Ronnie and Nancy (57 page)

Betty Adams agreed: “Ronnie was easy to understand, and he was one of the sweetest, most thoughtful men I ever met. I would have rather talked to Ronnie at a dinner party than anybody. We’d get talking head to head, because we talked politics. He was interested in history and remembered everything. This country was his life. He felt it was the greatest in the world, and he brought it up to people everywhere. And we all thought he and Nancy were so wonderful together.”111

“Our next anniversary will be our tenth,” Nancy told Lydia Lane of the
Los Angeles Times
, who interviewed her while she was visiting her husband on the
G.E. Theater
set in June 1961. “So I feel [our marriage is] a success.

A man should be the captain of the ship. I don’t feel it’s the woman’s place to run things.” She added, “A wife can’t let her housework and her children blot out her husband. I know this isn’t easy when she does all the work herself, but we can’t get away from the fact that romance is kept alive by keeping up appearances.”112

C H A P T E R T H I RT E E N

THE KITCHEN CABINET

1963–1966

I know it sounds corny, but these men were good men. They believed in the good. They believed in this country and all it stood for.

Marion Jorgensen to author, November 4, 1997

Most of them were self-made men. They were all tough and crusty and very patriotic and strongly anti-Communist. They really felt that the system had allowed them to come from very humble beginnings to wonderful lives that I don’t think they had ever even dreamed of when they were small children—and they were very, very grateful for that. I think those were the values they shared with Ronald Reagan. What really irritated all of these guys was to be called fat cats. That was how you got under their skin. Boy, my dad hated that.

Robert Tuttle, son of Holmes Tuttle, to author, November 19, 1997

ABOUT THE SAME TIME NANCY REAGAN BECAME A COLLEAGUE, RONALD

Reagan became a Republican. As she moved up socially, he moved right politically. He had supported Eisenhower and voted Republican for the first time in 1952. But his instincts remained liberal, and he campaigned for Los Angeles’s reformist mayor Fletcher Bowron against a Republican candidate handpicked by Asa Call and the Committee of 25, whom he then characterized as “a small clique of oil and real estate pirates.”1 Just seven years later he and Nancy were among a handful of stars who refused to attend a gala at 20th Century Fox for Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev.2 The following year he wrote
Playboy
publisher Hugh Hefner to complain about favorable articles on Charlie Chaplin and Dalton Trumbo, who was writing his first screenplay under his own name since the blacklist, for
Spartacus
, starring Kirk Douglas. Unlike most 3 1 3

3 1 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House people in Hollywood, Reagan still refused to admit that there had ever been a blacklist.

He backed Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election, even though he had long-standing doubts about the vice president’s integrity. After a conversation with G.E. chairman Ralph Cordiner, whom he greatly admired, he even agreed to head Democrats for Nixon in California.3 Reagan later wrote that he was ready to change parties at that point, but “[Nixon] said I’d be more effective if I campaigned as a Democrat.” Joe Kennedy, he said, tried to persuade him to support his son, “but I turned him down.”4 Reagan had an “almost visceral loathing” of JFK’s New Frontier agenda, historian Matthew Dallek observes in
The Right
Moment
, and was soon urging Nixon to expose Kennedy as a socialist at heart. “Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s
bold new imaginative
program with its proper age?” he wrote Nixon shortly after Kennedy’s nomination. “Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx.” Nixon passed Reagan’s letter on to his campaign staff, after scrawling across it,

“Use him as speaker whenever possible. He
used
to be a liberal.”5

Reagan was swimming against the tide, since Hollywood was solid Kennedy territory. The sexy young Democrat became a familiar presence at his brother-in-law Peter Lawford’s parties in Malibu, and Frank Sinatra was busy rallying everyone from Gregory Peck to Marilyn Monroe to back him.

Only the most diehard Republicans—Dick Powell, Edgar Bergen, George Murphy, John Wayne, Irene Dunne—supported Nixon. At a Nixon rally in Beverly Hills, Reagan met William F. Buckley Jr., who had founded the
National Review
in 1955—Reagan was a charter subscriber—and was already considered the country’s leading conservative intellectual. Shortly after that Reagan initiated a correspondence with Buckley that would go on for decades and greatly influence his political thinking; Nancy, in turn, would become close to Buckley’s outspoken socialite wife, Pat.

