The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 24

  Nancy picked up some of the slack by appearing in his stead, but she, too, confronted questions from worried grassroots supporters who wondered why Ronnie didn’t seem more engaged. Among the events on her schedule during the fall of 1979 was a swing through Iowa that included a pig roast in Mason City and a salad luncheon in Ottumwa. One briefing memo advised her to assure her husband’s backers that things were looking fine for Ronnie in a state where ground-level organizing was everything:

  Reflect the different status of the various campaigns. While RR has 100% name ID and established image, work is under way to identify supporters which already exist.

  Other campaigns are still at the first step attempting to establish name ID, campaign credibility and image. This effort requires visibility and big names while RFP [Reagan for President] is going to it’s [sic] strength—the people.

  Across the state line in Wisconsin, GOP activists were also feeling snubbed by a candidate who had pretty much ignored them in 1976 and visited the state only once in 1979. So, Nancy agreed to appear at a Republican women’s banquet in La Crosse on November 1. “Mrs. Reagan’s visit to Wisconsin at this time is crucial to maintaining morale of the Wisconsin [Reagan for President] due to experiences in 1976,” organizers wrote in a memo to her. “This psychological attitude cannot be stressed enough, as when people gathered in the intervening years between 1976 to the present, the fear that the Reagan Campaign will ignore Wisconsin is still very real. Every appearance in Wisconsin by Governor and Mrs. Reagan will aid in putting this fear to rest.” In her speech there, Nancy assured the women: “The ladies of our party are the glue that keeps campaigns running smoothly and provide the day-to-day operations to make sure that victory is ours on Election Day.”

  Whether the Reagans actually believed their own spin is unclear. But as the day of reckoning approached in Iowa, it was becoming increasingly obvious how badly they had miscalculated. Ronnie, still taking his above-the-fray posture, was absent when the GOP contenders debated in Des Moines in early January. With just over two weeks before the caucuses, that left the stage to six other candidates: Bush; Dole; ex-Texas governor John Connally; Senate minority leader Howard Baker of Tennessee; Phil Crane, a telegenic conservative congressman from Illinois; and independent-minded John Anderson, another House member from Illinois. Gleefully, they piled on the absent front-runner. “I want to say to Governor Reagan, wherever you are, I hope you’re having fun tonight because we are, and if you’re looking for a younger Ronald Reagan, with experience, I’m here,” Dole said, bringing laughter from the Iowa audience.

  Ronnie plummeted in the Iowa polls, from 50 percent to 25 percent. Still, expectations remained that he would come out ahead in the crowded field. Nor did he and Nancy seem to have been terribly worried. As the results rolled in on caucus night, January 21, the Reagans were more than 1,500 miles away. They spent the evening at the home of movie industry friends, watching a screening of the hot new film Kramer vs. Kramer, starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. They were shocked when pollster Richard Wirthlin called and delivered the news that Bush had edged past Ronnie to win by 2 percentage points.

  Suddenly the campaign was in deep trouble. If Ronnie couldn’t pull it out in New Hampshire just over a month later on February 26, the race was over. A small-state primary is political hand-to-hand combat. It cannot be won with money and advertising alone. And even if it could, Ronnie didn’t have the financial capacity to do it. His campaign was already bumping up against the legal spending limits, which meant that if he blew a lot of his funds in New Hampshire, there might be nothing left for the long march through the primaries ahead. “We’re going to change our tactics,” Ronnie told Sears. “We’re going to take that bus into every village and town in the state. We’re going to live in New Hampshire until Election Day.” Ronnie also remembered a tactical mistake he had made there in 1976: he had left the Granite State two days before the primary, thinking he had won, only to see Ford take it by a nose. “This time,” Ronnie told Sears, “we’re staying until it’s over.” Nancy had never seen her husband work so hard. For the next few weeks, Ronnie campaigned morning until night, a display of stamina that quieted some of the concerns about his age.

