Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [277]
Leonard Firestone and Taft Schreiber also backed Ford, though the latter would die before the Kansas City convention. In addition, the Reagan campaign found itself without two key strategists: Tom Reed and Stu Spencer. Reed, a driving force behind the 1968 presidential run and co-chair of the 1970 gubernatorial campaign, had been made an assistant secretary of defense by Nixon and would soon be promoted to secretary of the Air Force by Ford. Spencer would become the chief strategist in the Ford campaign, though, as he told me, he didn’t jump to the other side—he was pushed.
“My problem was never with the Reagans,” he confided, explaining that during the Governor’s second term his top staffers moved to consolidate their power. “I had total access to the Reagans. They [the staffers] had a problem with that. The Reagans didn’t even know it was happening, and I’m not the kind of guy to go around and whine. I fight my battles.” Although he counted Ed Meese among those who undermined him, Spencer was most disappointed by his old protégé, Mike Deaver. “He was a very big part of it. We had some real problems. This started in the last two years of the governorship, and it got worse. I just walked away. And then in 1976
there was no way that those people were going to let me in, even if I wanted in—it was obvious to me. I had known Ford for years, and his campaign started having some problems, and all of a sudden they came to me. Actually, I agreed to do something for two months, and I ended up there for eighteen months. The point is it was not a falling out with the Reagans.
But when I got into the Ford thing, I took some good shots at the Reagans, and they were pretty mad. But the reason I was there was, hey, Ford was the only show in town for me.”61
The Ford-Reagan contest was an exceptionally personal one, not only because the candidates had very little respect for each other’s abilities but also 4 4 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House because their wives seemed to be innately antipathetic. The two women could not have been more different. For Nancy Reagan, for instance, a trip to New York meant lunch at Le Cirque with Jan Cowles and Jerry Zipkin, a fitting at Adolfo or Bill Blass, and dinner at the Buckleys’ Park Avenue maisonette. Betty Ford’s best friend in New York, on the other hand, was her former teacher Martha Graham, the matriarch of modern dance, who introduced her to Halston, the hippest designer in town, and Andy Warhol, the wildest artist. Whereas Nancy was a virtual teetotaler, Betty liked to drink, and she would later admit to a problem with alcohol and pills. Even while she was First Lady, she talked about the nervous breakdown she had had in the 1960s and how much psychiatry had helped her—something the secretive, image-driven Nancy would never dream of doing.
In August 1975, Betty Ford gave an interview on 60 Minutes. When Morley Safer asked her how she would react if her eighteen-year-old daughter told her she was having an affair, the First Lady answered, “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. I think she’s a perfectly normal human being, like all girls. If she wanted to continue it, I would certainly counsel and advise her on the subject.” While not exactly condoning premarital sex, she did say that it “might lower the divorce rate,” and she also blithely suggested that if she were a young person today she might try marijuana. She called the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision “great,” saying that it had brought abortion “out of the backwoods and put it in the hospitals where it belongs.”62
The reaction from Republican right-wingers was instantaneous.
William Loeb, the ultraconservative publisher of New Hampshire’s leading newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader,