Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [236]
There wasn’t any question who we wanted. We knew the kind of Governor he had been; we knew what he stood for; we knew that was who we needed back at the White House.”102
More than the stay-at-home evenings and the run-away weekends, Reagan’s ostensibly reluctant quest for the presidency barely a year after he had arrived in the state capital made many feel that the movie star governor and his social queen wife saw Sacramento as a mere stepping-stone to higher ground. During his campaign, he had promised to serve a full term as governor, and he continued to insist until the very eve of the balloting in Miami that he wasn’t running for anything, just keeping his delegation unified. As far as the press was concerned, Reagan had been thrust into the front row of possible GOP nominees simply by virtue of his landslide victory in 1966: three days after that election, The New York Times ran a front-page story listing him as one of four leading contenders, along with Nixon, who had moved to New York and turned himself into the workhorse of the Republican Party; Governor George Romney of Michigan, a likable cen-trist; and Senator-elect Charles Percy of Illinois, a forty-eight-year-old corporate star with a handsome wife.103 Nixon worried about Reagan from day one. Bill Buckley told me, “Nixon asked me how did I account for Reagan’s success. This was just after he was elected Governor. And he spoke about him in terms of a presidential perspective. I said, ‘He’s a Hollywood actor.’
And he said, ‘Anybody who wins California by one million votes is a presidential candidate.’”104 One suspects that the savvy Nixon also realized that Reagan’s public appeal far outdistanced his. As Sue Cummings, the wife of Kitchen Cabinet member Ted Cummings, who knew both men quite well, Sacramento: 1967–1968
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said, “You had to know Nixon to like him. You didn’t have to know Reagan to love him.”105
As both Cannon and Garry Wills have pointed out, the anointing triumvirate of Rubel, Tuttle, and Salvatori had always wanted to elect a president; they had become interested in the charismatic actor only after their original favorite, Goldwater, stumbled. The idea of taking Reagan all the way to the White House was, at the very least, in the air early on. Jean French Smith told me that after hearing Reagan speak at the Ambassador Hotel the night of Goldwater’s defeat, she turned to her husband and said,
“That man ought to run for president.”106 Robert Tuttle remembered his father coming home from one of the first Major Appointments Task Force meetings and repeating what Jaquelin Hume had said: “Gentlemen, we don’t have gubernatorial material here, we have presidential material.”107
Henry Salvatori didn’t discourage the notion in an interview he gave a couple of months into the first gubernatorial term. “People criticize Ronnie for having no political experience,” he told Doris Klein of the Associated Press. “But he has a great image, a way to get through to people. . . .
Look at John F. Kennedy. He didn’t have much of a record as a senator.
But he made a great appearance—and he had a beautiful wife. So does the governor. Nancy Reagan doesn’t have to take a back seat to anyone. And the governor has plenty of time between now and the nomination to make a record as an administrator. But I don’t believe people in other states really care much about what’s happening in California anyway.”108
As for Reagan’s own ambitions, political consultant Stanley Plog, who traveled with him during the 1966 campaign, said, “He has always wanted to be president, not governor.”109 Also worth mentioning is Reagan’s reply to a letter from his most politically minded child, Maureen, written shortly after he switched parties in 1962. She had seen a newspaper item about his being approached to run for governor, and urged him to do so. “Run . . .
you can win back California” were her words. “Mermie, I really appreciate your support,” her father wrote in return, “but if we’re going to talk about what could be, well, I could be president—ha, ha!—but of