Kati Marton (43 page)

For a long time, Reagan hovered on the fringes of the country’s consciousness as a pleasant, second-tier actor and corporate spokesman whose ex-wife was more successful than he was. Nancy, conservative by nature and upbringing, no doubt influenced the rightward shift in her husband, as did the network of newly wealthy businessmen and industrialists they spent time with in California.

The years with GE were invaluable. He traveled the country, honing and polishing his speaking style, and learning what was on people’s minds. In 1964, in a nationwide sermon urging Barry Goldwater’s election, he shattered his soft-lens image. Angry and absolutist, he declared his new Republican credo. “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny …,” he said, appropriating his old hero FDR’s words for a different cause. “We can preserve for our children this last best hope of man on earth or we can sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” The overheated rhetoric did not save Goldwater’s candidacy, but it put Reagan on the nation’s radar. The
Washington Post
called it “the most successful political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with his ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.”

Two years later, campaigning for governor of California, Reagan transformed a speech about Depression-bound Dixon, Illinois, into a gripping parable of small-town America. Reagan, no longer simply the angry man of the 1964 Republican convention, electrified audiences. He had the actor’s skill at persuasion, but now he had a part he could play better than anyone: himself. His wife was always beside him, her hands clasped, her unblinking gaze fixed on him, transmitting a current of love, support and security. And Reagan, a man who believed deeply in luck, now got his first big dose of it. Californians’ fear of chaos, fueled by the recent Berkeley riots, helped Reagan defeat the incumbent governor, Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown, in a landslide in 1966.

In those early days, Nancy had not yet learned to camouflage her
insecurity. Governor Reagan’s secretary Nancy Reynolds recalled finding her looking forlorn at Sacramento Airport, one week after her husband’s election as governor. “She said, ‘I don’t know what to do. He just left me here. I need to get to Los Angeles.’ She seemed completely lost. I asked her if somebody was going to meet her at the other end in L.A., and she said yes, we have a car and driver. So I said, ‘I’m going to get two tickets and fly down with you.’ She was very relieved. But my memory is of a lost soul, unsophisticated and completely vulnerable.”

Mike Wallace, the CBS journalist and an old friend of both Nancy Reagan and her mother, recalls a moment that crystallized for him the relationship between Ronnie and Nancy. On board the U.S.S.
Independence
en route to a governors’ conference in the Virgin Islands,

Nancy had to surround Reagan with aides almost as dedicated to him as she herself. Ever alert to the slightest hint of disloyalty or less than total commitment to Ronnie, she developed antennae for staffers with their own agenda. With the laissez-faire Reagan, staff support took on a whole new meaning. His staff, with Nancy as invisible producer/director and Mike Deaver as her executor, enabled a stellar performance artist to function as an effective politician.

Nancy’s role as her husband’s unofficial chief of personnel dates from his time as governor. Stu Spencer, who worked with Reagan during this period, remembered that “She made judgments about the people
around him. She knew what type worked best with Ron. She tried to determine who would be loyal to him. She inserted herself into that role and he appreciated it. He respected her judgment and opinion.”

Trained as an actor, Reagan liked direction, a sense that everybody had a role to play in the production. “Once in 1966 when he was running for governor,” Spencer remembered, “at the end of the day we were in some cow town like Fresno, talking about scheduling for the next day, sitting in his room, and Reagan turns to me and says, ‘I think I figured this thing out.’ What do you mean? I asked him. ‘Politics,’ he said, ‘I figured it out. It’s just like show business. You have a hell of an opening. You coast. And then you have a hell of a closing.’ That was his view of the process, and there’s a lot of truth in that.”

Reagan had a handful of core beliefs. Once he made them known, he expected others to turn them into policy. The power to charm, persuade and, like his friend Jimmy Stewart, make Americans feel good about being American—those were his gifts. He could convey a stronger message with his crinkly grin and his jaunty step than Jimmy Carter could with a briefing book of facts at his command.

Reagan was incapable of dismissing people, no matter how incompetent. This trait dated from his days as head of the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan’s longtime Hollywood agent Taft Schreiber worried about how this would play out once the actor became a serious politician. “We better have lunch, kid,” Schreiber told Stu Spencer. “Something you are going to have to learn. You are going to have to fire a lot of people.” Startled, Spencer asked what he meant. “I was Ronnie’s agent for twenty years and he never fired anybody,” said Schreiber.

Nancy Reynolds, who observed the couple over many decades, concluded that “Nancy was Ronald Reagan’s first line of defense, politically and personally.” She recalled an incident during a flight with Mrs. Reagan when her husband was governor. “Behind us was somebody lacing into Ronald Reagan and his budget cuts. I could see the blood rising in Nancy’s face. Suddenly she flips back the seat, turns around and says, ‘That’s my husband you’re talking about and that budget is what this state needs.’ Nancy didn’t shout, but she was very firm.”

Even though Nancy is a tough-minded, practical woman, she sought
help in the occult. She believed in the alignment of planets and stars as predictors of events. An astrologer had chosen the precise moment of Reagan’s swearing-in as governor of California. Nancy started relying on astrology. Spencer claims that Reagan did not believe in it but humored his wife. Whatever made Nancy happy was all right with Ronnie.

