The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Read online

  “Marriage is a full-time job, and I think a woman’s real happiness and fulfillment is found in her home. You can have outside interests—and should have, I think—but within the framework of the marriage.”

  After Ronnie signed the abortion law, Nancy wrote back and forth with people on both sides of the increasingly explosive subject. “I personally believe that a woman should have the right to decide whether or not she will have a child, but this decision should be made before a child is created. Frankly, I approve of birth control methods,” she wrote to a woman who wanted to see abortion become more liberalized. To a man who opposed it, she responded: “I supported my husband’s abortion law, but both he and I are very distressed at the way it has been abused. The original bill he signed was to permit abortions when there was clear evidence that the birth would harm the mother—in other words, based on the moral principle of self-defense. However, many doctors have been using the mental health provision to perform abortions on anyone who asks. This clearly was not the original intention of the law.” (In fact, Ronnie had known that this would likely happen when he signed the law and had said so.)

  In addition to engaging in these correspondences with individual constituents, Nancy also spoke up more in public. In a 1970 interview, Associated Press reporter Edith M. Lederer asked Nancy whether a woman should have a choice on whether to become a mother. “But she does have a choice,” Nancy retorted. “It starts with a movement of the head either yes or no.” As for the youth of America, who were protesting on campuses across the country: “If they are concerned about things that need to be corrected, how can they correct them if they’re so doped up they don’t know what they’re doing?”

  Nancy also found her own causes to pursue, which among other things offered her outlets from constantly fretting over Ronnie. The doctor’s daughter made frequent trips to hospitals, usually with no publicity. It would have surprised her critics to see how at ease she was around the sick, the disabled, the disfigured, and how comfortable she made them feel.

  One day in 1967, while touring the Pacific State Hospital, a facility for people who were then known as the “mentally retarded” or “feebleminded,” Nancy learned of a new, federally funded program called Foster Grandparents. It was started under Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty by Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law who directed LBJ’s Office of Economic Opportunity. Foster Grandparents paired senior citizens with needy children and paid them a small stipend for serving as friends and mentors. Nancy loved the concept. “What excited me most about this program was that both sides benefited. Older people, who often feel lonely, unneeded, and unloved, have so much to give—especially to children, who need more love and attention than any institution can provide,” she said. “When you bring these two groups together, each one provides what the other needs, and everyone is better off.” Nancy convinced Ronnie to expand the program to all state hospitals and continued to champion it through her years in the White House. By 1985, there were 245 Foster Grandparents projects serving sixty-five thousand children across the country.

  The California first lady was especially conscientious about visiting wounded Vietnam servicemen. “She never just flipped from bed to bed—she’d spend hours. She got phone numbers of their sweethearts and their mothers and would go home and call them,” said her frequent traveling companion Nancy Reynolds, who herself would often have to leave the room because she couldn’t take the sight of the young men’s grievous injuries. Nancy was struck, too, by how the attitudes of the returning veterans began to shift—from a conviction in 1967 and 1968 that they had sacrificed for a just cause, to a growing bitterness in later years that the war that had cost them so much was unwinnable. This drew her as well to the wives, mothers, and children of the servicemen who were being held as prisoners of war by North Vietnam. She wrote a syndicated advice column and donated the money she made from it to the National League of Families of American Prisoners of War and Missing in Action. When the POWs started coming home in early 1973, following a peace agreement ending hostilities between the United States and Communist North Vietnam, Nancy organized a series of dinners for returning Californians. “If I don’t have a chance to put my arms around them, I’m going to pop,” she told Ronnie.

  They became close to one returning POW in particular: future Arizona senator John McCain, and his first wife, Carol. As Carol told the story to me, the McCains were at a reception at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, when a woman introduced herself as Nancy Reynolds, and said her boss, the governor of California, would like to meet the McCains. “As luck would have it, we were going to LA,” where the Reagans spent their weekends, “so we went to their home, and we just struck up a friendship,” Carol McCain said. “They were just such lovely people. You couldn’t help but be crazy about them.”

  Nancy would later say that celebrating the return of the POWs was one of the most gratifying things she had ever done. She saved all the souvenirs the newly freed men gave her: letters, poems, a tin spoon once used for prison rations, a pair of lieutenant’s bars, a package of Vietnamese cigarettes. “When anyone asks me what was the high point of my husband’s administration, I tell them this was it,” she said.

  By then, the Reagans were near the end of Ronnie’s second term as governor. He knew he would not run again, but what he would do beyond that remained unclear. He bought a third ranch, this one a 688-acre retreat twenty-nine miles northwest of Santa Barbara, for which he paid a reported $527,000 in 1974. It was located at the end of seven miles of road that twisted upward into the Santa Ynez Mountains to reveal a view of the Pacific. Though it had been called Tip Top Ranch, the Reagans rechristened it Rancho del Cielo, a Spanish phrase that means “Ranch in the Sky.” It had a tiny adobe house, which had been built in 1872 and was badly in need of work. But the prospect of devoting countless hours to making it perfect only added to Ronnie’s love of the spot. “From the first day we saw it, Rancho del Cielo cast a spell on us. No place before or since has ever given Nancy and me the joy and serenity it does,” Ronnie wrote in his post-presidential memoir.

