Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  If his purpose was to dissuade Reagan from running, he obviously didn’t succeed. Betty Ford later said of Nancy, “She’s a cold fish. . . . Nancy could 4 4 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House not have been colder. Then the flashbulbs went off, and she smiled and kissed me—suddenly an old friend. I couldn’t get over that. Off camera—

  ice. On camera—warmth.”50

  Two days later the Reagans flew to London, where Ronnie gave a speech to the Pilgrim Society, an organization founded by Cecil Rhodes to promote unity among English-speaking nations, and met with the first woman to head the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher. Justin Dart, who kept an apartment near Hyde Park, and Walter Annenberg had helped arrange the meeting. “I’d planned on spending only a few minutes with Margaret Thatcher but we ended up talking for almost two hours,”

  Reagan recalled. “I liked her immediately—she was warm, feminine, gracious, and intelligent—and it was evident from our first words that we were soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding economic freedom.”51

  Thatcher felt the same way. “It was clear that Ron Reagan was in politics out of passionate belief,” she told me in 1998. “This is the century when we have had the biggest battle of ideas in history. Between totalitarianism and freedom. Coercion versus liberty. Ron Reagan was a passionate warrior in this battle. I was also a warrior.”52 The Iron Lady, as she came to be known, had taken over the Tory leadership only two months before meeting Reagan, and had immediately declared “an all-out war on Socialism.” With an approval rating of 64 percent, she was the most popular politician in Britain at the time, well on her way to 10 Downing Street.53

  Shortly after Reagan returned to Los Angeles, he met with his inner circle, “confessed his increasing disillusion with Ford’s leadership and said he was willing to run.”54 Had Thatcher provided him with the example—

  and extra dose of affirmation—that he needed to commit to taking on the White House and its ideologically impure occupant? In a Memorial Day speech in Atlantic City, Reagan sounded the theme that would propel his campaign against Ford: “The free world—indeed, the entire non-Communist world—is crying out for strong American leadership, and we are not providing it. Neither are we providing a strong, lasting, consistent foreign policy.” The next morning on Face the Nation he promised he would make his plans known by the end of the year.55

  A few days later, Reagan’s principal boosters in the Senate, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, James McClure of Idaho, and James Buckley, issued a statement that could only make Ford more uncomfortable: “As neither the President nor the Vice President was elected to office, it would be in the Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

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  best interest of the Republican Party and of the country for the 1976 presidential and vice-presidential nominations to be sought and won in an open convention. . . . The merits of the current administration must be judged in 1976 by delegates pledged only to support the principles of their party. The President can ask for no more—and he deserves no less.”56

  Meanwhile, at a secret meeting in San Francisco with Deaver, Hannaford, and Nofziger, Sears was given the go-ahead to put together a Reagan for President committee. Nofziger soon moved to Washington, where he and Sears started working out of a makeshift headquarters at Sears’s law firm. They had already approached Senator Paul Laxalt about heading the committee. Laxalt, a tall, rugged conservative, had been governor of Nevada during Reagan’s first term, and the two men got along well. As a freshmen senator from a small state, however, he wanted to be sure Reagan was serious before he brought the ire of the White House down upon himself. In a July 4 phone call, Laxalt asked Reagan, “You’ve got a fire burning in your gut to do this, don’t you?” “I have to tell you I have,” Reagan answered. “Well, tell me, on a scale of one to ten,” Laxalt persisted,

  “where would you place yourself in terms of a candidacy?” “Oh, right about eight,” said the ever cautious Reagan. “That’s good enough for me,”

  his fellow Westerner told him. “I guess I’m your man.”57

  On July 15, Laxalt announced the formation of the Citizens for Reagan Committee, with himself as chairman and Sears as executive vice chairman.

