Volume 30, Number 14 · September 29, 1983
The Best Years of Our Lives
By Gore Vidal
Make-Believe: The Story of Nancy and Ronald Reagan
by Laurence Leamer
Harper and Row, 395 pp., $14.95
I first saw Ronnie and Nancy Reagan at the Republican convention of 1964 in San Francisco's Cow Palace. Ronnie and Nancy (they are called by these names throughout the book under review) were seated in a box to one side of the central area where the cows—the delegates, that is—were whooping it up. Barry Goldwater was about to be nominated for president. Nelson Rockefeller was being booed not only for his communism but for his indecently uncloseted heterosexuality. Who present that famous day can ever forget those women with blue-rinsed hair and leathery faces and large costume jewelry and pastel-tinted dresses with tasteful matching accessories as they screamed 'Lover!' at Nelson? It was like a TV rerun of the Bacchae, with Nelson as Pentheus.
Review, 6261 words
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