The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 25

  Carol was also struggling with the aftereffects of a car accident that had almost killed her on Christmas Eve in 1969, two years into John’s captivity. Nearly two dozen surgeries left her five inches shorter and walking with a limp. Some of their friends believed that her husband left her in part because she was no longer the statuesque beauty he had married. She said the collapse of their marriage was more complicated than that. In fact, there were many stories like theirs among POW families. But whatever caused the rupture, Carol knew he was gone. “John had met somebody young, wealthy, attractive—you know, all of the things I would be petrified about. He wanted to get a divorce and marry her. I didn’t like it, but there was not really a lot I could do about it,” Carol told me.

  Nancy had long been fond of Carol and looked for ways to ease her through this hard patch. “She knocked herself out to be kind, sweet, gentle, soft-spoken to me,” Carol said. As it happened, the campaign needed a press assistant to travel with the candidate’s wife, so Nancy suggested Carol, who had experience on Capitol Hill, for the job. Carol and her daughter moved to California, where they lived with Ed Meese and his wife, Ursula, for several months in early 1980. (After Ronnie was elected, Carol became director of the White House Visitors Office.)

  By the end of March, Ronnie had effectively sewn up the nomination, having won six out of the eight primaries that followed in the month after his New Hampshire victory. On the surface, it seemed the campaign was running much more smoothly. But Nancy was worried. Ronnie couldn’t seem to find a groove. On the stump, he was telling too many old stories and getting his facts mixed up.

  She realized there was still someone missing; someone who should have been at Ronnie’s side all along. In June, as the campaign’s focus turned to the convention and beyond, Nancy asked Deaver to place a call to Stu Spencer, the political consultant who had manned the launch pad of Ronnie’s political career. Though Nancy had been angry and hurt by Spencer’s defection to Ford in 1976, she believed his guiding hand was what Ronnie needed now.

  Spencer was startled when Deaver proposed he return. He asked for some time to think. At the time, he was living near the ocean in Los Angeles, so he walked to the beach and sat there for the next four hours. Then he called Deaver and asked one question: “Does Nancy want me back?” As Spencer explained it to me later, “it wasn’t a condition. It’s just that I wouldn’t believe it until I heard it from her. I knew she was the personnel director. If I didn’t have her, I would have had a miserable five months.” Within a day or two, a call came from Nancy. “You used to talk about rhythm,” she told Spencer. “We haven’t got any rhythm. We don’t have everybody working off the same page. Ronnie’s frustrated.”

  Spencer, given his history of friction with the other Californians, wanted it made clear that he was in charge. “My concept of a campaign, of what they had to do, involved certain skills that I saw they did not have. I wanted the authority to hire, and I wanted the authority to dump people,” Spencer said. He insisted that the “Sacramento claque” with whom he had clashed in the early days all meet for dinner, so that he could look each of them in the eye and hear them say they would accept having him back. “It was a riot,” Spencer told me. “They were all half drunk. I can remember [pollster and chief strategist Richard] Wirthlin, who was not [drinking], who was the good Mormon boy. I heard him say to somebody next to him, ‘Nancy really must want to win this thing.’ ”

  Oddly, the one person with whom Spencer did not have an in-depth discussion about his return was the candidate himself. The first time he set foot on the campaign plane was on July 12, as the Reagans were flying to the Republican convention in Detroit. First, he sat with Nancy, and she vented her grievances about Spencer’s betrayal four years earlier. He let her finish and then asked: “Okay—y’all happy? All the air clear?” Nancy told him yes, and then she gave up her seat to Ronnie. “He and I talked the rest of the way. My conversation with him was like we’d had one yesterday, and we were continuing it,” Spencer marveled. “Yet, what was it in between there? Five years? Six years? Something like that. It was ironical. We just started right back where we were.”

  As the Republican convention got under way on July 14 at the brand-new Joe Louis Arena, Ronnie’s top imperative was to unify the party. An important signal would be sent with his choice of a running mate. Privately, both Reagans would have liked Paul Laxalt, but a California-Nevada ticket would not have had much geographic reach. Ronnie’s advisers had another idea, one that horrified Nancy. They wanted him to pick none other than his old nemesis, Gerald Ford.

