Ronnie and Nancy (87 page)

Buried among the 365 names on the twenty-three-page list of committee members that Jim Lake handed out to the press were the Kitchen Cabinet veterans who had always run these things—Tuttle, Dart, Mills, Hume, French Smith. Henry Salvatori was missing altogether. This was in keeping with Sears’s strategy of toning down Reagan’s wealthy, conservative image and highlighting his appeal to the average American. It was also typical of Sears’s control-freak personality.

Sidelining the Kitchen Cabinet, however, created an immediate problem: money. Without Tuttle and Dart pounding on boardroom doors, much of the corporate cash that would have been Reagan’s went to Connally, a conservative and former Democrat who had bravely switched parties at the height of Watergate. By late April the campaign was having a hard time meeting its payroll. Sears blamed Nofziger for not raising enough money; Nofizger blamed Sears for spending too much. Enter Charles and Mary Jane Wick, who were personally close to the Reagans but not part of the Kitchen Cabinet clique. Charlie Wick was actually a registered Independent, though he agreed with Reagan’s basic philosophy and considered him “a man of destiny.” Mary Jane, a Republican, thought of herself as “a little to the right of Louis XIV,” but, like her husband, she had never been involved in politics. In 1978, Charlie had sold his nursing home chain for millions and, aside from looking after his investments, now had very little to do with his time.

One night in late April, the Wicks had dinner with Nancy at an Italian restaurant in Westwood and told her they would like to help raise money for Ronnie. “I said that we were thinking of having a lunch and inviting 4 7 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House heads of different major corporations whom we knew and they knew,”

Charles Wick told me. “But then we thought, The only problem with a lunch is if certain guys can’t show up, then we’ve kind of blown it with them. She looked at us somewhat plaintively and said, ‘Gee, I wish you really could think of something.’ So we decided to give a cocktail party and bill it as the formation of the Ground Floor Committee—to try and give some characterization as to there’s always a reward if you’re on the right side.”55

The Wicks sent out telegrams on behalf of the Ground Floor Committee, which consisted of them and ten other couples, saying: the first meeting will be at our house, june 28, 1979. the next meeting will be at the white house. p.s. ronnie and nancy will be at our reception. “Ronnie and Nancy had been going to different cocktail receptions in an effort to raise money,” Wick continued. “And if they raised $17,000

or $18,000 in one evening, they felt that was a pretty good success. Well, we charged a thousand bucks—that was the maximum you
could
charge.

And the dramatic thing is, we wound up with $80,000. Freeman Gosden’s daughter, Linda, stood at the door collecting the checks. Mary Jane designed large, attractive nametags for everyone. And I’m sort of short and resent having to stand at the edge of a crowd and not being able to see over people’s heads. So we had Ronnie speak from a riser right out here by the pool. We had these two giant speakers, and Ronnie addressed those people in those booming terms, and it was fabulous.”56

A month later,
The New York Times Magazine
ran the kind of article that Sears was so adept at eliciting from the national media. Titled “Reagan: The 1980 Model,” the piece was as flattering to Sears as it was to the candidate.

“Ronald Reagan is setting out on his third campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination, and his first truly well-prepared campaign,” Adam Clymer wrote. “This time he may win. A late June Gallup Poll gave him an edge over President Carter for the first time—49 percent for Mr. Reagan as opposed to 45 percent for President Carter. Indeed, repackaging Ronald Reagan is the key growth industry in American politics today. In Washington and Los Angeles, experienced politicians are plotting the finances, the branch offices and franchise distributorships, the sales pitches and the promotional tours of the new candidate Reagan.”57

Sears let Laxalt try out the slogan for the new, middle-of-the-road Reagan: “You’re not talking about a right-wing nut with horns growing out of his ears. You’re talking about a responsible conservative.” He had Reagan
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himself confront the “age problem” head-on, believing that the electorate would get bored with the subject if it were openly aired. As the
Times
noted, if Reagan were elected, he would be the oldest incoming president in U.S. history, and while his opponents promised that they would not make an issue of his age, they found ways to get in their digs—Howard Baker said after a meeting with Reagan that they had had a good “father-son talk.”58 On the campaign trail, Reagan joked about his longevity—“I can remember when a hot story broke and the reporters would run in yelling, ‘Stop the chisels.’ ” But he was serious with the
Times
: “The world has changed. The advances that have been made in every form of health care are such that I don’t think you go by numbers anymore with regard to age. It’s an individual and his capacity, and I feel fine.”59 As the columnist Robert Novak observed, “The tone of the campaign was set by Sears: dull, non-controversial sameness—sitting on the immense Reagan lead in the public opinion polls.”60

