Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  Lyn Nofziger, who had supplied Reagan with the erroneous information, persisted in telling reporters that they were making a mountain out of a molehill, which only made the situation worse. Since this fracas came right on top of the Taiwan brouhaha, Nancy realized that there was no one in the top staff who could handle her husband with the subtlety and candor required. The sixty-seven-year-old Casey, who was called “Spacey” behind his back, had never run a national campaign, and while Baker had done a good job for Ford in 1976 and for Bush in the primaries, he wasn’t familiar with Reagan’s idiosyncrasies. Nancy was aware that Deaver had patched things up with his old mentor, Stu Spencer, and while she and Ronnie hadn’t spoken to Spencer in four years, she asked Deaver to see if he would come back.

  Spencer agreed and came aboard as national political director three days after the Labor Day fiasco.141 “I started flying with Reagan again,” he told me.

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  “I let him vent his spleen on me about going with Ford in ’76. He had a good time, and from then on it was like the way it was before.”142

  That weekend, in another sign of the campaign’s tilt to the center, Reagan invited Henry Kissinger to lunch at Wexford, and that evening Kissinger and his wife were among one hundred guests at a private dinner Nancy gave for Mary Jane and Charlie Wick. The guest list also included David Rockefeller, Estée and Joseph Lauder, Drew Lewis, Charles and Carole Price from Kansas City, Jane and Guilford Dudley from Nashville, and Senator John Warner, who had a place nearby. Elizabeth Taylor, who was suffering from a bad back, could not attend.143 While Nancy was wary of Kissinger’s intentions, she realized his presence at her husband’s side was reassuring to the Eastern foreign policy establishment. On a personal level, the Reagans had grown more comfortable with the Kissingers after having spent time with them at the Buckleys’ in New York and Connecticut. Later in the campaign, Henry and Nancy Kissinger would give a dinner for Nancy Reagan at their River House apartment in New York.144

  Meanwhile, James Baker was trying to arrange a debate with Carter and Anderson, to be sponsored by the League of Women Voters. But Carter refused to participate if Anderson was included, considering the renegade liberal Republican more likely to draw votes from the left than from the right. After several compromises were rejected by the White House, the League agreed to go along with a Reagan-Anderson debate on September 21, though they refused Baker’s request that Carter be represented by an empty chair. The gangly, bespectacled Anderson was no match for a well-briefed and dynamic Reagan, who made a point of referring to “the man who isn’t here” as often as possible. Prior to the debate, Carter had pulled slightly ahead of Reagan in the polls; afterward, Reagan regained the lead, with Anderson remaining at around 10 percent.145

  The two major candidates’ numbers would seesaw back and forth all through October, as Carter abandoned his Rose Garden strategy of remaining cool and presidential and came out swinging. Campaigning in Chicago and Milwaukee on October 6, Carter called Reagan’s foreign policy “jingoistic” and “macho” and said it “would lead our country to war.”

  In Philadelphia the next day, Reagan responded, “Well, I think he’s a badly misinformed and prejudiced man. Certainly he’s reaching a point of hysteria that’s hard to understand.”146 Three days later, in Florida, the President stepped up his attacks, saying, “I don’t know what he would do in 5 0 0

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the White House, but his opposition to the SALT II treaty, his opposition to Medicare, his opposition to many of the programs that are important like the minimum wage or unemployment compensation, his call for the injection of American military forces into place after place after place around the world indicate to me that he would not be a good president or good man to trust with the affairs of this nation in the future.”147

  Carter, like Pat Brown and Jesse Unruh before him, had not figured out that going negative on Reagan had a boomerang effect—the meaner his opponent got, the nicer Ronnie seemed. Based on Wirthlin’s research that the

  “most salient issue” for voters was high prices, Reagan hammered away at the administration’s inability to control inflation. At first he largely ignored the President’s attempt to portray him as a recycled Barry Goldwater. After Carter’s campaign introduced TV ads implying that Reagan viewed arms control negotiation as “a poker game” and nuclear war as “just another shoot-out at the O.K. Corral,”148 however, Nancy decided to take the highly unusual step of taping a one-minute commercial of her own.

