Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [240]
“in this race for keeps.”130 With the convention only a month away, the hope was that if the two governors from opposite ends of the party could keep Nixon from winning on the first ballot, the convention would break open and one of them might emerge the nominee.
Two weeks later, on July 19, Reagan took off in a chartered jet with Tuttle, the increasingly important French Smith, White, Reed, Nofziger, and
“all the reporters whom Nofizger could induce to come along” for a delegate-hunting swing through the South. Grassroots support was strong for Reagan in Dixie, but the powers that be, such as South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond and Texas senator John Tower, had been rounding up delegates for Nixon for months.131 As Tuttle remembered the tour, from Charlottesville to Amarillo, Reagan’s team heard the same refrain: “‘But is he going to run?’ And I said, ‘Well, look, fellows, you’re running if you are a “favorite son.”’ But they kept pressing: ‘Why doesn’t he come out and say, Sacramento: 1967–1968
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“I’m going to be a candidate”?’”132 Lou Cannon, who was on the trip, wrote, “Delegates in every state left me with the impression that Reagan was their emotional first choice but that the California governor’s official non-candidacy had persisted for so long that Nixon had become their intellectual commitment.”133
The Reagans arrived in Miami on Saturday, August 3, on a private plane chartered by Alfred Bloomingdale. The California delegation was housed at the Deauville Hotel. “For some reason, it had this terrible smell,” said Betsy Bloomingdale, who recalled that she had to lend Nancy an iron because the hotel staff “didn’t know how to press a dress properly.”134 On Sunday morning Reagan appeared on Face the Nation and reiterated that he was just a favorite-son candidate. He then spent the day being driven from hotel to hotel on Collins Avenue, seeking support from half a dozen state delegations. In between there was the Bloomingdales’ lunch on their chartered yacht, and later Jack and Bunny Wrather’s dinner at the Jockey Club
“for all the Kitchen Cabinet and Ron and Nancy.” Like many in the Reagan Group, Jack Wrather was worried about his friend’s chances. “I don’t know the best way to say it,” the oil-and-entertainment tycoon later confessed, “I just thought that [it] was a little early, that the situation wasn’t right for him . . . and I didn’t want to see him beaten.”135
The latest reports had Nixon anywhere from ten to fifty votes short of the 667 needed for the nomination.136 He had also pulled ahead of Rockefeller for the first time, in a Gallup Poll released that weekend. The New York governor retained his lead in the Harris Poll and bravely stuck to his line that only he could win in November against Humphrey or McCarthy.
Rockefeller’s entourage included his three brothers—David, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, Laurence, one of the country’s foremost con-servationists, and Winthrop, governor of Arkansas—as well as Professor Henry Kissinger of Harvard and the philanthropic widow Brooke Astor.
(Society reporter Charlotte Curtis of The New York Times reported that Mrs.
Astor had to cancel her private dinner dance “after complaints about its being scheduled at a beach club that excludes Jews and Negroes.”)137 The New York delegation was headquartered at the Americana Hotel, but Rocky and Happy spent much of their time at the Indian Creek Island home of Gardner Cowles, where the publisher’s very social second wife, Jan, got the New York and California groups together for cocktails and, presumably, a bit of stop-Nixon plotting. The Rockefellers and the Reagans knew each other 3 8 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House slightly from governors conferences, and Happy much preferred Ronnie to his wife. “They were so different,” she confided to me years later.