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

as a top Pentagon official. “At no time in American history had a political party deposed its sitting president and then won the ensuing national election. To many of us, it was Gerald Ford or a Democrat. On top of that, we liked Jerry. He was a friend doing the best he could in chaotic circumstances.”

Ford hired Stu Spencer—Ronnie’s own campaign manager—to run his 1976 election effort. As it happened, Spencer was in the market for a new gig. He had been out of Ronnie’s orbit for a while, alienated by what he called the “palace guard” that surrounded the governor during his years in Sacramento. The feeling within Ronnie’s circle toward him was mutual. Though Spencer had gotten an occasional request to help fix a problem here and there—a summons, he noted, which always came from Nancy—that had only created more friction with the men who had created the mess. “It was awkward at best to be called by the governor’s wife and told to straighten something out when you are an outsider,” he recalled later. “I did it a couple of times and made plenty of enemies.” Nor had Spencer endeared himself with the other handlers by discouraging Ronnie’s halfhearted effort to run for president in 1968.

So, when Ford’s White House chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, called in 1975 with an offer to take over the president’s troubled campaign operation, Spencer took it. As was the case with Reed, Spencer had a genuine affection for Ford. He didn’t like the idea of anyone running against an incumbent of his own party. Spencer also knew he had something the Ford campaign needed: “I don’t think, even to this day, the Ford people would admit it, but one of the biggest assets I brought to the table was that I was the only one who knew and understood Ronald Reagan. They (like so many before and after) thought he would be a pushover. They were certain this would be a cakewalk.”

Ford formally declared his candidacy on July 8, 1975. Three weeks later, on July 29, a delegation from the Kitchen Cabinet convened at Pacific Palisades to try to talk Ronnie out of what they saw as a foolhardy and destructive venture that would only ensure a Republican defeat. Among those present were Tuttle, industrialist Justin Dart Sr., and Reagan’s future attorney general William French Smith. Tuttle had already met at the White House with Doug Bennett, Ford’s personnel director, to discuss swinging his support to the president. He and the others told Ronnie bluntly that they would not raise money for him. Tuttle reported back to Reed that Ronnie had been “shocked” by their declaration that they planned to defect. Reed, who was keeping tabs on things from Washington, wrote in his journal on August 22, 1975: “Nerve endings very raw in California.”

The Reagan team had already lost Spencer, whose political judgment Nancy trusted more than anyone else’s. A rebellion by Ronnie’s earliest and staunchest supporters could have killed his campaign before it even got off the ground. So, Nancy went to work on them, badgering them on the phone and in person. “She just did every dinner party in Los Angeles. She’d say, ‘Ronnie really needs to run, and you really need to support him,’ ” Reed said. “They got the Chinese water torture from Nancy.”

Her persistence worked. As Reed recalled: “Nancy tipped the balance. During the summer of ’75, she badgered ‘the boys’ until, by September of that year, many of them had changed their minds and come aboard.” Ford’s dismayed campaign team saw its hoped-for allies, the ones who could cut off the oxygen from a Reagan insurgency, slipping back to Ronnie one by one. Of them, only Henry Salvatori stood with Ford on the principle that a primary challenge to an incumbent president would be a death blow to any hopes of holding the White House.

Knowing he would for the first time be running a campaign without Spencer mapping his battle plan, Ronnie decided to go for Washington expertise. It came in the form of John Sears, a prematurely gray, thirty-five-year-old Nixon campaign veteran. Sears had first met the Reagans over dinner in 1974. He began to win their confidence when he predicted correctly how things would turn out for Nixon with Watergate and made the argument that this could open a path for Ronnie. “They were all thinking that Nixon was going to survive this Watergate thing,” Sears told me. “And I told them no, he wasn’t going to survive, he’d be out of office by the fall, and Ford would be president. But he’d be a unique kind of incumbent, because nobody had ever voted for him, and, therefore, it would be possible to run against him. Even though Ford would be president, they shouldn’t give up the idea of possibly taking a look at it. And that turned out to be the case, so probably my stock went up at that point.”

As Ronnie’s intentions grew more serious in 1975, Sears got to know Nancy over a series of lunches. She found him bright and fascinating to listen to. He seemed as sophisticated about politics as anyone she had ever met. Nancy also liked the fact that Sears was not a conservative ideologue, like so many of those around her husband. The only thing that bothered both her and Ronnie about the new campaign manager was his demeanor, which they found inscrutable. “He looks you in the tie,” Ronnie said. “Why won’t he look at me?”

Nancy poured out her anxieties about the endeavor to Sears, and he soon learned her priorities. “She wanted this done properly [with regard to] his image. They were from the movie business, and image was everything. What people thought of you, being the good guy and all that, was very important to her,” Sears recalled. “She never messed around with issues or tried to get involved in any of that, but if anything was being done that might damage his