Then came the Tet Offensive on January 30, in which North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces attacked Saigon and thirty South Vietnamese provincial capitals. They were driven back after three weeks, but the sight of Communist fighters storming the American embassy on the evening news was enough to propel Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, the hero of the antiwar movement, to a near victory over Johnson in the March 12
New Hampshire primary. The next morning Robert Kennedy, realizing that the President was vulnerable, jumped into the race, and at the end of the month a worn-out LBJ gave up the fight. Vietnam also did in Governor Romney, who claimed he had been “brainwashed” by American generals and diplomats on a tour of the battlefields, a remark that sent his poll numbers into a free fall that ended with his withdrawal in late February.
Nixon now looked unassailable, unless Rockefeller made a move, or Reagan got serious. Maryland’s cagey Governor Spiro Agnew was trying to start a “Draft Rocky” movement and writing letters to Reagan urging him to sign on for the vice presidency.
The country was stunned once again on April 4, by the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis and the rioting that broke out almost immediately in Washington, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and more than a hundred other cities. With thirty-nine dead, twenty thousand arrested, and fifty thousand Army troops and National Guardsmen on the streets, the political climate heated up all the more. Alabama’s racist former governor George Wallace managed to get his third party registered in all fifty states; Hubert Humphrey stepped forward as the mainstream alternative to the liberal RFK and the peacenik Sacramento: 1967–1968
3 8 3
McCarthy; Rockefeller decided to run after all; and Reagan got a little more serious by letting his name stay on the ballot in the May 28 Oregon primary. Nixon trounced him, 73 percent to 23 percent.121 A week later Reagan’s favorite-son slate was unopposed in the California primary, and Kennedy beat McCarthy decisively. Then, as the heir to Camelot exited his victory party through the Ambassador Hotel’s kitchen, he was shot by Sirhan B. Sirhan, a young Palestinian disgusted by Kennedy’s support of Israel in the Six Day War, and America turned upside down again.
This second Kennedy assassination seemed to have more of an effect on the Reagans than the first. It happened in their own city, in the very hotel where Reagan’s political career had been launched, and like the stricken Bobby, Ronnie was running for president. “It was a terrible tragedy that all Californians took to heart,” Nancy later wrote.122 Kathy Davis, Reagan’s secretary at the time, recorded her boss’s state of mind the following morning, when Kennedy’s condition was listed as extremely grave. The Governor looked as if he “had been up all night in front of the television. As I later found out he had. First, he asked me to reach Ethel Kennedy on the phone. I tried all day long and was never successful in getting through to her. I’m sure to this day that she doesn’t know that the Governor wanted to offer the services of his father-in-law, Dr. Loyal Davis, the world renowned neurosurgeon.”
Reagan’s secretary also typed a soothing letter he had handwritten to Patti that day, with a curious final paragraph that seems to refer to the seer Jeane Dixon: “Isn’t it strange, a few months ago our friend in Washington told me that she foresaw a tragedy for him before the election. She didn’t know whether it would be in the nature of illness or of accident, but that there would be a tragedy befall him.”123
RFK’s death made Nancy even more uncertain about the wisdom of pursuing the nomination. President Johnson ordered around-the-clock Secret Service protection for all the candidates, but Nancy still worried and kept track of every death threat, even though her husband tried to keep her from finding out about them.124 The King assassination had also shaken Nancy, as she and Ronnie had happened to be in Washington when the news broke, and witnessed the city go up in flames from their penthouse suite at the Madison Hotel. Reagan went ahead with his scheduled speech at the Women’s National Press Club, but they had to be escorted to the airport by National Guardsmen.125
The results of the California primary should have discouraged Reagan 3 8 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House for another reason: only 48 percent of the Republicans who turned out bothered to vote for his unopposed favorite-son slate.126 The previous week, a San Francisco Chronicle poll had shown that a paltry 30 percent of Californians thought he was doing a good job. Meanwhile, a petition to have him recalled had garnered two thirds of the 780,000 signatures needed to place the proposition on the ballot in November. Though it would ultimately fall short, this uprising in his own backyard was an embarrassment to Reagan at a time when he was attempting to make a good impression on the national stage. Aside from accusing him of being generally incompetent and endangering the state’s health programs and educational system, the petition charged, “Ronald Reagan is attempting to further his personal ambitions at the expense of the people of California.”127
But adversity had a way of energizing Reagan and bringing out his competitive side. As political operative Robert Walker observed, “When we got into the summer and things began to heat up, Reagan became considerably more enthusiastic about the possibility of being nominated. We were able to get him out of Sacramento more frequently for speeches. By the time he came to the convention in Miami Beach, a great deal of his reluctance had been overcome and he felt that lightning might strike and he would have to be ready.”128
When Goldwater wrote Reagan a letter in mid-June all but telling him to release his delegates and take the credit for clinching Nixon’s inevitable victory, Reagan dismissed his advice.129 When Rockefeller sent a secret emissary to Pacific Palisades in early July, Reagan assured him that he was
“in this race for keeps.”130 With the convention only a month away, the hope was that if the two governors from opposite ends of the party could keep Nixon from winning on the first ballot, the convention would break open and one of them might emerge the nominee.
