Ronnie and Nancy (76 page)

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riving at a Republican Party reception at the Fontaineblean Hotel.128 “Our car was almost turned over by these hoods,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me.

“Alfred saved our lives—he told the driver to step on it. The driver floored the accelerator, the car shot ahead, and the people fell off, or stopped chasing us.”129

The California delegation, chaired by Governor Reagan, included most of the Kitchen Cabinet, as well as the Gosdens’ nineteen-year-old daughter, Linda, whom Reagan had chosen over Walter Annenberg’s daughter, Wallis, to represent the newly enfranchised teenage voters.

Henry Salvatori, who had given $90,000 to Nixon’s last campaign, and would throw in another $100,000 in 1972, was hoping to be made ambassador to his native Italy. (It didn’t happen, perhaps because his FBI background check turned up the $5 dues he had paid to something called the Dante Alighieri Society, a reputedly pro-Mussolini group, in 1940.) Several other Reagan friends were among Nixon’s largest contributors, including Firestone ($113,000), Jules Stein ($118,000), and Thomas V.

Jones, whose Northrop Corporation gave a $150,000 donation that was later deemed illegal.130 In total, the Nixon campaign’s California finance committee, run by Tuttle, Dart, and Schreiber, raised more that $9 million, and was rewarded with a pre-inaugural dinner with the President at Blair House.131 Reagan campaigned throughout the South and West for Nixon, who carried forty-nine states, leaving only Massachusetts to his Democratic opponent, George McGovern.

Tuttle later explained the logic behind the Kitchen Cabinet’s all-out effort for Nixon: “There was no question in our minds at that time . . . that we were going to run Ron for office in 1976 after Nixon left office. Make no mistake about it, we were all primed. Our whole activity down at the convention in 1972 was to acquire friends and get commitments. We were working hard. Ron worked hard for Nixon. He spoke and raised money; we all did. Mr. Dart and I put on one of the biggest fund-raisers in history out here for President Nixon in 1972. But make no mistake about it, we were all ready to go. Don’t you think we weren’t building for 1976. . . . In fact, there was a great deal of pressure for the Governor to run for a third term, but we couldn’t convince him. He said, ‘No, I said I don’t believe in a third term. I tried to get a bill through the legislature for a two-term limit.

I’d make a hypocrite of myself, and I’m not going to do it.’ We thought maybe it might hurt his chances [in 1976] by being out of office. He could have won the governorship without any problems.”132

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

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Nancy arrived at Nixon’s January 1973 inauguration with a complete Galanos wardrobe, which met with the full approval of Jerry Zipkin, who had come down from New York for the festivities. The Reagans hosted one of the four inaugural balls, Nancy in white satin embroidered with black beaded tulips. There was a wonderful photograph in the
Los Angeles Times
of her embracing Martha Mitchell, soon to be the uncontrol-lable loose lips of the Watergate affair, and another of Imelda Marcos with her arm in a sling from a recent assassination attempt. There was also one of the Reverend Billy Graham greeting Republican National Chairman George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, at Ross Perot’s dinner at the Madison Hotel, which the Reagans attended with the Annenbergs, Lee dripping rubies and diamonds over her yellow lace gown.133

Later they all took their limousines to the Fairfax Hotel’s Jockey Club, where a boozed-up Frank Sinatra, who had performed at the inaugural gala, called
Washington Post
reporter Maxine Cheshire a “two-dollar broad” and much worse, and stuffed a couple of bills in her champagne glass.134 Sinatra had been out to get Cheshire ever since she humiliated him in front of Reagan a month earlier, when the two men arrived for a dinner Agnew was giving for Republican governors, by loudly asking,

“Mr. Sinatra, aren’t you afraid that your alleged Mafia associations are going to prove to be the same kind of embarrassment to Mr. Agnew that they were to the Kennedys?”135

But not even the ugly scene at the Jockey Club, which was widely reported, could mar the Reagans’ sense that the next inauguration in Washington would be their own. As the kingmakers of the Kitchen Cabinet reasoned, when Nixon stepped down in four years the lackluster Agnew would be brushed aside, and their man would have an open path to the nomination. Nancy had already made it clear that, while her husband was not going to run for a third term as governor in 1974, he wasn’t planning to retire. “He is very concerned as to the direction the Republican Party takes, not only in California, but in the country,” she wrote in a weekly Q&A column she had started contributing to the
Sacramento Union
, “and he certainly wants to have a voice in that determination.”136

