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

a management consultant, knew almost nothing about the state budget and tried to wing it. Legislators considered him a joke, and in just over a year, Smith was gone. He was replaced in February 1968 by future defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, a former state party chairman who was then working as a San Francisco attorney.

As would be the case in so many personnel shifts to come, Nancy’s unseen hand was at work in replacing Smith with Weinberger. The Kitchen Cabinet had initially rejected the highly credentialed Weinberger, deeming him too liberal because he had committed the unpardonable sin of supporting Nelson Rockefeller over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Republican primary. Nancy was far less concerned with ideology than competence. With turmoil mounting, she worked her back channels of information, which included Spencer. Who, Nancy asked over and over, could straighten out this mess?

“She was still in a period of learning and frustration because she could see all this going down,” Spencer said. “I’m not sure she really knew who Cappy Weinberger was at that point in time, but she knew there had to be a change.” The first lady privately—and persistently—lobbied her husband on Weinberger’s behalf. He turned out to be supremely capable in the job, showing the fiscal toughness that would later earn him the nickname “Cap the Knife.”

A very different kind of dilemma presented itself in April 1967—one that Ronnie later described as the hardest call he had ever made. California was scheduled to carry out its first execution in four years. Set to die was a thirty-six-year-old black man named Aaron Mitchell, who had spent four years on San Quentin’s death row for murdering a policeman during the robbery of a restaurant. Ronnie was a supporter of the death penalty, but the former Rock River lifeguard struggled when the power was put in his hands to end or save a man’s life. Breaking with what his predecessors had done in earlier cases, the governor refused to attend Mitchell’s clemency hearing two days before the execution was scheduled and then ignited more criticism when he showed up at the Academy Awards that same night.

On the eve of the execution, eight-year-old Ron watched through the windows of the governor’s mansion as demonstrators held a silent all-night vigil outside. Her son found the scene “strange and eerie,” Nancy recalled later. “We tried to explain why Ronnie had made his decision, and why some people didn’t agree with it.” Just after ten o’clock on the morning of April 12, 1967, church bells rang out as cyanide began rising through the floor of the apple-green gas chamber where Mitchell was strapped to a chair. Nancy was still disturbed weeks later, telling a reporter it had all given her “a very uncomfortable feeling,” but she added: “I think it would be nice too if they rang church bells every time a man is murdered. It’s the same principle, it seems to me.” The backlash was intense. California would not carry out another execution for twenty-five years.

Two months later, Ronnie faced another moral quandary when the California legislature passed and presented to him legislation to lift most restrictions on abortion. The state was operating under a Victorian-era law that allowed the procedure only when necessary to save the life of the mother. It made no exception for pregnancies that occurred through rape or incest. The legislation that landed on Ronnie’s desk would make abortion legal if it was performed in the first twenty weeks of a pregnancy, took place in an accredited hospital, and was approved by a panel of qualified physicians. California’s would be the most liberal law in the country and included no residency requirement, which Ronnie said he feared would turn his state into “a haven” for women seeking abortions.

This was nearly six years before the US Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nationally. As recently as the 1950s, newspapers had considered the subject so indecent that they would refer to it in their pages only as an “illegal operation.” But public sentiment had begun to shift, driven by the feminist movement and by horror stories about the butchery that desperate women had suffered at the hands of practitioners who performed the procedure outside the law. A March 1967 survey by the respected California pollster Mervin Field found that more than two-thirds of Catholics supported loosening the restrictions on abortion. Nancy did not take a public stand on the legislation, though people on both sides of the debate assumed she supported it. She did suggest that Ronnie seek her father’s counsel, to get his perspective as a physician. Loyal Davis, though conservative on many issues, was in favor of legalizing abortion and was an influential voice as his son-in-law wavered. Ronnie changed his mind twice in the week before he signed the Therapeutic Abortion Act on June 15, 1967. A year later, Ronnie told Cannon that he would not have done so if he had not been so inexperienced as governor. It was, Cannon noted, “the only time as governor or president that Reagan acknowledged a mistake on major legislation.”

Turmoil on college campuses also became a running challenge. Ronnie had campaigned on “cleaning up the mess in Berkeley.” He moved quickly, just weeks after his inauguration, to engineer the firing of University of California president Clark Kerr, who had refused to crack down on massive student protests. The governor also squeezed the university system’s budget by 10 percent and proposed that it start charging tuition. Tensions only escalated, as antiwar demonstrations grew and became more violent. In 1969 a battle erupted between police and students who had taken over a 2.8-acre plot of university-owned land known as People’s Park.

The day would become known as Bloody Thursday after nearly sixty people were sent to the hospital with serious injuries. Ronnie declared a state of “extreme emergency” and dispatched more than two thousand National Guard troops into the Berkeley area. The following year, a mob at the University of California at