My Turn

by Nancy Reagan

  What John was proposing was enormously risky, but nobody had a better plan. Finally Ronnie said, “Do it. Borrow the money. I’m taking this campaign right through to Kansas City, even if we lose every damn primary along the way.”

  That evening, Ronnie was speaking to a group called Ducks Unlimited, an organization of duck hunters in La Crosse, Wisconsin. When the first results from North Carolina started trickling in, Nancy Reynolds and I were sitting outside the hall in the back of a car, leaning forward and straining to catch every syllable coming from the tiny car radio. Ford was far ahead in the polls, but with 5 percent of the vote counted, Ronnie had jumped to a ten-point lead! Although it was still too early to tell what would happen, we cheered and hugged each other.

  When we came inside, Frank Reynolds, who was covering Ronnie’s campaign for ABC, told us that 15 percent of the vote was now in and that Ronnie’s lead was holding. As soon as Ronnie’s speech was over, we rushed up to tell him the good news.

  The press sensed a real breakthrough in North Carolina and they started clamoring for a statement. But Ronnie refused to say a word. He still remembered New Hampshire, which had looked like a sure thing.

  Later that night, as we took off for California, we still didn’t know what the results in North Carolina would be. But the pilots received regular updates on the radio, and I remember Marty Anderson sitting with his calculator, trying to show Ronnie that the numbers looked promising. Although the lead was holding, Ronnie wouldn’t believe it until we had a final count. Finally, with most of the precincts in, Marty showed him that even if every remaining vote went for Ford, Ronnie would still win. When Ronnie heard that, he broke into a smile and walked back to talk to the press. We celebrated with champagne and vanilla ice cream.

  It was a long time coming, but we finally had our first presidential primary victory!

  A week later, when Ronnie’s speech was aired on NBC, we raised almost a million and a half dollars—more than enough to keep us going. The Sears gamble had worked.

  Suddenly the momentum had shifted. In Texas, Ronnie won every county and all ninety-six delegates. On May 4, he won in Georgia, Alabama, and Indiana. The following night, Walter Cronkite uttered those magic words: “Ronald Reagan as of tonight looms as a serious threat.”

  Now it was a real contest—and better late than never.

  Although it was by no means a dirty campaign—nothing to compare with the Bush-Dukakis race in 1988—there was an unpleasant incident just before the California primary. In response to a reporter’s hypothetical question, Ronnie said he could imagine a situation where the United States might join in sending U.N. peace-keeping troops to Rhodesia, if Rhodesia requested it.

  Stuart Spencer, who had been with us in Ronnie’s two gubernatorial races but who now worked for the Ford campaign, quickly produced a television commercial for Ford which ended with these words: “When you vote Tuesday, remember: Governor Reagan couldn’t start a war. President Reagan could.”

  It was quite a while before I could forgive Stu for that one.

  But the people of California knew Ronnie, and the ad backfired. On election day, Ronnie won California by a two-to-one margin.

  When all the primaries were over, an unofficial count showed that Ford was going into the convention with 1,093 delegates, while Ronnie had 1,030. Neither man had enough delegates to clinch the nomination, but the magic number was 1,130, so Ford was awfully close.

  Now President Ford took full advantage of his office. He brought dozens of uncommitted delegates to the White House for lunches, cocktails, meetings, and dinners. He invited an entire state delegation to have lunch with him. In July, he invited Clarke Reed, the chairman of the Mississippi delegation, to a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth. (The Mississippi delegation was the largest uncommitted group attending the convention.) Over the July 4 weekend, he invited seven uncommitted delegates to watch the tall ships sail into New York Harbor from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

  To this day, I have never known the White House to be used by either party the way it was in this campaign. I was furious. The White House stands for something more important than partisan politics and uncommitted delegates—or at least it should.

  In July, a month before the convention, the press was starting to say among themselves that Ford had the nomination sewn up. If this perception became public, it would quickly become self-fulfilling.

