Authors: Bob Colacello
That summer, Reagan saw Nixon at the Bohemian Grove, the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco’s members and guests, an all-male event that went back to the 1870s and that in the postwar years had become the most important conclave of mainly Republican politicians and corporate chieftains in the country. The club’s secret membership was said to include such Reagan backers as Asa Call, Justin Dart, Earle Jorgensen, Leonard Firestone, and Northrop chairman Thomas V. Jones.
Barely a handful of staunchly conservative Hollywood people belonged—
Bing Crosby, Edgar Bergen, Art Linkletter. Bill Buckley was a guest of Senator George Murphy that year, and as Buckley’s biographer John Judis recounts: “At that gathering, Reagan and Nixon, who were both members, met frequently and agreed finally that Reagan would stay out of the primaries unless Nixon faltered.”115 Buckley, who had been actively courted by
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Nixon over the past year, had also begun a regular correspondence with Nancy Reagan at this time, and he may have influenced her cautious attitude about having her husband run.116
Ed Meese and Casper Weinberger also opposed a run, but Nofziger, Reed, and Clifton White, backed by the Kitchen Cabinet, pushed ahead.
As Rus Walton, a junior aide close to Clark, explained, “I think [Reagan]
was reluctant at first. I can’t pretend that I really know personally his inner thoughts. I think that he was had. I think what came into play were not necessarily his ambitions but other people’s ambitions. Maybe some of it was anti-Nixon. I don’t know. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think he pushed and shoved his way to get there in ’68. I think he was dragged rather than he led.”117
As far as Nofziger could tell, Reagan “believed that if God wanted him to be President He would see that it got done.”118 Usually accompanied by Nofziger and Reed, he began flying around the country giving speeches at GOP fund-raisers while maintaining that he was a “noncandidate.” When delegates to the South Carolina state convention in September started chanting, “Reagan ’68! Reagan ’68!” he gave them his best aw-shucks look, then blushed bright red before breaking into a great big grin that indicated how happy their chanting made him. Earlier in the year, he had agreed to debate Robert Kennedy, who had been elected to the Senate from New York after his brother’s death, on the CBS program
Town Meeting of the World
, and after standing up to intense questioning by European students about the Vietnam War, he emerged as the surprise victor. That fall, following in the footsteps of such heavyweights as Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson, he spent four days as a Chubb Fellow at Yale and again made a positive impression on those who were prepared to dismiss him as a dimwitted cowboy. After a brief visit to her alma mater, Smith College, Nancy joined him in New Haven—she wore a leopard coat over a bright green trapeze dress to one lecture—and the Reagans visited Bill and Pat Buckley at their weekend house in nearby Stamford.
By the end of 1967, Reagan had raked in some $1.5 million for the party, and a Gallup Poll of Republican county chairmen had him in second place after Nixon.119 “There is a very real possibility,” intoned Harry Reasoner on
CBS Reports
, “that Ronald Reagan, an actor who ran for his first public office just over a year ago, will be the next Republican candidate for president. This frightens some people and delights others. The 3 8 2
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House people who are delighted and those who are frightened are responding to the same feeling: that the man might go all the way.”120
To say 1968 was a tumultuous year in American politics is both an un-derstatement and a cliché. One shocking and calamitous event followed another, throwing the plans of candidates in both parties, including the sitting President himself, into constant disarray. For Reagan, the year began with a celebration: a $1,000-a-ticket ball in Sacramento co-chaired by Tuttle and Salvatori to congratulate their protégé on completing his first year as governor. At that point, President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey seemed all but certain to be renominated, and George Romney, backed by Nelson Rockefeller, who had vowed not to run again, was still Nixon’s strongest rival for the Republican nomination.
Then came the Tet Offensive on January 30, in which North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces attacked Saigon and thirty South Vietnamese provincial capitals. They were driven back after three weeks, but the sight of Communist fighters storming the American embassy on the evening news was enough to propel Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, the hero of the antiwar movement, to a near victory over Johnson in the March 12
New Hampshire primary. The next morning Robert Kennedy, realizing that the President was vulnerable, jumped into the race, and at the end of the month a worn-out LBJ gave up the fight. Vietnam also did in Governor Romney, who claimed he had been “brainwashed” by American generals and diplomats on a tour of the battlefields, a remark that sent his poll numbers into a free fall that ended with his withdrawal in late February.
