The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  Ford hired Stu Spencer—Ronnie’s own campaign manager—to run his 1976 election effort. As it happened, Spencer was in the market for a new gig. He had been out of Ronnie’s orbit for a while, alienated by what he called the “palace guard” that surrounded the governor during his years in Sacramento. The feeling within Ronnie’s circle toward him was mutual. Though Spencer had gotten an occasional request to help fix a problem here and there—a summons, he noted, which always came from Nancy—that had only created more friction with the men who had created the mess. “It was awkward at best to be called by the governor’s wife and told to straighten something out when you are an outsider,” he recalled later. “I did it a couple of times and made plenty of enemies.” Nor had Spencer endeared himself with the other handlers by discouraging Ronnie’s halfhearted effort to run for president in 1968.

  So, when Ford’s White House chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, called in 1975 with an offer to take over the president’s troubled campaign operation, Spencer took it. As was the case with Reed, Spencer had a genuine affection for Ford. He didn’t like the idea of anyone running against an incumbent of his own party. Spencer also knew he had something the Ford campaign needed: “I don’t think, even to this day, the Ford people would admit it, but one of the biggest assets I brought to the table was that I was the only one who knew and understood Ronald Reagan. They (like so many before and after) thought he would be a pushover. They were certain this would be a cakewalk.”

  Ford formally declared his candidacy on July 8, 1975. Three weeks later, on July 29, a delegation from the Kitchen Cabinet convened at Pacific Palisades to try to talk Ronnie out of what they saw as a foolhardy and destructive venture that would only ensure a Republican defeat. Among those present were Tuttle, industrialist Justin Dart Sr., and Reagan’s future attorney general William French Smith. Tuttle had already met at the White House with Doug Bennett, Ford’s personnel director, to discuss swinging his support to the president. He and the others told Ronnie bluntly that they would not raise money for him. Tuttle reported back to Reed that Ronnie had been “shocked” by their declaration that they planned to defect. Reed, who was keeping tabs on things from Washington, wrote in his journal on August 22, 1975: “Nerve endings very raw in California.”

  The Reagan team had already lost Spencer, whose political judgment Nancy trusted more than anyone else’s. A rebellion by Ronnie’s earliest and staunchest supporters could have killed his campaign before it even got off the ground. So, Nancy went to work on them, badgering them on the phone and in person. “She just did every dinner party in Los Angeles. She’d say, ‘Ronnie really needs to run, and you really need to support him,’ ” Reed said. “They got the Chinese water torture from Nancy.”

  Her persistence worked. As Reed recalled: “Nancy tipped the balance. During the summer of ’75, she badgered ‘the boys’ until, by September of that year, many of them had changed their minds and come aboard.” Ford’s dismayed campaign team saw its hoped-for allies, the ones who could cut off the oxygen from a Reagan insurgency, slipping back to Ronnie one by one. Of them, only Henry Salvatori stood with Ford on the principle that a primary challenge to an incumbent president would be a death blow to any hopes of holding the White House.

  Knowing he would for the first time be running a campaign without Spencer mapping his battle plan, Ronnie decided to go for Washington expertise. It came in the form of John Sears, a prematurely gray, thirty-five-year-old Nixon campaign veteran. Sears had first met the Reagans over dinner in 1974. He began to win their confidence when he predicted correctly how things would turn out for Nixon with Watergate and made the argument that this could open a path for Ronnie. “They were all thinking that Nixon was going to survive this Watergate thing,” Sears told me. “And I told them no, he wasn’t going to survive, he’d be out of office by the fall, and Ford would be president. But he’d be a unique kind of incumbent, because nobody had ever voted for him, and, therefore, it would be possible to run against him. Even though Ford would be president, they shouldn’t give up the idea of possibly taking a look at it. And that turned out to be the case, so probably my stock went up at that point.”

  As Ronnie’s intentions grew more serious in 1975, Sears got to know Nancy over a series of lunches. She found him bright and fascinating to listen to. He seemed as sophisticated about politics as anyone she had ever met. Nancy also liked the fact that Sears was not a conservative ideologue, like so many of those around her husband. The only thing that bothered both her and Ronnie about the new campaign manager was his demeanor, which they found inscrutable. “He looks you in the tie,” Ronnie said. “Why won’t he look at me?”

  Nancy poured out her anxieties about the endeavor to Sears, and he soon learned her priorities. “She wanted this done properly [with regard to] his image. They were from the movie business, and image was everything. What people thought of you, being the good guy and all that, was very important to her,” Sears recalled. “She never messed around with issues or tried to get involved in any of that, but if anything was being done that might damage his image in any way, she’d be very upset.”

  As always, Nancy also fretted over Ronnie’s physical well-being. When the switchboard operator at a small New Hampshire hotel once refused to put through her late-night call to check in on her husband, Nancy dialed up Nancy Reynolds, who was traveling with the campaign, and woke her up with an order: “You find out if he’s in bed, and if he’s not in bed in his jammies, I’m going to be mad at everybody.” Reynolds threw on a robe and slippers, and to the bemusement of Ronnie’s Secret Service detail, pounded on the door of his hotel room. The candidate was indeed in bed, looking over his speech for the next day. Reynolds told him his wife demanded that he turn out the lights and go to sleep. “Just what I need,” Ronnie laughed. “Two Nancys.” But the next morning, he asked Reynolds whether there was any way to rearrange his wife’s campaign schedule so that she could be with him. They had been apart for three days, and he missed her—nagging and all.

  Ronnie went into the February 24, 1976, New Hampshire primary so confident he would win that he left the state two days ahead of the vote. Instead, Ford beat him narrowly. Nancy was shocked. She later called that her lowest moment of the campaign: “We lost forty-eight to forty-nine, and there were fifteen hundred Democrats who wrote Ronnie’s name in on the ballot. If they had only registered as Republicans.” She blamed Sears for withholding the information that her husband had been slipping in the campaign’s internal polls, and Ronnie for being too trusting of his advisers’ assurances that everything was going fine. The momentum behind his audacious challenge was collapsing. After beating Ronnie in New Hampshire, Ford proceeded in the next three weeks to win four contests in a row, including in the big states of Florida and Illinois.

  In Florida, Ronnie had started out in a strong position. Campaigning there gave him an opportunity to reconnect with former Vietnam prisoner of war John McCain, then a navy commander stationed in Jacksonville. McCain’s wife, Carol, was running Ronnie’s effort in Clay County. When Carol had first registered to vote there in 1967, she was a rare political species. Out of 20,000 voters on the county rolls, only 7 were Republicans. Eleven years later, there were 4,200—at least 1,000 of whom Carol McCain and her volunteers had added in a pro-Reagan registration drive.

  But their efforts were little match for the increasing force of the Ford campaign. Ronnie’s Florida lead evaporated, and a last-minute surge put the president over the top by a comfortable 5 points in the March 9 primary. For the Reagans, the defeat was made all the more bitter by the fact that Ronnie had been undone by a couple of figures they knew well. On the day before the Florida vote, the New York Times’s R. W. Apple Jr. noted that there had been “a stunning change in the whole climate of the Republican contest.” Apple added: “The two men most responsible for the turnaround are an odd couple of Californians. Stuart Spencer and William Roberts, who, ironically, made their last big political splash by helping to put
Mr. Reagan into the statehouse in Sacramento.”

  The string of defeats left Ronnie’s campaign out of money as it limped into North Carolina, which was to hold its primary March 23. Hotels, rental car companies, and airlines started demanding payment in advance. By then, eleven of the past dozen GOP chairmen had endorsed Ford—the lone exception being George H. W. Bush, who as head of the Central Intelligence Agency could not get involved in the election. Ford’s campaign was orchestrating a drive within the party to put the squeeze on Ronnie from every direction. The National Republican Conference of Mayors called upon him to get out of the race, as did seven GOP governors. Unknown to Ronnie and Nancy, even their own campaign manager, Sears, was holding secret meetings with the Ford campaign to negotiate terms of surrender.

  Nancy was distraught. One dark day in mid-March, Nofziger walked into her hotel suite, and she pounced. “Ronnie has to get out,” she told him. “He’s going to embarrass himself if he doesn’t.” As she pleaded with Nofziger to convince her husband to give it up, Ronnie came through the door and surmised quickly what was being discussed. “I’m not going to quit,” he declared, directing his comments to the press secretary rather than confronting his wife. “I’m going to stay in this thing until the end.”

  It became hard for Nancy to continue going through the motions of what she saw as a doomed, humiliating endeavor. When she and Nancy Reynolds flew into Banner Elk, a charming town in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, it seemed like every Republican woman in that part of the state turned out to see her. The local ladies had knocked themselves out for days baking, and they welcomed the glamorous wife of their favorite candidate with a huge spread for tea. But Nancy was rude and barely acknowledged them. It was clear she did not want to be there.

  On the plane ride afterward, Nancy noticed that Reynolds was glowering at her. She nudged Reynolds with her foot and asked, “What’s wrong?” Reynolds told Nancy in blunt terms how impolite she had been toward the local women. It was one of the few times Reynolds could recall criticizing Nancy to her face. “Well, I’m sorry,” Nancy replied gracelessly, “but I’m really not in the mood.”

  Things could hardly have looked worse for Ronnie, but the campaign still had one more card to play. In the final days before the primary, a furious internal battle ignited between the national leadership and Ronnie’s North Carolina chairman, Tom Ellis, an ally of arch-conservative senator Jesse Helms. The fight was over how Ronnie should make his closing argument to North Carolina voters. All along, his media strategy had been to avoid running ads that showed Ronnie reading from a script. He was just too good at it, and the last thing they wanted to do was remind voters that he had been a Hollywood actor. Ellis—whom Nofziger regarded as “a right-wing zealot with a lot of far-out ideas, some pretty good”—thought otherwise. He suggested broadcasting a half-hour speech by Ronnie across the state. Sears and the other boys at headquarters told Ellis it was a terrible proposal. They couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to watch such a thing. What’s more, the only footage available was a grainy videotape that had been made two weeks before. As the two sides continued to argue, Helms appealed to Nancy and convinced her that it was time to shake things up with a bold play. She arranged for the senator and Ellis to receive a copy of the leftover video.

  The tape showed Ronnie sitting behind a desk against a stark blue background, looking directly into the camera with his hands folded. It had been produced in a local Florida television station studio, and the production values were hardly ideal. But Nancy recognized it held something magical. What she saw was the man who had given that speech for Goldwater back in 1964. “A Time for Choosing” had changed Ronnie’s destiny. If not for that powerful address, he would never have been elected governor. It was time to put her faith back where it belonged, in Ronnie. Voters needed to see and hear him directly, straight and unfiltered.

  The campaign spent a precious $10,000 to air the speech on fifteen of North Carolina’s seventeen stations. “Two hundred years is a dot of time, measured against the span of recorded history, but in that dot of time, we have achieved a higher standard of living, a greater range of opportunities for a greater number of people than has any other people who ever lived,” Ronnie said in the address. “And yet we celebrate our bicentennial beset by troubles that have us in a time of discontent.” He noted out-of-control inflation and a growing national debt, high taxes, the financial shakiness of the Social Security system. Ronnie compared Ford’s long record as a member of the “Washington establishment” against his own view that “changes must be made, and those changes can better be made by those who have not had a career in Washington and who are not bound by longtime relationships and personal ties.” He said US foreign policy under Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, was “wandering without aim,” and warned: “This nation has become number two in military power in a world in which it is dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best.”

  As the New York Times noted later, the “last ditch, desperation maneuver” broke every rule of politics at a time when thirty-second ads ruled the airwaves, but “all indications are that it had a powerful impact, so powerful that the speech may have made the difference for Mr. Reagan between victory and defeat.” An NBC News poll found that one in five North Carolina voters made up their minds in the last week of the primary campaign, after the pundits and political professionals had left Ronnie for dead. Those late deciders went for the former California governor by nearly three to one. Ronnie shocked everyone by winning North Carolina, sweeping almost every big county. His victory marked the first time since 1952 that an incumbent president actively running for a party nomination had been defeated in a primary contest.

