In January 1974, Kay Graham gave a dinner for Nancy in Washington.
The Reagans and the owner of the Post had seen quite a bit of each other since they met at Sun Valley four years earlier. In February 1971, the Governor had been the guest speaker at an editorial lunch at the paper, and that evening Graham gave a dinner at home for the Reagans. As Katharine Graham told me, “We kept up. When I went to California, I’d call them and receive them in some way. Nancy and I always liked each other, I believe. And I was interested in getting to know the Governor as a person who was on the conservative side of the Republican Party. And Nancy and I got to be friends. I think our friendship was sealed in a really odd way. They came back to Washington after the dinner for both of them, and I said to Nancy,
‘Would you like to come to dinner when you’re here?’ She said they couldn’t, because he was going to some male dinner—the Alfalfa Club dinner, I think. I said, ‘That’s too bad, but why don’t you come?’ And she said, ‘Oh, you don’t want me without Ronnie.’ I said—because the light had started to dawn at that point about women—‘Nancy, that’s not where it’s at anymore.
Of course, I want you.’ She said, ‘You do?’ I mean, she had apparently never gone out without him. So she was very pleased to be asked on her own.”152
Graham put together a serious group for Nancy’s solo dinner, including the man who was trying to save Nixon from Watergate, White House special counsel Leonard Garment; Helmut Sonnenfeld from the State Department; columnists James Reston, William Safire, and James Kilpatrick; and Clay Felker, the publisher and editor of New York magazine. In her Sacramento II: 1969–1974
4 2 7
thank-you note, Nancy wrote, “You can’t tell what might happen now that I’ve made the plunge.”153
Two months later Ronnie and Nancy were back in Palm Springs with the Annenbergs and their houseguest, Prince Charles. The Prince of Wales, then twenty-six, was in the Royal Navy, on shore leave from his ship, HMS Jupiter. Lee Annenberg recalled that “Nancy phoned and said,
‘Prince Charles is going to be in San Diego. What do you think we should do?’ I suggested they come down to Sunnylands, and I would invite him.
He came with his equerry for the weekend. And that’s when they got to know him very well.”154
While the Reagans and “the With-It Prince,” as he was sometimes called, were the only houseguests that weekend, a small group including Bob and Dolores Hope and Frank Sinatra, unrepentant but apparently absolved, came for dinner on Saturday night. The caviar Lee served was a personal gift, she told her guests, from the Shah of Iran.155
That summer, as the House Judiciary Committee began drawing up articles of impeachment, everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before the nation really wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around anymore. He resigned on August 9, 1974, and was succeeded by Gerald Ford, who under the terms of the Twenty-fifth Amendment was charged with nominating a new vice president for Congress to approve. According to Ed Mills, the Kitchen Cabinet made another play to get the vice presidency for Reagan. “I’m sure that Justin Dart and Holmes Tuttle made contact, but there was never any invitation, to my knowledge, for Reagan to come back and be interviewed relative to the situation,” Mills said, adding, “Rockefeller was actually selected. Maybe it’s a good thing it didn’t happen. Sometimes fate seems to dictate how these things ultimately work out.”156
On December 15, 1974, the Sacramento Union ran a farewell interview with Nancy Reagan. In eight years the First Lady had not given a single interview to the much more important Sacramento Bee—as many a former friend and ex-employee knew, when Mrs. Reagan was crossed, she stayed crossed. Mae Belle Pendergast, the society reporter who had gushed over Nancy’s inaugural wardrobe in 1967, was asking the questions. “What is ahead for the Reagans?” she wondered. “We’ll take that day by day,” said Nancy.157
In one of his end-of-term interviews, Ronnie told the Saturday Evening Post, “I’ve heard Nancy’s father say he could not possibly accomplish what 4 2 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House he did—even with his skill as a surgeon—without her mother. I could never do what I’m doing without Nancy. When you want to go home as much as I do, you work at it.”158
Shortly after Ronnie and Nancy left Sacramento, Jesse Unruh summed up the Reagan governorship: “I think he has been better than most Democrats would concede and not nearly as good as most Republicans and conservatives might like to think. As a politician I think he has been nearly masterful.” He added, “I do not like Ronald Reagan. I find him cold, with-drawn, shallow, sanctimonious and with very little personal warmth in spite of his appeal to people from the platform and the television tube.”159
Ronnie and Nancy
at their Malibu Canyon
ranch, 1954.