“I was having dinner at a restaurant across from the hall where I was to give this speech, and Reagan was there with Nancy,” Bill Buckley recalled.

“He got up and introduced himself. He had just read my book
Up from
Liberalism,
and he rambled off a couple of lines that had amused him. We went into the auditorium together, and there was this great panic because the kid who was supposed to turn on the loudspeaker system couldn’t be found. Reagan jumped up on the stage and tried to soothe the crowd while we waited for the superintendent to bring a key to the control room.

They couldn’t find him, so Reagan asked, ‘Where is this machine?’ They
The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

3 1 5

pointed way up to the balcony to a room abutting the street. The next thing we knew, he had poked his head out the window—there was a little ledge there—and he did one of those Cary Grant things. Nancy was practically ready to kill herself. I stuck my head out and thought, How is he going to do this? He got up to the window that corresponded to where the speaker system was, then sort of jutted his elbow in and broke the window, climbed in, turned on the loudspeaker system, and the show went on.

That was a great introduction to Reagan.”6

Over the next two years, Reagan traveled as far right as he would ever go. He gave several speeches for Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade in 1961 and was campaign chairman for Loyd Wright, the archconservative Los Angeles lawyer who challenged moderate Republican senator Thomas Kuchel in the 1962 primary. (Wright won only 15

percent of the vote, perhaps because he made statements such as “If we have to blow up Moscow, that’s too bad.”)7 Reagan was also the featured speaker at a 1962 fund-raiser for Republican congressman John Rousselot, who was a member of the John Birch Society.

This highly controversial organization—named after a Christian missionary and U.S. Army intelligence officer killed by the Chinese Communists—had been founded by Massachusetts candy manufacturer Robert Welch in 1958. It claimed 100,000 members, at least a quarter of them in Southern California, where the Birchers, as they were called, were system-atically taking over local Republican clubs and volunteer organizations—

much as the Communists had tried to take over liberal groups affiliated with the Democrats in the 1930s and 1940s. Welch actually accused former president Eisenhower of being a Communist agent, and while Reagan was not willing to go that far, he saw little to disagree with in the Birchers’

attack on the graduated income tax, Social Security, and school busing.

Two of his longtime allies in the battle against the Communists in Hollywood, Adolphe Menjou and John Wayne, were members.

Reagan devoted most of his efforts in 1962, however, to Nixon’s unsuccessful bid for the California governorship. It was at a Nixon fund-raiser that Reagan officially switched parties. As he told it, a woman in the audience stood up in the middle of his speech and asked, “Mr. Reagan, are you
still
a Democrat?” He replied that he was. “Well, I’m a deputy registrar, and I’d like to change that,” she announced, then marched to the stage with a registration form in hand. “I signed it and became a Republican,” Reagan recalled, “then said to the audience, ‘Now, where was I?’”8

3 1 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House From then on, he liked to say, “I didn’t leave the Democrats, they left me.” He never made the connection that his decision to abandon the party of his father came a month or so after his mother’s death.

The conventional wisdom is that Reagan’s decision to switch parties and shift to the far right was heavily influenced by Loyal Davis. Nancy Reagan objected strongly to the notion: “It’s always written that my father was a rich, conservative John Bircher. That is untrue. He was
not
rich. He was
not
a John Bircher. . . . And he did
not
influence Ronnie’s views. Ronnie made up his own mind about things. And once he did, it was very hard for anyone to change it.”9

Richard Davis agreed with her. “This business of Dr. Loyal convincing Ronald Reagan that he should be a Republican, and a conservative Republican at that, is absolute nonsense,” he told me. “Whenever I saw Edith and Loyal with Ronnie and Nancy, the dinner-table conversation was about family affairs, the children, that sort of thing. They didn’t really talk politics.”10 Alice Pirie Wirtz, who was married to Colleen Moore’s stepson, Homer Hargrave Jr., recalled rather differently a dinner with Reagan, the Davises, and her in-laws when he was passing through Chicago on a G.E.

trip. “He was talking politics during the
whole
dinner,” she said, “and they were all urging him to run for office.”11

