The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Read online

  “She was still in a period of learning and frustration because she could see all this going down,” Spencer said. “I’m not sure she really knew who Cappy Weinberger was at that point in time, but she knew there had to be a change.” The first lady privately—and persistently—lobbied her husband on Weinberger’s behalf. He turned out to be supremely capable in the job, showing the fiscal toughness that would later earn him the nickname “Cap the Knife.”

  A very different kind of dilemma presented itself in April 1967—one that Ronnie later described as the hardest call he had ever made. California was scheduled to carry out its first execution in four years. Set to die was a thirty-six-year-old black man named Aaron Mitchell, who had spent four years on San Quentin’s death row for murdering a policeman during the robbery of a restaurant. Ronnie was a supporter of the death penalty, but the former Rock River lifeguard struggled when the power was put in his hands to end or save a man’s life. Breaking with what his predecessors had done in earlier cases, the governor refused to attend Mitchell’s clemency hearing two days before the execution was scheduled and then ignited more criticism when he showed up at the Academy Awards that same night.

  On the eve of the execution, eight-year-old Ron watched through the windows of the governor’s mansion as demonstrators held a silent all-night vigil outside. Her son found the scene “strange and eerie,” Nancy recalled later. “We tried to explain why Ronnie had made his decision, and why some people didn’t agree with it.” Just after ten o’clock on the morning of April 12, 1967, church bells rang out as cyanide began rising through the floor of the apple-green gas chamber where Mitchell was strapped to a chair. Nancy was still disturbed weeks later, telling a reporter it had all given her “a very uncomfortable feeling,” but she added: “I think it would be nice too if they rang church bells every time a man is murdered. It’s the same principle, it seems to me.” The backlash was intense. California would not carry out another execution for twenty-five years.

  Two months later, Ronnie faced another moral quandary when the California legislature passed and presented to him legislation to lift most restrictions on abortion. The state was operating under a Victorian-era law that allowed the procedure only when necessary to save the life of the mother. It made no exception for pregnancies that occurred through rape or incest. The legislation that landed on Ronnie’s desk would make abortion legal if it was performed in the first twenty weeks of a pregnancy, took place in an accredited hospital, and was approved by a panel of qualified physicians. California’s would be the most liberal law in the country and included no residency requirement, which Ronnie said he feared would turn his state into “a haven” for women seeking abortions.

  This was nearly six years before the US Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationally. As recently as the 1950s, newspapers had considered the subject so indecent that they would refer to it in their pages only as an “illegal operation.” But public sentiment had begun to shift, driven by the feminist movement and by horror stories about the butchery that desperate women had suffered at the hands of practitioners who performed the procedure outside the law. A March 1967 survey by the respected California pollster Mervin Field found that more than two-thirds of Catholics supported loosening the restrictions on abortion. Nancy did not take a public stand on the legislation, though people on both sides of the debate assumed she supported it. She did suggest that Ronnie seek her father’s counsel, to get his perspective as a physician. Loyal Davis, though conservative on many issues, was in favor of legalizing abortion and was an influential voice as his son-in-law wavered. Ronnie changed his mind twice in the week before he signed the Therapeutic Abortion Act on June 15, 1967. A year later, Ronnie told Cannon that he would not have done so if he had not been so inexperienced as governor. It was, Cannon noted, “the only time as governor or president that Reagan acknowledged a mistake on major legislation.”

  Turmoil on college campuses also became a running challenge. Ronnie had campaigned on “cleaning up the mess in Berkeley.” He moved quickly, just weeks after his inauguration, to engineer the firing of University of California president Clark Kerr, who had refused to crack down on massive student protests. The governor also squeezed the university system’s budget by 10 percent and proposed that it start charging tuition. Tensions only escalated, as antiwar demonstrations grew and became more violent. In 1969 a battle erupted between police and students who had taken over a 2.8-acre plot of university-owned land known as People’s Park.

