Ronnie and Nancy (60 page)

If Tuttle was the conciliator among Reagan’s backers, Salvatori was the ideologue, the most committed to the conservative cause. A founding investor in the
National Review,
Salvatori also funded Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and started his own Anti-Communism Voters League, “whose purpose was the evaluation of all candidates for all offices on the basis of how well they were aware of the Communist threat.”66 He was a major contributor to the American Security Council, which was founded by General Douglas MacArthur and Henry and Clare Booth Luce in 1954 and aided the U.S. government’s anti-Soviet efforts overseas. (It would be repeatedly branded a CIA front by its leftist critics.) In the early 1960s, the Salvatoris gave $1 million to the University of Southern California to establish the Research Institute of Communist Strategy and Propaganda. “My father was very proud of being an American,” Laurie Salvatori said. “He believed that capitalism and the freedoms we enjoy as Americans have to be defended at all costs.”67

Salvatori was a consistent supporter of opportunities for African-Americans, making six-figure donations to Howard University and the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education. After the 1965 Watts riot, 3 3 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House he anonymously gave $250,000 to rebuild community institutions. “I’m a member of a minority myself,” he liked to say, and his daughter pointed out that her parents had no hesitation about bringing the distinguished black architect Paul Williams to dinner at Chasen’s. “They didn’t get their usual table,” she said, “and there were quite a few people staring at them.”68

In 1964 the Salvatoris commissioned Williams, who had designed the MCA headquarters for Jules Stein and Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, to build their new house. Williams was popular with conservatives—one of his earliest clients was ZaSu Pitts—who loved his “historical revival fantasies.”69

Williams was actually quite conservative himself and kept his distance from the civil rights movement. (“I am an architect . . . I am a Negro,” he once wrote. “We march forward singly, not as a race. Deal with me, and with the other men and women of my race, as individual problems, not as a race problem, and the race problem will soon cease to exist!”)70

For the Salvatoris he created a $700,000, thirty-three-room, twelve-thousand-square-foot neo-Georgian colonial that looked like Mount Vernon transported to a Bel Air hilltop. Betsy Bloomingdale declared it the most beautiful house in Los Angeles. Billy Haines did the interiors and designed most of the furniture, but at one point he walked off the job because he found Salvatori overbearing. “He and Henry had words,” recalled Haines’s associate Jean Hayden Mathison, who conspired with Grace to persuade Haines to complete the project. “Grace Salvatori was a delight—

a crazy, wonderful lady, always enthused about everything,” Mathison added.71 “Oh, she was something,” a friend said. “She had this
extremely
outgoing personality.”

After the San Francisco convention, the Goldwater cause became something of a family affair for the Reagans. With Salvatori’s backing, Reagan was made co-chair of California Citizens for Goldwater-Miller, the campaign’s main volunteer organization. At Ronnie’s suggestion, Neil Reagan, who was West Coast vice president of the McCann-Erickson advertising agency, was hired to produce Goldwater’s TV and radio ads. In Phoenix, Edith threw herself into raising money for her neighbor Barry. Nancy did her bit, too, plastering “Vote Goldwater” bumper stickers on their station wagon and her late-model Lincoln Continental.

As Anne Douglas remembered, Nancy was at least as gung ho for Goldwater as Ronnie was. “Young Ron and my son Eric were best buddies at John Thomas Dye,” she told me. “They would spend one weekend with us
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and one weekend with the Reagans at the ranch. You know how kids pick up what they hear at home—my husband and I didn’t care for Goldwater, and we must have discussed it. Anyway, I dropped Eric off at their house one Saturday morning, and about fifteen minutes later I got a call from him, crying and saying, ‘Come and pick me up.’ What happened was, he saw the Goldwater sign on the station wagon and said, ‘Boo Goldwater!’

Nancy was so furious she gave him a dressing down, and he started to cry.

He didn’t know what he had done. He was only six. Later on Nancy laughed about it, but at that moment she was serious. I went to pick him up, and that evening I talked to Nancy. She said, ‘I don’t know what your political opinions are, but you should keep the kids out of it.’ So she was off me for a while. It was the one time Nancy and I had a falling out.”72

Reagan had recommended Neil to Goldwater during the primary.

