Even as she battled to guard her privacy, Patti became more public in her liberal activism. A rebuke of Ronnie’s conservative policies by his own daughter guaranteed news coverage. This had been the case since early in his presidency. In June 1981 she was among the speakers at the fourth annual “Survival Sunday” antinuclear rally and rock concert at the Hollywood Bowl. “The fact that my father is president doesn’t take away my right as a citizen to speak my mind,” twenty-eight-year-old Patti told a news conference before the event. But the fact that her father was president surely figured in the organizers’ decision to give her a spotlight before an audience of eighteen thousand in a lineup that included Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, and Bonnie Raitt. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared there as well. Both her parents told her she was “being used.”
Patti nonetheless saw an opportunity to connect the president and people in his administration with some of the leading voices in the antinuclear movement. Ronnie was amenable enough to agree to meet with Patti and Australian physician Helen Caldicott, who had founded several activist organizations. They each had conditions: Caldicott demanded that the president come alone, without aides. Ronnie made it clear to his daughter that he did not want either of them to comment publicly about their December 1982 session. The exchange in the White House library lasted an hour and a half—an enormous block of time in a president’s schedule—and grew heated. According to Caldicott’s later account, Ronnie called the Soviets “evil, godless Communists,” and said the way to prevent nuclear war was to build more weapons; she asked him insultingly whether he had gotten his arguments from Reader’s Digest. Ronnie wrote in his diary that Caldicott “seems like a nice, caring person but is all steamed up and knows a lot of things that aren’t true. I tried but couldn’t get through her fixation. For that matter, I couldn’t get through to Patti. I’m afraid our daughter has been taken over by that whole d—n gang.”
In the summer of 1984 Patti married her yoga instructor Paul Grilley. He was six years younger than she was, and his background could hardly have been more different from hers. Grilley, the son of a building contractor and a secretary, had grown up near Glacier National Park in Montana. The marriage would last six years. Whatever misgivings Patti’s parents might have had about her choice of a mate, Nancy was thrilled that her daughter wanted to have a traditional wedding and that she sought her mother’s help in planning the private ceremony at the Hotel Bel-Air. Patti picked out her own dress, an off-the-shoulder creation of white silk lace and charmeuse. Following a traditional wedding custom, Nancy provided Patti something to wear that was old (a bracelet that had belonged to Edie’s mother) and something blue (a garter). Patti completed it by finding something to borrow: a ring from a friend. The Presbyterian service was conducted under a flower-and-vine-bedecked gazebo on the hotel’s serene Swan Lake Terrace. Ronnie gave a charming and sentimental toast in which he recalled how Patti as a baby would wrap her tiny fingers around his big one, gripping so tightly that he could still feel it. News accounts noted Ron and Maureen were there, and that Michael had been invited but did not attend.
It probably was not a coincidence that the timing of Patti’s honeymoon meant she would not be sitting in the presidential box in Dallas when her father accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for a second term. “I had hoped that Patti’s wedding would signal a new, happier stage in our relationship, but that was not to be,” Nancy wrote later. “She came to Ronnie’s second inauguration in 1985, but just for the day. When they took the family photograph, she was hiding in the back, and Ronnie kept saying, ‘Step forward, Patti, so we can see you.’ But she wouldn’t do it. And Paul didn’t come at all, which hurt me. He said he had to work, but it seemed to me that if you explained you were taking a couple of days off because your father-in-law was being sworn in as president of the United States, most people would understand.”
With the 1986 publication of Patti’s novel Home Front, the breach became deeper. According to the author, the night before she started her book tour, she got a call from her brother, Ron, who told her not to expect kudos from anyone for trashing their parents. He added that he had only thumbed through the book and had no intention of reading it. “Ron’s reaction hurt me more than anyone else’s, and I wish he had read the book before judging me,” Patti recalled. “He, better than anyone, would know the differences between the Canfields and the Reagans, and if he had read the story, I don’t think he would have found any unkind motivation in it.”
