Rendezvous with Destiny
by Craig Shirley

It certainly was not inevitable that Ronald Reagan would be elected President in 1980, not even after the disastrous and unpopular tenure of Jimmy Carter. Conservatives had suffered so many defeats that they didn't anticipate victory. As late as Election Day, newspaper headlines reported the Reagan-Carter race "too close to call." In Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America, Craig Shirley tells the whole exhilarating story of how Reagan triumphed and made us believe it was morning in America again.

Shirley relates how Reagan rose from the ashes of his failed 1976 campaign and narrow loss at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City, then triumphed over liberal Republican foes in hard-fought primaries. Of course, the media preferred George H.W. Bush. Shirley describes the exciting unprecedented story of how Establishment and media busybodies at the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit tried to get Reagan to accept Gerald Ford as "co-president." Then, Shirley gives us a behind-the-scenes account of Reagan's 1980 campaign and how he won a landslide victory despite such obstacles as the Third Party candidacy of John Anderson.

To write Rendezvous with Destiny, Shirley gained access to 1980 campaign files and interviewed more than 150 insiders, from Reagan's closest advisers and family members to Jimmy Carter himself. This book is the first comprehensive history of the hard-fought 1980 campaign which was a turning point in American political history.

Reagan's 1980 victory dramatically altered not only U.S. history, but the history of the entire world. His victory ended liberalism's half-century reign, reversed a devastating economic crisis, replaced our previous policy toward the Soviet Union from appeasement and defeatism to (in Reagan's words) "we win, they lose," led to the collapse of the evil empire, and gave rise to a new generation of conservatism. Because of Reagan, most public officials are now eager to label themselves "conservative."

(Harper Collins, 2009, 217 pages, $25)