Ronnie and Nancy (75 page)

A few weeks later, perhaps sensing something was wrong, Nancy invited her daughter to join her in New York, where she was speaking at a United Community Campaign of America luncheon. This had been Edith’s primary charity in Chicago, and now Nancy was national chairman of its women’s committee. Although Patti had not planned on even mentioning her failed affair, she was so upset that she found herself telling her mother the whole sad story. Much to her surprise, Nancy was understanding and comforting. Patti’s analysis of her mother’s reaction is insightful:

There have been comments from the media that she is more liberal politically than my father, but I don’t think her ideology or her morality are rooted in either liberalism or conservatism. One of my mother’s complexities is her ability to transform, adapt to situations for personal reasons. I was bringing her a personal crisis, showing her I needed her, and she adapted to that, became gentle, nurtur-ing, and non-judgmental.105

Yet when
The New York Times
’s Judy Klemesrud turned up at Nancy’s Waldorf Towers suite, she reverted to her public role as the no-nonsense wife of a conservative politician. She was “shocked,” she said, to read that a welfare family had recently been housed at the Waldorf. “I think the people of New York should be shocked, too. There must be somewhere else to put these people.” She was “appalled and ashamed” by the sex-oriented films Hollywood was turning out. “I think they’ve shown no sense of responsibility, no taste. . . . I’ve often said that it’s going to be cured at the box office if people stop going. But some people, even my friends, say they go ‘out of curiosity.’ I don’t see why they are so curious. A dirty picture is a dirty picture, and that’s that.” Even
Love Story
with Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw went too far for her. “I thought it leaned too heavily on the four-letter words. I would have liked a little more tenderness.” As for Women’s Lib, “I’m in agreement with equal pay for equal jobs. . . . After 4 1 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House that, I’m afraid they kind of lose me.” Hot pants? “I think a woman should look like a woman, with a little more femininity and elegance than hot pants offer. I don’t like fads.”106

As fate would have it, Patti no sooner returned to Northwestern than she was embroiled in what came to known as “the hot pants incident.”

This brouhaha started when she and a friend were approached in their dormitory lobby by a black man selling shorts out of a cardboard box; the friend called security, the man was arrested, and the press ran away with the story. reagan’s daughter in hot pants hassle was the headline on the
Chicago Tribune
’s front-page story the next day. Soon everyone from Loyal Davis to Eva Jefferson to the peddler’s brother, a local alderman, became involved. When Frank Sinatra read about the upcoming trial, he called Nancy, who told him she was on her way to Chicago. “He was in New York for some big fight,” recalled Nancy, “and he said, ‘Well, I’ll stop there on my way back to the Coast.’ We had dinner with Patti at the Drake.” As Patti remembered it, Sinatra gave her a lecture on law and order and sticking up for her rights, but others have suggested the dinner was merely a cover for an assignation between the singer and Nancy, who was staying at the hotel rather than at her parents’ one-bedroom pied-à-

terre. “Oh, please,” said Nancy when I asked her about these allegations.

“Frank? There was nothing.”107 It seems unlikely that someone as controlled as Nancy Reagan would have risked her husband’s political career for a fling with a man who was known to brag about his conquests.

In any event, the trial was postponed, perhaps because strings were pulled by Sinatra or the Davises, all of whom were friendly with Mayor Richard Daley, and Patti left Northwestern at the end of that semester. She spent the summer of 1971 at Oxford and then transferred to USC as a drama major. After two years she dropped out. “I can’t say we’re surprised,” her father told her. “Maybe I’ll go back and finish college someday,” Patti replied. “No, you won’t,” said Nancy.108

The great achievement of Reagan’s second term, indeed of his entire governorship, was the California Welfare Reform Act of 1971. It took him six months of struggle with the cocky new Democratic speaker of the assembly, Bob Moretti, to get the bill through the legislature, and when he first asked his aides, including Meese and Deaver, what they thought his chances of success were, their answers ranged from “We shouldn’t try” to “None.”109

Since coming into office, Reagan had been determined to get what he called
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“the welfare monster” under control—one out of nine Americans was on some form of relief by the early 1970s, and in California the Aid to Families with Dependent Children caseload was increasing by forty thousand a month.110 On March 3, 1971, Reagan unveiled the “lengthiest, most detailed and specific legislative proposal ever originated by a California governor,” which called for cutting welfare expenditures by as much as $800

million annually by tightening eligibility requirements and closing loop-holes while increasing funds for “the truly needy.”111 Reagan’s most controversial proposal would force able-bodied fathers—and mothers with older children—to work at public service for their AFDC checks.112

