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

She dropped her father’s surname and rechristened herself Patti Davis. It does not appear to have occurred to Patti that in claiming Davis as her name, she was repeating what her mother had done decades before. But in Patti’s case, there was a pull in the opposite direction. Nancy had done it to signal to the world that she belonged to someone; for Patti, it was a means of distancing herself from her father.

“There was an underlying reason for choosing my mother’s maiden name, but I wouldn’t admit it for years, even to myself. It was a child’s way of asking for a parent’s approval,” Patti wrote later. “It makes perfect sense to me now that I would take my mother’s name; for all our enmity, all our battles, she was the only parent who was there. My father’s emotional unavailability made it easy to relinquish his name; in a way, it had no identity to me. My mother’s did, just as she had a certain identity as a parent. It might not have been a nurturing identity, but at least it was something tangible.” So determined was Patti not to pass along the dysfunction by having children of her own that she had a tubal ligation at the age of twenty-four.

Patti was not present—and, according to her, was not invited—when Ronnie and Nancy summoned the other three Reagan children to a meeting on Halloween 1975. This was the first, and last, such session they would ever have as a family. The purpose: to inform them that their father was becoming serious about running for president, which meant he would be challenging a sitting Republican in the White House. The Watergate scandal and the prospect of impeachment had forced Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, and his vice president, Gerald Ford, had assumed the office. Ford himself had been named vice president in December 1973 amid an unrelated kickback scandal that had forced Spiro Agnew from office. The dominoes had fallen and put in the Oval Office a moderate former House minority leader who had never been elected to any office higher than congressman from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

As the family sat in the Reagans’ Pacific Palisades living room, Maureen tried to talk Ronnie out of running, arguing that the party was in too much turmoil in the wake of Watergate. She thought he should wait four years and try in 1980. Michael tried to sound enthusiastic but worried privately that the dark secret of his childhood sexual abuse—and the pictures that had been taken of him—would come out. Ron just pouted.

Nancy had her own reservations. According to Deaver: “Her questions were always the hardest for her husband and his top staff to answer. Who is going to organize this thing? Where is the money going to come from? Who specifically in state A or state B will break ranks with a sitting president to support Reagan? Who are we going to put on our board? Do we really have a chance or are we tilting at windmills?”

But Ronnie wanted to do it, and that meant Nancy did too. “Looking back, I realize it was inevitable that Ronnie would run. And certainly it was inevitable that I would go along with whatever he decided,” she recalled. Only his wife was at his side when Ronnie made his formal announcement on November 20, 1975, at the National Press Club, the headquarters of a professional and social organization and a popular spot for holding news conferences in Washington. Early reviews from the Eastern establishment were less than encouraging. “The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken so seriously by the media and particularly by the president. It makes a lot of news, but it doesn’t make much sense,” James Reston wrote in the New York Times.

Then again, so many other expectations had been upended that who was to say what made sense anymore? The initial assumption—by the Reagan team, and pretty much everyone else—had been that after Nixon was reelected in a 1972 landslide, he would serve a full second term, putting Ronnie in the pole position to run for the nomination four years later. But Watergate destroyed that scenario. Instead of Nixon—whom Ronnie defended after most other Republicans had abandoned him—Ford was in the White House as 1976 approached. He represented a soft-focus brand of politics that Ronnie and others on the right disdained. Ford’s naming of liberal Nelson Rockefeller as vice president only compounded the low regard that movement conservatives felt for him. Ronnie twice turned down lesser Cabinet posts with which Ford had sought to neutralize him, once in late 1974 and a second time in the spring of 1975.

The former California governor fired a salvo against his party’s president when he declared at the 1975 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that Republicans should raise “a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors.” His words were also a shot at a deflated and fearful party establishment. At that moment, the GOP seemed to have fallen even lower than it had been after Goldwater’s landslide defeat. In the wake of Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s subsequent pardon of his disgraced predecessor, Republicans lost forty-nine House seats in the 1974 midterm election, giving Democrats there enough votes to override a presidential veto.

But Ronnie argued this was no time to tack to the middle. “A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency or simply to swell its numbers,” he said. “It is time to reassert that principle and raise it to full view. And if there are those who cannot subscribe to these principles, then let them go their way.”

As unique as the circumstances were, challenging a sitting president in a Republican primary was an audacious move. “Many of Reagan’s past supporters, me included, were of a pragmatic view,” recalled Reagan’s former aide Tom Reed, who by then had joined Ford’s administration