Nancy and Ronald Reagan bask in the spotlight in their box at the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City, August 19, 1976. This photograph was featured on the cover of Time Magazine on March 21, 2016, after Nancy Reagan's death.
"Ronald Reagan rattled insiders with his insurgent campaign against President Gerald R. Ford, with party members arriving at the convention in Kansas City, Mo., without a clear nominee," The Times wrote. "Backroom deals and delegate swapping secured the nomination for Ford but left him bruised going into the general election, which he lost to Jimmy Carter."
On August 19, 1976, Reagan, accepted defeat at the Republican convention in Kansas City in a close race for delegates. He bade a teary farewell to his campaign workers today and indicated that his active political career was over. But for Reagan, a former Hollywood actor who came out of California as a telegenic and articulate spokesman of the conservative cause, his career was far from done.
In 2004, The Times wrote, "Less than two weeks after the convention, Reagan was again writing radio commentaries. One of them, 'Shaping the World for 100 Years to Come,' was not only a statement of Reagan's political philosophy and abhorrence of nuclear weapons, but also a window into how he wrote his commentaries; much of the commentary was a restatement of his extemporaneous speech at the Republican Convention. Although his commentaries would sometimes be a restatement of one of his newspaper columns, speeches, or congressional testimony, Reagan cast a wide net in looking for sources and subjects of his radio commentaries.
"Reagan was a powerful speaker. He wrote legibly and had a soothing, captivating radio voice. But it wasn't his penmanship or his voice that drove him up this path - it was the ideas about which he wrote and spoke." Reagan was elected the nation's 40th president and served from 1981-1989.
