Ronnie and Nancy

by Bob Colacello

  After Spencer’s remark was printed in Vanity Fair in 1998, Nancy Reagan called me to object. “It was exactly what Ronnie said. Pat Brown had sworn in eighty-four judges since the election, and Ronnie wanted to cut him off. I didn’t even know Jeane Dixon at the time. I met her once in Washington. I never had any conversation with her.” In his book on Reagan’s governorship, Lou Cannon concludes, “The real reason for the timing of the midnight ceremony was not astrological but political,” and he confirms that Brown appointed or promoted some eighty judges in the last two months of 1966, including his own brother, and that as late as January 1, 1967, he appointed his son, future governor Jerry Brown, to the State Narcotics Board.9

  Ed Helin told me that both Pat Brown and his predecessor, Goodwin Knight, were clients of his boss, Carroll Righter. According to Helin, Righter also advised “almost all of the Kitchen Cabinet,” though he was vague on specific names. Marion Jorgensen said she was not a devotee of Righter’s but had consulted with other astrologers on occasion. “A lot of us did that,” she said. “It was fun. But one of them said I would have a serious automobile accident in the next three months. I was so frightened I almost did have an accident. I said, ‘Never again.’ ” What did she think of the rumor that Nancy had set the swearing-in time based on the advice of 3 5 4

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House a stargazer? “Horsefeathers. She was never that big on that astrology stuff.

  It was not serious. At least I didn’t think it was serious.”10 It seems only fair to note that while Nancy usually took the heat for relying on astrologers, Ronnie was also “incurably superstitious,” in the words of Michael Deaver, who would soon become one of the Governor’s closest aides. “If he emptied his pants pocket you would always find about five good-luck charms that people had sent him. I am sure he read his horoscope every day.”11

  It was almost one in the morning on January 2 when the limousine of California’s new chief executive and first lady, followed by those of the Kitchen Cabinet and their wives, made its way to the Governor’s Mansion, where Betty Wilson had organized a buffet supper. The ninety-year-old Victorian house bore a marked resemblance to the Addams family’s residence and was in obvious need of extensive repairs, but the Infanta had done the best she could to camouflage the superficial defects of its main rooms. “Betty went in there and really fixed it up,” Harriet Deutsch recalled. “She had everything done in candlelight. She didn’t want the cobwebs to show. She put white camellias everyplace. Very dim lights.” Marion Jorgensen added, “We all looked very peculiar. It was the day of the very short sleeveless dress—you know, Norell, Courrèges, the whole bit.”12

  Sacramento, a city of 200,000 whose major industry after politics was fruit canning, had never seen anything quite like Nancy and her fashion-plate friends. The women of the Group may have been in their forties and fifties, but there was nothing matronly or dowdy about the way they looked. These were Sunbelt socialites, sleek, up-to-the-minute, almost Pop. The Sacramento Union’s Mae Belle Pendergast devoted many column inches to describing the designer outfits Nancy wore to the week’s inaugural events. For the swearing in, she borrowed a black-and-white se-quined Galanos cocktail dress so shiny that in photographs it looked as if it were coated in plastic. For Wednesday night’s inaugural concert, which featured the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, opera singer Marilyn Horne, and Jack Benny, she was in a “bright orange wool crepe formal gown with matching long coat.” For Thursday’s inaugural address on the steps of the capitol, it was a “bright-red” suit from Seventh Avenue’s Ben Zuckerman. The dress that caused the most talk was the one-shoulder white Galanos gown sprinkled with diamanté daisies that Nancy wore to that evening’s inaugural ball.13 (“That was mine,” she told me. “I bought Sacramento: 1967–1968

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  it and still have it.”)14 The Union’s reporter was not alone in observing that the former actress, with her size-five figure, perfect tan, and stylish “arti-choke” hairdo, looked a good ten years younger than her official forty-three years.15 Others noted the resemblance to Jacqueline Kennedy, particularly in the wide-spaced eyes, the full eyebrows, the chestnut-brown bouffant, the consciously elegant clothes. And just as Jackie had had her New York hairdresser, Kenneth Battelle, fly down to Washington regularly, Nancy had Julius Bengtsson from Saks Fifth Avenue Beverly Hills spend the week in Sacramento.

  In a 1979 interview for a University of California oral history project on his governorship, Reagan looked back on this first inauguration with humble pride. He recalled that after the swearing in, he took Holmes Tuttle to see the governor’s office in the east wing of the capitol. Speaking on behalf of the Kitchen Cabinet, Tuttle told Reagan “to sit down in the governor’s chair there, at the desk, and I did. Then he said, ‘I don’t know whether anyone has ever been able to say this before to a governor of California. But now you are sitting in that chair. And you don’t owe any of us anything.’

  He said, ‘All we wanted was good government. We believed that you could do that. You have no commitment, no promise to keep to anyone at all.

  You just do what you believe should be done.’”16

  “And, by that time, I must say, I was eager to deal with the things that up to then I’d only been talking about,” Reagan continued. “I also have to say that it wasn’t too long after that Nancy and I looked at each other and said that this made anything else we’d ever done in our lives seem dull as dishwater. It was the most personally fulfilling experience I’ve ever had.

  Some nights you come home feeling ten feet tall.”17

  During the transition period between the election and the inauguration, the Friends of Ronald Reagan’s executive committee had renamed itself the Major Appointments Task Force—with Cy Rubel staying on as chairman—and at Reagan’s behest set about recruiting managers and administrators from the business world to fill the cabinet and other high positions.

  As Reagan explained, “I went to some of the people who had talked me into running after I was elected and I said, ‘Look, I told you all I don’t want to go up there alone. Now, you know where the bodies are. You know where the talent in California is. I don’t want a screening committee to screen applicants for jobs. I want a recruiting committee.’ ”18

  In addition to Rubel, the task force included Tuttle, Salvatori, Ed Mills, 3 5 6

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Jaquelin Hume, Leonard Firestone, Taft Schreiber, Arch Monson, and Leland Kaiser, a retired investment banker and self-described “card-carrying capitalist” from San Francisco.19 Two weeks into their delibera-tions, Rubel fell seriously ill and was replaced as chairman by William French Smith, who at forty-nine was the youngest of the group. (Rubel died in June 1967.) Contrary to later accounts, Justin Dart was not a leading player at that point. Explaining that his still-growing business required his full attention, Dart said in a 1981 interview, “I was not involved with the ‘nitty-gritty’ of Ronald Reagan’s state government anything like Holmes or Ed Mills.” (Mills had recently gone to work for Holmes Tuttle Enterprises, as vice president, and was also made treasurer of the California Republican Party, part of the takeover of the party ap-paratus by the Kitchen Cabinet.) Dart couldn’t resist adding, “I could get Ronald Reagan on the telephone any time of the day or night. He knew I would be [behind] him all the way.”20

  Gordon Luce, a banker who had headed Reagan’s campaign in San Diego and who would soon be appointed secretary for business and transportation in Reagan’s cabinet, recalled attending several task force meetings in Los Angeles. “We used to meet at the California Club, which was a popular place for those gentlemen, have lunch, have an all-day meeting, go through boxes full of people’s names and personnel folders. Holmes Tuttle dominated those meetings. He was probably the closest of all the Kitchen Cabinet at that time to the Reagans. He gave it all day, all night—

  I mean, he worked, worked, worked.”21

  Jaquelin Hume outlined the criteria they set for a
ppointees: “We were trying to find people who, if they took a political office, would do a good job rather than people with experience as political officeholders. And people who were philosophically dedicated to a private enterprise, conservative, profit-oriented society. . . . We felt that you do not get a clean house unless you clean house.”22

  Meanwhile, two of the bright young men from Reagan’s campaign, Philip Battaglia and Thomas C. Reed, had set up a transition office at the IBM Building near the capitol in Sacramento and were also vetting applications. This parallel structure, pitting Reagan’s private court against his professional staff, would create some tensions but produce generally good results. Battaglia, a thirty-two-year-old lawyer from Los Angeles, had been hired as campaign chairman by Tuttle after Reagan won the primary. His résumé was impressive: accepted at USC law school at twenty; partner in a Sacramento: 1967–1968

