Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  “Never mind that two conservatives on the same ticket had no chance of winning. As always, some of Ronnie’s supporters insisted on putting ideological purity ahead of victory.”100 Bill Buckley, who was supporting Reagan, came to his defense. “It is worth recalling just how traditional, in essence, such a choice actually is,” he reminded his readers in a column defending the Schweiker ploy.101

  But in the few days left before the convention, it became clear that Reagan would not pick up more than a handful of delegates in the Northeast, and, to make matters worse, the Mississippi delegation, which had been leaning toward Reagan, was now completely up in the air. Reagan and Schweiker flew to Jackson, to meet directly with the delegates, taking along John Wayne, who told a reporter that he had always thought “Schweiker was a commie, but if he’s good enough for Ronnie, that’s enough for me.”102

  At the 1964 convention in San Francisco, Ronald Reagan had been a bit player. In Miami Beach in 1968, he had taken a more important part but was not quite sure how to play it. In 1972, in Miami Beach again, he had performed perfectly, but his was still a supporting role. Now, as the Grand Old Party gathered in Kansas City, Ronnie was definitely a star, playing his part to the hilt. And so was Nancy. In fact, she and Betty Ford nearly upstaged their husbands. As Jerald terHorst, Ford’s former press secretary, wrote in his syndicated column:

  The impact of the “presidential women,” their importance in making or breaking a ticket—perhaps even in shaping it—is now of Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

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  such significance that we should no longer discount or disguise it.

  The Republican scene in Kansas City last week was a testimonial to the fact. Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan were more than symbols in the intense rivalry between their husbands. They were competitors in their own right, vying for space in the papers and a place in the spotlight, their entrances to the convention hall carefully stage-managed to extract maximum attention from delegates and television viewers. On the sidewalks, street vendors hawked buttons reading “Vote for Betty’s Husband” and “Betty Can Dance But Nancy Can Lead.” Except for the two principals, no other Republican politician in the hall rated the special salute and the acknowledgement of personal influence and popularity accorded the First Lady. One cannot imagine Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Jackie Kennedy, or even Pat Nixon standing at the lectern with up-turned face, right fist punching the air, while defiantly shouting,

  “We’re going to win!”103

  The Reagans arrived in Kansas City on Sunday, August 15, the day before the convention opened. Flying with them were Maureen, Michael and Colleen, who was now his wife, and Ron, all of whom had done their part in the primary campaigns, and would surround Nancy in her skybox at the Kemper Arena for the next four nights. Though The New York Times delegate count now showed Ford only ten votes short, Reagan maintained that he could still win. In a last-ditch effort to pull off an upset, Sears had proposed a rule change that would require candidates to name a running mate before the presidential roll call. Reagan’s choice, Richard Schweiker, was waiting at the airport with the news that thirteen uncommitted Pennsylvania delegates were finally ready to come aboard, though he refused to provide their names to the press. The in-fighting among the Pennsylvanians had become so bitter that Schweiker’s children slipped a note under Drew Lewis’s door, saying, “Caesar had his Brutus, Jesus had his Judas, and Schweiker has his Lewis.”104

  Once again the Kitchen Cabinet comprised a large part of the California delegation: Tuttle, Dart, William French Smith, Jack Wrather, Earle Jorgensen, Bill Wilson, and Alfred Bloomingdale had seats on the convention floor. Their wives had brought Julius again, who spent much of his time coiffing Nancy in the Reagans’ suite at the Alameda Plaza Hotel. The Bloomingdales and Jerry Zipkin had arrived two days earlier for a round of parties, including one given by Kansas City banker Charles Price II and 4 5 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House his wife, Carol, a Swanson frozen food heiress, who were good friends of the Annenbergs and the newest additions to the Group.

  “It’s really quite civilized here,” Zipkin told The New York Times’s Charlotte Curtis. “I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. I’ve been up at the Olympics with the Jaggers and out in Beverly Hills with Ronnie and Nancy just oozing charm out of every pore. I brought some cheese and that nice pita bread just in case.”105 On Tuesday he had a tête-à-tête lunch with Nancy in her suite and caught her up on the parties she had missed over the weekend.106 A few eyebrows were raised when he and Betsy Bloomingdale were photographed sitting in the Reagan box, just behind Nancy and the children.

