The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 22

  Few understood better than Nancy the strategic value of entertaining, and she seethed as she saw the Fords turn it to their advantage. “I’ve never known the White House to be used by either party the way it has been used in this campaign,” she said in an interview with Time magazine’s Bonnie Angelo. “The White House stands for something. I don’t think it should be concerned about uncommitted delegates—the dinner invitations, that sort of thing.” Nor had that been the only advantage that came with incumbency. Nancy envied how Betty Ford could step off Air Force One for political events looking fresh and lovely, while she spent the lean days of her husband’s campaign bouncing around the country on a yellow prop plane they called the Flying Banana, with rarely an opportunity to powder her nose or run a comb through her hair.

  * * *

  The 1976 campaign also put Nancy under a new kind of scrutiny. Amid the feminist movement and in the openness of the post-Watergate era, voters wanted to hear from potential first ladies on topics they had never been asked to discuss in the past. “There was a time, as recent as 1968, when all anybody wanted to know about a presidential candidate’s wife were her favorite recipes, her hobbies, whether she bought her clothes off the rack, and the ages of her children,” a front-page New York Times story by Judy Klemesrud noted. “But that was ’68. By 1972, household questions began to go the way of the butter churn, and nowadays the wives are questioned almost as intensely as their husbands are about the issues. They also have become fair game for intimate questions about their personal opinions and lives—a situation that some of them find both distasteful and unfortunate.”

  Driving some of this new interest was the refreshing and unconventional style of the woman who was then living in the White House. As the Republican race heated up, Nancy found herself portrayed as the uptight, antifeminist foil to vivacious first lady Betty Ford, a onetime dancer and model. Though they both had backgrounds in show business, Betty and Nancy could hardly have been more different in temperament or image. The thoroughly modern first lady wore mood rings and danced to disco. She said that the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, which her husband had criticized, was “the best thing in the world.” Betty also acknowledged that her children had probably smoked marijuana, which she considered as harmless as her own generation’s underage experimentation with beer, and said she would have no objection if her daughter, Susan, engaged in premarital sex. Against the wishes of her husband’s advisers, she advocated for the Equal Rights Amendment, which would write into the US Constitution a prohibition against discrimination because of gender. After she gave a particularly controversial 60 Minutes interview in 1975, White House press secretary Ron Nessen told reporters: “The president has long since ceased to be perturbed or surprised by his wife’s remarks.”

  Nor would it have done any good if he had. At an International Women’s Year Conference in Cleveland, Betty Ford declared that being first lady should not prevent her from holding and expressing her own views. “Why should my husband’s job, or yours, prevent us from being ourselves?” she said. “Being ladylike does not require silence.” She horrified some conservatives, but her overall popularity soared to 75 percent. During the 1976 campaign, there were bumper stickers and buttons that said: “Vote for Betty’s Husband.”

  Nancy, on the other hand, never publicly gave any indication that she disagreed with her husband on anything. Which does not mean she didn’t. Her son, Ron, believes that Nancy, if she were voicing her own opinion, would not have opposed the ERA. “She’d have thought, ‘Well, that makes sense. Sure, that’s fine,’ ” he speculated. “A little in the same way that he was antiabortion, and she would kind of go along.… I think privately she was not at all antichoice.” (In 1994, with her husband out of office, Nancy declared that while she was personally against abortion, “I believe in a woman’s choice.”)

  During the first two days of the Republican convention, amid a behind-the-scenes battle over the remaining uncommitted delegates, the increasingly open friction between the two women became a delicious subplot. Nancy and Betty sat five seats apart at a luncheon given by the National Federation of Republican Women and did not acknowledge each other. Their rivalry boiled over in the convention hall in what Time dubbed the “contest of the queens.” As its correspondent Bonnie Angelo wrote in a dispatch to her editors: “While the two principals remained secluded in their hotel suites, as tribal rites demand of candidates and brides before the ceremony, the wives became surrogates, the rally point for the opposing forces.”

