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

Just three weeks into primary season, on March 31, LBJ stunned the country by announcing that he would not seek reelection. Johnson’s loyal vice president, Hubert Humphrey, entered the contest on April 27 and became the front-runner, propelled by Democratic establishment support in states where party leaders controlled the delegate selection process. Then in June came another shock: on the night Robert F. Kennedy won the crucial California primary, he fell to an assassin’s bullet. After Kennedy’s murder, Ronnie and all the other presidential candidates were assigned Secret Service protection.

The contest for the Republican nomination was fierce as well. As it took shape, the moderate Romney collapsed, and former vice president Richard M. Nixon surged. Nixon nailed down the South with an assist from his ally South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, a segregationist who had switched from the Democratic Party to the Republicans in 1964. Meanwhile, another segregationist, former Alabama governor George Wallace, ran on a third-party ticket, appealing to many of the same white conservatives that Ronnie did.

All of this turmoil turned the GOP race into a battle for the soul of Republicanism—a three-way one pitting Ronnie against both Nixon and liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. It ended with a monumental embarrassment for Ronnie at the 1968 convention in Miami, where Nixon arrived just short of the 667 delegates he needed to win on the first ballot. Ronnie and Rockefeller made an informal, ill-conceived pact to try to stop Nixon by peeling away uncommitted delegates from the Left and the Right. It failed spectacularly, and Ronnie ended up seconding Nixon’s nomination. He retreated back to Sacramento with his reputation tarnished.

As Reed sensed, Nancy had harbored reservations about this gambit from the start. With the political landscape so turbulent and Ronnie so new to politics, it was “way too early for this kind of thinking,” she told her husband and Deaver. But she took away an important lesson. “For Nancy, the convention fiasco served as confirmation of her own political antennae. After Miami, she would never again hold back her opinion on major political decisions, whatever the Gipper might be thinking,” Deaver wrote.

Both Ronnie and Nancy would later act as if none of this had ever happened. “Ronnie never sought the nomination in 1968,” Nancy insisted in her 1980 memoir. She claimed the episode was “more misrepresented than almost anything Ronnie has ever done.” Her husband made the preposterous statement that running in 1968 “was the last thing on my mind.”

Those statements flabbergasted Reed, but they also revealed something fundamental about the Reagans: their compulsion to rewrite every story that did not have a happy ending. “I had met with Reagan over 100 times in the company of others, often his wife, to discuss this project. We also consulted privately on another 21 occasions for one-on-one talks about the most sensitive aspects of our drive. I accompanied Reagan on dozens of politically funded flights on a chartered Jet Commander to meet with backers in our intended primary states, to talk with governors whom we might select as a running mate, or to solicit support from delegation members in swing-state Texas and the Thurmond-dominated South. When Lyndon Johnson later withdrew from, and Bobby Kennedy entered the Democratic contest in March 1968, we moved up to a chartered 727 jet to accommodate over 40 members of the traveling press,” Reed wrote. “How—or perhaps more accurately, why—did all of this campaigning slip the future president’s recall? That is a significant question, since Reagan’s proclivity to erase bad news from his memory remains an enigma to this day.”

The other thing that both Reagans would take away from 1968 was this: if Ronnie wanted to be president, he would have to go all in. He and Nancy would not be the first to come away from a defeat with a better understanding of what it was going to take to win. As his biographer Edmund Morris put it, “The experience was good for a man who had always come easily by success. It toughened him, carved a few more seams contrary to the laugh lines, made him warier of hustings hustlers like Nofziger. He learned to pay more attention to his own ‘feel’ for the mood of American voters.”

As Ronnie and Nancy mapped out what the future might hold for them, family life for the Reagans remained as complicated as ever. Young Ron, the only one still at home, was a natural charmer who could always find a way to make his mother laugh. Ronnie taught his youngest to swim and ride, as he had the other three. And Ronnie’s work was keeping him nearby, which meant the son they called Skipper saw more of his father than the others had. Ronnie, Nancy, and their youngest took a four-day horseback trip together in the High Sierras, something they had never done before. “I was the baby of the family. I know that my siblings, most all of them, resented me from Day One, as they perceived me to be her favorite, and therefore, the favorite in the family. That resentment deepened,” Ron told me.

But his father, even while attentive and doting on the favored child, kept what Ron recognized was an emotional barrier between them. As Ron saw it: “You almost get the sense that he gets a little bit antsy if you try and get too close and too personal and too father-and-sonny.” Meanwhile, his mother was overprotective, controlling, and always on a hair trigger.

So, Ron pushed back, in small ways at first. He grew his hair long. At the age of twelve, he announced he was an atheist. Near the end of the Reagans’ years in Sacramento, his parents sent him to a boarding school in Southern California, from which he was expelled for misbehavior. For several years when he was in high school, Ron was involved with an older woman from a prominent show business family