Ronald Reagan earned the nickname “the Great Communicator,” but on a 1976 trip to Tennessee that included a stop in Chattanooga, he probably wished he had said a little less — about TVA.
Reagan, then just over a year removed from his two terms as California governor, visited the Volunteer State that spring campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination. Reagan was in a race against incumbent President Gerald Ford, who had moved into the White House after Watergate ended the presidency of Richard Nixon.
Reagan’s troubles began the morning of May 21, 1976, when he told a Knoxville TVA station that selling the Tennessee Valley Authority would be “something to look into” if he was elected president, according to a story in the next day’s Chattanooga News-Free Press, then the city’s afternoon paper.
Tom Griscom, then the paper’s political reporter, covered Reagan’s Volunteer State swing, which included stops the same day in Chattanooga for a speech at Tennessee Temple College and Nashville.
Griscom, who just over a decade later became Reagan’s White House communications director and would serve as editor and publisher of the Chattanooga Times Free Press from 1999-2010, knew immediately Reagan’s statement had just become the story of the day.