Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  Little by little, Ronald Reagan was settling in—at the office and at home. He and Nancy had fled the Governor’s Mansion for a twelve-room Tudor on a tree-lined street in a section of East Sacramento called the Fabulous Forties. The house was a gem, perfect for entertaining. Nancy furnished it with an exquisite mix of antiques and contemporary pieces donated by her wealthy Los Angeles friends in exchange for generous tax deductions. Joan Didion famously ridiculed the decor as “a stage set,” but there were elements that gave it a homey, lived-in look. Mementos from their respective movie careers hung whimsically on the walls. Two dogs, Lady and Fuzzy, roamed the premises. There was a pool and cabana in a fenced-in backyard and a basement recreation room whose pool table was surrounded by the kind of toy train set one encountered in a museum. The Executive Residence, as it was branded, cost the Reagans a modest $1,250 a month in rent, which they paid regularly to the state, even after it was purchased for them by the Kitchen Cabinet.

  Ronald Reagan loved the residence. It was his refuge. Almost without fail, he arrived home at six each evening, showered, then slipped into his pajamas for some precious downtime in front of the TV. Nightly news broadcasts were required viewing before tuning in to the favorites—Mission: Impossible and reruns of his old nemesis Bonanza. On weekends, when his beloved Rams played at home, father and son, “Skipper,” suited up to watch the games.

  Social functions were avoided whenever possible, especially those attended by his staff. “There was always a distance between the Governor and his staff,” said Kathy Randall Davis, Reagan’s private secretary. “No one could say they really knew the Reagans. After the working day, the blinds were drawn and a veil of privacy separated the Governor from his public life.” In the early days of the administration, Ron and Nancy rarely went out unless there was a state function that demanded his attendance. Even at those affairs, Phil Battaglia often felt he had to step in to ease his boss’s anxiety. It wasn’t until September 1967, at an assemblyman’s annual crab feed at the Sutter Club in Sacramento, that Ronald Reagan began to unwind. It took more than two martinis to do the trick, and with no help from his executive secretary. By that time, Phil Battaglia was gone.

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  Unfortunately, there was no easy way to get rid of Battaglia. Using the imperial “we,” Tom Reed says, “We could not get Reagan to throw him out, because Reagan doesn’t fire people.” Moreover, the governor “had total trust in Phil,” often referring to him as “my strong right arm,” frustrating efforts to invite Reagan’s support. Instead, a whisper campaign was mounted to discredit Battaglia’s motives and impugn his competence. A handful of co-conspirators joined in from among the governor’s staff—Lyn Nofziger, Paul Haerle, Gordon Luce, and Bill Clark—men who, Sandy Quinn said, “had presidentialitis, had their eyes on the White House.” With Phil off in Washington much of the time, it was relatively easy for Reed to convince them Battaglia was “a self-promoting autocrat”—citing how only he was permitted to stand by the governor at press conferences, how he monopolized Ronald Reagan’s time and schedule, how he supposedly demeaned Reagan in private, how he mastered “cutting out and annihilating those who were perceived as a threat,” how he was positioning himself as de facto governor. Furthermore, he took heat for the administration’s early problems dealing with the state legislature—“trying to ram things through . . . without putting together the necessary pieces to build up support for the program.”

  Reed never let up, calling Battaglia “power-mad” and “clinically crazy,” a “young kid who suddenly found himself operating the levers and buttons and strings of a . . . governor.” None of this, however, was enough to vanquish him from Sacramento. “So we figured out that we had to use the political embarrassment of that time to get rid of him,” Reed says.

  They’d out Phil Battaglia as a homosexual.

  In 1967, being gay in politics was the kiss of death. Any gay person in government—whether a politician, a consultant, or the lowliest aide—remained in the closet, under constant fear of exposure and banishment. Stu Spencer, whose two business partners, Bill Roberts and Fred Haffner, were gay, says, “It was evil to be homosexual.” According to a gay staff member of Ronald Reagan’s administration, the rampant homophobia created an environment of “fairly high paranoia.” It was easier to reveal that you suffered from cholera. LBJ declared homosexuality “a case of sickness and disease” in 1964, when his top administrative aide, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a YMCA restroom on a morals charge and forced to resign.