  The day would become known as Bloody Thursday after nearly sixty people were sent to the hospital with serious injuries. Ronnie declared a state of “extreme emergency” and dispatched more than two thousand National Guard troops into the Berkeley area. The following year, a mob at the University of California at Santa Barbara looted a Bank of America building and set it on fire to protest the financial institution’s loans to South Africa, which had a racist apartheid government. At least once, Ronnie’s car was surrounded and rocked by demonstrators. When he visited Chico State College, a clean-shaven young man thrust his face into the governor’s and shouted: “You rotten son of a bitch!” Some of the staffers who traveled with Ronnie and his family began carrying concealed handguns.

  Nancy’s fears for her husband’s safety created problems for those who were trying to steer a political course for Ronnie through the rough waters of the era. In later years, she would learn to use her power more shrewdly, employing allies to fight her battles for her and to act as the agents of an agenda she preferred to keep unseen. But during Ronnie’s early days in the governor’s office, she was a constant source of disruption. The first lady’s input—or interference, as it was viewed by those on the receiving end—was no more welcome by the governor’s staff than it had been by the men who ran his campaign.

  Ronnie even interrupted Cabinet meetings to take Nancy’s calls. One time, the others in the room overheard her on the line venting about vulgar comments that radical black activist Eldridge Cleaver had made about Ronnie. “But, honey, I can’t have him arrested just because he says those things,” the governor told her. (Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther movement, would have a change of heart. In 1984 he endorsed Ronnie for reelection as president.)

  Among those with whom she clashed was Tom Ellick, a media operations assistant in the governor’s office who produced a televised series called Report to the People. These were twenty-eight-minute segments that ran on major stations in the state’s largest cities. For an episode about the campus violence, Ellick had the governor engage in a friendly question-and-answer session with students. The imagery was exactly what the producer wanted. It showed Ronnie at his resolute best, interspersed with scenes of rioting and property destruction by protesters. “I had about 99.9 percent of the footage that I needed, but I needed to get him on a college campus,” Ellick recalled. He arranged for film of the governor to be shot on a quiet corner of the UCLA campus on a weekend afternoon. Reagan was to stroll contemplatively for about forty-five seconds, with off-duty Los Angeles police officers posing in the background as students. Ellick thought everything was set, when he unexpectedly got a call summoning him to a meeting with Ronnie and his top advisers. He was told: “We need to roundtable this.” Those were dreaded words to anyone on the governor’s staff. It meant something had gone off track.

  Ellick flew to Southern California for a meeting at the Reagans’ home in Pacific Palisades and discovered the problem: Nancy. Everyone else sat silently as the panic-stricken first lady declared, “No, Daddy, we can’t do it. It’s too dangerous.”

  “We’ve got the LAPD lined up,” Ellick pleaded. “They will have excellent security, and it’s within minutes of your house, and it’s not going to be a problem, but I really do need this particular bit of footage.”

  Again, no one else said a word.

  So Ellick put the question directly to the governor, telling Ronnie: “It’s your call.” The others in the room looked shocked. Defying
the first lady was a reckless move for someone so junior on the staff.

  “Tom’s right,” Ronnie said. “We’re going to do it.”

  The film shoot went off without incident, but Ellick knew he would never make his way back into the first lady’s good graces. “I could see check mark number one against Tom Ellick,” he recalled. Ellick began having a recurring nightmare in which he was wading into a deep river with Nancy Reagan on his shoulders. By the time the 1970 election rolled around, he got word that he was among the “less desirable” aides whose services would not be needed in the governor’s second term.

  “She really, truly devoted her life to this man, and I respect and admire her for that, but as far as wanting to be around her in a working environment, that’s probably the last thing in the world that I wanted to do, and, frankly, one of the last things anybody on the staff wanted to do. They just didn’t want to deal with her,” Ellick said. Ronnie’s secretary Helene von Damm put it this way: “Everyone tensed when she came into the office.”