Two weeks later, on July 19, Reagan took off in a chartered jet with Tuttle, the increasingly important French Smith, White, Reed, Nofziger, and
“all the reporters whom Nofizger could induce to come along” for a delegate-hunting swing through the South. Grassroots support was strong for Reagan in Dixie, but the powers that be, such as South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond and Texas senator John Tower, had been rounding up delegates for Nixon for months.131 As Tuttle remembered the tour, from Charlottesville to Amarillo, Reagan’s team heard the same refrain: “‘But is he going to run?’ And I said, ‘Well, look, fellows, you’re running if you are a “favorite son.”’ But they kept pressing: ‘Why doesn’t he come out and say, Sacramento: 1967–1968
3 8 5
“I’m going to be a candidate”?’”132 Lou Cannon, who was on the trip, wrote, “Delegates in every state left me with the impression that Reagan was their emotional first choice but that the California governor’s official non-candidacy had persisted for so long that Nixon had become their intellectual commitment.”133
The Reagans arrived in Miami on Saturday, August 3, on a private plane chartered by Alfred Bloomingdale. The California delegation was housed at the Deauville Hotel. “For some reason, it had this terrible smell,” said Betsy Bloomingdale, who recalled that she had to lend Nancy an iron because the hotel staff “didn’t know how to press a dress properly.”134 On Sunday morning Reagan appeared on Face the Nation and reiterated that he was just a favorite-son candidate. He then spent the day being driven from hotel to hotel on Collins Avenue, seeking support from half a dozen state delegations. In between there was the Bloomingdales’ lunch on their chartered yacht, and later Jack and Bunny Wrather’s dinner at the Jockey Club
“for all the Kitchen Cabinet and Ron and Nancy.” Like many in the Reagan Group, Jack Wrather was worried about his friend’s chances. “I don’t know the best way to say it,” the oil-and-entertainment tycoon later confessed, “I just thought that [it] was a little early, that the situatio
n wasn’t right for him . . . and I didn’t want to see him beaten.”135
The latest reports had Nixon anywhere from ten to fifty votes short of the 667 needed for the nomination.136 He had also pulled ahead of Rockefeller for the first time, in a Gallup Poll released that weekend. The New York governor retained his lead in the Harris Poll and bravely stuck to his line that only he could win in November against Humphrey or McCarthy.
Rockefeller’s entourage included his three brothers—David, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, Laurence, one of the country’s foremost con-servationists, and Winthrop, governor of Arkansas—as well as Professor Henry Kissinger of Harvard and the philanthropic widow Brooke Astor.
(Society reporter Charlotte Curtis of The New York Times reported that Mrs.
