The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 26

  Noteworthy among the stories written about Nancy was a profile by the Washington Post’s legendary Sally Quinn: “She can sit perfectly still, her ankles neatly crossed, her hands resting calmly in her lap, her chin uplifted, her eyes glistening, her lips smiling… for what seems like hours… and hang raptly on his every word no matter what he is saying, no matter how many times she has heard it before in their twenty-eight-year marriage. She never seems to get an itch, her lips never stick to her teeth, she hardly blinks. Don’t her legs ever go to sleep? Haven’t they ever had a terrible fight just before the speech? Isn’t she ever bored hearing the whole thing over and over and over?”

  Quinn quoted an unnamed “very close former Reagan staffer” as saying that the real reason Ronnie was running was because “Nancy wants to be queen.” Her story cautioned: “Do not underestimate Nancy. She knows what she wants. She has made up her mind where she was going to go, and she would get Ronnie to take her. He is her vehicle.”

  And then there was this supposedly feminist take from New York magazine’s Julie Baumgold, which recycled some of the hoariest of sexist tropes: “It’s an old secret that if a woman will speak low and smile, defer and not compete, if she can believe that her husband’s triumphs are hers, achieve through his achievements, then she will have power over him. She does not provoke; she flatters and always suppresses the little touch of the bitch inside.”

  Carol McCain said Nancy had grown to expect harsh coverage, but she never got used to it. Nor could she figure out what she was doing wrong. “She’s very complicated, and she didn’t want to make it easy for people to understand her,” McCain said. Katharine Graham, the owner and publisher of the newspaper that published Quinn’s blistering critique, once pointed out to Nancy that many of the most scorching articles about her had been written by younger women who were “caught up” in the feminist movement. “They just couldn’t identify with you,” Graham told Nancy. “You represented everything they were rebelling against.”

  But in front of audiences of her husband’s conservative supporters, Nancy’s traditionalist image—which disguised her actual power—was an asset. Carol McCain recalled one union hall in New Jersey where “those men, their tongues were hanging out. They were drooling over this petite woman, soft-spoken, infectious laugh, terribly attractive. They just loved her. Of course she’s going to respond to that, so she just poured it on, and they just ate it up.”

  As the campaign headed into its final weeks, Ronnie’s momentum seemed to stall, and his team faced what would be its last big decision: Should he debate Carter? The president had refused to attend a September 21 debate in Baltimore because John B. Anderson, who after falling short in the Republican primary was running as an independent, had also been invited. At that point, Anderson was polling just above 15 percent, which was the threshold set by the League of Women Voters, the organization that sponsored the debate. With Carter boycotting, Ronnie debated Anderson alone and put in a strong enough performance that the third-party contender’s poll numbers began to drop. (In the end, Anderson won 7 percent of the popular vote and no electoral votes.)

  A one-on-one Carter-Reagan matchup was a far different proposition. Nancy was among those who had the deepest reservations about a high-risk move so close to the election, but Ronnie was convinced he could best the incumbent. Handling the negotiations with the Carter campaign was a newcomer to the Reagan team, James A. Baker III, a Texas lawyer who was George H. W. Bush’s closest friend and adviser. In his talks with the Carter campaign and the League of Women Voters, Baker pressed to have the debate scheduled as close to the election as possible. He assumed—incorrectly, it turned out—that the American hostages being held in Tehran would soon be released, lifting Carter’s fortunes. He wanted Ronnie to have a chance to make his closing argument after that happened, not before. The two sides agreed the candidates would meet to debate on October 28, a week before the election, in Cleveland.

  Baker also managed the debate rehearsals, which took place in the garage at Wexford. David Stockman, a Michigan congressman whom Ronnie would later appoint his first budget director, played Carter. Conservative columnist George Will acted the role of a reporter asking questions. It was a blatantly unethical move on Will’s part. Though he had made it clear in his columns for the Washington Post and Newsweek that he supported Ronnie, Will did not disclose that he was working with the campaign. In postdebate television commentary, he pronounced the Republican nominee to have given a “thoroughbred performance,” as though he had had nothing to do with it. “I was misbehaving,” Will conceded in an interview with me decades later.

