Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Conservatives had attempted to bar Kissinger from addressing the convention, but in the speech he gave that evening he tore into Carter’s foreign policy and came out sounding like Reagan at his most apocalyptic.

  “The Carter Administration has managed the extraordinary feat,” he intoned in his heavy German accent, “of having at one and the same time the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War. We can assert that these multiplying crises are the natural result of a naïve philosophy, which, since 1977, has recoiled from our power and fled from our responsibilities. Sooner or later our weakness will produce a catastrophe.”112

  At midnight Kissinger proceeded to Ford’s suite and made what several sources have called an “impassioned plea” for the former president to consider Reagan’s offer in light of the dire international situation. After forty-five minutes, Alan Greenspan, who had served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ford, joined the discussion. According to Theodore White, over the next two hours Kissinger and Greenspan developed the concept that “the President would be the Chief Policymaker, but 4 9 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the Vice-President would be the Chief Operator.” In this proposed scheme of things, Ford would oversee the Office of Management and Budget as well as the National Security Council. “All agreed,” White writes, “that the next morning Ford’s councillors would meet with Reagan’s and see if a new definition of the roles of President and Vice-President could be worked out.”113

  On Wednesday morning, Kissinger, Greenspan, and Dick Cheney, Ford’s former chief of staff, presented their ideas for a power-sharing arrangement to Casey, Meese, and Wirthlin. As Lyn Nofziger recalled, Meese “wrote down Ford’s demands and showed them to me. Among other things Ford, or at least those negotiating for him, was demanding that the White House staff report to the president through him—Ford would decide who on the staff would and would not see the president. He also wanted to pick the secretary of state and secretary of defense, although he generously offered Reagan a veto. But in turn, he wanted veto rights on Reagan’s other cabinet picks.”114

  “From my perspective as negotiator,” Meese later wrote, “this was a complete nonstarter. . . . I had no doubt that, from Kissinger’s standpoint, this meant control over important facets of foreign policy and arms control, in which Kissinger himself, it’s safe to say, would have played a prominent role. . . . I didn’t think that Ronald Reagan had campaigned for president in 1976 and again in 1980 to wind up with others calling the shots on foreign policy—or to barter away any other aspects of the executive authority conferred on the president by the Constitution.”115

  Nonetheless, the Reagan and Ford teams continued to negotiate throughout the day, and the principals met again at five that afternoon.

  Reagan remained noncommittal, however, when the former president said that if he were to return to Washington, he would need to have some of his key people come back with him, starting with Kissinger and Greenspan.116 Meanwhile, everyone wanted to get their two cents in. As Deaver remembered the scene, it seemed as if the entire Republican Party leadership was in Reagan’s suite at one time or another, including Bill Brock, Bob Dole, Bob Michel, Congressman John Rhodes of Ohio, and Governor Jim Thompson of Illinois—all giving the candidate advice.117

  “From the start, I vigorously opposed the Ford gesture. . . . My man was George Bush,” wrote Deaver, who had developed a friendly relationship with Bush’s campaign manager, James Baker. “I saw him as a class person and I thought he would bring the right assets to the ticket. A moderate, with ties to the East (Yale) and the oil fields of Texas. The son of a former sena-Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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  tor, Prescott Bush of Connecticut. Handsome, youthful, sharp.”118 Nancy Reynolds, who had taken time off from Bendix to help Nancy with her press at the convention, told me, “Elizabeth Dole, whom I knew personally, called and wanted to see me right away. She was promoting Bob for vice president. And I was sort of stunned, because we had never thought about it.”119 Jack Kemp, meanwhile, was going ahead with plans to have his name placed in nomination, so there was some apprehension that things could get out of hand on the convention floor.

  During most of this back and forth on Tuesday and Wednesday, Nancy Reagan was busy with her own schedule—lunch with Newsweek’s editorial board, an interview for Vogue, meet-and-greets with various state delegations, a photo-op with unemployed automobile workers and their wives.

