Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [287]
Justin Dart later maintained that he had convinced Reagan to take the nomination if it were offered. As he remembered it, he had cornered Ronnie in his suite after it became obvious that Ford would win—and at a moment when Nancy was at the convention hall. “I was there beg-Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976
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ging, arguing,” Dart said. “I said, ‘Look, your first duty is to your country—not to your wife, not to your family, not to anything, just your country. And Ford needs you to get elected.’ He would give me every reason in the world why he shouldn’t take it. . . . In any event I finally convinced him on a one-on-one basis that he owed it to his country. He said,
‘I don’t want to sit there presiding over that Senate with a gag on my mouth.’ . . . In his own way he was absolutely right and he was totally sincere, but the final line was, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it if he offers it.’ ”
In Dart’s account, he then sent a message to Ford, but there was no response. “Well, Ford didn’t offer it for two reasons,” Dart said. “First, he thought he didn’t need Ronald Reagan to win. And second, he was upset with Ronald Reagan for opposing him for the nomination, which is understandable. I like Jerry Ford. I don’t think he’s in the same class with Ronald Reagan either as a leader or a thinker or a statesman, but he had a right to those opinions.”121 Tuttle backed up Dart in saying that Reagan
“would have accepted. No question about it. He was not asked.”122 But Ed Mills, who was also at the convention, was not so sure. “After it was all over, whether Reagan would have considered it, I don’t know to this day.”123
Later on Thursday morning, with Nancy standing at his side, Reagan spoke to about two hundred of his campaign workers in the Alameda Plaza’s ballroom. “The cause goes on,” he told them. “Nancy and I aren’t going [to go]
back, sit on a rocking chair and say that’s all there is for us. We’re going to stay in there and you stay in there with me.” Nancy, obviously upset, turned her back to the crowd so that no one would see her openly sob.124 “There wasn’t a dry eye in the room, including my own,” said Mike Deaver.125
Cary Grant, white-haired but debonair, introduced a sparkling Betty Ford on the last night of the convention, and then the First Lady presented her husband. The President, who was famous for his dull delivery and clumsy manner, managed to give a rousing and polished acceptance speech, probably because he had rehearsed it for two weeks.126 In a mag-nanimous gesture, Ford then invited his would-be usurper to join him on the stage. “I don’t have the foggiest idea what I’m going to say,” Reagan told Deaver as he took Nancy’s hand and led her from their box.127 In his brief extemporaneous remarks, the once-and-future candidate sounded a cry to battle that brought him the longest, loudest ovation of the entire conven-4 6 0
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House tion. “In some campaigns,” columnist Tom Wicker wrote, “the loser is the biggest winner.”128
“After he lost the nomination in Kansas City in 1976,” Marion Jorgensen told me, “we were all at the Wilsons’ ranch, the one they had up in Santa Barbara. And we’d go for dinner, you know, at the neighbors’. And now Ronnie wasn’t being seated so well. He had lost and they put him next to me, an old friend, instead of next to the hostess, where he’d always been seated as Governor. You see what I mean? And I said to him one night, ‘It must be hard, losing like that.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Marion, you don’t understand. I am going to be President of the United States. I am not giving up.’ ”129
C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N
REAGAN VS. CARTER
1977–1980
[Reagan in 1976] was convinced that if he had won he would have beaten Jimmy Carter. The thought of getting his own shot at Carter certainly pushed him toward his eventual decision to run again.