Ronnie and Nancy (61 page)

Ronnie and Nancy were naturally cautious, however, especially when it came to their financial security, and he had just signed a two-year contract to host a TV series called
Death Valley Days.
Although it wasn’t nearly as prestigious as
G.E. Theater
, it paid a comparable salary and required nothing more than taping short introductions and doing the occasional star turn on horseback. The program was sponsored by U.S. Borax, a McCann-Erickson client handled by Neil Reagan, who had pushed his brother for the job. “There was a little method in my madness,” Neil admitted. “It kept him in the public eye for what I figured might be helpful if he ran for governor.”94

Neil was included in some of the early meetings with Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel at the Reagan house, and he attested to the fact that his brother struggled with his decision. These “long sessions,” Neil said, “used to start at eight o’clock in the evening and wind up at three and four the next morning. . . . [Ron] held out for a long time. . . . He was very noncommittal.”95

“I dismissed them lightly and quickly to begin with, but they just kept coming back,” Ronald Reagan recalled. “[They] kept insisting that I offered the only chance of victory and to bring the party back into something viable. It got to the place where I said, no, and no, and no. And Nancy and I couldn’t sleep anymore. You know, we wondered, ‘Are you making the right decision? Are you letting people down? What if they’re right?’”96

The pressure was coming from all sides, according to Jack Wrather, the husband of Bonita Granville, who had made a movie with Reagan at Warners before moving to MGM, where she became friendly with Nancy. The Texas-born Wrather, a Marine commander during the war, whose family was in oil and whose first wife was the daughter of Governor Pappy Daniels, had moved to Los Angeles in 1946 and assembled an entertainment-and-real-estate-empire that included the rights to
Lassie
and
The Lone Ranger
, the Muzak Corporation, the Disneyland Hotel, and the Balboa Bay Club in Newport Beach, where Barry and Peggy Goldwater kept a weekend apartment. Jack and Bunny lived a few houses down from the Bloomingdales in 3 3 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Holmby Hills, and they were very close to the Wilsons and the Jorgensens, as well as the Tuttles and Salvatoris.

“We all saw each other very often . . . at dinners and barbecues and cocktail parties and things,” Wrather recalled. “We’d sit and discuss what the hell happened to Barry, why, and how terrific that commercial was of Ron’s. . . . I remember one night at Bill Wilson’s . . . all the men were gathered kind of English-style after dinner together and the ladies were in the other room . . . and talk got around to Ron and how much we needed somebody like Ron in the governorship; Pat Brown had to be gotten out, that he was a disaster, a do-nothing and worse than that. . . . We just sat and talked to Ron and said, ‘Ron, God, you’ve got to run for governor.

You’ve just got to. And we talked and talked. The gals finally came in and said, ‘We’ve got to go home. It’s late.’

“We all assured Ron at one time or another that if he would run we’d be available to him, any of us or all of us,” Wrather continued, “for any kind of advice or help, or helping him put together any business plans or helping with personnel selection. And that we would obviously get behind him financially and that we would raise money for him; we’d do everything possible so that he wouldn’t have to worry about the campaign funds to run on—which, of course, even in those days, was a big worry. . . . In between these affairs, Holmes would get all hot and bothered and call Ron, like Holmes does. You know, he’s a great salesman!”97

By the end of the January, even
The New York Times
was asking Reagan if he was running. “I’m honored by all the interest,” he told them. “Politics is nothing I’d ever thought of as a career. But it’s something I’m going to give deep consideration and thought.”98

In February, Reagan finally made up his mind. “He called me and told me that he would run if we still felt the same way,” Tuttle said. “He and Nancy had discussed it and decided we should try it. He suggested that instead of announcing that he was going to run, we should just kind of put feelers out.”99 Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel formed an exploratory committee, which also included Tuttle’s longtime business partner, Charles Cook, chairman of the Community Bank; Ed Mills, the bank’s vice president and regional head of the Boy Scouts; and attorney William French Smith, who was brought in by Tuttle to oversee the campaign’s legal affairs. French Smith, a
Mayflower
descendent from Boston and a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, one of the largest law firms in Los Angeles, would soon
The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

3 3 7

become Reagan’s personal lawyer. His wife, Jean, a third-generation Angeleno whose family owned the city’s first lumber mill, had known the Tuttles for years, and she got along with Nancy right away.

