Morning in America first began to thaw the national psyche exactly 40 years ago on back-to-back late February nights. One cold Northeastern town hosted a miracle; another witnessed the moment the country began to straighten its spine.
In retrospect, that 1980 hockey game and a presidential debate produced a stark attitudinal reversal that led the United States (and its allies) on a successful, decadelong push to win the Cold War. Even at the time, the drama of both events felt epic and perhaps epochal. To this day, each event is regarded, in each’s respective field, as a touchstone, a permanent reference point, almost mythic.
The first event will forever be known as the “Miracle on Ice,” the huge upset victory of the U.S. Olympic hockey squad against the supposedly invincible Soviets. Sports Illustrated eventually called it the top sports moment of the entire 20th century.
The second event was the Republican presidential primary debate in Nashua, New Hampshire, where a politically reeling Ronald Reagan famously insisted that he “paid for this microphone” while arguing with the debate moderator. Reagan himself was later to call it the single most important moment of his 12-year quest for the presidency: “I may have won the debate, the primary, and the nomination right there.”
For American power and American prestige, the 1970s were a disaster. A presidential resignation. Ignominious retreat from Vietnam. Not one but two major “energy crises.” Hyperinflation for most of the decade, combined (eventually) with exorbitant interest rates and higher-than-acceptable unemployment. Increasing incidence of homelessness and rapidly rising crime rates. A president who made a national speech declaring an American “crisis of confidence” that “strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” Mind you, this speech of Jimmy Carter’s came even before Iranian “students” began holding 52 Americans hostage as our government failed with feckless diplomatic efforts to free them.
Most of all, there was the seemingly unstoppable Soviet hegemon, successfully sponsoring communist takeovers in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. As Nicaragua turned communist in 1979 and El Salvador was threatened by Soviet-backed guerrillas, real fears grew the “revolution” would spread into Mexico and toward our borders while the Caribbean might become what Reagan called a “communist lake.” The Soviets had more nuclear warheads than the U.S., and the gap was growing.
Then, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, in what originally seemed like yet another successful communist takeover, and a hapless Carter futilely imposed a grain embargo while lamenting he learned more about Soviet intentions in the past few months than he had ever known before.
On almost all fronts, the U.S. seemed like a declining power, a teetering giant.
Against this appearance of decrepitude, a band of college students and recent college graduates, with no significant professional hockey experience, grabbed the nation’s attention by willing its way into the medal round of the Winter Olympics in tiny Lake Placid, New York. Even then, hockey was not a particularly widespread American sport, played largely by working-class children in the northern states. But somehow, these players, bearing names such as Eruzione, McClanahan, O’Callahan, Janaszak, Pavelich, and Schneider, won four of their first five games and dramatically tied the other in the final 27 seconds.
The Soviets were pros. Their record in international competition in the previous 20 years was 27 wins, one tie, and just one loss. At Lake Placid, they won their first five games, by a combined score of 51-11. The U.S. flight to glory had been exciting, people assumed, but these Soviets surely would bring the Americans back to Earth.
By the time of the big game on Friday, Feb. 22, though, the American people had adopted their gritty team in a way I’ve never seen before or since. It is not mere ex post facto gloss to say the contest was seen as being about much more than just hockey, more even than Olympic gold. For the first time since World War I, Americans saw themselves — not just the team, but the nation — as underdogs. The young hockey squad carried the country’s hopes that underdogs still could win, that freedom could defeat regimentation, and that right could triumph. The battle seemed civilizational.
Win, of course, the Americans did. Most readers know the game story — the saves by goalie Jim Craig, the go-ahead goal by captain Mike Eruzione, and announcer Al Michaels’s immortal question, as the last seconds ran off the clock, “Do you believe in miracles?”
“Yes!” he answered his own question, and finally, yes, we did.
This was very important, because by most lights, it would take a miracle to outstrip the Soviets in the far more consequential, geopolitical, nuclear-haunted battle of ideals and will. The problem was that only one major presidential candidate in 1980 seemed eager to wage that battle. Sure, most of the Republican candidates said they wanted a stronger defense and a greater spine against the Soviets. Yet apart from Reagan and long-shot conservative Rep. Phil Crane, the rest clearly were more in the Nixon-Kissinger mode of thinking that “coexistence” with the Russian Reds was the best possible outcome — and even that achievable only through tact, luck, and an unlikely emergence of charitable goodwill by the powerful enemy.