  And so with nothing left to lose, John Sears tried his second major gamble of the campaign: He persuaded Ronnie to announce his choice of a running mate several weeks before the convention. Not that it took much convincing. For years, Ronnie had felt strongly that it was a bad idea to have the nominee select his running mate in a last-minute high-pressure late-night meeting at the convention.

  John hoped that Ronnie’s early choice of a running mate would signal that the race still wasn’t over. The man he recommended was Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania. Although Schweiker was known as a liberal, he had supported Barry Goldwater in 1964. Like Ronnie, he was in favor of a strong defense, school prayer, tax incentives, and the death penalty, and he was opposed to gun control and federally funded abortions. John believed that a Reagan-Schweiker ticket would be hard to beat in November, and I believe he was right.

  But when Ronnie announced that he had chosen Schweiker, conservative Republicans were furious. They saw Schweiker as too liberal, as another Rockefeller, and they felt that in choosing him, Ronnie had betrayed the cause. Never mind that Kennedy had picked Johnson in 1960 to unify the Democrats. Never mind that two conservatives on the same ticket had no chance of winning. As always, some of Ronnie’s supporters insisted on putting ideological purity ahead of victory.

  John hoped that Ronnie’s choice of Schweiker would pressure Ford into announcing his choice for vice president. Rockefeller had already been dropped from the Ford ticket, and John believed that no matter whom Ford selected, the choice would hurt him. If Ford picked a moderate, he would lose delegates in the South; a conservative would hurt him in the North.

  When Ford refused to announce his running mate, Sears tried to force the issue by calling for all presidential candidates to name their vice-presidential choices before the nomination. By forcing a floor vote on this question, John wanted to show that some of Ford’s support was soft. If our side could somehow win the vote on Rule 16-C, the uncommitted delegates might realize that a Ford victory was not inevitable.

  And so the climactic night of the convention came twenty-four hours before the nomination, when the delegates voted on John’s proposal. Emotions were running high, and I’ll never forget how angry I felt when I saw Nelson Rockefeller walking up and down the convention floor twisting arms for Ford. I even saw him grab a Reagan placard from a Utah delegate and break it. I couldn’t believe I was watching the vice president of the United States.

  We made a good try, but we just didn’t have the votes to change the rule. That was when we knew for certain that the race was over.

  The next evening, before the nominations were made, our family had a quiet dinner together in our suite at the Alameda Plaza Hotel. Then we all gathered in the living room, where Ronnie explained what we already knew—that our long, emotional struggle was about to end in defeat. “I’m sorry that you all have to see this,” he said.

  We were all in tears, but Ronnie tried to lift our spirits. “You know what I regret the most?” he said. “I had really looked forward to sitting down at the table with Brezhnev to negotiate on arms control. He would tell me all the things that our side would have to give up. And then, when he was finished, I was planning to stand up, walk around the table, and whisper one little word in his ear: Nyet.”

  I proposed a toast in honor of my husband. “Honey,” I said, fighting back the tears, “in all the years we’ve been married, you have never done anything to disappoint me. And I’ve never been prouder of you than I am now.”

  By tradition, the candidates don’t appear at the convention until the
nominee has been chosen. On the first three nights, Ronnie had stayed in the hotel with several of his advisers while the rest of the family went down to the arena. The Republican National Committee had assigned us to a skybox at the far end of the hall, more than two hundred feet from the stage, with a thick glass panel separating us from the delegates. It was very comfortable, with plush seats, a buffet, a bar, and a private bathroom. But it was also remote. We were tucked away so far from the action that we couldn’t really feel part of the people or the excitement.

  The Fords had a similar skybox at the other end, but Betty Ford was also given a box right down on the convention floor. Maureen was convinced that this was done deliberately, to give the Fords an advantage, and she may have been right. In any event, she worked out a swap with several alternates from the Colorado delegation; they were thrilled to take our places in the box, and we were happy to take their seats, which were much closer to the convention.