  “I don’t often speak out in campaigns,” she began, “but I think this campaign now has gotten to the point and the level where I have to say something. I am deeply, deeply offended by the attempts of Mr. Carter to paint my husband as a man he is not at all. I’m offended when he tries to portray him as a warmonger, as a man who would throw the elderly out on the street and cut off their Social Security when, in fact, he never said anything of the kind at any time. That’s a cruel thing to do. It’s cruel to the people. It’s cruel to my husband. I deeply, deeply resent it as a wife and a mother and a woman.”149

  From the start of the campaign, the national press, particularly female reporters, fixated on what came to be called The Gaze. “When I would look at Ronnie when he spoke, that wasn’t an act,” Nancy Reagan told me with an exasperated sigh in 1997. “That was the way I felt—no matter how many times I had heard a speech. The audience reaction always varies a bit—and I like to hear him speak. I adore him! And when I said, ‘My life began with Ronnie,’ well, it’s true. I mean, I had a wonderful life before then, but it really began.”150

  There were also innumerable references to Nancy Reagan’s influence and behind-the-scenes machinations, especially after her part in the Sears purge was made known. As always, Nancy sought to downplay her role, repeatedly telling interviewers that she would never sit in on cabinet meet-Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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  ings the way Rosalynn Carter did. Ironically, whenever Mrs. Carter tried to defend herself from those who criticized her for being too powerful, she tended to come out sounding like Nancy. “Jimmy makes the decisions. All I do is tell him what I think. He takes it or leaves it. He might be influenced to a certain degree, but people just don’t know Jimmy Carter if they think I can persuade him to do something he doesn’t want to do.” The White House communications chief Patrick Caddell once even said of Rosalynn, “She’s got great antennae.”151

  Unlike Rosalynn Carter, however, who usually campaigned on her own, Nancy didn’t like leaving Ronnie’s side. But as the race tightened, Stu Spencer convinced her that two could do more than one, and Peter McCoy—a Sotheby’s executive whose mother-in-law, Onnalee Doheny, was a friend of Nancy’s from the Colleagues—was hired to travel with her.

  “Nancy and I would go off on our own trips for three or four days at a time,” McCoy told me. “The campaign plane would come into a city, and we’d jump on a small jet and go do a little outside business, and then join up with the tour later. Nancy is quite remarkable. We’d be up at eight in the morning and go all day long until ten or eleven at night, and then go back to the hotel—and Ronnie would be off on the main tour somewhere else.

  I think they both really found it difficult to be separated. I’ve never seen anything quite like that. They would talk every night.”152

  Reagan himself tried to explain their relationship to Lally Weymouth, who, for her Times article on Nancy, asked him what he thought his life would have been like if he hadn’t met her. “I don’t know,” he answered,

  “except I know I wouldn’t have been happy. I was well aware that I was very lonely, although I guess I was a success in Hollywood and had all the perquisites that go with that. But I felt the need to love someone. . . . Has she influenced my life? Yes, because I’ve never been happier in my life than I have been with her. She is very much what you see. There is a gentleness to her, a fierce feeling of family loyalty. I mi
ss her very much when we’re not together. We’re very happy. I imagine if I sold shoes, as my father did, she would have wanted to help me sell shoes. . . . She’s a very intelligent person. I don’t know of anything we don’t talk about. When anything happens that’s interesting or exciting, the first thought that enters my mind is how I’m going to tell her.”153

  The press also tried to make an issue of the Reagan children’s not quite measuring up to the standards of the Republican Party platform, with its 5 0 2

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House high moral tone and disapproval of anything but the most traditional values. In an interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes, Patti, who had just come from Jane Fonda’s exercise class, defended her family: q: Somebody else in New York wrote a fascinating piece about the Reagan children and said, Can you imagine four children, one an E.R.A. organizer and an actress, divorced twice; second, divorced once, sells gasohol and races boats; third, a rock musician and composer and actress; fourth, a ballet dancer, 22 years old. Does this sound like the children of Ronald and Nancy Reagan?

  a: Well, you know, each of us are very individual and we have our own careers and our own interests that we’ve been working towards—I mean, what would make us normal? If we were book-keepers or waitresses or gas station—I mean, what do they want?

