Ronnie and Nancy (91 page)

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

“Peace through strength” was the new Reagan slogan. In essence, this was a Sears campaign without Sears.

The three candidates went into action on Labor Day: Anderson at a parade in Calumet City, Illinois, his home state; Carter at a picnic in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in the Baptist heart of the South; and Reagan at an

“ethnic festival” in Jersey City, New Jersey. With the Statue of Liberty looming in the background and the flags of Eastern European countries flanking him, Reagan took off his jacket and tie in the sweltering heat and launched into his familiar criticism of Carter’s handling of the economy, which was languishing from 13 percent inflation, 8 percent unemployment, and 12 percent interest rates.139 At the end of the speech, Reagan was joined on the stage by the father of Lech Walesa, the Polish union leader who had defied his country’s Communist regime by taking his shipyard workers out on strike.

A day that started out so well, however, ended in near disaster at Reagan’s last stop, the Michigan State Fair, where he told a predominantly black audience how happy he was to be there “while [Carter] is opening his campaign down there in the city that gave birth to and is the parent body of the Ku Klux Klan.” The crowd gasped, and Reagan knew he had made a major mistake. Not only were his facts wrong—Tuscumbia was neither the Klan’s birthplace nor its headquarters—but his remark came across as an incredibly cheap shot. The next day Carter assailed him for insulting the South, and although Reagan had already rushed to apologize to the governor of Alabama, six other Southern Democratic governors, including Bill Clinton of Arkansas, publicly denounced him.140

Lyn Nofziger, who had supplied Reagan with the erroneous information, persisted in telling reporters that they were making a mountain out of a molehill, which only made the situation worse. Since this fracas came right on top of the Taiwan brouhaha, Nancy realized that there was no one in the top staff who could handle her husband with the subtlety and candor required. The sixty-seven-year-old Casey, who was called “Spacey” behind his back, had never run a national campaign, and while Baker had done a good job for Ford in 1976 and for Bush in the primaries, he wasn’t familiar with Reagan’s idiosyncrasies. Nancy was aware that Deaver had patched things up with his old mentor, Stu Spencer, and while she and Ronnie hadn’t spoken to Spencer in four years, she asked Deaver to see if he would come back.

Spencer agreed and came aboard as national political director three days after the Labor Day fiasco.141 “I started flying with Reagan again,” he told me.

Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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“I let him vent his spleen on me about going with Ford in ’76. He had a good time, and from then on it was like the way it was before.”142

That weekend, in another sign of the campaign’s tilt to the center, Reagan invited Henry Kissinger to lunch at Wexford, and that evening Kissinger and his wife were among one hundred guests at a private dinner Nancy gave for Mary Jane and Charlie Wick. The guest list also included David Rockefeller, Estée and Joseph Lauder, Drew Lewis, Charles and Carole Price from Kansas City, Jane and Guilford Dudley from Nashville, and Senator John Warner, who had a place nearby. Elizabeth Taylor, who was suffering from a bad back, could not attend.143 While Nancy was wary of Kissinger’s intentions, she realized his presence at her husband’s side was reassuring to the Eastern foreign policy establishment. On a personal level, the Reagans had grown more comfortable with the Kissingers after having spent time with them at the Buckleys’ in New York and Connecticut. Later in the campaign, Henry and Nancy Kissinger would give a dinner for Nancy Reagan at their River House apartment in New York.144

Meanwhile, James Baker was trying to arrange a debate with Carter and Anderson, to be sponsored by the League of Women Voters. But Carter refused to participate if Anderson was included, considering the renegade liberal Republican more likely to draw votes from the left than from the right. After several compromises were rejected by the White House, the League agreed to go along with a Reagan-Anderson debate on September 21, though they refused Baker’s request that Carter be represented by an empty chair. The gangly, bespectacled Anderson was no match for a well-briefed and dynamic Reagan, who made a point of referring to “the man who isn’t here” as often as possible. Prior to the debate, Carter had pulled slightly ahead of Reagan in the polls; afterward, Reagan regained the lead, with Anderson remaining at around 10 percent.145

The two major candidates’ numbers would seesaw back and forth all through October, as Carter abandoned his Rose Garden strategy of remaining cool and presidential and came out swinging. Campaigning in Chicago and Milwaukee on October 6, Carter called Reagan’s foreign policy “jingoistic” and “macho” and said it “would lead our country to war.”

