Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Neil spent sixty-five days that summer and fall flying around the country on a Boeing 727 with Goldwater and his wife, Peggy—this was the first presidential campaign in which candidates chartered their own jets.74

  But nothing McCann-Erickson came up with could match Lyndon Johnson’s famous “Daisy” commercial, in which an image of a little girl picking the petals off a daisy is followed by one of a nuclear bomb exploding into a mushroom cloud. Goldwater’s name was never mentioned, but the ad recalled all the fears Rockefeller had stirred up about him in a devastating thirty-second spot. From then on everything seemed to work against Goldwater, including his own slogan, “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.” “In your heart you know he might,” hecklers would chant at his appearances. “In your guts you know he’s nuts.”75

  Late that summer, Tuttle asked Reagan to be the speaker at a $1,000-a-plate Goldwater fund-raiser—“which was unheard of at that time,” the car dealer noted—at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel.

  3 3 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

  “After he got through,” Tuttle said, “I was besieged—my goodness—by people that said, ‘He spoke of the issues, of the things that we are concerned about: government involvement, all these social programs, and all this ‘womb to tomb’ spending and so forth. We feel our federal government is taking a position that the Constitution never intended for it to do.’”76

  Reagan titled his speech “A Time for Choosing,” and it was a remarkably lucid distillation of everything he had been saying on the road for years, a mix of high-flying rhetoric and down-to-earth anecdotes that made ordinary people feel that he cared about their concerns and respected their intelligence. In contrast to Goldwater’s disastrous acceptance speech, he opened on a conciliatory note:

  On the one hand, a small group of people see treason in any philosophical difference of opinion and apply the terms “pink” and “leftist” to those who are motivated only by humanitarian idealism in their support of the liberal welfare philosophy. On the other hand, an even greater number of people today, advocates of this liberal philosophy, lump all who oppose their viewpoint under the banner of right-wing lunacy.

  But he quickly put the choice facing the electorate in stark terms: Either we believe in our traditional system of individual liberty, or we abandon the American Revolution and confess that an intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

  By the end of the speech he had made this choice apocalyptic. “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” he declared, echoing FDR. He then turned to Lincoln again. “We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”77

  As Nancy recalled the evening, “Ronnie’s speech went over so well that

  [Holmes] came to him afterwards and said ‘We’ve got to get that speech on television.’ ” Tuttle and Salvatori quickly came up with the money to buy a half hour of airtime on NBC so that Reagan could deliver his speech nationwide a week before the election. In Nancy’s recollection and most other versions, Goldwater’s advisers tried to stop the telecast, claiming it was “too emotional.” Goldwater himself called Reagan at home, and ReaThe Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

  3 3 3

  gan suggested he view a taped film of the speech that had been made for fund-raising events in California. After he had seen it, the candidate asked his staff, “What the hell was wrong with that?”78

  Laurie Salvatori, however, recalled a conversation with her mother that indicates that it was actually Grace who raised much of the money, and that a jealous Goldwater wanted the airtime for himself. “My first memory of this whole Reagan business,” she told me, “was walking into my mother’s study, and her shushing me. When she got off the phone she said, ‘You won’t believe who called—Barry Goldwater. He was calling from his airplane. Some girlfriends and I have bought the airtime for Ronald Reagan to go on television to talk about Barry Goldwater.’ Goldwater was asking my mother if he could have the time back, so he could talk for himself. And my mother said, ‘Well, do you have the money?’—which she knew he probably didn’t. And she said in the loveliest way possible, ‘Well, Barry, if you don’t . . .’ As you know, this particular speech that Ronald Reagan gave for Barry Goldwater was the highlight of the whole campaign.”79

  The final version of the speech was taped before an invited audience outfitted with Goldwater signs in a studio in Phoenix; Patti remembered that half the audience, including her mother, was in tears by the time her father finished.80 NBC broadcast the speech on October 27, 1964, at 8:30

  in the evening, and Ronnie and Nancy watched it at Bill and Betty Wilson’s house with the Salvatoris and the Tuttles. Over the next week $500,000

  poured into the campaign’s coffers, and another half million soon followed.

