Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [217]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House one of her most steadfast allies. He was one of the first to understand a key factor in Ronnie’s relationships: “Reagan didn’t have any close friends to speak of. They were all acquaintances. Well, Robert Taylor was close. . . .
Reagan went home to Mommy.”140 The wife of a prominent California Republican said, “Nancy was the one and only influence on Ronnie. The men in the Kitchen Cabinet went riding with him—they were always riding like a bunch of cowboys—but they were no closer to Ronald Reagan than those leaves on the ground over there. No matter how close you got to him, or how long you talked to him, you never got that close. No one did.”
Stanley Plog took note of another lack in Reagan’s makeup. While he had the capacity to engender great loyalty in the people who worked for him, he found it difficult to mediate when differences arose among them.
“He would not do that,” Plog said. “He is not an executive in that sense, of stepping in between his staff and saying, ‘You do this and you do that.’
. . . Others have traditionally done that for him. The personal relationships that are sticky like that are very disquieting for Reagan, very uncomfortable.”141
Plog mentioned Tuttle and Salvatori as people who would handle personnel problems for the candidate. Stu Spencer realized that Nancy could also play that role.
Governor Brown was pleased by Reagan’s victory—he considered him a lightweight who would be much easier to beat than Christopher. “Ronald Reagan for Governor of California? Absurd!” he scoffed when the actor’s name first came up as a possible candidate, and his attitude hadn’t really changed despite Reagan’s impressive performance on the campaign trail.
For a hard-bitten political veteran like Pat Brown, the so-called Citizen Politician would always be the “Professional Amateur,” even when he took the Governor’s Mansion right out from under his nose.142
It turned out that the bumbling old pro—his malapropisms were so frequent that they became known as “Brownisms”—was no match for the articulate, energetic, and astonishingly youthful-looking fifty-five-year-old movie star. During Brown’s two terms, the state’s population had zoomed from 15 million to 19 million,143 and he had kept pace with new freeways, new water projects, new schools and colleges, and new jobs. By 1966, California had the highest personal income in the nation. But it also had high taxes, huge welfare rolls, and a rapidly rising crime rate. In addition, Brown was cursed with a calamitous sense of timing. He was vacationing in Greece The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
3 4 9
when the Watts riots broke out in the summer of 1965, and when César Chávez and his striking grape pickers marched on Sacramento, Brown was spending Easter at Frank Sinatra’s compound in Palm Springs. His inability to handle the ongoing student unrest at Berkeley—home of the Free Speech, Filthy Speech, and Free Love movements—played into Reagan’s moralistic law-and-order campaign. And when the Governor ran an ad reminding voters that an actor had shot Lincoln, even Hollywood liberals were disgusted. Up to then only a handful of entertainment personalities had actively campaigned for Reagan, including Pat Boone, Gene Autry and Dale Evans, John Wayne, and Piper Laurie. (Dick Powell had passed away in 1963, and Bill Holden, after leaving Ardis, had become such a heavy drinker that Ronnie and Nancy hardly ever saw him.) “All of a sudden Sinatra’s in our camp, and a lot of others,” Stu Spencer said. “Frank came aboard and stayed there.”144
According to Henry Salvatori, Spencer-Roberts had a mole in the Brown camp who told them that the Governor’s team was planning to run
“a series of ads against Reagan besmirching his character involving some sexual misconduct.” No such ads ever ran, but Tuttle and Salvatori felt they had to ascertain from Reagan whether there was any basis for concern. “Five or six members of our group met with him at his home and we commenced the conversation: ‘Now, Ronnie, you understand that