In 1968, Joan Didion interviewed Nancy for a
Saturday Evening Post
profile that would forever seal Nancy’s distrust of the media. Didion had spent a day with her subject at the governor’s residence in Sacramento. Nancy, who thought the interview had gone well, was shattered by the article when it appeared. Entitled “Pretty Nancy,” it was etched in acid—and missed Nancy’s essential insecurity. “Nancy Reagan has an interested smile,” Didion wrote, “the smile of a good wife, a good mother, a good hostess, the smile of someone who grew up in comfort and went to Smith College and has a father who is a distinguished neurosurgeon … and a husband who is the definition of Nice Guy, not to mention governor of California, the smile of a woman who seems to be playing out some middle-class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948.”

After this article, a newly wary Nancy set out to befriend key members of the media. She never again granted an interview without a careful vetting by her friends. Former CIA director Richard Helms became one of her favorite “controllers.” Arrangements for an interview with her were (and remain) akin to obtaining clearance for a sensitive national security position. Unlike her husband, who used wit and charm to disarm the press, Nancy used fear and intimidation. Almost two decades later,
Washington Post
reporter Sally Quinn still remembered a confrontation with Nancy: “She gripped both my shoulders while she chewed me out about a comment I’d made on TV a few weeks before. I could feel that grip for a long time.”

IN 1976,
Reagan took a bold and dangerous step: he challenged a sitting president from his own party for the presidential nomination. A politically wounded Gerald Ford ultimately carried the day and blamed Reagan for dividing the party. “How can you challenge an incumbent,”
Ford asked in his autobiography, “and not be divisive?” Reagan, who preached the mantra of never attacking fellow Republicans, deflected blame for the party’s humiliation that fall through charm, persuasion and a quality later dubbed “Teflon.” Ronnie and Nancy had electrified the convention. They had a close-up view of the summit and they savored the excitement.

As Ronnie’s national prominence grew, so, too, did the Reagans’ interdependence. “When one of us has a problem, it automatically becomes a problem for the other; an attack on one of us is an attack on both of us. When one suffers, so does the other,” he wrote. The insecure woman abandoned by her own mother now felt secure with a man who didn’t seem to need anyone else. “Everything began with you,” Nancy wrote Ronnie in 1967, “my whole life—so you’d better be careful and take care of yourself because there’d be nothing and I’d be no one without you.”

His impressive physical presence was an important part of their bond and continued to be until very late in their married life. “I remember being upstairs in her office in the White House,” White House social secretary Gahl Burt recalled, “and he would walk in wearing his gym shorts and I was just stunned with his physique. Stunned. He had this broad chest, long, strong legs and arms. And there wasn’t an ounce of flab.”

Decades into their marriage, he still left her love notes ending, “I.T.W.W.W.”—“in the whole wide world”—as in “I love you more than anything.” Not surprisingly, their children felt left out, sidelined by their parents’ passionate need only of each other. When Ronnie wrote, “I love the whole gang of you,” he meant all of Nancy. “Mommie, first lady, the sentimental you, the funny you and the peewee power house you …. I couldn’t and don’t sleep well if [you aren’t] there—so please always be there.” For Reagan, his children were a responsibility to be fulfilled. “But what is really important,” he wrote Nancy in May 1963, “is that having fulfilled our responsibilities to our offspring, we haven’t been careless with the treasure that is ours—namely what we are to each other.” Late in his father’s life, his son Ron admitted, “I never had a real conversation with my father.”

Ronnie called her Mommy and liked to sort out her vitamin pills before she left for a trip. Nancy Reynolds traveled with him during the 1980 presidential campaign and often fielded Nancy’s nightly calls.

In 1980, Reagan had the perfect foil in Jimmy Carter. In politics, optimists always trump pessimists. Like FDR, Reagan had a winning temperament. He seemed to enjoy life, and found no issue too complex for a solution. Reagan, who could capture an audience with a single one-liner, famously did so that year with the line “There you go again!,” disorienting the earnest Carter. Reagan did not sound like a politician, which of course is the highest goal of all politicians. “He knows so little,” his national security adviser Bud McFarlane once marveled, “and he accomplished so much.” Carter lost not solely on issues but on how he came across to the country: a small man who filled Americans with self-doubt. The big, tall, radiant man of the West who talked to the country like a Depression-era man of the people said, “I can fix this!” He seemed glad to be alive. The country wanted to be sprinkled with some of his magic dust.

When his advisers made the mistake of treating Reagan like just another politician, cramming him with facts for a televised debate, he fizzled. When it happened, memorably, in his first debate with Walter Mondale in 1984, Nancy stepped in to refocus him. She knew how to extract his best performance. It was Nancy who made sure the house lights were on when he addressed a large group because he needed to see
faces and make eye contact. By telling his aides to back off and let Ronnie be Ronnie, Nancy enabled him to make that connection in the second debate, and he recovered from the disaster of his first encounter with Mondale.