Dickstein filed a motion for summary judgment, essentially agreeing in advance to all facts in the case, and asked for a ruling. Judge Thomas Aquinas Flannery ruled the purchase of Continental Illinois Properties was indeed a “transfer.” Because it had taken place without his permission, Salgo was owed damages. Lawyers for Luscombe and Pan-American Holdings appealed the ruling.
“We were lucky,” Dickstein told Salgo. “I can’t guarantee you that will happen on the appeal. My recommendation is to settle now.”
Under the terms of the settlement, Pan-American made a $100,000 payment to Salgo and agreed to new partnership terms. Both parties were now free to sell their interest in the Watergate at any time, and to whomever they wished.
IN APRIL 1980, ANNA CHENNAULT TOLD A REPORTER FOR W magazine that Ronald Reagan and George Bush were “equally qualified” to become president. She didn’t care at all for Illinois Congressman John Anderson. “He thinks he can sometimes be a Democrat and sometimes be a Republican,” she said, “and that doesn’t work.” Bush withdrew from the race at the end of May. Reagan accepted his party’s nomination in July and on November 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter.
Three days after the election, Chennault launched a vigorous campaign to land a job with the new Republican administration. “No words can express my joy and satisfaction on our overwhelming victory,” she wrote to three Reagan aides, E. Pendleton “Pen” James, Edwin Meese and William Casey on November 7, “particularly as I am among the first few supporters of Ronald Reagan’s candidacy for the presidency. I am proud to say I was right.” She recited her activities on behalf of the Reagan-Bush ticket, stating “without modesty” she had been “a very effective spokesman for our cause,” raising funds and addressing women’s groups and the Asian-American community. She had been offered positions in both the Nixon and Ford administrations, she added, “but it seemed tokenish to me and I was not in a position to accept.” Now, however, she was available.
At the crossroads of my career, I am responsible to many of my own people and the people who have helped the Republican Party because of me. Each election, after we either win or lose, we have always been cast aside or given some token recognition. Governor Reagan, coming from California, I don’t think this will be his policy. I know he has lots of appreciation and sympathy for the people who have helped him from the beginning.
. . . If I do not get any recognition, it will be difficult for me to respond to all those people who have worked so hard with me with confidence and dedication.
“I am not particularly interested in any paid job in the White House,” she wrote, “but I do think a title of Director of Special Projects, or Counsellor or Advisor to the President on Special Projects,” would be appropriate—with a portfolio that included looking after “the problems and interests of Americans Abroad” and advising the president on “Ethnic Affairs.”
The same day, Tommy Corcoran wrote to Pen James, who was in charge of appointments for the incoming Reagan administration. Corcoran was not seeking an appointment for himself, he wrote, but was reaching out to recommend Anna Chennault. “I am not sure if she would be interested in a job in the administration,” but “her talent and knowledge should be fully utilized in your new Administration.” Corcoran said he was forced to write because “Anna Chennault is not the kind of person who will blow her own horn.”
Anna, meanwhile, told a reporter she would not accept an appointment in the new Republican administration, despite “rumors circulating around Washington” that a cabinet post was about to be offered to her. “I want to be free and independent,” she said, “and I believe I will have the most influence in that capacity.”
On December 1, William Casey, the chairman of the Reagan-Bush campaign and Reagan’s nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency, sent a note to Pen James and passed along his “high opinion” of Chennault’s “capabilities.” Casey followed up with another note three weeks later. “Anna did everything from the very beginning,” Casey wrote. She “worked, raised money, contributed money, stood up to people on many ideas, and, more importantly, she does that with talent and ability and we should find a way to use her talents.”
On December 22, 1980, Chennault wrote to Bill Timmons, a lobbyist in the Reagan-Bush transition office, her tone now beginning to verge on despondent. “So many Senators and others have called on my behalf,” she wrote, “and I just feel a little disappointed that nothing has been done to recognize my effort and all the minorities who have helped.”
I just want to make it clear that I am not begging for a job—I have my pride and dignity.
