by H. W. Brands
MICHAEL CONTINUED TO seek his father’s approval. He was again wounded, but again not surprised, when his father, then governor, failed to attend his wedding, in 1971 in Hawaii. “Dad and Nancy were conspicuously absent,” Michael wrote. “To my chagrin, they attended Tricia Nixon’s wedding in Washington that same day. That hurt me deeply. As surely as acting had deprived me of my mother, it now seemed clear that politics had deprived me of my father.”
In lieu of attending, Reagan sent Michael a letter—“the first I had ever received from him,” Michael recounted. Reagan had watched from a distance as Michael acted the Lothario as a young man, and now he sent him fatherly advice of the sort he couldn’t bring himself to deliver face-to-face. “You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life,” Reagan wrote. “It can be whatever you decide to make it. Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till three A.M., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears. There are more men griping about marriage who kicked the whole thing away themselves than there can ever be wives deserving of blame. There is an old law of physics that you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in it. The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. Sure, there will be moments when you will see someone or think back on an earlier time and you will be challenged to see if you can still make the grade, but let me tell you how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music. If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.”
Reagan acknowledged that his son had faced challenges growing up. “Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others.” This was all the more reason for him to do whatever he could to ensure that his new home was a happy one. “Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.”
Reagan signed the letter “Love, Dad.” He added a postscript: “You’ll never get in trouble if you say ‘I love you’ at least once a day.”
Michael appreciated the sentiments, even if he had wished to hear them in person. “The letter was just like Dad,” he wrote. “It was straight from the heart and full of square, honest, old-fashioned sentiments. I was so touched when I read it that I cried.”
REAGAN’S ADVICE DIDN’T prevent Michael’s marriage from ending as Reagan’s first marriage had, in divorce. But Michael didn’t stop seeking his father’s approval. As Reagan decided to run for the presidency, Michael said he hoped the campaign would bring the family close together. “He looked at me quizzically,” Michael recalled. “ ‘But the family is close,’ he said.” Michael mentioned the same hope to Nancy. “I wouldn’t count on it,” she said.
Michael and Maureen both wanted to help with the campaign. Maureen had inherited her father’s penchant for politics, while Michael simply wanted to be part of his father’s life. But they hit a wall. Maureen saw it coming, for she had been made to feel the pariah before. Early in Reagan’s first campaign for governor, one of his advisers, Bill Roberts, paid her a visit. He explained that he and Stuart Spencer believed that the divorce issue had cost Nelson Rockefeller dearly in 1964. “The consultants were very nervous about Dad’s previous marriage,” Maureen remembered. “And the very clear message I was getting was that Michael and I were not to be involved in any way in the campaign. In fact, Stu Spencer later suggested to my husband that I dig a hole and pull the dirt in over me until after the election.”
Years later Maureen still felt the pain of that moment. “I was crushed by Bill Roberts’ visit,” she said. “How dare he see me as a liability to Dad’s campaign? Of course I understood the reasoning from his perspective, even if I disagreed with it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of being kicked in the stomach. It was bad enough that I’d grown up feeling removed from my family, but on top of that I was all of a sudden being told by this so-called expert that for the good of the campaign I should pretend that I didn’t even exist.”
She called her father hoping for sympathy but not really expecting it. “His reaction was predictable. ‘If you pay someone to manage a campaign,’ he said, ‘then you’ve got to give them the authority to do it as they see fit.’ ” And that was that. “Michael and I were ‘rubbed out’ by the Spencer/Roberts plan,” she said.
In 1975 they got the cold shoulder again. This time their age was the complaint of the campaign staff. Maureen was thirty-four and Michael thirty. “They felt we made Dad look too old,” Michael said. Reagan’s handlers much preferred the candidate to be seen with his second set of children. Patti had been born in 1952; Ron in 1958. When Reagan stood with them—a twenty-three-year-old and a teenager—he seemed almost young.
Nancy much preferred that the campaign showcase Patti and Ron, too. To Michael and Maureen this was ironic, besides being hurtful. The irony reflected the fact that Patti and Ron wanted nothing to do with their father’s politics or campaigns. The hurt was the same old stepmother story. “We were invariably identified as ‘the adopted son and the daughter of Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman,’ thus reminding Nancy of a marriage that had ended twenty-eight years earlier,” Michael reflected.
Only later was he able to sympathize with Nancy, at least a little. “Those constant references to a past marriage must have hurt Nancy every time she heard or read them, but I didn’t understand that then. All I knew was that we felt as though Nancy was pushing us out of the family circle and trying to bring Ron and Patti in.”
27
REAGAN’S FORMAL ANNOUNCEMENT produced the excitement he and his team hoped for. A Gallup survey in early December put him ahead of Ford among Republicans by 40 percent to 32. Among independents, key to victory in the general election, he led Ford by 27 percent to 25.
