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

Then tell her if she wants to know who that “someone” is just to turn her head to the left. I’ll be across the room waiting to see if you told her. If you’ll do this for me, I’ll be very happy knowing that she knows I love her with all my heart.

Thank you,

“Someone”

For their anniversary two and a half weeks later, Ronnie bought Nancy a canoe that he christened Tru Luv. It was a sentimental nod to a long-standing joke between the two of them. She had teased him since they were married about how perfunctory his proposal had been. In the scene of her dreams, Nancy often told Ronnie, he would have popped the question as she had seen it done in old movie romances: the two of them in a canoe at sunset, him strumming a ukulele, and her reclining with her fingers trailing in the water. When Ronnie took her out for their first ride in the Tru Luv, he apologized that he hadn’t brought a ukulele. “So would it be all right if I just hummed?” he asked. Nancy pronounced the gesture “unbelievably corny, but I loved it.”

Not quite a year later, Nancy received a letter from a young newlywed in Washington State named Adrienne Bassuk, who asked her advice on how to have a successful marriage. Nancy’s handwritten reply, dated January 10, 1978, is in the files of the Reagan Library. “I’ve been very lucky—however, I don’t ever remember once sitting down and mapping out a blueprint. It just became ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ very naturally and easily. And you live as you never have before despite problems, separation, and conflicts,” Nancy wrote. “I suppose mainly you have to be willing—and want—to give. It’s not always 50-50. Sometimes one partner gives 90% but then sometimes the other one does—so it all evens out. It’s not always easy, and it’s something you have to work at, which is what I don’t think many young people realize today.

“But the rewards are so great. I can’t remember what my life was like before, and can’t imagine not being married to Ronnie. When two people really love each other, they help each other stay alive and grow. There’s nothing more fulfilling, and you become a complete person for the first time.”

As happy—and complete—as Nancy and Ronnie were with each other, politics was never far from their thoughts. In the rubble that remained of the Republican Party, Ronnie was the closest thing to an heir apparent. But some of those closest to him were doubtful that he would make another presidential run. Though he was still fit and vigorous, people were beginning to raise the issue of his age. On Inauguration Day 1981, he would be just weeks away from turning seventy. That meant that if he were elected, Ronnie would be the oldest president ever to take office. An even bigger question was how badly Ronnie wanted it. Some of his advisers wondered whether he still had the fire that had ignited that bold challenge to Ford in 1976.

His wife, on the other hand, had no ambivalence about the prospect. Nancy was convinced Ronnie should run. As she saw it, “everything seemed preordained, really, after the 1976 campaign. He was ready, and everything seemed to fall into place.” She told him he had to try again. Without Nancy’s push, “I don’t think he would have made the ’80 race—that’s what he told me, at least,” said Ed Rollins, one of his political advisers. “She was the one who believed in him.”

It wouldn’t necessarily be easy. There was a possibility that Ford might make another bid, and others were eyeing the contest—among them, former CIA director George H. W. Bush, a respected figure who had also been chairman of the Republican Party, and Kansas senator Bob Dole, who had been on the 1976 ticket with Ford. Even as he deliberated, Ronnie knew that he could not afford to be unprepared or to slip into irrelevance. By Lou Cannon’s tally, he gave seventy-five speeches in 1977, sending a clear signal to his supporters that he was warming up for another run. To build his image as a statesman, Ronnie took a series of foreign trips as well. On one of them, he had his first meeting with future British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

The party’s right flank had almost delivered the nomination to Ronnie against Ford, but it was clear he had to broaden his base of Republican support beyond the activist conservative wing. Shortly after the 1976 election, Ronnie formed a political action committee with his leftover campaign funds. That in itself was evidence he was thinking about making another go of it, as the law in those days would have allowed the Reagans to pay income tax on the money and just keep it. The new organization was called Citizens for the Republic and headed by Lyn Nofziger. It gave about $800,000 to GOP candidates in the 1978 midterms, Nofziger wrote, “and bought a lot of friends for him. What we sought was enough political support to create an impression of inevitability about a Reagan candidacy.” Any remaining doubt was erased on March 7, 1979, when Nevada senator Paul Laxalt announced the formation of a Reagan presidential exploratory committee. Among its 365 members were 4 former members of Ford’s Cabinet. “Ours is not a fringe campaign,” Laxalt declared.

During this preparatory period, Nancy indirectly engineered a meeting that would assume great significance nearly four decades later. The Reagan operation dispatched a young organizer named Roger Stone to New York to raise money. It was a challenging assignment, as New York was considered a bastion of support for Bush. “I was given a card file from Nancy Reagan. It was like one of those little recipe boxes that had index cards of the Reagans’ friends in New York,” Stone recalled in a 2015 interview with C-Span. “Well, half