The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (best books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

The exploratory committee launched in May 1965. Ronnie spent the next months testing his message and his abilities as a candidate in small communities across the state. He questioned why his handlers weren’t sending him to larger places, where there were more votes to be had. “It’s like a show,” Spencer explained to Ronnie and Nancy, trying to frame the endeavor in terms the couple would understand. “You take it out of town. You work it out, get the kinks out of it, and screwups and all of this stuff, and then you go to the big city.”

Ronnie formally declared he was running for governor on January 4, 1966. His campaign broadcast the announcement in a pretaped speech on fifteen television stations across the state. A week earlier, Nancy had written William F. Buckley: “I must say my emotions are wired. I awaken early often and think, ‘Good God. What have we gotten ourselves into?’ Well, we shall see. Don’t you think you’ll have to come out here sometime during the campaign for National Review? Please do—I want my friends around me too—not just my enemies!”

California was a state where Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a 3-to-2 margin, but its voters were not intensely partisan. They had elected Republican governors Earl Warren and Goodwin Knight in the 1950s, and George Murphy as their senator over former Kennedy White House press secretary Pierre Salinger in 1964. Moreover, the political environment was ripe for Ronnie’s message and his fresh qualities as a “citizen-politician.” Los Angeles had been shaken in 1965 by race riots in Watts, which left thirty-four dead and created deep anxiety among whites. California news broadcasts were filled with anti–Vietnam War protests on the University of California at Berkeley campus and scenes of free-loving hippies in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, which unsettled people in the suburbs. Meanwhile, there was frustration across the political spectrum at the state’s soaring property taxes. A revolt was brewing.

With little guidance from Ronnie’s team, Nancy struggled to figure out what her own role in the campaign should be. At first, she did not want to go on the trail at all. Then she agreed to make appearances, but only to take questions about her husband, not to give speeches. “We went to tiny, tiny little towns,” she said. “One town I remember we landed in darkness, and they didn’t even have lights at the airport. They had gotten cars out to line the way, and they turned their lights on. And that’s how we landed.” Nancy learned not to mention the name of the city where she was speaking, because when she was making six stops a day, it was easy to get it wrong. “It’s nice to be here,” she would say. Part of her job was to reinforce Ronnie’s conservative message. On campuses, Nancy was asked about marijuana and said that as a doctor’s daughter, she opposed it. She told audiences she thought the movies of the day were too violent and explicit. She denounced premarital sex, live-in relationships, and permissive child rearing.

Her own home, however, was hardly the picture of the values she espoused. Nancy’s daughter was smoking pot with her friends and becoming addicted to diet pills. Patti’s rebellious nature was a constant source of potential embarrassment. One crisis came when she attempted to run off to Alaska with the handsome dishwasher from her Arizona boarding school. The plan was thwarted only because Patti tried to enlist her stepbrother, Michael, by then a twenty-one-year-old adult, to sign her out, and he alerted Nancy. At another point during the campaign, Patti disappeared from home for a day after an argument with her mother, one that started over Patti’s refusal to wear a Reagan campaign button. When Patti decided to return, Nancy sounded more concerned about how the incident might reflect upon Ronnie than about her daughter’s welfare. “It could have been all over the papers!” Nancy said.

“She slapped my face hard and then stormed out,” Patti wrote later. “I went to the mirror and watched as my face grew red. It had become a ritual: the siege would end with a slap, and I’d be left alone, staring in the mirror with hard, tearless eyes.”

Ronnie, as usual, left all of the difficult and contentious parts of parenting to Nancy.

It was decided that Maureen and Michael—awkward reminders of Ronnie’s first marriage—were to be rendered invisible for the duration of the campaign. On that, Nancy and Spencer agreed.

Michael seemed to have little interest in politics. He was adrift and preoccupied with finding his own way in life. Having flunked out of college, he worked a series of menial jobs, fell deeply into debt, and discovered a passion for racing expensive boats. At one point, Nancy asked Maureen whether her second husband, a marine captain named David Sills, might find a way to have Michael drafted and shipped off to Vietnam.

But while Michael was not clamoring for a role in his father’s campaign, it was hurtful to Maureen to be excluded from it. She had become a Republican before he had and worked for Goldwater in 1964. Early in Ronnie’s gubernatorial run, Maureen was invited by a local GOP organization to introduce her father at a banquet in San Diego. That seemed fine to assistant campaign director Dave Tomshany, who had driven Ronnie to the event. But when Tomshany and the candidate returned to Pacific Palisades later that night, they were met at the door by Nancy.

“She was livid—because Jane Wyman’s daughter, Maureen, had introduced Ron, her father, at this San Diego banquet and speech,” Tomshany recounted later in a book of reminiscences compiled by Reagan aide Curtis Patrick. “Now, I had no idea who Maureen was before that day—and all of a sudden, it’s his daughter from the previous marriage and—oh, she was livid! I think she chewed me out for, probably, fifteen minutes.”

The event had been painful for Maureen as well. She