Ronnie and Nancy, primed to move on to bigger things, seemed to do everything right in the last two years of his governorship. They highlighted
Sacramento II: 1969–1974

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their patriotism by giving dinners for prisoners of war returning from Vietnam after the Paris Peace Accord was signed in January 1973, and their steadfastness by hosting a controversial reception for South Vietnamese president Thieu a few months later. They made another trip to the Far East for Nixon in late 1973, even as the deepening Watergate scandal was causing other Republicans to keep their distance. They cultivated the grandees of the national press, growing ever closer to the Annenbergs, Gardner and Jan Cowles, and Kay Graham. By the end of 1974, Reagan could proudly point to the more than $5 billion given back to taxpayers in rebates, credits, and property tax cuts, and the 300,000 names taken off the state’s welfare rolls as a result of his reforms.137 He had gone from the candidate who was scorned for saying “A tree is a tree is a tree—how many more do you need to look at?” to a governor who oversaw the creation of the Redwoods National Park, added 145,000 square miles to the state park system, sponsored the nation’s toughest water pollution control laws, and established the Air Resources Board to deal with smog-causing automobile emissions. He shared credit for what
The New York Times
would call “a first-rate environ-mentalist” record with his resources director, Norman Livermore, a lumber-man who belonged to the Sierra Club and, like Bill Clark, rode horseback with him.138

For her part, Nancy’s persistent lobbying for a new Governor’s Mansion had finally paid off, even though, as she liked to point out, she and Ronnie would never spend a night in the $1.4 million, thirty-one-room, yellow-stucco edifice rising on eleven acres of riverfront land given to the state by the Kitchen Cabinet.139 She had also seen to it that the old gingerbread mansion would be preserved as a State Historic Site, and diplo-matically gave a few official functions there, with Mike Deaver pounding away at the piano in the parlor.140

“Ronnie accomplished a great deal during his eight years as governor of California, and in my own way, I suppose I did too,” Nancy later wrote.

“But for me, the return of the POWs marked the high point of Ronnie’s administration.”141 The Reagans hosted four dinners for the returning servicemen, two at the Executive Residence and two in Pacific Palisades.

“When they were landing in California, we saw them on TV,” Nancy Reagan told me. “And I said to Ronnie, ‘I just can’t wait to get my arms around them and tell them how I feel.’ They would get up and toast Ronnie for what he’d done. And Ronnie would say, ‘That’s not what we’re doing—we’re toasting you.’ I remember one man gave me the tin spoon he 4 2 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House had eaten with in prison. Patti came to one of the dinners—I thought it might be good for her to hear their stories—but she was very bored by the whole thing.”142

One of the returnees, Nancy recalled, was future Arizona senator John McCain, who would become a close friend of theirs. “We met John in Sacramento. He had been seven years in solitary confinement, and the ones there the longest came back first. He could have been released earlier, but the North Vietnamese wanted him to meet with Jane Fonda when she went to Hanoi. And he wouldn’t do it.”143

Nancy also prevailed upon Justin and Punky Dart to lend their Holmby Hills house for two large receptions for the POWs on March 28

and April 10, 1973. In between these two parties, the Governor and First Lady gave their dinner for Thieu at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where guests were greeted by picketing protesters led by Jane Fonda and her second husband, Tom Hayden, a founder of the radical Students for a Democratic Society.144 Nancy seated the South Vietnamese President between her and Irene Dunne, and Reagan’s table included Doris Stein, John Wayne, and Cy Ramo, the chairman of TRW, a major defense contractor based in Los Angeles.145 “Tell Jane Fonda what a dope she is,” Zsa Zsa Gabor told reporters as she arrived.146

Nancy donated her fees from her newspaper column to the National League of Families of American Prisoners of War and Missing in Action.

