Authors: Bob Colacello
“That article hugely affected how Nancy Reagan responded to the press,” said Betsy Bloomingdale’s daughter-in-law Justine. “Betsy told me that Nancy was just stunned by the way she was ripped up one end and down the other. It was the first time she had been excoriated like that.” As it happened, Justine’s sister Serena Carroll was taking a writing course taught by Joan Didion at UCLA that summer. “She talked about interviewing Nancy Reagan—repeatedly—and about how
cold
she was,” Carroll told me.
“Joan Didion
intensely
disliked Nancy Reagan.”56
Apparently Didion wasn’t alone. An article published a year earlier in 3 6 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the
California News Reporter
summed up the contradictory impressions people had of the controversial First Lady:
She is a beautiful, charming, talented lady, a devoted mother and wife, a warm, friendly, gentle and unpretentious human being with a deep interest in flowers, art, animals and music, a frail and un-complaining little girl out of place in the rough-and-tumble world of politics.
Or—she is an ambitious, shrewd, domineering woman, a cold and brittle professional actress, a self-centered, demanding and determined extrovert, the cleverly-concealed but constant driving force behind a husband of far less social and political ambition.57
Underlying much of the criticism of Nancy during her first two years in Sacramento was the feeling that, as Bill Boyarsky writes in
The Rise of
Ronald Reagan
, “Mrs. Reagan had considerable influence in running the state government.” Boyarsky had been covering Reagan for the Associated Press since 1965, and later recounted being in the Governor’s office one day early in the first term when Nancy happened to call. Apparently Gordon Smith, Reagan’s ill-fated first finance director, had said something in a speech that contradicted a previous statement by the Governor. As Boyarsky listened, after several “Yes, dears,” Reagan told his wife, “No, dear, I don’t think he was being insubordinate.”58
Lou Cannon, the capital correspondent for the
San Jose Mercury News
in those days, recalled a similar phone call from Nancy after the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver had made derogatory and threatening remarks about Reagan. “But, honey,” the Governor was overheard saying, “I can’t have him arrested just because he said those things.” Cannon was one of the first to make note of The Gaze, though he didn’t use the term. “The adoration that Nancy displays for her husband is publicly expressed every time she watches a Reagan speech,” he writes in
Ronnie and Jesse
, which was published in 1969. “During these moments, while other Reagan fans alternately applaud or laugh at the governor’s one-liners, Nancy composes her features into a kind of transfixed adoration more appropriate to a witness of the Virgin Birth.” In Cannon’s estimation, Nancy was “the most formidable personality of the Reagan administration.”59
When Reagan was asked by Harry Reasoner if he discussed major decisions with his wife, he was more frank than his aides may have wanted
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him to be. “We have no secrets,” Reagan told the CBS newsman. “She usually knows what’s on my mind and knows what’s bothering me. She also, I think, knows by now . . . that a lot of my thinking is done out loud.
So she usually hears a few different approaches to it, and suddenly one hits, and that’s the script we go with.” Reasoner also asked Nancy about the common perception that she was behind her husband’s conversion to conservatism. “No, that’s just not true at all,” she answered, looking directly at him and smiling sweetly. “My husband is not that weak a man.
And I’m not that strong a woman.”60
Reagan tended to dismiss criticism of himself as just so many bad reviews; it was box office he cared about. But, as he explained in another 1967 TV interview, his wife had the “greatest sense of loyalty” of almost anyone he knew, especially when it came to her family. “She mans the barricades when the attacks start,” he said with an admiring chuckle,
“whether it’s editorially, or a cartoon, or a fight here in the legislature, or someone making a statement on some controversy that we’re engaged in.
I have to bar the door every once in a while or she’ll march forth and do battle.”61
The Governor’s wife wasn’t above canceling their subscription to the relentlessly critical
Sacramento Bee
, or calling the publisher of the
Los Angeles
Times
at home to complain about yet another Paul Conrad cartoon making fun of her husband. Reagan’s assistant press secretary, Nancy Reynolds, who was assigned to travel with the First Lady, remembered that on their very first trip her charge lit into a fellow passenger. “I was sitting next to her,”
Reynolds said, “and right behind us was some guy who was tearing into Reagan’s budget. She flipped that seat back, damn it, and turned around to him and said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about—
that’s my husband
—
and you don’t have the facts right!’ Well, you can imagine, this guy was so
stunned
that he was like a fish. He never said another word. Then she flipped the seat back up and just sat there until we landed in L.A.”62
Reynolds, who had covered politics for the CBS affiliate in San Francisco before being hired by Lyn Nofziger, learned early on that the Governor would not tolerate the slightest questioning of his wife’s judgment.
