Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [253]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House concerned that you can establish a pattern of living wherein you accept dis-honesty as a way of life.”62
Young Ron was still the model son and favorite. “Why don’t we just nuke ’em?” he would say when his father complained about antiwar “flag-burners.”63 “Nancy was crazy about that boy, just crazy about him,” said Marion Jorgensen. “And for him to say his father didn’t spend enough time with him, I’m here to tell you that’s not true. In fact, I think they spent too much time with him—he was spoiled rotten. They’d drag him everywhere—to the Wilsons’ ranch when there were no other kids around. Earle used to say to me, ‘I don’t know what they’re doing, bringing that kid along.’ They had him underfoot every five seconds.”64 According to Nancy, she tried to make her son’s life as normal as possible and even had the security man who drove him to school wear a sweater instead of a jacket and a cap. But he had a hard time adjusting to the move from Pacific Palisades, switching schools twice before settling in at Sacramento Country Day. He was beaten up by three classmates one day, and later told Patti that the boys had called him “warmonger” as they pummeled him.65
“I remember going out to watch Ron play football on his sixth-grade team,” Nancy said, “and hearing the boys on the other team saying,
‘There’s Reagan. Let’s hit him hard.’ They practically had to hold me back to keep me from going after those kids.”66 Nancy Reynolds told me that the Governor soon realized that his presence at the games aggravated the situation, but he tried to make it up to his son in other ways. When the assistant principal took Ron’s class on a tour of the capitol, for example, Reagan not only showed them around his office but also invited them to lunch at the Executive Residence.67
Still, there was something odd about Ronald Reagan’s approach to fa-therhood. He would never let his son win a swimming race, explaining that his pretending to lose would undermine the boy’s confidence “in a genuine victory achieved at a later date.” After Ron finally bested him at age twelve, they never raced again.68 When Arizona governor Jack Williams, whose daughter also attended Orme, wrote to Reagan to say that he had seen Patti singing in the school choir, and commented on her “eloquently beautiful dark eyes,” as well as the loveliness of the Western sky on that particular evening, Reagan replied: “It was very kind of you to write about Patti as you did, and both Nancy and I are grateful. We would have enjoyed your letter even without reference to our daughter—your description of the beauty of the setting was so vivid.”69
Sacramento II: 1969–1974
4 0 7
*
*
*
“Mike came home one day and he was very excited—‘Oh, we’re going to the Orient! We’re going to Manila!,’ ” Carolyn Deaver recalled. “I heard the ‘we’ and was beginning to jump up and down. He said, ‘No, no, no, not you. I’m going with the Reagans.’ The next day I was in quite a funk about the whole thing when he came home. And he said, ‘I don’t know what you’ve done, but Nancy Reagan suggested that you come along. She said it would be fun, because they’re taking Patti and Ron.’ ”70
In early September 1969, President Nixon asked Governor Reagan to represent him at the opening of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the pet project of that country’s first lady, Imelda Marcos. As much as Nixon resented Reagan’s popularity, he also feared that he might mount a challenge from the right in 1972, and the largely ceremonial trip to Manila was one way of keeping Ronnie and Nancy happy. Nixon was well aware that Nancy, whom he considered “smart and tough,” was her husband’s “chief advisor.” As he once told an aide, “Nancy Reagan runs Ronald Reagan. . . .
You just can’t afford to alienate [her].”71
The Reagans were provided with an Air Force jet and Secret Service protection, and put up at the four-hundred-year-old Malacañang Palace of President Ferdinand