  The press made a big fuss over Betty Ford and me, and there were several stories about “the battle of the wives,” or as Time magazine put it, “the contest of the queens.” These reports centered on such “issues” as what each of us was wearing, and who came into the convention hall first. In its way, it wasn’t all that different from what happened ten years later with Raisa Gorbachev, when, on a much larger scale, the media paid so much attention to the two of us, and to our feuds, both real and imaginary.

  Every time Betty or I entered the convention hall, our husbands’ supporters would put on a demonstration. On the second night, during an ovation for me, the band struck up “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree” and Betty started dancing with Tony Orlando, who was visiting the Ford box. The crowd went wild. Some of our people saw this as a deliberate attempt to upstage me, but I never thought that was her intention.

  The night before, I was in our hotel suite when Ron called me to say, “Mom, Betty Ford just showed up and we all think you should get over here.”

  “But Ron,” I said, “I’m already undressed. I was told that we weren’t supposed to appear until tomorrow.”

  Ron persisted, so I got dressed and went over. I didn’t really need to be there, but when everybody around you is caught up in a competition, it’s hard to stay on the sidelines.

  The “battle of the wives” at the 1976 convention created a lot of friction that shouldn’t have been there. It made both of us feel self-conscious, and it took years to get over. As far as our relationship went—and that wasn’t very far—it was hampered by the jealousies and the tensions of our staffs. Things were repeated to me about Betty Ford (and I’m sure to her about me) that weren’t necessarily true. And I didn’t appreciate it when Betty was quoted in Time magazine as saying that “when Nancy met Ronnie, that was it as far as her own life was concerned. She just fell apart at the seams.”

  The two of us were different people who came from different worlds. When she was interviewed on 60 Minutes, Betty had come out strongly in favor of abortion and had implied that marijuana was no more dangerous than beer or cigarettes. Whenever I was asked about Betty Ford’s views during the campaign, I tried to avoid the subject by saying I didn’t think she should have been asked the questions she was.

  Gerald Ford won the nomination at twelve-thirty in the morning, as Ronnie and I and Lyn Nofziger watched the proceedings in our hotel. When it was all over, Lyn went into the bathroom and cried. Then he poured himself a glass of gin. Finally he picked up the phone and called Bob Nieson, the head of the California delegation, to ask that California make it unanimous for Ford.

  When the delegates refused, Lyn rushed to the convention floor and begged them to do it for the sake of party unity. He found Bill Wilson and Alfred Bloomingdale, and both men had tears in their eyes. Bill told him, “Lyn, I came here to vote for Ronald Reagan, and that’s who I’m going to vote for.”

  When John Rhodes, the chairman of the convention, saw what was happening, he suddenly banged his gavel and announced that the convention had just made it unanimous for Gerald Ford. In the heat of the moment I thought this was outrageous. But in retrospect, it was probably a wise move.

  John Sears had already worked out an arrangement with Dick Cheney, the White House chief of staff, that whichever candidate won the nomination would visit the other man in his hotel for a brief symbolic meeting of reconciliation. Because there was talk of a Ford-Reagan ticket, Ronnie asked John to make sure Ford would not raise this issue during their meeting. Ronnie still wasn’t interested in being vice president, but he also didn’t want to be in the position of having to turn down the president.

  It was one-thirty in the morning when President Ford came to our suite, along with Dick Cheney, several aides, and Ford’s Secret Service detail. The two candidates then met privately in the living room. Ford kept his word and did not ask Ronnie to be on the ticket. (I know that because Ron and Maureen were listening on the other side of the door. As I said, feelings run high during a campaign!)

  Ford had brought along a list of vice-presidential prospects, and he mentioned six names: Howard Baker, Elliot Richardson, John Connally, William Simon, William Ruckelshaus, and Robert Dole. Ronnie told Ford that he thought especially highly of Bob Dole.

  We didn’t get much sleep that night. At seven-fifteen the next morning, Michael Deaver knocked on our bedroom door. “Governor,” he said to Ronnie, “Holmes, Justin, and Bill Smith are here to see you. They think you should accept the vice presidency.” (Holmes Tuttle, Justin Dart, and William French Smith were all longtime supporters and friends of Ronnie’s.)