  According to Nancy, some $8 million was generated for the Republican Party as a result of the speech.81 A new political star was born. Washington Post columnist David Broder declared that Reagan had made “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with his ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.”82

  No one seemed to notice that Barry Goldwater’s name was mentioned only once, and then almost as an afterthought, following the rousing climax. Except, that is, Goldwater himself. “To his discredit, Goldwater always seemed to resent being superseded by Reagan,” says Lyn Nofziger, who covered the 1964 election for the Copley newspapers and went on to become Reagan’s press secretary two years later, in his eponymous memoir. “Probably Reagan was too effective from Goldwater’s point of view because Reagan, not Goldwater, emerged from that campaign as the conservative hero.”83

  “Ronnie always believed that we’re all put here for a purpose,” Nancy 3 3 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Reagan told me. “We might not know now why or what the purpose is, but eventually we will. Barry opened the door. And then Ronnie took it along.”84

  Goldwater’s defeat was the worst the Republicans had suffered since the Roosevelt years. Johnson carried forty-four states, winning even in such bastions of Midwestern Republicanism as Galesburg, Illinois, which so upset Loyal Davis that he announced he no longer wanted to be buried in his hometown.85 Reagan took the loss more evenly, giving a brief pep talk to dejected campaign workers at an election night party at the Ambassador Hotel and encouraging them not to give up on the conservative cause.86

  “We didn’t want that to be the demise of the Republican Party,” said Tuttle, “so we thought the best way to start rebuilding was here in California.”87 Tuttle got together with Salvatori and A. C. “Cy” Rubel, a key Goldwater supporter who had recently retired as chairman of the Union Oil Company, to discuss the future of the party, including whom they could run for governor against the Democratic incumbent, Edmund “Pat”

  Brown, in 1966. “Gentlemen,” Tuttle told his cohorts, “I think we’ve got a candidate right here. How about Ron?”88

  It didn’t take much convincing. As Laurie Salvatori said, “My father felt that, unlike Goldwater, Ronald Reagan could get elected because he spoke better than anybody else in the world.”89 Furthermore, George Murphy’s victory in the 1964 Senate race demonstrated that Californians were willing to elect an actor to high office; Reagan had campaigned for his old friend from SAG. “So I went to see him,” Tuttle said. “In fact, Mrs. Tuttle went with me, and we spent the evening at Ron’s home.”90 It is not clear whether this visit took place in late December 1964 or early January 1965. In either case, it was followed by more visits to San Onofre Drive by Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel.

  “I knew those people were going to come up to the house after that disastrous election,” Nancy Reagan told me. “I knew it. And they did. At first Ronnie said, ‘Well, let me think about it.’ And then finally he said to me,
<
br />   ‘You know, the party is in such bad shape, if I felt that I could do something to help it, and I didn’t do it, I’d feel terrible.’ So he said to them, ‘Let me go out and see what the response of the people is.’ And there we were.

  On a road we never intended to be on. Ever.”91

  It was certainly a hard decision for the Reagans to make; on the other hand, there was also an air of inevitability about it, as if they had known The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

  3 3 5

  all along where they were heading. Nancy’s old friend Bruce McFarland vividly remembered her telling him on a visit to Chicago shortly after Patti was born, “Mark my words, Ronnie will be governor of California someday.”92 Others, including Ardie and Harriet Deutsch, remembered Nancy dropping similar comments over the years. Arlene Dahl recalled that Nancy had asked her to read her tea leaves at their hairdresser’s in early 1965; she told Nancy that she would soon receive important news having to do with California’s government.93

  Ronnie and Nancy were naturally cautious, however, especially when it came to their financial security, and he had just signed a two-year contract to host a TV series called Death Valley Days. Although it wasn’t nearly as prestigious as G.E. Theater, it paid a comparable salary and required nothing more than taping short introductions and doing the occasional star turn on horseback. The program was sponsored by U.S. Borax, a McCann-Erickson client handled by Neil Reagan, who had pushed his brother for the job. “There was a little method in my madness,” Neil admitted. “It kept him in the public eye for what I figured might be helpful if he ran for governor.”94

  Neil was included in some of the early meetings with Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel at the Reagan house, and he attested to the fact that his brother struggled with his decision. These “long sessions,” Neil said, “used to start at eight o’clock in the evening and wind up at three and four the next morning. . . . [Ron] held out for a long time. . . . He was very noncommittal.”95

  “I dismissed them lightly and quickly to begin with, but they just kept coming back,” Ronald Reagan recalled. “[They] kept insisting that I offered the only chance of victory and to bring the party back into something viable. It got to the place where I said, no, and no, and no. And Nancy and I couldn’t sleep anymore. You know, we wondered, ‘Are you making the right decision? Are you letting people down? What if they’re right?’”96

  The pressure was coming from all sides, according to Jack Wrather, the husband of Bonita Granville, who had made a movie with Reagan at Warners before moving to MGM, where she became friendly with Nancy. The Texas-born Wrather, a Marine commander during the war, whose family was in oil and whose first wife was the daughter of Governor Pappy Daniels, had moved to Los Angeles in 1946 and assembled an entertainment-and-real-estate-empire that included the rights to Lassie and The Lone Ranger, the Muzak Corporation, the Disneyland Hotel, and the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach, where Barry and Peggy Goldwater kept a weekend apartment. Jack and Bunny lived a few houses down from the Bloomingdales in 3 3 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Holmby Hills, and they were very close to the Wilsons and the Jorgensens, as well as the Tuttles and Salvatoris.

  “We all saw each other very often . . . at dinners and barbecues and cocktail parties and things,” Wrather recalled. “We’d sit and discuss what the hell happened to Barry, why, and how terrific that commercial was of Ron’s. . . . I remember one night at Bill Wilson’s . . . all the men were gathered kind of English-style after dinner together and the ladies were in the other room . . . and talk got around to Ron and how much we needed somebody like Ron in the governorship; Pat Brown had to be gotten out, that he was a disaster, a do-nothing and worse than that. . . . We just sat and talked to Ron and said, ‘Ron, God, you’ve got to run for governor.

  You’ve just got to. And we talked and talked. The gals finally came in and said, ‘We’ve got to go home. It’s late.’

  “We all assured Ron at one time or another that if he would run we’d be available to him, any of us or all of us,” Wrather continued, “for any kind of advice or help, or helping him put together any business plans or helping with personnel selection. And that we would obviously get behind him financially and that we would raise money for him; we’d do everything possible so that he wouldn’t have to worry about the campaign funds to run on—which, of course, even in those days, was a big worry. . . . In between these affairs, Holmes would get all hot and bothered and call Ron, like Holmes does. You know, he’s a great salesman!”97

  By the end of the January, even The New York Times was asking Reagan if he was running. “I’m honored by all the interest,” he told them. “Politics is nothing I’d ever thought of as a career. But it’s something I’m going to give deep consideration and thought.”98

  In February, Reagan finally made up his mind. “He called me and told me that he would run if we still felt the same way,” Tuttle said. “He and Nancy had discussed it and decided we should try it. He suggested that instead of announcing that he was going to run, we should just kind of put feelers out.”99 Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel formed an exploratory committee, which also included Tuttle’s longtime business partner, Charles Cook, chairman of the Community Bank; Ed Mills, the bank’s vice president and regional head of the Boy Scouts; and attorney William French Smith, who was brought in by Tuttle to oversee the campaign’s legal affairs. French Smith, a Mayflower descendent from Boston and a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, one of the largest law firms in Los Angeles, would soon The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

  3 3 7

  become Reagan’s personal lawyer. His wife, Jean, a third-generation Angeleno whose family owned the city’s first lumber mill, had known the Tuttles for years, and she got along with Nancy right away.