But polls were simply polls. The first real test would come in New Hampshire in February 1976. Reagan braved the New England chill day after day, courting voters at diners and factory gates. He won the endorsement of William Loeb, the cranky publisher of the state’s largest newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader. The campaign proceeded so smoothly that Reagan’s handlers sent him out of the state two days before the primary so that the local team, which had been dealing with the logistics of his appearances, could concentrate on getting voters to the polls.
The decision proved a tactical blunder. While Reagan wooed voters in the Midwest, Ford gained ground in New Hampshire. Mild weather on primary day boded well for the moderates, and Ford wound up beating Reagan by a bit more than 1 percent of the votes cast.
John Sears wanted to spin the result as a victory. “We’ve got to go out there as if we had really won this,” he told the campaign team. The argument wasn’t implausible. To push a sitting president so hard was a feat. A close call in New Hampshire had brought down Lyndon Johnson in 1968; Ford would be the next to topple.
Still, the disappointment was hard to hide. “The press could see it in our faces
, and it was all about impression,” Michael Deaver remembered. Reagan had fallen short. He had been the front-runner, and Ford had caught him and won. Ford’s side claimed the momentum of victory and the mantle of the new favorite.
“That was the start of a very disastrous period,” Lyn Nofziger recalled. Reagan lost the next five primaries. Each loss eroded Reagan’s credibility. Republicans of assorted persuasions began asking when he was going to drop out of the race, when he would fall in line behind the president like a loyal member of the party. He responded that he hadn’t entered the race lightly and wouldn’t leave it so. He would battle all the way to the convention in Kansas City.
His quest seemed increasingly quixotic after he lost the Florida primary in March. Ford’s team beat the drums more loudly for party unity. If Reagan really believed in the Eleventh Commandment, they said, he would step aside, for his continued campaign did more damage to the party than any speeches against the president could have.
Even Nancy concluded he ought to get out, although she was thinking of him rather than the party. “Nancy was most unhappy,” Nofziger remembered. She took Nofziger aside in a hotel room. “Lyn, you know you’ve got to get Ronnie out of this race,” she said. “We can’t embarrass him any further.”
At this moment Reagan entered the room. “He thought that I was going to go along with her,” Nofziger remembered. “And he said, ‘Lynwood’—which is not my name, but it’s what he calls me—he says, ‘I am not going to get out of this race. I am going to stay in this through Texas. I am going to stay in it all the way.’ ”
Nofziger finished the story, which he considered characteristic of Reagan and his relationship with Nancy. “She accepted that okay. People who thought that Nancy ran Reagan—no. She ran Reagan when he didn’t care. When he cared, she didn’t. I mean, I’ve been there on a number of occasions where she wanted her way, and he got his way.”
So Reagan stayed in the race, reiterating that he would fight through to the convention. Yet brave words were no substitute for hard dollars, and as his chances of victory grew slimmer, so did his campaign coffers. The primary contest moved across the South, with Reagan desperate for funds to continue the campaign. Then a supporter in North Carolina, recalling the effect of Reagan’s 1964 televised speech for Goldwater, suggested airing something similar on stations in the Tar Heel State. Nofziger found a half-hour clip of a speech Reagan had given in Florida, and, slightly edited, it went out to North Carolina viewers.
The effect was less dramatic than that of the 1964 national speech, but it showcased Reagan for southern voters. The message had hardly changed in a dozen years, yet it was what southern conservatives wanted to hear.
They liked something else Reagan said. So far in the campaign he had trod lightly in the realm of foreign policy, in part because attacking the commander in chief on matters of national security carried the greatest risk of a political backlash, and in part because he could claim no expertise or experience on the subject. But Jesse Helms, a conservative Republican who represented North Carolina in the Senate, had been railing against détente and other aspects of the Nixon-Kissinger-Ford foreign policy, and he was getting a good response. Reagan decided to chime in.
He criticized arms control as controlling only American arms; the Soviets continued their buildup, he said. Before long the United States would find itself vulnerable to Russian blackmail, if not wholesale annihilation. He blamed Ford and Kissinger for ignoring the activities of Soviet proxies and communist agents in Central America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. And in a line he borrowed from Helms, he accused the Ford administration of trying to give away the Panama Canal.
This last count of the indictment was puzzling. Negotiations over the future of the Panama Canal had been under way since the 1960s. They had never sparked much interest among Americans, and North Carolinians had even less stake in the canal than residents of several other states.
But for some reason they responded. Reagan’s recycled television speech and his dark warning about a canal giveaway, combined with the conservative disposition of most North Carolina Republicans, resulted in a stunning victory in the North Carolina primary. Reagan beat Ford by 52 percent to 46. North Carolina’s Republican rules specified proportional division of the delegates, so the effect on the delegate count was modest, with Reagan winning 28 delegates to Ford’s 26. But North Carolina allowed Reagan to fight on. The pressure to abandon the race didn’t end; if anything, the jolt prompted the Ford side to intensify its efforts to cast Reagan as a wrecker. Yet Reagan could now dismiss the efforts as evidence that his message was boring home. And the money flowed in, not in gushers, but in a steady stream.
