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

But the continuing turmoil in the campaign grew more worrisome. More and more of the Golden State old guard was forced out. Conservative economist Martin Anderson had led the issues and research operation for Ronnie in 1976 and expected to do it again, Within two weeks of the campaign’s launch, however, Anderson announced he was returning to Stanford University so that he could have “more time to think.” Laxalt worried that he would be next; word was going round that Sears was sounding out others to become campaign chairman. Ronnie’s former chief of staff Ed Meese, who had been given a smaller role in the campaign than he merited, was also on shaky ground. Behind Sears’s back, the Californians began referring to the campaign manager as “Rasputin.”

It turned out that the next person to find himself in Sears’s crosshairs was Nancy’s closest political confidant and ally. Michael Deaver had been the only California insider who had supported the decision to put Sears in charge of the campaign. But he chafed as he was assigned to take over fund-raising after Nofziger left. He was no better at it than Nofziger had been, and, in Sears’s view, the canny Deaver was a constant troublemaker who was trying to put his fingers into too many other parts of the operation.

Everything came to a head at a meeting at the Reagan home in Pacific Palisades on November 26. Deaver had been invited there by Nancy and figured he was being summoned to a routine session where they would talk about money. He had his wife, Carolyn, drop him off, told her to run errands for an hour and a half, and then to come retrieve him. Deaver sensed something serious was up when Nancy met him at the front door and told him to wait in a bedroom. She led him past the living room, where Deaver saw “the Easterners”—Sears, press secretary Jim Lake, and strategist Charles Black—huddling with Ronnie. Nancy then left him and joined the group back in the living room. Deaver paced and flipped through an old Reader’s Digest, trying to figure out what was happening. Nancy’s presence was highly unusual. Only rarely did she sit through normal staff meetings. After twenty minutes had passed, Deaver burst into the living room. “What the hell is going on here?” he demanded.

This was the kind of scene that Ronnie, with his distaste for discord, was ill-equipped to handle. While everyone else looked at the floor, he began awkwardly: “Mike, the fellas here have been telling me about the way you’re running the fund-raising efforts, and we’re losing money.” Ronnie pressed Deaver to explain why his firm was charging the campaign $30,000 a month to lease office space in its building. Deaver insisted that the figure was a lie. Nancy watched as Ronnie struggled with the predicament before him. Deaver was a long-serving aide and adviser; practically a surrogate son. Sears was the political wunderkind without whom they believed they could not win. “Honey,” she finally told her husband, “it looks as if you’ve got to make a choice.”

“No, Governor,” Deaver retorted, “you don’t have to, because I’m leaving.”

He stormed out of the house—only to realize suddenly that he had no way of getting home. His wife had his car. Embarrassed on top of being furious, Deaver turned back and quietly opened the front door of the house. Inside, he found Nancy pacing the foyer alone. When Nancy saw Deaver return, she welcomed him. She assumed he would ask her to help him get his job back. Instead, he requested the keys to her station wagon so he could get out of there. From the living room, he could hear Ronnie telling the others: “Well, I hope you’re happy; the best guy we had just left.”

According to biographer Lou Cannon, “Reagan never spoke warmly to Sears again. The confrontation left him depressed and angry at himself about what he had allowed to happen. His mood did not improve when old friends and allies, who had rarely criticized him to his face, bluntly told him he had made a mistake.” As Nancy put it: “I’ve never known Ronnie to carry a grudge, but after that day, I think he resented John Sears. The chemistry between them wasn’t good to begin with, and now it was worse.” Nancy also had begun to lose her faith in the operative whose knowledge and sophistication about politics had so impressed her when she first met him. “I don’t know what made John change in the years between 1976 and 1980, but I thought he had become arrogant and aloof,” she wrote later.

A tactical blunder of epic proportion further shook the Reagans’ confidence. Ronnie’s late start effectively meant he wasn’t campaigning during the months running up to the January 1980 Iowa caucuses, which were the first statewide contest on the calendar. One measure of Iowa’s low priority was the fact that Michael and Maureen, who had been sidelined in their father’s earlier campaigns, were dispatched to stump there. Both reported back to Ronnie that they were appalled at how little organization they saw on the ground. But the candidate did nothing. He kept telling his children that the operation was in the hands of professionals.

Nancy picked up some of the slack by appearing in his stead, but she, too, confronted questions from worried grassroots supporters who wondered why Ronnie didn’t seem more engaged. Among the events on her schedule during the fall of 1979 was a swing through Iowa that included a pig roast in Mason City and a salad luncheon in Ottumwa. One briefing memo advised her to assure her husband’s backers that things were looking fine for Ronnie in a state where ground-level organizing was everything:

Reflect the different status of the various campaigns. While RR has 100% name ID and established image, work is under way to identify supporters which already exist.

Other campaigns are still at the first step attempting to