Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [8]
This work is not a full-scale biography of either Reagan, but rather an attempt to paint a portrait of a marriage that changed the course of history. I have sought to expand and correct the rather limited existing record of Nancy Reagan’s life before she became First Lady, which is riddled with errors and distortions, partly because her most extensive biography to date was written by the sensationalistic Kitty Kelley, a dogged digger for documents but a relentlessly negative judge of character. Nancy Reagan herself contributed to the confusion by redacting and deleting, whitewashing and sugarcoating the more unpleasant and complicated facts of her life. Ronald Reagan was also prone, like most politicians, to sentimentalizing and mythologizing his past, but his many biographers, including Lou Cannon, Garry Wills, Stephen Vaughn, and the self-destructive Edmund Morris (who for some inexplicable reason virtually ignored Nancy Reagan), have done an admirable job of setting the record of his life straight. I have mostly summarized and interpreted that record in order to give the reader a clearer picture of the man with whom Nancy Reagan fell in love. This volume, the first of two, follows the couple up to 1980 and the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
“He never would have made it without her,” I was told again and again Le Cirque: 1981
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in the course of interviewing nearly two hundred Reagan relatives, friends, colleagues, campaign aides, administration officials, and observers. “He never would have been elected Governor without her.” “He never would have become President without her.” They talked about her devotion, her protectiveness, her “antennae” for sussing out people who put their agendas ahead of her husband’s. This was not to discredit Ronald Reagan’s intelligence, talents, or achievements, they insisted. He was the simple man with the simple plan, the visionary, the dreamer, the great communicator, who had the big ideas he believed could change the country and the world for the better. She was the complicated woman of parts, the strategist, the fighter, the “personnel director of the Reagan operation,” who created the atmosphere and forged the relationships that made it possible for him to carry out what both of them saw as his destiny.
One of the most telling conversations I ever had with Nancy Reagan was after I had appeared on the Today show to talk about my Vanity Fair story and had stressed the point that the Reagans were a great political team. “How was I?” I asked when she called that same day.
“You were good,” she said, with a certain hesitation in her voice. “But you left out the most important word.”
What was that? I asked.
“Love,” she said. “Please don’t make me sound like some kind of master backstage manipulator. Everything I did, I did for Ronnie.”
C H A P T E R O N E
EARLY RONNIE
1911–1932
We were poor and I suppose at the bottom edge of the town, but we thought of ourselves as typically middle-class Americans. . . . My father told Neil, two years older, and me, that he would try to help us get to college, but that we would have to do most toward it ourselves.
Ronald Reagan, in a Saturday Evening Post interview, April 1974
I was the one who . . . would go down to the one pool hall in town that was downstairs under a store, where your folks couldn’t see you if they happened to walk by on the walk. [Dutch] would never do anything like that. He would rather be up there, just gazing at his birds’ eggs.
Neil Reagan, UCLA Oral History Program, 19811
RONALD WILSON REAGAN WAS BORN AT HOME ON FEBRUARY 6, 1911, IN
Tampico, Illinois, the son of John Edward Reagan, a shoe salesman everyone called Jack, and Nelle Wilson Reagan, a housewife who sometimes took in sewing. The Reagans lived in a five-room apartment over a row of stores on the town’s one-block-long Main Street. Heated by three coal-burning stoves,