  Was Phil Battaglia homosexual? There was never any evidence that he was. He had been seemingly happily married to the same woman for over forty years, a family man in most traditional respects. If he engaged in same-sex relationships, he kept it to himself. But Reed and company assembled a dossier that was loaded with ambiguities. They formed a committee to investigate Battaglia and his alleged love interests—Sandy Quinn and Jack Kemp, the Buffalo Bills’ star quarterback who was interning in the governor’s office. “Clark and I were the ringleaders,” says Reed. “Ed Gillenwaters* and Gordon Luce ran the intelligence network; Curtis Patrick was in charge of planting bugs; Art Van Court involved the cops; Nofziger and I wrote the report—we dealt in adjectives and wild claims—and to back us up we wanted the lawyers, Meese and Haerle, on board.” There were nine who helped plot the coup. It was a bungle: the private investigator they sent to tail Battaglia lost him, the bugs planted in Phil’s office never transmitted a word of evidence, and an attempt to gain access to Sandy Quinn’s apartment proved futile. “We made the Keystone Cops look good,” Lyn Nofziger reported.

  It didn’t matter. In lieu of evidence, they concocted a report stating what they suspected. “We knew in our minds, though no place else for sure, that there was hanky-panky,” Nofziger said, “we just couldn’t prove it.” The crowning touch was the graphic description of an “orgy” at a Lake Tahoe cabin jointly owned by Phil Battaglia and Jack Kemp. A snoop was dispatched to peek in the windows for a glimpse of male sexual escapades. Again, there was no indication of untoward behavior—even Reed acknowledges, “I don’t think there was anything going on in Tahoe.” But a list of the cabin’s occupants—Battaglia, Kemp, Quinn, and two gay sons of a Republican state senator—was evidence enough, however circumstantial.

  “It was all circumstantial,” Bill Clark admitted.

  But it read guilty, according to Stu Spencer—a twelve-page report of who was sleeping with whom, who was taking trips together, what hotel rooms they’d stayed in, who was paying the bills. “We knew we had to get it to Reagan,” Tom Reed says, “so we made a plan.” “It was decided that the Labor Day holiday was the time to see the governor about it,” Ed Meese recalls. “He was down at the Hotel Del Coronado [on San Diego Bay], recovering from prostate surgery.” They all decided to go, all of the “coup plotters,” as Tom Reed called them, to put up a united front. Holmes Tuttle was recruited for extra influence. Despite the solidarity, paranoia reigned. “Everybody was nervous,” Ed Meese says. “We weren’t sure how the governor was going to take it.” Any publicity would prove disastrous. They decided it was best to travel separately and meet in San Diego. Ed Meese laughs when he recalls the cloak-and-dagger scenario. “Bill Clark and I went down together on a PSA flight from Los Angeles,” Meese recalls, “and as we walked down the aisle, all our guys were seated in different places on the same plane.”

  They rented separate cars and rendezvoused in the parking lot of the Del Coronado around three o’clock in the afternoon. Reed knocked on the governor’s hotel door, with the others huddled closely behind him. Ron and Nancy, just in from the beach, were dressed in bathrobes over their swimsuits. Reagan took one look at the gang, grinned, and said, “Golly, are you quitting all at once?”

  His smile disappeared when he read their report. “He was absolutely shocked,” Ed Meese recalls. “He looked up and said, ‘After all my time in Hollywood, I thought I’d be able to
spot this sort of thing.’” Bill Clark recalled him looking up ashen-faced and saying, “My God, has government failed?” Each man heard exactly what he wanted to hear. The governor went around the room asking everyone individually if they were sure the information was correct and seeking advice on how to proceed. “This is not a Monday problem,” Holmes Tuttle said. “This is now.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Phil has to go.” Nancy, seated quietly on the bed, seconded him. “She saw the potential vulnerability for the governor,” says Ed Meese.

  Tom Reed recalls the relief everyone felt. “We’d put all our chips on the table. The last thing we wanted was for him to say, ‘You guys get together and work it out.’ Politically, personally, we would have been dead. Instead his decision was clean, decisive.”

  Phil has to go.

