Geraldine Ferraro: A Break with Tradition

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Reilly dialed Ferraro's hotel in San Francisco, got the Queens Congresswoman on the phone and handed the receiver to Mondale. "Here goes," said Mondale to his aides, and into the mouthpiece, to Ferraro: "I'd like you to run with me ... [pause] Great!" He passed the phone back to Reilly to arrange the logistics of getting her to Minnesota for the formal announcement. Reilly apologized for putting pressure on her just as she was about to deliver a foreign policy speech to the World Affairs Council in San Francisco. Unruffled, the Congresswoman replied, "I think I'll go out and give Reagan hell." (She did.) Reilly told her, "You'll be hearing from Peter Kyros," who was dispatched to bring her to Minnesota, and hung up.

The den erupted. Mondale and his aides cheered, shook hands and, in a strange gesture for that controlled group, slapped palms in the high-five manner of basketball players celebrating a slam dunk. Mondale a few minutes later strolled out onto the patio, lit a cigar and savored the moment alone. His younger son William, 22, joined him; they talked about, of all things, mosquitoes, which are plaguing North Oaks this summer.

Ferraro, between her talk with Mondale and her speech, got in two quick calls. Her 18-year-old daughter, Laura, picked up the phone at the family home in Queens and said simply, "Well?" Ferraro: "It's yes." Laura: "Are you sure it's not 'maybe'? Are you sure it's not 'possibly'?" "It's definite," replied Ferraro. Laura screamed to her father, "Yes!" Then Ferraro called her mother Antonetta, 79, and told her to stop worrying about living alone in New York and "shift your prayers somewhere else." Said Antonetta: "I think I'm so excited, I'm going to faint."

Mondale had some calling to do too. After a supper of cold fried chicken with family and aides, he returned to the den to contact the other candidates he had been considering and tell them he had chosen someone else—without saying whom. Most reacted without surprise. Bradley had so little expectation of getting favorable word, that embarrassed aides had to tell Mondale's assistants that the mayor had gone out on a private matter without bothering to tell them where he could be reached. Mondale did not get hold of him until Thursday morning.

Feinstein had agreed to pose for TIME as a possible Vice President and was just about to leave her Pacific Heights home for a nearby studio when the phone rang. She later recalled her conversation with Mondale: "He said, 'I want to tell you that I think you are a star. I want to tell you that you're on the top of the media's list, but I've decided to go another way and I hope you will trust me.' " Feinstein called off the photo session and went on calmly to attend a black-tie dinner. When reporters met with her the next day in her city hall office, a black-and-white MONDALE-FEINSTEIN button still reposed on a small china tray.