The Triumph of Nancy Reagan Karen Tumulty (motivational novels .TXT) 📖

benefited. Older people, who often feel lonely, unneeded, and unloved, have so much to give—especially to children, who need more love and attention than any institution can provide,” she said. “When you bring these two groups together, each one provides what the other needs, and everyone is better off.” Nancy convinced Ronnie to expand the program to all state hospitals and continued to champion it through her years in the White House. By 1985, there were 245 Foster Grandparents projects serving sixty-five thousand children across the country.

The California first lady was especially conscientious about visiting wounded Vietnam servicemen. “She never just flipped from bed to bed—she’d spend hours. She got phone numbers of their sweethearts and their mothers and would go home and call them,” said her frequent traveling companion Nancy Reynolds, who herself would often have to leave the room because she couldn’t take the sight of the young men’s grievous injuries. Nancy was struck, too, by how the attitudes of the returning veterans began to shift—from a conviction in 1967 and 1968 that they had sacrificed for a just cause, to a growing bitterness in later years that the war that had cost them so much was unwinnable. This drew her as well to the wives, mothers, and children of the servicemen who were being held as prisoners of war by North Vietnam. She wrote a syndicated advice column and donated the money she made from it to the National League of Families of American Prisoners of War and Missing in Action. When the POWs started coming home in early 1973, following a peace agreement ending hostilities between the United States and Communist North Vietnam, Nancy organized a series of dinners for returning Californians. “If I don’t have a chance to put my arms around them, I’m going to pop,” she told Ronnie.

They became close to one returning POW in particular: future Arizona senator John McCain, and his first wife, Carol. As Carol told the story to me, the McCains were at a reception at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, when a woman introduced herself as Nancy Reynolds, and said her boss, the governor of California, would like to meet the McCains. “As luck would have it, we were going to LA,” where the Reagans spent their weekends, “so we went to their home, and we just struck up a friendship,” Carol McCain said. “They were just such lovely people. You couldn’t help but be crazy about them.”

Nancy would later say that celebrating the return of the POWs was one of the most gratifying things she had ever done. She saved all the souvenirs the newly freed men gave her: letters, poems, a tin spoon once used for prison rations, a pair of lieutenant’s bars, a package of Vietnamese cigarettes. “When anyone asks me what was the high point of my husband’s administration, I tell them this was it,” she said.

By then, the Reagans were near the end of Ronnie’s second term as governor. He knew he would not run again, but what he would do beyond that remained unclear. He bought a third ranch, this one a 688-acre retreat twenty-nine miles northwest of Santa Barbara, for which he paid a reported $527,000 in 1974. It was located at the end of seven miles of road that twisted upward into the Santa Ynez Mountains to reveal a view of the Pacific. Though it had been called Tip Top Ranch, the Reagans rechristened it Rancho del Cielo, a Spanish phrase that means “Ranch in the Sky.” It had a tiny adobe house, which had been built in 1872 and was badly in need of work. But the prospect of devoting countless hours to making it perfect only added to Ronnie’s love of the spot. “From the first day we saw it, Rancho del Cielo cast a spell on us. No place before or since has ever given Nancy and me the joy and serenity it does,” Ronnie wrote in his post-presidential memoir.

Figuring out what he wanted to do professionally was more of a challenge. Lou Cannon conducted several interviews with the governor in 1973 and 1974: “Each time Reagan came across as conflicted. Should he run for president? Should he return to what he called ‘the mashed potato circuit’ and make millions of dollars as an inspirational speaker? Should he retire, with Nancy, to his ranch? At different times, he expressed all three things—and at the same time.”

Ronnie’s tenure as governor ended on a bitter note. In the wake of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal and his resignation, the 1974 election saw a nationwide Democratic sweep. In California, voters chose as their new governor Jerry Brown, the son of the man that Ronnie had beaten eight years before. After the movers packed up the Reagans’ house in Sacramento, Nancy sat alone in the bedroom and looked out at the camellias blooming in the garden she had come to love. “I thought, ‘So this is how it ends. Our eight years of politics are over.’ True, some of Ronnie’s advisers were talking about Ronnie’s running for president, but I didn’t really expect that to happen. As we left Sacramento that night, I honestly believed we were leaving politics forever.”

But for a while, at least, the big decisions could wait. There was still the imperative of earning a living. When the Reagans moved back to Los Angeles, Deaver set up a public relations firm in Westwood, not far from Pacific Palisades, with a partner, Peter D. Hannaford. Ronnie was their chief client. Hannaford and Deaver sold and helped write Ronnie’s nationally syndicated column, which was quickly picked up by more than 170 newspapers, and daily, sharp-edged radio commentary, which was carried by 350 stations reaching as many as fifteen million people. Deaver also traveled with Ronnie to lucrative speaking engagements, where the former governor could command $5,000 fees—big money in those days.

Soon it became clear that the pieces were falling into place for something much, much bigger. Ronnie’s profile was rising.