  The polls indicated a Reagan-Ford “dream ticket” would give the biggest boost to Ronnie’s chances of winning. But what kind of situation would they be creating if he did? A former president serving as number two to a current one? “It can’t be done,” Nancy argued to her husband. “It would be a dual presidency. It just won’t work.” Spencer also hated the proposal, which he saw as just a ploy by DC’s Old Guard to keep its foothold when Ronnie came to town. “It was a power play by folks who had lost theirs when Carter was elected. They were desperate, and without a Jerry Ford going to bat for them, were convinced they would have no role in a Reagan administration,” Spencer said.

  They were getting nowhere with Ronnie, so Nancy and Spencer turned for help to an unlikely source: Betty Ford. She agreed with them that the idea was preposterous. Betty was also in the early stages of her recovery from more than a decade of drug and alcohol addiction and didn’t want to risk it by returning to the White House pressure cooker. Betty told Spencer that if Jerry did this, she would divorce him. “Does he know that?” Spencer asked her. “Hell, yes, he knows that,” Betty retorted.

  Despite the strenuous objections of their wives, the future president, the former one, and their emissaries continued to talk about the conditions under which they might run together. Ford’s demands became stiffer and stiffer. The White House staff would have to report to the president through Ford. He would get control over key Cabinet appointments. In essence, Ford “wanted to run the White House and control the government while Reagan met the dignitaries and attended the funerals,” Nofziger recalled.

  Negotiations continued until the second to last night of the convention. When Ronnie and his top advisers heard Ford acknowledge in an interview with Walter Cronkite on CBS that he envisioned the arrangement as a kind of “copresidency,” they realized they needed to put a halt to the deal. And as it turned out, Ford had also come around to recognizing it would never work. It would devalue the presidency. The two men met one last time, and Ford officially took himself out of consideration. Ronnie placed a call to a suite at the Hotel Pontchartrain and offered the second spot on his ticket to a startled George H. W. Bush, who had been the last man standing against him in the race for the nomination.

  Nancy was not thrilled with that choice, either. She knew a running mate from the more moderate wing of the GOP would help Ronnie’s chances to win, particularly in the Northeast and among upper-income whites. But Nancy still remembered the bitterness of the early primaries when Bush had mocked her husband’s core policies as “voodoo economics.” And where Ford would have had too much influence in the role, she saw Bush as too weak to be an effective partner.

  The crowd on the convention floor went wild when Ronnie took the stage and announced his pick just moments later. It was right after the roll call, where 1,939 out of 1,990 delegates had given him their votes. “The roof almost came off,” he wrote later. “As George and I stood there together, it was almost as if we were putting the party back together.” Nancy did not bother to hide how she felt. New York magazine wrote: “When her husband finally selected Bush in a midnight appearance before the convention that had nominated him only minutes before, the world was witness to her antagonism. Nancy Reagan, who always smiles, didn’t.” The Washington Post described it this way: “Her face told it all when she stood on the podium as Reagan announced Bush as his running mate. She looked like a little girl who ha
d just lost her favorite Raggedy Ann doll: sad, disappointed, almost crushed. Sen. Paul D. Laxalt, Reagan’s campaign chairman, wrapped his arm around her shoulder, consoling her.”

  But there was now the fall contest upon which to focus. Ronnie’s campaign moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Arlington, Virginia, inside the Washington Beltway. Nancy and Ronnie rented a house on an estate known as Wexford. Located on thirty-nine acres in the Virginia hunt country, it was owned at the time by Texas governor William Clements, but the 5,050-square-foot ranch-style home had a touch of Camelot. It had been built in 1963 by John and Jackie Kennedy, and named for the Kennedy ancestral birthplace in Ireland. Jackie had designed it herself. Her idea was that it would be a retreat where the Kennedys could be a normal family, located close enough to Washington to serve as a regular escape. The house was purposefully plain. Jackie wrote that she wanted it to have “all the places we need to get away from each other. So husband can have meetings. Children watch TV. Wife paint or work at desk. Nurse have own room. Help a place to sit. All things so much bigger houses don’t have. I think it’s brilliant!” The Kennedys spent only two weekends there before Jack was assassinated. His widow sold it the following year.

