Customer Reviews

Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America

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The 1980 presidential election ranks with the elections of 1800, 1828, 1860, and 1932 as one of the most important in American history, and this book by Craig Shirley provides a comprehensive look at this pivotal contest--the author was able to gain interviews with many important figures in the campaign and unearth previously unknown facts.

Shirley outlines the social and economic conditions at the end of the 1970s that led to Reagan's election, and gives details on Reagan's activities in the years leading up to the 1980 nomination fight.

The descriptions of the long nomination fights for both parties are excellent. The author provides inside information on some of the conflicts among the Reagan staffers, recounts the famous "I am paying for this microphone" Nashua debate, and remembers the times when it looked as though Ronald Reagan's campaign and political career were over. Many do not know or remember that Gerald Ford gave serious thought to running in 1980--Shirley recalls the points in the campaign at which the former president was tempted to jump in.

The Reagan-Ford "Dream Ticket" saga, the Reagan acceptance speech, and the selection of George Bush as the vice-presidential nominee at the Detroit convention are thoroughly covered.

Even though the election ended in a landslide, the fall campaign of 1980 was one of the most suspenseful of all time, as the race looked close right up until Election Day. The author chronicles the ups and downs for both Carter and Reagan, including the all-important Cleveland debate, and even solves the mystery of the missing Carter debate briefing books.

Those of us old enough to remember Election Day 1980 will have their memories jogged by Shirley's look back at the networks' coverage of the election. My parents were going to allow me, a ten-year-old Reagan supporter, to stay up as late as necessary to see the outcome, but, as the book remembers, the result was settled VERY early (and I didn't get to stay up nearly as late as I thought I might get to stay up).

The foreword by George Will and the epilogue examining the Gipper's place in history round out this volume that would be enjoyed by all conservative political junkies.

Landing a role as a key Reagan historian with his last book on the 1976 campaign, Craig Shirley has secured it for the ages in this meticulous run down on Ronald Reagan's second earnest go at the presidency in 1980. Come for the history, stay for the fascinating and at times hysterically funny factoids and anecdotes about the 'Campaign that Changed America'.....

What better time for a reminder that conservatives have been there before and managed to return the GOP to the people.
Craig Shirley, in exacting detail, points put that the party was once far out of touch and yet returned to its base.
A MUST for the historian, political junkie, or combination thereof. An excellent Christmas gift for your friend who
shares your interests (after all, you've read this...)

Half way through Craig Shirley's new book, Rendezvous With Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America, I began to wonder if America had finally produced a worthy successor to Theodore (Teddy) White, the legendary political writer of the 1960's and 70's, and the author of the classic "Making of the President" series. By the end of the book I came to the inescapable conclusion that the answer was an emphatic yes.

Shirley's crisp style and soft turn of phrase (his allusion to Senator Kennedy in a Shakespeare play is as lovely a written phrase as I have read in a long time) marks him as a leading interpreter of modern American political history. This book has achieved a level of understanding and ease of reading that is remarkable. His research is impeccable and the presentation of the Reagan story is first class.

Shirley has also achieved something almost impossible. In his first efforts he has written two books that are, and will continue to be, the definite history of Ronald Reagan's rise to the Presidency. This book, when combined with his first work on the Reagan 1976 campaign, will become the almost singular source of information for future generations of political historians who want to know how Ronald Regan won the presidency. These volumes are a significant addition and complement to the already large body of work on the actual Presidency of Ronald Reagan.

This book is a must read for those who want to know how Ronald Reagan lead the country to its challenging and ultimately victorious Rendezvous with Destiny.

-Michael McShane, Washington DC

Picking up "Rendezvous with Destiny" was reminiscing with an old friend. Shirley's account of the 1980 election cycle brought me back thirty years when anything was possible and political leaders led. Having worked for three of the principals in his book-Ford,Crane and Connolly- I re-lived the heady days and very long nights of ups and downs during the primary and general elections that year. It brought both smiles and frowns with each turned page, as memories of my life leaped off the pages. It should be required reading - along with Theodore White's book on the presidential campaign twenty years earlier- for any student of presidential elections.

I don't plan on reading the recent book on Obama's election. The events are too fresh. The real story can't be told yet. Key events in the election won't be revealed until years or decades later. People aren't willing to talk just yet about how things happened. They haven't yet written their own accounts or confided to friends and family what really went down. A good author needs time to dig up all the dirt about how the battle was won. Read Rendezvous with Destiny and you'll know what I mean.

You'll enjoy the hundreds of anecdotes about an incredible cast of characters. A couple you've probably never heard of are:

1) Jerry Carmen, the loose cannon who comes across as the hero of Reagan's key victory in New Hampshire
2) Paul Corbin, the Kennedy operative who may have been responsible for Reagan's victory. The chapter on Corbin was one of the funniest things I've ever read.

It's impossible to read this book without playing "what if" with all the twists and turns. What if Carter hadn't ignored Paul Caddell's advice and agreed to debate Reagan? What if he had listened to his aides who pleaded with him not to bring up little Amy's insights on nuclear war? What if Carter's debate playbook hadn't been stolen? Shirley argues that the pilfered book didn't swing the election, but after reading his book I'm not so sure. What if Bush hadn't frozen for a brief moment in the Nashua debate? What if Kemp hadn't been passed over as Reagan's VP because of untrue allegations of homosexuality? Would Kemp have been president instead of Bush? Would that mean no President George W. Bush? What if Kennedy hadn't challenged Carter?

The author is a conservative Republican and couldn't resist throwing in some jabs against a couple Democrats still in public life. He touches on Congressman John Murtha's dealings with the phony Arabs in the ABSCAM scandal. Murtha is currently involved in a hotly contested re-election contest.

