Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [310]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House take my eyes off her . . . and she’s been just darling to us. If anything, I think she’s just shy.”
“People say there is a big difference between you and Mrs. Reagan.
Can you describe the difference?”
“Why, yes,” Barbara Bush answered. “Nancy is a size four, and I’m a size forty-four.”135
In a well-orchestrated show of camaraderie, the Reagans flew to Houston with the Bushes at the end of the convention. After lunch at the Bush home in the old-money Memorial section, the two couples made the first public appearance of the Republican ticket at the upscale Galleria shopping mall. Five days later, Reagan, Bush, and Anne Armstrong, who was named co-chairman of the campaign with Paul Laxalt, met with the Executive Advisory Committee at the Los Angeles Hyatt. Laffer’s deadpan minutes are quite revealing:
Tuttle and Smith both were exceptionally pleased with the convention and praised the way Ford handled himself and the outcome of the entire process. Dart thought the entire process was great with the best of all possible worlds with George Bush. . . . Max Rabb noted that Henry Kissinger did not demand any conditions and is fully on board with the Reagan efforts. . . . Coors said that any controversy over Gerald Ford was as a result of Cronkite’s mistakes and not anything to do with Ford or anyone else. . . . George Bush then expressed his pleasure at being at the meeting. . . . His major point was that he and Mrs. Bush had developed an extraordinary personal relationship with the Reagans. . . . The meeting broke up at approximately the predetermined time with a mad dash to waiting vehicles as the Dart-Kendall cabal headed en masse toward The Grove (most of the others were right with them).136
After making a brief appearance at the Bohemian Grove, the candidate headed straight for his mountaintop ranch. He kept a low profile during August, while the Democrats met in New York City and renominated President Jimmy Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale. One of the social highlights of the convention week was a birthday lunch for Miss Lillian, the President’s eighty-two-year-old mother. The guest list included Mayor Ed Koch; Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke and his wife, Robin; real estate queen Alice Mason, who was Carter’s number-one fund-raiser in New Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980
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York; Walter Cronkite’s wife, Betsy; and former California governor Pat Brown. The host, Richard Weisman, a rich young art collector, had called the Warhol Factory and asked us to bring a few celebrities: Andy took Patti LuPone, the star of Evita; I invited Jerry Zipkin. When reporter Enid Nemy asked him what such a good friend of Nancy Reagan’s was doing there, Zipkin snapped, “I had to eat lunch somewhere.”137 He was then introduced to the guest of honor by Oatsie Charles, an old friend of his who was one of Georgetown’s leading hostesses. “This is Jerome Zipkin, he’s a Republican,” Charles told Miss Lillian. “That’s okay,” she said good-naturedly, “I have lots of Republican friends.” “So do I,” replied Zipkin.
At the end of the month, the Reagans moved to Wexford, the former weekend house of Jack and Jackie Kennedy in the Virginia hunt country, which would be their East Coast base for the duration of the campaign. National campaign headquarters had already been set up in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington. Reagan had come out of the Detroit convention with a 55–24–15 lead over Jimmy Carter and John Anderson, who was running as an independent. But after a week of being portrayed as a simpleminded, heartless, nostalgic fantasist by the Democrats in New York—and making a couple of gaffes on his own, such as calling for renewed diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and then having to admit he had misspoken—Reagan found his lead over