Reagan: The Life (31 page)

He denied, against the evidence, that his candidacy was directed against Gerald Ford, and he wrapped himself in the Republican Eleventh Commandment.
Lyn Nofziger, his press secretary, said the former gover
nor had spoken by phone with the president and that each had expressed a wish to avoid splitting the party. Reagan’s aides characterized a conversation between the candidate and Ford’s vice president,
Nelson Rockefeller, as “very cordial.”

John Sears, Nofziger, and others on Reagan’s staff had arranged for the announcement of his candidacy to take place in Washington, rather than California, to mesh more neatly with the news cycles of the major television networks and to allow Reagan time to jet to
Florida for another appearance that afternoon. In Miami he addressed a crowd that seemed uniformly delighted that he was taking on the establishment. One young man, however, was out of place, as became apparent when he pointed a pistol in Reagan’s direction. Security personnel instantly wrestled the man to the ground, discovering in the process that the weapon was a toy. Reagan brushed off the incident; the news media mentioned it in passing.

But Nancy Reagan, at her husband’s side, was badly upset. “
I was trembling, and Ronnie had to calm me down,” she recalled.

M
ICHAEL
R
EAGAN WANTED
to be part of his father’s campaign. Reagan’s elder son had spent much of his life wanting to be a larger part of his father’s life, but circumstances and the personalities of those involved worked against it. His mother and his stepmother never got along. “
For thirty-five years I feel as if I have been in the middle of a battle between Mom and Nancy,” Michael wrote later. Jane Wyman didn’t like her son growing close to Nancy, not least because Nancy obviously made Reagan happier than she ever had. Nancy, for her part, didn’t appreciate being reminded that her husband had loved someone before he had met her. She knew that the split between Jane and Reagan hadn’t been his idea; if matters had been left to him, he and Jane would still have been married.

The tension between Nancy and Jane affected
Maureen Reagan, too. But she had been older than Michael when her parents divorced and older when she acquired a stepmother. More tellingly, perhaps, she didn’t face the questions adopted children often face: about why their birth parents gave them up, about whether they are really part of their adoptive families. By his own testimony Michael required constant reassurance that he was loved. And he often didn’t get it. Jane was too busy with her film career, and Reagan with the Screen Actors Guild and then politics. Michael bounced from one boarding school to the next, wondering why neither of his parents seemed to want him. He craved affection that his father couldn’t demonstrate. “He can give his heart to the country, but he just finds it difficult to hug his own children,” Michael wrote.

Much later Michael revealed that he had been plagued with guilt since being sexually molested by a camp counselor at the age of seven.
When his father entered politics, Michael feared that reporters or Reagan’s opponents would uncover what he considered his shameful secret. His dread increased with each victory his father won. And simply being the son of a famous man, and a famous woman, was burden enough. He concluded that people pretended to like him to get close to his father or mother.

Reagan’s distraction hardly helped matters. Michael attended a boarding academy in Arizona for his last two years of high school; as graduation day approached, he understood that he would not be allowed to participate in commencement exercises on account of previous misbehavior. But a member of the faculty suggested that if he could prevail on his father to speak at commencement, his indiscretion would be overlooked. Reagan might or might not have understood the linkage, but he was happy to do anything that would help Michael get his diploma.

Reagan arrived on graduation day and greeted the graduates. “As the others passed in front of him one by one,” Michael recalled, “I heard Dad introduce himself and then ask for the graduate’s name. My grin was as wide as a cavern when I came before him.

“ ‘My name is Ronald Reagan,’ Dad said. ‘What’s yours?’ ”

Michael was badly hurt but not wholly surprised. “I took off my mortar board. ‘Remember me?’ I said. ‘I’m your son Mike.’

“ ‘Oh,’ said Dad. ‘I didn’t recognize you.’ ”

M
ICHAEL 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.”

R
EAGAN
’
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.”

R
EAGAN
’
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.”