In Philadelphia the next day, Reagan responded, “Well, I think he’s a badly misinformed and prejudiced man. Certainly he’s reaching a point of hysteria that’s hard to understand.”146 Three days later, in Florida, the President stepped up his attacks, saying, “I don’t know what he would do in 5 0 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the White House, but his opposition to the SALT II treaty, his opposition to Medicare, his opposition to many of the programs that are important like the minimum wage or unemployment compensation, his call for the injection of American military forces into place after place after place around the world indicate to me that he would not be a good president or good man to trust with the affairs of this nation in the future.”147

Carter, like Pat Brown and Jesse Unruh before him, had not figured out that going negative on Reagan had a boomerang effect—the meaner his opponent got, the nicer Ronnie seemed. Based on Wirthlin’s research that the

“most salient issue” for voters was high prices, Reagan hammered away at the administration’s inability to control inflation. At first he largely ignored the President’s attempt to portray him as a recycled Barry Goldwater. After Carter’s campaign introduced TV ads implying that Reagan viewed arms control negotiation as “a poker game” and nuclear war as “just another shoot-out at the O.K. Corral,”148 however, Nancy decided to take the highly unusual step of taping a one-minute commercial of her own.

“I don’t often speak out in campaigns,” she began, “but I think this campaign now has gotten to the point and the level where I have to say something. I am deeply, deeply offended by the attempts of Mr. Carter to paint my husband as a man he is not at all. I’m offended when he tries to portray him as a warmonger, as a man who would throw the elderly out on the street and cut off their Social Security when, in fact, he never said anything of the kind at any time. That’s a cruel thing to do. It’s cruel to the people. It’s cruel to my husband. I deeply, deeply resent it as a wife and a mother and a woman.”149

From the start of the campaign, the national press, particularly female reporters, fixated on what came to be called The Gaze. “When I would look at Ronnie when he spoke, that wasn’t an act,” Nancy Reagan told me with an exasperated sigh in 1997. “That was the way I felt—no matter how many times I had heard a speech. The audience reaction always varies a bit—and
I like
to hear him speak. I adore him! And when I said, ‘My life began with Ronnie,’ well, it’s true. I mean, I had a wonderful life before then, but it really
began
.”150

There were also innumerable references to Nancy Reagan’s influence and behind-the-scenes machinations, especially after her part in the Sears purge was made known. As always, Nancy sought to downplay her role, repeatedly telling interviewers that she would never sit in on cabinet meet-Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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ings the way Rosalynn Carter did. Ironically, whenever Mrs. Carter tried to defend herself from those who criticized her for being too powerful, she tended to come out sounding like Nancy. “Jimmy makes the decisions. All I do is tell him what I think. He takes it or leaves it. He might be influenced to a certain degree, but people just don’t know Jimmy Carter if they think I can persuade him to do something he doesn’t want to do.” The White House communications chief Patrick Caddell once even said of Rosalynn, “She’s got great antennae.”151

Unlike Rosalynn Carter, however, who usually campaigned on her own, Nancy didn’t like leaving Ronnie’s side. But as the race tightened, Stu Spencer convinced her that two could do more than one, and Peter McCoy—a Sotheby’s executive whose mother-in-law, Onnalee Doheny, was a friend of Nancy’s from the Colleagues—was hired to travel with her.

“Nancy and I would go off on our own trips for three or four days at a time,” McCoy told me. “The campaign plane would come into a city, and we’d jump on a small jet and go do a little outside business, and then join up with the tour later. Nancy is quite remarkable. We’d be up at eight in the morning and go all day long until ten or eleven at night, and then go back to the hotel—and Ronnie would be off on the main tour somewhere else.