  On the opening night, Vice President Rockefeller’s keynote speech was completely overshadowed by the boisterous demonstrations set off by the back-to-back arrivals of Nancy, in a crimson Galanos, and Betty Ford, in an aquamarine Halston. The band got so mixed up that it switched abruptly from “California, Here I Come” to “The Michigan Fight Song”

  and back again, squeezing a few bars of “The Sidewalks of New York” in between as Rockefeller took the podium.107 During the course of the day, Ford had won enough public commitments to give him a majority of the delegates, but the Reagan forces were still counting on fights over their proposed rule change and an anti-Kissinger platform plank they had introduced at the last minute to undo the inevitable.

  The following night, Ford wisely accepted this so-called Morality in Foreign Policy plank, complete with its praise for Solzhenitsyn, overruling the protests of Rockefeller and Kissinger himself. The climactic moment came when the rule change was narrowly defeated after Mississippi’s Clarke Reed, under heavy pressure from White House chief of staff Dick Cheney, threw in his lot with Ford. “So close and yet so far,” an unnamed Reagan supporter told the Times.108 “That was when we knew for certain that the race was over,” said Nancy, who had suffered a defeat of her own that evening when Betty Ford upstaged her entrance by dancing in the aisles with pop singer Tony Orlando.109

  “The next evening, before the nominations were made, our family had a quiet dinner together in our suite,” Nancy later wrote. “Then we all gathered in the living room, where Ronnie explained what we already knew—

  that our long, emotional struggle was about to end in defeat.” Facing his teary-eyed family, Reagan said, “I’m sorry that you all have to see this.”

  Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

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  Characteristically, he then tried to lighten the mood. “You know what I regret the most? I had really looked forward to sitting down at the table with Brezhnev to negotiate on arms control. He would tell me all the things that our side would have to give up. And then, when he was finished, I was planning to stand up, walk around the table, and whisper one little word in his ear: Nyet.” Nancy proposed a toast: “Honey, in all the years we’ve been married, you have never done anything to disappoint me. And I’ve never been prouder of you than I am now.”110

  At 12:30 it was all over when West Virginia put Ford over the top on the first ballot. But it was close: Ford 1,187; Reagan 1,070. Several delegations then moved to switch their votes and make it unanimous for Ford.

  The California delegation would not go along with this customary gesture, and knowing how bad that would look for Reagan, Nofziger called Tuttle and asked him to make them switch. For once, even Tuttle couldn’t deliver, so Nofziger went down onto the convention floor and pleaded with the delegates himself. “We came here to vote for Reagan and we’re going to keep voting for him,” Bill Wilson snapped. The matter was resolved when convention chairman Governor James Rhodes decided the appearance of party unity was more important than the fine points of procedure, pounded his gavel, and declared “The vote is unanimous.”111 “In the heat of the moment I thought this was outrageous,” Nancy said. “But in retrospect, it was probably a wise move.”112

  “All at once I began to cry, not just a few tears but real sobs,” Nofziger recalled. “I couldn’t figure it out. In the back
of my head I was calm and rational but still, there I was, crying like a girl.”113 Back at the hotel, Helene von Damm was crying “so hard I had to take big gulps of air between sobs.”114 By that time Wilson, Earle Jorgensen, and Alfred Bloomingdale had come to the Reagan suite. “I’ll never forget the sight of those three great big grown-up men crying when Ronnie lost,” Nancy told me.115