Homer junior told me that Loyal paid him very little notice until he ran for Congress in Chicago in 1958, as a conservative Republican. “He was way to the right, further to the right than I am,” said Hargrave.12 “He had fairly strong political opinions,” said Nancy’s friend Kenneth Giniger, who helped Loyal write his autobiography. “Yes, I would call them rightwing.” Giniger doubted, however, that Loyal would have joined the John Birch Society, which attracted mostly middle-class suburbanites. “It wasn’t his kind of thing. He wouldn’t have liked the other people. He was a considerable snob.”13

In fact, Ronnie and Loyal were already in agreement on the big issues when they met. Both had a burning antipathy for the Soviet Union and

“confiscatory taxes,” and no doubt fueled each other’s fire when it came to denouncing Communist sympathizers and “encroaching government control,” the dominant themes of Reagan’s G.E. speeches by the late 1950s.

On certain issues, including abortion and separation of church and state, the irreligious Loyal was more liberal than his son-in-law. Loyal’s novel,
Go
in Peace
, a defense of euthanasia in hopeless cases, caused quite a stir when
The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

3 1 7

it was published in 1954. After Kennedy took office, Ronnie was only too happy to oblige Loyal when he asked him to record an album,
Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,
which the American Medical Association distributed as part of its campaign against what would become the Medicare program. A year later Reagan, in a speech on the same subject titled “Losing Freedom by Installments,” warned that “you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”14

Often overlooked is Edith Davis’s role in Reagan’s rise. A year after Nancy and Ronnie married, Edith accosted the Reverend Billy Graham on the Biltmore golf course and dragged him into the house to meet her sonin-law. The politically conservative evangelical minister would say that the two-hour talk he and Reagan had that afternoon was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, and that Reagan was the president to whom he was closest.15 After Mayor Kelly’s death, Edith herself apparently switched parties. “I can assure you that she worked for Republican candidates starting already in 1960, and maybe before that,” Loyal’s partner Dr. Daniel Ruge told me.16

Edith’s greatest influence continued to derive from the fact that she, not her husband, decided whom they saw for dinner. By the early 1960s, Loyal was semiretired, and the Davises had given up their lakefront maisonette for a pied-à-terre in a new high-rise off Michigan Avenue. Although they had finally made the Chicago Social Register—Cleveland Amory in
Who
Killed Society?
listed Edith as one of the city’s leading grande dames17—

Phoenix was now their primary residence. Edith had encouraged her Chicago friend Abra Rockefeller Prentice to build a house down the street, and Colleen Moore and Homer Hargrave took a casita at the Biltmore Hotel for several months each winter. Edith and Loyal’s group also included Donald Harrington, a right-wing oilman from Amarillo, Texas, and his wife, Sybil, who was known for her fabulous jewelry and for giving $1 million a year to the Metropolitan Opera. The Davises continued to spend Christmas in Pacific Palisades, and Nancy, Ronnie, and the children took the overnight train to Phoenix for Easter every year.

Henry Luce and his wife, Clare, who had been Eisenhower’s ambassador to Italy, were also spending more time in Phoenix by then, though he remained editor in chief at Time-Life until 1964. The Luces were the king and queen of Biltmore Estates, and Edith sought eagerly to have them look favorably upon Ronnie. Apparently she succeeded, because Henry Grunwald, 3 1 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House then managing editor of
Time
, recalled in his memoir that the magazine’s

“first significant political mention” of Reagan, in April 1961, was the result of a “suggestion” from Henry Luce, who later “groused” that he had had to push the editors to run the story. “The piece summarized Reagan’s message about the excesses of government and described him as ‘boyish of face and gleaming of tooth,’” recalled Grunwald, adding that he didn’t take the G.E.

spokesman very seriously back then.18

An anecdote told by Richard Davis indicates that Loyal sometimes made Edith’s job more difficult. “The Luces had a dinner party one night, and Henry Luce got to talking about marijuana and other drugs and the pharmacology on it. Dr. Loyal ate him alive. He didn’t spare any language at all. He said Luce didn’t know a goddamn thing about marijuana or co-caine or their effects on the brain. At that point Mrs. Luce got up and left the dining room in tears. Edith and the other women had to go and sympathize with her to get her back to the table. Loyal would not tolerate fools lightly. Unless you really had the facts, you were in no position to disagree with him. . . . I also think he resented people with money. And, of course, they were the poor kids on the block, there’s no question about that.”19