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

He was building a political network across the country. More and more, his name was being mentioned as a potential presidential candidate in 1976. More and more, that was the door that fortune and opportunity seemed ready to open for him and Nancy.

CHAPTER EIGHT

From the very outset of Ronnie’s political career, his admirers had seen an aura of presidential inevitability around him. Ballots had barely been counted in the 1966 gubernatorial election before he was being talked up as a national prospect. Two days after he won, the lead story on the front page of the New York Times pronounced him one of his party’s four brightest hopes for 1968, along with Michigan governor George Romney, former vice president Richard M. Nixon, and Illinois senator elect Charles H. Percy. California’s film-star-turned-political-star, the Times wrote under a four-column headline, had become “without a day in office, the favorite presidential candidate of Republican conservatives.”

This was not just idle chatter among reporters and political handicappers. Though they would later refuse to admit it, Ronnie and Nancy began looking toward the White House even before he was inaugurated as governor. On a Thursday afternoon just nine days after his first election, a half dozen members of Ronnie’s political brain trust gathered in the Reagans’ living room. Among them were consultants Stu Spencer and Bill Roberts; their partner, Fred Haffner; press spokesman Lyn Nofziger; and Phil Battaglia, his incoming chief of staff. They were brought together by Tom Reed, who had been Ronnie’s Northern California chairman. Reed had a project in mind, something he was calling “Prairie Fire.” At those two words, Reed recalled, “Ronnie’s face hardened; he knew what was coming.”

Reed pushed on: “Lyndon Johnson is a disaster. Vietnam and our economy confirm that. Even so, given Johnson’s ego, he’ll surely run again in ’68. We cannot let him succeed. The Republicans on the horizon are all boring losers, Ron. You’ve got the talent and now the momentum to run and win two years from now. I want to start putting the pieces in place, to start collecting ’68 delegates and to plan for your election to the presidency.” They talked for hours, until the last rays of the sun sinking into the ocean streamed through the windows in Pacific Palisades. Ronnie gave what they all read as a tentative go-ahead for this presumptuous plan, though those involved would in retrospect understand that he approached it with equal measures of ambition and ambivalence. As her husband and his advisers strategized about which moneymen and national political talent to recruit, Nancy said almost nothing. Reed had the sense she was trying to absorb it all.

In fact, audacious as it was, this was a proposition that had been germinating for years. Back when Ronnie was still on the speaking circuit in 1962, his daughter Maureen had been among the early voices urging him to run for governor. “Mermie,” he wrote her, “I really appreciate your support, but if we’re going to talk about what could be, well, I could be President—ha, ha!—But of course, that’s not going to happen, is it?”

As the 1968 presidential primary season approached, the tricky part for Ronnie would be mounting a campaign for president without actually declaring that he was doing it. He was, after all, a new governor with plenty on his hands just learning how to do his day job. He was also enough of a realist to understand what a long shot a White House bid would be. Reed and the others settled on a strategy. They would get Ronnie’s name on the ballot in California as an ostensibly symbolic “favorite son.” His supporters could also put him in contention in states where there was an “opt-out” rule. In those states, he wouldn’t have to formally announce he was running, only demand that he be taken off the ballot if he wasn’t. Meanwhile, the new governor of California could travel the country, raising his national profile and connecting with influential officials and activists. Ronnie won conservative admirers wherever he went.

Liberals also began to get an inkling that he shouldn’t be underestimated. In May 1967 California’s brand-new Republican governor surprised pretty much everyone by besting New York’s young Democratic senator Robert F. Kennedy in a debate over the Vietnam War. It was broadcast by CBS and billed as a Town Meeting of the World. An estimated fifteen million people tuned in to watch these two politicians, the rising stars of the Left and the Right, field questions from a hostile audience of international students. Ronnie stood up for America, its morality and its role in the world, while Kennedy came off as meek and apologetic. RFK was purported to have said afterward: “Who the fuck got me into this?”

Not everyone on Ronnie’s team was enamored with his quiet project to put himself in the mix for the 1968 presidential nomination, or the subterfuge around it. When Ronnie asked Stu Spencer what he thought, his campaign strategist was blunt about his misgivings. Not only was the timing bad, Spencer said, but the political operation around the governor was simply not up to the task. He also warned Ronnie that there could be no such thing as a halfhearted campaign for president.

“You’ve got no idea how to get there,” Spencer told Ronnie.

“The office seeks the man,” Ronnie replied.

“That’s bullshit,” Spencer retorted. “If you want to be president of the United States, you’ve got to get it, and you’ve got to fight for it.”

As Ronnie wavered, with one foot in the race and one foot out, the 1968 election season took several twists that no one had anticipated. It turned out that all of their assumptions about how the election would play out were wrong. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, an antiwar candidate, challenged Johnson for the Democratic nomination and came surprisingly close to beating the incumbent president in the March 12 New Hampshire primary. Shortly after that, Robert F. Kennedy joined the race, which