  Afterward, on their way out of town, most of them convened in the airport bar and got fall-down drunk, barely making it onto the plane.

  Bill Clark prepared a letter of resignation, and the next morning, Saturday, August 25, 1967, Holmes Tuttle took it to Taft Schreiber’s house in Los Angeles, where they knew Battaglia would be meeting to discuss personal business. It was over quickly; the aging car dealer didn’t mince words. “Phil,” Tuttle said, “when you leave here today, understand that you will no longer be working for the State of California or the governor.” Not a word of the document mentioned homosexuality. In fact, Battaglia was at a loss to know why he was being dismissed. He was shell-shocked; tears came fast.

  Immediately, Bill Clark replaced Battaglia as the executive secretary and conducted state business as though nothing had changed. The staff liked Clark and welcomed the change. “He was very different, not political at all, but savvy, and a gentleman,” says George Steffes, the governor’s legislative aide. It was imperative, the staff agreed, that no publicity leak out. Phil Battaglia, to his credit, played the good soldier to the end. At a press conference the following Monday, he announced, “This citizen politician has determined it is time to go back to citizen life.” The last thing he or anyone wanted was to set off a torrent of sordid headlines. “Besides,” Tom Reed continues to point out, “this was not a scandal. It was a good, old-fashioned struggle for power.” L’Affaire Battaglia was strictly hush-hush.

  Lyn Nofziger, ever the squeaky wheel, couldn’t control himself. It was a secret waiting to burst forth. At a reception for the National Governors’ Conference aboard the USS Independence off the Florida coast, Nofziger, who was reportedly drunk, laid out Battaglia’s dismissal to three reporters—Paul Hope of the Washington Evening Star, David Broder of the Washington Post, and Karl Fleming of Newsweek. “Lyn decided he needed to tell the story his way and attempted to tell it off the record, but his judgment was impaired,” Spencer says. Details were leaked to muckraker Drew Pearson, and within days the full story—“Gov. Ronald Reagan Faces First Acid Test; Homosexuals Discovered in His Office”—was splashed across papers nationwide.

  Demanding a fuller explanation, reporters converged on the governor’s office. At a hastily arranged press conference on October 31, 1967, Ronald Reagan, clearly annoyed, issued an unqualified denial that he “had harbored a homosexual ring in his own executive office,” and assailed Drew Pearson as a liar. “I’m prepared to say that nothing like that ever happened,” he insisted. Then, he turned abruptly to Nofziger, stationed at his side, and said, “Want to confirm it, Lyn?” A visibly agitated Nofziger raised his hand and said, “Confirmed.”

  Many in attendance knew it was an outright lie, and “were astonished” by Reagan’s reaction. It seemed incredible to them that a man mentioned seriously as a 1968 Republican presidential hopeful would risk his credibility by making such a bald-faced denial. In a follow-up column, Drew Pearson suggested the issue wasn’t so much the “homosexual scandal” as it was Ronald Reagan’s “credibility gap.” Even Bill Clark, the governor’s new chief executive, admitted that this “hurt our relationship with everyone—the legislature and the press.”

  Intrigue and confusion extended to the state capitol, where door locks were changed and guards posted to protect against anyone rifling the files. Staff positions were hastily shuffled, rumors churned up fresh suspicions. In one episode that illustrates the paranoia, Bill Clark’s young assistant, Michael Deaver, confessed to his boss that he, too, “had experimented” sexually and intended to resign so as not to drag the administration into further embarrassment. According to Ed Meese, “Mike’s father had caught him with a boy when he was twelve years old, but he’d been ‘cured’ with psychiatric help.” This disclosure failed to sink Deaver, who proved invaluable to Ronald Reagan for the next thirty years. But the governor remained wary. When Truman Capote visited the office six months later, Reagan suggested to his lieutenant governor, Robert Finch, “We ought to troll him up and down the hall to see if there is anybody else in here we should wash out.”

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  The so-called homosexual scandal began to fade, and Reagan was able to return to pressing forward on his agenda, including air-pollution regulation, clamping down on alleged welfare fraud, establishing a system of mediation in farm labor disputes, and introducing laws to crack down on pornography. And despite the false starts and flawed appointments, by the end of 1967 the Reagan administration had reached cruising altitude.

