Ronnie and Nancy (70 page)

For his part, a confident Richard Nixon was fishing for bass in far-off Montauk, Long Island, with his buddy Robert Abplanalp, the aerosol king, and wasn’t planning to arrive in Florida until Tuesday afternoon. He had his daughters, Tricia and Julie, represent him at Sunday night’s obligatory gala at the Fontainebleau, along with Julie’s fiancé, David Eisenhower, Ike’s grandson. The Rockefellers and the Reagans breezed in and out of this $500-a-ticket Republican Party fund-raiser for two thousand, with its life-size pink pachyderm in the hotel lobby and its “special surprise guest,”

Thomas Dewey. Also making the Miami Beach GOP scene: Teddy Roosevelt’s eighty-four-year-old daughter, Alice Longworth; A&P heir Huntington Hartford; Kleenex heir James Kimberly; New York power lawyer—and former Joe McCarthy aide—Roy Cohn; and Walter and Lee Annenberg, who were remaining studiously neutral between their good friends Nixon and Reagan.139

The twenty-ninth Republican National Convention officially opened on Monday morning, August 5, with an “inspirational reading” by John Wayne, titled “Why I Am Proud to Be an American.” But Reagan stole the day’s show by unexpectedly announcing that he was a real candidate after all. While he was making his announcement at an impromptu press conference in the Deauville’s Napoleon II Room, Nancy, who was upstairs having her hair done by Julius, heard the news on the radio. She was about to have a press conference of her own, but she was so thrown by the sudden development that she had her mother, who had arrived from Chicago with Loyal the day before, greet the reporters for her. “I only know about my children from what I read in the papers,” claimed Edith, who was then asked if she was a Republican. “‘Oh, heavens,’ she exclaimed, as if to say, perish any other thought,” reported
The Washington Post
. She then declared that she was too nervous to answer any more questions.140 When Nancy finally appeared, in a blue-and-white cotton dress by Chester Weinberg, she told the reporters, “I think it is important to a man to do something about the things he feels strongly about. Whatever satisfies and fulfills him makes for a better marriage.”141

According to Bill Clark, “Nancy and I were in total agreement in Miami that he should not go for the presidency. And he was in agreement,
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too. If she hadn’t been under a hairdryer when that came up, and if she had joined me, it probably could have been stopped.”142 Clearly Reagan and the Kitchen Cabinet got carried away by the intrigue, plots, and flattery of Convention Hall. As French Smith recalled, “Everywhere he went, he evoked such enthusiasm that it sort of became contagious.”143 There were rumors that morning, based on what turned out to be a fraudulent telegram, that Rockefeller’s backers within the California delegation were about to bolt, breaking the unity that Reagan—and Tuttle and Salvatori—

so cherished.144 So they listened to the fired-up Nofziger and the supposedly brilliant White; to bitter William Knowland, the former senator who hated Nixon for having deprived him of the vice presidential nomination back in 1952; to Governor James Rhodes of Ohio, himself a favorite son but really a Rockefeller stalking horse—all of whom were saying that Reagan would not be taken seriously unless he made his candidacy explicit. His announcement made headlines, though it was overshadowed a few hours later by that of Governor Agnew, who withdrew his favorite-son candidacy and threw Maryland’s delegates to Nixon.

Nofziger was ecstatic about Reagan’s decision to announce. Reagan aide Rus Walton remembered being greeted by the Governor’s press secretary as he arrived at the Deauville. “The first thing he said to me [was], ‘I want you to go down to your room and start writing an acceptance speech.’ . . . I said, ‘You got to be kidding.’ He said, ‘No, sir.’ He said, ‘You get down there and start drafting the acceptance speech.’ Well, I tell you, I didn’t put one word on a piece of paper. I sat there and thought, ‘What if something happens?’ Because this guy does have the luck of the Irish.