On August 24, Sears moved to strengthen his position even more by forcing Nofziger to quit. The “dirty work,” as Nofziger called it, was done by Deaver, who informed his old colleague that he would be taking over the fund-raising operation. Turning down the consolation prize of running the campaign in California and Texas, Nofziger resigned on the spot.

Reagan, who was spending most of that month vacationing at the ranch, called and told him, “I don’t want you to quit. . . . We’ve been together too long.” But, according to Nofziger, at a meeting held two days later at the Pacific Palisades house, Sears, Black, Lake, and Deaver voted to let him go, with only Meese and Reagan himself defending him. “I was an example of what could happen if you stood up to [Sears],” Nofziger said.61

Nancy didn’t cast a vote on Nofziger’s fate, but one can trace her invisible hand working in other ways. Two weeks before Nofziger’s ouster, Sears and Deaver had been asked by the Reagans to meet with Charlie Wick to discuss fund-raising ideas. “We had rented a place out in Malibu that summer,” Wick explained. “We’re walking on the beach, Nancy and Mary Jane in front and Ronnie and I in back. We’re talking about the campaign and when and where he was going to announce. I said, ‘I think you ought to announce in New York. That is the citadel of the world’s media. I’m sure we could do a Ground Floor Committee dinner there and get at least 250 people. That would take care of the whole week’s expenses.’ Ronnie said, ‘Let me talk to Mike and John Sears.’ We had lunch at the Beverly 4 7 8

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Wilshire Hotel, and they thought it was a fabulous idea. They said, ‘The only way it can be done is if you go to New York for a couple of months to put it together.’ I said, ‘Forget it.’ Deaver and Sears then called Mary Jane, and that did it.”62

In September the Wicks took a suite at the Mayfair Regent on Park Avenue, the hotel that housed Le Cirque. “At eight o’clock in the morning it became the office,” said Mary Jane Wick. “It was just work, work, work all day long. We started by calling a number of the big CEOs in the city, and much to my surprise there weren’t too many of them who were interested in Reagan. Their feeling was that, even though he had been governor for eight years, he was still an actor, and they couldn’t quite see him as president. A lot of them preferred John Connally or George Bush.” Through Helene von Damm, who had been running the campaign’s fund-raising efforts in the Northeast, the Wicks found two prominent New York Republicans to co-chair the announcement dinner: William Casey, a Wall Street lawyer who had headed the Securities and Exchange Commission under Nixon, and Maxwell Rabb, who was also a lawyer and had served in Eisenhower’s cabinet.

“We had to get a ballroom in a hotel for the dinner, but there always was the money problem,” Mary Jane Wick told me. “Fortunately, Charlie had a friend from college who was president of Hilton Hotels, and he let us have the New York Hilton ballroom without a down payment. When we were planning the dinner, I called a florist we all knew in L.A., and he had all these tablecloths from a benefit he had done in Palm Springs. Anyhow, Marion Jorgensen and Betty Wilson put them in their luggage and brought them to New York.”63

“Little by little it looked like we could exceed 250,” said Charlie Wick.

“On the night of the dinner there were 1,800 people in the ballroom, and in the balcony there were 250 of the world’s press.” Mary Jane Wick added,

“Our daughter Cindy was going with this young man whose father was a political cartoonist for a well-known newspaper in Paris, so he came over to cover this. Of course, with his son going with our daughter, we knew he wouldn’t do anything that wouldn’t be acceptable. And our other daughter, Pam, is married to the son of Bob Michel—he was the minority leader in the House of Representatives. So Bob, who has a great voice, sang ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”64

The Bloomingdales, the Deutsches, the Darts, and the Tuttles flew in for the announcement dinner, which was held on November 13, and Jerry
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Zipkin was there with the Cowleses and the Buckleys. All four Reagan children attended, and Jimmy Stewart narrated the official campaign film, which introduced the new, supposedly improved Ronald Reagan. “I believe this country hungers for spiritual revival; hungers to once again see honor placed above political expediency; to see government once again the protector of our liberties, not the distributor of gifts and privilege,”

Reagan intoned. In keeping with Sears’s cautious, above-the-fray approach, the speech recycled Reagan’s criticism of big government and support of a strong national defense, but without the hard-edged rhetoric that had thrilled conservative audiences but frightened almost everyone else.

