Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [242]
You’ve seen it time and time again. I thought, ‘Oh, boy, if he gets the nomination, I’m dead.’ But he didn’t.”145
“Nancy Reagan was a model of serenity and composure as her husband was nominated Wednesday night,” Women’s Wear Daily reported. “Thousands of colored balloons tumbled from the ceiling, hundreds of neon-orange-shawled demonstrators paraded around the floor stamping on them, Reagan banners jumped in the air while the slide-trombone band blared
‘California Here I Come.’ The deafening noise didn’t faze Nancy. Facing TV cameras at the edge of her box, in her orange-lavender-and-white high-belted Galanos with the gold buckle, she waved and shook hands with all the passersby she knew. Does she ever tire of smiling, she was asked. ‘No, not now,’ she smiled. She said Ronnie wouldn’t be here, but that was all 3 8 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House right. ‘I’m very proud and pleased.’” ( WWD added, “She’s been perfectly groomed at every moment. She also gets first prize for looking divine under intense floodlights which do devastating damage to both Pat Nixon and Loraine Percy.”)146
Reagan was still working the delegates on the floor and in caucus rooms around the hall when his name was placed in nomination by Ivy Baker Priest, a former U.S. treasurer and the first woman to nominate a major presidential candidate. No fewer than eleven more candidates were put forward, including favorite sons from Alaska and Hawaii. Convention chairman Congressman Gerald Ford had called the proceedings to order at 5:30, and the roll call of the states would not begin until after one in the morning. Compared to the hysterical ideological warfare of the 1964 convention, this was torture by tedium: “Hour upon hour of thundering cliché, of enervating restatement of the obvious, of prancing up and down the hall in exhaustively planned ‘demonstrations’—the whole soggy business relieved only by an occasional burst of asininity,” as Russell Baker so brilliantly put it.147
In the end, the South held for Nixon, who had spent Tuesday afternoon reassuring Southern delegates that he was against busing, Communism, and an activist Supreme Court, and who was said to have given Strom Thurmond a veto over the pick for vice president. In what The New York Times called “the greatest comeback since Lazarus,”148 Nixon received 692 votes to Rockefeller’s 277 and Reagan’s 182. But it wasn’t until Wisconsin, the next-to-the-last state, that Nixon went over the top, and for Reagan’s men that was proof of how close they had come.
“We were just outgunned,” said Robert Walker, who had spent five months working the South for Reagan. “They had more power than we had. If you really want to know what stopped it . . . Barry Goldwater, Strom Thurmond are the ones that stopped it. Because they were establishment Republicans at the time, in reaction to their being ostracized, if you will, by their abysmal defeat in ’64. They wanted nothing more than to be respectable again and Richard Nixon gave them respectability within the Republican party.” As Walker saw it, “It would have just taken one state to deny him that nomination on the first ballot, and that could have been South Carolina, it could have been Florida, it could have been Mississippi.
We had all these states under the gun, and we even had Mississippi off of the floor—with [Reagan] pleading with them, when the people running the convention started calling the first ballot. So they had, of course, to go Sacramento: 1967–1968
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back in order to answer the call. The Governor didn’t even get to finish his pitch.”149
It was two in the morning when Reagan marched to the platform to propose that the convention make the nomination unanimous. Ford, citing the rules, tried to stop Reagan from taking this honor, just as he had hurried the roll call to keep Reagan from prying Mississippi out of Nixon’s grasp. These