  Sometime after one in the morning, a victorious Gerald Ford was driven to the Alameda Plaza to meet with his vanquished foe. Sears had agreed to this meeting in advance on the condition that Ford not ask Reagan to be his running mate, so that Reagan would not be put in the awkward position of having to turn the President down.116 Many in Kansas City believed a Ford-Reagan ticket was the Republicans’ best chance of winning against Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale, who had been nominated by a strong and 4 5 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House unified Democratic Party the previous month. According to Nofziger, however, one of Ford’s top aides told him the President “absolutely refused to discuss the possibility of picking Reagan.”117 For his part, Reagan said, “I just wasn’t interested in being vice-president.”118 According to her friends, Nancy was even less interested. During their twenty-seven-minute meeting, Ford did not extend an offer, and Reagan extolled the virtues of Senator Robert Dole of Kansas. Yet at the “unity press conference” that followed, Reagan waffled when asked what he would do if he were drafted at the convention the following night. A smiling Ford then wrapped things up by saying he was sure there would be a place for Reagan in his administration.119

  Back at his own hotel, the Crown Plaza, on what was now Thursday morning, Ford and his advisers held two meetings to pick the vice presidential candidate from a list of sixteen names that included one woman, Ambassador Anne Armstrong of Texas (whose strongest advocate among the Ford insiders was Stu Spencer). The first meeting went from 3:15 to 5:00 a.m., the second started at 9:30.

  “At seven o’clock there was a knock on the door of my hotel room,” recalled Mike Deaver. “I go to the door bleary-eyed in my pajamas, and there are Jus Dart, Holmes Tuttle, and William French Smith, all in their blue blazers, rep ties, gray slacks, and loafers. ‘We want to see Ron,’ Jus said.

  They wanted him to be vice president in the worst way. My room was right next to the Reagans’ suite, so I let them into the living room, got some coffee for them, went into the Reagans’ bedroom—they were sound asleep—

  woke them up, and said, ‘I’m sorry, but Jus and Holmes and Bill Smith are out there and want to talk to you about the vice presidency.’ Reagan said,

  ‘Tell them I don’t want the vice presidency.’ I said, ‘They’re not going to take that from me. You have to tell them.’ The guy was ticked, but he got up and got dressed, and just as he came into the living room the telephone rings. I pick it up and say, ‘Governor, it’s President Ford.’ Reagan takes the phone. ‘Right, right, right. Great. I’ll do everything I can to help. Wonderful.’ He puts the phone down and says, ‘Guys, I know what you came here for, but he’s picked Bob Dole.’ Jus Dart put his arms around Reagan and wept. ”120

  Justin Dart later maintained that he had convinced Reagan to take the nomination if it were offered. As he remembered it, he had cornered Ronnie in his suite after it became obvious that Ford would win—and at a moment when Nancy was at the convention hall. “I was there beg-Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

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  ging, arguing,” Dart said. “I said, ‘Look, your first duty is to your country—not to your wife, not to your family, not to anything, just your country. And Ford needs you to get elected.’ He would give me every reason in the world why he shouldn’t take it. . . . In any event I finally convinced him on a one-on-one basis that he owed it to his country. He said,

  ‘I don’t want to sit there presiding over that Senate with a gag on my mouth.’ . . . In his own way he was absolutely right and he was totally sincere, but the final line was, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it if he offers it.’ ”

  In Dart’s account, he then sent a message to Ford, but there was no response. “Well, Ford didn’t offer it for two reasons,” Dart said. “First, he thought he didn’t need Ronald Reagan to win. And second, he was upset with Ronald Reagan for opposing him for the nomination, which is understandable. I like Jerry Ford. I don’t think he’s in the same class with Ronald Reagan either as a leader or a thinker or a statesman, but he had a right to those opinions.”121 Tuttle backed up Dart in saying that Reagan

  “would have accepted. No question about it. He was not asked.”122 But Ed Mills, who was also at the convention, was not so sure. “After it was all over, whether Reagan would have considered it, I don’t know to this day.”123

  Later on Thursday morning, with Nancy standing at his side, Reagan spoke to about two hundred of his campaign workers in the Alameda Plaza’s ballroom. “The cause goes on,” he told them. “Nancy and I aren’t going [to go]

  back, sit on a rocking chair and say that’s all there is for us. We’re going to stay in there and you stay in there with me.” Nancy, obviously upset, turned her back to the crowd so that no one would see her openly sob.124 “There wasn’t a dry eye in the room, including my own,” said Mike Deaver.125

