Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [230]
“Ronald Reagan was the sweetest, kindest, most wonderful man to work for,” Reynolds told me. “One of the great things about him was that he never equated disagreement with disloyalty. That was really important, because Mike and Lyn and I and many others could disagree with him even on policy matters. He would listen and then he’d argue back. He’d say, ‘Well, now here’s why I believe such-and-such.’ Or, ‘This is what I’m Sacramento: 1967–1968
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thinking.’ And yet when you parted, you knew he’d never say, ‘Sounds like disloyalty to me.’ ”73
The low-key, soft-spoken Clark brought an openness and calm to the Governor’s office that had been missing under the controlling, peripatetic Battaglia. A fourth-generation Californian and churchgoing Catholic with a German wife and five kids, Clark had been raised as a “Jeffersonian Democrat” but changed parties in 1964 because he was impressed with the Goldwater message. He had met Reagan—on horseback, appropriately enough—when he managed his campaign in Ventura County in 1966. Both men were asked to join Rancheros Vistadores, the private riding club of which Justin Dart and Bill Wilson were long-standing members. Clark invented the “mini-memo” for Reagan, “a form of communication which the Governor liked very much—one page, four paragraphs, which started the discussion in cabinet meetings,” he explained.
“But I never had any aspirations for government or political work,” he added. “I didn’t have the fire in the belly.”74 Clark’s laid-back attitude was reassuring to Reagan, but others felt that he was much more dogmatic and ambitious than he seemed.
It was Clark who assigned Deaver to what was derisively referred to as the “Mommy watch” by staffers who found dealing with the First Lady difficult. As Clark told me, “My workload got so heavy—in the reorganization of state government, in working with the Democratic legislature—
and Nancy’s calls were so frequent, that I asked her first, and then the Governor, to understand that Mike could handle her requests, up to a point. But I told them that he would always keep me informed.”75 Helene von Damm noted that “Mrs. R,” as everyone in the office called her, “was an extremely persistent person. If she called when Bill was in a meeting, I knew that she’d call back in half an hour. If Bill’s meetings ran long enough to provoke a third call from Mrs. R, I’d call Mike Deaver and ask him to talk to her rather than have to tell her that Bill was still unavailable.” According to von Damm, that was how the Nancy Reagan–Mike Deaver friendship began.
“Mrs. R didn’t have the skill with people that her husband had,” von Damm wrote in her memoir, At Reagan’s Side. “In fact, where he always gave people the impression that he liked them, she, probably without knowing it, gave the opposite impression. Everyone tensed when she came into the office. I have to admit that when I heard her voice on the other end of the phone I’d always stiffen a little bit in anticipation of some criticism 3 7 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House or other. Mrs. R was goal-oriented with people. If you were someone she thought important enough to befriend, she could pour on the charm. And she usually got the friendships she wanted. Similarly, if you worked for her or her husband, she wanted things done a certain way and would make constant demands until she was satisfied. In both cases, it seemed to me that she saw people, potential friends or employees, as means to an end, not as ends in themselves.”76
Von Damm, a buxom brunette who was not yet thirty in 1967—and who had flown herself to San Francisco and begged for a job with Reagan’s campaign after hearing him give a speech in Chicago—aroused suspicions in Nancy from the first. They gave each other a wide berth and would become openly hostile in the years to come, so there is a strong element of score-settling in von Damm’s account. But even Nancy’s close friends remarked about her tenaciousness. “When she gets onto