Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [272]
In considering the problems and rebellions of the Reagan children, one has to realize that things could have been much worse, given the turbulence of the times and their parents’ celebrity. No fewer than five of the Reagans’
friends’ children had overdosed or committed suicide. Like Bob and Ursula Taylor’s boy, Charles Boyer’s twenty-one-year-old son, Michael, was found dead in his bed. Art Linkletter’s twenty-year-old daughter, Diane, and Ray and Fran Stark’s twenty-five-year-old son, Peter, both jumped out of windows, reportedly while high on LSD. Gregory Peck’s son, Jonathan, was thirty when he shot himself in 1975. By her own admission, Patti was taking psychedelics, including peyote, and had a “six month bout with co-caine” later in the 1970s, but she was so estranged from the family that her mother could only imagine what was going on.33 In Ron’s case, Nancy had found a bag of marijuana in his room during the summer before he was expelled from Webb, and was so upset that for the first time she tried to hit him.34 Her suspicion that he was using drugs would continue to be another source of contention between them, and lead her to the sort of overbearing motherly behavior—monitoring his phone calls, grilling him about his friends—that drives teenagers to despair.
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House That evening in October 1975, as Ron slouched on the living room sofa, impatient to get into his costume for a Halloween party, his father explained why he had called the family together. “Dad had a speech all prepared,” Maureen recalled, “and it was clear to me as we all sat down that he had thought about this meeting for a good long while before we all got there.”35
“Whenever I check into a hotel, the bellhop asks, ‘Why don’t you run for President?’” Ronnie told his children. “The next morning, when I leave, the chambermaids come up to me and say the same thing. When I walk through the airports, people are always stopping me and saying, ‘Please, we need you to run.’ It won’t be easy but the grassroots support is there. I’ve been speaking out on the issues for quite a while now, and it’s time to put myself on the line. In three weeks I’m going to announce that I’m entering the race. Otherwise, I’d feel like the guy who always sat on the bench and never got into the game.”36
“You might think that Ronnie’s decision to run for president was a big turning point for our family or for us as a couple,” Nancy later wrote.
“While it was in certain ways, in others it wasn’t. We didn’t agonize over whether or not Ronnie should run. Quickly enough, it just became obvious that running for president was what Ronnie was going to do and that I was going to support him. If Ronnie was worried after he made his decision, he never let on. If I sometimes knew he was worried, it wasn’t because he told me; it was just because I knew him so well. I never heard him express real fear or self-doubt; I don’t think he really felt either. As I’ve said before, he liked a good competition.”37
And that’s what he would get.
“The potential risks of his candidacy were not lost on any of us,” wrote Mike Deaver. “Ford was a sitting, if unelected, president, and Reagan considered himself a loyalist, a consummate party man. No Republican president had been denied his party’s renomination in one hundred years.
None had been challenged within the party since Teddy Roosevelt did so in 1912, against William Howard Taft, and lost.”38 More recently, however, two Democratic presidents, Truman in 1952 and Johnson in 1968, had given up the fight in the face of strong opposition in the primaries.
As with Reagan’s first race for governor in 1966 and what Nofziger called his “quarter-hearted” presidential effort in 1968, the planning for 1976 began early but the announcement came late. This time, however, the Reagan vs. Ford: