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Reagan was in bounding good humor throughout the final days, buoyed by reports from his pollster, Richard Wirthlin, that he was steadily gaining. On Monday he played Peoria, Ill., and played it well, his voice getting richer and stronger throughout the day. At a campaign-closing rally in a shopping mall near San Diego, a few hecklers kept screaming "ERA!" Reagan stopped in mid-sentence and snapped, "Aw, shut up!" The crowd erupted with cheers of "Reagan!" The candidate cocked his head, grinned and said: "My mother always told me that I should never say that. But this is the last night of a long campaign, and I thought just once I could say it." It was Reagan at his avuncular best.
On Election Day, Reagan voted in the morning and refused to make any predictions. "President Dewey told me to just play it cool," he said. At 12:15 p.m., Wirthlin called with good news about the early returns. Reagan's response was to cross the fingers of one hand above his head and rap on wood with the other hand. At 5:35 p.m., he was stepping out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, when the phone rang; Jimmy Carter was calling to congratulate him.
At the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, Reagan mingled with old California backers and show-biz friends such as Jimmy Stewart and Charlton Heston, and got a surprising phone call from Ted Kennedy, offering his cooperation.
When Reagan finally went downstairs to make his victory speech to wildly cheering supporters, he struck the same mixed tone of humility and boyish glee that so obviously had charmed American voters during the campaign. Said he: "I consider that trust you have placed in me sacred, and I give you my sacred oath that I will do my utmost to justify your faith." That was the sober side; the other showed a few moments later when supporters brought him a cake shaped like the country, lush with flags marking the states he had carried. As the bearers held it up, the cake started to slip. Said Reagan with his widest grin: "When that began to slide, I thought that maybe the world was going out as I was getting in."
Reagan could certainly be pardoned for feeling that life begins at 69. His rise has been one of the most remarkable success stories in American politics, and he has come a long, long way. Entering political life only after his show-business career was washed up, he had his first run for elective office at 55, an age when many successful men are thinking of retirement. Despite eight effective years as Governor of California, he was twice denied his party's nomination for President.
Indeed, to achieve his triumph, Regan had to break most of the unwritten rules about White House eligibility . At the start of the year, he was widely considered too old, and his background as a movie star too frivolous, for the Oval Office. Above all, he was thought too conservative. Even last spring, as Regan was sweeping aside a crowd of rivals in one Republican primary after another. Gerald Ford was grumbling that "a very conservative Republican [he did not have to say whom he meant] cannot be elected."