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

think my thoughts must be reaching for you without waiting for paper and ink and stamps and such. If I ache, it’s because we are apart and yet that can’t be because you are inside and a part of me, so we aren’t really apart at all. Yet I ache but wouldn’t be without the ache, because that would mean being without you and that I can’t be because I love you.

Your Husband

By the time Ronnie wrote this, their circumstances had changed again. General Electric Theater had slipped in the ratings and plunged when NBC in 1961 moved its popular Western show Bonanza into the same time slot on Sunday nights. In March 1962 General Electric informed Ronnie that it was canceling his show. Ronnie believed that one reason he lost his corporate sponsor was the more overtly political direction that his speeches had taken. He was constantly talking of the dangers of government run amok. One of his lines of argument went like this: “Today there is an increasing number who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without automatically coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they would seek the answer to all the problems of human need through government.”

By the late 1950s, Ronnie had fully broken with the New Deal liberalism of his youth; in 1962 he reregistered as a Republican. General Electric began pressuring him to confine his speeches to pitching the company’s products—or as Ronnie put it, suggesting he pick such spellbinding topics as “a description of the new 1963 coffee pot.” Ronnie refused, so he and GE parted ways. His career in show business was effectively over, save for a twenty-one-episode gig hosting and acting in the television series Death Valley Days and a flop of a film called The Killers. The Reagans were once again fearful about their financial security, although their situation was far better than it had been before GE Theater. Nancy could also see that Ronnie’s passions were driving him in a new direction. As early as 1962, he was getting letters urging him to run for president. I found one of them saved among the personal papers at the Reagan Library. “The country needs your kind of leadership,” wrote Norman L. Stevens Jr., a petroleum consultant from Roswell, New Mexico, who had heard Ronnie speak to the local chamber of commerce.

Ronnie became a sought-after campaign surrogate for Republican candidates, including 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, who had become friendly with Edie and Loyal in Arizona. As Ronnie spoke on behalf of others, he made basically the same pitch he had been giving for years, throwing in a few references to the campaign and the candidate he was promoting. He lit up conservative audiences as he had the workers in the GE plants. After a group of Goldwater donors heard him give his standard spiel at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles, some of them came up with an idea: they would buy a big block of time on national television to have Ronnie deliver it again right before the election.

Goldwater himself was initially hesitant to let Ronnie do it. The Republican standard-bearer wanted to instead air a more conventional spot featuring himself meeting with former president Dwight D. Eisenhower. But his backers persuaded him that Ronnie could make a stronger case for Goldwater than he could for himself. On October 27, 1964, he gave an electrifying half-hour address, which was broadcast on NBC. “A Time for Choosing” would later be seen as a pivotal moment in the Reagan story. Its most memorable passage echoed one that FDR had delivered when he accepted the Democratic nomination in 1936. “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny,” Ronnie declared. “We can preserve for your children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we can sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” By some accounts, his appeal raised $8 million for Goldwater—an unheard-of sum. Not even that windfall, however, was enough to save the Arizona senator from losing to incumbent Lyndon Johnson in a landslide of historic proportion.

Still, that televised speech turned out to be Ronnie and Nancy’s rendezvous with their own destiny. Ronnie was suddenly seen as the voice of a conservative movement, the savior who might lead the Republican Party’s rise from the wreckage of the 1964 defeat. Just a few days after the election, a group of Goldwater’s big fund-raisers were in the Reagans’ Pacific Palisades living room, pleading with Ronnie to consider running for California governor in 1966. They were led by wealthy automobile dealer Holmes Tuttle. He was a respected figure among Republicans in the West, well connected enough to be a regular member of Eisenhower’s golfing foursomes in Palm Desert.

As Ronnie told it later, Nancy was “flabbergasted.” But that was not true. “I knew those people were going to come up to the house after that disastrous election,” she told biographer Bob Colacello. “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.”

CHAPTER SIX

Actor Jimmy Stewart was purported to have once said: “If Ronald Reagan had married Nancy the first time round, she could’ve got him the Academy Award.” Nancy may never have expected to see Ronnie go into politics. But once their life turned in that direction, she was determined that the two of them would set a course for greatness.

History has given much credit to the early assistance that Ronnie