Ronnie and Nancy (82 page)

Ironically, in private Nancy Reagan, because of her glamorous upbringing and her years in Hollywood, was much more sophisticated than Betty Ford. As the editor of
Interview
in those days, I had occasion to see Mrs. Ford at Halston’s dinners, where she was really a fish out of water—

extremely pleasant but at a loss with guests such as Diana Vreeland and Truman Capote, who had both hit it off perfectly with Nancy. One of the 4 4 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House new friends Nancy made during this period was Barry Diller, who was a senior ABC executive when he met her at a dinner given by Oscar and Françoise de la Renta in Los Angeles. “I was seated next to her, and instantly we got it,” Diller recalled. “It didn’t really make any sense—we weren’t of the same age, I was hardly a Republican—but within twenty minutes we were telling each other about our lives.” After the Reagans left Sacramento and Diller took over Paramount in 1974, he continued to see her, and when his relationship with Diane von Furstenberg was in trouble, he told me, “one of the people I really talked about it with was Nancy. And I did not talk to too many of the older folks about my personal life. But with her I talked about everything, and I totally trusted her.”67

But then again, Nancy was always at ease with men. Merv Griffin, who had known the Reagans since he was under contract to Warner Bros. in the 1950s, regularly put her, with or without Ronnie, on his nightly talk show throughout the governorship and afterward. Mike Wallace, who went even further back with Nancy, aired an interview with her and Ronnie and Maureen for
60 Minutes
on December 14, 1975, three weeks after Reagan formally announced his candidacy. CBS ran a full-page ad in
The New York Times
: “Tonight, Ronald Reagan tells how he’d play the role of President.”

Up to the last minute, Gerald Ford did everything possible to stop Reagan from entering the race. In early October he put the super-professional Stu Spencer in charge of his campaign’s day-to-day operations, in effect turning the campaign manager, the feckless Howard “Bo” Callaway of Georgia, into a figurehead. A month later the President shook up his foreign policy team and top staff. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, a hard-liner who opposed the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente with the Soviet Union and Communist China, was replaced by the more moderate Donald Rumsfeld, who had been White House chief of staff. Rumsfeld’s deputy, Richard Cheney, took his boss’s job, and, as a supposed sop to conservatives, Henry Kissinger, who had been serving as both secretary of state and national security adviser since Watergate, gave up the latter post to his right-hand man, Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft. In the midst of this upheaval, Vice President Rockefeller, tired of the constant chorus of criticism aimed at him by Southern Republicans, including Bo Callaway, told Ford that he was taking himself out of consideration for the 1976 ticket.

Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976

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Reagan promptly went on the record with his reaction. He said he was

“shocked” at the dismissal of Schlesinger, calling him “the most articulate voice” on national defense in the administration, and expressed dismay at the “shabby treatment” of Rockefeller. “I’m certainly not appeased,” he told the press with a laugh. Speaking at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton on November 3, he answered a student’s question about his intentions by saying, “On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m about a 9.”68

Meanwhile Tom Reed, who had become Air Force secretary in the November shuffle, advised Dick Cheney to call the only person who could persuade Reagan to pull out—Holmes Tuttle. According to Tuttle, however, another move Ford had made around this time to burnish his image with the right actually worked against him with Reagan. In late October, when New York mayor Abe Beame begged the federal government to guarantee the bonds of his nearly bankrupt city, Ford refused, which resulted in the notorious
Daily News
headline ford to city: drop dead.

“The governor had been talking about all the cities being in bad shape,”

Tuttle recalled. “That convinced us. We took a poll throughout this country, and the poll showed us there was strong support for what Governor Reagan was talking about. He was the man, so we decided to run. . . .