  Figuring out what he wanted to do professionally was more of a challenge. Lou Cannon conducted several interviews with the governor in 1973 and 1974: “Each time Reagan came across as conflicted. Should he run for president? Should he return to what he called ‘the mashed potato circuit’ and make millions of dollars as an inspirational speaker? Should he retire, with Nancy, to his ranch? At different times, he expressed all three things—and at the same time.”

  Ronnie’s tenure as governor ended on a bitter note. In the wake of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal and his resignation, the 1974 election saw a nationwide Democratic sweep. In California, voters chose as their new governor Jerry Brown, the son of the man that Ronnie had beaten eight years before. After the movers packed up the Reagans’ house in Sacramento, Nancy sat alone in the bedroom and looked out at the camellias blooming in the garden she had come to love. “I thought, ‘So this is how it ends. Our eight years of politics are over.’ True, some of Ronnie’s advisers were talking about Ronnie’s running for president, but I didn’t really expect that to happen. As we left Sacramento that night, I honestly believed we were leaving politics forever.”

  But for a while, at least, the big decisions could wait. There was still the imperative of earning a living. When the Reagans moved back to Los Angeles, Deaver set up a public relations firm in Westwood, not far from Pacific Palisades, with a partner, Peter D. Hannaford. Ronnie was their chief client. Hannaford and Deaver sold and helped write Ronnie’s nationally syndicated column, which was quickly picked up by more than 170 newspapers, and daily, sharp-edged radio commentary, which was carried by 350 stations reaching as many as fifteen million people. Deaver also traveled with Ronnie to lucrative speaking engagements, where the former governor could command $5,000 fees—big money in those days.

  Soon it became clear that the pieces were falling into place for something much, much bigger. Ronnie’s prof
ile was rising. He was building a political network across the country. More and more, his name was being mentioned as a potential presidential candidate in 1976. More and more, that was the door that fortune and opportunity seemed ready to open for him and Nancy.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  From the very outset of Ronnie’s political career, his admirers had seen an aura of presidential inevitability around him. Ballots had barely been counted in the 1966 gubernatorial election before he was being talked up as a national prospect. Two days after he won, the lead story on the front page of the New York Times pronounced him one of his party’s four brightest hopes for 1968, along with Michigan governor George Romney, former vice president Richard M. Nixon, and Illinois senator elect Charles H. Percy. California’s film-star-turned-political-star, the Times wrote under a four-column headline, had become “without a day in office, the favorite presidential candidate of Republican conservatives.”

  This was not just idle chatter among reporters and political handicappers. Though they would later refuse to admit it, Ronnie and Nancy began looking toward the White House even before he was inaugurated as governor. On a Thursday afternoon just nine days after his first election, a half dozen members of Ronnie’s political brain trust gathered in the Reagans’ living room. Among them were consultants Stu Spencer and Bill Roberts; their partner, Fred Haffner; press spokesman Lyn Nofziger; and Phil Battaglia, his incoming chief of staff. They were brought together by Tom Reed, who had been Ronnie’s Northern California chairman. Reed had a project in mind, something he was calling “Prairie Fire.” At those two words, Reed recalled, “Ronnie’s face hardened; he knew what was coming.”

  Reed pushed on: “Lyndon Johnson is a disaster. Vietnam and our economy confirm that. Even so, given Johnson’s ego, he’ll surely run again in ’68. We cannot let him succeed. The Republicans on the horizon are all boring losers, Ron. You’ve got the talent and now the momentum to run and win two years from now. I want to start putting the pieces in place, to start collecting ’68 delegates and to plan for your election to the presidency.” They talked for hours, until the last rays of the sun sinking into the ocean streamed through the windows in Pacific Palisades. Ronnie gave what they all read as a tentative go-ahead for this presumptuous plan, though those involved would in retrospect understand that he approached it with equal measures of ambition and ambivalence. As her husband and his advisers strategized about which moneymen and national political talent to recruit, Nancy said almost nothing. Reed had the sense she was trying to absorb it all.

  In fact, audacious as it was, this was a proposition that had been germinating for years. Back when Ronnie was still on the speaking circuit in 1962, his daughter Maureen had been among the early voices urging him to run for governor. “Mermie,” he wrote her, “I really appreciate your support, but if we’re going to talk about what could be, well, I could be President—ha, ha!—But of course, that’s not going to happen, is it?”

  As the 1968 presidential primary season approached, the tricky part for Ronnie would be mounting a campaign for president without actually declaring that he was doing it. He was, after all, a new governor with plenty on his hands just learning how to do his day job. He was also enough of a realist to understand what a long shot a White House bid would be. Reed and the others settled on a strategy. They would get Ronnie’s name on the ballot in California as an ostensibly symbolic “favorite son.” His supporters could also put him in contention in states where there was an “opt-out” rule. In those states, he wouldn’t have to formally announce he was running, only demand that he be taken off the ballot if he wasn’t. Meanwhile, the new governor of California could travel the country, raising his national profile and connecting with influential officials and activists. Ronnie won conservative admirers wherever he went.