You’ve seen it time and time again. I thought, ‘Oh, boy, if he gets the nomination, I’m dead.’ But he didn’t.”145

“Nancy Reagan was a model of serenity and composure as her husband was nominated Wednesday night,”
Women’s Wear Daily
reported. “Thousands of colored balloons tumbled from the ceiling, hundreds of neon-orange-shawled demonstrators paraded around the floor stamping on them, Reagan banners jumped in the air while the slide-trombone band blared

‘California Here I Come.’ The deafening noise didn’t faze Nancy. Facing TV cameras at the edge of her box, in her orange-lavender-and-white high-belted Galanos with the gold buckle, she waved and shook hands with all the passersby she knew. Does she ever tire of smiling, she was asked. ‘No, not now,’ she smiled. She said Ronnie wouldn’t be here, but that was all 3 8 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House right. ‘I’m very proud and pleased.’” (
WWD
added, “She’s been perfectly groomed at every moment. She also gets first prize for looking divine under intense floodlights which do devastating damage to both Pat Nixon and Loraine Percy.”)146

Reagan was still working the delegates on the floor and in caucus rooms around the hall when his name was placed in nomination by Ivy Baker Priest, a former U.S. treasurer and the first woman to nominate a major presidential candidate. No fewer than eleven more candidates were put forward, including favorite sons from Alaska and Hawaii. Convention chairman Congressman Gerald Ford had called the proceedings to order at 5:30, and the roll call of the states would not begin until after one in the morning. Compared to the hysterical ideological warfare of the 1964 convention, this was torture by tedium: “Hour upon hour of thundering cliché, of enervating restatement of the obvious, of prancing up and down the hall in exhaustively planned ‘demonstrations’—the whole soggy business relieved only by an occasional burst of asininity,” as Russell Baker so brilliantly put it.147

In the end, the South held for Nixon, who had spent Tuesday afternoon reassuring Southern delegates that he was against busing, Communism, and an activist Supreme Court, and who was said to have given Strom Thurmond a veto over the pick for vice president. In what
The New York Times
called “the greatest comeback since Lazarus,”148 Nixon received 692 votes to Rockefeller’s 277 and Reagan’s 182. But it wasn’t until Wisconsin, the next-to-the-last state, that Nixon went over the top, and for Reagan’s men that was proof of how close they had come.

“We were just outgunned,” said Robert Walker, who had spent five months working the South for Reagan. “They had more power than we had. If you really want to know what stopped it . . . Barry Goldwater, Strom Thurmond are the ones that stopped it. Because they were establishment Republicans at the time, in reaction to their being ostracized, if you will, by their abysmal defeat in ’64. They wanted nothing more than to be respectable again and Richard Nixon gave them respectability within the Republican party.” As Walker saw it, “It would have just taken one state to deny him that nomination on the first ballot, and that could have been South Carolina, it could have been Florida, it could have been Mississippi.

We had all these states under the gun, and we even had Mississippi off of the floor—with [Reagan] pleading with them, when the people running the convention started calling the first ballot. So they had, of course, to go
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back in order to answer the call. The Governor didn’t even get to finish his pitch.”149

It was two in the morning when Reagan marched to the platform to propose that the convention make the nomination unanimous. Ford, citing the rules, tried to stop Reagan from taking this honor, just as he had hurried the roll call to keep Reagan from prying Mississippi out of Nixon’s grasp. These were the kinds of machinations, the not-so-subtle slights, that Nancy Reagan noticed and remembered.

The Reagans were less unhappy with Goldwater, for whose reelection campaign in Arizona, Edith Davis had again been a significant fund-raiser.150 After all, his advice had proven to be correct. Nor were they angry with Thurmond, who, along with Goldwater, had been very vocally urging Nixon to take Reagan as his running mate. By some accounts Reagan was on the short list until the last cut, when Spiro Agnew, the man Dick Nixon was most comfortable with, emerged as the surprise choice. That was okay with the Reagans, too. As Nancy told
The Washington Post
, “My husband feels he can implement his philosophy and ideas more as governor of California than as vice president, and I agree with that.”151

Only the postmortems remained:

“I wrote in a column from Miami that Reagan’s candidacy was almost certainly something that he undertook to do something nice for his friends.

It was so obvious he was not going to win,” said Bill Buckley. “Reagan called to tell me that was exactly correct—it was only because he felt an obligation to them.”152

“I think Cliff [White] gave us a little bad advice,” said Holmes Tuttle.

