Ford, Reagan, and the Halloween Massacre | The Reagan Era
Whistlestop: Presidential History and Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2015
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Thumbing his nose at both courtesy and convention, Ronald Reagan challenged incumbent Gerald Ford for the GOP presidential nomination in 1976. But why would Reagan run against a sitting president of his own party? On this episode of Whistlestop, Slate's political correspondent John Dickerson gives the background of the Gipper's ascendency to hero status in the conservative movement.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Whistlestop, a podcast of Presidential Campaign Curiosities. |
| 0:08.3 | I'm John Dickerson. Our whistle stop today is Miami, Florida, November 20th, 1975 and Governor Ronald Reagan is making his very first campaign stop as an official |
| 0:26.6 | candidate for the Republican nomination. |
| 0:29.8 | He's challenging his party's sitting president Gerald Ford. |
| 0:33.5 | Reagan started the day in Washington DC. |
| 0:35.8 | In resplendent fashion, he was wearing a purple plaid suit, |
| 0:39.5 | a pinstrip shirt, a polka dot tie, and a white silk handkerchief blooming out of his breast pocket. |
| 0:47.0 | Reagan hadn't mentioned Ford in his speech by name, but he indicted the system that Ford had been a part of since 1948 when Ford was first |
| 0:55.2 | elected to his 13 terms in Congress. Reagan said, in Washington, D.C. our nation's capital |
| 1:00.4 | has become the seat of a buddy system that functions for its own benefit, |
| 1:05.0 | increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker who supports it with his taxes. |
| 1:10.0 | Today, it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us |
| 1:15.7 | our problems, the Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business, and big labor. |
| 1:20.8 | I don't believe for one moment that four more years of business as usual in |
| 1:24.6 | Washington is the answer to our problems and I don't believe the American people |
| 1:28.6 | believe it either. Reagan had called Ford the day before at the White House to inform him of his decision, |
| 1:35.0 | saying that the campaign would not be divisive. |
| 1:38.0 | Ford said to Reagan, |
| 1:40.0 | How can you challenge an incumbent president of your own party and not be divisive? |
| 1:45.7 | The two men were divided. |
| 1:48.3 | It was a risky gambit for Reagan. |
| 1:50.8 | An incumbent president had not lost his nomination in a hundred years. |
... |
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