My Turn

by Nancy Reagan

  I loved Wexford, especially the stone patio in the back where you looked out over the wonderful green rolling hills. Although we were there only on weekends, it helped me survive the rigorous schedule of the campaign. I had never been in the Virginia countryside before, but I fell in love with those wooden fences and stone walls. For me, Wexford was the happiest part of the 1980 campaign.

  Senator John Warner was one of our neighbors, and at the time he was married to Elizabeth Taylor, an old friend of mine from Metro. Elizabeth was nursing a bad back, but John used to come over, and the three of us would ride by and wave to her. There wasn’t much free time during the campaign, and even at Wexford, most of the days were taken up with meetings, phone calls, and planning. There were always people coming for lunch or dinner, and I did a lot of hostessing and serving coffee. Even so, it was a relaxed and happy place, and I just loved being out in those wide-open spaces, away from the crowds, the cities, and the noise.

  • • •

  As in 1976, I did a fair amount of campaigning on my own in 1980, traveling to some of the smaller cities and towns that Ronnie couldn’t reach. Typically, I’d fly out with Ronnie on LeaderShip ’80, our campaign plane, to some large center like Chicago, and while he campaigned in the city, I would take a smaller plane to another part of the state. Peter McCoy from our staff was with me, along with a pair of Secret Service agents, and, occasionally, a reporter.

  Many of the hotels we stayed in were so honored to have Ronald Reagan’s wife as a guest that they painted our rooms just before we arrived. I appreciated the gesture, but have you ever slept in a freshly painted room? The smell is overpowering, and in many hotel rooms you can’t open a window. I’d arrive exhausted, wanting only to sleep and breathe some fresh air, and what I’d get would be paint fumes strong enough to knock me out.

  I shook a lot of hands during that campaign, and the best advice I can give to anyone in that situation is that you should never, ever, wear a ring on your right hand. There’s always going to be some little lady—for some reason it’s never a big strong man—who will grab your hand in such a way that she presses the ring right up against a nerve. The pain is excruciating, so it’s a mistake you don’t make more than once.

  During a presidential race you spend a lot of time in the air, and there was a wonderful feeling of camaraderie on that campaign plane. Every time we took off, the PA system would play a tape of Willie Nelson singing “On the Road Again.” Then I would roll an orange down the aisle. That was my little ritual, and it quickly became a game with the press. I would try to get the orange to the end of the plane without having it carom off under the seats. When I finally got the knack of it, the press started setting up little roadblocks to make it more challenging.

  Once we were in the air, I would walk back and pass out chocolates to the press. People were always giving us boxes of candy, and since Ronnie and I don’t eat candy (I prefer cookies, while Ronnie sticks to jelly beans), I would give them away. It was all done in good fun, and it never entered my mind that anyone would think I was forcing it on them. When one of the reporters wrote a column saying that unless you ate your candy, you wouldn’t get an interview with Ronnie, I was so hurt and embarrassed that I never wanted to go down that aisle again. But with Stu Spencer’s encouragement, I did—with a sign around my neck that said: TAKE ONE OR ELSE!

  We had a lot of laughs on that plane. The pilot kept a rubber chicken in the cockpit, and as soon as we landed he would stick it on the windshield. Then he would radio the tower to report that we had evidently hit something on the way down. As the plane taxied to the gate, the man on the runway would be moving his arms slower and slower as he stared at this unidentified object on the windshield.

  You’re always working on those flights—talking strategy, working on speeches, doing interviews, and making plans. It’s a very intense and close experience, and when it’s over there’s a terrible letdown, even if you win.

  The first few weeks of the 1980 campaign had been dreadful, but the spirit was a lot better in the fall—especially when Stu Spencer joined our team after the convention. Stu had been the key man in Ronnie’s two gubernatorial campaigns, but in 1976, as I’ve already described, he had gone with Gerald Ford. In the summer of 1980, when Mike Deaver called and asked him to join us, Stu had only one question: “Does Nancy want me?” He knew I had been upset about his role with the Ford campaign, but I was more hurt and disappointed than angry. I’ve always been very fond of Stu, and it was great to have him back.

  Years earlier, during Ronnie’s first gubernatorial campaign, Stu had come to our house for a meeting. After an hour or so, I suddenly felt overwhelmed by all of the political talk, and I went into the bedroom and lay down. Stu came in looking for me, and said, “Nancy, what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “It’s just too much. It’s a whole new world and I’m not sure I’m ready for it.”

  “You can do it,” he said. “But I don’t want to kid you. This is just the beginning. It’s going to get much worse.”

  I wasn’t happy to hear that, but I could see that Stu cared. He may be gruff on the outside, but underneath he’s a very sensitive man.

  He’s also a real character—short, rumpled, and tough-talking. He always gives you a straight answer. Stu has the greatest political instincts of anybody I’ve ever met, but he doesn’t get carried away with his own importance, the way John Sears sometimes did. He never acts as if he were the candidate, and he never tries to force his opinions. And unlike most people in a presidential campaign, who hope to be offered a position in the administration, Stu Spencer never wanted anything for himself.