  Nancy upstaged Betty the first night. When she entered her glassed-in VIP booth in Kemper Arena, the hall erupted in glee and foot stomping that went on for more than fifteen minutes, during which Betty Ford’s arrival at the opposite end went practically unnoticed. Not so the second night. Late in the afternoon, the Ford campaign quietly asked many of the VIPs to relinquish their tickets in the gallery so that it could be packed with Ford supporters. They cheered when Betty came into the hall around eight o’clock, dressed in a sunshine-yellow dress, with her family in tow. Seated beside her was the universally recognizable pop singer Tony Orlando, one of the biggest stars of the midseventies.

  Nancy had not originally intended to be there. But Ron called his mother from the hotline in the hall. “Gee, Mom,” he pleaded, “why don’t you come over here and show them what a real reception is like?” So, Nancy did, bringing along an entourage of her friends. The Reagan delegates on the floor whooped at her surprise entrance. A CBS commentator noted: “One gets the definite impression here that the wives of the candidates for the presidential nomination are being moved like pawns, or perhaps like queens, in a chess game.” But by then, Betty had figured out her checkmate. On cue, the convention band struck up “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” Orlando’s biggest hit. The singer swept the first lady into his arms, and the entire crowd’s attention turned to them as they began dancing in the aisle.

  The duel merited a five-column, front-page headline in the next day’s New York Times: “Betty Ford Bests Nancy Reagan on Applause.” As Angelo noted in her file to her editors: “The gamesmanship between the two wives was a spontaneous moment of levity that will be remembered long after the dreary speeches have been forgotten.” But Betty, amid her triumph, could not resist taking a final, contemptuous shot at Nancy. “She was a working girl as an actress,” the first lady said in an interview with Angelo. “I just think that when Nancy met Ronnie, that was it, as far as her own life was concerned. She just fell apart at the seams.”

  It would not be the last time that an adversary read Mrs. Ronald Reagan so wrong. For Nancy, 1976 had been a brutal year but an experience that made her tougher and wiser. That losing campaign stood out more vividly in her memory than any of the four races that Ronnie won. No other had so much drama, so much emotion, so many what-ifs. Nancy would go over the mistakes and missed opportunities again and again in her mind. “When I first went into politics, I was constantly getting my feelings hurt. I’m better than I used to be, but if somebody knows a way to make it feel less painful, I wish they’d tell me,” she said. “There are lots of things that, looking back, we might have done differently. Maybe if you’d stayed an extra day in Florida, or had money to go into Ohio, where Ronnie got forty-five percent of the vote without campaigning. Or if we had the money to go into New Jersey and New York and Pennsylvania. But we had no money. No money.”

  On the night that Ford was to be formally nominated by the convention, the Reagans had a quiet dinner with family and a few others in their suite at the Alameda Plaza Hotel. Then, they all sat in the living room and watched the roll call of the delegates. Shortly after midnight, West Virginia cast the votes that put Ford over the top. The final count came in at 1,187 votes for Ford and 1,070 for Reagan. “I’m so sorry that you all have to see this,” Ronnie said. He talked about the things he had hoped to do in the White House; the things that it appeared he never would. What he had most wanted, he said, was a chance to sit a
cross a negotiating table from the Soviets.

  Nancy, fighting back tears, proposed a toast.

  “Honey,” she said, “in all the years we’ve been married, you have never done anything to disappoint me. And I’ve never been prouder of you than I am now.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  On November 2, 1976, Gerald Ford narrowly lost to Jimmy Carter, a former governor of Georgia. It was the closest electoral college margin in sixty years. Carter, a born-again Baptist, was a peanut farmer who came from nowhere to win the Democratic nomination. He ran as the cleansing force the country needed after Richard Nixon. America, it was clear, wanted to turn a page. Stu Spencer, who had managed Ford’s campaign, put it this way: “After Watergate, if Republicans had nominated Jesus Christ that year, he would have lost too.”

