Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [201]
Rockefeller’s 1963 divorce and remarriage a month later, to divorcée Margaretta “Happy” Murphy, was also used against him by the Goldwaterites, in an era when politicians stayed married no matter what. Nowhere was the battle fought more bitterly than in California.
Reagan became an almost full-time volunteer for Goldwater. At a breakfast rally in Inglewood in May, he accused Goldwater’s “liberal Republican enemies” of conducting the “most vicious and venomous campaign against a candidate in our party we have ever seen.” Mimicking Goldwater’s detrac-tors, he proceeded to introduce the candidate as “a Neanderthal man, a bigot, a warmonger, looking out at us from the 19th century.” The joke fell flat.45 Overall, though, Reagan was one of the campaign’s most effective and popular speakers, drawing huge crowds wherever he appeared. At the Memorial Day finale at Knott’s Berry Farm in Anaheim, he stood on the podium—flanked by John Wayne and Rock Hudson—and led 27,000
Goldwater enthusiasts in a roaring Pledge of Allegiance.46 The race was so 3 2 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House close that on primary night Walter Cronkite was projecting Goldwater the winner at the same time the wire services were declaring a Rockefeller victory. The results were made official only after the absentee ballots were counted—Goldwater won by 68,000 votes out of more than two million cast.
A month later Nancy and Ronnie, who had been made an alternate delegate by the Los Angeles County Republican organization, were at the party’s national convention in San Francisco’s Cow Palace, which was completely dominated by Goldwater supporters, who were nearly hysterical at the thought of nominating a true-blue conservative for the first time since Calvin Coolidge in 1924. They shouted “lover” and booed during Nelson Rockefeller’s speech, shook their fists at the TV anchormen in their booths above the convention floor, and triumphantly voted down every proposal to soften the platform committee’s hard-line planks on civil rights, Social Security, and foreign policy. A horrified Gore Vidal, who was there as a commentator, happened to be standing near the box from which Ronnie and Nancy watched former president Eisenhower give his speech on the second night.
“Suddenly, I was fascinated by them,” the acidic Vidal later wrote. “First, there was her furious glare when someone created a diversion during Ike’s aria. She turned, lip curled with Bacchantish rage, huge unblinking eyes afire with a passion to kill the enemy so palpably at hand—or so it looked to me. . . . I had heard that Reagan might be involved in the coming campaign. So I studied him with some care. He was slumped in a folding chair, one hand holding up his chins; he was totally concentrated on Eisenhower.
. . . I had seen that sort of concentration a thousand times in half-darkened theatres during rehearsals or Saturday matinees: The understudy examines the star’s performance and tries to figure how it is done. An actor prepares, I said to myself: Mr. Reagan is planning to go into politics. With his crude charm, I was reasonably certain that he could be elected mayor of Beverly Hills.”47
The convention was a major social event, with such Rockefeller friends as New York Herald Tribune publisher John Hay Whitney and CBS chairman William F. Paley and their wives—the fashionable Cushing sisters, Betsy and Babe—flying in from