Ron offers a different version. “To the best of my recollection, that particular falling out with Patti occurred at a small party one evening in the apartment I shared with Doria on Devon Avenue in Westwood,” he told me. “Patti was excited that night about her book and about being the center of so much attention. She also stood to make what, for her, was a considerable amount of money. But she was bitter and complaining about her parents’ failure to energetically promote the book. I tried explaining several times that the book painted a less-than-flattering portrait of them and that they were embarrassed and understandably just wanted it to go away. Patti continued to insist that her mother and father owed her their support in her endeavor. Finally, exasperated, I told her—rather tartly, I must admit—that she had turned her parents into cartoons, and it was crazy to expect them to get behind such a thing.” Patti left the party, her brother recalled, and the two of them did not speak for a long time afterward.
Nancy spent part of her thirty-fourth wedding anniversary on March 4, 1986, watching her daughter tout the book on Good Morning America and then in another appearance on the TV talk show Donahue. But Patti’s publicity tour was short lived. Nancy’s close friend Merv Griffin bumped Patti from his show, as did comedienne Joan Rivers, who was hosting the Tonight show. The snubs only ignited more news coverage. “Phil Donahue admitted publicly that he’d been pressured to take me off his show, which didn’t deter him from putting me on. He didn’t specify exactly who pressured him; he didn’t have to,” Patti recalled. “Reporters staked out the front of my house; I climbed down the back fence to avoid them. They chased down Joan Rivers, who said, ‘No comment.’ They chased down my parents. My mother said nothing. My father said, ‘Nancy had nothing to do with it.’ ”
In Nancy’s memoir, published in late 1989, she wrote at length about her continuing estrangement from her daughter, as well as her hopes that, someday, the two of them might get past their bitterness: “Parents are not always responsible for their children’s problems. When your child has a difficult time, it’s only natural to blame yourself and think, What did I do wrong? But some children are just born a certain way, and there’s very little you can do about it.
“And yet I remain optimistic. There is still time for us to improve our relationship, and now that our public years are over, I’m hoping Patti and I will be able to reach some kind of understanding.
“I also hope Patti doesn’t turn out to be an ‘if only’ child. I’ve known people who, years after their parents had died, were still saying, ‘If only I had told my mother that I loved her,’ or ‘If only I had made some peace with my father.’ What a terrible burden that must be to carry.
“One of the great blessings of my life is that I’ve never felt that way. I had occasional moments of tension with my parents, but they both knew that I loved them, and I always knew that they loved me.
“I hope and pray that before my own life is over, Patti and I will be able to put the past behind us and arrive at that same point. Nothing would make me happier than to work that out.”
There would be more years of pain and alienation ahead, but eventually Nancy and Patti did move toward that point. Nancy was right in what she had feared. It was loss that brought Patti to her side in the 1990s. Together they shared the slow, cruel loss of Ronnie, right before their eyes, to Alzheimer’s disease. “I think sometimes of how different my life would be if my parents hadn’t lived this long, or if I hadn’t listened to the echo of my own despair,” Patti w
rote in September 1995. “The thought comes to me in small moments—walking with my father, my arm through his. What if he weren’t there to touch, and I had to live my life with only the remnants of my anger at my fingertips? It comes to me with the sound of my mother’s voice and the things I am learning from her now.”
At the midpoint of her own life, Patti had finally learned to count her blessings. One of them was that there was still a chance to make things right—or at least better—with her mother. She had been spared that regret. “I might have been too late,” she said. “I might have been left with only silence and distance.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ronnie made his announcement that he would run for a second term in a four-minute, nationally televised address on January 29, 1984. He did it at the exceedingly odd time of 10:55 p.m. on a Sunday night, which was nearly an hour after the president generally liked to be in bed. His campaign offered no explanation why. The stars must have aligned favorably at that moment, but Nancy was far from reassured. It was an open secret in Washington that she had been opposed to another campaign. Ronnie wore her down with what she called “a steady drumbeat.” There were things on his agenda that he wanted to finish, and he was doubtful Vice President George H. W. Bush could hold the White House for Republicans if Ronnie’s name was not at the top of the ticket.
