The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  It wouldn’t necessarily be easy. There was a possibility that Ford might make another bid, and others were eyeing the contest—among them, former CIA director George H. W. Bush, a respected figure who had also been chairman of the Republican Party, and Kansas senator Bob Dole, who had been on the 1976 ticket with Ford. Even as he deliberated, Ronnie knew that he could not afford to be unprepared or to slip into irrelevance. By Lou Cannon’s tally, he gave seventy-five speeches in 1977, sending a clear signal to his supporters that he was warming up for another run. To build his image as a statesman, Ronnie took a series of foreign trips as well. On one of them, he had his first meeting with future British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

  The party’s right flank had almost delivered the nomination to Ronnie against Ford, but it was clear he had to broaden his base of Republican support beyond the activist conservative wing. Shortly after the 1976 election, Ronnie formed a political action committee with his leftover campaign funds. That in itself was evidence he was thinking about making another go of it, as the law in those days would have allowed the Reagans to pay income tax on the money and just keep it. The new organization was called Citizens for the Republic and headed by Lyn Nofziger. It gave about $800,000 to GOP candidates in the 1978 midterms, Nofziger wrote, “and bought a lot of friends for him. What we sought was enough political support to create an impression of inevitability about a Reagan candidacy.” Any remaining doubt was erased on March 7, 1979, when Nevada senator Paul Laxalt announced the formation of a Reagan presidential exploratory committee. Among its 365 members were 4 former members of Ford’s Cabinet. “Ours is not a fringe campaign,” Laxalt declared.

  During this preparatory period, Nancy indirectly engineered a meeting that would assume great significance nearly four decades later. The Reagan operation dispatched a young organizer named Roger Stone to New York to raise money. It was a challenging assignment, as New York was considered a bastion of support for Bush. “I was given a card file from Nancy Reagan. It was like one of those little recipe boxes that had index cards of the Reagans’ friends in New York,” Stone recalled in a 2015 interview with C-Span. “Well, half the people in the cards were dead, and the others were fairly prominent, but among those was a card for Roy Cohn, the flamboyant former counsel to the McCarthy committee [made infamous during the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s], at that point a fixture in the firmament of the New York legal profession, and a major power broker here in New York.”

  When Stone met with Cohn and explained he was setting up a finance committee for the former California governor, the notorious lawyer asked: “Do you know Fred and Donald Trump?” Cohn explained that Donald Trump’s father had been an original backer of Goldwater, so he was certain to be attracted to Ronnie, the most conservative candidate in the race. Both Trumps joined Ronnie’s fund-raising committee and, according to Stone, made the maximum donations allowed under federal law. (Federal Election Commission records suggest otherwise—that the Trump family gave instead to Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign—and show no donations to the Reagan effort.)

  The younger Trump also helped out in other ways, according to Stone. Using his connections as a real estate developer, he helped the campaign find low-cost office space in Midtown Manhattan and cut through the red tape when the phone company said there would be a three-month wait to install lines there. “They came the next morning,” Stone said. Trump also loaned his personal plane to fly nominating petitions to the state capital in Albany, so that the Reagan campaign could meet a tight deadline to qualify for the New York ballot. The petitions got there with fifteen minutes to spare. In the course of their work for Ronnie, Stone and Trump became close friends and political allies. Stone would act as a key strategist when Trump ran for president himself in 2016.

  As Ronnie’s 1980 campaign was gearing up, it was becoming evident that Jimmy Carter could be a highly vulnerable incumbent. In June 1979 Carter’s job approval stood at a dismal 28 percent in the Gallup poll. The economy was suffering from 12 percent inflation and stagnant economic growth, a toxic combination known as stagflation. Middle East turmoil produced milelong lines and three-hour waits at US gasoline stations. It was the second such oil shock Americans suffered in six years and was starting to look like a new normal. In July Carter went on national television to lament that the country had entered “a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” Though the president never used the word, it was dubbed his “malaise” speech, and to his critics, it became emblematic of Carter’s ineptitude and impotence.