Of the major candidates, Reagan alone insisted that the Soviet Union was not necessarily a permanent entity. Reagan alone said it could be not just endured but defeated. Of all the major candidates, his rival, George H.W. Bush, the establishmentarian member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, was considered the one most likely to do the old “go along to get along” routine with the Russians.
Reagan entered the New Hampshire primary on the ropes. Poor strategic choices cost him a surprise defeat to Bush in the Iowa caucuses, and Bush’s New England roots made him seem a favorite in the Granite State, too. Reagan had lost New Hampshire to Gerald Ford in 1976, and Bush had a 9-point polling lead there after his Iowa win.
Luckily for Reagan, the New Hampshire primary that year was five full weeks after Iowa, giving him time to recover. And, yes, the theme he chose to hammer home was his stance on the Soviet threat. If he was going to go down, he would go down swinging, on the basis of his deepest and boldest beliefs. All across the state, he insisted that the U.S. should not beg for mercy from the Soviets, but strive for victory.
The theme seemed to be working, and by the weekend before the primary, Reagan had pulled nearly even in the state’s polls. The last big confrontation would be in Nashua on Saturday, Feb. 23, the night after the big hockey game. The local Nashua Telegraph, the debate sponsor, wanted the drama of a one-on-one battle between the two front-runners, with the other five candidates excluded. So did Bush. So, at first, did Reagan.
But then a court ruled that excluding the others would amount to an illegal campaign donation by the paper to Reagan and Bush. The Reagan campaign, wanting to rescue the debate, offered to replace the Nashua Telegraph as the paying sponsor of the event.
All day long on debate day, though, as the other candidates complained, Reagan’s sense of fairness emerged. He signed on to a plan by his campaign brain trust to invite the other candidates after all. Newspaper editor Jon Breen, still serving as emcee, even if not playing host, refused. So did Bush himself, who wanted Reagan mano a mano for a knockout blow. As reported in campaign historian Craig Shirley’s definitive account, Rendezvous with Destiny (which I helped edit but can claim no credit for), as the negotiations went back and forth, Bush himself used some choice expletives to rebuff Reagan’s emissaries.
As the candidates finally were called to the stage in the hot and overcrowded gymnasium serving as the debate venue, an increasingly angry Reagan became convinced that excluding the others would be a grave injustice. While discussing with them how to handle the situation, wife Nancy Reagan was the one, on the spur of the moment, who suggested that they all take the stage together, even if no chairs were set up for the other four who had showed up.
“Let’s go!” Reagan said, and they did.
When they all entered the stage, Bush sat there sullen and stone-faced. Reagan took the microphone to try to explain to the audience why he wanted the others included. Breen tried to talk over him. Neither would yield, even as Reagan reminded Breen that as debate sponsor, he should “have some right” to speak. Breen ordered the sound technician to turn off Reagan’s microphone. The mic stayed on, and Breen barked the order again.
That’s when Reagan, pushed to the limit, all but erupted. “I’m paying for this microphone, Mr. Green [sic]!” The audience, by now, firmly on the side of Reagan and the other candidates, cheered lustily and hooted at Bush, who looked simultaneously ashen, helpless, and a little bit prim.
Reagan appeared the righteous fighter for justice, while Bush seemed like the establishmentarian trying to rig the rules. It didn’t matter that the other candidates eventually volunteered to leave the stage (with Bob Dole muttering curses in Bush’s ear as he exited); the point had been made. Reagan, the guy who said he would stand up to the Soviets in a way nobody else would, showed in an instant that he would and could back up tough talk, under pressure, with controlled but effective fury.
The debate wasn’t even televised live, but the film clip of the “microphone moment” played endlessly in the remaining three days of the primary battle. From a polling dead heat, Reagan in just days vaulted to a stupendous 50% to 23% victory. He was on his way to the White House.
Both events, the Reagan debate surge and the miracle, in retrospect marked a turning point. And who knows, maybe one led to the other. Especially in a right-leaning New Hampshire electorate, perhaps the demonstration that the Soviets could be beaten on ice bolstered the case that they could be defeated in a different sort of “cold” confrontation. The candidate who had made that case, the same candidate who had shown more gumption on stage, was the candidate the voters would embrace.
Those two otherwise unrelated events, on one weekend 40 years ago, marked an American attitudinal shift against malaise and against acceptance of what seemed to them plainly wrong.
The day after the Nashua debate, two days before the New Hampshire primary, Reagan told listeners that “this isn’t a campaign anymore. It’s a crusade to save this nation.”
He was right.
Quin Hillyer is a senior commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
