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

Beginning that spring, the name “C. McCain” shows up frequently in the flight manifests of Nancy’s travels. Carol McCain, the wife of former Vietnam prisoner of war John McCain, was going through a dark time. Her husband had decided to leave her for Cindy Lou Hensley, the daughter of a prosperous beer distributor in Phoenix. For years to come, this would strain Nancy’s friendship with the future senator, who would himself make two bids for the presidency. John McCain was elected to Congress in 1983 as a self-described “foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution,” but he wrote later that Nancy treated him with “a cool correctness that made her displeasure clear.… I had, of course, deserved the change in our relationship.”

Carol was also struggling with the aftereffects of a car accident that had almost killed her on Christmas Eve in 1969, two years into John’s captivity. Nearly two dozen surgeries left her five inches shorter and walking with a limp. Some of their friends believed that her husband left her in part because she was no longer the statuesque beauty he had married. She said the collapse of their marriage was more complicated than that. In fact, there were many stories like theirs among POW families. But whatever caused the rupture, Carol knew he was gone. “John had met somebody young, wealthy, attractive—you know, all of the things I would be petrified about. He wanted to get a divorce and marry her. I didn’t like it, but there was not really a lot I could do about it,” Carol told me.

Nancy had long been fond of Carol and looked for ways to ease her through this hard patch. “She knocked herself out to be kind, sweet, gentle, soft-spoken to me,” Carol said. As it happened, the campaign needed a press assistant to travel with the candidate’s wife, so Nancy suggested Carol, who had experience on Capitol Hill, for the job. Carol and her daughter moved to California, where they lived with Ed Meese and his wife, Ursula, for several months in early 1980. (After Ronnie was elected, Carol became director of the White House Visitors Office.)

By the end of March, Ronnie had effectively sewn up the nomination, having won six out of the eight primaries that followed in the month after his New Hampshire victory. On the surface, it seemed the campaign was running much more smoothly. But Nancy was worried. Ronnie couldn’t seem to find a groove. On the stump, he was telling too many old stories and getting his facts mixed up.

She realized there was still someone missing; someone who should have been at Ronnie’s side all along. In June, as the campaign’s focus turned to the convention and beyond, Nancy asked Deaver to place a call to Stu Spencer, the political consultant who had manned the launch pad of Ronnie’s political career. Though Nancy had been angry and hurt by Spencer’s defection to Ford in 1976, she believed his guiding hand was what Ronnie needed now.

Spencer was startled when Deaver proposed he return. He asked for some time to think. At the time, he was living near the ocean in Los Angeles, so he walked to the beach and sat there for the next four hours. Then he called Deaver and asked one question: “Does Nancy want me back?” As Spencer explained it to me later, “it wasn’t a condition. It’s just that I wouldn’t believe it until I heard it from her. I knew she was the personnel director. If I didn’t have her, I would have had a miserable five months.” Within a day or two, a call came from Nancy. “You used to talk about rhythm,” she told Spencer. “We haven’t got any rhythm. We don’t have everybody working off the same page. Ronnie’s frustrated.”

Spencer, given his history of friction with the other Californians, wanted it made clear that he was in charge. “My concept of a campaign, of what they had to do, involved certain skills that I saw they did not have. I wanted the authority to hire, and I wanted the authority to dump people,” Spencer said. He insisted that the “Sacramento claque” with whom he had clashed in the early days all meet for dinner, so that he could look each of them in the eye and hear them say they would accept having him back. “It was a riot,” Spencer told me. “They were all half drunk. I can remember [pollster and chief strategist Richard] Wirthlin, who was not [drinking], who was the good Mormon boy. I heard him say to somebody next to him, ‘Nancy really must want to win this thing.’ ”

Oddly, the one person with whom Spencer did not have an in-depth discussion about his return was the candidate himself. The first time he set foot on the campaign plane was on July 12, as the Reagans were flying to the Republican convention in Detroit. First, he sat with Nancy, and she vented her grievances about Spencer’s betrayal four years earlier. He let her finish and then asked: “Okay—y’all happy? All the air clear?” Nancy told him yes, and then she gave up her seat to Ronnie. “He and I talked the rest of the way. My conversation with him was like we’d had one yesterday, and we were continuing it,” Spencer marveled. “Yet, what was it in between there? Five years? Six years? Something like that. It was ironical. We just started right back where we were.”

As the Republican convention got under way on July 14 at the brand-new Joe Louis Arena, Ronnie’s top imperative was to unify the party. An important signal would be sent with his choice of a running mate. Privately, both Reagans would have liked Paul Laxalt, but a California-Nevada ticket would not have had much geographic reach. Ronnie’s advisers had another idea, one that horrified Nancy. They wanted him to pick none other than his old nemesis, Gerald Ford.

The polls indicated a Reagan-Ford “dream ticket” would give the biggest boost to