The “Dear Abby” format allowed her to voice her opinion on such subjects as the legalization of marijuana (against), the death penalty (for), and teenage marriage (wait). The column also spawned a parody in the
National Lampoon
, titled “Nancy Reagan’s Dating Do’s and Don’ts.” A typical installment:

Dating is like dynamite. Used wisely, it can move mountains and change the course of mighty rivers. Used foolishly, it can blow your legs off. Scientists have calculated, for example, that if a man could harness even a fraction of the kinetic energy wasted in a single session of Post Office or Spin the Bottle, he could light up the entire city of Wilmington, Delaware, and have enough left over to discover and mass produce a cheap, effective cure for cancer of the larynx.147

There were a few glitches, such as a 1974
Los Angeles Times
exposé involving Anita May. Seven months after Reagan was given the National
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Jewish Hospital Tom May Award at a gala in Beverly Hills, the
Times
accused him of reversing a decision made by the state parks department not to renew the lease on a private beach club in Santa Monica as a favor to Anita May. The Sand and Sea Club, of which May was a member, occupied three acres of state-owned land that was slated to be turned into a parking lot to provide public access to the beach. May had written a letter to Reagan in 1971, which led to a meeting between her and parks commissioner William Penn Mott, shortly after which the lease was renewed for another ten years. After the
Times
story appeared, a Democratic state senator declared that “a few rich individuals have no right to monopolize state park lands.” But Reagan and Mott denied the allegations, and the eighty-one-year-old May, pleading illness, refused to comment.148

The worst glitch of all was one over which the Reagans had no control—

the ongoing scandal in Washington, which would completely upend their hopes for a smooth ride to the 1976 nomination. “I think the situation is being taken care of,” Nancy placidly told a reporter in April 1973, ten days after Watergate had claimed its first high-level casualties, H. R. Haldeman and John Erlichman, who had been forced to resign their White House posts. “The American people are always fair people; they’re not going to condemn a whole party for the actions of a few.”149

The first real jolt to the Reagans’ plans was the October 10, 1973, resignation of Vice President Agnew, who had pleaded no contest to unrelated corruption charges that went all the way back to his days as a Maryland county executive. His replacement by House minority leader and party stalwart Gerald Ford meant Nixon now had a much more palatable heir apparent—a prospect that did not warm the hearts of the Reagans, who remembered how Ford had tried to keep Ronnie from the podium at the 1968 convention. The Kitchen Cabinet actually tried to get Nixon to appoint Reagan instead of Ford. “Oh, yes,” said Tuttle. “I took quite an active part in that, and I think President Nixon made a very bad mistake when he didn’t appoint him. I did my best, and so did Mr. Dart, to convince Nixon that he should. You bet I did.” Would Reagan have accepted the vice presidency then? “Nobody ever turns it down,” Tuttle said, not quite answering the question.150

By the spring of 1974, when Haldeman, Erlichman, and John Mitchell had been indicted and Nixon had been ordered to turn over his White House tapes by the Supreme Court, Ronnie and Nancy were losing their cool. “Nixon should have destroyed the tapes,” said Ronnie, according to 4 2 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Patti. “It’s a witch-hunt. It’s just because he’s a Republican.” “[It’s] terrible what they are doing to this man,” said Nancy, adding, “It’s wonderful that his daughters are sticking by him.”151

But life—and strengthening ties to those who could be helpful—had to go on. In August 1973, Nancy gave the first of several dinners at Pacific Palisades for Jan and Gardner Cowles, whose Cowles Communications owned TV stations in Des Moines, Memphis, and Orlando as well as
Look
and
Family Circle
magazines. There were three tables of eight with David Jones centerpieces on the deck, and not a single unfamiliar name on the guest list. Except for Jerry Zipkin, who escorted the recently widowed Irene Dunne, it was the same set of couples who saw one another all the time: the Darts and the Gosdens, who were both very close to the Cowleses, the Bloomingdales and the Annenbergs and the Deutsches, the Jorgensens and the Wilsons, the Tuttles, and Tex and Flora Thornton of Litton Industries.

In January 1974, Kay Graham gave a dinner for Nancy in Washington.

The Reagans and the owner of the
Post
had seen quite a bit of each other since they met at Sun Valley four years earlier. In February 1971, the Governor had been the guest speaker at an editorial lunch at the paper, and that evening Graham gave a dinner at home for the Reagans. As Katharine Graham told me, “We kept up. When I went to California, I’d call them and receive them in some way. Nancy and I always liked each other, I believe. And I was interested in getting to know the Governor as a person who was on the conservative side of the Republican Party. And Nancy and I got to be friends. I think our friendship was sealed in a really odd way. They came back to Washington after the dinner for both of them, and I said to Nancy,