  One of Stu’s first observations was that Ronnie was spending too much time talking to the press. That was fine when he was governor of California, but now, in a national race, every syllable a candidate uttered was weighed and examined, and Ronnie’s friendly and casual style occasionally got him into trouble. Like the time in September when Ronnie mistakenly referred to Tuscumbia, Alabama, where President Carter had opened his campaign, as the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Or the time that Ronnie charged that Carter had led the country into a depression.

  “That shows how little he knows,” Carter said. “This is a recession.”

  At least Ronnie had a good comeback: “They say I can’t use the word ‘depression.’ Well, if the president wants a definition, I’ll give him one. A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. And recovery will be when Jimmy Carter loses his.”

  The stress of a political campaign can be unbelievable, and sometimes you get tired and say things that just come out wrong. It happened to me in February 1980. Ronnie’s plane was stuck in New Hampshire during a snowstorm, so I filled in for him with a speech in Chicago. A telephone hookup had been arranged, and Ronnie called me so he could say hello to the crowd. When he mentioned that he was looking out at all the beautiful white snow, I replied, “And I’m looking out at all these beautiful white faces.”

  As soon as the words left my mouth, I thought, Oh my God, I didn’t mean it that way. I quickly corrected myself, but it was too late. The press took it as a racial remark, which is certainly not what I had intended. It soon blew over, but I took a lot of heat for a couple of days.

  It’s incredibly easy to make this kind of mistake during a campaign. You get tired and numb, and reporters keep after you. If they persist long enough with the same question, you’re liable to blurt out anything, just to get them off your back.

  The wrong spontaneous remark can be deadly, but as we learned during the final week of the campaign, the right one can help you enormously. It occurred during Ronnie’s one and only debate with Jimmy Carter, which turned out to be as important in the general election as the Nashua debate had been in the primaries.

  Not all of Ronnie’s advisers were convinced that he should debate Carter, and I too had reservations. Although Ronnie was in favor of a debate, it wa
sn’t until he saw Carter at the annual Alfred E. Smith Dinner in New York, where both candidates appeared together for the first time in the campaign, that he knew for sure that he wanted to go head-to-head with the president. That night, the contrast between the two men was remarkable: Ronnie gave a short, light, self-deprecating speech, while Carter delivered a boastful foreign policy address that was completely off the mark.

  The dinner is not supposed to be political, and Carter’s advisers should have known that. The president had also refused to come downstairs during the meal. Instead, he remained in his hotel room until it was time for him to speak. Everybody in the hall knew he was upstairs, and that certainly didn’t win him any votes.

  The next morning, in a meeting in our suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, Ronnie said, “I can beat that guy!”

  The debate took place in Cleveland on October 28, just a few days before the election. Throughout the evening, Carter consistently misrepresented Ronnie’s position on the issues. As the debate was ending, Carter charged that Ronnie had begun his political career by campaigning against Medicare. That was true, but Carter neglected to say that at the time, Ronnie was supporting an alternative health-care plan sponsored by the American Medical Association.

  When it was Ronnie’s turn to respond, he smiled at Carter with a look of mock exasperation, shook his head, and said, “There you go again.” For millions of viewers, that phrase said it all. Carter may have been well informed, but there was something grim and moralistic about him that made people feel bad. “There you go again” quickly entered the language, and a few weeks after the election, when Ronnie used it again in a White House press conference, he brought the house down.

  Earlier in the debate, Carter had tried to portray Ronnie as a warmonger. He said Ronnie had a “belligerent attitude,” and a “long-standing inclination” toward the use of military power. Then Carter mentioned that he had recently asked his daughter, Amy, who was twelve at the time, what the most important issue was, and that she had answered, “Nuclear weaponry and the control of nuclear arms.”

  Many people in the studio audience laughed at that remark, because it didn’t seem very likely that a twelve-year-old would be all that interested in “nuclear weaponry.” Carter took a lot of heat in the media for bringing Amy into the discussion, and some of Ronnie’s supporters started carrying ASK AMY signs at his campaign rallies.

  But it was Ronnie’s final statement in the debate that really sealed Jimmy Carter’s fate. This was vintage Ronnie—clear, personal, and empathetic:

  “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less employment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago?

  “If your answer to all of these questions is yes, why I think your choice is very obvious as to who you’ll vote for. If you don’t agree, if you don’t think that this course that we’ve been on for the last four years is what you would like to see us follow for the next four, then I could suggest another choice that you have.”

  In the final days of the campaign, Carter stepped up his attacks and again tried to suggest that Ronnie was a warmonger. Back in September, Carter had said that the upcoming election would decide “whether we have peace or war.” This remark had infuriated Ronnie, who called Carter’s statement “unforgivable.” But as the campaign drew to a close he responded, characteristically, with humor. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he told one rally after the debate, “but I was busy starting a war.”

  Back in March, Ronnie had been campaigning in Brooklyn, where a group of hecklers started yelling that he wanted to start a war. “No,” he answered them, “I don’t want to do that. But if I did, I’d start it right here with you guys!”