Tuttle also sent Reagan to San Francisco to meet with Jaquelin Hume, the founder of Basic Vegetable Products, the world’s largest processor of dehydrated onions and garlic. Hume, who had been one of Goldwater’s key supporters in Northern California, immediately agreed to come on board and gave a breakfast for Reagan to meet other prominent San Francisco conservatives. “I thought he was as sound as he could be,” Hume said of his first meeting with Reagan. “He advocated the political and economic philosophy of which I approved and he seemed to have the ability to express it even better than Goldwater. . . . He is an extremely able individual, much more so than most people realize. . . . Most people had no comprehension that he had such an excellent mind.”100

These men constituted the original nucleus of what would come to be known as the Kitchen Cabinet, though they would not actually be called that until after Reagan’s election.101 As William French Smith explained,

“We had social contacts and political contacts, and the relationships just grew. I think what is now referred to as the Kitchen Cabinet was not known by any title. It was just a group of friends that became an executive committee. And I think that group of friends probably may be unique in the annals of American political history, because it started with him, and at least the nucleus has been with him ever since. I don’t know of any other situation where it has been quite like that, people are both social friends and then became active politically in furthering his candidacy.”102

From the beginning, Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel were determined not to repeat the mistakes of Goldwater’s narrowly based campaign; they saw Reagan as someone who could unify the party. One of their first and wisest moves was to seek out the political consulting firm of Spencer-Roberts, which had run Rockefeller’s campaign in the 1964 primary. Stuart Spencer, a former parks-and-recreation director, and Bill Roberts, a onetime television salesman, had been active in the L.A. County Young Republicans in the 1950s and started their own business in 1960. In six years, Lou Cannon notes, “they had won 34 of 40 congressional races with Republican candidates of various views.” These successful candidates included Betty Adams’s first husband, Alphonzo Bell, a moderate, and John Rousselot, whom they refused to handle for reelection when his John Birch Society 3 3 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House membership was revealed. Even Goldwater grudgingly admitted to Tuttle that they were the best.103

Spencer-Roberts had also been approached by Reagan’s likely opponent, George Christopher, the moderate former mayor of San Francisco.

As Stu Spencer told me, he first met with Tuttle, Mills, and the Cook brothers at the Cave de Roy, a Hollywood key club. “Then we met with the Reagans several times at their home. It was a really big decision for the company. George Christopher was the odds-on favorite, not this guy coming out of Hollywood who had given a great speech for Goldwater.

We spent quite a bit of time talking to him. He then went over to see his in-laws in Phoenix, and he called us from there and said, ‘When the hell are you guys going to make your minds up?’ We said, ‘We’re not finished checking yet. We don’t want to find out you’re a Bircher or something.’ So we had one more meeting. I’ll never forget, we got to the house, and he’s sitting there with these big bright red socks on. It was his sense of humor.

We agreed to do it.”104

In May the exploratory committee launched Friends of Ronald Reagan, with Rubel, who at seventy was the oldest of the original triumvirate, as chairman of its executive committee. Their first move was to hire Spencer-Roberts to set up the “test-the-waters” tour at a reported fee of $50,000.105

A few weeks later Friends of Reagan sent out a mailing with requests for donations, which quickly brought in $135,000, enough to cover expenses through the end of the year, when Reagan agreed to make his decision final. Among the forty-one names on the letterhead were James Cagney, Walt Disney, Robert Taylor, and Randolph Scott, as well as Nancy’s friend Anita May, who had been predicting for years that Ronnie would run, and who was the only woman included in meetings of the Kitchen Cabinet’s inner circle. Although Jack Wrather, Bill Wilson, Earle Jorgensen, and Alfred Bloomingdale were not actively involved at this point, they were early contributors. “I remember saying, ‘But Ronnie’s an actor. An actor can’t be governor,’” Betsy Bloomingdale told me. “‘Well,’ Alfred said, ‘you just wait and see.’”106

Marion Jorgensen recalled how Tuttle got her and Earle to contribute.

