Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [215]
After being holed up with Reagan for three days in a borrowed Malibu The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
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beach house, Plog and Holden made thirteen black books, each covering an important state issue, with information on five-by-eight cards that Reagan could remove and insert into a speech. “The speeches were all his, we didn’t touch that,” Plog said. “His short little one-liners all came from him. His ability to ad-lib in a spot was just fabulous; he could handle any situation.”129 To complement Spencer-Roberts’s Citizen Politician concept, Plog and Holden dubbed Reagan’s program the Creative Society.
The idea was to counteract the perception of conservatives’ always being against something—welfare, busing, Russia—and to reinforce Reagan’s natural optimism and good humor. “Our problems are many but our capacity for solving them is immense,” Reagan told his audiences. “The government is like a baby’s alimentary canal,” he would joke, “with a healthy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.”130
Reagan lost his cool only once during the months leading up to the June primary, at a convention of the National Negro Republican Assembly in Santa Monica, when Christopher and a minor candidate implied that he was a racist for opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature,” Reagan barked. Then, flipping one of his note cards into the audience, he stalked off the stage, muttering “sons of bitches” under his breath, and drove home. Lyn Nofziger, his press secretary, followed him and, with Nancy, persuaded him to return for the cocktail party that followed the debate. Henry Salvatori was so upset when he read of the incident the next day that he told Nofziger he thought Reagan was “not smart enough or stable enough to be governor.” He threatened to get former governor Goodwin Knight to run against Reagan, but Nofziger managed to talk him out of it, and he didn’t say anything to Ronnie or Nancy.131
In contrast to Salvatori’s prima donna behavior—he also had run-ins with Spencer-Roberts and Plog and Holden—Holmes Tuttle never wavered in his support for or belief in Reagan through all the ups and downs of the campaign. In addition to constantly calming down Salvatori, he was besieged with phone calls from angry Birchers who thought Reagan was abandoning the cause, as well as fretful moderates who warned that Reagan was an irredeemable right-winger. (Among the most adamant of the latter was Congressman Alphonzo Bell.) “It was a lonely and difficult time for my father,” Robert Tuttle told me. “Because, of the three original Reagan supporters, he was the one who really worked day to day on the campaign.
Mom and Dad were both very involved. They’d go down to the Reagan for Governor headquarters on Wilshire and Vermont, near the old I. Magnin’s, 3 4 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House and just work their hearts out. A lot of his close friends supported George Christopher, and would say to him, ‘Why are you supporting this actor?
Look at what Goldwater did to the party. Now you’re going to do it again.’
But he managed to continually reach out to the other side and say, ‘If Christopher wins, we’ll be on board the next day.’ And he got them to say,
‘If Reagan wins, we’ll be on board.’ And many of those people—the most prominent one was Justin Dart—came right on board.’”132
Reagan beat Christopher with a solid 65 percent of the vote, and several top Christopher backers were enlisted into the Kitchen Cabinet, including Dart and Leonard Firestone; Ted Cummings, the founder of the Food Giant supermarket chain and a leader in the Los Angeles Jewish community; and Arch Monson Jr., owner of a San Francisco–based theater supplies business and a prominent member of the exclusive and influential Bohemian Club. Taft Schreiber, who had also supported Christopher, was made vice chairman of the campaign’s finance committee, and Jules Stein stepped up his behind-the-scenes activities. (Lew Wasserman raised money for Brown,