  Behind her back, her husband’s aides called her Governor Nancy. No detail, it seemed, was too small to escape her eye. The appearance of the suite of offices where Ronnie spent his days was of particular concern to her. She scolded the staff if she saw a chair askew, or a stack of papers on a desk, or a dirty ashtray. Nancy, who would sometimes joke that she was “a frustrated interior decorator,” also oversaw a major renovation of the governor’s drab suite. The only decoration its previous occupant Pat Brown had left behind was a tomahawk hanging on the wall. Nancy replaced the carpet that was full of holes, had the orange paneling stained a darker, richer color, and installed cream-colored draperies. She was particularly proud of a set of gold-rush-era prints she had excavated from a state storage facility at historic Sutter’s Fort in Sacramento. When she saw how the governor’s assistant Curtis Patrick was hanging them in the hallway, she went into a rage. The first lady’s shouting could be heard from Ronnie’s inner office.

  Aides learned early not to take any complaints about Nancy to the governor. “We all thought of her as a demanding and somewhat aloof person. But in his adoring eyes, she was the sweetest, gentlest, most wonderful person in the world,” von Damm wrote. “Ronald Reagan didn’t even seem to see the same person the rest of us saw. When an aggrieved staffer once approached the governor about something Mrs. R had done, Governor Reagan was so utterly incredulous and completely unbelieving (‘You must be wrong. My Nancy wouldn’t do that.’) that no one ever tried to talk to him about her again.”

  When Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver told Ronnie that his wife, Carolyn, was pregnant, the governor told him to pray that it was a girl.

  “What about Ron?” Deaver asked him, knowing the governor’s affection for his youngest child.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t trade Ron for anything,” Ronnie replied. “But when you have a daughter, you get to see your wife grow up all over again.”

  Ronnie was indulgent of—and even somewhat amused by—Nancy’s inability to shrug off his critics. “She bleeds pretty good,” he said affectionately. The first lady canceled their subscription to the Sacramento Bee, which had been relentlessly critical of him; Ronnie didn’t tell her he was still reading the capital’s leading newspaper at the office. Once, on a commercial flight from Sacramento to San Diego, she overheard three men in the row behind her criticizing the governor’s spending cuts. Nancy leaned her seat back until she was practically in their laps and told her astonished fellow passengers: “That’s my husband you’re talking about! You don’t know what you’re saying. He’s going on television tonight, and if you watch him, you’ll learn the real story of the budget.”

  When she or Ronnie came under fire, Nancy retreated to her bathtub, where she soaked and fantasized about the arguments she wished she could have with the offending reporter or political adversary. “I was sensational during these encounters—I could always think of just the right thing to say. And, of course, with nobody to answer back, I always came out the winner,” she recalled later. “I finished those baths feeling great. I stopped holding those imaginary conversations before we moved to Washington, and it’s a good thing, too. Otherwise, I would have spent eight solid years in the tub.”

  Though Nancy did not weigh in often on policy, she wielded a heavy hand as the chief guardian of her husband’s well-being. On her orders, he left the office nearly every day at five o’clock. As he headed home, Ronnie would tell everyone else to do so as well. She made sure Ronnie had his raincoat when it was wet outside and ordered him to turn off his favorite show, Mission: Impossible, when it was time for bed. “She would call in and ask what the schedule was like for the governor, and did he bring his cough syrup, or can we get him some soup for lunch, or something like that. I would think, ‘Why is she calling so much? We’re busy here,’ ” Ronnie’s secretary, Kathy Osborne, recounted.

  But once, Osborne had to run something to the executive residence and found Ronnie walking around with a box of Kleenex in his hands, red nosed and obviously running a fever. Nancy followed her husband, pleading for him to stay home and warning that it would take him longer to get better if he didn’t. Ronnie told Nancy that there was a busload of kids coming in from Bakersfield, and he wouldn’t disappoint them by not showing up. So, he ended up going to work. That glimpse of their home life gave Osborne a new appreciation of why Ronnie needed a protector. “I thought, ‘You know, he’s so lucky that he has somebody who’s so devoted to him, who’s worried about him. The state will get along just fine without him for a day if he has to stay home and take care of his cold.’ That was my first clue that she is a very strong woman, she’s very devoted, and she’s looking out for her husband. And he was an extremely happy man because of that,” Osborne said.