I certainly hope something happens very soon before our President-elect takes office. I have calls from the people who worked so hard for us during the campaign and I don’t have any answer.
As Washington geared up to welcome the Reagan administration, Anna Chennault co-hosted a reception at the Capitol Hill Club to welcome the sixteen new Republican senators. “After four years of being about as fashionable as a hula hoop,” the Washington Post reported, Anna Chennault was back in style. One headline in the Washington Star said it all: CHENNAULT’S COMEBACK.
She bristled, however, when People magazine referred to her as a skilled hostess on the Washington social circuit. “I am not a hostess,”,” she snapped. “For years I have despised that description.”
Chennault was also eager to shed the nickname that had haunted her since 1968. “Don’t call her Dragon Lady ever again,” the Washington Post reported. “Politicians have been using Anna Chennault for years. Using her to entertain them, to introduce them to important people, to raise money for them, to carry their messages, even—say some of her critics—to do their dirty work.”
“If people like this ask me to do something again,” Chennault said, “I’m going to make them put it in writing. I was younger, and maybe I was also naïve.”
Corcoran predicted Anna would never run for office, or take a high-profile job in the Reagan administration, other than perhaps as a “roving ambassador.” He offered another prediction: She would never marry him, or anyone else. “Anna is afraid that if she remarries she cannot be buried in that lovely place in Arlington Cemetery where her husband is buried,” he said.
“As long as I was the young widow of Chennault, good-looking, it was all right,” she told the Chicago Tribune. “A woman is all right as long as she sits at home, doing nothing but eating candies.” In aviation, for example, “the only women they recognized 20 years ago were what? Stewardesses, that’s all. . . .
Yes, if there’s one thing you learn in the man’s world, it’s that if you are a woman who is successful, you will be kicked out. If you are not a doer, no one will say anything. But once you show some capability, the attack begins.
There are lots of insecure men in this world. When they see that a woman is charming, intelligent, and capable, they say, “Be careful, your brain is showing.” And women are no better. “I never experienced discrimination in my life,” they say. Well you know they are only saying this to please the men.
When asked whether she might be heading into the government, she deflected the question. “I haven’t had time to think about that,” she said.
In the hallway of the Reagan-Bush inaugural committee offices, Chennault bumped into a colleague from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and told him she was headed to Taiwan over the holidays and was planning to deliver something very valuable: five invitations to attend the Reagan inaugural festivities. The invitations delighted Taipei, but when word reached China’s ambassador to the United States, Chai Zemin, he threatened to boycott the events if Taiwanese officials attended. Five days before Inauguration Day, Reagan’s foreign policy team disinvited Tsiang Yien-si, the secretary of Taiwan’s ruling Nationalist Party, who heard the bad news just as he was arriving in Washington. He dutifully came down with a “diplomatic illness” and checked himself into Jefferson Memorial Hospital. A Taiwanese spokesman said he was too ill to attend the in
auguration.
The Chinese ambassador attended, along with the rest of the diplomatic corps. Three Taiwanese—members of the group invited by Chennault and subsequently disinvited by the committee—managed to get in anyway, using tickets provided by individual members of Congress. A reporter for the Christian Science Monitor said the episode revealed that despite China’s harsh rhetoric, the country “is prepared to be flexible on the Taiwan question,” provided U.S.–Taiwanese ties “are not flaunted too openly” by the U.S. government. The Christian Science Monitor also hinted the scuffle had damaged Anna Chennault’s reputation with the Reagan crowd.
“WE’VE NEVER HAD SO MANY ESTABLISHED CONGRESSMEN lose their jobs,” said a Washington real estate agent in early December 1980. Republicans netted 34 seats in the House and 12 seats in the Senate, enough to become the majority for the first time in 28 years. A total of 44 Democrats in Congress—32 in the House and 12 in the Senate—lost their reelection campaigns in the 1980 Reagan landslide.