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  top-notch firm at twenty-seven; head of the L.A. Junior Chamber of Commerce. Battaglia made a point of being deferential to Reagan and Nancy; others found him high-handed and abrupt. By election day it was clear that he would be chief of staff for the new governor, who referred to him as “my strong right arm.”23

  Reed, a millionaire land developer from Marin County in his early thirties, had been the campaign’s Northern California chairman. He, too, had the credentials: first in his class at Cornell’s engineering school and a master’s degree from USC; stints in the Air Force and at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, where he helped design the first hydrogen bomb. Reed had worked on Goldwater’s campaign, and began promoting Reagan as a candidate for the presidency in 1968, almost from the moment the governorship was won. When he was offered the job of appointments secretary in the new administration, he accepted on the condition that he would serve only for the first hundred days. Reed would remain a key political strategist for Reagan, however.24

  The key post to fill was that of finance director, the most powerful executive position after governor. Battaglia, Lyn Nofziger, who stayed on as press secretary, and Stu Spencer, who continued to advise Reagan, recommended Caspar Weinberger, an attorney and former assemblyman from San Francisco, but he was blackballed by Salvatori because he had supported Rockefeller in 1964 and Christopher in the primary before joining the Reagan campaign. Salvatori’s personal choice for the job was Walt Disney, who declined. “We had set our sights entirely too high,” the oil tycoon later said. “Our group was a little unsophisticated to think that a fellow like Walt Disney would quit his job to accept the position of finance director simply because he was a strong Reagan supporter.”25

  The $31,835 job went to Gordon Smith, who took a 75 percent cut in salary from his position at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the four head-hunting firms that had been asked to help the task force.26 The way Smith came to be hired says a lot about how the Kitchen Cabinet operated.

  William French Smith was impressed by the recommendations Gordon Smith (no relation) had made for other positions, and suggested that he himself might be suited for the finance job. French Smith took the head-hunter for a drink at the home of Salvatori, who grilled him on a wide range of issues, including capital punishment. Satisfied that Smith was sufficiently conservative, Salvatori invited him for breakfast the next day with Tuttle and Schreiber. They then recommended Smith to Reagan, who had 3 5 8

  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House reservations about him and asked for two or three more choices. But Tuttle persisted, and Gordon Smith was hired. “As it turned out Reagan’s perception was right,” Salvatori conceded. “Gordon Smith had all the necessary qualifications but he did not know how to handle people and he had no political know-how.”27

  The Kitchen Cabinet’s choice, in Spencer’s word, was a “disaster. They got practical when they realized, Whoa, got a problem! This guy can’t even add up what the deficit is.” 28 Smith resigned a year later and was replaced by the pros’ choice, Weinberger, who would earn Reagan’s unshakable respect for his intellectual perspicacity and diligence. “Cap [is] an unusual man,”

  Reagan said in 1979. “It is absolutely true when Cap Weinberger was only fourteen years old, he used to read the Congressional Record for pleasure. Cap has a mind, and a mind for finance; I’ve never seen anything like it.”29

  Nonetheless, Reagan continued to rely heavily on his rich backers for advice and support. Ronnie and Nancy returned to Pacific Palisades almost every weekend during their first two years in Sacramento, and while Nancy had fittings at Galanos or lunched at the Bistro with the gals from the Group, Reagan got together with the Kitchen Cabinet. “They would meet on Saturdays up at the Reagan home,” Robert Tuttle said. “They’d just sit around and talk. They were a very congenial group of strong-willed guys. They would argue over things, there were disagreements, but basically they were all strong economic conservatives. Dad actually became assistant chief of protocol for the state. He didn’t really want the job, and sure enough along comes his first duty and he has a stomach attack and couldn’t fulfill it. We always teased him about it. So he promptly resigned.”

  According to his son, Holmes Tuttle continued to spend at least half his time on politics all through Reagan’s time in Sacramento. “It got to the point,” Robert Tuttle said, “where our business was actually suffering because of it.”30

  Stu Spencer elaborated: “Holmes did the things that had to be done.

  During the first term, for example, when I said, ‘Hey, we got to get the legislature back,’ Holmes raised the money to let us go out and do the job.

