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“We didn’t want that to be the demise of the Republican Party,” said Tuttle, “so we thought the best way to start rebuilding was here in California.”87 Tuttle got together with Salvatori and A. C. “Cy” Rubel, a key Goldwater supporter who had recently retired as chairman of the Union Oil Company, to discuss the future of the party, including whom they could run for governor against the Democratic incumbent, Edmund “Pat”

Brown, in 1966. “Gentlemen,” Tuttle told his cohorts, “I think we’ve got a candidate right here. How about Ron?”88

It didn’t take much convincing. As Laurie Salvatori said, “My father felt that, unlike Goldwater, Ronald Reagan could get elected because he spoke better than anybody else in the world.”89 Furthermore, George Murphy’s victory in the 1964 Senate race demonstrated that Californians were willing to elect an actor to high office; Reagan had campaigned for his old friend from SAG. “So I went to see him,” Tuttle said. “In fact, Mrs. Tuttle went with me, and we spent the evening at Ron’s home.”90 It is not clear whether this visit took place in late December 1964 or early January 1965. In either case, it was followed by more visits to San Onofre Drive by Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel.

“I knew those people were going to come up to the house after that disastrous election,” Nancy Reagan told me. “I knew it. And they did. At first Ronnie said, ‘Well, let me think about it.’ And then finally he said to me,

‘You know, the party is in such bad shape, if I felt that I could do something to help it, and I didn’t do it, I’d feel terrible.’ So he said to them, ‘Let me go out and see what the response of the people is.’ And there we were.

On a road we never intended to be on. Ever.”91

It was certainly a hard decision for the Reagans to make; on the other hand, there was also an air of inevitability about it, as if they had known The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

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all along where they were heading. Nancy’s old friend Bruce McFarland vividly remembered her telling him on a visit to Chicago shortly after Patti was born, “Mark my words, Ronnie will be governor of California someday.”92 Others, including Ardie and Harriet Deutsch, remembered Nancy dropping similar comments over the years. Arlene Dahl recalled that Nancy had asked her to read her tea leaves at their hairdresser’s in early 1965; she told Nancy that she would soon receive important news having to do with California’s government.93

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