Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Over the next two years, Ronnie spent most of his free time fixing up Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

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  his “Ranch in the Sky,” usually making the two-hour drive from Pacific Palisades with Barney Barnett, the retired California highway patrolman who had been his driver in Sacramento, and Dennis LeBlanc, the young former state trooper who had been his security man and now traveled with him on his speaking trips. “Sometimes the three of us would go up and back every day for three days in a row,” LeBlanc recalled. “Anne, the Reagans’ housekeeper, would pack a lunch for us or we’d stop at a Kentucky Fried Chicken place on the way up.” They completely gutted the house, converting its screened-in wrap-around porch into an L-shaped living room and dining area, replaced the asbestos roof with Spanish-style tiles, repaired old fences and built new ones. Nancy helped Ronnie paint the house and lay a new floor in the kitchen. They also dug a pond behind the house and named it Lake Lucky.20

  The end result was an exceedingly modest, 1,500-square-foot cottage heated only by two fireplaces. There were two bedrooms, one off the kitchen for Anne Allman. The master bedroom had sunny yellow walls and a matching chenille bedspread. The living room sofas were covered in brown cotton, the armchairs in the den were done in orange plaid, and paintings of horses, cowboys, and Western landscapes hung in every room. As I toured the place in 1999, I kept thinking, Nancy Reagan stayed here? It was a far cry from Sunnylands, or even her parents’ villa in manicured Biltmore Estates. But it had a simplicity and coziness that said a lot about the couple that spent so much time there together.

  On a rise just above the house were a tack barn and a spruced-up trailer, where the kids stayed. “There was always a project at the ranch, and if you went up there to stay, you helped,” said the Wicks’ son C.Z., who had become close to young Ron. “On one of the first weekends I went there, they were building a patio in front of the house. Ron and I quarried the rocks for that—putting them in the back of their ancient Ford station wagon and bringing them down to the house.”

  C. Z. Wick explained that when guests arrived at the turnoff from Pacific Coast Highway, “you’d call from the gas station down at the bottom of Refugio Road and say you were coming up. The Governor would always be waiting to unlock the gate for you. Inevitably, something would catch his interest while he was waiting. I remember once he’d been creosoting those telephone poles that he used to make the fences around the house—you know, this greasy stuff that would make them waterproof and keep the termites away. And he had found some berries that when you 4 3 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House rubbed them together acted like soap. I walked up, and there he was rubbing these things between his hands, cleaning the creosote off.”21

  “Since the day we bought the ranch,” Ronnie said, “if Nancy or I wanted to think something out, there’s been no better place to do it than Rancho del Cielo. . . . During those first months after we left Sacramento, I spent a lot of time . . . riding around the ranch thinking about the future.”22

  On Halloween 1975, Ronnie and Nancy called a family meeting at San Onofre Drive to tell the children that he had decided to run for president.

  Maureen, the self-described “political junkie” of the family, arrived first.23

  She had campaigned hard for Nixon in 1972—George Shultz, then secretary of the treasury, even wrote Reagan a note calling her “terrific.” But, at thirty-four, Maureen was not having much success in launching an acting career, and had taken up with a fifty-five-year-old song-and-dance man named Gene Nelson. Her new beau had actually acted with her father in one of his last films for Warner Bros., but that did not endear him to Ronnie or Nancy.

  Then came Michael with his fiancée Colleen Sterns. After a brief first marriage—to an eighteen-year-old belle from Mobile, Alabama—that produced a son in 1973, Michael had finally found a source of stability in Colleen, “a girl who was equal in strength to Mom or Nancy.”24 He had a good job selling boats in Costa Mesa, and with Colleen’s help he was working off his considerable debts, while trying to follow the advice his father had given him about marriage: “You’ll never get in trouble if you say

  ‘I love you’ at least once a day.”25

  Patti was not at the meeting. Her parents claimed she didn’t want to come; she said she hadn’t been asked.26 A year earlier, while working as a singing hostess at the Great American Food and Beverage Company in Santa Monica, she had met Bernie Leadon, the pot-smoking steel guitarist for the Eagles, one of the most popular rock bands of the early 1970s.