Watergate sellers started raising prices on their apartments within days of the election. A two-bedroom duplex that had been on the market for nearly a year at $325,000 was relisted at $350,000. James Brockett, president of First Commercial Bank in Virginia, raised the asking price of his three-bedroom apartment in Watergate East from $450,000 to $485,000. The owner of a one-bedroom apartment put his unit up for sale five days after the election at $300,000. “That’s about $100,000 more than one-bedrooms sell for,” scoffed a real estate agent. “He’s just trying to make a killing.” A two-bedroom apartment sold for $750,000—about double what it would have fetched a year earlier.
Local real estate observers believed the Reagan appointees, coming to town from expensive Southern California, would not be deterred by 15 percent mortgage interest rates. “Prices don’t scare them,” said one agent.
Just days after the election, Charles Wick, co-chairman of the Reagan inaugural, moved into Watergate South, renting an apartment for $1,800 a month. “We just love it,” said his wife, Mary Jane. “There is nothing in Washington that has the amenities this place has. The shops, the beauty salon, the dentist, they’re all here. And we all have homes in California, so you don’t want the responsibility of that here.”
Betsy and Alfred Bloomingdale, longtime friends of the Reagans, rented an eleventh-floor apartment in Watergate South. “They treat us very well,” said Alfred. “And we can put people up at the hotel.” “It’s safe,” Betsy added. “You don’t get mugged.”
William Wilson, another member of Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet,” which had helped finance Reagan’s political rise, and who would become U.S. ambassador to the Holy See, rented an apartment with his wife, Betty, in Watergate South. Drew Lewis, Reagan’s secretary of transportation, moved into Watergate East. Supreme Court nominee Sandra Day O’Connor took up temporary residence at the Watergate as she prepared for her confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Before the election, the Watergate Hotel prepared two budgets: the Carter budget and the Reagan budget. The Reagan budget was considerably higher. In the first five months of 1981, the hotel spent nearly $1 million to accommodate its new Republican guests. There were fresh raspberries from Chile, chocolate truffles, orchids, copies of the Los Angeles Times on doorsteps in the morning and marzipan elephants placed on pillows every night. “Their whole lifestyle is so unlike anything in Washington,” gushed Diane Sappenfield, an assistant to Salgo. “They’re our royalty.”
Publishing magnate Walter Annenberg and his wife, Leonore, known as Lee, along with a maid and butler, moved into a three-bedroom suite on the tenth floor of the Watergate Hotel. Their suite, redecorated at the Watergate’s expense in Mrs. Annenberg’s favorite colors—beige, pink and green—normally rented for $750 a night, but was offered to them at a special rate a hotel staffer described as “several thousand dollars a week.” The Annenbergs considered buying the penthouse apartment of Senator and Mrs. Javits in Watergate West, but it didn’t have a river view.
Whenever Carol and Charles Price visited Washington, they rented a suite in the Watergate Hotel next door to the Annenbergs. Carol Price was the Swanson’s frozen food heiress; Charles was the new nominee for U.S. ambassador to Belgium. The morning of Lee Annenberg’s swearing-in ceremony as chief of protocol at the State Department, Jerry Zipkin—a Manhattan real estate agent and bon vivant, once labeled a “Social Moth” by Women’s Wear Daily—stood in the lobby of the Watergate Hotel. He tilted his head back and shouted: “Where’s Carol?!?!”
Carol’s mother looked up from a couch in the lobby. “She’s in the safety deposit box, getting her jewelry.”
Jane and Justin Dart—he was a former drugstore magnate, chairman of Dart & Kraft, Inc., the food and consumer products conglomerate, and also a member of Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet”—rented a one-bedroom suite in the Watergate Hotel whenever they visited Washington, staying on the same floor as the Annenbergs and the Prices. Zipkin rented a suite down the hall. “He likes to have everybody on the same floor,” observed the hotel’s general manager. “If I got an apartment in Washington, it would definitely be at the Watergate,” Zipkin drawled. “It’s so private.”
Nancy Reagan and her California girlfriends referred to themselves simply as “the Group.” They traveled in a pack. They threw parties for each other. They dined regularly at Jean-Louis, as often as three times a week. “They’re the Gucci coochi cost too moochi group,” said Watergate South resident Victor Lasky, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Martha Mitchell.
