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

at all antichoice.” (In 1994, with her husband out of office, Nancy declared that while she was personally against abortion, “I believe in a woman’s choice.”)

During the first two days of the Republican convention, amid a behind-the-scenes battle over the remaining uncommitted delegates, the increasingly open friction between the two women became a delicious subplot. Nancy and Betty sat five seats apart at a luncheon given by the National Federation of Republican Women and did not acknowledge each other. Their rivalry boiled over in the convention hall in what Time dubbed the “contest of the queens.” As its correspondent Bonnie Angelo wrote in a dispatch to her editors: “While the two principals remained secluded in their hotel suites, as tribal rites demand of candidates and brides before the ceremony, the wives became surrogates, the rally point for the opposing forces.”

Nancy upstaged Betty the first night. When she entered her glassed-in VIP booth in Kemper Arena, the hall erupted in glee and foot stomping that went on for more than fifteen minutes, during which Betty Ford’s arrival at the opposite end went practically unnoticed. Not so the second night. Late in the afternoon, the Ford campaign quietly asked many of the VIPs to relinquish their tickets in the gallery so that it could be packed with Ford supporters. They cheered when Betty came into the hall around eight o’clock, dressed in a sunshine-yellow dress, with her family in tow. Seated beside her was the universally recognizable pop singer Tony Orlando, one of the biggest stars of the midseventies.

Nancy had not originally intended to be there. But Ron called his mother from the hotline in the hall. “Gee, Mom,” he pleaded, “why don’t you come over here and show them what a real reception is like?” So, Nancy did, bringing along an entourage of her friends. The Reagan delegates on the floor whooped at her surprise entrance. A CBS commentator noted: “One gets the definite impression here that the wives of the candidates for the presidential nomination are being moved like pawns, or perhaps like queens, in a chess game.” But by then, Betty had figured out her checkmate. On cue, the convention band struck up “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” Orlando’s biggest hit. The singer swept the first lady into his arms, and the entire crowd’s attention turned to them as they began dancing in the aisle.

The duel merited a five-column, front-page headline in the next day’s New York Times: “Betty Ford Bests Nancy Reagan on Applause.” As Angelo noted in her file to her editors: “The gamesmanship between the two wives was a spontaneous moment of levity that will be remembered long after the dreary speeches have been forgotten.” But Betty, amid her triumph, could not resist taking a final, contemptuous shot at Nancy. “She was a working girl as an actress,” the first lady said in an interview with Angelo. “I just think that when Nancy met Ronnie, that was it, as far as her own life was concerned. She just fell apart at the seams.”

It would not be the last time that an adversary read Mrs. Ronald Reagan so wrong. For Nancy, 1976 had been a brutal year but an experience that made her tougher and wiser. That losing campaign stood out more vividly in her memory than any of the four races that Ronnie won. No other had so much drama, so much emotion, so many what-ifs. Nancy would go over the mistakes and missed opportunities again and again in her mind. “When I first went into politics, I was constantly getting my feelings hurt. I’m better than I used to be, but if somebody knows a way to make it feel less painful, I wish they’d tell me,” she said. “There are lots of things that, looking back, we might have done differently. Maybe if you’d stayed an extra day in Florida, or had money to go into Ohio, where Ronnie got forty-five percent of the vote without campaigning. Or if we had the money to go into New Jersey and New York and Pennsylvania. But we had no money. No money.”

On the night that Ford was to be formally nominated by the convention, the Reagans had a quiet dinner with family and a few others in their suite at the Alameda Plaza Hotel. Then, they all sat in the living room and watched the roll call of the delegates. Shortly after midnight, West Virginia cast the votes that put Ford over the top. The final count came in at 1,187 votes for Ford and 1,070 for Reagan. “I’m so sorry that you all have to see this,” Ronnie said. He talked about the things he had hoped to do in the White House; the things that it appeared he never would. What he had most wanted, he said, was a chance to sit across a negotiating table from the Soviets.

Nancy, fighting back tears, proposed a toast.

“Honey,” she said, “in all the years we’ve been married, you have never done anything to disappoint me. And I’ve never been prouder of you than I am now.”

CHAPTER NINE

On November 2, 1976, Gerald Ford narrowly lost to Jimmy Carter, a former governor of Georgia. It was the closest electoral college margin in sixty years. Carter, a born-again Baptist, was a peanut farmer who came from nowhere to win the Democratic nomination. He ran as the cleansing force the country needed after Richard Nixon. America, it was clear, wanted to turn a page. Stu Spencer, who had managed Ford’s campaign, put it this way: “After Watergate, if Republicans had nominated Jesus Christ that year, he would have lost too.”

But many in the party establishment believed Ronnie also shared part of the blame for the GOP defeat. They thought he had weakened Ford by running against him in the primary; that his speech from the GOP convention stage had sounded more like a battle cry than a concession; that he