NO SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY:

The 1976 campaign was epochal for GOP (Donald Lambro, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

That 1976 campaign, in which Mr. Reagan came within a handful of delegates of denying the nomination to the party’s unelected incumbent, set in motion a historic shift in Republican politics.

“I’ve always thought the ‘76 campaign was fascinating but had never been really covered in book length, and in my view it is his most important campaign,” [Craig] Shirley, a Washington public-relations man, said in an interview with The Washington Times.

“If he doesn’t run in 1976, then he doesn’t run in 1980 and there would be no Republican revolution, no fall of the Berlin Wall and no realignment of the two parties the way they are today.”

Most younger Americans, said Mr. Shirley, who was a college junior in 1976, cannot remember the moribund state of the Republican Party after the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Nixon. Nearly everyone agreed the party was dying.

“The Republican Party stood for nothing and antagonized everybody,” he said. “Even after Nixon resigned, for two years of Gerald Ford’s presidency Republican identification continued to go down from 26 percent to 18 percent. Ford continued the pursuit of Nixon’s liberal policies, picking Nelson Rockefeller as vice president, appointing liberals to the Cabinet, proposing tax increases and, with Henry Kissinger, pushing detente with the Soviet Union.” [...]

Mr. Shirley’s 417-page treatment [Reagan's Revolution] deals with the campaign in minute detail — from the New Hampshire primary, where Mr. Reagan came within 1,317 votes of upsetting a sitting president, to the pivotal North Carolina primary, where after five straight primary losses his candidacy took off, with an emphasis on retaining sovereignty over the Panama Canal, standing up to the Soviet Union and curbing the size and growth of government.

“I never had as full an appreciation of Reagan’s convictions and utter belief in his abilities until I got into writing this book,” Mr. Shirley said. “And that really comes out in North Carolina. He had lost five primaries in a row and had the stuffing kicked out of him. Every day, someone was calling for him to get out of the race — and that never worked with Reagan. You didn’t tell Reagan what to do. All that did was stiffen his spine and make him more resolute.” [...]

After his victory in North Carolina — with the help of Sen. Jesse Helms and political strategist Tom Ellis — Mr. Reagan began winning primaries in a see-saw battle that went all the way to Kansas City, Mo., where Mr. Ford won the nomination with a 117-delegate margin.

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Remarks at the 31st Republican National Convention (Ronald Reagan, August 19, 1976)

Thank you very much. Mr. President, Mrs. Ford, Mr. Vice President, Mr. Vice President to be, [Applause and laughter] the distinguished guests here, and you, ladies and gentlemen: I am going to say fellow Republicans here, but also those who are watching from a distance, all of those millions of Democrats and Independents who I know are looking for a cause around which to rally and which I believe we can give them. [Applause]

Mr. President, before you arrived tonight, these wonderful people here, when we came in, gave Nancy and myself a welcome. That, plus this, and plus your kindness and generosity in honoring us by bringing us down here will give us a memory that will live in our hearts forever. [Applause]

Watching on television these last few nights, and I have seen you also with the warmth that you greeted Nancy, and you also filled my heart with joy when you did that. [Applause]

May I just say some words. There are cynics who say that a party platform is something that no one bothers to read and it doesn't very often amount to much.

Whether it is different this time than it has ever been before, I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors, with no pastel shades. [Applause]

We have just heard a call to arms based on that platform, and a call to us to really be successful in communicating and reveal to the American people the difference between this platform and the platform of the opposing party, which is nothing but a revamp and a reissue and a running of a late, late show of the thing that we have been hearing from them for the last 40 years. [Applause]

If I could just take a moment; I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our Tricentennial.

It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and the issues today. I set out to do so, riding down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa Ynez Mountains on the other, and I couldn't help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day.

Then, as I tried to write -- let your own minds turn to that task. You are going to write for people a hundred years from now, who know all about us. We know nothing about them. We don't know what kind of a world they will be living in.

And suddenly I thought to myself, if I write of the problems, they will be the domestic problems the President spoke of here tonight; the challenges confronting us, the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democratic rule in this country, the invasion of private rights, the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy. These are our challenges that we must meet.

And then again, there is that challenge of which he spoke, that we live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive at each other's country and destroy, virtually, the civilized world we live in.

And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.

Will they look back with appreciation and say, "Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now 100 years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction"?

And if we failed, they probably won't get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom, and they won't be allowed to talk of that or read of it.

This is our challenge; and this is why here in this hall tonight, better than we have ever done before, we have got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we have ever been, but we carry the message they are waiting for.

We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory, Mr. President. [Applause]

Note: This speech was delivered impromptu at the Republican National Convention at the urging of President Gerald Ford.