Its most daring proposal was a call for a new economic and military partnership with Canada and Mexico, and no mention was made, for example, of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran nine days earlier. A headline in the following morning’s
New York Times
said it all: the 1980

model reagan: strident campaign tone is gone.65

That morning Reagan flew to Washington for a news conference, at which he announced that he would not participate in debates or other public appearances with his rivals for the nomination. He was introduced by Representative Jack Kemp as the “oldest and the wisest candidate,” an unfortunate choice of words that annoyed Reagan’s handlers and led journalists to refer to him among themselves as “the O & W.”66 Sears had cut a deal with Kemp in October: in exchange for the congressman’s agreement to endorse Reagan instead of running himself, he would be made campaign chairman in place of Laxalt. When Laxalt got wind of the plot, however, he went directly to the Reagans, who overruled Sears. At the news conference in Washington, Reagan presented Kemp as the campaign’s “chief spokesman.”

Arthur Laffer disclosed to me that Kemp’s real goal from the beginning was to be Reagan’s running mate. Laffer had therefore advised the young congressman not to give up his bargaining power by dropping out too early. “I had a little dinner party for Jack Kemp at my home in Rolling Hills Estates with the Reagans and the Tuttles and the Darts. I have a little guesthouse in the back. I told him, ‘Jack, what you’ve got to do is walk down to the guesthouse with Ron. I’ll set it all up, and you and Ron just sit down and have a little private chat for a while. And you tell him this:

“Sir, you know I adore you. I think the world of you. I’ve worked for you, you’ve been my hero, my role model, all my life. What I’m going to do, sir, is I’m going to run, and every delegate I get, come convention time, I’m 4 8 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House going to instruct all those delegates to vote for you.” Jack, that’s what you’ve got to tell him.’ And they were down there for half an hour. My scheme was working. When they came back up, they were chatting away, all smiles. Then I finally got to Jack. ‘Jack, did you do it? Did you tell him that?’ He said, ‘Oh, no, Art, I couldn’t. I told him I’d never run against him. I’d give him all the support I could.’ I said, ‘Jack, you just lost the vice presidency. He’s not going to pick a wuss for a vice president. He’s going to pick someone who shows vote-getting ability. Why would he take someone who doesn’t run?’ And, of course, that’s Jack’s history. He’s made an ever greater reputation by not running for ever higher offices.”67

On Thanksgiving, nine days after the announcement, Nancy called Mike Deaver and asked him to come up to San Onofre Drive. As he came into the foyer, he could see Ronnie in the living room with Sears, Black, and Lake, but Nancy surprised him by asking if he would mind waiting in their bedroom. After twenty minutes, Deaver later recalled, “I decided this was ridiculous. I walked into the living room and said, to no one in particular,

‘What’s going on?’ No one looked directly at me, almost always a bad sign.

Then Reagan said, ‘Mike, the fellows here have been telling me about the way you’re running the fund-raising efforts, and we’re losing money. As a matter of fact, they tell me I have to pay thirty thousand dollars a month to lease my space in your office building.’ I was more stunned than angry.”

Deaver, who knew that Reagan’s monthly charges, including everything from secretaries to limousines, ran from only about $5,000 to $10,000, told him, “If these gentlemen have convinced you that I am ripping you off, after all these years, then I’m out. I’m leaving.” Reagan followed him out of the room, saying, “No, this is not what I want.” Deaver snapped, “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s what I want.”68

Deaver’s departure shocked Reagan’s entourage. As one insider told
The
New York Times
, “There’s a new Ronald Reagan who wants the Presidency so bad that he’s willing to dump old friends.”69 Nancy Reynolds told me,