He scored victories elsewhere in the South during May. He captured Indiana and Nebraska and predictably thrashed Ford in California in early June.
Ford countered with victories in the industrial Midwest and the Northeast. And the president’s team enlisted the services of James Baker, a Houston lawyer with an uncanny ability to work the political system in his candidate’s favor. Baker hunted down delegates in states with conventions and caucuses, employing the charm of his southern upbringing, the guile of his years in law, and the leverage of the White House.
By the time the primaries, conventions, and caucuses had been completed, Ford held a modest lead in delegates over Reagan. The numbers were imprecise, given the diversity of rules determining whom the delegates were bound to, if bound at all. Each side publicly interpreted the imprecision in its favor. Each spoke of covert supporters who would surface at the decisive moment of the convention. But impartial estimates gave Ford around 1,090 delegates and Reagan about 1,030. Ford needed roughly 40 delegates to claim the convention’s majority; Reagan some 100. In the scrapping for those last delegates, the president’s institutional heft would surely work in his favor.
Reagan resorted to novelty. At the instigation of John Sears he announced his running mate ahead of the vote on the presidential nomination. Richard Schweiker was a moderate Republican senator from Pennsylvania. “What Sears thought was that if he picked Schweiker, we could peel off the Pennsylvania delegation, and that would help us get some of these other delegations,” Lyn Nofziger recalled.
The announcement intrigued the media but backfired among the delegates. “The Southern Reagan thing just fell apart overnight because of Schweiker,” Michael Deaver remembered. “We go down to Mississippi and we start meeting with all of the delegations, and it was just a total disaster. The whole point of picking Dick Schweiker was to cut into the Northeast, and to see if we could get Pennsylvania. Then maybe we could get a little bit of New Jersey, New York, and then it would all start to unravel for Ford. Of course, Schweiker couldn’t even deliver Pennsylvania. So then we had to go defend our base, which was in the South. We’d had these delegations into this Marriott or Ramada Inn, or wherever it was, in Jackson, Mississippi. The Alabama delegation, there were four of them, I think. We’re in this room that’s about four times the size of this, with these four little people sitting out there. Schweiker, and Mrs. Claire Schweiker, and Ronald Reagan are up at this head table. They go through this whole thing, and this man from Alabama stands up. He’s got a bow tie on, perfectly dressed. ‘Governor,’ he said, ‘I am not a drinking man. But when I heard that you picked Dick Schweiker to be your running mate, I went home and drank a pitcher of whiskey sours.’ And he said, ‘I would rather have had my doctor call me at home and tell me that my wife had a venereal disease.’ ”
The Schweiker gambit sealed Reagan’s defeat. The delegates gathered and did the usual convention business until the roll call, when, in the predawn hours of August 19, they gave Ford the nomination by 1,187 votes to Reagan’s 1,070.
Some conservatives refused to yield even in defeat. Jesse Helms thundered his undying opposition to détente and to those responsible for it. A Reagan campaign worker from Missouri, buttonholed after the balloting, hoped for Ford’s November defeat. “The Republican party needs to lose soundly, and that’s
the inevitability of the Ford candidacy,” he said.
But the candidates moved quickly to close ranks. Ford gestured toward making Reagan his running mate. Reagan responded diffidently, or perhaps coyly. James Baker, who later worked closely with Reagan, thought a Ford-Reagan ticket would have been appealing to voters and could have happened had either side been a bit more forthcoming. “You know, Mr. President,” he told Reagan afterward, “if President Ford had asked you to run with him, he would have won.” Baker added, thinking of what happened in the next four years, “And you might never have been president.”
“You’re right,” Reagan responded. “If he had asked, I’d have felt duty-bound to run.”
Baker continued: “President Ford didn’t ask you because we received word from your campaign that you would join him for a unity meeting only on condition that he wouldn’t offer you the vice presidency. And besides that, you very publicly shut down the movement by your supporters in Kansas City to draft you for the vice presidential nomination.”
“Look, I really did not want to be vice president, and I said so at the time,” Reagan responded. “But I don’t have any recollection of telling anyone to pass a message to President Ford not to offer me the spot. If he had asked, I would have felt duty-bound to say yes.”
Baker could hardly believe what he was hearing. “I was shocked,” he recalled. “How different history might have been. Given the intensity of their primary battle, Ford really didn’t want Reagan as his running mate, but the president might have asked if he had thought Reagan would accept. And with a Ford-Reagan ticket in 1976, I think two portraits might be missing from the White House walls today—those of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.”
Ford did not ask Reagan to join the ticket, but he did invite him to join the victory celebration on the convention stage. Their clasped hands conveyed at least the appearance that unity prevailed among the Republicans. Reagan’s supporters demanded a speech from their man; his remarks caused their hearts to flutter anew and some to consider demanding a recount. But he understood that the moment wasn’t his, and he stepped aside before provoking a stampede, but not before receiving an ovation louder and more heartfelt than Ford got.