Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [227]
Or—she is an ambitious, shrewd, domineering woman, a cold and brittle professional actress, a self-centered, demanding and determined extrovert, the cleverly-concealed but constant driving force behind a husband of far less social and political ambition.57
Underlying much of the criticism of Nancy during her first two years in Sacramento was the feeling that, as Bill Boyarsky writes in The Rise of Ronald Reagan, “Mrs. Reagan had considerable influence in running the state government.” Boyarsky had been covering Reagan for the Associated Press since 1965, and later recounted being in the Governor’s office one day early in the first term when Nancy happened to call. Apparently Gordon Smith, Reagan’s ill-fated first finance director, had said something in a speech that contradicted a previous statement by the Governor. As Boyarsky listened, after several “Yes, dears,” Reagan told his wife, “No, dear, I don’t think he was being insubordinate.”58
Lou Cannon, the capital correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News in those days, recalled a similar phone call from Nancy after the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver had made derogatory and threatening remarks about Reagan. “But, honey,” the Governor was overheard saying, “I can’t have him arrested just because he said those things.” Cannon was one of the first to make note of The Gaze, though he didn’t use the term. “The adoration that Nancy displays for her husband is publicly expressed every time she watches a Reagan speech,” he writes in Ronnie and Jesse, which was published in 1969. “During these moments, while other Reagan fans alternately applaud or laugh at the governor’s one-liners, Nancy composes her features into a kind of transfixed adoration more appropriate to a witness of the Virgin Birth.” In Cannon’s estimation, Nancy was “the most formidable personality of the Reagan administration.”59
When Reagan was asked by Harry Reasoner if he discussed major decisions with his wife, he was more frank than his aides may have wanted Sacramento: 1967–1968
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him to be. “We have no secrets,” Reagan told the CBS newsman. “She usually knows what’s on my mind and knows what’s bothering me. She also, I think, knows by now . . . that a lot of my thinking is done out loud.
So she usually hears a few different approaches to it, and suddenly one hits, and that’s the script we go with.” Reasoner also asked Nancy about the common perception that she was behind her husband’s conversion to conservatism. “No, that’s just not true at all,” she answered, looking directly at him and smiling sweetly. “My husband is not that weak a man.
And I’m not that strong a woman.”60
Reagan tended to dismiss criticism of himself as just so many bad reviews; it was box office he cared about. But, as he explained in another 1967 TV interview, his wife had the “greatest sense of loyalty” of almost anyone he knew, especially when it came to her family. “She mans the barricades when the attacks start,” he said with an admiring chuckle,
“whether it’s editorially, or a cartoon, or a fight here in the legislature, or someone making a statement on some controversy that we’re engaged in.
I have to bar the door every once in a while or she’ll march forth and do battle.”61
The Governor’s wife wasn’t above canceling their subscription to the relentlessly critical Sacramento Bee, or calling the publisher of the Los Angeles Times at home to complain about yet another Paul Conrad cartoon making fun of her husband. Reagan’s assistant press secretary, Nancy Reynolds, who was assigned to travel with the First Lady, remembered that on their very first trip her charge lit into a fellow passenger. “I was sitting next to her,”
Reynolds said, “and right behind us was some guy who was tearing into Reagan’s budget. She flipped that seat back, damn it, and turned around to him and said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about— that’s my husband—
and you