[But] we said, ‘Well, maybe we’ll wait for another poll.’ So we waited three weeks or thirty days, and we took another one. When that happened, we met up at the governor’s house. It was a go, and we went.”69

On November 20, Reagan, having informed Ford the day before, held a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington to announce officially that he was a candidate for president. Presenting himself once more as a Citizen Politician and vowing to respect the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican,” he nevertheless declared, “Our nation’s capital has become the seat of a buddy system that functions for its own benefits—increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker who supports it with his taxes. Today it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us our problems: the Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business and big labor.”70

The reference to big business was the idea of John Sears, who quite brilliantly realized that Reagan could appeal to traditionally Democratic blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt as well as to his base of affluent Sun Belt suburbanites. It did not endear Sears to Tuttle, Dart, and the rest of 4 4 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the Kitchen Cabinet, though they had to marvel at the efficiency with which he launched the new Reagan campaign. Immediately following the press conference, the Reagans, accompanied by a large contingent from the national media, boarded a chartered 727 for a two-day blitz of the four key early-primary states: New Hampshire, Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina. The Secret Service attached to the Reagans assigned the couple the code names that would follow them the rest of their lives: his was Rawhide, hers Rainbow.71

At every stop, Sears had organized well-planned, well-controlled, and well-timed-for-TV events. For a brief frightening moment, however, at the first stop in Miami, a rally outside a Ramada Inn near the airport, things went awry when a young man waving a toy pistol was wrestled to the ground by the Secret Service as the Reagans stepped off the platform.

A terrified Nancy blamed Ronnie for not precisely following the Secret Service’s instructions. “From now on,” she told him, “if the Secret Service tells you to turn to the left, turn left! Do what they tell you to do!”72

Nancy’s hysteria was somewhat justified. In September two assassination attempts with real guns had been made on President Ford’s life. The first, in Sacramento, was by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a member of the Charles Manson Family; the second, in San Francisco, was by Sara Jane Moore, a prisoners’ rights fanatic.

Three weeks after Reagan announced, the latest Gallup Poll had him at 40

percent, Ford at 32 percent—numbers that boded well for Sears’s blitzkrieg strategy of knocking the President out of the race with quick wins in New Hampshire in February and Florida in March. By the end of the year, the Reagan campaign had raised $2 million, against $1.7 million raised for Ford.73 After spending Christmas Eve at the home of Charles and Mary Jane Wick—the start of another Reagan ritual—and New Year’s Eve at the Annenbergs’, the Reagans headed for New Hampshire.

On his first day in the Granite State, wearing two sweaters and a ski jacket in 7-degree weather, Reagan told three hundred residents of Moul-tonborough that détente with the Soviet Union had become a “one-way street.” He continued, “I think it’s time for us to straighten up and eyeball them, and say, ‘Hey, fellas, let’s get this back on the track where it’s something for something, not all one way.’” If he were president, he added, he would tell the Russians for starters to get out of Angola, where they were
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backing the pro-Communist side in a civil war—“or you’re going to have to deal with us.” The next day
New York Times
columnist James Reston wrote,

“The more bonnie Ronnie talks, the better President Ford looks. . . . For del-icacy of language and precision of policy, [Reagan] makes Mr. Ford’s statements on détente and Angola seem almost eloquent and statesmanlike.”74

On a second trip to New Hampshire, Reagan went after the welfare system. “There’s a woman in Chicago,” he said. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands. And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.” His listeners, however, kept bringing up his proposal to save the federal government $90 billion annually by transferring most of its welfare and social service programs to the states. No, he had to keep telling them, that did not mean that New Hampshire would have to enact an income tax or a sales tax to cover the costs. A Gallup Poll released on January 10 now had Ford and Reagan running neck and neck, with 45 percent each. On January 12, Reagan disavowed his proposal, calling it a “mistake”; one day later he disavowed his disavowal.75 Under Stu Spencer’s guidance, Ford made hay of his opponent’s gaffes, calling his economic plan “pure political demagoguery” and asserting that Reagan was too “extreme” a conservative to win against the Democrats in November.76

On February 24, Ford beat Reagan by 1,300 votes out of 108,000 cast, and took seventeen of the state’s twenty-one convention delegates. Reagan, who had celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday in New Hampshire, called it a

“virtual tie.”77 But Paul Laxalt, who had spent the previous night with Ronnie and Nancy waiting to uncork the champagne, saw it for what it was.

