Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [262]
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House
“Reagan tracked me down in Madrid,” Bill Buckley told me. “He was as mad as I ever heard him. He said, ‘What am I going to do? Here I just reassured all of our friends that nothing that matters is going to change, and I come back and now this terrible thing happens.’ ”125
According to Haldeman’s Diaries, a “very upset” Reagan tried to reach Nixon after midnight on the day of the vote, and when the President returned his call the next morning, Reagan pushed him to go on TV and denounce the U.N. When Nixon said that wasn’t possible, an infuriated Reagan called Secretary of State William Rogers and Attorney General John Mitchell. “The P makes the point that we need to keep the right wing on track,” Haldeman wrote. “We have to see if K[issinger] can keep Reagan in line and try to do so with Buckley also, and we’ve just got to keep Reagan from jumping off the reservation.”126
Nixon sent Reagan off on an Air Force plane again in July 1972—this time to Europe—perhaps to prevent his making any last-minute waves before the August convention in Miami. Reagan met with the prime ministers of Britain, France, Italy, and Denmark, and was given a full day’s briefing by NATO secretary general Joseph Luns in Brussels. In Madrid he and Nancy dined with both Generalissimo Franco and the future king and queen, Juan Carlos and Sofia. There was also a glamorous lunch on the Queen of Denmark’s yacht, and an audience with Pope Paul VI. Their final stop was in the Governor’s ancestral land, Ireland, where they threw coins in a wishing well at Cashel Rock.127
It was all fun and unity at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, which opened with a filmed tribute to the late President Eisenhower in which Mamie urged the delegates to give Nixon “the full eight years.” The following night Nancy sat beside Happy Rockefeller and right behind Pat Nixon as Nixon’s was the only name placed in nomination. The President himself was at a Republican youth rally headlined by Sammy Davis Jr., reminding the assembled throng that he had not only ended the draft but also lowered the voting age to eighteen. The Reagans were staying with the Leonard Firestones on Key Biscayne, as were the Bloomingdales and the Annenbergs. So was Frank Sinatra. Vice President Agnew, who was now a regular at Sinatra’s Palm Springs compound, had also stayed on at least one occasion with the Reagans in Sacramento. The only jarring note came when angry young demonstrators, “in a symbolic protest of the poor against the rich,” started ripping designer dresses off the backs of women ar-Sacramento II: 1969–1974
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riving at a Republican Party reception at the Fontaineblean Hotel.128 “Our car was almost turned over by these hoods,” Betsy Bloomingdale told me.
“Alfred saved our lives—he told the driver to step on it. The driver floored the accelerator, the car shot ahead, and the people fell off, or stopped chasing us.”129
The California delegation, chaired by Governor Reagan, included most of the Kitchen Cabinet, as well as the Gosdens’ nineteen-year-old daughter, Linda, whom Reagan had chosen over Walter Annenberg’s daughter, Wallis, to represent the newly enfranchised teenage voters.
Henry Salvatori, who had given $90,000 to Nixon’s last campaign, and would throw in another $100,000 in 1972, was hoping to be made ambassador to his native Italy. (It didn’t happen, perhaps because his FBI background check turned up the $5 dues he had paid to something called the Dante Alighieri Society, a reputedly pro-Mussolini group, in 1940.) Several other Reagan friends were among Nixon