“He felt we couldn’t convince some of these people unless he was a definite candidate, you understand, instead of just being a ‘favorite son.’ I think we were just overoptimistic. . . . Well, we were a little premature, I’ll put it that way. . . . But it was a good start.”153

“What I remember most,” said Betsy Bloomingdale, “was there were so many Secret Service we could hardly move. And the night Ronnie didn’t make it, we came back to the hotel, and there was not a soul around.”154

Ronnie and Nancy stayed in Florida for the weekend, cruising through the Keys on Alfred Bloomingdale’s yacht. “Only the two of us and the crew,”

Reagan wrote. “That first night, we slept fourteen hours, and we felt the greatest sense of relief either of us had ever known.”155

“Reagan limped back to Sacramento, more than a little embarrassed, 3 9 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House to lick his political wounds,” Mike Deaver recalled. “For Nancy, the convention fiasco served as confirmation of her own political antennae. After Miami, she would never again hold back her opinion on major political decisions, whatever the Gipper might be thinking; but it was always about protecting her husband, not about driving him on.”156

“He told me afterward,” Lyn Nofziger confided, “and I know he told other people, too, that he was not disappointed. He did not feel that he was really ready for the presidency.”157

C H A P T E R F I F T E E N

SACRAMENTO II

1969–1974

It was in the California period that I began to understand that there was a Reagan mystique, that it carried a force of its own, and that no matter how you tried you couldn’t pin it down. I saw Reagan run for reelection as governor by running against the government. He campaigned as if he had not been part of it for four years. I can’t explain it either. I only know it worked.

Michael Deaver,
Behind the Scenes
1

Reagan is a closet moderate and regularly practiced compromise with other consenting adult politicians in Sacramento.

Richard Whalen,
The New York Times
, February 22, 1976

Princess Salima, English-born wife of Aga Khan IV, was named the best-dressed woman in the world yesterday, nosing out the leading American entry, Mrs. Ronald Reagan.

Frederick Winship, UPI, January 7, 1972

RONALD REAGAN HAD GOOD REASON TO BE PLEASED WITH HIMSELF ON

December 5, 1968, as he headed to Palm Springs to host the Republican Governors’ Conference. The state budget was now running a surplus, and Reagan had been able to announce the first of four rebates he would give to taxpayers during his governorship. In November the Republicans had won control of the state legislature, and Nixon had beat Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, by a hair in the popular vote but decisively in the Electoral College. No governor had campaigned harder for Nixon than Reagan, who traveled to twenty-two states in the ten weeks between the convention and the election and was credited with helping Nixon keep most of the South out of George Wallace’s hands.2

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Nancy was in a cheerful mood, too, since the Reagans would be staying at Sunnylands, the Annenbergs’ sumptuous estate in Rancho Mirage, along with the President-elect and his daughter Tricia. The 32,000-square-foot neo-Mayan palace had been completed two years earlier at a cost of $5 million. Set on a square mile of erstwhile desert and enclosed by pink stucco walls, with a gatehouse at the corner of Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope Drives, the house had been designed by Quincy Jones, the dean of USC’s architecture school, and decorated by Billy Haines and Ted Graber in vibrant corals, yellows, and greens. Its 6,400-square-foot living room was shaped like a tent, with walls of volcanic rock and enormous picture windows looking out onto Walter’s private nine-hole golf course. There was a meditation garden for Lee, still a devoted Christian Scientist, as well as a cactus garden and two hothouses, one just for orchids. The house contained a good part of the Annenbergs’ art collection, including masterpieces by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse.3 The first time the Reagans had visited Sunnylands in 1967, Nancy wrote in the guest book,

“Sheer heaven! How can you ever bear to tear yourself away?”4

“The Eisenhowers came to us for lunch while Nancy and Ronnie were our guests,” Lee Annenberg said of that visit. After leaving the White House in 1961, Ike and Mamie spent their winters in a bungalow on the eleventh fairway of the Eldorado Country Club, the most exclusive of the private gated communities around Palm Springs, and the Annenbergs became their friends. “You know, when you played golf with General Eisenhower, no one ever spoke,” she continued. “There was this silence. He was very serious about his golf. And he always wanted to be called ‘General.’

He was a chef. He loved to cook steaks, and he would put on an apron and a high, tall chef hat and do delicious barbecued steaks. They had their friends at the club—the Darts and the Gosdens and the Tuttles. The Firestones were at Thunderbird. It was like a big, happy group. They had us over from time to time, and they came here from time to time. He came here for golfing and fishing. We had the lake stocked with fish, and as he got older and it was harder for him to play golf, he would come over here and fish.”5