Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [285]
Once again the Kitchen Cabinet comprised a large part of the California delegation: Tuttle, Dart, William French Smith, Jack Wrather, Earle Jorgensen, Bill Wilson, and Alfred Bloomingdale had seats on the convention floor. Their wives had brought Julius again, who spent much of his time coiffing Nancy in the Reagans’ suite at the Alameda Plaza Hotel. The Bloomingdales and Jerry Zipkin had arrived two days earlier for a round of parties, including one given by Kansas City banker Charles Price II and 4 5 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House his wife, Carol, a Swanson frozen food heiress, who were good friends of the Annenbergs and the newest additions to the Group.
“It’s really quite civilized here,” Zipkin told The New York Times’s Charlotte Curtis. “I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. I’ve been up at the Olympics with the Jaggers and out in Beverly Hills with Ronnie and Nancy just oozing charm out of every pore. I brought some cheese and that nice pita bread just in case.”105 On Tuesday he had a tête-à-tête lunch with Nancy in her suite and caught her up on the parties she had missed over the weekend.106 A few eyebrows were raised when he and Betsy Bloomingdale were photographed sitting in the Reagan box, just behind Nancy and the children.
On the opening night, Vice President Rockefeller’s keynote speech was completely overshadowed by the boisterous demonstrations set off by the back-to-back arrivals of Nancy, in a crimson Galanos, and Betty Ford, in an aquamarine Halston. The band got so mixed up that it switched abruptly from “California, Here I Come” to “The Michigan Fight Song”
and back again, squeezing a few bars of “The Sidewalks of New York” in between as Rockefeller took the podium.107 During the course of the day, Ford had won enough public commitments to give him a majority of the delegates, but the Reagan forces were still counting on fights over their proposed rule change and an anti-Kissinger platform plank they had introduced at the last minute to undo the inevitable.
The following night, Ford wisely accepted this so-called Morality in Foreign Policy plank, complete with its praise for Solzhenitsyn, overruling the protests of Rockefeller and Kissinger himself. The climactic moment came when the rule change was narrowly defeated after Mississippi’s Clarke Reed, under heavy pressure from White House chief of staff Dick Cheney, threw in his lot with Ford. “So close and yet so far,” an unnamed Reagan supporter told the Times.108 “That was when we knew for certain that the race was over,” said Nancy, who had suffered a defeat of her own that evening when Betty Ford upstaged her entrance by dancing in the aisles with pop singer Tony Orlando.109
“The next evening, before the nominations were made, our family had a quiet dinner together in our suite,” Nancy later wrote. “Then we all gathered in the living room, where Ronnie explained what we already knew—
that our long, emotional struggle was about to end in defeat.” Facing his teary-eyed family, Reagan said, “I’m sorry that you all have to see this.”
Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976
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Characteristically, he then tried to lighten the mood. “You know what I regret the most? I had really looked forward to sitting down at the table with Brezhnev to negotiate on arms control. He would tell me all the things that our side would have to give up. And then, when he was finished, I was planning to stand up, walk around the table, and whisper one little word in his ear: Nyet.” Nancy proposed a toast: “Honey, in all the years we’ve been married, you have never done anything to disappoint me. And I’ve never been prouder of you than I am now.”110
At 12:30 it was all over when West Virginia put Ford