The Triumph of Nancy Reagan by Karen Tumulty (short books for teens txt) 📕

it; that debate was a nightmare.” Mondale, on the other hand, showed a mastery of the issues. He mixed his jabs at Ronnie with enough deference to avoid alienating that segment of voters who liked the president but might have doubts about whether he deserved another term.

Nancy was furious—predictably, not at Ronnie but at Deaver, Baker, Richard Darman, and the others who had been in charge of preparing him for the debate. “What have you done to my husband?” she demanded when she saw Deaver back at the hotel. Campaign chairman Paul Laxalt, the Nevada senator and longtime friend of the Reagans, was channeling Nancy when he held a news conference to declare that Ronnie had been “brutalized by a briefing process that didn’t make any sense” and that his handlers had “filled his head with so many facts and figures that he lost his spontaneity and his visionary concepts.” The night had gone so badly that even irrepressible optimist Ronnie was down. “I have to say I lost,” he wrote in his diary. “I guess I’d crammed so hard on facts & figures in view of the absolutely dishonest things he’s been saying in the campaign, I guess I flattened out. Anyway I didn’t feel good about myself.”

Decades later, Baker still bristled at Nancy’s contention that he and his team were to blame for Ronnie’s disastrous performance in Louisville. Baker insisted to me that they had prepared Ronnie exactly as they had in 1980, when he had “beat Carter like a drum.” This time, in Baker’s view, the problem was an overweening incumbent who had been too lazy to buckle down as he should have. Nancy “decided a head needed to roll, so it could be somebody else’s fault and not the president’s fault,” Baker said. “That head was going to be Dick Darman, who was in charge of the preparation.” Baker refused to fire his aide, telling Deaver and Spencer that he would do it only if he were ordered to by Ronnie himself. “I knew he wouldn’t,” Baker recalled. “That’s just the way he was. He would never. Anyway, he went on and said, ‘I didn’t do my homework,’ and he didn’t, but she didn’t like that.”

Mondale had at last found an opening. The next week saw a wave of stories that brought to the surface the sensitive “age issue” that had been simmering all along, raising questions whether seventy-three-year-old Ronnie was too old to do the job. The Wall Street Journal ran a headline that said: “Fitness Issue—New Question in Race: Is Oldest US President Now Showing His Age? Reagan Debate Performance Invites Open Speculation on His Ability to Serve.” Television networks repeatedly showed clips of him nodding off at the Vatican in 1982. They also replayed a recent photo opportunity at the ranch, where the president had been asked a question about US-Soviet talks on space weapons. As Ronnie hesitated, Nancy could be heard saying sotto voce, “Tell them we are doing everything we can.” After which, her husband piped up: “We’re doing everything we can.” Nancy claimed later she had been talking to herself and that Ronnie didn’t have his hearing aid turned up enough to have caught it.

Unlike in 1980, when there had been only one debate between Carter and Ronnie at the very end of the race, there would be a second one in 1984, in Kansas City on October 21. “Let Ronnie be Ronnie,” Nancy demanded of Deaver. The number of rehearsals was reduced from five to two. His massive briefing book was trimmed down to twenty-five pages. Media consultant Roger Ailes, who would later become famous for building Fox News into a conservative media powerhouse, was brought in to rebuild Ronnie’s confidence. Even former president Nixon wrote a letter of encouragement and advice. The campaign held a warm-up rally right before the debate, so that Ronnie would go in with the cheers of his supporters and not his own self-doubt ringing in his ears. Aides also made sure that Nancy would be in the front row when Ronnie was on the stage and that he knew where to look for her. As the debate began, she plastered a smile on her face, but her stomach was in knots, and her hands felt cold as ice.

The difference was dramatic. Ronnie was relaxed and confident; Mondale was combative. The former vice president’s campaign aides had also placed a piece of reflective white paper on his lectern, which threw off the lighting. It accentuated the bags under Mondale’s eyes and made his skin appear pasty. The coup de grâce came when moderator Henry Trewhitt of the Baltimore Sun asked whether Ronnie had any doubt that, at his age, he would be able to function were a crisis to hit.

“Not at all, Mr. Trewhitt,” the president answered, “and I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Even Mondale had to laugh. The age issue, which had been the biggest remaining speed bump on Ronnie’s road to a second term, had been flattened with a single quip.

It had once again been Nancy who knew what it was going to take to get Ronnie back into his groove. She understood, as author Garry Wills once put it, that “a Reagan without confidence would not be Reagan. It is against this background that we must interpret all tales of Nancy Reagan’s ‘ruthlessness.’ ” Nancy was constantly telling his aides that they must build him up, not knock him down. Lou Cannon wrote later: “In recognizing the actor’s truth that it is the performance that is crucial, Nancy Reagan had saved the day, however bruising and unfair her intervention may have been to Baker and Darman.”

The day before the election, as Ronnie’s campaign plane headed for California, Rollins predicted boldly that the president would carry forty-nine states. In an informal poll taken at the back of