(Murray Garrett/Getty
Images)
The Reagans at the 1958 baptism of their son, Ronald Prescott, with their daughter, Patti, and the boy’s godparents, Robert and Ursula Taylor.
(Reagan Family Photo Collection)
Nancy in 1956 at their Pacific
Palisades home, which
General Electric called
the House of the Future.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
Nancy with her longtime favorite designer,
James Galanos, in Los Angeles, 1967.
(Bob Willoughby/MPTV)
The Reagans arriving at the funeral
of their close friend Dick Powell
in Beverly Hills, 1963.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
The Reagans
celebrating his
victory in the
1966 Republican
primary for
governor of
California,
with actor
Cesar Romero.
(A.P. Wide World
Photos)
Nancy gazing at her husband
after his swearing-in as
governor in Sacramento,
January 2, 1967.
(Reagan Family Photo Collection)
Governor and Mrs. Reagan
backstage at the opening of the
San Francisco Opera with tenor
Franco Bonisolli, 1969.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
The Reagans with their children, Ron and Patti, moving into the old Governor’s Mansion, January 1967.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale greeting guests at a 1967 dinner they gave for Governor and Mrs. Reagan.
(Bob Willoughby/MPTV)
Ronnie and Nancy
with former president
Dwight Eisenhower and
Lee Annenberg at
Sunnylands, the Annenbergs’
Palm Springs estate, 1967.
(Reagan Family Photo
Collection)
Nancy with her New York
confidant Jerry Zipkin
in the 1970s.
(Reagan Family Photo
Collection)
Ladies of the Group in 1980: from left, Marion Jorgensen, Betty Wilson, Erlenne Sprague, Bunny Wrather, Harriet Deutsch, and Betty Adams.
(Reagan Family Photo Collection)
Oilman Henry Salvatori, one of the
original members of the Kitchen Cabinet,
with his wife, Grace, in Los Angeles, 1979.
(George Rose/Los Angeles Times)
Drugstore tycoon Justin Dart,
another prominent Reagan backer,
with an assortment of his company’s
products, 1966.
(Steve Fontanini/Los Angeles Times)
Car dealer Holmes Tuttle,
the leader of the Kitchen Cabinet,
at home in Hancock Park, 1973.
(Fitzgerald Whitney/Los Angeles Times)
Reagan’s 1976 and 1980
campaign manager,
John Sears III, center,
with his lieutenants,
Charles Black and
James Lake.
(The New York Times)
Reagan with his long-
time press secretary,
Lyn Nofziger, 1967.
(©Bettmann/Corbis)
Stuart Spencer, who ran Reagan’s
gubernatorial campaigns but worked
for Gerald Ford in 1976.
(The New York Times)
Michael Deaver, the aide
closest to the Reagans personally,
in Sacramento and afterward.
(John Barr)
Ronald Reagan campaigning for president in 1980, flanked by former president Ford and Reagan’s running mate, George H.W. Bush.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
Nancy and Ronnie at Rancho del Cielo in the canoe he gave her as an anniversary gift, 1976.
(A.P. Wide World Photos)
C H A P T E R S I X T E E N
REAGAN VS. FORD
1975–1976
Once upon a time [Reagan] said [something] to me on an airplane about the future and about the presidency, and about any possibilities in ’76. He was telling me that I was perhaps overly concerned; that I should not be concerned so much about the future, about the planning, and about making sure you meet all the right people or enough of them, and that sort of thing. He said, “Bob, if the Lord wants me to be president of the United States, I’ll be president of the United States, and you don’t need to worry.”