  By that fall, polls showed the president running double digits behind in a hypothetical matchup with Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, a potential challenger from his own party whose last name was magical in Democratic circles. On November 4 hundreds of Iranian students—furious over the United States’ continued support for exiled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a hated figure who had been overthrown that year in a revolution—stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took more than fifty Americans hostage. So began a siege that would last for 444 days. Three days into it, the forty-seven-year-old Kennedy formally announced his presidential bid. “I say it is not the American people who are in a malaise,” he declared. “It’s the political leadership that’s in a malaise.”

  While Carter struggled over those months, the Reagan operation was moving slowly and cautiously. There was a strategic argument to be made against getting into the fray too soon. And there were some practical considerations as well. “They boiled down to one thing: money,” Nofziger recalled. “Although the Reagans lived well enough, they did not live lavishly. They were certainly not as rich as the people they associated with: the Holmes Tuttles, Alfred Bloomingdales, Bill Wilsons, Earle Jorgensens, and others with really deep pockets.” As long as Ronnie remained officially undeclared, he could continue to make a living giving speeches, doing radio commentary, and writing his column.

  Sears, who had managed the 1976 campaign, persuaded Ronnie and Nancy that he should be given the job again. The candidate-to-be and his wife had a sort of West Coast inferiority complex when it came to national politics. Sears convinced them they could not win without his pragmatism, expertise, and Washington connections. But he was an unpopular choice within the California inner circle, much of which the campaign manager had alienated four years before. With the exception of Deaver, they had all opposed putting Sears in charge. Nofziger, in particular, felt betrayed. He had never gotten along with Sears and shared the view of many of Ronnie’s staunchest backers that the campaign manager was not a true conservative. Ronnie’s daughter Maureen was also dismayed because her father had assured her, she claimed, that “under no circumstances would John Sears be involved in his 1980 campaign.”

  Nonetheless, by the spring of 1979, Sears was in control of the nascent operation. He and Nancy resumed their old rhythm from 1976, with regular lunches and long phone conversations. He soothed her anxieties and was receptive to the latest snippets of intelligence she had gathered. “She loved to gossip. She liked to give it and get it,” Sears told me. At one of their meetings, Nancy obliquely brought up the subject of astrology. Sears had heard that she dabbled in it. But then again, millions of people checked their daily horoscopes in the newspaper. It seemed to him a harmless enough pastime. Sears realized Nancy took it more seriously than he had thought, however, when she asked him an odd question out of the blue:

  “Do you believe there might be a better day to do something than another day?”

  Sears didn’t quite know what to say, and he fumbled for words: “Well, I don’t know. I travel a lot to Japan. And a lot of people I know there believe very strongly in astrology, and they’re smart in that. I don’t know anything about it, but they do. I can’t say I disbelieve it or believe it—either one.”

  “Well, if I let you know wh
at is a good day to do things, would that be helpful?” Nancy asked.

  “Sure, let me know,” Sears said. “But you gotta understand: our problem is, we gotta do things every day.” That was pretty much the end of it. Nancy never mentioned the subject to Sears after that, though she did send him a book on astrology.

  The campaign operation was not a happy one. Internal tension escalated as Sears maneuvered to replace the old Reagan hands with his own allies. Over drinks at a governors’ conference in North Carolina, he sought the counsel of former Reagan campaign manager Stu Spencer, who was still estranged from Ronnie and what Spencer viewed as the “palace guard.” He told Sears to be cautious. “I’d pick them all off except one,” Spencer said. “You have to have one person, either Lyn or Meese or Deaver, so that when Reagan gets up in the morning, he sees a familiar face. That’s very important, but dump the rest.”

  Sears did not heed Spencer’s advice. He began going after the whole California contingent. The Kitchen Cabinet, those elder figures who had built Reagan’s operation at the dawn of his political career, were sidelined early on. In late August Nofziger was abruptly fired as the campaign’s chief fund-raiser. It was a job for which he was ill-suited, which Nofziger suspected was why Sears assigned it to him in the first place.

