Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [241]
For his part, a confident Richard Nixon was fishing for bass in far-off Montauk, Long Island, with his buddy Robert Abplanalp, the aerosol king, and wasn’t planning to arrive in Florida until Tuesday afternoon. He had his daughters, Tricia and Julie, represent him at Sunday night’s obligatory gala at the Fontainebleau, along with Julie’s fiancé, David Eisenhower, Ike’s grandson. The Rockefellers and the Reagans breezed in and out of this $500-a-ticket Republican Party fund-raiser for two thousand, with its life-size pink pachyderm in the hotel lobby and its “special surprise guest,”
Thomas Dewey. Also making the Miami Beach GOP scene: Teddy Roosevelt’s eighty-four-year-old daughter, Alice Longworth; A&P heir Huntington Hartford; Kleenex heir James Kimberly; New York power lawyer—and former Joe McCarthy aide—Roy Cohn; and Walter and Lee Annenberg, who were remaining studiously neutral between their good friends Nixon and Reagan.139
The twenty-ninth Republican National Convention officially opened on Monday morning, August 5, with an “inspirational reading” by John Wayne, titled “Why I Am Proud to Be an American.” But Reagan stole the day’s show by unexpectedly announcing that he was a real candidate after all. While he was making his announcement at an impromptu press conference in the Deauville’s Napoleon II Room, Nancy, who was upstairs having her hair done by Julius, heard the news on the radio. She was about to have a press conference of her own, but she was so thrown by the sudden development that she had her mother, who had arrived from Chicago with Loyal the day before, greet the reporters for her. “I only know about my children from what I read in the papers,” claimed Edith, who was then asked if she was a Republican. “‘Oh, heavens,’ she exclaimed, as if to say, perish any other thought,” reported The Washington Post. She then declared that she was too nervous to answer any more questions.140 When Nancy finally appeared, in a blue-and-white cotton dress by Chester Weinberg, she told the reporters, “I think it is important to a man to do something about the things he feels strongly about. Whatever satisfies and fulfills him makes for a better marriage.”141
According to Bill Clark, “Nancy and I were in total agreement in Miami that he should not go for the presidency. And he was in agreement, Sacramento: 1967–1968
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too. If she hadn’t been under a hairdryer when that came up, and if she had joined me, it probably could have been stopped.”142 Clearly Reagan and the Kitchen Cabinet got carried away by the intrigue, plots, and flattery of Convention Hall. As French Smith recalled, “Everywhere he went, he evoked such enthusiasm that it sort of became contagious.”143 There were rumors that morning, based on what turned out to be a fraudulent telegram, that Rockefeller’s backers within the California delegation were about to bolt, breaking the unity that Reagan—and Tuttle and Salvatori—
so cherished.144 So they listened to the fired-up Nofziger and the supposedly brilliant White; to bitter William Knowland, the former senator who hated Nixon for having deprived him of the vice presidential nomination back in 1952; to Governor James Rhodes of Ohio, himself a favorite son but really a Rockefeller stalking horse—all of whom were saying that Reagan would not be taken seriously unless he made his candidacy explicit. His announcement made headlines, though it was overshadowed a few hours later by that of Governor Agnew, who withdrew his favorite-son candidacy and threw Maryland’s delegates to Nixon.
Nofziger was ecstatic about Reagan’s decision to announce. Reagan aide Rus Walton remembered being greeted by the Governor’s press secretary as he arrived at the Deauville. “The first thing he said to me [was], ‘I want you to go down to your room and start writing an acceptance speech.’ . . . I said, ‘You got to be kidding.’ He said, ‘No, sir.’ He said, ‘You get down there and start drafting