Bob Walker, political aide to Governor Reagan1
Of Ronnie’s five campaigns for public office, the one I remember most vividly is the only one he lost. That was in 1976, when he challenged President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination. That campaign was so exciting, so dramatic, and so emotional—especially at the convention—that in my mind it almost overshadows Ronnie’s four victories.
Nancy Reagan, My Turn 2
ONE RESULT OF NIXON’S DOWNFALL WAS THAT THE ANNENBERGS CAME
home from London and made their presence felt much more in the Reagan Group. On December 31, 1974, they had the first of their New Year’s Eve parties at Sunnylands, and it would become Reagan court ritual. “Lee called and said, ‘Could I take over your whole New Year’s Eve party?’ ” recalled Betsy Bloomingdale. “They wanted to have the Governor and Mrs.
Reagan, you see. She said she would have everyone we had, but she didn’t have Connie Wald, which kind of put me in the thickety-wicket with Connie, whom I adore. She did have Jules and Doris Stein. I remember Doris changing into her long dress in the car on the way out, because she didn’t want to spend the night in Palm Springs.”3
4 2 9
4 3 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House This passing of the torch did not go smoothly; in fact, it created something of a power struggle between Betsy Bloomingdale and Lee Annenberg, with Nancy caught in the middle, juggling her steel-beneath-the-bubbles best friend and the titanium-tough wife of the man who could be most useful to Ronnie’s political future. “I told Lee, ‘I always spend New Year’s with my children,’” Betsy Bloomingdale went on, “and she said, ‘That’s okay, I’m inviting them.’ She invited the children the first year, but for after dinner.
The second year she didn’t invite them. And the third year she didn’t invite Alfred and me. Alfred said, ‘I don’t care about going all the way out to Palm Springs anyway. We’re not going to beg for an invitation.’ Apparently it was all because that summer, when Walter and Lee came out here, as they did every year in August, and stayed in the bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I didn’t entertain them. I don’t know why I didn’t. I must have been busy with other things. But I didn’t have a lunch or dinner for them, and all the others would line up to give dinners for the Annenbergs every single night.
So Lee got miffed, and Nancy and I understood: one must pay attention.”4
Stirring the pot was Jerry Zipkin, who also spent Augusts at the Beverly Hills Hotel and had not made Lee’s New Year’s Eve list.
Nancy and Ronnie went to the Annenbergs’ again in 1975, the year that Lee codified the houseguest roster. From then on, the same five couples—the Reagans, the Jorgensens, the Wilsons, the French Smiths, and the Deutsches—would stay in the same five guest suites, each done up by Billy Haines in a single cheery California color, with everything matching from the curtains to the wastebaskets. In 1976, however, Nancy favored Betsy, and they went there on New Year’s Eve. The matter was finally resolved the following year. “Ardie Deutsch made it up,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me. “He said, ‘This is ridiculous, that we’re all there and Alfred and Betsy aren’t.’”5
President Ford called Governor Reagan over the 1974 holidays and, already nervous, tried to tempt him with a choice of jobs: he could go to Washington as secretary of transportation or take the post Walter Annenberg had just left at the Court of St. James’s. Reagan declined, saying, “Hell, I can’t afford to be an ambassador.”6 He agreed, however, to serve on a commission to investigate alleged CIA abuses connected to Watergate; the eight-man panel was chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and included former secretary of the treasury C. Douglas Dillon, former NATO supreme Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976
4 3 1
commander General Lyman Lemnitzer, and Lane Kirkland, the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO.7
The sixty-four-year-old Reagan was leaving office on a wave of high approval ratings and flattering editorials and about to embark on a lucrative career as a private citizen. By January 6, 1975, he was on his way back to Pacific Palisades, after seeing his successor, Edmund “Jerry” Brown Jr., the son of his predecessor, sworn in. The thirty-six-year-old, unmarried Jerry had already annoyed Nancy by announcing that he would not live in the new Governor’s Mansion upon its completion, referring to it as “a Taj Mahal” and suggesting that it be used as “a halfway house for lobbyists.”8
