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’68! Reagan ’68!” he gave them his best aw-shucks look, then blushed bright red before breaking into a great big grin that indicated how happy their chanting made him. Earlier in the year, he had agreed to debate Robert Kennedy, who had been elected to the Senate from New York after his brother’s death, on the CBS program Town Meeting of the World, and after standing up to intense questioning by European students about the Vietnam War, he emerged as the surprise victor. That fall, following in the footsteps of such heavyweights as Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson, he spent four days as a Chubb Fellow at Yale and again made a positive impression on those who were prepared to dismiss him as a dimwitted cowboy. After a brief visit to her alma mater, Smith College, Nancy joined him in New Haven—she wore a leopard coat over a bright green trapeze dress to one lecture—and the Reagans visited Bill and Pat Buckley at their weekend house in nearby Stamford.

By the end of 1967, Reagan had raked in some $1.5 million for the party, and a Gallup Poll of Republican county chairmen had him in second place after Nixon.119 “There is a very real possibility,” intoned Harry Reasoner on CBS Reports, “that Ronald Reagan, an actor who ran for his first public office just over a year ago, will be the next Republican candidate for president. This frightens some people and delights others. The 3 8 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House people who are delighted and those who are frightened are responding to the same feeling: that the man might go all the way.”120

To say 1968 was a tumultuous year in American politics is both an un-derstatement and a cliché. One shocking and calamitous event followed another, throwing the plans of candidates in both parties, including the sitting President himself, into constant disarray. For Reagan, the year began with a celebration: a $1,000-a-ticket ball in Sacramento co-chaired by Tuttle and Salvatori to congratulate their protégé on completing his first year as governor. At that point, President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey seemed all but certain to be renominated, and George Romney, backed by Nelson Rockefeller, who had vowed not to run again, was still Nixon’s strongest rival for the Republican nomination.

Then came the Tet Offensive on January 30, in which North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces attacked Saigon and thirty South Vietnamese provincial capitals. They were driven back after three weeks, but the sight of Communist fighters storming the American embassy on the evening news was enough to propel Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, the hero of the antiwar movement, to a near victory over Johnson in the March 12

New Hampshire primary. The next morning Robert Kennedy, realizing that the President was vulnerable, jumped into the race, and at the end of the month a worn-out LBJ gave up the fight. Vietnam also did in Governor Romney, who claimed he had been “brainwashed” by American generals and diplomats on a tour of the battlefields, a remark that sent his poll numbers into a free fall that ended with his withdrawal in late February.

Nixon now looked unassailable, unless Rockefeller made a move, or Reagan got serious. Maryland’s cagey Governor Spiro Agnew was trying to start a “Draft Rocky” movement and writing letters to Reagan urging him to sign on for the vice presidency.

The country was stunned once again on April 4, by the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis and the rioting that broke out almost immediately in Washington, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and more than a hundred other cities. With thirty-nine dead, twenty thousand arrested, and fifty thousand Army troops and National Guardsmen on the streets, the political climate heated up all the more. Alabama’s racist former governor George Wallace managed to get his third party registered in all fifty states; Hubert Humphrey stepped forward as the mainstream alternative to the liberal RFK and the peacenik Sacramento: 1967–1968

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McCarthy; Rockefeller decided to