Though the brothers were finally in the same party, they had hardly seen each other since Nelle died. “All of a sudden, one day, I got a call from Ronald,” Neil recounted. “Ronald said, ‘I told Barry Goldwater to call you.

I think you can help him.’ I said, ‘What’s the problem?’ And he said, ‘Well, he’s getting all kinds of criticism of his TV commercials.’ Well, the criticism they were getting—I found out—was not necessarily [on the] content; it was the production. . . . [But] I was the most surprised person in the world that he told Barry to call me, because I always operate on the theory that he doesn’t even know I’m breathing, and he’s probably suspicious that I don’t know or care whether he’s breathing or not.”73

Neil spent sixty-five days that summer and fall flying around the country on a Boeing 727 with Goldwater and his wife, Peggy—this was the first presidential campaign in which candidates chartered their own jets.74

But nothing McCann-Erickson came up with could match Lyndon Johnson’s famous “Daisy” commercial, in which an image of a little girl picking the petals off a daisy is followed by one of a nuclear bomb exploding into a mushroom cloud. Goldwater’s name was never mentioned, but the ad recalled all the fears Rockefeller had stirred up about him in a devastating thirty-second spot. From then on everything seemed to work against Goldwater, including his own slogan, “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.” “In your heart you know he might,” hecklers would chant at his appearances. “In your guts you know he’s nuts.”75

Late that summer, Tuttle asked Reagan to be the speaker at a $1,000-a-plate Goldwater fund-raiser—“which was unheard of at that time,” the car dealer noted—at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel.

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

“After he got through,” Tuttle said, “I was besieged—my goodness—by people that said, ‘He spoke of the issues, of the things that we are concerned about: government involvement, all these social programs, and all this ‘womb to tomb’ spending and so forth. We feel our federal government is taking a position that the Constitution never intended for it to do.’”76

Reagan titled his speech “A Time for Choosing,” and it was a remarkably lucid distillation of everything he had been saying on the road for years, a mix of high-flying rhetoric and down-to-earth anecdotes that made ordinary people feel that he cared about their concerns and respected their intelligence. In contrast to Goldwater’s disastrous acceptance speech, he opened on a conciliatory note:

On the one hand, a small group of people see treason in any philosophical difference of opinion and apply the terms “pink” and “leftist” to those who are motivated only by humanitarian idealism in their support of the liberal welfare philosophy. On the other hand, an even greater number of people today, advocates of this liberal philosophy, lump all who oppose their viewpoint under the banner of right-wing lunacy.

But he quickly put the choice facing the electorate in stark terms: Either we believe in our traditional system of individual liberty, or we abandon the American Revolution and confess that an intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

By the end of the speech he had made this choice apocalyptic. “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” he declared, echoing FDR. He then turned to Lincoln again. “We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”77

As Nancy recalled the evening, “Ronnie’s speech went over so well that

[Holmes] came to him afterwards and said ‘We’ve got to get that speech on television.’ ” Tuttle and Salvatori quickly came up with the money to buy a half hour of airtime on NBC so that Reagan could deliver his speech nationwide a week before the election. In Nancy’s recollection and most other versions, Goldwater’s advisers tried to stop the telecast, claiming it was “too emotional.” Goldwater himself called Reagan at home, and ReaThe Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

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gan suggested he view a taped film of the speech that had been made for fund-raising events in California. After he had seen it, the candidate asked his staff, “What the hell was wrong with that?”78

Laurie Salvatori, however, recalled a conversation with her mother that indicates that it was actually Grace who raised much of the money, and that a jealous Goldwater wanted the airtime for himself. “My first memory of this whole Reagan business,” she told me, “was walking into my mother’s study, and her shushing me. When she got off the phone she said, ‘You won’t believe who called—Barry Goldwater. He was calling from his airplane. Some girlfriends and I have bought the airtime for Ronald Reagan to go on television to talk about Barry Goldwater.’ Goldwater was asking my mother if he could have the time back, so he could talk for himself. And my mother said, ‘Well, do you have the money?’—which she knew he probably didn’t. And she said in the loveliest way possible, ‘Well, Barry, if you don’t . . .’ As you know, this particular speech that Ronald Reagan gave for Barry Goldwater was the highlight of the whole campaign.”79