“For a while, we talked about it every night, until it became more and more obvious that this was something Ronnie just had to do. Finally, I said, ‘If you feel that strongly, go ahead. You know I’m not crazy about it, but okay,’ ” Nancy recalled. The public uncertainty over what he would do continued until just days before Ronnie formally made his declaration. Nancy appeared to have lost weight, which fueled speculation that she was having health problems. The previous Wednesday, rumors that he would not run had sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbling.
Nancy’s concerns were many. There was, of course, her unshakeable fear about the physical dangers to Ronnie. She missed her privacy and their old life in California. But Nancy was also worried about whether he would win. Republicans had lost twenty-six House seats in the 1982 midterm election. Ronnie’s approval rating had only recently recovered to a robust 57 percent after having spent twenty-two months below 50 percent during the depths of the recession. The internal numbers of his pollster Richard Wirthlin showed a sharp decline in support among the blue-collar voters who had been so crucial to Ronnie’s 1980 victory. In May 1983 a Washington Post headline declared: “Go Ahead, Sucker—Bet on Reagan’s Reelection.”
Meanwhile, a potentially formidable Democratic field was shaping up, with Walter Mondale, who had been Jimmy Carter’s vice president, leading the pack. The night of Ronnie’s announcement that he would run again, Nancy wrote in her diary: “I think it’s going to be a tough, personal, close campaign. Mondale is supposed to be an infighter.… Ronnie is so popular that they might be desperate. I’ll be glad when the next nine months are over.”
The construction of Ronnie’s own campaign apparatus was well under way. Stu Spencer would continue to be both Reagans’ most trusted strategist, but he declined the role of campaign manager. That went to Ed Rollins, who had become White House political director when Lyn Nofziger left in November 1981. Rollins moved into a campaign headquarters on Capitol Hill and was given a $21 million budget for the 1984 primary season. To quiet any concern about the age issue, the Reagan team arranged for Parade magazine to run a December 1983 story on the president’s workout program, with a cover image of Ronnie, in a white T-shirt, pumping iron.
Even while she was trying to talk her husband out of running, Nancy had been sizing up his potential adversaries. As she had noted in her diary, Mondale seemed most likely to win the Democratic nomination. By the fall of 1983, she had correctly discounted the assumption of many in Washington that Ohio senator and former astronaut John Glenn, an American hero, had the potential to “ride the rocket ship” to the White House. She started to worry more about youthful Colorado senator Gary Hart, the insurgent in the race. When Hart dealt Mondale a stunning upset in the February 1984 New Hampshire primary, Nancy called Rollins and demanded: “What do we have on Hart?” The campaign manager assured her that while Hart had some appeal, he probably wouldn’t be able to go the distance against Mondale and the Democratic establishment. Nancy replied, “Well, you better look into this. I’m getting calls from my friends that we better take him seriously.” Rollins had not had much by way of direct dealings with Nancy previously. She was suddenly on the phone to him constantly, telling him what intelligence she was picking up and demanding to know what the campaign was doing about potential trouble spots that popped up on her radar.
It drove him nearly crazy. Nancy and her network did not share Rollins’s confidence that the campaign was going their way. One of her chief worries was that Ronnie might lose their home state of California, and no amount of argument from Rollins could convince her otherwise. She had heard that the campaign had only a light footprint in the state and demanded to know why it hadn’t set up an office in Beverly Hills. Why weren’t her friends there seeing campaign signs for Ronnie? Once, when Rollins couldn’t tell her where one of them could send a contribution, she said: “Shouldn’t you know the address in California where people can send checks? You’re the campaign manager. This is embarrassing.” After one particularly brutal campaign strategy session with the first lady, Spencer told him: “She could smell fear all over you, Rollins. You’re doomed.”