“We couldn’t believe it,” he wrote. “Ron Reagan had never lost a race.”78

He lost three more states in early March, Massachusetts and Vermont on the 2nd, and a week later, more significantly, Florida, where his state campaign chairman had originally predicted a two-to-one victory—and where Ford beat him by ten points. But in his speeches around Florida he had found his issue, the Panama Canal, his bogeyman, Henry Kissinger, and his voice. In Winter Haven, on February 29, he accused the secretary of state of having a secret plan to give sovereignty over the canal to Panama, then ruled by a leftist military dictator, General Omar Torrijos. “If these reports 4 5 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House are true,” he asserted, “it means that the American people have been de-ceived by a State Department preoccupied by secrecy. They are due a full explanation. Presumably Mr. Ford has not been fully informed by the State Department, for if he were, I cannot imagine he would knowingly endorse such action. . . . When it comes to the Canal, we bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we should tell Torrijos and company that we are going to keep it!”79

He went even further in Orlando four days later, especially regarding Kissinger, whom he condemned as the architect of America’s retreat in the face of “Soviet imperialism” in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. “Last year and this, the Soviet Union, using Castro’s mercenaries, intervened decisively in the Angola civil war and routed the pro-Western forces. Yet, Messrs. Ford and Kissinger continue to tell us that we must not let this interfere with détente. We have given the Soviets our trade and our technology. At Kissinger’s insistence, Mr. Ford snubbed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the great moral heroes of our time. . . . Mr. Ford and Dr. Kissinger ask us to trust their leadership. I confess I find that more and more difficult to do. Henry Kissinger’s stewardship of United States foreign policy has coincided precisely with the loss of United States military supremacy.”80 Reagan’s attacks on Kissinger were so strident that Bill Buckley, whose
National Review
was enthusiastically “plugging for Reagan,” called him on Kissinger’s behalf and argued that the Panama Canal issue was more complicated than he was making it out to be.81

The day after Reagan’s Florida defeat,
The New York Times
reported that Ford’s campaign advisers were sending signals to Reagan “to end his insurgency—and perhaps join the Republican ticket as a running mate.” Dick Cheney was quoted as saying that the White House would not hold a grudge against the Californian for things said in “the heat of the campaign.”

With Nancy at his side, Reagan dug in his heels and told the press, “The incumbent in these first couple of primaries has thrown the whole load at us, he has shot all the big artillery there is, used everything in the incumbency he can, and we are still possessing almost half the Republican vote.”82

The following Tuesday, Ford took Reagan’s native state of Illinois, 61

percent to 39 percent. Ford declared “a great victory and another real clincher in our effort to win the nomination and go on to victory in 1976.”

Stu Spencer said that Reagan should withdraw, “the sooner the better.”83

Eleven out of twelve living former Republican National Committee chairmen had already endorsed Ford, the only exception being George H. W.

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Bush, who had been made director of the CIA by Ford and was therefore obliged to remain neutral.84 The National Republican Conference of Mayors and seven of the thirteen Republican governors called on Reagan to quit the race. All of this only served to fuel Reagan’s stubbornness. Arriving at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, with Jimmy Stewart, who called Reagan “a friend of mine,” Reagan told reporters to tell Ford to quit.85

Laxalt recalled that the campaign was so broke by then that they had barely been able to pay for the 727 to fly them to North Carolina, and according to Nofziger even Nancy Reagan had come to the conclusion that it was time to throw in the towel. Nofziger was stunned when a frazzled Mike Deaver told him, “You’ve got to talk her out of it.” He knew he was not Nancy’s favorite, but he agreed to give it a try. “Ronnie has to get out,”