The final version of the speech was taped before an invited audience outfitted with Goldwater signs in a studio in Phoenix; Patti remembered that half the audience, including her mother, was in tears by the time her father finished.80 NBC broadcast the speech on October 27, 1964, at 8:30

in the evening, and Ronnie and Nancy watched it at Bill and Betty Wilson’s house with the Salvatoris and the Tuttles. Over the next week $500,000

poured into the campaign’s coffers, and another half million soon followed.

According to Nancy, some $8 million was generated for the Republican Party as a result of the speech.81 A new political star was born.
Washington
Post
columnist David Broder declared that Reagan had made “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with his ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.”82

No one seemed to notice that Barry Goldwater’s name was mentioned only once, and then almost as an afterthought, following the rousing climax. Except, that is, Goldwater himself. “To his discredit, Goldwater always seemed to resent being superseded by Reagan,” says Lyn Nofziger, who covered the 1964 election for the Copley newspapers and went on to become Reagan’s press secretary two years later, in his eponymous memoir. “Probably Reagan was too effective from Goldwater’s point of view because Reagan, not Goldwater, emerged from that campaign as the conservative hero.”83

“Ronnie always believed that we’re all put here for a purpose,” Nancy 3 3 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Reagan told me. “We might not know now why or what the purpose is, but eventually we will. Barry opened the door. And then Ronnie took it along.”84

Goldwater’s defeat was the worst the Republicans had suffered since the Roosevelt years. Johnson carried forty-four states, winning even in such bastions of Midwestern Republicanism as Galesburg, Illinois, which so upset Loyal Davis that he announced he no longer wanted to be buried in his hometown.85 Reagan took the loss more evenly, giving a brief pep talk to dejected campaign workers at an election night party at the Ambassador Hotel and encouraging them not to give up on the conservative cause.86

“We didn’t want that to be the demise of the Republican Party,” said Tuttle, “so we thought the best way to start rebuilding was here in California.”87 Tuttle got together with Salvatori and A. C. “Cy” Rubel, a key Goldwater supporter who had recently retired as chairman of the Union Oil Company, to discuss the future of the party, including whom they could run for governor against the Democratic incumbent, Edmund “Pat”

Brown, in 1966. “Gentlemen,” Tuttle told his cohorts, “I think we’ve got a candidate right here. How about Ron?”88

It didn’t take much convincing. As Laurie Salvatori said, “My father felt that, unlike Goldwater, Ronald Reagan could get elected because he spoke better than anybody else in the world.”89 Furthermore, George Murphy’s victory in the 1964 Senate race demonstrated that Californians were willing to elect an actor to high office; Reagan had campaigned for his old friend from SAG. “So I went to see him,” Tuttle said. “In fact, Mrs. Tuttle went with me, and we spent the evening at Ron’s home.”90 It is not clear whether this visit took place in late December 1964 or early January 1965. In either case, it was followed by more visits to San Onofre Drive by Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel.

“I knew those people were going to come up to the house after that disastrous election,” Nancy Reagan told me. “I knew it. And they did. At first Ronnie said, ‘Well, let me think about it.’ And then finally he said to me,

‘You know, the party is in such bad shape, if I felt that I could do something to help it, and I didn’t do it, I’d feel terrible.’ So he said to them, ‘Let me go out and see what the response of the people is.’ And there we were.

On a road we never intended to be on. Ever.”91

It was certainly a hard decision for the Reagans to make; on the other hand, there was also an air of inevitability about it, as if they had known
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all along where they were heading. Nancy’s old friend Bruce McFarland vividly remembered her telling him on a visit to Chicago shortly after Patti was born, “Mark my words, Ronnie will be governor of California someday.”92 Others, including Ardie and Harriet Deutsch, remembered Nancy dropping similar comments over the years. Arlene Dahl recalled that Nancy had asked her to read her tea leaves at their hairdresser’s in early 1965; she told Nancy that she would soon receive important news having to do with California’s government.93