Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [279]
But then again, Nancy was always at ease with men. Merv Griffin, who had known the Reagans since he was under contract to Warner Bros. in the 1950s, regularly put her, with or without Ronnie, on his nightly talk show throughout the governorship and afterward. Mike Wallace, who went even further back with Nancy, aired an interview with her and Ronnie and Maureen for 60 Minutes on December 14, 1975, three weeks after Reagan formally announced his candidacy. CBS ran a full-page ad in The New York Times: “Tonight, Ronald Reagan tells how he’d play the role of President.”
Up to the last minute, Gerald Ford did everything possible to stop Reagan from entering the race. In early October he put the super-professional Stu Spencer in charge of his campaign’s day-to-day operations, in effect turning the campaign manager, the feckless Howard “Bo” Callaway of Georgia, into a figurehead. A month later the President shook up his foreign policy team and top staff. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, a hard-liner who opposed the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente with the Soviet Union and Communist China, was replaced by the more moderate Donald Rumsfeld, who had been White House chief of staff. Rumsfeld’s deputy, Richard Cheney, took his boss’s job, and, as a supposed sop to conservatives, Henry Kissinger, who had been serving as both secretary of state and national security adviser since Watergate, gave up the latter post to his right-hand man, Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft. In the midst of this upheaval, Vice President Rockefeller, tired of the constant chorus of criticism aimed at him by Southern Republicans, including Bo Callaway, told Ford that he was taking himself out of consideration for the 1976 ticket.
Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976
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Reagan promptly went on the record with his reaction. He said he was
“shocked” at the dismissal of Schlesinger, calling him “the most articulate voice” on national defense in the administration, and expressed dismay at the “shabby treatment” of Rockefeller. “I’m certainly not appeased,” he told the press with a laugh. Speaking at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton on November 3, he answered a student’s question about his intentions by saying, “On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m about a 9.”68
Meanwhile Tom Reed, who had become Air Force secretary in the November shuffle, advised Dick Cheney to call the only person who could persuade Reagan to pull out—Holmes Tuttle. According to Tuttle, however, another move Ford had made around this time to burnish his image with the right actually worked against him with Reagan. In late October, when New York mayor Abe Beame begged the federal government to guarantee the bonds of his nearly bankrupt city, Ford refused, which resulted in the notorious Daily News headline ford to city: drop dead.
“The governor had been talking about all the cities being in bad shape,”
Tuttle recalled. “That convinced us. We took a poll throughout this country, and the poll showed us there was strong support for what Governor Reagan was talking about. He was the man, so we decided to run. . . .
[But] we said, ‘Well, maybe we’ll wait for another poll.’ So we waited three weeks or thirty days, and we took another one. When that happened, we met up at the governor’s house. It was a go, and we went.”69
On November 20, Reagan, having informed Ford the day before, held a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington to announce officially that he was a candidate for president. Presenting himself once more as a Citizen Politician and vowing to respect the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican,” he nevertheless declared, “Our nation’s capital has become the seat of a buddy system that functions for its own benefits—increasingly insensitive to the needs of the American worker