Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [237]
This attitude, at once boastful, ambivalent, and self-deprecating, would characterize the entire 1968 Reagan for President campaign. Like his run for the governorship, it began with a meeting at the house on San Onofre Drive of the Reagans and their rich backers, who would eventually 3 8 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House spend nearly half a million dollars on the effort.111 As Theodore H. White revealed in The Making of the President 1968: Within ten days of his election, Reagan had gathered his inner circle together, on Thursday, November 17, 1966, at his home in Pacific Palisades for a first discussion of the Presidency. There, too, was named a captain for the adventure—young Tom Reed. . . .
Reed, in the next two weeks, was to engage as counsel for the campaign the master architect of the Goldwater nomination of 1964, F.
Clifton White of New York. Together, the two were to draw up a meticulous master plan for seizure of the nomination, timed in five phases and date-deadlined from December, 1966 to nomination in August, 1968.112
Lyn Nofziger, who was present at that meeting and was one of those pushing hardest for Reagan to run, named the other participants as Battaglia, Tuttle, Salvatori, Schreiber, and Mills, all of whom were also raring to go. Only Nancy and her ally Stu Spencer, it appears, were counseling caution. According to Mike Deaver, Nancy “was skeptical from the start.
I can still hear her telling Reagan and me that it was ‘way too early for this kind of thinking.’ ”113 Deaver, however, didn’t come into the picture until after Battaglia’s exit, in August 1967, and the scandal that ensued convinced nearly everyone in the Governor’s office, especially the new chief of staff, Bill Clark, that it would be wise to pull back. “My position throughout was that first we had to prove ourselves in Sacramento,” Clark told me. “And I thought we had a lot of work to do.”114
That summer, Reagan saw Nixon at the Bohemian Grove, the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco’s members and guests, an all-male event that went back to the 1870s and that in the postwar years had become the most important conclave of mainly Republican politicians and corporate chieftains in the country. The club’s secret membership was said to include such Reagan backers as Asa Call, Justin Dart, Earle Jorgensen, Leonard Firestone, and Northrop chairman Thomas V. Jones.
Barely a handful of staunchly conservative Hollywood people belonged—
Bing Crosby, Edgar Bergen, Art Linkletter. Bill Buckley was a guest of Senator George Murphy that year, and as Buckley’s biographer John Judis recounts: “At that gathering, Reagan and Nixon, who were both members, met frequently and agreed finally that Reagan would stay out of the primaries unless Nixon faltered.”115 Buckley, who had been actively courted by Sacramento: 1967–1968
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Nixon over the past year, had also begun a regular correspondence with Nancy Reagan at this time, and he may have influenced her cautious attitude about having her husband run.116
Ed Meese and Casper Weinberger also opposed a run, but Nofziger, Reed, and Clifton White, backed by the Kitchen Cabinet, pushed ahead.
As Rus Walton, a junior aide close to Clark, explained, “I think [Reagan]
was reluctant at first. I can’t pretend that I really know personally his inner thoughts. I think that he was had. I think what came into play were not necessarily his ambitions but other people’s ambitions. Maybe some of it was anti-Nixon. I don’t know. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think he pushed and shoved his way to get there in ’68. I think he was dragged rather than he led.”117
As far as Nofziger could tell, Reagan “believed that if God wanted him to be President He would see that it got done.”118 Usually accompanied by Nofziger and Reed, he began flying around the country giving speeches at GOP fund-raisers while maintaining that he was a “noncandidate.” When delegates to the South Carolina state convention in September started chanting, “Reagan