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

Over the coming years, Nancy would speak up more often, as her confidence in her own instincts grew. At those times, Spencer learned, he was the one who should be listening. “She’s actually a terrifically intelligent politician,” he said. “She thinks politically. In some ways, much more than he ever did.… She developed over the years an instinct about people who would fit her husband best. She knew his strengths and weaknesses, surely. But the chief criterion for her was: whose agenda are they pursuing? Ronald Reagan’s or their own? She got very good at sorting that out.”

The intensity of the Reagans’ emotional and romantic bond became evident to Spencer early. One evening, following a dinner at a Mexican restaurant, he accompanied the couple to Los Angeles’s Union Station, where Ronnie was catching a train for a television shoot. As the conductor shouted, “All aboard!” Ronnie and Nancy fell into each other’s arms and started making out for what seemed like an interminable amount of time. Spencer grew deeply embarrassed. “Jesus, this is like a scene out of a damn movie,” he thought to himself. “What the hell is going on?” Those cinematic displays of affection were something he would learn to get used to.

There was one more insight into the couple that Spencer would gain as he was deciding whether to attempt to turn a movie actor into a politician. He had lunch one day with Reagan’s agent, Taft Schreiber, who cautioned him that Ronnie was allergic to interpersonal conflict, which is something endemic to nearly every political operation. “You’re going to have to fire a lot of people,” Schreiber advised. “Ronnie never fired anybody in his life.”

That, Spencer would later come to understand, would be Nancy’s job—just as so many other distasteful things would fall to her, in California and beyond. “She was the one that was going to be the bad guy,” he said. “She took on a role as personnel director. She knew as well as I knew, because we discussed it. ‘Ronnie won’t fire anybody.’ I said, ‘Well, somebody’s going to have to fire people.’ She had no qualms about firing people. She’d get somebody to do the job. One of her qualities was tenacity.”

The initial order of business: Spencer and Roberts told both Reagans they were going to have to get over their fear of flying. It was the only way to get around the vast state. Ronnie and Nancy agreed, though for years they would insist on traveling in separate planes, apparently superstitious that being on the same one was tempting fate. On Spencer’s first flight with Nancy, a short hop from LA to San Francisco on Western Airlines, she dug her nails so deeply into his hand that it bled.

The consultants went to work writing campaign plans for Ronnie. It was a challenge to figure out how to put one together for such an unconventional candidate. Former actor George Murphy, who, coincidentally, had played Ronnie’s father in the 1943 movie This Is the Army, had been elected to the US Senate the previous year. The Republican’s victory showed that Californians were willing to vote for a former movie actor with a conservative message. But putting one in the governor’s mansion was a bigger leap.

Around their third day on the job, the consultants were pondering the candidate’s potential negatives. What from Reagan’s past might emerge and become a problem for his campaign? That was when they suddenly realized there was a big unknown that had to be dealt with: Jane Wyman. Divorced politicians were a rarity in those days, and they had no idea what Ronnie’s ex-wife might say once the campaign got under way.

“We’ve got to find out where she is on this whole thing,” Roberts said. Spencer drew the short straw to take on this awkward task. He made an appointment to visit Wyman at her home. Though it was only ten in the morning, Jane greeted him with a cocktail in her hand—apparently not her first of the day. Spencer also noticed that she didn’t offer him one. He told Jane that her ex-husband was thinking of running for governor, something she already knew from reading the papers. After a little more small talk, Jane interrupted him: “I think I know why you’re here. You’re worried about what I might do.”

“You hit it right on the head,” Spencer replied. “We just feel it’s important that we know where you stand in this whole thing.”

“I hope Ronnie wins,” Jane said. “He deserves it.”

Spencer was relieved, but he wasn’t prepared for what Jane said next. “She had a little bit of Irish devil in her,” Spencer told me. “She says, ‘I will not tell the world that Ronnie was a lousy lay.’ ”

Jane was as good as her word. For the next two decades, as Ronnie rose to the most powerful office in the world, she refrained from making public comments about her ex-husband. “She played it straight the whole time. I think she made one statement early about how he’s always wanted this. ‘I wish him well,’ ” Spencer said. “I remember, on election night, she was about the third person that called us at the Biltmore hotel to congratulate him.

“I didn’t tell Nancy that,” he added.

Spencer also found an unexpected asset in Edie. Nancy’s mom handed the campaign manager a list of names of people she promised would give large sums to help her son-in-law get elected. Spencer called them, and sure enough, every one of them promised a contribution. When Edie checked in a few weeks later to see how it went, Spencer dutifully tallied for her what he had gotten from her friends: a $1,500 check here, another $4,000 there. He thought she would be pleased.

“Those cheap sons of bitches!” Edie sputtered. “I’m taking over!”

Spencer marveled: “I watched it. One of the sons of bitches sent a check for fifteen grand, and another one