  It was a pivotal moment for the candidate’s wife as well. Nancy’s initial impulse to give up on her husband had been a betrayal. She had listened too much to the naysayers, the people who supposedly knew what they were doing. She had flinched, but she wouldn’t again. No one knew Ronnie or believed in him like she did, and if he really wanted this, she was the best one to help him figure out how to win it. “I never again heard Nancy talk about her husband getting out of the race,” Nofziger said. “Today I’m sure that if he had yielded then, conservatives would never have given him a second chance in 1980.”

  After North Carolina, Ronnie swept Texas, Georgia, Indiana, and Nebraska. By the first week of May, he was gaining on Ford. After another round of victories, esteemed CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite pronounced that “Ronald Reagan, as of tonight, looms as a serious threat.”

  Spencer, however, continued to pull no punches against his old client: “My basic premise was every three weeks or so, I’ve got to knock Reagan off his rhythm. I have to do something to piss him off.” He succeeded spectacularly with an ad that ran right before the June 8 California primary. It was a time of mounting tension in Rhodesia, and Ronnie had made ill-considered comments indicating he might be willing to send troops there. The television spot that Spencer produced concluded with a reminder that was meant to terrify: “When you vote Tuesday, remember: Governor Reagan couldn’t start a war. President Reagan could.”

  When Ronnie heard about the ad, he slammed his fist into the bulkhead wall of his campaign plane. He recognized immediately that the shot had been fired at close range. “That damn Spencer’s behind this,” he said. Nancy’s anger at Spencer was more like ice, hard and cold. “It was quite awhile before I could forgive Stu for that one,” she wrote. The incendiary ad didn’t change the outcome in California; Ronnie won his home state by nearly two to one. But to Spencer’s great satisfaction, it reverberated in Ohio and New Jersey, where Ford won primaries the same day.

  Both Nancy and her mother were stung by what they regarded as another act of betrayal by a onetime ally. Their family friend Barry Goldwater, for whom Ronnie had done so much in 1964, began criticizing the former California governor publicly that spring and formally endorsed Ford in July. Goldwater warned that Ronnie had a “surprisingly dangerous stat
e of mind” and would lead the country into needless conflict overseas. His words were amplified on Ford campaign ads. “I feel as if I have been stabbed,” Nancy told reporters at a news conference in Sacramento.

  Edie called Goldwater in his Senate office and declared he would never be welcome at her house again. The precise words that Nancy’s mother pulled from her capacious vocabulary are a matter of some dispute. Her stepson, Dick, told author Bob Colacello that Edie called the senator from Arizona a “cocksucker,” while Kitty Kelley heard that she told him he was “a fucking horse’s ass.” Nancy allowed only that her mother had used some “very colorful language.” Edie’s fury at Goldwater eventually subsided, but her daughter never again felt the same about him.

  Ronnie and Ford were still fighting it out for delegates into the 1976 GOP convention, which took place in August in Kansas City, Missouri. Though Ford was slightly ahead in the unofficial tallies, both of them were just short of the 1,130 votes it took to get the nomination. And everyone knew the situation was fluid. As Spencer put it: “Reagan really had the heart of the convention and the party, whether he had the votes or not.” But a sitting president has perquisites of office at his disposal. That summer, the nation had come together to celebrate its bicentennial. When a spectacular parade of tall ships sailed into New York Harbor on Independence Day, uncommitted delegates from New York and New Jersey were given the best vantage point imaginable—from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. A few days later, the Fords invited Mississippi GOP chairman Clarke Reed, a key powerbroker who had been leaning toward Ronnie, to meet Queen Elizabeth at a White House dinner during her July state visit. (The dinner is also remembered for an epic faux pas; when Ford escorted the queen onto the dance floor, the US Marine Band struck up the next song on its playlist, which, unfortunately, happened to be “The Lady Is a Tramp.”)