  Nancy, however, was instantly enamored with this erudite young rogue from the fourth estate. “Jim Baker had asked me to write something, so I was sitting at a typewriter, which tells you how long ago it was,” Will recalled. “Someone came up behind me and tousled my hair, and it was her. She tousled my hair and said, ‘Oh, I see we brought in the varsity.’ She was a great flirt.” So began a great friendship. Over the coming years, Nancy and Will would become so tight that Washington insiders thought they heard Nancy’s voice at times in Will’s columns.

  Though Ronnie had been leading in the polls going into the debate, his better-than-expected performance helped nail down his victory. When he walked onstage, Barbara Bush, the wife of his running mate, leaned over to Nancy and whispered that Ronnie’s makeup looked better than Carter’s. “Ronnie never wears makeup,” Nancy replied with a touch of annoyance. In fact, Deaver had given him a glass of wine before he went on, to add “a little color to his cheeks.”

  Carter flubbed an answer on nuclear weapons by noting that he had discussed the issue with his daughter, Amy, who had just turned thirteen. (“Ask Amy” signs popped up at Republican rallies shortly thereafter.) Ronnie scored with two memorable lines near the end. When Carter noted Ronnie’s early opposition to Medicare and suggested he might stand in the way of efforts to fix the health care system, Ronnie flattened him with a dismissive “There you go again.” The capper, however, was Ronnie’s closing statement. He looked into the television camera and asked the country: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the store than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago?”

  * * *

  As victory looked more and more certain, the time arrived to begin talking about what came next. About three weeks before the election, Spencer and Deaver decided to raise a delicate issue with the Reagans. If there was ever a president who would need a top-notch chief of staff, it was Ronnie, whose detached management style would leave room for all kinds of chaos. Loyal Ed Meese, who had held the job in California and who could channel Ronnie’s beliefs better than anyone else, assumed that it would be him. So did most everyone else. Meese was already passing around an organization chart he had drawn with his own name as chief of staff. But as Meese’s bulging briefcase attested, organization was not his strong suit. “If you wanted a document to disappear, you’d give it to Ed,” Nancy said. Moreover, she viewed him as too much of an ideologue, one of those she described as “so rigid in their beliefs that they’d rather lose than win a partial victory.”

  When Spencer broached the subject of who they might consider to run the White House staff, he was surprised when both Nancy and Ronnie replied, “Oh, no, not Ed.” Spencer and Deaver would each later claim to be the one who first raised the idea of naming James Baker. However it came about, it was an unlikely move. The Reagans did not know the fifty-year-old Baker well, and until he took over organizing for the debate, their experience with him was largely as an adversary. Baker, who came from one of Houston’s old-line families, had served as chairman of Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign in its later stages and had run Bush’s operation in the 1980 primary. As Baker noted, “I had mana
ged two hard-fought battles to deny Ronald Reagan his party’s nomination—one successful, the other not.”

  Spencer and Deaver arranged to have him travel with the Reagans in the final days before the election, just to see how things went. “Nobody in the campaign, except Deaver and I, knew why Baker was suddenly on the plane,” Spencer recalled. The polished, personable Texan quickly developed a chemistry with Nancy. “Jim Baker is a gentleman. River Oaks, Houston. Princeton, and all that stuff, and dressed well, and she liked that because in politics you don’t always run around with that kind of person,” Will observed. Baker was also the kind of pragmatist who made Nancy comfortable, and he was self-assured enough to tease her, putting her at ease. Nancy decided he was perfect for the chief of staff job. “She was the one who had pushed it more than anybody else,” Baker said later.

  Baker’s temporary stint on the campaign plane was ending, and as he was preparing to get off, Nancy decided it was time to seal the deal. The campaign’s foreign-policy adviser, Richard Allen, noticed her frantically trying to get her husband’s attention. “Ronnie, Jim is leaving the plane,” she said. “Ronnie, you need to talk to Jim now.” Allen thought to himself: “What in God’s name have we got going here?”