At the Watergate Salon, Antonio Buttaro reported business was up 25 percent since the Reagan crowd arrived. Regulars called it the “Gossip Salon,” a place where the women shouted above the din of blow dryers and traded notes about who was leaving the Reagan administration, who was coming in and who they saw at an embassy the night before. Lee Annenberg summoned a hairdresser to her suite every morning at eight. Other customers tinted their eyebrows to match their hair, or indulged in a “bio-peel” treatment to reverse damage caused by the California sun. “Most of ’em don’t even have a bottle of shampoo at home,” said Tom Gerhart, a Watergate Salon stylist. “I like the California people,” added George Ozturk, another stylist. “I don’t feel like a hairdresser. I feel like a sculptor.” After four years of the Carter administration—when women boasted in the newspapers they did their own hair—Buttaro was elated. “The business has changed completely,” he said. “Before it was peanuts. Now it’s different.”
SHORTLY AFTER MOVING INTO THE WHITE HOUSE, President Reagan appointed Elizabeth Hanford Dole as assistant to the president for public liaison, with a portfolio that included reaching out to interest groups across the nation, including ethnic and religious minorities. “What does she know about minorities?” an irritated Chennault told the Washington Post. “How does she understand how we feel?”
Chennault fired off another letter to Pen James. “Being among the first few to come out in support of Ronald Reagan,” she wrote, “I hoped we would be given special consideration.” She asked for a personal meeting with James to discuss her future.
“Anna Chennault has probably done as much for the Republican Party as any woman I know in America,” Senator Barry Goldwater wrote James the next day. “I cannot understand why the President hasn’t at least called her, talked with her, and better than that, given her something to do in recognition of her long years of service.” Goldwater hoped his letter would do some good. “I have used every other track I know and none of them has worked,” he wrote, “including a direct communication” with Reagan. “These people need to be kept in the Party,” Goldwater concluded, “even though some of them are getting on in years.”
On February 10, Chennault wrote again to Ed Meese. “I have not heard from you and I wondered if anything has been done on my assignment. Will you please phone!”
Tommy Corcoran sent a personal letter to President Reagan on February 11. Corcoran and Reagan had something in common: They we
re Irishmen with a gift for storytelling. Corcoran began his letter with a story.
Corcoran and President Franklin D. Roosevelt were at Hyde Park working on an important speech. Two secretaries were there as well, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand and Peggy Dowd, but the first lady and her mother had gone out and were not expected to return until the afternoon. Roosevelt received “glorious news”—a friend had sent him a pheasant!—and ordered it cooked immediately for lunch. “Thereafter,” Corcoran wrote, “we talked more about the pheasant than the speech.”
Just before lunch, however, Eleanor Roosevelt returned with her mother and a female cousin. “Four for lunch is a lot for one pheasant,” Corcoran wrote. Now the pheasant would have to feed seven.
Roosevelt smiled. “Tommy,” the president said, “you are now going to witness an exercise in the highest Presidential diplomacy. I will carve this pheasant so that each lady will appreciate there is no distinction in their rank in my affection. But as a necessary consequence, unhappily for you, nothing can be left but the Pope’s nose!”
Corcoran suggested to Reagan that, having been raised in Iowa, he would know what “the Pope’s nose” was—the heart-shaped flap covering the bird’s posterior.
“For my Anna,” Corcoran begged, “please not just the ‘Pope’s nose.’”
ON SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1981, PRESIDENT REAGAN POSED for his official portrait in the East Room of the White House and for a second portrait, with Mrs. Reagan, in the Red Room. At 8:05 that night, the Reagans left the White House and headed to the Watergate Hotel for a private dinner at Jean-Louis, hosted by Mary Jane and Charles Wick, in celebration of Reagan’s seventieth birthday. Before dinner, the Reagans popped into the Annenbergs’ suite in the Watergate Hotel. Peter Buse was introduced to the president as the vice president of the hotel. Reagan shook his hand and smiled: “You must be the youngest vice president in Washington.”
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