“The first week Reagan was Governor, I had set up an interview with a TV
reporter from L.A., and I had him waiting in a room. I walked out into the hall and there was Nancy Reagan with Curtis Patrick, a young man who worked for the Governor. They were discussing something she wanted off the wall, and he was saying, ‘Gee, I don’t think we should do this.’ She 3 6 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House said, ‘I want this taken down, and I want that put up.’ I was afraid the reporter would hear this—it wasn’t anything bad, but for some reason I thought, Oh, gee. So I went into the Governor’s office, and I said, “Governor, Mrs. Reagan is out in the hall with Curtis Patrick, and they’re having a lively discussion about the placement of something. I thought since we have a TV reporter in the next room, you might want to step out and tell Mrs. Reagan that there’s somebody down the hall.’ He looked at me in amazement and said, ‘You must be mistaken. Nancy would never say or be in a position to cause any problem.’ I realized from that moment that I was mistaken, and that he would always see her as he really thought about her—as the perfect wife and mother.”63
The biggest crisis of Reagan’s first year in office came in the summer of 1967, when he was forced to fire Phil Battaglia because of rumors that he was the leader of a “homosexual ring” on the Governor’s staff. These charges were never proven, and, because Battaglia was married and had two adopted children, it was reported that he was leaving to return to his law practice. All this was actually the result of a coup against the egotistical and aggressive chief of staff led by Tom Reed, Lyn Nofziger, and Bill Clark, the Governor’s appointments secretary, who would take Battaglia’s job. “Battaglia behaved as if he ran the place,” Lou Cannon later observed. “And some reporters sarcastically called him ‘deputy governor’ before Nofziger began using this phrase. My opinion at the time was that Battaglia patronized Reagan. He acted as if he were smarter than his boss.”64
Battaglia had raised suspicions by the keen interest he took in Jack Kemp—the Buffalo Bills quarterback (and future congressman) who was working on the Governor’s staff during his off-season that year—with whom he bought a cabin at Lake Tahoe. Kemp denied any sexual involvement with Battaglia. Battaglia was also close to the Governor’s young scheduler, Richard Quinn, which added to the speculation about “homosexual activities,” in Nofziger’s words. “My concerns were purely political and they had to do with Reagan,” Nofziger claimed. “Because he came out of the Hollywood scene, where homosexuality was almost the norm, I . . . feared that rumors would insinuate that he, too, was one. In those days that would have killed him politically.”65
Reed, Nofziger, and Clark tried to bug Battaglia’s office, had him and Kemp followed, and tracked them to a San Francisco hotel, only to discover that they stayed in separate rooms. Still, they were convinced that
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3 6 7
some kind of “hanky panky” was going on, and produced a report to give to Reagan that was mostly based on circumstantial evidence. Reed, who by then had returned to his real estate development business, informed Tuttle and French Smith that the Governor was facing a “Walter Jenkins situation,” referring to the 1964 scandal surrounding the arrest of a close adviser to President Johnson in a YMCA men’s room.66
Reagan was surprised when Tuttle, French Smith, and nine of his top aides came to see him in late August at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, where he was recuperating from a minor prostate operation. Reed said that Reagan “initially made excuses for Battaglia, suggesting he had been ill or under strain.”67 After an hour, however, according to Nofziger,
“Reagan agreed that Battaglia and Quinn would have to go.”68 But he wouldn’t confront Battaglia himself; he had Holmes Tuttle do it for him the next day. “You know who fired Phil Battaglia? Dad,” Robert Tuttle told me. “I remember hearing raised voices downstairs at our house in Hancock Park. Phil was trying to get a judgeship out of it, and my father told him, ‘Phil, when you walk out that door, you are no longer employed by Governor Reagan.’ ”69
Instead of disappearing, Battaglia remained in Sacramento and began using his Reagan connections on behalf of clients. Nofziger recalled,
“Battaglia’s behavior infuriated Nancy Reagan,” who asked in exasperation,
“Why doesn’t someone do something about Phil?” Nofziger set about “destroying Battaglia’s credibility” by confiding the details of his demise to several reporters he thought he could trust. In late September,
Newsweek
ran a blind item referring to a “top GOP presidential prospect” who had a “potentially sordid scandal on his hands,” and a month later syndicated columnist Drew Pearson broke the story. Pearson inaccurately claimed that Reagan’s security chief had a tape recording of a “sex orgy” at the Lake Tahoe cabin, and ominously asserted, “The most interesting speculation among political leaders in this key state of California is whether the magical charm of Governor Ronald Reagan can survive the discovery that a homosexual ring has been operating in his office.”70
Reagan denied the story with increasing indignation at his weekly press conferences well into November, despite articles in
The New York Times
and the
Washington Star
stating that Nofziger had indeed talked to at least three journalists. Nancy was so mad at Nofziger for mishandling the situation that she refused to speak to him for five months. She had never really approved of the press secretary because of his rumpled appearance, and 3 6 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House now she conspired with Stu Spencer, Tuttle, and Salvatori to get him fired.