  Liberals also began to get an inkling that he shouldn’t be underestimated. In May 1967 California’s brand-new Republican governor surprised pretty much everyone by besting New York’s young Democratic senator Robert F. Kennedy in a debate over the Vietnam War. It was broadcast by CBS and billed as a Town Meeting of the World. An estimated fifteen million people tuned in to watch these two politicians, the rising stars of the Left and the Right, field questions from a hostile audience of international students. Ronnie stood up for America, its morality and its role in the world, while Kennedy came off as meek and apologetic. RFK was purported to have said afterward: “Who the fuck got me into this?”

  Not everyone on Ronnie’s team was enamored with his quiet project to put himself in the mix for the 1968 presidential nomination, or the subterfuge around it. When Ronnie asked Stu Spencer what he thought, his campaign strategist was blunt about his misgivings. Not only was the timing bad, Spencer said, but the political operation around the governor was simply not up to the task. He also warned Ronnie that there could be no such thing as a halfhearted campaign for president.

  “You’ve got no idea how to get there,” Spencer told Ronnie.

  “The office seeks the man,” Ronnie replied.

  “That’s bullshit,” Spencer retorted. “If you want to be president of the United States, you’ve got to get it, and you’ve got to fight for it.”

  As Ronnie wavered, with one foot in the race and one foot out, the 1968 election season took several twists that no one had anticipated. It turned out that all of their assumptions about how the election would play out were wrong. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, an antiwar candidate, challenged Johnson for the Democratic nomination and came surprisingly close to beating the incumbent president in the March 12 New Hampshire primary. Shortly after that, Robert F. Kennedy joined the race, which meant Johnson was facing not one but two strong challengers from within his own party.

  Just three weeks into primary season, on March 31, LBJ stunned the country by announcing that he would not seek reelection. Johnson’s loyal vice president, Hubert Humphrey, entered the contest on April 27 and became the front-runner, propelled by Democratic establishment support in states where party leaders controlled the delegate selection process. Then in June came another shock: on the night Robert F. Kennedy won the crucial California primary, he fell to an assassin’s bullet. After Kennedy’s murder, Ronnie and all the other presidential candidates were assigned Secret Service protection.

  The contest for the Republican nomination was fierce as well. As it took shape, the moderate Romney collapsed, and former vice president Richard M. Nixon surged. Nixon nailed down the South with an assist from his ally South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, a segregationist who had switched from the Democratic Party to the Republicans in 1964. Meanwhile, another segregationist, former Alabama governor George Wallace, ran on a third-party ticket, appealing to many of the same white conservatives that Ronnie did.

  All of this turmoil turned the GOP race into a battle for the soul of Republicanism—a three-way one pitting Ronnie against both Nixon and liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. It ended with a monumental embarrassment for Ronnie at the 1968 convention in Miami, where Nixon arrived just short of the 667 delegates he needed to win on the first ballot. Ronnie and Rockefeller made an informal, ill-conceived pact to try to stop Nixon by peeling away uncommitted delegates from the Left and the Right. It failed spectacularly, and Ronnie ended up seconding Nixon’s nomination. He retreated back to Sacramento with his reputation tarnished.

  As Reed sensed, Nancy had harbored reservations about this gambit from the start. With the political landscape so turbulent and Ronnie so new to politics, it was “way too early for this kind of thinking,” she told her husband and Deaver. But she took away an important lesson. “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,” Deaver wrote.

  Both Ronnie and Nancy would later act as if none of this had ever happened. “Ronnie never sought the nomination in 1968,” Nancy insisted in her 1980 memoir. She cla
imed the episode was “more misrepresented than almost anything Ronnie has ever done.” Her husband made the preposterous statement that running in 1968 “was the last thing on my mind.”

  Those statements flabbergasted Reed, but they also revealed something fundamental about the Reagans: their compulsion to rewrite every story that did not have a happy ending. “I had met with Reagan over 100 times in the company of others, often his wife, to discuss this project. We also consulted privately on another 21 occasions for one-on-one talks about the most sensitive aspects of our drive. I accompanied Reagan on dozens of politically funded flights on a chartered Jet Commander to meet with backers in our intended primary states, to talk with governors whom we might select as a running mate, or to solicit support from delegation members in swing-state Texas and the Thurmond-dominated South. When Lyndon Johnson later withdrew from, and Bobby Kennedy entered the Democratic contest in March 1968, we moved up to a chartered 727 jet to accommodate over 40 members of the traveling press,” Reed wrote. “How—or perhaps more accurately, why—did all of this campaigning slip the future president’s recall? That is a significant question, since Reagan’s proclivity to erase bad news from his memory remains an enigma to this day.”

  The other thing that both Reagans would take away from 1968 was this: if Ronnie wanted to be president, he would have to go all in. He and Nancy would not be the first to come away from a defeat with a better understanding of what it was going to take to win. As his biographer Edmund Morris put it, “The experience was good for a man who had always come easily by success. It toughened him, carved a few more seams contrary to the laugh lines, made him warier of hustings hustlers like Nofziger. He learned to pay more attention to his own ‘feel’ for the mood of American voters.”