Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [202]
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their little notebooks,” said Homer Hargrave Jr., who was a Goldwater delegate. “The California delegation was two sections behind Illinois, and every time Reagan came down the aisle, he’d stop and say hello to me.”48
Eisenhower’s entourage included the Justin Darts and the Freeman Gosdens—both couples had weekend houses at the Eldorado Country Club near Palm Springs, where the Eisenhowers had been given a retirement villa. According to Dart, no one was more upset by Goldwater’s harshly uncompromising acceptance speech—which ended with those fatal lines “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”—than Eisenhower, who had hoped Pennsylvania governor William Scranton would be able to stop the Arizonan at the last minute. “Ike was sick, absolutely sick,” said Dart.49 Ike and Mamie spent the weekend following the convention at the Darts’ summer house in Pebble Beach. “Ike never liked Goldwater,” one of the guests told me.
“He’d get that pained Eisenhower expression on his face when Goldwater’s name came up. He thought Goldwater was one-dimensional. Not subtle.
He said the conservative cabal had taken over the party. We asked Ike,
‘What do we do?’ ‘You’re going to hold your nose and vote for him.’ ”50
Eisenhower was far from alone in his distaste for Goldwater’s candidacy: the entire Eastern wing of the Republican Party was up in arms.
Walter Annenberg’s Philadelphia Inquirer, which had endorsed every Republican candidate since Lincoln, supported Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater
“was a smart-aleck, a dope, and he drank too much,” Annenberg later said. “He wasn’t fit to be president.”51 Babe Paley stomped off the dance floor at a post-convention party in Los Angeles at Anita May’s when her dancing partner, Billy Haines, crowed, “Isn’t it great? We got Goldwater nominated.”52
The Reagans went to the convention with Holmes and Virginia Tuttle and Henry and Grace Salvatori. Henry Salvatori, the multimillionaire head of the Western Geophysical oil company, was Goldwater’s finance chairman in California, and Holmes Tuttle was also heavily involved in fund-raising for the campaign. “Holmes and Salvatori were true believers,” a moderate Republican friend of theirs told me. “We’d roll our eyes when they got going. Not that they were John Birchers.” Salvatori had found Goldwater’s speech “exhilarating,” and said years later, “I don’t understand to this day what’s wrong with that statement.”53 Both he and Tuttle had been greatly impressed by Reagan’s ability to draw crowds and articulate the conservative message during the primary.
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Although the Reagans didn’t know the Tuttles or the Salvatoris well at that point, they had many mutual friends. Both couples went back a long way with Betty Adams, through her Republican Party connections. The Salvatoris lived next door to Bill and Betty Wilson and were friends of the Bloomingdales’—Grace was the godmother of Alfred and Betsy’s second son. Holmes Tuttle, who had been selling cars to Ronnie since the 1940s, was a close pal of Earle Jorgensen’s. Tuttle’s son, Robert, told me, “My father could always count on Earle to write a check.”54
“To look at Holmes Tuttle you would never believe that he was one of the biggest movers and shakers in L.A.,” said David Jones, who did the flowers for the Tuttles’ dinners at their Tudor mansion in Hancock Park. “He was a man who was at ease with himself, and very firmly grounded,” said Robert Tuttle. There was something about this tall, balding, pleasant-looking man that inspired confidence. As Betsy Bloomingdale put it, “Everybody listened to Holmes. He was an oracle. He knew what should be done and saw that it got done.”55
The seventh of ten children,