Nixon now looked unassailable, unless Rockefeller made a move, or Reagan got serious. Maryland’s cagey Governor Spiro Agnew was trying to start a “Draft Rocky” movement and writing letters to Reagan urging him to sign on for the vice presidency.
The country was stunned once again on April 4, by the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis and the rioting that broke out almost immediately in Washington, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and more than a hundred other cities. With thirty-nine dead, twenty thousand arrested, and fifty thousand Army troops and National Guardsmen on the streets, the political climate heated up all the more. Alabama’s racist former governor George Wallace managed to get his third party registered in all fifty states; Hubert Humphrey stepped forward as the mainstream alternative to the liberal RFK and the peacenik
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McCarthy; Rockefeller decided to run after all; and Reagan got a little more serious by letting his name stay on the ballot in the May 28 Oregon primary. Nixon trounced him, 73 percent to 23 percent.121 A week later Reagan’s favorite-son slate was unopposed in the California primary, and Kennedy beat McCarthy decisively. Then, as the heir to Camelot exited his victory party through the Ambassador Hotel’s kitchen, he was shot by Sirhan B. Sirhan, a young Palestinian disgusted by Kennedy’s support of Israel in the Six Day War, and America turned upside down again.
This second Kennedy assassination seemed to have more of an effect on the Reagans than the first. It happened in their own city, in the very hotel where Reagan’s political career had been launched, and like the stricken Bobby, Ronnie was running for president. “It was a terrible tragedy that all Californians took to heart,” Nancy later wrote.122 Kathy Davis, Reagan’s secretary at the time, recorded her boss’s state of mind the following morning, when Kennedy’s condition was listed as extremely grave. The Governor looked as if he “had been up all night in front of the television. As I later found out he had. First, he asked me to reach Ethel Kennedy on the phone. I tried all day long and was never successful in getting through to her. I’m sure to this day that she doesn’t know that the Governor wanted to offer the services of his father-in-law, Dr. Loyal Davis, the world renowned neurosurgeon.”
Reagan’s secretary also typed a soothing letter he had handwritten to Patti that day, with a curious final paragraph that seems to refer to the seer Jeane Dixon: “Isn’t it strange, a few months ago our friend in Washington told me that she foresaw a tragedy for him before the election. She didn’t know whether it would be in the nature of illness or of accident, but that there would be a tragedy befall him.”123
RFK’s death made Nancy even more uncertain about the wisdom of pursuing the nomination. President Johnson ordered around-the-clock Secret Service protection for all the candidates, but Nancy still worried and kept track of every death threat, even though her husband tried to keep her from finding out about them.124 The King assassination had also shaken Nancy, as she and Ronnie had happened to be in Washington when the news broke, and witnessed the city go up in flames from their penthouse suite at the Madison Hotel. Reagan went ahead with his scheduled speech at the Women’s National Press Club, but they had to be escorted to the airport by National Guardsmen.125
The results of the California primary should have discouraged Reagan 3 8 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House for another reason: only 48 percent of the Republicans who turned out bothered to vote for his unopposed favorite-son slate.126 The previous week, a
San Francisco Chronicle
poll had shown that a paltry 30 percent of Californians thought he was doing a good job. Meanwhile, a petition to have him recalled had garnered two thirds of the 780,000 signatures needed to place the proposition on the ballot in November. Though it would ultimately fall short, this uprising in his own backyard was an embarrassment to Reagan at a time when he was attempting to make a good impression on the national stage. Aside from accusing him of being generally incompetent and endangering the state’s health programs and educational system, the petition charged, “Ronald Reagan is attempting to further his personal ambitions at the expense of the people of California.”127
But adversity had a way of energizing Reagan and bringing out his competitive side. As political operative Robert Walker observed, “When we got into the summer and things began to heat up, Reagan became considerably more enthusiastic about the possibility of being nominated. We were able to get him out of Sacramento more frequently for speeches. By the time he came to the convention in Miami Beach, a great deal of his reluctance had been overcome and he felt that lightning might strike and he would have to be ready.”128
When Goldwater wrote Reagan a letter in mid-June all but telling him to release his delegates and take the credit for clinching Nixon’s inevitable victory, Reagan dismissed his advice.129 When Rockefeller sent a secret emissary to Pacific Palisades in early July, Reagan assured him that he was
“in this race for keeps.”130 With the convention only a month away, the hope was that if the two governors from opposite ends of the party could keep Nixon from winning on the first ballot, the convention would break open and one of them might emerge the nominee.