  Asked about a recent Gallup Poll showing Reagan as the first choice of 20

  percent of Republicans as opposed to 41 percent for President Ford, Laxalt maintained that was a strong position for a noncandidate against an incumbent.58 Ford had officially declared he was running in a July 8 speech from the Oval Office; two days later forty-four prominent California Republicans, including several longtime Reagan associates, came out for the President. The defectors included state party chairman Paul Haerle, who had been Reagan’s appointments secretary in Sacramento and did not get along with Nancy, and computer tycoon David Packard, who had been at the first strategy meeting in Pacific Palisades in May 1974, but who now signed on as Ford’s national finance chairman. The most surprising name on the list was Henry Salvatori.

  “I felt this way very strongly,” Salvatori later explained, “that an incumbent President should not be opposed by a member of his own party. At no time has such a man won. If he wins the nomination, he loses the election. I 4 4 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House thought of it strictly as a practical situation. I felt for Reagan. Through no fault of his own, lightning struck, and he had to face an incumbent President when he shouldn’t have. If Nixon hadn’t gotten involved in Watergate, Reagan would have marched right in. I understood how a lot of people felt.

  It was hard for them and it was hard for Reagan to say, ‘Let’s wait for next time.’ I was hoping he wouldn’t run for his own ultimate good. I asked him before I committed to Ford if he was going to run and he hadn’t decided. I don’t think he would have run if he hadn’t felt a responsibility to various people around the country who liked him so much and urged him to run.

  It proved me wrong, but I really thought that if one or two guys like me would go for Ford that maybe he wouldn’t run. I really believed that.”59

  Salvatori tried to talk Tuttle into seeing things his way, but as far as Tuttle was concerned whatever Ronnie wanted Ronnie got. This split in the Kitchen Cabinet was some time in coming, and it would never quite be repaired. At the root of it was an antagonism between Salvatori and Justin Dart that went all the way back to 1964, when they were on opposite sides of the Goldwater-Rockefeller divide. Both men tended toward the pugnacious and arrogant, and both were fond of publicizing their wealth and power. Salvatori, whose influence in Reagan’s first term had nearly equaled Tuttle’s, resented the sudden rise of Dart in the second term. The change in the federal campaign finance law after Watergate, limiting individual donations to $1,000 to any one candidate and $25,000 to any party in each campaign cycle, further strengthened Dart’s position as an ace fund-raiser against the big-check writer Salvatori.

  Nancy also played a significant role in this shifting dynamic. Although she and Punky Dart hadn’t hit it off at first—and Punky would never become a lady-in-waiting like Betsy, Marion, and Betty Wilson—Nancy had come to appreciate her discretion and independence. The fact that Punky had refused to join the Blue Ribbon 400, while Grace Salvatori remained Buff Chandler’s right arm despite being publicly humiliated by her, no doubt contributed to Nancy’s growing affection for Dart’s wife. The elegant champagne receptions the Darts gave for the POWs had also made points with the Governor’s wife. Moreover, Nancy had developed her own relationship with Justin Dart; she frequently called him about fund-raising and personnel matters, just as she had been doing with Alfred Bloomingdale for years.

  Though such subtle social shifts may seem inconsequential, the decline of the archconservative Salvatori and the rise of the more corporate-minded Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

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  Dart, especially when seen in the light of Nancy’s increasing closeness to the Gosdens, the Cowleses, Kay Graham, and other establishme
nt types, represented a small step in the long process of moving her husband toward the center. In any event, Nancy would never fully forgive Henry Salvatori for his 1976 defection. The Salvatoris were off Marion Jorgensen’s guest list as early as May 1975, and when the Jorgensens had a big cocktail party for the Reagans on the night of the California primary in June 1976, everyone from Betty Adams to Jerry Zipkin was there nibbling on the guacamole in toast cups with bacon bits—everyone except Henry and Grace.60

  Leonard Firestone and Taft Schreiber also backed Ford, though the latter would die before the Kansas City convention. In addition, the Reagan campaign found itself without two key strategists: Tom Reed and Stu Spencer. Reed, a driving force behind the 1968 presidential run and co-chair of the 1970 gubernatorial campaign, had been made an assistant secretary of defense by Nixon and would soon be promoted to secretary of the Air Force by Ford. Spencer would become the chief strategist in the Ford campaign, though, as he told me, he didn’t jump to the other side—he was pushed.