  Not that I would give them what they wanted anyway, but I’d be curious to know. You know, I don’t think that anything that any of us is doing is so alarming, you know.

  q: It’s just unexpected, apparently, to some people.

  a: I think it’s kind of refreshing. . . .

  q: You gonna vote?

  a: Yes.

  q: Jimmy Carter, John Anderson, Ronald Reagan?

  a: I’m gonna vote for my father. It wouldn’t be very nice not to vote for him, would it?

  q: That’s the only reason?

  a: No. I’m gonna vote for him because I think he’d be a good President. I do.154

  On October 28, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter had their only debate. “[It was] scheduled for 8 p.m. in Philadelphia,” Deaver recalled. “I had planned a quiet, early dinner, topped off with a 1964 Cabernet. I let Reagan have one glass of wine before the debate . . . a little color for his cheeks. The Reagans, Stu Spencer, and I were the only ones in the room. Then he went into the bedroom for half an hour to rest. When I walked in, to let him know it was time to leave, he was standing at the mirror, practicing his lines, rehearsing his opening statement.”155

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  Some people thought it was all over when the President told the audience that he had asked his twelve-year-old daughter, Amy, what she thought the most important issue was. “She said she thought nuclear weaponry and the control of nuclear arms,” said Carter, as the audience groaned. “I knew the race was won,” wrote Deaver later.156

  As Jack Wrather put it, “It was a cut-and-dried situation at the end, because Carter made such an ass of himself. Again, I’m sure he’s a very decent, and, I think, even intelligent guy, but he just made an ass of himself.

  He didn’t do anything; he went from one side to the other. And he gave people of this country such a sense of insecurity that, during that last famous debate that he and Ron had, it was just so obvious that he really didn’t know what he was talking about. You know, when Ron said,

  ‘Jimmy, there you go again,’ or something like that, everybody in the United States said, ‘That’s it.’ They said, ‘We agree with you, Ron.’ Everybody talked back to the television set.”157

  On Thursday, October 30, the Reagan campaign’s worst nightmare seemed to be coming true: the Iranian majlis, or parliament, had started debating whether to release the American hostages held in Tehran for nearly a year.

  Carter’s failure to secure their freedom continued to be the great disgrace of his administration, especially after an attempted rescue mission in April had ended with four Army helicopters crashing in the Iranian desert. Now, as Reagan’s advisers had feared, it looked as if he might be able to cut a deal just before the election. On Halloween there were reports that a DC-8 was waiting in Europe to fly the hostages home. On Saturday night, White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan caught up with the President in Chicago and told him that the Iranians were offering terms. Canceling the next day’s campaign events, Carter flew back to Washington at four in the morning, only to realize that the Iranians were playing games: they wanted to release their captives one by one over a period of time. Meanwhile, all three networks were running hour-long specials on the first anniversary of the embassy seizure, which would fall on election day.158

  That weekend, an article headlined close reagan business friends; they seem to personify his values appeared on the first page of The New York Times business section, with profiles of Holmes Tuttle, Justin Dart, Ted Cummings, Earle Jorgensen, Jack Wrather, and William French Smith, who was described as “a possible Attorney General.” Tuttle, the Times reported, 5 0 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

  “expects to help screen appointees for Mr. Reagan, as he did in California.” Dart, still feisty at seventy-three, despite a hip replacement and heart troubles, announced that he would head a presidential advisory board on productivity, “the nation’s No. 1 problem.”159 The Executive Advisory Committee was so sure their boy was going to win that they started calling themselves the Transition Advisory Committee.

  On election night, Tuesday, November 4, 1980, they were all at Earle and Marion Jorgensen’s house in Bel Air: Holmes and Virginia Tuttle, Henry and Grace Salvatori, Justin and Punky Dart, Bill and Betty Wilson, Jack and Bunny Wrather, William and Jean French Smith, Armand and Harriet Deutsch, Charles and Mary Jane Wick, Bob and Betty Adams, Voltaire and Erlenne Perkins, Tex and Flora Thornton from Litton, Tom and Ruth Jones from Northrop. Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale took Jerry Zipkin, who wore a “Reagan for President” button on his lapel and, for a change, told all the women how fabulous they looked. Walter and Lee Annenberg had voted early that morning in Philadelphia, then boarded their jet and picked up Charles and Carol Price in Kansas City on the way out.