  Baker claimed he was dumbstruck when he was asked to run the White House. “I don’t think anybody ever has picked as their chief of staff someone who ran two campaigns against them, and I’m damn sure nobody will ever do so in the future,” he said. One of the first pieces of advice he got was from Spencer: “Now, Jimmy, you call him every day. Because don’t count on him to call you. You call him every day.” In his years running the White House, Baker would come to appreciate the wisdom of that counsel. Baker also figured out that Ronnie’s introverted, sometimes distant nature made Nancy all the more critical, and an indispensable ally. “He didn’t really have a lot of close friends. His close friend was Nancy,” Baker said. “Her role was really large. It was subsurface, but really important.”

  In offering him the job, Ronnie had but one demand of Baker: “I want you to make it right with Ed.” That would take some doing. Under an arrangement that Baker worked out with Meese in the days after the election, they agreed that the top leadership in the White House would be divided between the two of them plus Deaver. It was an unusual—and, it turned out, problematic—distribution of power that became known as the “troika.” Meese got the title of counselor to the president and Cabinet rank. Deaver was assistant to the president, in charge of, as he put it, “Reagan’s personal and political needs, and acting when needed as an honest broker between Baker and Meese.”

  When Spencer found out about the three-way power-sharing arrangement, he was appalled. Baker was to be chief of staff, Spencer argued, which meant he should be the boss. Meese, he thought, was better suited to be attorney general and out of the White House entirely. “I blew my cork,” Spencer told me. “I said, ‘Oh, Jesus, here we go.’ ” Many battles over the next four years found pragmatists Baker and Deaver—and Nancy—aligned against the more ideological Meese. As William Clark, who became national security adviser, once put it: “The real troika, frankly, in the White House, in the opinion of many, would be Nancy, Baker, and Deaver.”

  * * *

  Election Day finally came. November 4, 1980, dawned bright and warm in Pacific Palisades, with a hint of smog in the air. Nancy and Ronnie, accompanied by a horde of press, headed for the ranch-style home of stockbroker Robert Gulick and his wife, Sally, which was the Precinct No. 1376 polling place where they had voted for nearly a quarter century. Ronnie wore a casual checked shirt, open at the neck; Nancy, a tartan-plaid dress with a perky bow at the collar. Poll workers set out jars of Ronnie’s favorite candy, jelly beans, and clamored for his autograph. He held up his ballot for the photographers who crowded to get a shot, and when a reporter asked him for whom he had voted, Ronnie replied: “Nancy.” The candidate demurred that he was too superstitious to answer another question, which was whether he expected a victory. Nancy nudged him and whispered, “Cautiously optimistic.” This time Ronnie ignored the cue from his wife.

  Their children Ron and Patti were also registered to vote there—he as a Democrat, and she, apparently making an ironic statement, as a member of the right-wing American Independent Party that had supported former Alabama governor George Wallace. Reporters noted that neither had cast a ballot by the time their parents voted. Patti later dropped hers in the box without punching a hole in it. “I couldn’t vote for my father. I thought he was wrong on everything,” she recalled. “But I couldn’t vote against him because that would have taken more courage than I had right then. So I did nothing, which is probably about as cowardly as you can get.”

  The plan had been to spend election night as they always did. Nancy’s pals Earle and Marion Jorgensen would throw a dinner at their home in Bel Air. They would invite the circle of close friends who had been there after the polls closed in 1966 and 1970. The Tuttles would come, and the Wicks, and the Bloomingdales, and the Darts, and the Annenbergs. The Jorgensens would serve the same menu as always: veal stew and coconut cake, both Ronnie’s favorites. From the Jorgensens’, everyone would go to the Century Plaza Hotel to spend the evening awaiting the returns. The difference in the ritual this time was that the Secret Service had checked out the Jorgensens’ house days before and placed telephones throughout.