  As attuned as she was to Ronnie’s image, it was perhaps inevitable that Nancy would clash with her husband’s wisecracking communications director, Lyn Nofziger. Friction between the two of them went back to the gubernatorial campaign, when Nofziger told Nancy that her gardenia scent smelled like “dime-store perfume.” She didn’t speak to him for days. He soon became familiar with the fire-and-ice quality of her fury: “One thing about Nancy, you can tell when she’s angry with you. You either get hollered at or get the silent treatment.”

  Nancy mistrusted Nofziger’s closeness with reporters (he had been one himself), and thought he was failing at his duty when one of them wrote a story she didn’t like. She frowned upon the communications director’s rumpled suits, untucked shirts, and uncombed hair, as well as his habit of padding around the office in his socks. “He wasn’t suave, he wasn’t sophisticated, and he didn’t really look the part that she wanted those around her husband to look,” recalled Nofziger’s research assistant, Karen Hanson, who later married Tom Ellick. Reagan biographer Edmund Morris wrote that Nofziger “looked like a used sleeping bag.” But Nofziger joked that his dishevelment actually provided a strategic benefit: the contrast made the governor look good.

  Tension between the first lady and her husband’s chief spokesman came to a head in a crisis that occurred early in Ronnie’s tenure as governor. Rumors began circulating in the summer of 1967 about a “homosexual ring”—or as Nofziger put it, a “daisy chain”—in the governor’s office. The stories centered around the activities of Ronnie’s first chief of staff (the job title then was “executive secretary”), a man named Phil Battaglia, who was in his early thirties, married, and a father of two. Battaglia was said to have a penchant for hiring attractive young men and having them accompany him whenever business took him away from Sacramento. Where talk of someone’s sexual orientation might have raised few eyebrows in Hollywood—and, indeed, the Reagans had moved comfortably in circles where people made no secret of their homosexuality—attitudes were far different in politics.

  A potential for scandal was not the only reason people around Ronnie were gunning for Battaglia. The pudgy lawyer was brilliant and had done a good job running the 1966 campaign as its state chairma
n; Ronnie called him “my strong right arm.” But once Reagan was elected, Battaglia’s big ego took over. He sometimes acted as though he were governor. Battaglia made decisions without consulting anyone, was frequently absent without explanation, and committed the cardinal sin of seeming like he was trying to outshine the boss. So, when the rumors about him started, some of the governor’s aides and advisers seized upon them and undertook a slipshod, almost comedic investigation.

  They tried and failed to bug Battaglia’s office, botched an attempt to break into the apartment of a supposed male paramour, and put a tail on him that came up with—well, with pretty much nothing. But as Nofziger described it: “We knew in our minds, though no place else for sure, that there was hanky panky.” The coup plotters put together a dossier, which was really just a compilation of gossip, and delivered it to the governor and his wife at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado, where Ronnie was recuperating from a prostate operation.

  “Eleven of us barged in unannounced. Nancy, who had just finished showering, at our insistence joined us wearing a terry cloth robe with a towel wrapped around her head. Naturally, the Reagans were curious,” Nofziger wrote later. “I handed each of them a copy of our report. We waited silently as they sat side by side on the sofa in the living room and read. Nancy finished first and gave us a quizzical look.”

  It was decided that Battaglia would be quietly fired. Holmes Tuttle was tasked with delivering the news to the shocked aide, because everyone knew Ronnie was incapable of cutting anyone loose. They also agreed to put out a story that Battaglia’s departure was voluntary. In August 1967 he announced that he wanted to return to practicing law in Southern California and did not discourage speculation that he would also be laying the groundwork for a possible Reagan presidential run the following year. But Battaglia soon resurfaced in Sacramento, trading on his presumed closeness to the governor to build a high-profile lobbying business. “His continuing presence around the administration was an irritation to those of us who knew the whole story. Nancy was among them,” Nofziger wrote in his memoir. “One day in my presence, she asked in exasperation, ‘Why doesn’t someone do something about Phil?’ ”