  They were now living together in Topanga Canyon, the hippie haven near Malibu, which her angry father told her was a sin.27 Marion Jorgensen told me that Nancy tried to get along with Patti during this period and even had her friends buy “these little beaded things she was making out there in the woods.”28 In 1974, when Patti and Bernie co-wrote a song for the Eagles called “I Wish You Peace,” her album credit read Patti Davis. Patti saw dropping her father’s name as a “turning point.” As she wrote, “There was Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

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  an underlying reason for choosing my mother’s maiden name. . . . It was a child’s way of asking for a parent’s approval.”29

  The youngest Reagan, who was still living at home but refused to be called the Skipper, had also turned rebellious as he approached eighteen. In the summer of 1973, Ronnie and Nancy had taken him on a four-day horseback trip through Yosemite National Park, with no tents, just sleeping bags, and Ron was so proud of his mother that he had her tin cup engraved,

  “To the World’s Greatest Camper—Sport—and Mom.”30 The following year, however, he was expelled from Webb, one of the top boarding schools in California. “They threw me out halfway through my junior year,” Ron said. “I was too much of a troublemaker. Too prankish. My mother was mortified. . . . She thought my life was over. But my father had a good sense of humor about that sort of thing. He took it with a little more grace.”

  Now that he was back in Pacific Palisades and enrolled at the prestigious Harvard School, the neighbors often heard him screaming at his mother,

  “Leave me alone! . . . All I want is to be left alone.”31

  A likely source of these arguments was the affair he was having with an older, married woman. “She was terrible,” Nancy Reagan told me. “She looked like a child, but she certainly wasn’t a child. She had a daughter whom Ron should have been going out with.”32

  In considering the problems and rebellions of the Reagan children, one has to realize that things could have been much worse, given the turbulence of the times and their parents’ celebrity. No fewer than five of the Reagans’

  friends’ children had overdosed or committed suicide. Like Bob and Ursula Taylor’s boy, Charles Boyer’s twenty-one-year-old son, Michael, was found dead in his bed. Art Linkletter’s twenty-year-old daughter, Diane, and Ray and Fran Stark’s twenty-five-year-old son, Peter, both jumped out of windows, reportedly while high on LSD. Gregory Peck’s son, Jonathan, was thirty when he shot himself in 1975. By her own admission, Patti was taking psychedelics, including peyote, and had a “six month bout with co-caine” later in the 1970s, but she was so estranged from the family that her mother could only imagine what was going on.33 In Ron’s case, Nancy had found a bag of marijuana in his room during the summer before he was expelled from Webb, and was so upset that for the first time she tried to hit him.34 Her suspicion that he was using drugs would continue to be another source of contention between them, and lead her to the sort of overbearing motherly behavior—monitoring his phone calls, grilling him about his friends—that drives teenagers to despair.

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House That evening in October 1975, as Ron slouched on the living room sofa, impatient to get into his costume for a Halloween party, his father explained why he had called the family together. “Dad had a speech all prepared,” Maureen recalled, “and it was clear to me as we all sat down
that he had thought about this meeting for a good long while before we all got there.”35

  “Whenever I check into a hotel, the bellhop asks, ‘Why don’t you run for President?’” Ronnie told his children. “The next morning, when I leave, the chambermaids come up to me and say the same thing. When I walk through the airports, people are always stopping me and saying, ‘Please, we need you to run.’ It won’t be easy but the grassroots support is there. I’ve been speaking out on the issues for quite a while now, and it’s time to put myself on the line. In three weeks I’m going to announce that I’m entering the race. Otherwise, I’d feel like the guy who always sat on the bench and never got into the game.”36

  “You might think that Ronnie’s decision to run for president was a big turning point for our family or for us as a couple,” Nancy later wrote.