More interestingly, and perhaps unfairly, he slips in Corbin's assertion that Al Gore used to lock himself in his hotel room and watch pornography. In fairness to Gore, the evidence is a hearsay quote from a long-dead sleaze bag. Nowadays politicians who are so inclined can go into their office and enjoy dirty movies in cyber-space. If the Gipper were alive today he might say something like, "Well, maybe now we know why Al Gore invented the internet."

Not just the gold standard of works on the 1980 election, surpassing even Germond and Witcover's superb contemporary account, Rendezvous With Destiny is also one of the 2 or 3 finest studies of Ronald Reagan himself. In it, Craig Shirley provides insightful portraits of the "Gipper" himself along with each of the other major candidates in both parties. While clearly a veteran of several Reagan campaigns, Shirley treats Reagan's Democratic rivals with considerable sympathy, noting that Walter Mondale was the one candidate who ever bested Reagan in a debate, the 1980 campaign helped Ted Kennedy find the "voice" that made him the outstanding Senate liberal of the last quarter century, and he even points out some positive portions of Jimmy Carter's record that even some of Carter's admirers in the historical profession forget while treating him.

Still, the greatest virtue of this work and Reagan's Revolution, Shirley's earlier work on the Reagan-Ford struggles of the 1976 campaign, is the nuanced depiction of the Gipper himself, which provides a far more compelling personna than any of the caricatures that seem to be favored by Reagan's critics or ironically, by many of his champions. Rendezvous With Destiny is full of previously untold stories as well as vivid portrayals of some of the key if nearly forgotten figures in the last half-century, from the near saintly John Seigenthaler to the roguish Paul Corbin, who Shirley fingers as the man responsible for delivering stolen debate briefing books from the Carter White House to the Reagan campaign.

One finds amusement of all places even in the Acknowledgements, where Shirley laments his inability to secure an interview with rockstar Reagan supporter Alice Cooper, with a Cooper aide citing his client's inebriated state for much of the previous decade.

This is must reading for any political junkie of any mainstream ideology.

J. Lee Annis, Jr., Author, Howard Baker: Conciliator in an Age of Crisis

Craig Shirley adds a new level of understanding to the ascent of Ronald Reagan with this volume on the 1980 campaign.

Everyone knows that Reagan won in a landslide. Few people know all of the drama and twists and turns leading up to the most consequential presidential election since 1980. That is until now.

Filled with firsthand interviews and meticulous research, Rendezvous with Destiny is essential to understanding a pivotal moment in American political history.

This book is a page-turner! It provides a fascinating view of the Reagan campaign and Reaganites from the inside. It is based on hundreds of hours of reviews. Anyone interested in Reagan should read it and its predecessor. Together, they give us an invaluable portrait of Reagan's political journey.

Well... (as the hero of the story might have put it...) the wait for the followup to Shirley's REAGAN'S REVOLUTION, though somewhat longer than expected, was certainly worth it. As Shirley's earlier book has come to be regarded as a definitive portrait of Ronald Reagan's near-miss challenge of Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican Presidential nomination, so this much thicker tome is likely to stand as the standard account of Reagan's successful capture of the White House in 1980 -- at least from a Reagan-friendly perspective -- for the foreseeable future. That all-important election is now far enough in the past that the story needs to be retold, especially now that the first great wave of "Reagan revisionism" is being met by counterblasts from some writers on the Left. The facts that Reagan was anything but a universally respected and popular figure (even within his own party and campaign staff), and that Reagan nearly blew what should have been a clear victory over a fatally weak and incompetent incumbent President, have been blanketed beneath the haze of golden memories streaming from the unforgettable experience of Reagan's state funeral. Shirley lays out many familiar anecdotes from the campaign trail, rustles up a few new ones for our delectation, solves a long-standing "mystery" in the bargain, and, though his bias in favor of Reagan is always evident, gives both friends and foes their fair share of ink. (Shirley's favorable description of Ted Kennedy's speech at the 1980 Democratic Convention is particularly notable. Perhaps his discovery that a number of Kennedy hands, angry at Jimmy Carter for personal, political, and ideological reasons, apparently voted for Reagan influenced his posture here?)

One of the great questions about the 1980 campaign concerns how a set of Carter's debate briefing books got into the hands of Reagan's people. Shirley presents evidence that Paul Corbin, a shadowy figure on the Kennedy periphery, was responsible for the theft. I remember when "Debategate" blew up and how some elements of the media seized on it as a way of trying to, in some sense, delegitimize Reagan's election. Shirley argues that the books contained nothing more than records of Reagan's past statements and, as such, didn't materially affect the candidates' debate performances. While that can be fairly debated, I think that Shirley puts the kibosh on any claims of "Republican dirty tricks" here.

As thorough as Shirley is, I think that his text could have done with just one more read-through by an objective editor familiar with Shirley's style in REAGAN'S REVOLUTION. The earlier book was informally written and contained several funny anecdotes but never strayed over the line separating seriousness from silliness. The tone of RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY, by contrast, can only be described as sophomoric in places. The use of words like "kinda" and "natch" in what purports to be an exhaustive history of an historic election rubbed me the wrong way, I must admit. I mean, Teddy White pioneered the "campaign biography" and never resorted to such shenanigans. Also, a few too many sentences are "clunkily" written for my taste. Perhaps Shirley was so focused on packing the narrative with detail (did the original version of the text really run to 1700 pages, as one Amazon reviewer claimed?) that he paid less attention to how he was writing. If you can ignore the occasional gaucheries, however, you'll find this to be a truly fascinating read.