  There was heckling throughout the campaign, but Ronnie always handled it with a light touch. The final appearance of the 1980 race was in San Diego, where Ronnie was repeatedly interrupted by a heckler who kept shouting throughout his speech. Finally Ronnie looked at the man and said, “Ah, shut up.” When the cheering died down, he added, “My mother always told me I should never say that, but I’ve been dying to do it throughout the whole campaign.” The crowd loved it, and I’m sure that anyone who has ever gone through a long political campaign knew exactly how Ronnie felt.

  From San Diego we returned to Los Angeles, and the night before the election we went to bed not in some freshly painted hotel room but in our own bed in Pacific Palisades. Heaven—sheer heaven. The next morning we went to vote in the same house where we had voted for the past twenty-five years. The women put out jars of jelly beans for Ronnie, and we were greeted by hordes of photographers and reporters. As we left, Ronnie joked with the press that he had voted for me.

  “And what about your wife?” somebody called out. “Who did she vote for?”

  “Oh,” he replied, “Nancy voted for some has-been actor.”

  It’s quite a feeling to see your husband’s name at the top of the ballot. Voting for Ronnie as governor was a little strange, but for president—even after all our work, I found it almost unbelievable.

  Ever since Ronnie’s first campaign in 1966, election day has always seemed like the longest day of the year. You feel it will never end, and you look for ways to pass the time. When Ronnie first ran for governor, we invited some of the press back to our house for coffee and sweet rolls. Then, after lunch, Ronnie went off to play golf with Holmes Tuttle and a couple of other men. He did the same thing four years later.

  This time he went out to get a haircut, but we both spent most of the day at home, catching up with odds and ends as the telephone kept ringing. I wanted to rest, because we were both exhausted from the long campaign. And as usual, I expected we’d be in for a long night as we waited for the votes to come in. We planned to spend part of the evening at the home of our friends Earle and Marion Jorgensen, and to watch the election returns with the same friends who had been with us on Ronnie’s two previous election nights. In 1966, and again in 1970, we had gone there to watch the early returns before going on to Ronnie’s campaign headquarters at the Century Plaza Hotel, and we planned to follow the same routine tonight. It had become a superstition: Marion would always ask the same people, have the same help, and serve the same food—chicken curry.

  A few minutes after five, I took a bath and Ronnie went into the shower. We had the television on very loud in our bedroom so we could hear the news. Suddenly, I heard John Chancellor say that Ronnie was going to win in a landslide victory.

  I leaped out of the tub, threw a towel around me, and started banging on the shower door. Ronnie got out, grabbed a towel, and we ran over to the television set. And there we stood, dripping wet, wearing nothing but our towels, as we heard that Ronnie had just been elected!

  Then the telephone started to ring. It was President Carter, calling to concede, and to congratulate Ronnie on his victory.

  I was thrilled, and stunned. We hadn’t even gone to the Jorgensens’ yet!

  “Congratulations, honey,” I said, as I hugged the fortieth president of the United States.

  12

  On to Washington

  AFTER the election, I was excited about moving to Washington. Still, it was harder than I expected to pack up our house in California and leave it for the last time. For twenty-seven busy years, 1669 San Onofre Drive, Pacific Palisades, had been our home. When Ronnie and I had first moved in, he had drawn a little heart with our initials in it in the wet cement on the patio off our bedroom. It was still there, of course, and to me it symbolized the many good times we’d had in that house.

  Although we were moving to the White House, I knew I would miss this house, with all its memories, and the magnificent view. From the deck, you could look out over the Pacific, and then turn and see the city, and turn again and see the mountains. One night shortly after we moved in
, Ronnie and I were sitting outside after dinner. Below us, the city lights were sparkling like fallen stars. Ronnie reached over and took my hand. “You see,” he said, “I’ve given you all these jewels.” I felt as if he truly had.

  The house meant far more to me than jewels ever could. We had been happy there. Our children had grown up there. And I had always expected that this was where Ronnie and I would live out our lives together. But everything was different now, and once we left, we would not be coming back.

  It was a matter of security. Ronnie and I now had Secret Service protection, and they would be with us even after we left Washington. After the election, the Secret Service had set up headquarters in an enormous trailer at the end of our driveway. It wasn’t an ideal arrangement, to put it mildly. There was no room left for anyone else to park, and it became increasingly awkward all around. When Ronnie’s term was over, we would need another house, which would provide all the Secret Service requirements without infringing on our privacy and the privacy of our neighbors.

  Ron and Patti were already living on their own, but even so, our leaving the family house was traumatic for them, too. Ron called me from New York and begged me not to sell the house. “You can’t,” he said. “It’s our home.” Patti called from Santa Monica and started to cry. “It just won’t be the same without having you up there on the hill,” she said.

  Packing up a house is an enormous task for anyone, but it’s particularly hard for me, because I’m a saver who hates to throw anything away. I save my clothes, and I still have every letter that Ronnie and the children ever wrote me. And zillions of photographs. And old movie scripts, and baskets, which I love. I can’t begin to list the things I had squirreled away over the years, telling myself, You never know when you might want this.