1976, the Republican Convention. |
| 1:12.6 | It's part two, you remember. |
| 1:14.8 | We talked about last week Ronald Reagan's surprise come back in the primaries where he took on |
| 1:19.8 | Gerald Ford, the incumbent sitting president. |
| 1:23.5 | Ford was the great winner of this protracted battle. |
| 1:27.5 | But while Ford won the night in Kansas City |
| 1:30.6 | and Reagan was the loser, in in fact this was the convention that led |
| 1:34.8 | to one of the great signature moments in Ronald Reagan's life and mythology that |
| 1:38.5 | laid the groundwork for his two-term presidency and the birth of the modern conservative movement. |
... |
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