Nofziger finally offered to resign, telling the Governor, “I’m tired of Nancy cutting me up. . . . It just isn’t worth it.” Reagan replied that Nancy was doing no such thing, and persuaded Nofziger to stay through the 1968 elections. “Those who think that Ronald Reagan is run by Nancy should know that almost immediately I ceased hearing about demands that I be fired,”
he later wrote. “In fact, it wasn’t long before she and I were back on speaking terms, where we have pretty much remained ever since.”71
This was apparently an instance where Reagan put his foot down with his wife, but even though she had to wait several more months, in the end she got her way. And the campaign against Nofziger may have continued without his knowing it. “We’d get phone calls from Henry Salvatori after he had seen Nofziger on the six o’clock news with his tie down and hair messed up,” said Battaglia’s successor, Bill Clark. “ ‘Can’t you straighten him up?’ Henry would say. I heard that from several of the Kitchen Cabinet—almost in concert. ‘Think about it for a moment,’ I’d say, ‘with Lyn standing there disheveled, doesn’t it make Ron look better?’ ”72
Battaglia’s downfall led to the rise of the team that would follow Reagan all the way to Washington: William P. Clark, Edwin Meese III, and Michael Deaver. As the Governor’s new chief of staff, Clark, a thirty-five-year-old county lawyer and rancher who loved horseback riding, would become closer to Reagan than any other aide. In 1969, when he was appointed to a judgeship, he was succeeded by Ed Meese, a former prosecu-tor from Oakland who had been the Governor’s legal affairs adviser. Mike Deaver served as deputy chief of staff to both Clark and Meese in Sacramento, where he became the personal favorite and political ally of Nancy Reagan. Then there was Helene von Damm, the Austrian-born dynamo who started out as Clark’s secretary and then became Reagan’s. Nancy Reynolds, who would grow as close to the First Lady as Deaver, completed the Reagan team.
“Ronald Reagan was the sweetest, kindest, most wonderful man to work for,” Reynolds told me. “One of the great things about him was that he never equated disagreement with disloyalty. That was really important, because Mike and Lyn and I and many others could disagree with him even on policy matters. He would listen and then he’d argue back. He’d say, ‘Well, now here’s why I believe such-and-such.’ Or, ‘This is what I’m
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thinking.’ And yet when you parted, you knew he’d never say, ‘Sounds like disloyalty to me.’ ”73
The low-key, soft-spoken Clark brought an openness and calm to the Governor’s office that had been missing under the controlling, peripatetic Battaglia. A fourth-generation Californian and churchgoing Catholic with a German wife and five kids, Clark had been raised as a “Jeffersonian Democrat” but changed parties in 1964 because he was impressed with the Goldwater message. He had met Reagan—on horseback, appropriately enough—when he managed his campaign in Ventura County in 1966. Both men were asked to join Rancheros Vistadores, the private riding club of which Justin Dart and Bill Wilson were long-standing members. Clark invented the “mini-memo” for Reagan, “a form of communication which the Governor liked very much—one page, four paragraphs, which started the discussion in cabinet meetings,” he explained.