Spencer's allegiance to Ford rests on two premises: "If you have a sitting Republican officeholder, there's no sense in trying to throw him out. That's No. 1. No. 2: I think the President is doing a good job." Though working against Reagan has cast the 49-year-old Spencer in the Frankenstein role of antagonist to his own foremost creation, he claims there is no animosity. "Reagan's aides and I had a falling out," he says. "I never had a falling out with him."
However it came about, the split has been costly to Reagan. For it is Spencer, a self-proclaimed "political junkie," who is credited with engineering Ford's five out of six primary victories. "Politics is the only thing I know how to do well," he says. "It's not a science. You need guts and instinct. I am sort of a manager. I get the right people in the right jobs, and then things move."
Roberts, 51, who ended a virtual two-year retirement from politics to help Spencer put Ford's Florida campaign in order, believes the President's string of victories is only beginning, and that his loss in North Carolina was a mere interruption. Although he helped to make Reagan governor, Roberts doesn't want to see him in the White House. "Ron has one lack," he says. "He has a basic inability to lead. If you sat across from him and you couldn't come up with any programs, the two of you would be sitting there for four years. He's just incapable of initiating action."
Spencer detected a similar reticence in 1968, a year in which he thinks that Reagan could have won the Republican nomination. "If Reagan had come out in February or March and said, 'I want to be President and I'm going after it,' " says Spencer, "I think he could have taken it away from Nixon, and I told him so. He gave me a great quote, 'The office seeks the man, the man doesn't seek the office.' Maybe now he has decided I was right. I think if there hadn't been Watergate and the Agnew thing that Reagan would probably be the nominee this year."
Spencer is glad the Californian offered his challenge ("It's like with a fighter. You get sharper with action"), but now he thinks Reagan should quit. "If we go much further, it's going to get pretty strident and divisive," says Spencer, "and it's going to be harmful in the general election. About 20 percent of the people in this country identify with the Republican party, and that's a pretty small number. You can't have divisiveness. You need them all."
What does Spencer see in store for the Democrats? "I think it is going to be a brokered convention," he predicts. "My gut feeling is that it's going to be Humphrey."
Roberts disagrees. "It will either be Carter or one of the liberals like Udall," he says. "I just don't see Humphrey any more. He's a used tire." Sen. Henry Jackson's conservatism would make him the toughest opponent, Roberts believes, but he doesn't see Jackson getting the nomination. Jimmy Carter is the opponent he wants. "I don't think he'll hold up as Mr. Clean," he says. "I think he's Mr. Slick, and in time it will show."
Though Spencer and Roberts work only for Republicans ("You can't switch from side to side," says Roberts. "If you do, nobody trusts you"), they are both former Democrats who migrated to the GOP in the early 1950s. They met as Young Republicans, and launched their campaign business in 1960. Partisan without being ideological, they have lent their talents to a mixed bag of candidates. "I've worked for Congressman Johnny Rousselot, who's now a Bircher," says Spencer, "and Nelson Rockefeller. That's the two extreme wings of our party. The only criterion I have for a candidate is that he has got to have his head screwed on right as a person."
A onetime recreation director for the city of Alhambra, Calif. ("He plays golf like he plays politics," says his wife, Joan. "He psychs out his opponents"), Spencer has been married since 1949 and has two grown children. Between campaigns, he lives a tranquil seaside life in Newport Beach. Now, however, stringing together a succession of grueling seven-day workweeks, he holes up in a one-bedroom Washington apartment. His only exercise is the three-block walk to the White House from the downtown office where he lays out his strategy. "I have a tendency to eat under pressure," he admits, "and my weight is up from about 162 to 175. I've started smoking again. And the ringing of the phones drives me crazy."
Roberts, tired of politics and suffering from diabetes, quit the partnership to establish Threshold, a Los Angeles organization that trains companions for the terminally ill. A lifelong bachelor, he became interested in the project when a journalist he knew was dying of cancer. "He wasn't really a close friend," says Roberts, "but close enough that I went to the hospital to visit him. I asked him one day if he wanted to talk about what was happening to him, and he started telling me about his anger that he wasn't going to see his young family grow up. I was the only one he was confiding in, and that taught me quite a bit. People die very lonely."
Until Spencer summoned him to Florida, Roberts had been living quietly, devoting most of his attention to Threshold and running a few local campaigns to pay bills. Now he seems ready for battle again. "After all," he reflects, "Gerald Ford is our first client who's been President."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