  Accompanied by all four children—even Patti made it—she represented her husband at the Joe Louis Arena Tuesday night while he remained at the hotel, as convention protocol dictated. A rotating cast of Republican leaders’ wives occupied the seat beside her, including Nancy Kissinger, Peggy Goldwater, Nellie Connally, Teresa Heinz (wife of Senator John Heinz, later wife of John Kerry), and an old acquaintance from MGM, Elizabeth Taylor, whose sixth husband was Senator John Warner of Virginia.120

  Nancy had to miss another event that evening. As reported by Eugenia Sheppard the previous day in her “Around the Town” column in the New York Post, “Jerome Zipkin will give a dinner for 17 ladies at the London Chop House. He will be the only male present. The ladies he’s invited are Mrs. Alfred Bloomingdale . . . Mrs. William Buckley Jr. . . . Mrs. Guilford Dudley, from Nashville . . . Mrs. Justin Dart, Mrs. Earl [sic] Jorgensen, Mrs. William Wilson . . .”121

  Nancy was also enlisted in the effort to make the dream ticket a reality, even though she was still plugging for Laxalt. “I thought the whole idea was ridiculous,” she said of a Reagan-Ford combination. “I didn’t see how a former president— any president—could come back to the White House in the number-two spot. It would be awkward for both men, and impractical, and I couldn’t understand why that wasn’t obvious to everybody. ‘It can’t be done,’ I told Ronnie. . . . But he didn’t see it that way.” Nancy halfheartedly agreed to call Betty Ford and feel her out. “I was relieved to find that Betty felt pretty much as I did,” she later wrote. “‘No,’ she said. ‘As much as we’d like to help, I don’t think it’s a good idea.’”122

  Nancy was in the suite with Ronnie at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday when, 4 9 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House to their astonishment, they turned on the CBS Evening News and saw Gerald Ford giving a live interview to Walter Cronkite. “If I go to Washington, and I’m not saying that I’m accepting, I have to go there with the belief that I would play a meaningful role, across the board, in the basic, crucial, tough decisions that have to be made in the four-year period.”

  Cronkite asked Ford, “It’s to be something like a co-presidency?” Ford answered, “That’s something that Governor Reagan really ought to consider.

  . . . The point you raise is a legitimate one.”123

  “As far as Ronnie was concerned,” Nancy said, “that did it.”124

  Society columnist Aileen “Suzy” Mehle, who had come to the convention with Zipkin, recalled a conversation she had had with Nancy that evening about Ford and Kissinger’s power play. “‘How dare they,’ she said.

  And I said, ‘You’d have to watch them. There wouldn’t be any co-presidency.

  They would be president, and maybe they’d let Ronnie be vice president—

  let us guide you. Right. ’ Nancy was miffed. She was very miffed.”125 Nancy later admitted, “I think I would have done almost anything to prevent Ronnie from picking a former president as his running mate.”126

  Reagan immediately ordered Deaver to get Kissinger on the phone, saying, “This has gone too far.” On Reagan’s behalf, Deaver told Kissinger that it was time for Ford to put up or shut up. At the same time, Reagan dispatched Casey to Ford’s suite with the message that if the former president accepted his offer, it “had to be based on faith and understanding; it could not be a written compact.”127 Shortly after eleven o’clock, Ford appeared at R
eagan’s suite and gracefully withdrew. “Then [Reagan] picked up the phone and said, to the amazement of everyone in the room, ‘I’m calling George Bush. I want to get this settled. Anyone have any objections?’”128

  “Out of a clear blue sky, Governor Reagan called me up and asked if I would be willing to run with him on the ticket,” an elated Bush told reporters the next day. “I was surprised, of course, and I was very, very pleased. I feel honored. . . . I told him I would work, work, work.”129 It is clear from Barbara Bush’s memoir that she wanted her husband to be on the ticket. George Bush had addressed the convention earlier that evening, assuming, as the rumor mill had it, that Ford had already been chosen.