  But there were also some unforced errors. On February 16 Nancy created a controversy with a slip of the tongue at a big GOP dinner in Chicago. She was filling in for her husband, so that he could continue to stump in New Hampshire. Ronnie made a few comments to the Chicago crowd over a telephone that had been placed near a loudspeaker and rhapsodized about the spectacular sixteen-inch snowfall he was seeing at that moment in New England. It had transformed the barren winter landscape with a fresh coat of brilliant white. Well, Nancy blurted out, she wished he could be with her in Chicago, “to see all these beautiful white people.” Nancy immediately recognized her mistake and tried to recover. “These beautiful black and white people,” she said, though there were no African Americans in the room. The timing for such a gaffe could hardly have been worse. The press was already buzzing over another incident that had happened that same weekend. Ronnie had told an ethnic joke to a busload of reporters. The joke, which he had heard from his son Michael, involved Poles, Italians, the Mafia, cockfights, and a duck. So here they were, just ten days before the New Hampshire vote, with both the candidate and his wife having to apologize for racially and ethnically insensitive comments.

  Things turned Ronnie’s way the following Saturday, on the final weekend before the primary, when he and Bush were scheduled to debate in Nashua. The sponsoring newspaper, the Nashua Telegraph, withdrew its financial support for the debate after Dole complained to the Federal Election Commission that it would amount to an illegal contribution if the other candidates were excluded, and the FEC agreed. Ronnie’s campaign proposed to split the costs with Bush’s. But Bush refused, so the Reagan campaign picked up the entire $3,500 tab for the debate.

  By then, Sears had seen an uptick in Ronnie’s polling numbers. That suggested it would be better for him to face all the candidates on the debate stage rather than elevating Bush alone. So, Sears invited the others who were in New Hampshire to join the debate. Bush’s campaign called the change “an ambush.” Hoping to capitalize on their momentum coming out of Iowa, they did not want to be deprived of a head-to-head showdown against the front-runner. The sniping about the debate—who would be in it and who wouldn’t—soon became topic A in the race. “I really thought Bush’s people would be smart enough to know they were in a hole and they ought to just quit,” Sears told me, “but they persisted and demanded that the two of us debate—which, of course, teed off Howard Baker and everybody else that was running, ’cause it was their last chance to make a case to people.” The night of the debate, all the others showed up except for Connally, who was campaigning in South Carolina. The quartet of lesser candidates was instantly dubbed the “Nashua Four.”

  No one knew quite what was going to happen from there. With five minutes to go before the event was set to start, the scene in the Nashua High School gymnasium was pandemonium. At least eighty reporters were there to see how all of this would play out. The Reagans were waiting in a classroom, along with Baker, Dole, Crane, and Anderson. Everyone seemed confused. Then they heard a knock on the door. Someone from the Telegraph came in to warn them that if Ronnie didn’t get out there within three minutes, the whole thing would be called off.

  Sears was unsure what he wanted to do. He was dubious about sending his candidate into such a raucous and unpredictable circumstance, especially given Ronnie’s recent ethnic-joke gaffe and other mistakes he had been making lately on the campaign trail. God only knew what could happen in a setting as chaotic as this. That’s when Nancy stepped in and took over. “I know what you’re going to do,” she said firmly to the candidates. “You’re all going to go out there.”

  What Sears would realize later was that Nancy understood something fundamental about Ronnie that he didn’t. Even before this, she had advised the campaign manager that
he should never fear letting Ronnie do some improvising when a moment demanded it. “Just put him in the situation,” Nancy said. “He’ll be fine.” In fact, Nancy knew that this was how Ronnie performed best: when he was spontaneous by appearance, but, in truth, working off an internal script. She was confident that Ronnie would find something right for the moment tucked in the back of his mind—perhaps a line or a scene from an old movie, or something he had read somewhere. With a near-photographic recall, honed by all those years working as an actor, he had the ability to retrieve that kind of information under pressure. His brain worked like the stack of index cards that he held in his hand as he gave his speeches.