Two weeks later, on July 19, Reagan took off in a chartered jet with Tuttle, the increasingly important French Smith, White, Reed, Nofziger, and
“all the reporters whom Nofizger could induce to come along” for a delegate-hunting swing through the South. Grassroots support was strong for Reagan in Dixie, but the powers that be, such as South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond and Texas senator John Tower, had been rounding up delegates for Nixon for months.131 As Tuttle remembered the tour, from Charlottesville to Amarillo, Reagan’s team heard the same refrain: “‘But is he going to run?’ And I said, ‘Well, look, fellows, you’re running if you are a “favorite son.”’ But they kept pressing: ‘Why doesn’t he come out and say,
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“I’m going to be a candidate”?’”132 Lou Cannon, who was on the trip, wrote, “Delegates in every state left me with the impression that Reagan was their emotional first choice but that the California governor’s official non-candidacy had persisted for so long that Nixon had become their intellectual commitment.”133
The Reagans arrived in Miami on Saturday, August 3, on a private plane chartered by Alfred Bloomingdale. The California delegation was housed at the Deauville Hotel. “For some reason, it had this terrible smell,” said Betsy Bloomingdale, who recalled that she had to lend Nancy an iron because the hotel staff “didn’t know how to press a dress properly.”134 On Sunday morning Reagan appeared on
Face the Nation
and reiterated that he was just a favorite-son candidate. He then spent the day being driven from hotel to hotel on Collins Avenue, seeking support from half a dozen state delegations. In between there was the Bloomingdales’ lunch on their chartered yacht, and later Jack and Bunny Wrather’s dinner at the Jockey Club
“for all the Kitchen Cabinet and Ron and Nancy.” Like many in the Reagan Group, Jack Wrather was worried about his friend’s chances. “I don’t know the best way to say it,” the oil-and-entertainment tycoon later confessed, “I just thought that [it] was a little early, that the situation wasn’t right for him . . . and I didn’t want to see him beaten.”135
The latest reports had Nixon anywhere from ten to fifty votes short of the 667 needed for the nomination.136 He had also pulled ahead of Rockefeller for the first time, in a Gallup Poll released that weekend. The New York governor retained his lead in the Harris Poll and bravely stuck to his line that only he could win in November against Humphrey or McCarthy.
Rockefeller’s entourage included his three brothers—David, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, Laurence, one of the country’s foremost con-servationists, and Winthrop, governor of Arkansas—as well as Professor Henry Kissinger of Harvard and the philanthropic widow Brooke Astor.
(Society reporter Charlotte Curtis of
The New York Times
reported that Mrs.
Astor had to cancel her private dinner dance “after complaints about its being scheduled at a beach club that excludes Jews and Negroes.”)137 The New York delegation was headquartered at the Americana Hotel, but Rocky and Happy spent much of their time at the Indian Creek Island home of Gardner Cowles, where the publisher’s very social second wife, Jan, got the New York and California groups together for cocktails and, presumably, a bit of stop-Nixon plotting. The Rockefellers and the Reagans knew each other 3 8 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House slightly from governors conferences, and Happy much preferred Ronnie to his wife. “They were so
different,”
she confided to me years later. “He was this big, warm, funny Irishman. And she was this, well, Birchite, as far as I was concerned. Now I think I was probably wrong.”138