Astor had to cancel her private dinner dance “after complaints about its being scheduled at a beach club that excludes Jews and Negroes.”)137 The New York delegation was headquartered at the Americana Hotel, but Rocky and Happy spent much of their time at the Indian Creek Island home of Gardner Cowles, where the publisher’s very social second wife, Jan, got the New York and California groups together for cocktails and, presumably, a bit of stop-Nixon plotting. The Rockefellers and the Reagans knew each other 3 8 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House slightly from governors conferences, and Happy much preferred Ronnie to his wife. “They were so different,” she confided to me years later. “He was this big, warm, funny Irishman. And she was this, well, Birchite, as far as I was concerned. Now I think I was probably wrong.”138
For his part, a confident Richard Nixon was fishing for bass in far-off Montauk, Long Island, with his buddy Robert Abplanalp, the aerosol king, and wasn’t planning to arrive in Florida until Tuesday afternoon. He had his daughters, Tricia and Julie, represent him at Sunday night’s obligatory gala at the Fontainebleau, along with Julie’s fiancé, David Eisenhower, Ike’s grandson. The Rockefellers and the Reagans breezed in and out of this $500-a-ticket Republican Party fund-raiser for two thousand, with its life-size pink pachyderm in the hotel lobby and its “special surprise guest,”
Thomas Dewey. Also making the Miami Beach GOP scene: Teddy Roosevelt’s eighty-four-year-old daughter, Alice Longworth; A&P heir Huntington Hartford; Kleenex heir James Kimberly; New York power lawyer—and former Joe McCarthy aide—Roy Cohn; and Walter and Lee Annenberg, who were remaining studiously neutral between their good friends Nixon and Reagan.139
The twenty-ninth Republican National Convention officially opened on Monday morning, August 5, with an “inspirational reading” by John Wayne, titled “Why I Am Proud to Be an American.” But Reagan stole the day’s show by unexpectedly announcing that he was a real candidate after all. While he was making his announcement at an impromptu press conference in the Deauville’s Napoleon II Room, Nancy, who was upstairs having her hair done by Julius, heard the news on the radio. She was about to have a press conference of her own, but she was so thrown by the sudden development that she had her mother, who had arrived from Chicago with Loyal the day before, greet the reporters for her. “I only know about my children from what I read in the papers,” claimed Edith, who was then asked if she was a Republican. “‘Oh, heavens,’ she exclaimed, as if to say, perish any other thought,” reported The Washington Post. She then declared that she was too nervous to answer any more questions.140 When Nancy finally appeared, in a blue-and-white cotton dress by Chester Weinberg, she told the reporters, “I think it is important to a man to do something about the things he feels strongly about. Whatever satisfies and fulfills him makes for a better marriage.”141
According to Bill Clark, “Nancy and I were in total agreement in Miami that he should not go for the presidency. And he was in agreement, Sacramento: 1967–1968
3 8 7
too. If she hadn’t been under a hairdryer when that came up, and if she had joined me, it probably could have been stopped.”142 Clearly Reagan and the Kitchen Cabinet got carried away by the intrigue, plots, and flattery of Convention Hall. As French Smith recalled, “Everywhere he went, he evoked such enthusiasm that it sort of became contagious.”143 There were rumors that morning, based on what turned out to be a fraudulent telegram, that Rockefeller’s backers within the California delegation were about to bolt, breaking the unity that Reagan—and Tuttle and Salvatori—
so cherished.144 So they listened to the fired-up Nofziger and the supposedly brilliant White; to bitter William Knowland, the former senator who hated Nixon for having deprived him of the vice presidential nomination back in 1952; to Governor James Rhodes of Ohio, himself a favorite son but really a Rockefeller stalking horse—all of whom were saying that Reagan would not be taken seriously unless he made his candidacy explicit. His announcement made headlines, though it was overshadowed a few hours later by that of Governor Agnew, who withdrew his favorite-son candidacy and threw Maryland’s delegates to Nixon.
Nofziger was ecstatic about Reagan’s decision to announce. Reagan aide Rus Walton remembered being greeted by the Governor’s press secretary as he arrived at the Deauville. “The first thing he said to me [was], ‘I want you to go down to your room and start writing an acceptance speech.’ . . . I said, ‘You got to be kidding.’ He said, ‘No, sir.’ He said, ‘You get down there and start drafting the acceptance speech.’ Well, I tell you, I didn’t put one word on a piece of paper. I sat there and thought, ‘What if something happens?’ Because this guy does have the luck of the Irish.
