Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [257]
Reagan’s decision to seek reelection surprised no one, as he said in a fifteen-minute televised speech on March 10, 1970. Less than two weeks earlier he had been forced to call upon the National Guard again, when students at U.C.-Santa Barbara, shouting “Death to corporations” and
“Burn, baby, burn,” set fire to a Bank of America branch. The attacks on businesses continued on and off for three months, and at one point a frustrated Reagan snapped at a reporter, “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.”91 Nancy told columnist George Christy,
“From a woman’s standpoint, it frightens me when I see students shouting obscenities; I think of Hitler’s Nazi youth movement.”92 “Every time you and Ronnie open your mouths you echo my thoughts,” a supportive Lillian Gish wrote Nancy from New York.93
Reagan was opposed by the Democrats’ State Assembly leader, Jesse Unruh, who opened his campaign on Labor Day weekend by taking two busloads of reporters to the gates of Henry Salvatori’s estate in Bel Air. As the TV cameras rolled, Unruh asserted that a property-tax-relief bill proposed by Reagan would save his wealthy friend $4,113 a year, whereupon Salvatori, in tennis whites, appeared and yelled through the gates, “Oh, you ass! Is this the way you have to get your publicity?” Grace was right behind him, shouting, “We worked for the money to pay for it!”94
Unruh was playing on the lingering perception that the Kitchen Cabinet was running the state—he also staged a showy scene outside the 45th Street house to remind voters that it had been bought by a group headed by Holmes Tuttle and Jaquelin Hume—but his antics backfired. “In a single stroke Unruh had revived the image of ‘Big Daddy,’ the domineering political bully who had no respect for the rights of others,” Lou Cannon observes. “Californians value both their holidays and their privacy, and they identified with the nice-looking elderly couple whose castle had been invaded on a holiday by the dread Unruh. Rarely has a self-inflicted wound so thoroughly undermined what might have been a promising campaign.”95
“We just stood on Ron’s record, and ran on it and ran on it and ran on it, and we won again,” said Tuttle. “Of course, we didn’t win by a million votes, but we won by over a half million.”96 Despite a recent hospitalization Sacramento II: 1969–1974
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for his chronic stomach problems, Tuttle co-chaired the campaign with Tom Reed. Tuttle’s fund-raising partner, Justin Dart, replaced Salvatori as finance chairman, but in most respects 1970 was a carbon copy of 1966, with Hume heading the Northern California effort and Ed Mills serving as Tuttle’s deputy in the south. Spencer-Roberts managed the campaign, and Neil Reagan’s agency, McCann-Erickson, handled the advertising. However, there was one big new name on the campaign’s organizational chart, Frank Sinatra, who was a co-chair of Californians for Reagan, which was made up of Democrats and independents.97
It is commonly thought that Sinatra, who was once so far left that both MGM and MCA dropped him in the blacklist days, had switched sides after his buddy President Kennedy opted to stay with Bing Crosby instead of him on a 1962 visit to Palm Springs. According to Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs, Attorney General Robert Kennedy had told Sinatra, “We can’t have the president sleeping in the same house where Sam Giancana slept.”98 “The Kennedy slight hurt him deeply,” his daughter Tina Sinatra told me. “But he did not sledgehammer his helipad when he found out the President wasn’t coming, and the new guesthouse had been built for my sister, brother, and me, not Kennedy.” In Tina’s view, her father had little truck with “the far-right Minutemen—John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Ward Bond,” who were Reagan’s most faithful Hollywood supporters. He saw his role, she said, as “nudging Ronnie toward the middle. . . . I also think he thought the Democratic Party was going to take a major nosedive. Once he went off to the Reagan camp, he stayed there, but he remained