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

dangerous state of mind” and would lead the country into needless conflict overseas. His words were amplified on Ford campaign ads. “I feel as if I have been stabbed,” Nancy told reporters at a news conference in Sacramento.

Edie called Goldwater in his Senate office and declared he would never be welcome at her house again. The precise words that Nancy’s mother pulled from her capacious vocabulary are a matter of some dispute. Her stepson, Dick, told author Bob Colacello that Edie called the senator from Arizona a “cocksucker,” while Kitty Kelley heard that she told him he was “a fucking horse’s ass.” Nancy allowed only that her mother had used some “very colorful language.” Edie’s fury at Goldwater eventually subsided, but her daughter never again felt the same about him.

Ronnie and Ford were still fighting it out for delegates into the 1976 GOP convention, which took place in August in Kansas City, Missouri. Though Ford was slightly ahead in the unofficial tallies, both of them were just short of the 1,130 votes it took to get the nomination. And everyone knew the situation was fluid. As Spencer put it: “Reagan really had the heart of the convention and the party, whether he had the votes or not.” But a sitting president has perquisites of office at his disposal. That summer, the nation had come together to celebrate its bicentennial. When a spectacular parade of tall ships sailed into New York Harbor on Independence Day, uncommitted delegates from New York and New Jersey were given the best vantage point imaginable—from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. A few days later, the Fords invited Mississippi GOP chairman Clarke Reed, a key powerbroker who had been leaning toward Ronnie, to meet Queen Elizabeth at a White House dinner during her July state visit. (The dinner is also remembered for an epic faux pas; when Ford escorted the queen onto the dance floor, the US Marine Band struck up the next song on its playlist, which, unfortunately, happened to be “The Lady Is a Tramp.”)

Few understood better than Nancy the strategic value of entertaining, and she seethed as she saw the Fords turn it to their advantage. “I’ve never known the White House to be used by either party the way it has been used in this campaign,” she said in an interview with Time magazine’s Bonnie Angelo. “The White House stands for something. I don’t think it should be concerned about uncommitted delegates—the dinner invitations, that sort of thing.” Nor had that been the only advantage that came with incumbency. Nancy envied how Betty Ford could step off Air Force One for political events looking fresh and lovely, while she spent the lean days of her husband’s campaign bouncing around the country on a yellow prop plane they called the Flying Banana, with rarely an opportunity to powder her nose or run a comb through her hair.

The 1976 campaign also put Nancy under a new kind of scrutiny. Amid the feminist movement and in the openness of the post-Watergate era, voters wanted to hear from potential first ladies on topics they had never been asked to discuss in the past. “There was a time, as recent as 1968, when all anybody wanted to know about a presidential candidate’s wife were her favorite recipes, her hobbies, whether she bought her clothes off the rack, and the ages of her children,” a front-page New York Times story by Judy Klemesrud noted. “But that was ’68. By 1972, household questions began to go the way of the butter churn, and nowadays the wives are questioned almost as intensely as their husbands are about the issues. They also have become fair game for intimate questions about their personal opinions and lives—a situation that some of them find both distasteful and unfortunate.”

Driving some of this new interest was the refreshing and unconventional style of the woman who was then living in the White House. As the Republican race heated up, Nancy found herself portrayed as the uptight, antifeminist foil to vivacious first lady Betty Ford, a onetime dancer and model. Though they both had backgrounds in show business, Betty and Nancy could hardly have been more different in temperament or image. The thoroughly modern first lady wore mood rings and danced to disco. She said that the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, which her husband had criticized, was “the best thing in the world.” Betty also acknowledged that her children had probably smoked marijuana, which she considered as harmless as her own generation’s underage experimentation with beer, and said she would have no objection if her daughter, Susan, engaged in premarital sex. Against the wishes of her husband’s advisers, she advocated for the Equal Rights Amendment, which would write into the US Constitution a prohibition against discrimination because of gender. After she gave a particularly controversial 60 Minutes interview in 1975, White House press secretary Ron Nessen told reporters: “The president has long since ceased to be perturbed or surprised by his wife’s remarks.”

Nor would it have done any good if he had. At an International Women’s Year Conference in Cleveland, Betty Ford declared that being first lady should not prevent her from holding and expressing her own views. “Why should my husband’s job, or yours, prevent us from being ourselves?” she said. “Being ladylike does not require silence.” She horrified some conservatives, but her overall popularity soared to 75 percent. During the 1976 campaign, there were bumper stickers and buttons that said: “Vote for Betty’s Husband.”

Nancy, on the other hand, never publicly gave any indication that she disagreed with her husband on anything. Which does not mean she didn’t. Her son, Ron, believes that Nancy, if she were voicing her own opinion, would not have opposed the ERA. “She’d have thought, ‘Well, that makes sense. Sure, that’s fine,’ ” he speculated. “A little in the same way that he was antiabortion, and she would kind of go along.… I think privately she was not