  No such offer had been made, of course, but many Republicans believed that only a Ford-Reagan ticket could win in November. And many of Ronnie’s supporters felt that half a loaf was better than none.

  “No,” said Ronnie. “We’ve been through all that. Please tell them I’m not interested.”

  “Governor,” said Mike, “you’ll have to tell them yourself. They’re your friends, not mine.”

  Ronnie climbed out of bed, got dressed, and invited the three men into the living room. Once more, he explained that he simply didn’t want to be vice president.

  Just then the phone rang; Ronnie picked it up, listened, and said, “Terrific. I think you made the right choice.”

  When he put down the phone he said, “Fellows, that was Jerry Ford. He’s just picked Bob Dole.”

  Dole had been selected in one of those high-pressure middle-of-the-night meetings that Ronnie had hoped to avoid. Justin Dart had been there, and he told us later that when somebody brought up Ronnie’s name, Ford had said, “Absolutely not. I don’t want anything to do with that son of a bitch.”

  On the final night of the convention, we all returned for Ford’s acceptance speech. Ron and Maureen got there first, and when they arrived in our box, they found that all the Reagan stickers and banners had been torn down. They immediately started putting them back up.

  This was Ronnie’s first and only appearance at the convention, and the demonstration he set off was simply astonishing. It was the largest, loudest ovation I had ever heard. Ever. The place just went wild! People were screaming “We want Reagan.” The band was playing “God Bless America,” although you could hardly hear it. Down on the stage, John Rhodes was trying in vain to restore order. In the Florida delegation, Ronnie’s supporters held up a sign: RON, WE ALMOST MADE IT.

  Every few minutes, Ronnie would stand up and motion to the people to sit down. But each time he stood, the crowd would break into shouts of “Speech! Speech!” As the ovation continued, Frank Reynolds came into the box to interview Ronnie. “What do you think about this, Governor? Are you going to speak?”

  “No, Frank,” Ronnie replied. “This is someone else’s night, not mine.”

  But the commotion just wouldn’t stop. At one point, Ronnie got up to try to thank his supporters. I remember hearing Frank Reynolds say, “My Lord, he’s trying to speak!” But there was no way Ronnie could address that huge crowd without a microphone.

/>   Then, instead of trying to interview us, Frank said, “This may not be the best of journalistic derring-do, but I’m going to leave now and let the Reagans enjoy this moment.” Before he left, Frank put his arm around me and I hugged him. He was a dear man, and I had grown very fond of him.

  Eventually, order was restored and Gerald Ford began his acceptance speech. While Ford was speaking, Bryce Harlow, an elder statesman of the party, was conferring with Ronnie’s top advisers to see whether Ronnie would agree to address the convention if Ford invited him down. Mike Deaver checked with Ronnie, who said yes. But nobody in our box expected that Ford would actually do such a thing, now that this long and difficult campaign was over.

  As Ford finished his remarks, a big bunch of balloons was released. Then Ford looked up toward our box and said, “Governor Reagan, come on down—and bring Nancy with you!”

  Ronnie couldn’t quite believe it. “Does that mean I’ve been asked?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Mike. “You better get moving!”

  A moment later the Secret Service led us through a labyrinth of back halls, stairwells, tunnels, and corridors as we made our way to the stage. We were running, as it was quite a distance away. And the whole time Ronnie was asking me, “What am I going to say? I don’t know what to say!”

  “Don’t worry,” I replied. “You’ll think of something!”

  When we finally reached the stage, the convention exploded all over again. They shouted “Viva! Olé!” again and again. The Fords were already on the stage, along with the Doles and the Rockefellers. Ronnie moved toward the microphone and I stood nearby. The stage was so crowded that I ended up standing over a grate that blew cool air up my skirt. It was hot in that arena, and the air felt good. But the whole time we were there, I had to press my skirt down so it wouldn’t fly up. It’s a good thing I was wearing a knit dress instead of silk! Funny, the things you remember.