  “While it was in certain ways, in others it wasn’t. We didn’t agonize over whether or not Ronnie should run. Quickly enough, it just became obvious that running for president was what Ronnie was going to do and that I was going to support him. If Ronnie was worried after he made his decision, he never let on. If I sometimes knew he was worried, it wasn’t because he told me; it was just because I knew him so well. I never heard him express real fear or self-doubt; I don’t think he really felt either. As I’ve said before, he liked a good competition.”37

  And that’s what he would get.

  “The potential risks of his candidacy were not lost on any of us,” wrote Mike Deaver. “Ford was a sitting, if unelected, president, and Reagan considered himself a loyalist, a consummate party man. No Republican president had been denied his party’s renomination in one hundred years.

  None had been challenged within the party since Teddy Roosevelt did so in 1912, against William Howard Taft, and lost.”38 More recently, however, two Democratic presidents, Truman in 1952 and Johnson in 1968, had given up the fight in the face of strong opposition in the primaries.

  As with Reagan’s first race for governor in 1966 and what Nofziger called his “quarter-hearted” presidential effort in 1968, the planning for 1976 began early but the announcement came late. This time, however, the Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

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  candidate’s delaying tactics were based on calculation rather than doubt—

  Reagan wanted to keep making money for as long as possible before he formally declared, when federal law would require him to give up his lucrative radio commentaries. As usual, the first strategy meeting, in May 1974, took place in Pacific Palisades, with Nancy present. The cast included Deaver, Hannaford, Meese, and Nofziger, as well as Holmes Tuttle and Justin Dart, who was eclipsing Henry Salvatori as the co-leader of the Kitchen Cabinet. There were also some new faces, including David Packard, the billionaire founder of the Hewlett-Packard computer company; Clarke Reed, the chairman of the Republican Party in Mississippi; and, most importantly, John P. Sears III, a well-connected Washington lawyer and the wunderkind tactician of Nixon’s 1968 campaign.39

  The shadow of Watergate, which was still three months from resolution, hung over the gathering. According to Jules Witcover in Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency, 1972–1976, “Meese summarized the morning’s discussion and the general agreement that Reagan should run, but that the effort would have to be contingent on Nixon’s remaining as President through 1976.” When Reagan asked if anyone disagreed, only Sears contradicted the consensus. “I think it can be done, I think it should be done; the party needs it, the country needs it; but I disagree that Nixon has to stay as President,”

  Sears asserted. “In fact, Nixon will be gone in six months.” Furthermore, Sears told Reagan, “Jerry Ford can’t cut the mustard, he’s not perceived as a leader; he can’t lead the Congress or the country. He will be vulnerable and we can beat him. He will not be seen as a true incumbent; you have as much support around the country as he has.”40

  The thirty-four-year-old Sears had studied chemistry at Notre Dame, in hopes of pursuing a career in psychiatry, but he wound up at Georgetown Law School. “He’s cool and unflappable and has a great capacity to size other people up,” a friend once described him. “In that way he’s never really abandoned his wish to be a psychiatrist.”41 Sears had been recruited for the 1976 effort by the Governor’s top political aide, Bob Walker, who had worked for Nixon in 1968 before defecting to Reagan and heading his delegate hunt in the South, where he found himself outsmarted at almost every turn by Sears. Nixon had taken the cunning young lawyer to the White House with him, but he was quickly forced out by John Mitchell.

  The attorney general “neither liked nor trusted him,” said Nofziger, who had also worked in the Nixon White House, “feelings I grew to understand and appreciate.” As Nofziger tells it, Walker “persuaded Deaver to invite 4 3 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

  [Sears] to some early organizational meetings. Deaver became enamored of Sears, whose line of political chatter impressed almost all of us, including the Reagans.”42

  “John Sears was urbane and articulate,” Nancy recalled in My Turn.