  “We went right back to the Pontchartrain Hotel and our whole floor was filled with many close friends and family,” Mrs. Bush wrote. “It was like a funeral. George found Jeb [Bush] in our bedroom really upset. ‘It’s not fair, it’s not fair,’ he said. George and I put on old clothes, and I urged him to let us pack up and get out of there. George gave both Jeb and me a Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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  talking-to: ‘We came to this convention to leave politics with style and we are going to do it.’ Almost immediately, the phone call came to our room from Ronald Reagan and the rest is history.”130

  Nancy had been in the convention hall for three hours by then. After watching the Ford-Cronkite interview, she had taken Patti, Ron and his girlfriend Doria, and Michael and Colleen to the Joe Louis Arena.

  Maureen, who was a delegate from California, had been there all day.

  Several of Nancy’s friends were also with her that night, including Betty Wilson, Norma Redo, and Betty Adams, who remembered how surprised Nancy was when “she was called out of the box and told that they chose Bush.”131

  “On ‘decision night,’ I went to the convention hall totally in the dark,”

  Paul Laxalt recalled. “Before long, I had an urgent call from Ron, which I took in a trailer outside the arena. ‘Paul,’ Ron said, ‘I’ve decided to go [with]

  George Bush. I know that many of the delegates will be unhappy, so George and I are coming to the arena together. Will you please join us?’ In a few minutes, George and Barbara Bush and Ron and Nancy Reagan arrived.

  Nancy rushed to me and took my hand. ‘I’m so sorry, Paul. I wish it had been you.’”132

  Nancy grudgingly came to see things Mike Deaver’s way. As he wrote,

  “You could not have invented a more balanced ticket than Ronald Reagan and George Bush. One, a Midwesterner, up from poverty, a performer, out-doorsman, and regular guy, strong in the West. The other, a child of wealth, of prep schools, a war hero—a commissioned navy pilot at eighteen—captain of the Yale baseball team, now a transplanted Texas oilman. Bush had credentials where Reagan needed them most. He had served in Congress, as ambassador to the United Nations, as chairman of the Republican National Committee, as director of the CIA, as envoy to China. He was a professional who came across as earnest, well-bred, squeaky-clean.”133

  But, Nancy Reynolds told me, “I don’t think Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush ever developed a great, warm, cozy relationship.”134 Although both women went to Smith, and Barbara was only four years younger than Nancy, their backgrounds, styles, and personalities contrasted sharply.

  Even in Detroit, the buzz was that the two women didn’t get along. “Why that’s silly,” Barbara Bush told Los Angeles Times reporter Bella Stumbo, who had bluntly asked about the rumors. “We’ve only met twice. And from what I’ve seen of Nancy so far, I like her and she likes me. Furthermore, I think she’s ravishingly beautiful. When we were with them, I could hardly 4 9 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House take my eyes off her . . . and she’s been just darling to us. If anything, I think she’s just shy.”

  “People say there is a big difference between you and Mrs. Reagan.

  Can you describe the difference?”

  “Why, yes,” Barbara Bush answered. “Nancy is a size four, and I’m a size forty-four.”135

  In a well-orchestrated show of camaraderie, the Reagans flew to Houston with the Bushes at the end of the convention. After lunch at the Bush home in the old-money Memorial section, the two couples made the first public appearance of the Republican ticket at the upscale Galleria shopping mall. Five days later, Reagan, Bush, and Anne Armstrong, who was named co-chairman of the campaign with Paul Laxalt, met with the Executive Advisory Committee at the Los Angeles Hyatt. Laffer’s deadpan minutes are quite revealing:

  Tuttle and Smith both were exceptionally pleased with the convention and praised the way Ford handled himself and the outcome of the entire process. Dart thought the entire process was great with the best of all possible worlds with George Bush. . . . Max Rabb noted that Henry Kissinger did not demand any conditions and is fully on board with the Reagan efforts. . . . Coors said that any controversy over Gerald Ford was as a result of Cronkite’s mistakes and not anything to do with Ford or anyone else. . . . George Bush then expressed his pleasure at being at the meeting. . . . His major point was that he and Mrs. Bush had developed an extraordinary personal relationship with the Reagans. . . . The meeting broke up at approximately the predetermined time with a mad dash to waiting vehicles as the Dart-Kendall cabal headed en masse toward The Grove (most of the others were right with them).136