  For the Reagans, Wexford would be a temporary home and a respite from the campaign trail, albeit one in which meetings and phone calls were constantly going on. Nancy especially loved the stone patio, where she could look out over the rolling countryside with its wooden fences and stone walls. Her old MGM compatriot Elizabeth Taylor lived nearby with her sixth husband, John Warner, a former navy secretary recently elected to the US Senate. “For me,” Nancy would later write, “Wexford was the happiest part of the 1980 campaign.” Ronnie felt so at home there that when he became annoyed with a pine tree blocking his view from a window, he took an axe and chopped it down. Only later was it discovered that the tree was a favorite of the Texas governor who owned the place.

  Away from that bucolic spot, there was renewed turmoil within the campaign. In August Ronnie made some unforced errors. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964, the Republican nominee declared his belief in “state’s rights,” a phrase that has an ugly racist legacy. At a religious convention in Dallas, he endorsed the teaching of creationism. None of this boded well for a candidate seeking to reassure voters that he wasn’t a right-wing zealot or a bigot. He needed to recognize he was talking to the whole country now, not just the conservatives who had cheered him to victory in the Republican primary.

  Meanwhile, Spencer’s return had not been welcomed by others in the campaign’s top echelon. He was beginning to worry that he had made a terrible mistake. It was hardly a subtle hint that there was no office—or even a desk—for him at the new Arlington headquarters. Nor was he being included in strategy meetings at Wexford, which was something Nancy noticed. “Where’s Stu?” she asked at one. “Next meeting, make sure Spencer is here.”

  “I hadn’t been invited. Bill Casey, Dick Wirthlin, and the rest wanted me nowhere near the candidate. Neither did Ed Meese, for that matter,” Spencer said. “Nancy was the one who delivered the message—and the guys heard her loud and clear.” But by then, Spencer had come up with another, more effective plan to assert control. He proposed an audacious scheme to Deaver: “Mike, you and I both know that with Ronald Reagan, whoever owns the body owns the campaign. We take over their plane. We cut off the phones. And then we run the damn show.”

  The coup came together quickly. Spencer brought in his own scheduler, Joe Canzeri. He kept Nofziger aboard to handle the press. Martin Anderson would direct policy from the plane and act as the “conservative conscience,” ignoring whatever dictates were coming from Arlington. They found an experienced Washington hand named Jim Brady, who understood the workings of government and could help with issues research. Spencer also added Ken Khachigian, a young and gifted wordsmith who had written speeches for Nixon. “That was my team. I had a speechwriter. I had a press operation. I had a scheduling operation. I had a philosopher. I had Deaver for Ron and Nancy. I had me,” Spencer recalled.

  For the final two months before the election, Spencer’s rogue operation was in charge. “We ran the entire campaign from that airplane,” he said. “The Reagans were very happy; they were completely comfortable again for the first time in ages. Meanwhile, back at the national headquarters in Arlington, they were having fits. They would demand, let’s say, a copy of the speech Reagan was going to give in Des Moines. We gave it to them after the fact, not before.”

  Under Spencer’s guidance, everything began working better. Ronnie kept his message focused on Carter’s failings and the country’s economic problems. He took fewer questions from the press. Spencer also managed to secure for Ronnie the endorsements of civil rights leaders Ralph Abernathy and Hosea Williams, both of whom had supported Carter in 1976. The Reagans’ comfort level with Spencer was such that they would often include him as they hashed out their own differences over how the campaign was going and bickered over Nancy’s constant worries that Ronnie was being pushed too hard physically. These conversations usually took place at night, after Ronnie got into his pajamas. “I spent half my life in their bedroom,” Spencer said. “This was where the arguments always took place. She’s jumping on him. Sometimes there were arguments about the kids, but they had nothing to do with the campaign, so I didn’t get into those. They were usually over schedule. They’d argue and argue.”