The bill became law on August 13, after a final version had been hammered out in three weeks of face-to-face negotiations between Reagan and Moretti, which involved a fair degree of cursing as well as nitty-gritty hag-gling over nearly every subclause. “Both he and I developed a grudging respect for each other,” said the thirty-four-year-old speaker, who came from a poor, half-Italian, half-Armenian family in Detroit. “I don’t think that socially we’d ever have mixed, but when the governor gave a commitment he kept it, and when I gave a commitment, I kept it. So that working on the development of legislation with him was relatively easy because we always knew where the other guy stood.”113

“Reagan always prided himself on his ability to compromise,” said Mike Deaver, who had been given the fancy new title director of administration at the start of the second term. “And he understood that there always was going to
be
compromise. He would tell you stories about what he learned in his work with the unions and the studios and the Screen Actors Guild. That’s where he really learned how to compromise—
when
to make the move and so forth.”114

The path to reform had taken Reagan to the Winter White House at San Clemente that April for a “welfare summit” with President Nixon, who had proposed his own Family Assistance Plan in 1969 and was not happy about the California Governor stealing his thunder. Nixon’s plan essentially amounted to a guaranteed minimum income for welfare recipients and was seen by conservatives as yet another example of his inability to control spending and his lack of principles. Reagan had even testified against Nixon’s plan in U.S. Senate hearings the previous summer.115 Their three-hour meeting in San Clemente was mediated by Caspar Weinberger, who had left Sacramento to become Nixon’s budget director. Reagan essentially got what he wanted, the presidential blessing for his work-for-checks 4 1 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House reform. In exchange he agreed to stop opposing Nixon’s plan, which would be shelved in 1972.116 Reagan’s reform legislation, on the other hand, would become the model for other states, and eventually for the federal government during the Clinton administration.

For Nixon, struggling with a recession, inflation, and soaring deficits, as well as a war in Southeast Asia he could neither win nor end, Reagan increasingly represented a looming threat to his renomination in 1972. Despite Reagan’s assurance at a White House meeting in January 1971 that he

“would not in any way allow himself to become a candidate,” as Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman noted in his diary, the President’s paranoia was set off by the slightest sign of a Reagan surge. When the Young Americans for Freedom came out for Reagan that May, for example, Nixon ordered Attorney General John Mitchell to “straighten them back out.”117

But Reagan was both sincere and realistic about not running this time around. In July, responding to a letter from Vermont governor Deane Davis urging him to make another try for the White House, Reagan joked,

“Just between us, though, I think we’d better settle for the North Pole—it’s easier to reach than that other place you mentioned.”118

“They got along fine,” Nancy Reagan said of her husband and Nixon, adding, “We were never
close
.”119 Nixon seemed to alternate between slighting the Reagans and courting them. Nancy Reagan told me that they were never invited to a state dinner by Nixon, though they were by Lyndon Johnson, who seated her at his table. They were asked to San Clemente in the summer of 1970 for an intimate dinner with the Nixons and Henry Kissinger, who was then national security adviser. Reagan wrote Kissinger a cryptic note the following day: “It was good seeing you last night—my mind is busy but my lips are sealed. Enclosed is the Pat-ton speech made to his 3rd Army before it left England to cross the Channel.”120

On July 15, 1971, Nixon startled the nation—and Ronald Reagan—

when he announced that he would be paying an official visit to Communist China the following year. Bill Buckley, who was in Sacramento to tape a session of his talk show,
Firing Line
, with Reagan, was at the Governor’s house when “there was a call from his office saying that it was very important to hear a special broadcast that Richard Nixon was making at six o’clock. It was the announcement that he was going to China, which was a very anti-rightwing thing to do in those days. So we sat and watched it. And then the phone rang, and someone came in and said, ‘Dr. Kissinger for Governor
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Reagan.’ Henry was losing no time.”121 As Buckley recalled, Kissinger guaranteed Reagan “that the strategic intentions of the President were in total harmony with the concerns of the conservative community.”122

