Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House by Bob Colacello

Author:Bob Colacello
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780759512672
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2004-10-06T10:00:00+00:00

I think you can help him.’ I said, ‘What’s the problem?’ And he said, ‘Well, he’s getting all kinds of criticism of his TV commercials.’ Well, the criticism they were getting—I found out—was not necessarily [on the] content; it was the production. . . . [But] I was the most surprised person in the world that he told Barry to call me, because I always operate on the theory that he doesn’t even know I’m breathing, and he’s probably suspicious that I don’t know or care whether he’s breathing or not.”73

Neil spent sixty-five days that summer and fall flying around the country on a Boeing 727 with Goldwater and his wife, Peggy—this was the first presidential campaign in which candidates chartered their own jets.74

But nothing McCann-Erickson came up with could match Lyndon Johnson’s famous “Daisy” commercial, in which an image of a little girl picking the petals off a daisy is followed by one of a nuclear bomb exploding into a mushroom cloud. Goldwater’s name was never mentioned, but the ad recalled all the fears Rockefeller had stirred up about him in a devastating thirty-second spot. From then on everything seemed to work against Goldwater, including his own slogan, “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.” “In your heart you know he might,” hecklers would chant at his appearances. “In your guts you know he’s nuts.”75

Late that summer, Tuttle asked Reagan to be the speaker at a $1,000-a-plate Goldwater fund-raiser—“which was unheard of at that time,” the car dealer noted—at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel.

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House

“After he got through,” Tuttle said, “I was besieged—my goodness—by people that said, ‘He spoke of the issues, of the things that we are concerned about: government involvement, all these social programs, and all this ‘womb to tomb’ spending and so forth. We feel our federal government is taking a position that the Constitution never intended for it to do.’”76

Reagan titled his speech “A Time for Choosing,” and it was a remarkably lucid distillation of everything he had been saying on the road for years, a mix of high-flying rhetoric and down-to-earth anecdotes that made ordinary people feel that he cared about their concerns and respected their intelligence. In contrast to Goldwater’s disastrous acceptance speech, he opened on a conciliatory note:

On the one hand, a small group of people see treason in any philosophical difference of opinion and apply the terms “pink” and “leftist” to those who are motivated only by humanitarian idealism in their support of the liberal welfare philosophy. On the other hand, an even greater number of people today, advocates of this liberal philosophy, lump all who oppose their viewpoint under the banner of right-wing lunacy.

But he quickly put the choice facing the electorate in stark terms: Either we believe in our traditional system of individual liberty, or we abandon the American Revolution and confess that an intellectual elite in a far distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

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