  But many in the party establishment believed Ronnie also shared part of the blame for the GOP defeat. They thought he had weakened Ford by running against him in the primary; that his speech from the GOP convention stage had sounded more like a battle cry than a concession; that he had not campaigned with enough enthusiasm for the nominee during the general election season. And they were right about how Ronnie felt. Those around him could see that he had not let go of his anger at how the Republican contest had played out. “To my surprise, Reagan, who is seldom bitter, went to California a bitter man, convinced that Ford had stolen the nomination from him,” Nofziger wrote later.

  As the Reagans looked toward returning to a more normal life and figuring out their next move, there was a new family drama to deal with. Just weeks after the election, eighteen-year-old Ron announced that he was dropping out of Yale University to pursue… ballet. Dance, he declared, was his true passion. Nancy was flabbergasted: “I had never heard the word ballet cross his lips.”

  Ron, who had barely begun his freshman year, broke the news to his parents as they were making a two-hour drive from New York to Connecticut. The three were to be Thanksgiving guests at the waterfront home of the Reagans’ old friends conservative publisher William F. Buckley Jr. and his socialite wife, Pat. There was a holiday meal planned and a traditional football game, which that year had Reagan father and son as opposing team captains. In between the festivities, just about everyone took a turn trying to talk Ron into abandoning his new ambition, or, at least, into finishing his first semester. It was futile, Bill Buckley recalled: “Individually and in groups—my brother Jim, a Yale graduate, had a round or two—we attempted to make the point that Ron Jr. should give the academic life a better try. He in turn stressed the point that already, at eighteen, he was far behind in studying dance.”

  Ronnie and Nancy realized their son had given them no say in the matter, so they tried to figure out how to make the best of it. Ronnie turned for advice to Hollywood movie and dancing legend Gene Kelly, who suggested that Ron should study at the Stanley Holden Dance Center in Los Angeles. Though Ron was older than other beginners—some started serious training as early as age twelve—it turned out he had some talent. Within four years, he would work his way up the esteemed Joffrey Ballet and be named to its senior company.

  At the Holden Dance Center, Ron met and fell in love with Doria Palmieri, who worked there and was seven years older than he was. Nancy was not thrilled. “Frankly, I didn’t particularly like Doria then. I guess I was thinking back to Ron’s other relationship, and because Doria, too, was older, I was afraid this one would come to the same disastrous end, and Ron would wind up hurt,” Nancy wrote. His romance with Doria notwithstanding, Ron’s decision to pursue ballet also set off speculation that he was gay. The rumors would continue for decades and were awkward, given the social conservatism of his father’s political supporters.

  Though Ronnie and Nancy could not deter their son from the path he was determined to take, they also chose not to make it any easier for their son by providing him financial assistance. Ron and Doria moved to New York, where he made less than $300 a week as a dancer and was laid off periodically. Ron was so strapped for money that he sometimes put water instead of milk on his cereal. Years later, at the depth of the 1982 recession, national headlines would reveal that the president’s own son was collecting unemployment, one of millions out of work at a time when the jobless rate was higher than it had been since the Great Depression.

  In his parents’ willingness to let him struggle, Ron saw several impulses at work, particularly on the part of Nancy, who was the one who kept the closest watch on the family finances. The youngest Reagan had left the nest, but his mother wanted to make sure he could not fly too far. The allure of independence, she hoped he would learn, was just an illusion. “It was sort of mutual, I suppose. I mean, they weren’t offering, I was not going to ask,” Ron told me. “My father was, by nature, very generous. He’d pick up the check anytime. But my mother was not. My mother was one of those personalities—if somebody else was getting it, it’s being taken from her. You know, your gain is her loss. Controlling the purse strings is a way to control the person. If you’re financially comfortable, then you could decide to leave, you could decide to just walk off. And so, it was a way to keep you on a tether.”