  After making a brief appearance at the Bohemian Grove, the candidate headed straight for his mountaintop ranch. He kept a low profile during August, while the Democrats met in New York City and renominated President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale. One of the social highlights of the convention week was a birthday lunch for Miss Lillian, the President’s eighty-two-year-old mother. The guest list included Mayor Ed Koch; Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke and his wife, Robin; real estate queen Alice Mason, who was Carter’s number-one fund-raiser in New Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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  York; Walter Cronkite’s wife, Betsy; and former California governor Pat Brown. The host, Richard Weisman, a rich young art collector, had called the Warhol Factory and asked us to bring a few celebrities: Andy took Patti LuPone, the star of Evita; I invited Jerry Zipkin. When reporter Enid Nemy asked him what such a good friend of Nancy Reagan’s was doing there, Zipkin snapped, “I had to eat lunch somewhere.”137 He was then introduced to the guest of honor by Oatsie Charles, an old friend of his who was one of Georgetown’s leading hostesses. “This is Jerome Zipkin, he’s a Republican,” Charles told Miss Lillian. “That’s okay,” she said good-naturedly, “I have lots of Republican friends.” “So do I,” replied Zipkin.

  At the end of the month, the Reagans moved to Wexford, the former weekend house of Jack and Jackie Kennedy in the Virginia hunt country, which would be their East Coast base for the duration of the campaign. National campaign headquarters had already been set up in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington. Reagan had come out of the Detroit convention with a 55–24–15 lead over Jimmy Carter and John Anderson, who was running as an independent. But after a week of being portrayed as a simpleminded, heartless, nostalgic fantasist by the Democrats in New York—and making a couple of gaffes on his own, such as calling for renewed diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and then having to admit he had misspoken—Reagan found his lead over Carter had shrunk to only six points.

  On August 30, the Reagan team gathered at Wexford. In addition to Casey, Meese, Wirthlin, Nofziger, Anderson, Allen, and Deaver, there was a new face: James Baker, who was put in charge of debates. With Deaver’s encouragement, the suave, impeccably groomed, fourth-generation Houston lawyer had managed to win over Nancy, despite his closeness to the Bushes. As Nancy Reynolds told me, “Jim Baker really had a great sense of humor, and he could kid her in a nice way. If you could kid her, that was a big plus.”138 Baker was also seen as a pragmatist who would bolster the basic campaign strategy of keeping the focus on Carter’s “failure of leadership” while at the same time helping Reagan moderate his positions in o
rder to broaden his appeal, particularly to ethnic and blue-collar voters in the big industrial states of the Northeast and Midwest. A tricky balance would have to be maintained, however, for if Reagan came across as abandoning his conservative principles, he would forfeit his hopes of making significant inroads into Carter’s native South.

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

  “Peace through strength” was the new Reagan slogan. In essence, this was a Sears campaign without Sears.

  The three candidates went into action on Labor Day: Anderson at a parade in Calumet City, Illinois, his home state; Carter at a picnic in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in the Baptist heart of the South; and Reagan at an

  “ethnic festival” in Jersey City, New Jersey. With the Statue of Liberty looming in the background and the flags of Eastern European countries flanking him, Reagan took off his jacket and tie in the sweltering heat and launched into his familiar criticism of Carter’s handling of the economy, which was languishing from 13 percent inflation, 8 percent unemployment, and 12 percent interest rates.139 At the end of the speech, Reagan was joined on the stage by the father of Lech Walesa, the Polish union leader who had defied his country’s Communist regime by taking his shipyard workers out on strike.

  A day that started out so well, however, ended in near disaster at Reagan’s last stop, the Michigan State Fair, where he told a predominantly black audience how happy he was to be there “while [Carter] is opening his campaign down there in the city that gave birth to and is the parent body of the Ku Klux Klan.” The crowd gasped, and Reagan knew he had made a major mistake. Not only were his facts wrong—Tuscumbia was neither the Klan’s birthplace nor its headquarters—but his remark came across as an incredibly cheap shot. The next day Carter assailed him for insulting the South, and although Reagan had already rushed to apologize to the governor of Alabama, six other Southern Democratic governors, including Bill Clinton of Arkansas, publicly denounced him.140