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

get her husband’s attention. “Ronnie, Jim is leaving the plane,” she said. “Ronnie, you need to talk to Jim now.” Allen thought to himself: “What in God’s name have we got going here?”

Baker claimed he was dumbstruck when he was asked to run the White House. “I don’t think anybody ever has picked as their chief of staff someone who ran two campaigns against them, and I’m damn sure nobody will ever do so in the future,” he said. One of the first pieces of advice he got was from Spencer: “Now, Jimmy, you call him every day. Because don’t count on him to call you. You call him every day.” In his years running the White House, Baker would come to appreciate the wisdom of that counsel. Baker also figured out that Ronnie’s introverted, sometimes distant nature made Nancy all the more critical, and an indispensable ally. “He didn’t really have a lot of close friends. His close friend was Nancy,” Baker said. “Her role was really large. It was subsurface, but really important.”

In offering him the job, Ronnie had but one demand of Baker: “I want you to make it right with Ed.” That would take some doing. Under an arrangement that Baker worked out with Meese in the days after the election, they agreed that the top leadership in the White House would be divided between the two of them plus Deaver. It was an unusual—and, it turned out, problematic—distribution of power that became known as the “troika.” Meese got the title of counselor to the president and Cabinet rank. Deaver was assistant to the president, in charge of, as he put it, “Reagan’s personal and political needs, and acting when needed as an honest broker between Baker and Meese.”

When Spencer found out about the three-way power-sharing arrangement, he was appalled. Baker was to be chief of staff, Spencer argued, which meant he should be the boss. Meese, he thought, was better suited to be attorney general and out of the White House entirely. “I blew my cork,” Spencer told me. “I said, ‘Oh, Jesus, here we go.’ ” Many battles over the next four years found pragmatists Baker and Deaver—and Nancy—aligned against the more ideological Meese. As William Clark, who became national security adviser, once put it: “The real troika, frankly, in the White House, in the opinion of many, would be Nancy, Baker, and Deaver.”

Election Day finally came. November 4, 1980, dawned bright and warm in Pacific Palisades, with a hint of smog in the air. Nancy and Ronnie, accompanied by a horde of press, headed for the ranch-style home of stockbroker Robert Gulick and his wife, Sally, which was the Precinct No. 1376 polling place where they had voted for nearly a quarter century. Ronnie wore a casual checked shirt, open at the neck; Nancy, a tartan-plaid dress with a perky bow at the collar. Poll workers set out jars of Ronnie’s favorite candy, jelly beans, and clamored for his autograph. He held up his ballot for the photographers who crowded to get a shot, and when a reporter asked him for whom he had voted, Ronnie replied: “Nancy.” The candidate demurred that he was too superstitious to answer another question, which was whether he expected a victory. Nancy nudged him and whispered, “Cautiously optimistic.” This time Ronnie ignored the cue from his wife.

Their children Ron and Patti were also registered to vote there—he as a Democrat, and she, apparently making an ironic statement, as a member of the right-wing American Independent Party that had supported former Alabama governor George Wallace. Reporters noted that neither had cast a ballot by the time their parents voted. Patti later dropped hers in the box without punching a hole in it. “I couldn’t vote for my father. I thought he was wrong on everything,” she recalled. “But I couldn’t vote against him because that would have taken more courage than I had right then. So I did nothing, which is probably about as cowardly as you can get.”

The plan had been to spend election night as they always did. Nancy’s pals Earle and Marion Jorgensen would throw a dinner at their home in Bel Air. They would invite the circle of close friends who had been there after the polls closed in 1966 and 1970. The Tuttles would come, and the Wicks, and the Bloomingdales, and the Darts, and the Annenbergs. The Jorgensens would serve the same menu as always: veal stew and coconut cake, both Ronnie’s favorites. From the Jorgensens’, everyone would go to the Century Plaza Hotel to spend the evening awaiting the returns. The difference in the ritual this time was that the Secret Service had checked out the Jorgensens’ house days before and placed telephones throughout.

A few minutes after five o’clock Pacific time—eight o’clock on the East Coast, where the polls were already closing—the Reagans began to get ready. Nancy was taking a bath, and Ronnie was in the shower. There was no rush, they thought. Voting in California would be open for another two hours. But then from the television in the bedroom, Nancy heard NBC Nightly News anchor John Chancellor proclaim that it looked like Ronnie was going to win in a landslide. Nancy leaped out of the tub, wrapped a towel around herself, and banged on the shower door. Ronnie emerged and grabbed his own towel as they ran to the TV set. There they stood, both of them soaking wet, as they heard the race being called for Ronnie.

Then the phone rang. It was Jimmy Carter, calling to concede and to congratulate the fortieth president of the United States.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Washington looked toward the arrival of the Reagans with equal measures of wariness and fascination. Nancy recognized an opportunity to be seized in a city where the political hierarchy intertwined with the social one. As one unnamed Reagan aide told the Washington Post: “We want to avoid Jimmy Carter’s fatal mistake. He never