  Ronnie and Nancy also had their own life choices to consider. Chief among them: would he run again in 1980? They were settling back into Pacific Palisades, which had much to recommend it. Ronnie was spending time at his new ranch and making a handsome living on the speaking circuit. Nancy returned to the embrace of her friends in Los Angeles, and an even busier social schedule than she had enjoyed before they entered politics. After a presidential campaign that had often kept them apart, they could savor the simple and pure joy of being together. On Valentine’s Day 1977, shortly before their silver wedding anniversary, Ronnie left this note:

  Dear St. Valentine

  I’m writing to you about a beautiful young lady who has been in this household for 25 years now—come March 4th.

  I have a request to make of you but before doing so feel you should know more about her. For one thing she has 2 hearts—her own and mine. I’m not complaining. I gave her mine willingly and like it right where it is. Her name is Nancy but for some time now I’ve called her Mommie and don’t believe I could change.

  My request of you is—could you on this day whisper in her ear that someone loves her very much and more and more each day? Also tell her this “someone” would run down like a dollar clock without her so she must always stay where she is.

  Then tell her if she wants to know who that “someone” is just to turn her head to the left. I’ll be across the room waiting to see if you told her. If you’ll do this for me, I’ll be very happy knowing that she knows I love her with all my heart.

  Thank you,

  “Someone”

  For their anniversary two and a half weeks later, Ronnie bought Nancy a canoe that he christened Tru Luv. It was a sentimental nod to a long-standing joke between the two of them. She had teased him since they were married about how perfunctory his proposal had been. In the scene of her dreams, Nancy often told Ronnie, he would have popped the question as she had seen it done in old movie romances: the two of them in a canoe at sunset, him strumming a ukulele, and her reclining with her fingers trailing in the water. When Ronnie took her out for their first ride in the Tru Luv, he apologized that he hadn’t brought a ukulele. “So would it be all right if I just hummed?” he asked. Nancy pronounced the gesture “unbelievably corny, but I loved it.”

  Not quite a year later, Nancy received a letter from a young newlywed in Washington State named Adrienne Bassuk, who asked her advice on how to have a successful marriage. Nancy’s handwritten reply, dated January 10, 1978, is in the files of the Reagan Library. “I’ve been very lucky—however, I don’t ever remember once sitting down and mapping out a blueprint. It just became ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ very naturally and easily. And you live as you never have before despite problems, separation, and conflicts,” Nancy wrote. “I suppose mainly you have to be willing—and want—to give. It’s not always 50-50. Sometimes one
partner gives 90% but then sometimes the other one does—so it all evens out. It’s not always easy, and it’s something you have to work at, which is what I don’t think many young people realize today.

  “But the rewards are so great. I can’t remember what my life was like before, and can’t imagine not being married to Ronnie. When two people really love each other, they help each other stay alive and grow. There’s nothing more fulfilling, and you become a complete person for the first time.”

  As happy—and complete—as Nancy and Ronnie were with each other, politics was never far from their thoughts. In the rubble that remained of the Republican Party, Ronnie was the closest thing to an heir apparent. But some of those closest to him were doubtful that he would make another presidential run. Though he was still fit and vigorous, people were beginning to raise the issue of his age. On Inauguration Day 1981, he would be just weeks away from turning seventy. That meant that if he were elected, Ronnie would be the oldest president ever to take office. An even bigger question was how badly Ronnie wanted it. Some of his advisers wondered whether he still had the fire that had ignited that bold challenge to Ford in 1976.

  His wife, on the other hand, had no ambivalence about the prospect. Nancy was convinced Ronnie should run. As she saw it, “everything seemed preordained, really, after the 1976 campaign. He was ready, and everything seemed to fall into place.” She told him he had to try again. Without Nancy’s push, “I don’t think he would have made the ’80 race—that’s what he told me, at least,” said Ed Rollins, one of his political advisers. “She was the one who believed in him.”