  “She wasn’t worried about what he would say, seemingly off the cuff, publicly,” Sears told me. “I didn’t realize this was good advice for a long time. Two or three of us who went through both campaigns used to joke a little bit that he really had sort of a record library in his brain, because if you were with him a lot, you’d find that certain things would touch on what we used to think of as a record, that it would play, word for word the same. There were a lot of them. It wasn’t just one or two. It was tons of them.”

  Bush was waiting on the stage, staring straight ahead. William Loeb III, the influential and notoriously cantankerous publisher of the conservative Manchester Union Leader, wrote later that the former CIA director looked like a little boy suddenly realizing that his mother had dropped him off at the wrong birthday party. Ronnie marched out and took his seat. The Nashua Four lined up against the blue curtain backdrop: from left to right, Anderson, Baker, Dole, and Crane. They stood motionless as the school gym erupted into cheers and hoots. There were shouts to get them some chairs. Someone joked that the diminutive Baker could stand on the table. Telegraph editor Jon Breen, the moderator, tried to proceed to the first question. Ronnie’s face flushed brightly, and he raised a defiant index finger.

  “Before the question, you asked me if you could make an announcement first, and I asked you for permission to make an announcement myself—”

  “Would the sound man please turn Mr. Reagan’s mike off?” Breen ordered the engineer, Bob Molloy.

  Ronnie rose and picked up the microphone from the table. “Is this on?” he asked, his anger rising.

  “Would you turn that microphone off, please?” Breen implored.

  Ronnie planted himself back in his chair, made eye contact with the sound engineer, and roared: “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!”

  In his fury, Ronnie mangled the name of the moderator, but it didn’t matter. The gymnasium exploded with cheers. Behind him, the Nashua Four applauded their rival. No one remembers much of what happened after that moment. Nor did it really matter. “I may have won the debate, the primary—and the nomination—right there,” Ronnie recalled later. “After the debate, our people told me the gymnasium parking lot was littered with Bush-for-President badges.” More than a dozen years later, Nancy had Ronnie’s microphone retrieved from the office pigeonhole where Molloy had stored it, never to be used again. She put it on display in her husband’s presidential library.

  While Ronnie’s anger had been genuine, his line about paying for the microphone, which became an instant classic in politics, was not original. Spencer Tracy had used one very similar at a pivotal moment in the 1948 political satire State of the Union, a movie in which Tracy played, coincidentally, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Nancy had known Ronnie would find it—or something equally useful—in the recesses of his brain. “It was in the record library,” Sears said, “so she was absolutely right.”

  Ronnie was back on top, but the tensions within the campaign had only grown worse in the weeks before the crucial primary. When Nancy got wind that Sears was trying to get rid of Meese, she put out distress calls to old allies, including the exiled Deaver. At night, as Ronnie prepared for bed at whatever hotel they were in, Nancy roamed the hallways, meeting quietly with various factions within the operation. She was desperate to smooth things where she could and figure out whether there was a solution to all of this. “When I finally got to bed, Ronnie would ask me where I had been, and I would make up various excuses,” she recalled. “For as long as possible, I delayed telling him how much tension there was; I wanted to protect him from these undercurrents so he could concentrate on campaigning. For a while, I succeeded. But I soon realized that we were merely putting a Band-Aid over a serious problem.”

  Nancy knew what had to happen: Sears had to be neutralized. So, she went to work convincing Ronnie that changes must be made. “She reviewed for him the body count of people who had been his friends,” Deaver recounted later. “Nofziger was gone. And Deaver. Meese would be next. In her usual way, Nancy had recruited Paul Laxalt and Dick Wirthlin, associates of long standing, to call Reagan. They convinced him that he had to choose between losing another confidant, Meese, and this group of ‘Washington mercenaries.’ ”

  Nancy had already asked Justin Dart, a stalwart from the Kitchen Cabinet, to start putting the campaign’s finances back in order. She sounded out Bill Clark, who had been Ronnie’s gubernatorial chief of staff, about the possibility of coming aboard to share authority with Sears. “The campaign is in chaos, and there’s no central direction,” she told Clark in a phone call. “Ronnie’s mind is fuzzy. He can’t think things through.”