I think they both really found it difficult to be separated. I’ve never seen anything quite like that. They would talk every night.”152

Reagan himself tried to explain their relationship to Lally Weymouth, who, for her
Times
article on Nancy, asked him what he thought his life would have been like if he hadn’t met her. “I don’t know,” he answered,

“except I know I wouldn’t have been happy. I was well aware that I was very lonely, although I guess I was a success in Hollywood and had all the perquisites that go with that. But I felt the need to love someone. . . . Has she influenced my life? Yes, because I’ve never been happier in my life than I have been with her. She is very much what you see. There is a gentleness to her, a fierce feeling of family loyalty. I miss her very much when we’re not together. We’re very happy. I imagine if I sold shoes, as my father did, she would have wanted to help me sell shoes. . . . She’s a very intelligent person. I don’t know of anything we don’t talk about. When anything happens that’s interesting or exciting, the first thought that enters my mind is how I’m going to tell her.”153

The press also tried to make an issue of the Reagan children’s not quite measuring up to the standards of the Republican Party platform, with its 5 0 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House high moral tone and disapproval of anything but the most traditional values. In an interview with Mike Wallace on
60 Minutes
, Patti, who had just come from Jane Fonda’s exercise class, defended her family: q: Somebody else in New York wrote a fascinating piece about the Reagan children and said, Can you imagine four children, one an E.R.A. organizer and an actress, divorced twice; second, divorced once, sells gasohol and races boats; third, a rock musician and composer and actress; fourth, a ballet dancer, 22 years old. Does this sound like the children of Ronald and Nancy Reagan?

a: Well, you know, each of us are very individual and we have our own careers and our own interests that we’ve been working towards—I mean, what would make us normal? If we were book-keepers or waitresses or gas station—I mean, what do they want?

Not that I would give them what they wanted anyway, but I’d be curious to know. You know, I don’t think that anything that any of us is doing is so alarming, you know.

q: It’s just unexpected, apparently, to some people.

a: I think it’s kind of refreshing. . . .

q: You gonna vote?

a: Yes.

q: Jimmy Carter, John Anderson, Ronald Reagan?

a: I’m gonna vote for my father. It wouldn’t be very nice not to vote for him, would it?

q: That’s the only reason?

a: No. I’m gonna vote for him because I think he’d be a good President. I do.154

On October 28, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter had their only debate. “[It was] scheduled for 8 p.m. in Philadelphia,” Deaver recalled. “I had planned a quiet, early dinner, topped off with a 1964 Cabernet. I let Reagan have one glass of wine before the debate . . . a little color for his cheeks. The Reagans, Stu Spencer, and I were the only ones in the room. Then he went into the bedroom for half an hour to rest. When I walked in, to let him know it was time to leave, he was standing at the mirror, practicing his lines, rehearsing his opening statement.”155

Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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Some people thought it was all over when the President told the audience that he had asked his twelve-year-old daughter, Amy, what she thought the most important issue was. “She said she thought nuclear weaponry and the control of nuclear arms,” said Carter, as the audience groaned. “I knew the race was won,” wrote Deaver later.156

As Jack Wrather put it, “It was a cut-and-dried situation at the end, because Carter made such an ass of himself. Again, I’m sure he’s a very decent, and, I think, even intelligent guy, but he just made an ass of himself.

He didn’t do anything; he went from one side to the other. And he gave people of this country such a sense of insecurity that, during that last famous debate that he and Ron had, it was just so obvious that he really didn’t know what he was talking about. You know, when Ron said,

‘Jimmy, there you go again,’ or something like that, everybody in the United States said, ‘That’s it.’ They said, ‘We agree with you, Ron.’ Everybody talked back to the television set.”157

On Thursday, October 30, the Reagan campaign’s worst nightmare seemed to be coming true: the Iranian majlis, or parliament, had started debating whether to release the American hostages held in Tehran for nearly a year.

Carter’s failure to secure their freedom continued to be the great disgrace of his administration, especially after an attempted rescue mission in April had ended with four Army helicopters crashing in the Iranian desert. Now, as Reagan’s advisers had feared, it looked as if he might be able to cut a deal just before the election. On Halloween there were reports that a DC-8 was waiting in Europe to fly the hostages home. On Saturday night, White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan caught up with the President in Chicago and told him that the Iranians were offering terms. Canceling the next day’s campaign events, Carter flew back to Washington at four in the morning, only to realize that the Iranians were playing games: they wanted to release their captives one by one over a period of time. Meanwhile, all three networks were running hour-long specials on the first anniversary of the embassy seizure, which would fall on election day.158