  Cary Grant, white-haired but debonair, introduced a sparkling Betty Ford on the last night of the convention, and then the First Lady presented her husband. The President, who was famous for his dull delivery and clumsy manner, managed to give a rousing and polished acceptance speech, probably because he had rehearsed it for two weeks.126 In a mag-nanimous gesture, Ford then invited his would-be usurper to join him on the stage. “I don’t have the foggiest idea what I’m going to say,” Reagan told Deaver as he took Nancy’s hand and led her from their box.127 In his brief extemporaneous remarks, the once-and-future candidate sounded a cry to battle that brought him the longest, loudest ovation of the entire conven-4 6 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House tion. “In some campaigns,” columnist Tom Wicker wrote, “the loser is the biggest winner.”128

  “After he lost the nomination in Kansas City in 1976,” Marion Jorgensen told me, “we were all at the Wilsons’ ranch, the one they had up in Santa Barbara. And we’d go for dinner, you know, at the neighbors’. And now Ronnie wasn’t being seated so well. He had lost and they put him next to me, an old friend, instead of next to the hostess, where he’d always been seated as Governor. You see what I mean? And I said to him one night, ‘It must be hard, losing like that.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Marion, you don’t understand. I am going to be President of the United States. I am not giving up.’ ”129

  C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N

  REAGAN VS. CARTER

  1977–1980

  [Reagan in 1976] was convinced that if he had won he would have beaten Jimmy Carter. The thought of getting his own shot at Carter certainly pushed him toward his eventual decision to run again. I’m sure that Nancy, too, wanted him to run again. They had come so close. And there was no doubt in her mind or her husband’s that he was the best man, better than Ford, better than Carter.

  Lyn Nofziger, Nofziger 1

  “Fate” as a character in legend represents the fulfillment of man’s expectation of himself.

  Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly:

  From Troy to Vietnam 2

  Bush was the last-minute choice for vice president, because what’s-his-name—Ford—asked to be co-president. That made Ronnie so mad that he picked up the phone and called George Bush.

  Betsy Bloomingdale to author,

  September 26, 1999

  A WEEK AFTER THE CONVENTION IN KANSAS CITY, PRESIDENT FORD CALLED

  Ronald Reagan and invited him and Nancy “to come to Washington and spend a night in the White House.” Reagan declined, and while he assured Ford that he would do whatever he could to help the ticket, he added, “I’ve also got to get back to making a living.” Mike Deaver, who had already started putting Reagan’s speaking schedule together for the fall, explain
ed that this should not be interpreted as a rebuff, and issued a pro forma statement of support: “The Governor sincerely believes that the 4 6 1

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House country cannot afford four years of Jimmy Carter and the stakes are too high to wallow in recriminations.”3

  Over the next nine weeks Reagan campaigned in more than twenty states, but exclusively for Republican candidates who had supported his challenge to Ford. Just as pointedly, his speeches emphasized the party’s platform, with its anti-détente and anti-abortion planks, which had been included to mollify his conservative supporters. Likewise, when he finally agreed to do television ads for the Ford-Dole effort, they focused almost entirely on the virtues of the platform.4 There were no joint appearances with Ford, and when the President appeared in California in late October, with John Wayne at his side, Reagan remained at Rancho del Cielo, sending his regrets by telegram, which an annoyed Ford staff released to the press.5 After Lyn Nofziger, who was working for Dole, pleaded with him, Reagan acquiesced to a photo op with the vice presidential candidate, on the condition that it take place in Pacific Palisades.6 When Ford’s campaign chairman, James Baker III, called Holmes Tuttle and begged him to persuade Reagan to make a quick swing through Florida, Mississippi, and Texas in the final days before the election, Reagan said no.7 According to Nofziger, Reagan wouldn’t even accept an invitation to a Salute to Ford fund-raiser in Los Angeles unless Paul Haerle, the California Republican Party chairman who had deserted him early on, was disinvited.8 Nancy later admitted, “It took years for the scars of 1976 to heal between the Fords and the Reagans. . . . You can’t work that hard and that long without being frustrated, and Ronnie and I were both deeply disappointed that he didn’t win the nomination in 1976.”9