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

debate scheduled as close to the election as possible. He assumed—incorrectly, it turned out—that the American hostages being held in Tehran would soon be released, lifting Carter’s fortunes. He wanted Ronnie to have a chance to make his closing argument after that happened, not before. The two sides agreed the candidates would meet to debate on October 28, a week before the election, in Cleveland.

Baker also managed the debate rehearsals, which took place in the garage at Wexford. David Stockman, a Michigan congressman whom Ronnie would later appoint his first budget director, played Carter. Conservative columnist George Will acted the role of a reporter asking questions. It was a blatantly unethical move on Will’s part. Though he had made it clear in his columns for the Washington Post and Newsweek that he supported Ronnie, Will did not disclose that he was working with the campaign. In postdebate television commentary, he pronounced the Republican nominee to have given a “thoroughbred performance,” as though he had had nothing to do with it. “I was misbehaving,” Will conceded in an interview with me decades later.

Nancy, however, was instantly enamored with this erudite young rogue from the fourth estate. “Jim Baker had asked me to write something, so I was sitting at a typewriter, which tells you how long ago it was,” Will recalled. “Someone came up behind me and tousled my hair, and it was her. She tousled my hair and said, ‘Oh, I see we brought in the varsity.’ She was a great flirt.” So began a great friendship. Over the coming years, Nancy and Will would become so tight that Washington insiders thought they heard Nancy’s voice at times in Will’s columns.

Though Ronnie had been leading in the polls going into the debate, his better-than-expected performance helped nail down his victory. When he walked onstage, Barbara Bush, the wife of his running mate, leaned over to Nancy and whispered that Ronnie’s makeup looked better than Carter’s. “Ronnie never wears makeup,” Nancy replied with a touch of annoyance. In fact, Deaver had given him a glass of wine before he went on, to add “a little color to his cheeks.”

Carter flubbed an answer on nuclear weapons by noting that he had discussed the issue with his daughter, Amy, who had just turned thirteen. (“Ask Amy” signs popped up at Republican rallies shortly thereafter.) Ronnie scored with two memorable lines near the end. When Carter noted Ronnie’s early opposition to Medicare and suggested he might stand in the way of efforts to fix the health care system, Ronnie flattened him with a dismissive “There you go again.” The capper, however, was Ronnie’s closing statement. He looked into the television camera and asked the country: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the store than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago?”

As victory looked more and more certain, the time arrived to begin talking about what came next. About three weeks before the election, Spencer and Deaver decided to raise a delicate issue with the Reagans. If there was ever a president who would need a top-notch chief of staff, it was Ronnie, whose detached management style would leave room for all kinds of chaos. Loyal Ed Meese, who had held the job in California and who could channel Ronnie’s beliefs better than anyone else, assumed that it would be him. So did most everyone else. Meese was already passing around an organization chart he had drawn with his own name as chief of staff. But as Meese’s bulging briefcase attested, organization was not his strong suit. “If you wanted a document to disappear, you’d give it to Ed,” Nancy said. Moreover, she viewed him as too much of an ideologue, one of those she described as “so rigid in their beliefs that they’d rather lose than win a partial victory.”

When Spencer broached the subject of who they might consider to run the White House staff, he was surprised when both Nancy and Ronnie replied, “Oh, no, not Ed.” Spencer and Deaver would each later claim to be the one who first raised the idea of naming James Baker. However it came about, it was an unlikely move. The Reagans did not know the fifty-year-old Baker well, and until he took over organizing for the debate, their experience with him was largely as an adversary. Baker, who came from one of Houston’s old-line families, had served as chairman of Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign in its later stages and had run Bush’s operation in the 1980 primary. As Baker noted, “I had managed two hard-fought battles to deny Ronald Reagan his party’s nomination—one successful, the other not.”

Spencer and Deaver arranged to have him travel with the Reagans in the final days before the election, just to see how things went. “Nobody in the campaign, except Deaver and I, knew why Baker was suddenly on the plane,” Spencer recalled. The polished, personable Texan quickly developed a chemistry with Nancy. “Jim Baker is a gentleman. River Oaks, Houston. Princeton, and all that stuff, and dressed well, and she liked that because in politics you don’t always run around with that kind of person,” Will observed. Baker was also the kind of pragmatist who made Nancy comfortable, and he was self-assured enough to tease her, putting her at ease. Nancy decided he was perfect for the chief of staff job. “She was the one who had pushed it more than anybody else,” Baker said later.

Baker’s temporary stint on the campaign plane was ending, and as he was preparing to get off, Nancy decided it was time to seal the deal. The campaign’s foreign-policy adviser, Richard Allen, noticed her frantically trying to