  Nancy was not sorry to see Nofziger go, given that they had never gotten along. But to influential conservatives, the loss of one of their own—especially someone who had been central to shaping Ronnie’s message—was a disturbing signal that their champion was going off course. And indeed, with Sears firmly in command, Ronnie’s rhetoric shifted in ways that unsettled his supporters on the Right.

  It was not that the former governor’s positions had changed; they hadn’t. But the way he talked about them was evolving and softening. Under Sears’s guidance, the candidate made fewer references to his opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and more to how he supported equal pay for equal work. Instead of railing as much about welfare cheats, Ronnie told stories of how he had helped individual people better their circumstances. And while the subject of abortion still came up, Ronnie framed it differently, with a nod to the fact that this was a country built on individual rights.

  It didn’t exactly allay conservative suspicions when he started getting praise from a normally hostile quarter—the mainstream media. A headline in the November 14, 1979, issue of the New York Times declared: “The 1980 Model Reagan: Strident Campaign Tone Is Gone.” The article quoted Reagan press secretary James Lake as saying: “If you’re trying to get elected, you combat the perception that some people have of you as a strident, right-wing conservative.”

  No doubt this tempering of Ronnie’s image met with the approval of Nancy. She had never been comfortable with the rigid ideologues in her husband’s circle, the ones she would later describe as “jump-off-the-cliff-with-the-flag-flying conservative.” And she was anxious that Ronnie not be seen as a fire-breather himself. “The idea that he was, you know, a gun-toting, hip-shooting cowboy from the West was something that bothered her,” his longtime aide Ed Meese told me.

  In fact, Sears recalled in an interview with me that Nancy had been a critical force behind a surprising move Ronnie made in 1978. California voters were considering a ballot initiative that would have banned gays and lesbians from working in the state’s public schools. While many of Ronnie’s right-wing backers assumed he would support Proposition 6, Nancy helped persuade her husband to come out against it. State Senator John Briggs, who was leading the charge for the initiative, was flabbergasted: “Nobody is going to convince me that Ronald Reagan is going to put homosexual rights over parents’ rights.”

  By today’s standards, Ronnie would hardly have been seen as a progressive on gay rights. He maintained that he was against homosexuality but warned that the ballot initiative “has the potential of infringing on basic rights of privacy and perhaps even constitutional rights.” Days before the November election where the initiative was on the ballot, he wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner arguing that “homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual’s sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child’s teachers do not really influence this.”

  Proposition 6 had been leading by nearly two to one in an August survey by the authoritative California Poll. Ronnie’s opposition helped send it down to a 17-point defeat. Conservatives blamed Sears, but he told me in an interview that Nancy’s had been the voice to which her husband listened. Absent Nancy’s influence, he said, Ronnie most likely would have come down on the other side. “A lot of people she knew in the film business would not have liked” to see it pass, Sears added, “and so she was very helpful.”

  Finally, the time came when Ronnie could no longer be coy about his intentions. His presidential campaign got under way officially on November 13, 1979, at a $500-a-plate dinner in the ballroom of the New York Hilton. It was an unconventional setting. White House contenders normally made their declarations either in their home states or, as Ronnie had done four years earlier, in Washington, DC. By choosing the capital of liberal cosmopolitanism, the Reagans were determined to show that Ronnie was not a figure of limited regional stature or narrow ideological appeal. Something else was different this time. Where only Nancy had been at his side when he declared in 1975, all four of his children were there when he did it the second time. Ronnie quipped: “None of them are looking for jobs in the government.”

  But the continuing turmoil in the campaign grew more worrisome. More and more of the Golden State old guard was forced out. Conservative economist Martin Anderson had led the issues and research operation for Ronnie in 1976 and expected to do it again, Within two weeks of the campaign’s launch, however, Anderson announced he was returning to Stanford University so that he could have “more time to think.” Laxalt worried that he would be next; word was going round that Sears was sounding out others to become campaign chairman. Ronnie’s former chief of staff Ed Meese, who had been given a smaller role in the campaign than he merited, was also on shaky ground. Behind Sears’s back, the Californians began referring to the campaign manager as “Rasputin.”