  “My problem was never with the Reagans,” he confided, explaining that during the Governor’s second term his top staffers moved to consolidate their power. “I had total access to the Reagans. They [the staffers] had a problem with that. The Reagans didn’t even know it was happening, and I’m not the kind of guy to go around and whine. I fight my battles.” Although he counted Ed Meese among those who undermined him, Spencer was most disappointed by his old protégé, Mike Deaver. “He was a very big part of it. We had some real problems. This started in the last two years of the governorship, and it got worse. I just walked away. And then in 1976

  there was no way that those people were going to let me in, even if I wanted in—it was obvious to me. I had known Ford for years, and his campaign started having some problems, and all of a sudden they came to me. Actually, I agreed to do something for two months, and I ended up there for eighteen months. The point is it was not a falling out with the Reagans.

  But when I got into the Ford thing, I took some good shots at the Reagans, and they were pretty mad. But the reason I was there was, hey, Ford was the only show in town for me.”61

  The Ford-Reagan contest was an exceptionally personal one, not only because the candidates had very little respect for each other’s abilities but also 4 4 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House because their wives seemed to be innately antipathetic. The two women could not have been more different. For Nancy Reagan, for instance, a trip to New York meant lunch at Le Cirque with Jan Cowles and Jerry Zipkin, a fitting at Adolfo or Bill Blass, and dinner at the Buckleys’ Park Avenue maisonette. Betty Ford’s best friend in New York, on the other hand, was her former teacher Martha Graham, the matriarch of modern dance, who introduced her to Halston, the hippest designer in town, and Andy Warhol, the wildest artist. Whereas Nancy was a virtual teetotaler, Betty liked to drink, and she would later admit to a problem with alcohol and pills. Even while she was First Lady, she talked about the nervous breakdown she had had in the 1960s and how much psychiatry had helped her—something the secretive, image-driven Nancy would never dream of doing.

  In August 1975, Betty Ford gave an interview on 60 Minutes. When Morley Safer asked her how she would react if her eighteen-year-old daughter told her she was having an affair, the First Lady answered, “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. I think she’s a perfectly normal human being, like all girls. If she wanted to continue it, I would certainly counsel and advise her on the subject.” While not exactly condoning premarital sex, she did say that it “might lower the divorce rate,” and she also blithely suggested that if she were a young person today she might try marijuana. She called the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision “great,” saying that it had brought abortion “out of the backwoods and put it in the hospitals where it belongs.”62

  The reaction from Republican right-wingers was instantaneous.

  William Loeb, the ultraconservative publisher of New Hampshire’s leading newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader, condemned the immorality and the “utter stupidity” of Betty Ford’s remarks. “Involving any prominent individual, this would be a disgusting spectacle,” he wrote. “Coming from the First Lady in the White House, it disgraces the nation itself.”63 So many angry phone calls, telegrams, and letters deluged 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that the President was only half joking when he said that he was afraid his wife’s remarks would cost him 20 million votes. The very next week, however, a Harris Poll showed that she was a lot more popular than he was, and in analyzing the results, Louis Harris said, “Mrs. Ford’s outspoken statements have won support from those younger and more independent elements in the electorate who are indispensable to her husband in a contest for the White House next fall.” Feminist leader Betty Friedan anointed the First Lady “the best kind of liberated woman.”64

  Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

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  None of this went over well with Nancy. In mid-September she took it upon herself to attack the increasingly admired First Lady. She didn’t mention Betty Ford by name in the speech she gave to the Women’s Republican Club of Grosse Pointe, the richest town in the Fords’ home state of Michigan, but everybody knew exactly whom she was referring to when she said, “I am disturbed about the growing immorality. . . . Our sons and daughters are told not only that it’s all right to break our rules of morality, but that there should be no rules at all. . . . I believe it is time the great majority of us said, ‘Enough already. Stop.’ ”65