  A few minutes after five o’clock Pacific time—eight o’clock on the East Coast, where the polls were already closing—the Reagans began to get ready. Nancy was taking a bath, and Ronnie was in the shower. There was no rush, they thought. Voting in California would be open for another two hours. But then from the television in the bedroom, Nancy heard NBC Nightly News anchor John Chancellor proclaim that it looked like Ronnie was going to win in a landslide. Nancy leaped out of the tub, wrapped a towel around herself, and banged on the shower door. Ronnie emerged and grabbed his own towel as they ran to the TV set. There they stood, both of them soaking wet, as they heard the race being called for Ronnie.

  Then the phone rang. It was Jimmy Carter, calling to concede and to congratulate the fortieth president of the United States.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Washington looked toward the arrival of the Reagans with equal measures of wariness and fascination. Nancy recognized an opportunity to be seized in a city where the political hierarchy intertwined with the social one. As one unnamed Reagan aide told the Washington Post: “We want to avoid Jimmy Carter’s fatal mistake. He never met the power brokers in this city. He never had any real friends here. Governor Reagan not only wants to know them, but he needs them to get this place working again.”

  The social diplomacy effort began just days after the election. Nancy Reynolds, the Reagans’ aide from their Sacramento days, was already in Washington as chief lobbyist for the Bendix Corporation and knew the city’s major players. She arranged for the incoming first couple to host a candlelit dinner on November 18, 1980, at the exclusive 1925 F Street Club, which was housed in a nineteenth-century Greek Revival mansion just blocks from the White House.

  Reynolds was amused by the first few responses she got to the invitations she sent out by telegram: “Are you sure this is serious? It’s not a practical joke? I’m a Democrat.” More than fifty leading figures from political, social, religious, and sports circles showed up. One woman ordered wine during the cocktail hour but changed her mind: “Oh, make it Scotch and water! The Carters are gone.” After dinner, the enchanted guests—many of whom had done their best to defeat Ronnie during the election—crowded around the president elect. The front page of the next day’s New York Times declared: “After four long years as wallflowers, members of the Washington establishment will finally have a suitor in the White House. Never was a neglected belle more eager to be wooed.” Two nights later, columnist George Will—whom the Times dubbed the Reagans’ “unofficial social director”—hosted another party for Ronnie and Nancy at his house in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Will also prevailed on New York
’s social doyenne Brooke Astor to put on a five-course dinner for fifty in the Reagans’ honor at her Park Avenue apartment.

  Nancy’s hand was obvious in all of this; in fact, she had been laying the groundwork for years. She could not bear the perception among the sophisticates of New York and Washington that her husband was some kind of unpolished, unlettered cowboy. “The approval of the establishment was important to her,” said television newsman Chris Wallace, whose journalist father, Mike Wallace, had been a friend of Nancy’s mother going back to the 1940s. “There was no question that she wanted the big stage, and she defined success in a very conventional way.”

  Among the capital’s power brokers, none was more important than Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, whose grand, art-filled home on R Street in Georgetown functioned as a salon for DC’s most interesting and influential people. Nancy had gotten to know Graham a decade earlier through their mutual friend, author Truman Capote. “I couldn’t go to their dinner at the F Street Club because I was going to be out of town,” Graham recalled later. “I called up Nancy Reynolds and said I was so disappointed I couldn’t come, and she said, ‘Why don’t you invite them to dinner?’ And I said, ‘I couldn’t do that. I didn’t vote for them, and the paper didn’t endorse them.’ That would be like trying to have it both ways. But Nancy Reynolds said, ‘Just invite them and see.’ ” So she did. Graham’s dinner on December 11 brought together an all-star list of DC luminaries, who for that night put aside their political differences and the still-raw feelings from the election. Henry Kissinger was there, as were Carter’s White House counsel Lloyd Cutler, National Urban League president Vernon Jordan, and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his journalist wife, Sally Quinn, who had written blistering profiles of Nancy.