“We went to a party at the Beverly Wilshire and I was sitting next to Holmes. He said, ‘I want to drop by and see Earle tomorrow.’ He started telling me about how Ronnie would make a good governor, and he felt Nancy could be a good help to him. He said, ‘I want Earle to give me $25,000.’ In those days that was a
lot
of money. But I said, ‘Sure, Earle will
The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

3 3 9

give it to you.’ When I got in the car, I said, ‘Earle, I committed you for $25,000.’ He said, ‘You did
what
?’ I said, ‘Yes, because I knew you would want to. You always do anything Holmes asks you to do.’ So he did. And that’s how he got there with Holmes, Jack Hume, Henry Salvatori, and Cy Rubel.”107

Late that spring Reagan hit the road, literally. “They had a hell of a time getting him to go on a plane in 1965,” Robert Tuttle recalled.108 All summer and fall Reagan drove around the state, building grassroots support by giving speeches to local chapters of the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, and the United Way. Nancy accompanied him only occasionally during this period and found campaigning daunting at first. As she recalled in
My Turn
, “We went to a reception for Ronnie at one of the big hotels in San Francisco, where so many people wanted to meet him, that they were lined up through the lobby, and around the block, waiting to get in. This was my introduction to politics, and when I woke up the next morning I couldn’t move my neck. We called a doctor, who explained that when people are nervous, they tend to raise their shoulders—which I had apparently done for four hours. That, plus standing in an unnatural position with my arm extended, shaking hands, had sent me into a spasm.

When I came home, a friend put me in touch with a Swedish woman, who put me in hot packs, massaged my neck, and used traction. Ever since, I’ve kept my shoulders down in a receiving line.”109

“Politically, they were both green as hell in 1965,” said Stu Spencer.

“She didn’t know what she was getting into, I don’t think. But it turned out Nancy was born a politician. They were a team. People have got to recognize that. We never held a meeting in the house with Ron and discussed strategic matters—which we did a lot of—that she wasn’t present. Listening. And, as time went on, asking questions. The tough questions. She was on a learning curve of the political process. She would double-check with others. She’s a great phone person—talking to her friends out there, getting a lot of feedback, some of it valid, some it off-the-wall. I’d talk to her every day, or one of us from the campaign did—and I could always tell that night that she had talked to five people on the telephone. I’m talking about the 1960s, but this was true all the way through the process. Her political skills were better, in terms of what was best for Ron, than even his own. His skills were in the communications aspect and the beliefs and ideology. She was the personnel director of the Reagan operation, so to speak. She wanted to know who was going to be around Ron and who they were. She made a lot 3 4 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House of decisions about people coming and people leaving. She was right 90 percent of the time. Her instincts were good. She knew what worked well with him. I’ve always said he’d never have made it without her.”110

The Reagan road show was a huge success. Spencer-Roberts cast its client as the Citizen Politician, and he played the role to the hilt. Despite initial concern on the part of his handlers and the Kitchen Cabinet, Reagan insisted on following his talks with a question-and-answer period to show that he could think on his feet, not just memorize scripts. Constantly asked about the John Birch Society, he came up with an answer that had managed to elude Nixon and Goldwater: the former had denounced the Birchers and narrowly lost in 1962 as conservative Republicans sat on their hands; the latter had refused to denounce the society and had it hung around his neck like an albatross by the Democrats. Reagan said again and again and again, “They’re supporting
my
philosophy, I’m not supporting
their
philosophy.”111

To bolster Reagan’s new, middle-of-the-road image, Tuttle took him out to Eldorado for a round of golf with Eisenhower. Although Ike remained neutral in the Reagan-Christopher contest, he is said to have told Tuttle, “I like your boy.”112 In the meantime, Salvatori was quietly encouraging his friend Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty to challenge Governor Brown in the Democratic primary. For his part, Cy Rubel set up a lunch at the California Club at which Reagan was given the blessing of Asa Call and the Committee of 25—some say it was Call who really decided to run Reagan in the first place. Rubel also provided the Friends of Reagan with office space in the Union Oil Building and persuaded former USC football star and fellow oil executive Joe Shell not to enter the race. The triumvirate also prevailed on Republican state chairman Dr. Gaylord Parkinson to issue his so-called Eleventh Commandment that spring: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” This enabled Reagan, who as someone who had never held public office was more vulnerable to criticism than his opponent, to take the high road. Christopher, who was reprimanded at least twice by Parkinson for violating his stricture, seethed, and his supporters accused Reagan’s rich backers of buying the state chairman off.113