  Tuttle also sent Reagan to San Francisco to meet with Jaquelin Hume, the founder of Basic Vegetable Products, the world’s largest processor of dehydrated onions and garlic. Hume, who had been one of Goldwater’s key supporters in Northern California, immediately agreed to come on board and gave a breakfast for Reagan to meet other prominent San Francisco conservatives. “I thought he was as sound as he could be,” Hume said of his first meeting with Reagan. “He advocated the political and economic philosophy of which I approved and he seemed to have the ability to express it even better than Goldwater. . . . He is an extremely able individual, much more so than most people realize. . . . Most people had no comprehension that he had such an excellent mind.”100

  These men constituted the original nucleus of what would come to be known as the Kitchen Cabinet, though they would not actually be called that until after Reagan’s election.101 As William French Smith explained,

  “We had social contacts and political contacts, and the relationships just grew. I think what is now referred to as the Kitchen Cabinet was not known by any title. It was just a group of friends that became an executive committee. And I think that group of friends probably may be unique in the annals of American political history, because it started with him, and at least the nucleus has been with him ever since. I don’t know of any other situation where it has been quite like that, people are both social friends and then became active politically in furthering his candidacy.”102

  From the beginning, Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel were determined not to repeat the mistakes of Goldwater’s narrowly based campaign; they saw Reagan as someone who could unify the party. One of their first and wisest moves was to seek out the political consulting firm of Spencer-Roberts, which had run Rockefeller’s campaign in the 1964 primary. Stuart Spencer, a former parks-and-recreation director, and Bill Roberts, a onetime television salesman, had been active in the L.A. County Young Republicans in the 1950s and started their own business in 1960. In six years, Lou Cannon notes, “they had won 34 of 40 congressional races with Republican candidates of various views.” These successful candidates included Betty Adams’s first husband, Alphonzo Bell, a moderate, and John Rousselot, whom they refused to han
dle for reelection when his John Birch Society 3 3 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House membership was revealed. Even Goldwater grudgingly admitted to Tuttle that they were the best.103

  Spencer-Roberts had also been approached by Reagan’s likely opponent, George Christopher, the moderate former mayor of San Francisco.

  As Stu Spencer told me, he first met with Tuttle, Mills, and the Cook brothers at the Cave de Roy, a Hollywood key club. “Then we met with the Reagans several times at their home. It was a really big decision for the company. George Christopher was the odds-on favorite, not this guy coming out of Hollywood who had given a great speech for Goldwater.

  We spent quite a bit of time talking to him. He then went over to see his in-laws in Phoenix, and he called us from there and said, ‘When the hell are you guys going to make your minds up?’ We said, ‘We’re not finished checking yet. We don’t want to find out you’re a Bircher or something.’ So we had one more meeting. I’ll never forget, we got to the house, and he’s sitting there with these big bright red socks on. It was his sense of humor.

  We agreed to do it.”104

  In May the exploratory committee launched Friends of Ronald Reagan, with Rubel, who at seventy was the oldest of the original triumvirate, as chairman of its executive committee. Their first move was to hire Spencer-Roberts to set up the “test-the-waters” tour at a reported fee of $50,000.105

  A few weeks later Friends of Reagan sent out a mailing with requests for donations, which quickly brought in $135,000, enough to cover expenses through the end of the year, when Reagan agreed to make his decision final. Among the forty-one names on the letterhead were James Cagney, Walt Disney, Robert Taylor, and Randolph Scott, as well as Nancy’s friend Anita May, who had been predicting for years that Ronnie would run, and who was the only woman included in meetings of the Kitchen Cabinet’s inner circle. Although Jack Wrather, Bill Wilson, Earle Jorgensen, and Alfred Bloomingdale were not actively involved at this point, they were early contributors. “I remember saying, ‘But Ronnie’s an actor. An actor can’t be governor,’” Betsy Bloomingdale told me. “‘Well,’ Alfred said, ‘you just wait and see.’”106