Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [263]
Jones, whose Northrop Corporation gave a $150,000 donation that was later deemed illegal.130 In total, the Nixon campaign’s California finance committee, run by Tuttle, Dart, and Schreiber, raised more that $9 million, and was rewarded with a pre-inaugural dinner with the President at Blair House.131 Reagan campaigned throughout the South and West for Nixon, who carried forty-nine states, leaving only Massachusetts to his Democratic opponent, George McGovern.
Tuttle later explained the logic behind the Kitchen Cabinet’s all-out effort for Nixon: “There was no question in our minds at that time . . . that we were going to run Ron for office in 1976 after Nixon left office. Make no mistake about it, we were all primed. Our whole activity down at the convention in 1972 was to acquire friends and get commitments. We were working hard. Ron worked hard for Nixon. He spoke and raised money; we all did. Mr. Dart and I put on one of the biggest fund-raisers in history out here for President Nixon in 1972. But make no mistake about it, we were all ready to go. Don’t you think we weren’t building for 1976. . . . In fact, there was a great deal of pressure for the Governor to run for a third term, but we couldn’t convince him. He said, ‘No, I said I don’t believe in a third term. I tried to get a bill through the legislature for a two-term limit.
I’d make a hypocrite of myself, and I’m not going to do it.’ We thought maybe it might hurt his chances [in 1976] by being out of office. He could have won the governorship without any problems.”132
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House
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Nancy arrived at Nixon’s January 1973 inauguration with a complete Galanos wardrobe, which met with the full approval of Jerry Zipkin, who had come down from New York for the festivities. The Reagans hosted one of the four inaugural balls, Nancy in white satin embroidered with black beaded tulips. There was a wonderful photograph in the Los Angeles Times of her embracing Martha Mitchell, soon to be the uncontrol-lable loose lips of the Watergate affair, and another of Imelda Marcos with her arm in a sling from a recent assassination attempt. There was also one of the Reverend Billy Graham greeting Republican National Chairman George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, at Ross Perot’s dinner at the Madison Hotel, which the Reagans attended with the Annenbergs, Lee dripping rubies and diamonds over her yellow lace gown.133
Later they all took their limousines to the Fairfax Hotel’s Jockey Club, where a boozed-up Frank Sinatra, who had performed at the inaugural gala, called Washington Post reporter Maxine Cheshire a “two-dollar broad” and much worse, and stuffed a couple of bills in her champagne glass.134 Sinatra had been out to get Cheshire ever since she humiliated him in front of Reagan a month earlier, when the two men arrived for a dinner Agnew was giving for Republican governors, by loudly asking,
“Mr. Sinatra, aren’t you afraid that your alleged Mafia associations are going to prove to be the same kind of embarrassment to Mr. Agnew that they were to the Kennedys?”135
But not even the ugly scene at the Jockey Club, which was widely reported, could mar the Reagans’ sense that the next inauguration in Washington would be their own. As the kingmakers of the Kitchen Cabinet reasoned, when Nixon stepped down in four years the lackluster Agnew would be brushed aside, and their man would have an open path to the nomination. Nancy had already made it clear that, while her husband was not going to run for a third term as governor in 1974, he wasn’t planning to retire. “He is very concerned as to the direction the Republican Party takes, not only in California, but in the country,” she wrote in a weekly Q&A column she had started contributing to the Sacramento Union, “and he certainly wants to have a voice in that determination.”136
Ronnie and Nancy, primed to move on to bigger things, seemed to do everything right in the last two years of