  Ironically, the more fit Reagan seemed to be doing his current job, the greater the distractions pulling him away from it, as speculation about the 1968 presidential race continued to intrude. Newspapers across the country had begun making proclamations like “Ronald Reagan has a strong chance for the Republican Presidential nomination next year.” Forecasters saw him “rapidly displacing Richard M. Nixon” as the party’s strongest conservative candidate. Henchmen began working behind the scenes in earnest to tune up the Reagan engine.

  The prairie fire was heating up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE NON-CANDIDATE

  “Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt.”

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  The ridge road from Monte Rio to the unmarked turnoff a half mile away was shrouded in shadows, making visibility difficult. Redwoods the size of respectable skyscrapers lined either side of the dark corridor functioning as the sole access in or out of the Bohemian Grove. Cars approaching the Grove’s front gate found it a slow, arduous trek through dense virgin forest ringed by thousand-foot-high hills, but once inside the grounds, past the armed security shack, the journey ended in a sylvan retreat.

  For one week each July, the Bohemian Grove provided refuge to top politicians, titans of industry, and assorted power brokers from across several continents. The lot was full of Maseratis, Ferraris, and Rolls-Royces slotted so closely together that the young valets entrusted to park them had to crawl out the windows in order to return to their posts. Stress, anxiety, and—most important—women were strictly prohibited. The first order of business for any man arriving there was to head directly to the redwood just beyond the gate and to urinate on it. In fact, urinating on trees was both a ritual and a standard practice throughout the stay for all Grove guests—alone, in groups, whatever configuration, wherever one pleases—prompting “sword fights” and occasional misfires.

  Men at play. This is where the powerful came to unwind and interact. Even though one of the camp’s stated rules was “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here”—loosely translated as “Don’t Do Business on the Premises”—deals were negotiated, pacts made, agreements brokered, alliances strengthened, often with far-reaching repercussions. Campers answered to names such as Scripps, Rockefeller, Cronkite, Kravis, Goldwater, Kluge, and Kissinger. Presidents from Herbert Hoover to Dwight Eisenhower used Julys at the Bohemian Grove to float their ideas and gauge support. And in 1967, that tradition carried on.

  This was Ronald Reagan’s first visit. He was the guest of George Murphy, his old Hollywood co-star and first-term U.S. senator from California. No doubt Re
agan was impressed, as everyone is, with the enchanting surroundings. The Grove was a beautiful 2,600-acre encampment of mostly rustic terrain close to the Russian River. Dragonflies convened over a kidney-shaped lake, a gathering point at the base of a great lawn, and bullfrogs crooned in the leafy underbrush. An untrained visitor could get seriously lost wandering the network of wood-chip trails that led off to 119 secluded “camps.” The cottages on each site, stretching back into the hillside, were mostly rickety redwood structures, with inscrutable names such as Monkey Block, Valhalla, Mandalay, Owl’s Nest, and Woof.

  George Murphy’s cabin, Lost Angels, named in honor of the Los Angelenos in residence, sat high above the road, requiring roughly eighty-five steps straight up to reach it. Considered large as these places went, it was stocked with enough liquor to run a booming pub along with relevant supplies like cigars and Cheetos. Early on the afternoon of July 23, 1967, its elevated deck was thronged with Messrs. Murphy and Reagan and their respective entourages, about a dozen men dressed in matching camp attire—polo shirts, khaki shorts, and boat shoes—sitting in wide wicker chairs and chuckling at the nonstop repartee. Seated in the middle, holding court and dressed in the only blue serge suit within thirty miles, was the man of the hour: Richard Milhous Nixon.

  This was no chance get-together. The following morning, Nixon was slated to deliver the lakeside keynote address. He would later write, “If I were to choose the speech that gave me the most pleasure and satisfaction in my political career, it would be my Lakeside Speech at the Bohemian Grove in July 1967,” but it paled in importance to the get-together in progress. The seemingly nonchalant banter and raunchy jokes traded on Lost Angels’ cozy deck were a smoke screen for the very substantive conversation that was scheduled to take place. Perhaps that is why many among the group were not club members and just visiting for the day, outside normal procedure at the Bohemian Grove.