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

Ronnie’s chances of winning. But what kind of situation would they be creating if he did? A former president serving as number two to a current one? “It can’t be done,” Nancy argued to her husband. “It would be a dual presidency. It just won’t work.” Spencer also hated the proposal, which he saw as just a ploy by DC’s Old Guard to keep its foothold when Ronnie came to town. “It was a power play by folks who had lost theirs when Carter was elected. They were desperate, and without a Jerry Ford going to bat for them, were convinced they would have no role in a Reagan administration,” Spencer said.

They were getting nowhere with Ronnie, so Nancy and Spencer turned for help to an unlikely source: Betty Ford. She agreed with them that the idea was preposterous. Betty was also in the early stages of her recovery from more than a decade of drug and alcohol addiction and didn’t want to risk it by returning to the White House pressure cooker. Betty told Spencer that if Jerry did this, she would divorce him. “Does he know that?” Spencer asked her. “Hell, yes, he knows that,” Betty retorted.

Despite the strenuous objections of their wives, the future president, the former one, and their emissaries continued to talk about the conditions under which they might run together. Ford’s demands became stiffer and stiffer. The White House staff would have to report to the president through Ford. He would get control over key Cabinet appointments. In essence, Ford “wanted to run the White House and control the government while Reagan met the dignitaries and attended the funerals,” Nofziger recalled.

Negotiations continued until the second to last night of the convention. When Ronnie and his top advisers heard Ford acknowledge in an interview with Walter Cronkite on CBS that he envisioned the arrangement as a kind of “copresidency,” they realized they needed to put a halt to the deal. And as it turned out, Ford had also come around to recognizing it would never work. It would devalue the presidency. The two men met one last time, and Ford officially took himself out of consideration. Ronnie placed a call to a suite at the Hotel Pontchartrain and offered the second spot on his ticket to a startled George H. W. Bush, who had been the last man standing against him in the race for the nomination.

Nancy was not thrilled with that choice, either. She knew a running mate from the more moderate wing of the GOP would help Ronnie’s chances to win, particularly in the Northeast and among upper-income whites. But Nancy still remembered the bitterness of the early primaries when Bush had mocked her husband’s core policies as “voodoo economics.” And where Ford would have had too much influence in the role, she saw Bush as too weak to be an effective partner.

The crowd on the convention floor went wild when Ronnie took the stage and announced his pick just moments later. It was right after the roll call, where 1,939 out of 1,990 delegates had given him their votes. “The roof almost came off,” he wrote later. “As George and I stood there together, it was almost as if we were putting the party back together.” Nancy did not bother to hide how she felt. New York magazine wrote: “When her husband finally selected Bush in a midnight appearance before the convention that had nominated him only minutes before, the world was witness to her antagonism. Nancy Reagan, who always smiles, didn’t.” The Washington Post described it this way: “Her face told it all when she stood on the podium as Reagan announced Bush as his running mate. She looked like a little girl who had just lost her favorite Raggedy Ann doll: sad, disappointed, almost crushed. Sen. Paul D. Laxalt, Reagan’s campaign chairman, wrapped his arm around her shoulder, consoling her.”

But there was now the fall contest upon which to focus. Ronnie’s campaign moved its headquarters from Los Angeles to Arlington, Virginia, inside the Washington Beltway. Nancy and Ronnie rented a house on an estate known as Wexford. Located on thirty-nine acres in the Virginia hunt country, it was owned at the time by Texas governor William Clements, but the 5,050-square-foot ranch-style home had a touch of Camelot. It had been built in 1963 by John and Jackie Kennedy, and named for the Kennedy ancestral birthplace in Ireland. Jackie had designed it herself. Her idea was that it would be a retreat where the Kennedys could be a normal family, located close enough to Washington to serve as a regular escape. The house was purposefully plain. Jackie wrote that she wanted it to have “all the places we need to get away from each other. So husband can have meetings. Children watch TV. Wife paint or work at desk. Nurse have own room. Help a place to sit. All things so much bigger houses don’t have. I think it’s brilliant!” The Kennedys spent only two weekends there before Jack was assassinated. His widow sold it the following year.

For the Reagans, Wexford would be a temporary home and a respite from the campaign trail, albeit one in which meetings and phone calls were constantly going on. Nancy especially loved the stone patio, where she could look out over the rolling countryside with its wooden fences and stone walls. Her old MGM compatriot Elizabeth Taylor lived nearby with her sixth husband, John Warner, a former navy secretary recently elected to the US Senate. “For me,” Nancy would later write, “Wexford was the happiest part of the 1980 campaign.” Ronnie felt so at home there that when he became annoyed with a pine tree blocking his view from a window, he took an axe and chopped it down. Only later was it discovered that the tree was a favorite of the Texas governor who owned the place.

Away from that bucolic spot, there was renewed turmoil within the campaign. In August Ronnie made some unforced