Ronnie and Nancy (64 page)

According to Nancy Reagan, the Sunday night swearing in was supposed to be a private affair for family and friends, to be followed by the official inauguration on Thursday, January 5. But more than thirty TV crews were waiting in the ornate rotunda of the capitol to watch Ronald Reagan assume the governorship of the most populous state in the union. As State Supreme Court Justice Marshall McComb held the four-hundred-year-old Bible of Father Junipero Serra, one of the state’s first Spanish settlers, Reagan repeated the oath of office, and Nancy stood by, her big eyes brimming with
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pride and adoration. “Well, George, here we are on
The Late Show
again,”

the freshly installed Governor quipped to his old co-star Senator George Murphy, who had preceded him at the rostrum. When the laughter died down, Reagan delivered a brief and surprisingly religious speech in which he promised to try to “bring to public office the teachings and the precepts of the Prince of Peace.”6 This was clearly the son of Nelle speaking, not the heir of Barry Goldwater.

There has been much speculation as to why this ceremony was held at such an odd hour. The reason, Reagan always said, was to put a stop to Pat Brown’s last-minute judge-appointing binge as soon as legally possible.

The outgoing Governor had another theory. “My only guess is that it’s because he believes in astrology,” Brown told a reporter. “I understand he does.” A San Francisco astrologer was quoted as saying, “No better time could be picked”: Jupiter, the planet of kings, he explained, was high in the sky that night.7 Even Stu Spencer had his doubts about the putative reason for the late hour. “That was the party line,” he told me. “It was held at midnight because Nancy talked to [psychic] Jeane Dixon or somebody like that.”8

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
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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 appointees: “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
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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,”