Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [231]
“From the beginning, everybody was scared to death of Nancy,” Deaver admitted. “Nancy’s only interaction with the staff would be when there was a problem. She’d call up and say, ‘Well, why did this happen?’ Or, ‘Why is Ronnie doing that?’ My reaction was to tell her the truth. ‘We did it because it’s the right thing to do, and here’s why.’ ‘Oh, okay.’ And so pretty soon people would say, ‘You can deal with her.’ And I didn’t have a problem with that. Because I liked her. So I developed a kind of personal relationship with Ronald and Nancy Reagan. I wasn’t intimidated by either of them.”78
According to Nancy Reynolds, “Mike had the personality and the ability to anticipate her needs, and that’s always a helpful thing. He had a great sense of PR, although that was not what he was hired for at the time.
He had good instincts and she liked him. She trusted him. But she didn’t just rush into it.”79 Stu Spencer, who was Deaver’s political mentor, described the evolution of the alliance between the First Lady and her husband’s deputy more cynically. “In the early days Mike worked at it,”
Spencer told me. “And then she found somebody who would carry the water when she wanted it carried.”80
Deaver was a twenty-eight-year-old Republican Party field worker when Spencer put him in charge of the Reagan campaign in Santa Clara County. The first time Deaver saw the candidate, he thought, “My God, he has on rouge,” but he soon realized that Reagan’s rosy cheeks were as real as his convictions.81 He had come to politics more by accident than by Sacramento: 1967–1968
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choice: he was playing piano in a San Jose cocktail lounge “for beer and sandwiches,” according to Republican politician Vernon Cristina, who
“hired him for a damn little amount of money” to work for the local party organization in 1962.82 In his senior year at San Jose State, Deaver had flirted with the idea of becoming an Episcopalian priest, but upon graduation in 1960 he opted for a job in sales with IBM, which he found so boring that he took off on an around-the-world trip with a college buddy.
Restless by nature, easily impressed by glamour and power, gregarious and charming, Deaver was one of those people who needed to be in the middle of things.
“My roots were lower middle class, not unlike Reagan’s,” he wrote in his memoir, Behind the Scenes. “We Deavers had what we needed and not much else.” His father was a Shell Oil distributor in Bakersfield, and Deaver had after-school and summer jobs as a paper boy, soda jerk, fry cook, ditch digger, meter reader, and offset printer. His family was the last on the block to have a TV set;83 perhaps he watched it more intently as a result, for somehow he developed a keen visual sense that would serve him well in the image-obsessed world of modern American politics. This attribute had particular appeal to Nancy Reagan, who shared his understanding of how much appearances mattered, even if she seemed better at shaping her husband’s public persona than her own. In fact, Deaver later said, it was Nancy who first saw in him “a quality I wasn’t at all sure I possessed: the instinct for how the media operates and how to best present Ronald Reagan to it.”
Soon we were huddling on scheduling, politics, the press, speeches, and other affairs of state. I had fully expected to learn the lion’s share of politics at the side of Ronald Reagan. . . . But Nancy proved to be a shrewd political player in her own right. She forced me to get in front of the governor, promoting issues where [she]
and I found common cause. She also taught me ways to win him over, ones other aides were unaware of. If you want to prevail on Reagan, she advised, never use blatant, crass politics as a tool to pull him in your direction. If I were to say that going to a certain event or supporting a certain bill would mean “political death” for him, he would dismiss my argument out of hand. But if I said that his support of this bill or his attendance at this event would hurt folks