But as months went by, Rollins told me, “I sort of moved from being scared to death of her to having great, great respect for her.” Nancy may not have had his deep knowledge of the intricacies of making a campaign work, but she was unsurpassed when it came to knowing what it took to make her husband appear and perform at his best. Nor was she going to shrink back into the traditionally ornamental role to which the political handlers preferred to consign a candidate’s wife. As he came to accept those realities, Rollins finally developed a workable relationship with Nancy. He knew he had passed his biggest test with her when she told him: “I know you love my husband. You’re a protector of my husband.” In other words, she saw them as comrades, united in a common cause.
With the economy on the rebound, the 1984 reelection strategy was to go long on feel-good themes and short on policy specifics, because many of Ronnie’s remained controversial. One of Nancy’s chief concerns was the advertising. She had been dissatisfied with the quality of the spots their campaign team had put on the air in 1980 and pressed for something more creative and interesting this time around. Rollins argued that television did not make much difference. He wanted to invest more money into voter registration, ground organization, and other fundamentals that he felt were being neglected. Lyn Nofziger, who was advising the reelection effort, warned the campaign manager: “Don’t forget who your clients are. They’re movie stars. To them, all this stuff that you’re talking about—voter registration, what have you—that doesn’t mean jack shit to them. What’s important to them are pictures. Their friends are going to see the commercials.”
Rather than hiring an existing advertising agency, Mike Deaver put together a high-priced all-star group from around the country. They were dubbed the Tuesday Team. These were people who came not from the political world but from the corporate one, where they had produced ads for notable brands such as Pepsi, General Electric, and Pan American World Airways. The work they did from their headquarters in Rockefeller Center had a polished, cinematic quality.
One sixty-second commercial in particular stands as a modern political classic. It had a dreamlike quality that was inspired by The Natural—a popular movie that year about a middle-aged baseball phenom, played by Robert Redford, who seems to materialize from nowhere—and reflected Deaver’s belief in using visual images as powerful storytelling tools. As orchestral music played, the campaign spot opened with a montage of softly lit scenes showing everyday Americans going about their lives of contentment and prosperity: a lobster boat
heading to sea, a man carrying a briefcase getting out of a taxi, a farmer on a tractor, a neighbor waving to a paperboy on a bicycle, a family moving into a new home, proud grandparents watching a bride and groom walk down the aisle, campers raising an American flag. The narrator’s soothing voice intoned: “It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?”
The ad was both nostalgic for the past and upbeat about the future. Notably, Ronnie did not appear in it, except for a brief shot at the end that showed his face set against an American flag. The ad makers had titled this spot “Prouder, Stronger, Better.” But it soon became known as the “Morning in America” ad. Nancy loved it. Rollins made sure the commercial got heavy play in California, where the people she talked to most frequently would see a lot of it. Spending so much on ads in California—at least $1 million, the campaign manager recalled—was a waste of money strategically. But if it calmed Nancy down, Rollins thought it was worth it. “It was really to please that element as opposed to driving a campaign message,” he told me.
Nancy was not so enamored with another proposed concept for an ad. It was to begin with a close-up shot of fit young men playing volleyball, with the ocean sparkling behind them. As the camera pulled back, it would become clear that these were sailors getting in some recreation time on the deck of an aircraft carrier. The announcer was to have said: “Thank you, Mr. President. We’re now prepared for peace.” A similar spot was planned with army soldiers playing softball, where the frame would have widened to reveal tanks in the background. This would have been a way of highlighting the buildup in the military budget that Ronnie had pushed through during the first term. But Nancy, Deaver, and Baker, among others, were concerned that it would only remind voters of their fears that Ronnie was spoiling to get the country into a war. It might also stir growing public concerns about the explosion in Pentagon spending, which had helped create an enormous budget deficit and was bound to bring a fiscal reckoning. The ads were vetoed. Later, Rollins would learn it was in part at Nancy’s behest. “They were spectacular ads,” he recalled mournfully more than thirty years later. “They were my favorite ads of all time.”
The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Page 41