  The Jaquelin Humes arrived from San Francisco, and Old Hollywood was represented by the Jimmy Stewarts, the Robert Stacks, and the Ray Starks.

  Of the campaign staff, only Ed and Ursula Meese, Mike and Carolyn Deaver, and Peter and Casey McCoy were included. Nancy’s hairdresser, Julius Bengtsson, was there, too. So were the Reagan children—Patti, Ron with Doria, Michael with Colleen, Maureen with her new fiancé, Dennis Revell, a lawyer she had met through the Young Republicans—and Neil and Bess Reagan.160 Ronnie’s brother, now seventy-two and retired to posh Rancho Santa Fe, told everyone not to worry, Dutch was going to win in a landslide.161

  Marion Jorgensen told me she served the same food she served at her election night parties in 1966 and 1970—veal stew and coconut cake. “But that night was so different than when he was governor,” she said. “The Secret Service came five or six days ahead and put telephones all over my house. They even put in the ‘red telephone.’ They were looking for a private place to put it, so they put it in Earle’s dressing room. I have a picture of Ronnie sitting in a chair in Earle’s dressing room with that phone—it was a call from the King of Saudi Arabia, congratulating him on just being elected president.”162

  The party began at the usual time—4:30 in the afternoon. By then the polls had started closing in the East, and forty-five minutes later NBC’s Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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  John Chancellor was the first to call the election. “NBC News now makes its projection for the presidency,” he announced, as a hush fell over the Jorgensens’ party and the Reagans’ closest friends and family stood transfixed in front of the five television sets Marion had placed around the living room, library, and den. “Reagan is our projected winner. Ronald Wilson Reagan of California, a sports announcer, a film actor, a governor of California, is our projected winner at 8:15 E
astern Standard Time on this election night.”163 Reagan would carry forty-four states and trounce Carter 51 percent to 41 percent in the popular vote, with 7 percent going to John Anderson.

  Ronnie was in the shower, and Nancy was in the bathtub, with the TV

  in the bedroom turned up extra loud, when she heard Chancellor declaring her husband the winner. “I leaped out of the tub,” she recalled, “threw a towel around me, and started banging on the shower door. Ronnie got out, grabbed a towel, and we ran over to the television set. And there we stood, dripping wet, wearing nothing but our towels, as we heard that Ronnie had just been elected! Then the phone started to ring. It was President Carter, calling to concede, and to congratulate Ronnie on his victory. I was thrilled, and stunned. We hadn’t even gone to the Jorgensens’ yet!”164

  “They were late,” Marion Jorgensen recalled, “and they were never late. I got a call from Nancy’s secretary, Elaine Crispin, who said they were just a little bit detained. And pretty soon the helicopters and the motorcade came—I never saw anything like it. A Secret Service man came in and tapped me on the shoulder, so we knew, Earle and I, to go out and greet them. And he said to us, ‘Now, you know how to do this?’ I said, ‘Sure, I know how to do it. We’ve done this many times before.’ And he said, ‘Oh, no, you haven’t. You haven’t greeted the president of the United States before.’ . . . The minute Ronnie became president, I called him ‘Mr. President.’

  And he said to me, ‘Wait a minute. What’s this?’ I said, ‘Well, you are. And that will be forevermore now.’ And he said, ‘Not with you, my friend. Not with Earle. Not with my good friends.’ I said, ‘Well, I will say this: Around anybody, it’ll be Mr. President. When we’re just a few of us longtime friends, O.K., it’ll be Ronnie.’”165

  “Oh, what an evening that was,” said Betsy Bloomingdale, recalling the triumphant procession of the Reagans and their friends from the Jorgensen house in Bel Air to the official victory party at the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City.166 “Jerry was with us, and Alfred was a fast driver and he followed the Reagan motorcade, and all along Beverly Glen there were crowds 5 0 6