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

was handed a biography the campaign had drafted to be read as her father’s introduction. It said: “Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, have two children, Patti and Ronnie.” Humiliated to see herself written out of the story of his life, Ronnie’s eldest discarded it and read from her own notes, telling stories from her and Michael’s childhood. Later, Maureen claimed, Spencer told her husband that Maureen should “dig a hole and pull the dirt in over me until after the election.” Maureen appealed to her father, asking for a more visible role. But Ronnie told her: “If you pay someone to manage a campaign, then you’ve got to give them the authority to do it as they see fit.”

Nancy, meanwhile, was becoming less willing to defer to the campaign’s hired guns. She let the men who ran the campaign know when she—and her friends—thought they were falling down on the job. “I’m working. My phone would ring, it’s Nancy Reagan,” Spencer told me. “It’s six o’clock, and she wants to talk about the campaign, talk about all the goddamn rumors she’d heard at the bridge party that day with Betsy, and blah, blah, blah. All the stuff, and all her political counsel and advice, every day.”

One morning, the operator running the old-fashioned PBX switchboard at campaign headquarters neglected to put Nancy on hold before announcing to Spencer: “The bitch is on the phone again.” Then the operator accidentally dropped the line. Nancy called right back and said icily: “Well, I hope I didn’t destroy your day.” This time the embarrassed woman quickly transferred her to Spencer. Nancy didn’t miss a beat before launching into her fresh list of concerns.

Ronnie’s Northern California chairman, Tom Reed, also got regular calls, which he considered “a dubious honor heretofore sloughed off on those closer at hand. Nancy was a very active candidate’s wife, supportive and protective of RR, but incessantly injecting her views and personal demands on anyone who would listen—along with many who did not wish to do so.” Reed wrote that “Nancy’s political calls, directed at any who would listen, usually came first thing in the morning as soon as RR left the house. She wanted to discuss her perception of the campaign, garnered from her dinner companions of the night before. These women were hardly a cross-section of working-class California.”

No doubt there was more than a little sexism at work in these men’s dismissal of the idea that Nancy should be anything but ornamental to Ronnie’s campaign. In their view, the role of the spouse was to make herself presentable, show up where asked, and parrot what she was told to say. Spencer, though, would come to understand that Nancy’s instincts were generally on the mark. They revealed a deep understanding of her husband and a sharp sense of what he needed to stay on the top of his game. Nancy made demands that Ronnie wouldn’t. She insisted, for instance, that no matter how much he traveled, he must spend every night possible at home in his own bed. She knew that when Ronnie was tired or under the weather, or when the campaign ran him too hard, he blundered—as he did when he stormed out of a convention of black Republicans after his GOP opponents suggested he was racist for opposing the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In the June primary, Ronnie easily beat former San Francisco mayor Christopher, getting 65 percent of the vote. That set him up to face Democratic incumbent governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown in the fall election. Brown made the mistake—as so many others would in the years to come—of underestimating Ronnie and his appeal from the outset. The governor painted his opponent as an inexperienced extremist; at one point referring to the affable host everyone remembered from GE Theater as an “enemy of the people.” One of Brown’s television spots featured the governor telling a group of schoolchildren: “I’m running against an actor, and you know who shot Lincoln, don’t ya?” That kind of rhetoric backfired, sending more disaffected voters to the Republican side.

Hollywood also took note of Brown’s over-the-top comment about actors. “Frank Sinatra called me the next day,” Spencer recalled. “He was a big Democrat then for whom I had done a little work. Without even a hello, he’s going on, ‘What can I do? What can I do?’

“And he was just the first. They came out of the woodwork, those Hollywood Democrats. Maybe they were already supporting Ron, but certainly not publicly. Brown’s quote blew him out of the water with those folks.”

Ronnie won the November election in a landslide. He got nearly a million more votes than Brown and carried many traditionally Democratic precincts in suburban and rural California, as well as working-class enclaves of Los Angeles. As the Reagans drove to his campaign party on election night, they heard an announcer on the radio proclaim that Ronnie would be California’s next governor. “I had always thought you waited up all night listening to the returns, and although this may sound silly, I felt let down,” Nancy recalled. “After so much hard work, Ronnie’s early and overwhelming victory seemed almost an anticlimax.”

They were on their way.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Ronnie was sworn in as governor just minutes after midnight on January 2, 1967, his hand on a four-hundred-year-old Bible believed to have been brought to California by Father Junipero Serra, the Spanish priest who had spread the Catholic faith in the seventeen hundreds. That odd hour brought no small amount of speculation—including by his predecessor, Pat Brown—that the timing had been determined by astrology. After all, it was no secret that the Reagans began each day by reading what the signs were saying in their friend Carroll Righter’s column. The official story, plausible enough, was that Ronnie wanted to put a stop to Brown’s aggressive use of last-minute appointments of friends and allies to judgeships and other posts. So, he decided to take office at the