Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [196]
attack on the graduated income tax, Social Security, and school busing.
Two of his longtime allies in the battle against the Communists in Hollywood, Adolphe Menjou and John Wayne, were members.
Reagan devoted most of his efforts in 1962, however, to Nixon’s unsuccessful bid for the California governorship. It was at a Nixon fund-raiser that Reagan officially switched parties. As he told it, a woman in the audience stood up in the middle of his speech and asked, “Mr. Reagan, are you still a Democrat?” He replied that he was. “Well, I’m a deputy registrar, and I’d like to change that,” she announced, then marched to the stage with a registration form in hand. “I signed it and became a Republican,” Reagan recalled, “then said to the audience, ‘Now, where was I?’”8
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House From then on, he liked to say, “I didn’t leave the Democrats, they left me.” He never made the connection that his decision to abandon the party of his father came a month or so after his mother’s death.
The conventional wisdom is that Reagan’s decision to switch parties and shift to the far right was heavily influenced by Loyal Davis. Nancy Reagan objected strongly to the notion: “It’s always written that my father was a rich, conservative John Bircher. That is untrue. He was not rich. He was not a John Bircher. . . . And he did not influence Ronnie’s views. Ronnie made up his own mind about things. And once he did, it was very hard for anyone to change it.”9
Richard Davis agreed with her. “This business of Dr. Loyal convincing Ronald Reagan that he should be a Republican, and a conservative Republican at that, is absolute nonsense,” he told me. “Whenever I saw Edith and Loyal with Ronnie and Nancy, the dinner-table conversation was about family affairs, the children, that sort of thing. They didn’t really talk politics.”10 Alice Pirie Wirtz, who was married to Colleen Moore’s stepson, Homer Hargrave Jr., recalled rather differently a dinner with Reagan, the Davises, and her in-laws when he was passing through Chicago on a G.E.
trip. “He was talking politics during the whole dinner,” she said, “and they were all urging him to run for office.”11
Homer junior told me that Loyal paid him very little notice until he ran for Congress in Chicago in 1958, as a conservative Republican. “He was way to the right, further to the right than I am,” said Hargrave.12 “He had fairly strong political opinions,” said Nancy’s friend Kenneth Giniger, who helped Loyal write his autobiography. “Yes, I would call them rightwing.” Giniger doubted, however, that Loyal would have joined the John Birch Society, which attracted mostly middle-class suburbanites. “It wasn’t his kind of thing. He wouldn’t have liked the other people. He was a considerable snob.”13
In fact, Ronnie and Loyal were already in agreement on the big issues when they met. Both had a burning antipathy for the Soviet Union and
“confiscatory taxes,” and no doubt fueled each other’s fire when it came to denouncing Communist sympathizers and “encroaching government control,” the dominant themes of Reagan’s G.E. speeches by the late 1950s.
On certain issues, including abortion and separation of church and state, the irreligious Loyal was more liberal than his son-in-law. Loyal’s novel, Go in Peace, a defense of euthanasia in hopeless cases, caused quite a stir when The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
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it was published in 1954. After Kennedy took office, Ronnie was only too happy to oblige Loyal when he asked him to record an album, Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine, which the American Medical Association distributed as part of its campaign against what would become the Medicare program. A year later Reagan, in a speech on the same subject titled “Losing Freedom by Installments,” warned that “you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling