Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [275]
Two days later the Reagans flew to London, where Ronnie gave a speech to the Pilgrim Society, an organization founded by Cecil Rhodes to promote unity among English-speaking nations, and met with the first woman to head the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher. Justin Dart, who kept an apartment near Hyde Park, and Walter Annenberg had helped arrange the meeting. “I’d planned on spending only a few minutes with Margaret Thatcher but we ended up talking for almost two hours,”
Reagan recalled. “I liked her immediately—she was warm, feminine, gracious, and intelligent—and it was evident from our first words that we were soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding economic freedom.”51
Thatcher felt the same way. “It was clear that Ron Reagan was in politics out of passionate belief,” she told me in 1998. “This is the century when we have had the biggest battle of ideas in history. Between totalitarianism and freedom. Coercion versus liberty. Ron Reagan was a passionate warrior in this battle. I was also a warrior.”52 The Iron Lady, as she came to be known, had taken over the Tory leadership only two months before meeting Reagan, and had immediately declared “an all-out war on Socialism.” With an approval rating of 64 percent, she was the most popular politician in Britain at the time, well on her way to 10 Downing Street.53
Shortly after Reagan returned to Los Angeles, he met with his inner circle, “confessed his increasing disillusion with Ford’s leadership and said he was willing to run.”54 Had Thatcher provided him with the example—
and extra dose of affirmation—that he needed to commit to taking on the White House and its ideologically impure occupant? In a Memorial Day speech in Atlantic City, Reagan sounded the theme that would propel his campaign against Ford: “The free world—indeed, the entire non-Communist world—is crying out for strong American leadership, and we are not providing it. Neither are we providing a strong, lasting, consistent foreign policy.” The next morning on Face the Nation he promised he would make his plans known by the end of the year.55
A few days later, Reagan’s principal boosters in the Senate, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, James McClure of Idaho, and James Buckley, issued a statement that could only make Ford more uncomfortable: “As neither the President nor the Vice President was elected to office, it would be in the Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976
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best interest of the Republican Party and of the country for the 1976 presidential and vice-presidential nominations to be sought and won in an open convention. . . . The merits of the current administration must be judged in 1976 by delegates pledged only to support the principles of their party. The President can ask for no more—and he deserves no less.”56
Meanwhile, at a secret meeting in San Francisco with Deaver, Hannaford, and Nofziger, Sears was given the go-ahead to put together a Reagan for President committee. Nofziger soon moved to Washington, where he and Sears started working out of a makeshift headquarters at Sears’s law firm. They had already approached Senator Paul Laxalt about heading the committee. Laxalt, a tall, rugged conservative, had been governor of Nevada during Reagan’s first term, and the two men got along well. As a freshmen senator from a small state, however, he wanted to be sure Reagan was serious before he brought the ire of the White House down upon himself. In a July 4 phone call, Laxalt asked Reagan, “You’ve got a fire burning in your gut to do this, don’t you?” “I have to tell you I have,” Reagan answered. “Well, tell me, on a scale of one to ten,” Laxalt persisted,
“where would you place yourself in terms of a candidacy?” “Oh, right about eight,” said the ever cautious Reagan. “That’s good enough for me,”
his fellow Westerner told him. “I guess I’m your man.”57
On July 15, Laxalt announced the formation of the Citizens for Reagan Committee, with himself as chairman and Sears as executive vice chairman.
Asked about a recent Gallup Poll showing Reagan as the