Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [214]
Ronnie and Nancy saw in 1966 at the Bloomingdales’. “It was the first year I did a New Year’s Eve party, and I had champagne, caviar, and chili,”
said Betsy Bloomingdale, reeling off the guest list from her party book.
“Irene Dunne, the Lohmans—she’s Beverly Morsey now, the Dominick Dunnes, Bill Frye, and Jim Wharton. And I had everybody’s children—
that was the idea, to keep it small and family.” Dominick Dunne, who was a producer then, and his wife, Lenny, were on the Beverly Hills A-list, and Lew Lohman was a rich oilman from Texas whose wife was in the Colleagues.123
Four days later Ronald Reagan formally announced his candidacy for governor in a televised broadcast from Pacific Palisades. Nancy stood at his side, looking up at him lovingly. The candidate was wearing a dark-green-and-navy tartan jacket, a white shirt, a dark tie, and black slacks; his wife wore a suit of fire-engine red, a color that guaranteed she would stand out.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Reagan began, “for the last six months I’ve been traveling up and down this state meeting as many of you as I could—answering questions and asking a few. There isn’t any secret as to why I’ve been doing this: I have said I’ll be a candidate for Governor once I’ve found the answers to a few questions myself—mainly about my acceptability to 3 4 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House you. Who would like to be Governor isn’t important. Who the people would like to be Governor is very important.”124
The presentation seemed deliberately Rooseveltian in its homey majesty, from the direct appeal to the people right down to the crackling logs in the living room fireplace behind him. As Lou Cannon writes,
“Reagan found his true calling in politics. Reagan was a competent actor with a limited range. As a politician, however, he was so enormously gifted that he seemed a president-in-waiting almost as soon as he began campaigning.”125
Reagan “fielded a variety of questions with impeccable nonchalance,”
said The New York Times about the press conference that followed at the Statler-Hilton downtown. Then came a reception for 150 reporters, a private party for the Kitchen Cabinet, and another reception for the Friends of Ronald Reagan, whose numbers had swelled to six thousand. The campaign now began in earnest. To comply with the equal-airtime laws, Reagan took a leave from Death Valley Days; Robert Taylor and John Wayne agreed to fill in for him. He even gave in to flying for the first time in some twenty-five years—“Holmes told him, ‘If you want to run, you gotta fly,’ ”
Betty Adams recalled.126 The campaign chartered a DC-3 for trips to Northern California, but Reagan used a bus or chauffeured car in the south.127 Nancy accompanied him almost everywhere.
So did a team of Republican psychology professors hired by Spencer-Roberts with the Kitchen Cabinet’s approval. Stanley Plog and Kenneth Holden had recently started a company called Behavior Science Corporation of Los Angeles, and they would come to be seen as the precursors of today’s campaign consultants, who mold, advise, and direct a candidate every step of the way. “We were with him every waking moment during the entire campaign, one of the three of us,” said Plog, referring to himself, Holden, and their assistant. “You’d fly up on the plane with him to Sacramento. You’d follow him into the restroom before he goes on stage, giving him a last-minute bit of advice. We were over at his home a lot, talking over issues with him, feeding [him] things, telling him, ‘Look, here’s three alternate programs that could grow out of your belief about this. Now which one do you like? You choose the one you like, and then we’ll develop information and support it.’” Plog added, “The primary thing was to educate him on the politics and issues of California because, all along, that