  The great issue of the day for American women was the Equal Rights Amendment, which had been passed by Congress but had not been ratified by the required three quarters of the states. Among the wives of potential presidential candidates from both parties, a field that included Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, Arizona congressman Morris Udall, and Sargent Shriver, only two opposed the ERA—Cornelia Wallace, the wife of the Alabama governor, and Nancy Reagan. As First Lady, Betty Ford became the amendment’s most prominent supporter, spending countless hours calling state legislators and urging them to vote for it. Her progressive views endeared her most of all to women in the media, just as Nancy’s obsession with tradition and appearance worked against her. As Helen Jackson, the wife of another prospective candidate, Senator Henry

  “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, said, “More is expected of wives this year than at any other time in a Presidential campaign. We all discuss cerebral things. . . . I think it’s all because of Watergate and the women’s movement. Watergate made people more concerned about the kind of people elected to public office, and because of the women’s movement, wives are now expected to be able to talk issues. It takes a lot more energy now than when all we did was drink tea and shake hands with the ladies.”66 At the end of 1975, Newsweek put Betty Ford on its cover as “Woman of the Year” and Time named her its “Man of the Year,” making her only the eleventh woman to receive that distinction.

  Ironically, in private Nancy Reagan, because of her glamorous upbringing and her years in Hollywood, was much more sophisticated than Betty Ford. As the editor of Interview in those days, I had occasion to see Mrs. Ford at Halston’s dinners, where she was really a fish out of water—

  extremely pleasant but at a loss with guests such as Diana Vreeland and Truman Capote, who had both hit it off perfectly with Nancy. One of the 4 4 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House new friends Nancy made during this period was Barry Diller, who was a senior ABC executive when he met her at a dinner given by Oscar and Françoise de la Renta in Los Angeles. “I was seated next to her, and instantly we got it,” Diller recalled. “It didn’t really make any sense—we weren’t of the same age, I was hardly a Republican—but within twenty minutes we were telling each other about our lives.” After the Reagans left Sacramento and Diller took over Paramount in 1974, he continued to see her, and when his relationship with Diane von Furstenberg was in trouble, he told me, “one of the people I really talked about it with was Nancy. And I did not talk to too many o
f the older folks about my personal life. But with her I talked about everything, and I totally trusted her.”67

  But then again, Nancy was always at ease with men. Merv Griffin, who had known the Reagans since he was under contract to Warner Bros. in the 1950s, regularly put her, with or without Ronnie, on his nightly talk show throughout the governorship and afterward. Mike Wallace, who went even further back with Nancy, aired an interview with her and Ronnie and Maureen for 60 Minutes on December 14, 1975, three weeks after Reagan formally announced his candidacy. CBS ran a full-page ad in The New York Times: “Tonight, Ronald Reagan tells how he’d play the role of President.”

  Up to the last minute, Gerald Ford did everything possible to stop Reagan from entering the race. In early October he put the super-professional Stu Spencer in charge of his campaign’s day-to-day operations, in effect turning the campaign manager, the feckless Howard “Bo” Callaway of Georgia, into a figurehead. A month later the President shook up his foreign policy team and top staff. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, a hard-liner who opposed the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente with the Soviet Union and Communist China, was replaced by the more moderate Donald Rumsfeld, who had been White House chief of staff. Rumsfeld’s deputy, Richard Cheney, took his boss’s job, and, as a supposed sop to conservatives, Henry Kissinger, who had been serving as both secretary of state and national security adviser since Watergate, gave up the latter post to his right-hand man, Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft. In the midst of this upheaval, Vice President Rockefeller, tired of the constant chorus of criticism aimed at him by Southern Republicans, including Bo Callaway, told Ford that he was taking himself out of consideration for the 1976 ticket.

  Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

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  Reagan promptly went on the record with his reaction. He said he was

  “shocked” at the dismissal of Schlesinger, calling him “the most articulate voice” on national defense in the administration, and expressed dismay at the “shabby treatment” of Rockefeller. “I’m certainly not appeased,” he told the press with a laugh. Speaking at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton on November 3, he answered a student’s question about his intentions by saying, “On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m about a 9.”68