  And we got it and we won it. . . . He spent a lot of time. I mean, I’d come to him at midnight and say, ‘I need thirty grand for something.’ He’d say,

  ‘Go spend it!’ That’s the way he was.”31

  “We were in and out of Sacramento fairly often,” said Hume,32 who, along with Tuttle, became heavily involved in the Task Force on Govern-Sacramento: 1967–1968

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  ment Efficiency and Economy, which was established shortly after Reagan took office. This project, which brought some two hundred corporate executives to government agencies for six months to find ways to cut spending on everything from telephone bills to use of office space, was the flagship of Reagan’s promised Creative Society. It was also one of the more public ways in which the Kitchen Cabinet made its influence felt in Sacramento.

  In April 1967, the Los Angeles Times ran an article by Carl Greenberg titled “Ronald Reagan’s ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ ”—the first documented use of this term in reference to the tycoons behind Reagan. Salvatori boasted that he talked to Reagan’s chief of staff, Phil Battaglia, once a week, and Tuttle, French Smith, Schreiber, and Monson admitted to frequent phone calls and meetings with the Governor. But each assured the Times that, as Leland Kaiser put it, “There’s one boss—and that’s Reagan. Nobody is controlling him.”33 Still, the impression lingered that somehow they were.

  “When I got in office then, I must say those first days were very dreary, very dark,” Reagan recalled. “First of all, January and February in Sacramento are dreary and dull. Those damn tule fogs! And Nancy had to stay

  [in Los Angeles] till the semester ended, with our son. . . . I was over in that old mansion. Oh, that was the most dreary, dismal place in the world.

  It was just—to go home from the office to that—alone you know.” What’s more, Reagan complained, there was “controversy about everything,” and he was “constantly being attacked.”34

  Even before the inauguration, Reagan’s team discovered that Brown had used accounting tricks to cover up an estimated $400 million deficit.35 In an effort to bring the budget under control, Reagan ordered a 10 percent across-the-board cut in spending for all government departments, including the state’s much-heralded higher-education system. He also proposed charging tuition at state universities and colleges for the first time and, to make matters worse, in late January he helped engineer the firing of University of California president Clark Kerr by the Board of Regent
s, who were dissatisfied with his handling of the ongoing student unrest. Within days Reagan, who had railed against campus “beatniks and malcontents” during his campaign, was hung in effigy at Sacramento State, and protestors at U.C.-Davis staged a mock burial.

  California was “the laughingstock of the nation, as far as the academic community is concerned,” declared the Democratic speaker of the State Assembly, Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh.36

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  Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Uproar followed uproar. In February, when Battaglia asked state employees to work on Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays to save money, only 2 percent showed up. In March, Reagan asked for a $1 billion tax hike—then the largest tax increase ever proposed by a governor in the nation’s history—including higher rates on personal income, corporate profits, retail sales, liquor, and cigarettes.37 Conservatives in his own party howled even louder than the opposition. But Reagan fought back, turning to Asa Call for help in getting corporate chieftains to rein in their lobbyists.38 Tuttle supplied the funds for a series of ninety-second filmed messages that were distributed to local TV stations, a new technique in political public relations that upset reporters, who felt they were being bypassed.

  Nofziger told them that was the point. “It’s not a happy picture,” Reagan informed his audience in the first message aired. “Our state has been looted and drained of its financial resources in a manner unique in our history,”

  he said, laying the blame for the state’s fiscal crisis at the feet of the previous administration with his usual dramatic flair. The public loved it, and his poll numbers remained high.39 After extensive wrangling between Reagan and Unruh, the tax increase and a record $5 billion budget squeaked through the legislature.

  During these same few months, Reagan was confronted with what he said were the two most difficult decisions he would make as Governor. In April he refused a plea for clemency from a black man who had murdered a white police officer while out on bail for a robbery charge; it was the first execution in the state in four years (and would be the last—the California Supreme Court overturned the state’s capital punishment law in Reagan’s second term).40 Also in April, State Senator Anthony Beilenson—whose lawyer father, Laurence, had arranged the 1952 MCA waiver from SAG—