  “And he knew as much about politics as anyone I had ever met. I loved having lunch with him because he was bright, knowledgeable, and fascinating to listen to. John was not a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, and some of Ronnie’s supporters didn’t trust him. His mission was to bring home a winner, and he would do everything possible to make that happen.” She added, “He also had excellent contacts with the Washington press corps, which would be very important if Ronnie entered the race.”43 In fact, a decade after Nancy penned those words, Nixon’s lawyer Leonard Garment published In Search of Deep Throat, in which he came to the well-considered conclusion that John Sears had been Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s infamous secret source.

  In the event, Nixon resigned three months earlier than Sears had predicted, but that still made Sears something of a prophet for Ronnie, Nancy, and Mike Deaver. “Our long national nightmare is over,” declared Gerald Ford on August 10, 1974, after being sworn in as the first man to assume the presidency without having been elected to that office or to the vice presidency. This precedent would subtly undermine Ford’s legitimacy and provide justification for Reagan’s challenge, but for the moment the entire nation was relieved to have a “regular guy” from Grand Rapids, Michigan, replacing the dour, paranoid, and downright weird Richard Milhous Nixon. Betty Ford, a former modern dancer who still liked to kick up her heels on the dance floor, was also a breath of fresh air in contrast to the sad, uptight, isolated Pat Nixon. And the four Ford children, all in their early twenties and late teens, were athletic and outgoing, not prim and prissy like the Nixon girls. That fall, after the new First Lady underwent a radical mastectomy, she spoke openly about the previously taboo subject of breast cancer and earned the respect of the country for her honesty and bravery.

  By then her husband’s popularity had been severely damaged by his unconditional pardon of Nixon, and there was audible grumbling on the right about his selection of Rockefeller for vice president, his offer of amnesty to Vietnam War evaders, and his proposed deficit to stimulate the lagging economy. In the November 1974 midterm elections, the Democrats picked up forty-nine House seats, five Senate seats, and four gover-Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

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  norships. Reagan, winding down in Sacramento and wanting to be seen as giving Ford a chance, remained temporarily above the fray, though he publicly supported the pardon, saying Nixon had “suffered as much as any man should.”44

  In December, Tuttle, Dart, and Jack Wrather hosted a lunch at the Downtown Los Angeles Club for Senator Lloyd Bentsen, a conservative Texas Democrat who was thinking of running for president. The lunch was widely seen as a warning signal to Ford, and The New York Times quoted unnamed guests as saying that the Kitchen Cabinet big shots would never have given the lunch without Reagan’s prior knowledge.45 Meanwhile, John Sears was letting it drop that he had been offered a job in the Ford White House, and pressuring De
aver to get Reagan to announce as soon as possible in the new year.46

  That would have to wait, since Reagan was just embarking on the radio, newspaper, and speaking schedule put together by Deaver and Hannaford. In February 1975, “immaculate in a carefully pressed blue suit and highly polished loafers,” he was the star speaker at a conference sponsored by the Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union to explore the possibility of forming a third party. Introduced by Bill Buckley’s brother, Senator James Buckley of New York, as “the Rem-brandt of American conservatism,” Reagan brought the crowd to its feet.

  “Is it a third party we need?” he bellowed. “Or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all the issues troubling the people?”47

  In early March, at a Republican leadership conference in Washington, Reagan rejected appeals by Ford and Rockefeller to broaden the party base by asserting, “A political party cannot be all things to all people. . . . It is not a social club or fraternity engaged in intramural contests to accumu-late trophies on the mantel over the fireplace.”48 A Newsweek cover story later that month, titled “Ready on the Right,” called him “the most kinetic single presence in American political life.”49 Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, contacted Reagan and offered him the post of secretary of commerce, which Reagan politely turned down. On March 30, an increasingly edgy President Ford invited the Reagans for dinner at the Palm Springs house he and Betty were renting from one of his golfing partners.