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at Pacific Palisades for Jan and Gardner Cowles, whose Cowles Communications owned TV stations in Des Moines, Memphis, and Orlando as well as Look and Family Circle magazines. There were three tables of eight with David Jones centerpieces on the deck, and not a single unfamiliar name on the guest list. Except for Jerry Zipkin, who escorted the recently widowed Irene Dunne, it was the same set of couples who saw one another all the time: the Darts and the Gosdens, who were both very close to the Cowleses, the Bloomingdales and the Annenbergs and the Deutsches, the Jorgensens and the Wilsons, the Tuttles, and Tex and Flora Thornton of Litton Industries.

In January 1974, Kay Graham gave a dinner for Nancy in Washington.

The Reagans and the owner of the Post had seen quite a bit of each other since they met at Sun Valley four years earlier. In February 1971, the Governor had been the guest speaker at an editorial lunch at the paper, and that evening Graham gave a dinner at home for the Reagans. As Katharine Graham told me, “We kept up. When I went to California, I’d call them and receive them in some way. Nancy and I always liked each other, I believe. And I was interested in getting to know the Governor as a person who was on the conservative side of the Republican Party. And Nancy and I got to be friends. I think our friendship was sealed in a really odd way. They came back to Washington after the dinner for both of them, and I said to Nancy,

‘Would you like to come to dinner when you’re here?’ She said they couldn’t, because he was going to some male dinner—the Alfalfa Club dinner, I think. I said, ‘That’s too bad, but why don’t you come?’ And she said, ‘Oh, you don’t want me without Ronnie.’ I said—because the light had started to dawn at that point about women—‘Nancy, that’s not where it’s at anymore.

Of course, I want you.’ She said, ‘You do?’ I mean, she had apparently never gone out without him. So she was very pleased to be asked on her own.”152

Graham put together a serious group for Nancy’s solo dinner, including the man who was trying to save Nixon from Watergate, White House special counsel Leonard Garment; Helmut Sonnenfeld from the State Department; columnists James Reston, William Safire, and James Kilpatrick; and Clay Felker, the publisher and editor of New York magazine. In her Sacramento II: 1969–1974

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thank-you note, Nancy wrote, “You can’t tell what might happen now that I’ve made the plunge.”153

Two months later Ronnie and Nancy were back in Palm Springs with the Annenbergs and their houseguest, Prince Charles. The Prince of Wales, then twenty-six, was in the Royal Navy, on shore leave from his ship, HMS Jupiter. Lee Annenberg recalled that “Nancy phoned and said,

‘Prince Charles is going to be in San Diego. What do you think we should do?’ I suggested they come down to Sunnylands, and I would invite him.

He came with his equerry for the weekend. And that’s when they got to know him very well.”154

While the Reagans and “the With-It Prince,” as he was sometimes called, were the only houseguests that weekend, a small group including Bob and Dolores Hope and Frank Sinatra, unrepentant but apparently absolved, came for dinner on Saturday night. The caviar Lee served was a personal gift, she told her guests, from the Shah of Iran.155

That summer, as the House Judiciary Committee began drawing up articles of impeachment, everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before the nation really wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around anymore. He resigned on August 9, 1974, and was succeeded by Gerald Ford, who under the terms of the Twenty-fifth Amendment was charged with nominating a new vice president for Congress to approve. According to Ed Mills, the Kitchen Cabinet made another play to get the vice presidency for Reagan. “I’m sure that Justin Dart and Holmes Tuttle made contact, but there was never any invitation, to my knowledge, for Reagan to come back and be interviewed relative to the situation,” Mills said, adding, “Rockefeller was actually selected. Maybe it’s a good thing it didn’t happen.