Both Ronnie and Nancy were relieved to be leaving the drab state capital and eager to get on with the next stage of their life. As Lyn Nofziger, who had reconciled with the Reagans when he ran Nixon’s 1972 campaign in California, later wrote, “I think he was tired of the job, tired of dealing with the petty personalities in the legislature, tired of commuting to Los Angeles on most weekends so his wife could socialize with their rich friends, tired of the small-town atmosphere of Sacramento.”9
Three months earlier, Michael Deaver and Peter Hannaford, a public relations specialist who joined the Governor’s staff in his last year, had presented Reagan with a “comprehensive plan” for his immediate future, including a syndicated newspaper column, a daily radio program, and frequent speaking engagements. Both aides relocated to Los Angeles, where they opened Deaver & Hannaford, in a high-rise on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, fifteen minutes from San Onofre Drive. The corner office was reserved for Reagan and decorated by Nancy with mostly the same furniture and in the same warm reds as his office in the state capitol. The jellybean jar was on his desk, Helene von Damm was office manager, and Nancy Reynolds was in charge of advance work.10 Only Ed Meese, who took a job as vice president and general counsel of the Rohr Corporation, an aircraft manufacturer based in San Diego, was missing, but he was in constant touch.11 Although Ronald Reagan was the raison d’être of Deaver
& Hannaford, the PR firm would pick up a few other clients, including the Dart Corporation, the government of Taiwan, and Rockwell International, one of the major Southern California defense firms.12
Reagan’s income reportedly jumped to more than $800,000 that year.13
His five-minute radio program, titled Viewpoint, was aired every weekday on nearly three hundred stations, his column ran in more than two hundred 4 3 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House newspapers, and he commanded up to $10,000 for each of the eight to ten speeches he gave every month.14 In all three formats his message was basically the same as it had been since the 1950s: only conservatism could save America from economic disaster and the world from Communist domination. As always, he wrote t
he bulk of his own material, scratching out his radio addresses on yellow pads as he flew around the country on his speaking tours. It was a clever way to keep Reagan in the public eye—
by his own calculation he was reaching 20 million Americans each week15—and a fairly exhausting routine even for someone half his age.
But Nancy made sure his itineraries allowed for an afternoon nap, and Ronnie kept up his exercise regime on the road. He was constantly telling Deaver and Hannaford, “Remember to build some ranch time into that schedule.”16
“From the first day we saw it, Rancho del Cielo cast a spell over us,” Reagan would write of his fourth and last ranch. “No place before or since has ever given Nancy and me the joy and serenity it does.”17 The Reagans had closed on their 688-acre hideaway in the Santa Ynez Mountains north of Santa Barbara just a few weeks before the end of the governorship. It had been found for them by Bill Wilson, whose avocado ranch was a few miles away.
Nancy was nervous at first about the torturously twisting seven-mile-long road that led to the remote property, but as Wilson recalled, “Ronnie fell in love with the place immediately—before we got anywhere near the house.
As we got closer to it, he said, ‘It’s absolutely gorgeous here. I love it.’”18
Nancy, too, was swept away by the sheer beauty of the place, with its old oaks and madrones, riding trails crisscrossing the chaparral, and views of the Pacific in one direction and the horse farms and vineyards of the Santa Ynez Valley in the other.
A tiny—“and I mean tiny,” as Nancy put it—adobe house built in 1871
by the property’s first owner, José Jesús Pico, a homesteader from Mexico, sat in the middle of a rolling pasture, and cattle grazed under a smog-free blue sky. A subsequent proprietor had named the place Tip Top Ranch, and while the Reagans changed the name, they maintained it as a working livestock operation, with twenty-two head of cattle and four horses, to take advantage of California tax breaks for agricultural preserves. The New York Times estimated that the $900 in property tax they paid in 1979 would otherwise have been closer to $42,000.19
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