In October, Nixon sent Reagan on a two-week tour of Asia to reassure our allies that his historic opening to China would not change their relationships with the United States. In Japan the Reagans were the first foreign visitors who were not heads of state to have an audience with Emperor Hirohito, and in Thailand they were received by King Bhumi-bol—Ronnie bowed and Nancy curtsied. In Singapore, Reagan met with Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and in South Korea with President Park, who told him how
he
dealt with student unrest. “Just before our arrival there was rioting on the campus of the University of Seoul,” Nancy recalled. “It was interesting to see how such things are handled in these countries. First, let me say there was irrefutable evidence that the rioting was engineered by Communist infiltrators. The president simply closed the university, and the young men were drafted into the army. President Park told Ronnie that after they had a little taste of military life, he’d reopen the university, and he was sure the returning students would have a greater appreciation of their educational opportunity.”123

There was also a quick, unannounced detour to Saigon, where Reagan was helicoptered to lunch with President Thieu while Nancy and young Ron took a second helicopter to the American ambassador’s residence.

Nancy also made a point of visiting an American military hospital in the South Vietnamese capital. Between official duties, the superstitious Reagans bought a “spirit house” at Bangkok’s floating market for their garden in Sacramento, and Nancy found time for a visit to Hanae Mori’s couture house in Tokyo. “Skipper was the best traveler of all,” Nancy Reynolds told the
Sacramento Union
upon their return. “He certainly developed the most sophisticated palate and was quite an expert with chopsticks by the time we left.”124

Reagan’s most important stop was Taiwan, where he and Nancy dined with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the formidable Madame Chiang. The eighty-five-year-old Nationalist Chinese leader, who had been driven from the mainland by Mao Zedong’s Red Army in 1949, was understandably concerned by Nixon’s surprise announcement, and pleased to receive his personal message of reassurance from Reagan. But two days after Reagan returned to Sacramento, the U.N. General Assembly, with tacit U.S. approval, voted to expel Taiwan in favor of Communist China.

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

“Reagan tracked me down in Madrid,” Bill Buckley told me. “He was as mad as I ever heard him. He said, ‘What am I going to do? Here I just reassured all of our friends that nothing that matters is going to change, and I come back and now this terrible thing happens.’ ”125

According to Haldeman’s
Diaries
, a “very upset” Reagan tried to reach Nixon after midnight on the day of the vote, and when the President returned his call the next morning, Reagan pushed him to go on TV and denounce the U.N. When Nixon said that wasn’t possible, an infuriated Reagan called Secretary of State William Rogers and Attorney General John Mitchell. “The P makes the point that we need to keep the right wing on track,” Haldeman wrote. “We have to see if K[issinger] can keep Reagan in line and try to do so with Buckley also, and we’ve just got to keep Reagan from jumping off the reservation.”126

Nixon sent Reagan off on an Air Force plane again in July 1972—this time to Europe—perhaps to prevent his making any last-minute waves before the August convention in Miami. Reagan met with the prime ministers of Britain, France, Italy, and Denmark, and was given a full day’s briefing by NATO secretary general Joseph Luns in Brussels. In Madrid he and Nancy dined with both Generalissimo Franco and the future king and queen, Juan Carlos and Sofia. There was also a glamorous lunch on the Queen of Denmark’s yacht, and an audience with Pope Paul VI. Their final stop was in the Governor’s ancestral land, Ireland, where they threw coins in a wishing well at Cashel Rock.127

It was all fun and unity at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, which opened with a filmed tribute to the late President Eisenhower in which Mamie urged the delegates to give Nixon “the full eight years.” The following night Nancy sat beside Happy Rockefeller and right behind Pat Nixon as Nixon’s was the only name placed in nomination. The President himself was at a Republican youth rally headlined by Sammy Davis Jr., reminding the assembled throng that he had not only ended the draft but also lowered the voting age to eighteen. The Reagans were staying with the Leonard Firestones on Key Biscayne, as were the Bloomingdales and the Annenbergs. So was Frank Sinatra. Vice President Agnew, who was now a regular at Sinatra’s Palm Springs compound, had also stayed on at least one occasion with the Reagans in Sacramento. The only jarring note came when angry young demonstrators, “in a symbolic protest of the poor against the rich,” started ripping designer dresses off the backs of women ar-Sacramento II: 1969–1974