You’ve seen it time and time again. I thought, ‘Oh, boy, if he gets the nomination, I’m dead.’ But he didn’t.”145
“Nancy Reagan was a model of serenity and composure as her husband was nominated Wednesday night,” Women’s Wear Daily reported. “Thousands of colored balloons tumbled from the ceiling, hundreds of neon-orange-shawled demonstrators paraded around the floor stamping on them, Reagan banners jumped in the air while the slide-trombone band blared
‘California Here I Come.’ The deafening noise didn’t faze Nancy. Facing TV cameras at the edge of her box, in her orange-lavender-and-white high-belted Galanos with the gold buckle, she waved and shook hands with all the passersby she knew. Does she ever tire of smiling, she was asked. ‘No, not now,’ she smiled. She said Ronnie wouldn’t be here, but that was all 3 8 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House right. ‘I’m very proud and pleased.’” ( WWD added, “She’s been perfectly groomed at every moment. She also gets first prize for looking divine under intense floodlights which do devastating damage to both Pat Nixon and Loraine Percy.”)146
Reagan was still working the delegates on the floor and in caucus rooms around the hall when his name was placed in nomination by Ivy Baker Priest, a former U.S. treasurer and the first woman to nominate a major presidential candidate. No fewer than eleven more candidates were put forward, including favorite sons from Alaska and Hawaii. Convention chairman Congressman Gerald Ford had called the proceedings to order at 5:30, and the roll call of the states would not begin until after one in the morning. Compared to the hysterical ideological warfare of the 1964 convention, this was torture by tedium: “Hour upon hour of thundering cliché, of enervating restatement of the obvious, of prancing up and down the hall in exhaustively planned ‘demonstrations’—the whole soggy business relieved only by an occasional burst of asininity,” as Russell Baker so brilliantly put it.147
In the end, the South held for Nixon, who had spent Tuesday afternoon reassuring Southern delegates that he was against busing, Communism, and an activist Supreme Court, and who was said to have given Strom Thurmond a veto over the pick for vice president. In what The New York Times called “the greatest comeback since Lazarus,”148 Nixon received 692 votes to Rockefeller’s 277 and Reagan’s 182. But it wasn’t until Wisconsin, the next-to-the-last state, that Nixon went over the top, and for Reagan’s men that was proof of how close they had come.
“We were just outgunned,” said Robert Walker, who had spent five months working the South fo
r Reagan. “They had more power than we had. If you really want to know what stopped it . . . Barry Goldwater, Strom Thurmond are the ones that stopped it. Because they were establishment Republicans at the time, in reaction to their being ostracized, if you will, by their abysmal defeat in ’64. They wanted nothing more than to be respectable again and Richard Nixon gave them respectability within the Republican party.” As Walker saw it, “It would have just taken one state to deny him that nomination on the first ballot, and that could have been South Carolina, it could have been Florida, it could have been Mississippi.
We had all these states under the gun, and we even had Mississippi off of the floor—with [Reagan] pleading with them, when the people running the convention started calling the first ballot. So they had, of course, to go Sacramento: 1967–1968
3 8 9
back in order to answer the call. The Governor didn’t even get to finish his pitch.”149
It was two in the morning when Reagan marched to the platform to propose that the convention make the nomination unanimous. Ford, citing the rules, tried to stop Reagan from taking this honor, just as he had hurried the roll call to keep Reagan from prying Mississippi out of Nixon’s grasp. These were the kinds of machinations, the not-so-subtle slights, that Nancy Reagan noticed and remembered.
The Reagans were less unhappy with Goldwater, for whose reelection campaign in Arizona, Edith Davis had again been a significant fund-raiser.150 After all, his advice had proven to be correct. Nor were they angry with Thurmond, who, along with Goldwater, had been very vocally urging Nixon to take Reagan as his running mate. By some accounts Reagan was on the short list until the last cut, when Spiro Agnew, the man Dick Nixon was most comfortable with, emerged as the surprise choice. That was okay with the Reagans, too. As Nancy told The Washington Post, “My husband feels he can implement his philosophy and ideas more as governor of California than as vice president, and I agree with that.”151
Ronnie and Nancy Page 53