  Clark agreed to meet with both Reagans at the ranch the second weekend in February, but he declined their entreaties to join the campaign. He said he couldn’t take a leave from the seat on the California Supreme Court to which Ronnie had appointed him. Privately, Clark later told his fellow Sacramento veteran Tom Reed that he believed the operation was so dysfunctional that it was “pretty hopeless. I can’t leave my judicial bench to join that maelstrom.”

  When Clark turned Ronnie down, Nancy brought up the name of Wall Street banker William J. Casey, the former chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Reagans had met him through their old friends the Wicks at a New York fund-raiser. Nancy posited that Casey might be a good person to bring order to the whole operation—and she just happened to have his phone number handy. He accepted the offer on the spot. (Casey would later become director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Ronnie and play a major role in putting together the secret operations that were at the center of the Iran-contra scandal.)

  Thanks to Nancy, the wheels were already in motion for a campaign shake-up when Sears made a serious misstep, the one that would seal his fate. He told her that Meese was undermining his authority and demanded that the last California stalwart in the operation be fired. That was Nancy’s opening. With the primary only about a week away, she told Ronnie that his campaign manager was trying to oust the ever-loyal Meese. Late one night, exhausted by another long day on the trail, Ronnie finally had it out with Sears. “You got Deaver,” he shouted, “but, by God, you’re not going to get Ed Meese. You guys have forced me to the wall.” Ronnie was so furious, Nancy wrote later, that it appeared he might actually slug Sears. She took her husband’s arm and told him: “It’s late, and I think we should all get some sleep.”

  On February 26, as New Hampshire voters were going to the polls, Ronnie summoned Sears, strategist Charlie Black, and press secretary Jim Lake to the Reagans’ third-floor suite at the Manchester Holiday Inn. He handed them each a copy of a statement the campaign planned to issue. It said that Sears had decided to return to his law practice, and his two lieutenants would be leaving as well. The new campaign administrator would be William Casey. The whole thing was straightforward and bloodless, a far different scene from the explosive one that had taken place in the middle of the night the previous week.

  As Sears left the room, Nancy followed him out. “I am sorry this happened,” she told him, “but I hope we can still be friends.”

  Nancy and Sears never spoke again, though they would occasionally cross paths over the years at political and social functions. At one, Nancy tried to have a word with him, and Sears pretended he did
n’t hear her. In an interview with me nearly forty years after they parted ways in Manchester, Sears reflected upon everything that he had gone through with both Reagans. The decades had given him a philosophical perspective, the kind that comes with seeing how everything turned out.

  “She was a very powerful woman in her way,” he said of Nancy. “About the things she was interested in, she had very good instincts.”

  As for Ronnie: “He was the best candidate to be president. He gave the country back its optimism.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  After the votes were counted in New Hampshire, the cover of Time magazine declared the result to have been “Ronnie’s Romp!” He swamped Bush, 50 percent to 23 percent. Anderson and Baker barely broke double digits, while Connally, Crane, and Dole each came in with 2 percent or less. From there, it would never really be in question that the Republican nomination was Ronnie’s. Casey moved quickly to right the ship financially after the New Hampshire victory, cutting the campaign’s staff in both the Los Angeles and Washington offices by nearly half and getting rid of its expensive charter aircraft.

  One by one, the California contingent— Mike Deaver, Lyn Nofziger, and Marty Anderson—trickled back. There were also new people joining the campaign. Beginning that spring, the name “C. McCain” shows up frequently in the flight manifests of Nancy’s travels. Carol McCain, the wife of former Vietnam prisoner of war John McCain, was going through a dark time. Her husband had decided to leave her for Cindy Lou Hensley, the daughter of a prosperous beer distributor in Phoenix. For years to come, this would strain Nancy’s friendship with the future senator, who would himself make two bids for the presidency. John McCain was elected to Congress in 1983 as a self-described “foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution,” but he wrote later that Nancy treated him with “a cool correctness that made her displeasure clear.… I had, of course, deserved the change in our relationship.”