  Nancy also took the measure of the newer members of the team. Speechwriter Khachigian recalled his first long conversation with her, which happened as they campaigned in Illinois that fall. Normally consigned to the staff bus, Khachigian had been summoned to ride in the Reagans’ limousine because he and the candidate needed to talk over plans for a half-hour television address. The speechwriter sat in the jump seat, his knees jammed against Nancy’s. As Ronnie turned his attention to the remarks he would have to deliver at the next event, Nancy turned hers to Khachigian.

  “It’s important for Ronnie in his speeches to be emotional,” she told him. As she saw it, Ronnie should not be steered toward hard-edged bombast or swamped with the intricacies of policy. He was at his best when he could strive “to move an audience, and to reach for their passions, to string out their emotions and reach their hearts,” said Khachigian, who would go on to become the chief White House speechwriter. “I think one of the reasons I synced with Reagan is that I paid attention to her instructions.”

  Nancy was not so sure-footed in managing her own image. In the 1980 campaign, as in 1976, there were harsh comparisons with the woman she would replace in the White House. Four years earlier, Nancy had been portrayed as the buttoned-up antithesis of breezily candid Betty Ford; this time around, glamorous and perfectly coiffed Nancy was being held up against earnest, down-to-earth Rosalynn Carter, who sewed some of her own clothes and served nothing harder than wine when she entertained. But Rosalynn also raised eyebrows by sitting in on meetings of her husband’s Cabinet and his National Security Council, and sent her chief of staff to important policy-making sessions. Nancy said she would never do such things.

  Nancy’s disavowal of any hand in her husband’s governing agenda was seen as yet more evidence that she was merely a paper doll figure. At the same time, a separate and contradictory story line was developing. This one had Nancy as a master manipulator; a behind-the-curtain whisperer. Campaign reporters took note how, on the day Sears was fired in New Hampshire, Ronnie had seemed at a loss for words when asked where the pressure had come from to dismiss the campaign manager.

  “From you,” Nancy prompted.

  “From me,” her husband said.

  At a stop in Florida, Ronnie made the claim that marijuana was a greater cancer and heart disease hazard than tobacco. When a journalist noted that people didn’t smoke as much of it, Nancy nudged her husband and murmured, “You wouldn’t know.” After which he dutifully piped up: “I wouldn’t know.” The Associated Press noted: “Rosalynn Ca
rter would never put words in her husband’s mouth in public.”

  Nancy tried to reboot perceptions of her with the publication of Nancy, a syrupy-sweet memoir written with coauthor Bill Libby. This was something no candidate’s wife had ever done before, and it backfired. Reviews were withering. “Perhaps you’ll be pleased to know that ‘Little Mary Sunshine’ lives in California,” began one in the Los Angeles Times. The book included a false birth date (Nancy’s actual one would be unearthed by the Washington Post’s Maxine Cheshire shortly after the election), did not name her husband’s first wife, and made only passing reference to her children. In Nancy, she pronounced the movies of the day “trash” and suggested that censorship was a good thing. Nancy also decried “premarital or casual sex, live-in relationships, early marriage and easy divorce, abortions and permissive child rearing.” San Francisco Examiner columnist Herb Caen noted: “The type is large, for the benefit of the senior citizens who will read it with approving clucks and nods.”

  Nancy made an effort to court the journalists who traveled with the campaign. Every time the Boeing 727 dubbed LeaderShip ’80 took off, the PA system played country singer Willie Nelson’s current hit “On the Road Again,” and Nancy playfully “bowled” oranges down the aisle past the rows in the back where the campaign reporters were sitting. She also passed out chocolates on each leg of every trip. But even those small gestures fit into a story line that had already been set. “When one of the reporters wrote a column saying that unless you ate your candy, you wouldn’t get an interview with Ronnie, I was so hurt and embarrassed that I never wanted to go down that aisle again,” Nancy recalled later. “But with Stu Spencer’s encouragement, I did—with a sign around my neck that said: Take One or Else!”