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

ambush.” Hoping to capitalize on their momentum coming out of Iowa, they did not want to be deprived of a head-to-head showdown against the front-runner. The sniping about the debate—who would be in it and who wouldn’t—soon became topic A in the race. “I really thought Bush’s people would be smart enough to know they were in a hole and they ought to just quit,” Sears told me, “but they persisted and demanded that the two of us debate—which, of course, teed off Howard Baker and everybody else that was running, ’cause it was their last chance to make a case to people.” The night of the debate, all the others showed up except for Connally, who was campaigning in South Carolina. The quartet of lesser candidates was instantly dubbed the “Nashua Four.”

No one knew quite what was going to happen from there. With five minutes to go before the event was set to start, the scene in the Nashua High School gymnasium was pandemonium. At least eighty reporters were there to see how all of this would play out. The Reagans were waiting in a classroom, along with Baker, Dole, Crane, and Anderson. Everyone seemed confused. Then they heard a knock on the door. Someone from the Telegraph came in to warn them that if Ronnie didn’t get out there within three minutes, the whole thing would be called off.

Sears was unsure what he wanted to do. He was dubious about sending his candidate into such a raucous and unpredictable circumstance, especially given Ronnie’s recent ethnic-joke gaffe and other mistakes he had been making lately on the campaign trail. God only knew what could happen in a setting as chaotic as this. That’s when Nancy stepped in and took over. “I know what you’re going to do,” she said firmly to the candidates. “You’re all going to go out there.”

What Sears would realize later was that Nancy understood something fundamental about Ronnie that he didn’t. Even before this, she had advised the campaign manager that he should never fear letting Ronnie do some improvising when a moment demanded it. “Just put him in the situation,” Nancy said. “He’ll be fine.” In fact, Nancy knew that this was how Ronnie performed best: when he was spontaneous by appearance, but, in truth, working off an internal script. She was confident that Ronnie would find something right for the moment tucked in the back of his mind—perhaps a line or a scene from an old movie, or something he had read somewhere. With a near-photographic recall, honed by all those years working as an actor, he had the ability to retrieve that kind of information under pressure. His brain worked like the stack of index cards that he held in his hand as he gave his speeches.

“She wasn’t worried about what he would say, seemingly off the cuff, publicly,” Sears told me. “I didn’t realize this was good advice for a long time. Two or three of us who went through both campaigns used to joke a little bit that he really had sort of a record library in his brain, because if you were with him a lot, you’d find that certain things would touch on what we used to think of as a record, that it would play, word for word the same. There were a lot of them. It wasn’t just one or two. It was tons of them.”

Bush was waiting on the stage, staring straight ahead. William Loeb III, the influential and notoriously cantankerous publisher of the conservative Manchester Union Leader, wrote later that the former CIA director looked like a little boy suddenly realizing that his mother had dropped him off at the wrong birthday party. Ronnie marched out and took his seat. The Nashua Four lined up against the blue curtain backdrop: from left to right, Anderson, Baker, Dole, and Crane. They stood motionless as the school gym erupted into cheers and hoots. There were shouts to get them some chairs. Someone joked that the diminutive Baker could stand on the table. Telegraph editor Jon Breen, the moderator, tried to proceed to the first question. Ronnie’s face flushed brightly, and he raised a defiant index finger.

“Before the question, you asked me if you could make an announcement first, and I asked you for permission to make an announcement myself—”

“Would the sound man please turn Mr. Reagan’s mike off?” Breen ordered the engineer, Bob Molloy.

Ronnie rose and picked up the microphone from the table. “Is this on?” he asked, his anger rising.

“Would you turn that microphone off, please?” Breen implored.

Ronnie planted himself back in his chair, made eye contact with the sound engineer, and roared: “I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!”

In his fury, Ronnie mangled the name of the moderator, but it didn’t matter. The gymnasium exploded with cheers. Behind him, the Nashua Four applauded their rival. No one remembers much of what happened after that moment. Nor did it really matter. “I may have won the debate, the primary—and the nomination—right there,” Ronnie recalled later. “After the debate, our people told me the gymnasium parking lot was littered with Bush-for-President badges.” More than a dozen years later, Nancy had Ronnie’s microphone retrieved from the office pigeonhole where Molloy had stored it, never to be used again. She put it on display in her husband’s presidential library.

While Ronnie’s anger had been genuine, his line about paying for the microphone, which became an instant classic in politics, was not original. Spencer Tracy had used one very similar at a pivotal moment in the 1948 political satire State of the Union, a movie in which Tracy played, coincidentally, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Nancy had known Ronnie would find it—or something equally useful—in the recesses of his brain. “It was in the record library,” Sears said, “so she was absolutely right.”

Ronnie was back on top, but the tensions within the campaign had only grown worse in the weeks before the crucial primary. When Nancy got