  It turned out that the next person to find himself in Sears’s crosshairs was Nancy’s closest political confidant and ally. Michael Deaver had been the only California insider who had supported the decision to put Sears in charge of the campaign. But he chafed as he was assigned to take over fund-raising after Nofziger left. He was no better at it than Nofziger had been, and, in Sears’s view, the canny Deaver was a constant troublemaker who was trying to put his fingers into too many other parts of the operation.

  Everything came to a head at a meeting at the Reagan home in Pacific Palisades on November 26. Deaver had been invited there by Nancy and figured he was being summoned to a routine session where they would talk about money. He had his wife, Carolyn, drop him off, told her to run errands for an hour and a half, and then to come retrieve him. Deaver sensed something serious was up when Nancy met him at the front door and told him to wait in a bedroom. She led him past the living room, where Deaver saw “the Easterners”—Sears, press secretary Jim Lake, and strategist Charles Black—huddling with Ronnie. Nancy then left him and joined the group back in the living room. Deaver paced and flipped through an old Reader’s Digest, trying to figure out what was happening. Nancy’s presence was highly unusual. Only rarely did she sit through normal staff meetings. After twenty minutes had passed, Deaver burst into the living room. “What the hell is going on here?” he demanded.

  This was the kind of scene that Ronnie, with his distaste for discord, was ill-equipped to handle. While everyone else looked at the floor, he began awkwardly: “Mike, the fellas here have been telling me about the way you’re running the fund-raising efforts, and we’re losing money.” Ronnie pressed Deaver to explain why his firm was charging the campaign $30,000 a month to lease office space in its building. Deaver insisted that the figure was a lie. Nancy wa
tched as Ronnie struggled with the predicament before him. Deaver was a long-serving aide and adviser; practically a surrogate son. Sears was the political wunderkind without whom they believed they could not win. “Honey,” she finally told her husband, “it looks as if you’ve got to make a choice.”

  “No, Governor,” Deaver retorted, “you don’t have to, because I’m leaving.”

  He stormed out of the house—only to realize suddenly that he had no way of getting home. His wife had his car. Embarrassed on top of being furious, Deaver turned back and quietly opened the front door of the house. Inside, he found Nancy pacing the foyer alone. When Nancy saw Deaver return, she welcomed him. She assumed he would ask her to help him get his job back. Instead, he requested the keys to her station wagon so he could get out of there. From the living room, he could hear Ronnie telling the others: “Well, I hope you’re happy; the best guy we had just left.”

  According to biographer Lou Cannon, “Reagan never spoke warmly to Sears again. The confrontation left him depressed and angry at himself about what he had allowed to happen. His mood did not improve when old friends and allies, who had rarely criticized him to his face, bluntly told him he had made a mistake.” As Nancy put it: “I’ve never known Ronnie to carry a grudge, but after that day, I think he resented John Sears. The chemistry between them wasn’t good to begin with, and now it was worse.” Nancy also had begun to lose her faith in the operative whose knowledge and sophistication about politics had so impressed her when she first met him. “I don’t know what made John change in the years between 1976 and 1980, but I thought he had become arrogant and aloof,” she wrote later.

  A tactical blunder of epic proportion further shook the Reagans’ confidence. Ronnie’s late start effectively meant he wasn’t campaigning during the months running up to the January 1980 Iowa caucuses, which were the first statewide contest on the calendar. One measure of Iowa’s low priority was the fact that Michael and Maureen, who had been sidelined in their father’s earlier campaigns, were dispatched to stump there. Both reported back to Ronnie that they were appalled at how little organization they saw on the ground. But the candidate did nothing. He kept telling his children that the operation was in the hands of professionals.