Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [207]
As Nancy recalled the evening, “Ronnie’s speech went over so well that
[Holmes] came to him afterwards and said ‘We’ve got to get that speech on television.’ ” Tuttle and Salvatori quickly came up with the money to buy a half hour of airtime on NBC so that Reagan could deliver his speech nationwide a week before the election. In Nancy’s recollection and most other versions, Goldwater’s advisers tried to stop the telecast, claiming it was “too emotional.” Goldwater himself called Reagan at home, and ReaThe Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
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gan suggested he view a taped film of the speech that had been made for fund-raising events in California. After he had seen it, the candidate asked his staff, “What the hell was wrong with that?”78
Laurie Salvatori, however, recalled a conversation with her mother that indicates that it was actually Grace who raised much of the money, and that a jealous Goldwater wanted the airtime for himself. “My first memory of this whole Reagan business,” she told me, “was walking into my mother’s study, and her shushing me. When she got off the phone she said, ‘You won’t believe who called—Barry Goldwater. He was calling from his airplane. Some girlfriends and I have bought the airtime for Ronald Reagan to go on television to talk about Barry Goldwater.’ Goldwater was asking my mother if he could have the time back, so he could talk for himself. And my mother said, ‘Well, do you have the money?’—which she knew he probably didn’t. And she said in the loveliest way possible, ‘Well, Barry, if you don’t . . .’ As you know, this particular speech that Ronald Reagan gave for Barry Goldwater was the highlight of the whole campaign.”79
The final version of the speech was taped before an invited audience outfitted with Goldwater signs in a studio in Phoenix; Patti remembered that half the audience, including her mother, was in tears by the time her father finished.80 NBC broadcast the speech on October 27, 1964, at 8:30
in the evening, and Ronnie and Nancy watched it at Bill and Betty Wilson’s house with the Salvatoris and the Tuttles. Over the next week $500,000
poured into the campaign’s coffers, and another half million soon followed.
According to Nancy, some $8 million was generated for the Republican Party as a result of the speech.81 A new political star was born. Washington Post columnist David Broder declared that Reagan had made “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with his ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.”82
No one seemed to notice that Barry Goldwater’s name was mentioned only once, and then almost as an afterthought, following the rousing climax. Except, that is, Goldwater himself. “To his discredit, Goldwater always seemed to resent being superseded by Reagan,” says Lyn Nofziger, who covered the 1964 election for the Copley newspapers and went on to become Reagan’s press secretary two years later, in his eponymous memoir. “Probably Reagan was too effective from Goldwater’s point of view because Reagan, not Goldwater, emerged from that campaign as the conservative hero.”83
“Ronnie always believed that we’re all put here for a purpose,” Nancy 3 3 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Reagan told me. “We might not know now why or what the purpose is, but eventually we will. Barry opened the door. And then Ronnie took it along.”84
Goldwater’s defeat was the worst the Republicans had suffered since the Roosevelt years. Johnson carried forty-four states, winning even in such bastions of Midwestern Republicanism as Galesburg, Illinois, which so upset Loyal Davis that he announced he no longer wanted to be buried in his hometown.85 Reagan took the loss more evenly, giving a brief pep talk to dejected campaign workers at an election night party at the Ambassador Hotel and encouraging