Ronnie and Nancy (88 page)

“John Sears got Mike fired. Boy, that was a tough one. I was furious and sick and hurt that he had that much influence. Mike was really hurt, and Nancy Reagan wasn’t happy either.”70

The following Monday, Martin Anderson, who was close to both Deaver and Nancy, announced that he was leaving the campaign to return to his position as senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.71

Anderson put all the blame on Sears. As he told me, “Sears was a brilliant
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strategist, but he developed what I’d call an incipient megalomania. He did not like any criticism. At policy meetings he would propose something as a political stroke. And I’d say that’s great but it wouldn’t work, and I’d tell him why, and he did not like that. So he took a couple of hundred thousand bucks of campaign money and set up a competing policy shop in Washington, without telling me. I found out about that and had a long talk with him. Anyways, I went on strike. I quit. I walked away. He spent about six hours trying to talk me out of it, but there was no way to deal with him.”72

Perhaps Sears was aware of the nickname people were using with increasing frequency about him: Rasputin.73

In his memoir,
Revolution
, Anderson attributes all this court intrigue partly to Reagan’s “highly unusual” and “unique” managerial style: He made no demands, and gave almost no instructions. Essentially, he just responded to whatever was brought to his attention and said yes or no, or I’ll think about it. At times he would just change the subject, maybe tell a funny story, and you would not find out what he thought about it, one way or the other. His style of managing was totally different from the model of the classic executive who exercised leadership by planning and scheming, and barking out orders to his subordinates.

It was something that all those who had worked closely and intimately with Ronald Reagan knew. Ed Meese knew. Mike Deaver knew. And so did Dick Allen and Lyn Nofziger and Peter Hannaford and John Sears. . . . But we rarely talked about it among ourselves and never to outsiders.

We kept it a secret.

We just accepted Reagan as he was and adjusted ourselves to his manner. If that was the way he wanted to do things, fine. At the time it seemed like a small thing, an eccentricity that was dwarfed by his multiple, stunning qualities.

So everyone overlooked and compensated for the fact that he made decisions like an ancient king or a Turkish pasha, passively letting his subjects serve him, selecting only those morsels of public policy that were especially tasty. Rarely did he ask searching questions and demand to know why someone had or had not done something. He just sat back in a supremely calm, relaxed manner and waited until important things were brought to him. And then he would act, quickly, decisively, and usually, very wisely. . . .

This kind of behavior in a political candidate is unheard of. From the viewpoint of a jealous, competitive staff it is potentially chaotic.74

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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House How did Nancy perceive her role in this competitive cast of characters?

“I was always conscious of people who were trying to end-run Ronnie, who were trying to use him for their own agendas,” she told me. “And all my little antennae would go up. It never occurred to him, because he didn’t work that way. He wouldn’t think anybody would work that way.

But they do. So I’d point things out to him.”75

Now the only Californian left at the top of Reagan’s campaign was Ed Meese, and he was extremely upset over the departures of Nofziger, Deaver, and Anderson. In early December, Morgan Mason, the handsome young son of the actor James Mason and a favorite of Betsy Bloomingdale’s and Nancy Reagan’s, applied for a job at campaign headquarters in Los Angeles.

Among the restricted personal papers at the Reagan Library is a record of his interview with Mike Wallace, a staffer close to Sears. The handwritten notes make clear the extent to which Sears sought control of access to the Reagans: Mike Wallace said:

New team in ctrl here

Sears, Wallace, Black, Lake

“Meese if he comes out of his pout”

Conc. re allegiance to MKD [Deaver] & your relationship to NR

[Nancy Reagan]

JPS [Sears] wary of peo in contact w. Reagans That was MKD’s problem. Instead of fighting it out down here, he would just call the Reagans.

Anything said to Reagans must be cleared w. Wallace or Sears76

Morgan Mason did not get the job. A month later, however, he was hired as a consultant by the newly formed Reagan Executive Advisory Committee, which was comprised mainly of Kitchen Cabinet members who had decided that the time had come for them to get more involved. “The original group was Holmes Tuttle, Jack Wrather, Bill French Smith, Bill Wilson, Ted Cummings, Charles Wick, and me,” said Arthur Laffer, who was named the EAC’s secretary and kept minutes of its meetings, some of which can be found in the Reagans’ restricted papers. “The first meeting was in Justin Dart’s office, with all the eagles flying—Jus had big wooden eagles everywhere. All those guys just loved eagles.” According to Laffer, Dart was the driving force of the group, and he chose Bill Simon as the chairman. They
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decided to keep the membership to about two dozen and to bring in prominent business leaders from other parts of the country, including David Packard of Hewlett-Packard, Bill Boeing of Boeing Aircraft, Don Kendall of Pepsico, and Joe Coors, the Colorado beer king who had been a major contributor to Reagan’s 1976 effort. “We had the word come down that Alfred Bloomingdale was also to be in the group,” recalled Laffer. “Betsy had asked Nancy, and Nancy asked Ronnie, and Ronnie said, ‘Yes, sir.’”77

The EAC’s mission, spelled out in notes from a meeting on February 5, 1980, was “to advise and assist RR on all aspects of the campaign, with particular attention to policy and issue positions and to recommending qualified individuals who might serve as advisors and consultants to RR and the campaign. The EAC will be organizationally responsible directly to RR.”

Among the illustrious figures the EAC would enlist as advisers were the economists Milton Friedman and George Shultz, former ambassador to South Vietnam Robert Ellsworth, and retired admiral Elmo Zumwalt.78

Michael Deaver wrote that, except for infrequent phone conversations with Nancy, he was out of touch with the Reagans for five months after he quit. But the February 5 notes say, “Michael K. Deaver has been appointed as his personal liaison to the E.A.C. by RR.” While Dart went on about the

“need to combat Soviets in Middle East by any means necessary,” the notes indicate that Deaver was suggesting “2 things this group can do—broad strategy priorities; get management into campaign.”79 Ed Meese was also involved with the EAC from the beginning, and as early as January 14 he was making sure that copies of his memos to Bill Simon went to Deaver.80

Around the same time, Nancy, who talked regularly with Justin Dart, asked him to look into the campaign’s hemorrhaging finances. Dart turned to William Casey, who had co-chaired the announcement dinner in New York and had recently joined the EAC.81 Casey undertook an audit of Sears’s costly operation, which included eighteen regional offices with more than two hundred employees, and was said to be paying $50,000-a-year consulting fees to scholars for position papers. According to his biographer Joseph E. Persico, after Casey finished his “management audit,” he met with the Kitchen Cabinet at Tuttle’s house and told them, “Ronald Reagan hasn’t got a campaign organization. He’s got a civil war. There’s Ed Meese and the California guys in one camp. There’s John Sears and his technocrats on the other side. Between the two, the campaign’s paralyzed. I also looked at the books. You’re going broke.”82

Meanwhile, a few days after Reagan suffered a wholly unexpected early 4 8 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House defeat to George Bush in Iowa, Casey sat down and wrote a six-page letter to the candidate urging him to rethink his entire campaign strategy. The letter ended with a call for “a sharp assertive stance.”83

The Iowa caucuses on January 21 were the first contest of the primary season, and Reagan had been expected to win handily in a state where he was still remembered fondly as the Des Moines sports announcer who had made it big in Hollywood. Following Sears’s above-it-all strategy, Reagan spent only six days in the state and refused to join six other candidates in a televised debate, which Iowans saw as a snub. Despite a precipitous drop in local polls within days of the debate, and a second-place finish six points behind Bush, Reagan refused to blame his campaign manager, telling reporters, “If I had to do it over I’d do it the same way again.”84 But even Sears conceded, “The public’s perception of the campaign has changed. People now think there’s a race where they didn’t think there was one before. In some ways, that’s sort of a relief for us. We won’t have a motivational problem anymore.”85

For all his spin, Sears was in trouble and he knew it. According to reporter Lally Weymouth, the daughter of Kay Graham, who wrote a profile of Nancy Reagan for
The New York Times Magazine
, Sears went to Nancy and told her that he had overheard Meese “telling some staff members that Sears would be fired the day after the New Hampshire primary, along with Lake and Black.” Sears said that put him in an intolerable position, and he suggested bringing in Bill Clark—whom Reagan had elevated to the California Supreme Court—presumably to ease out Meese, Sears’s archenemy. Nancy agreed to call Clark, but, according to the Judge, as he was known, she didn’t make the offer Sears had suggested.86

“On Lincoln’s Birthday,” Clark told me, “Nancy and Ron asked me to come to the ranch. I spent most of the day and the evening with them—

it was just the three of us. They wanted me to replace Sears. I didn’t say no, because you don’t say no to Ronald Reagan—or to Nancy—but, as the Irish would say, I sorted it out. I explained that my position on the Supreme Court was critical at the time, and if I left we would probably lose three or four cases that were under submission. Ron looked me in the eye and said, ‘Bill, I understand. But if I make it, you’re going to hear from me again.’ ” Furthermore, Clark disclosed, after the Reagans ran down a list of prospective replacements for Sears with him, “I suggested that Bill Casey be tagged.”87

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Matters came to a head at a Holiday Inn in Worcester, Massachusetts, three days later. That afternoon the Reagans held a meeting in their room with Casey, Meese, Richard Wirthlin, the campaign pollster, and Richard Allen, the foreign policy adviser, who had complained that he was being cut out of the loop by Sears. Casey’s report on the campaign’s finances and management so impressed everyone present that it was agreed that he should join the team immediately, though no announcement would be made until after New Hampshire. That evening Reagan summoned Sears, Black, and Lake to discuss restructuring the campaign. One of the three later told Lally Weymouth it was “a very contentious meeting. Anger, a great deal of anger, was displayed by [Reagan], and after two hours we were at the point where Sears said something to the effect of ‘I cannot work here as long as Ed Meese continues to be in the spot he is in.’ The clear intent was: ‘Him or me.’ At that point, Reagan blew up. He jumped out of his chair and shouted.”88

As Nancy remembered the scene, things got even more dramatic: “Ronnie rarely loses his temper, but he certainly was angry that night. ‘You got Deaver,’ he told John, ‘but, by God, you’re not going to get Ed Meese! You guys have forced me to the wall.’ I was sure he was going to hit John, so I took his arm and said, ‘It’s late, and I think we should all get some sleep.’”89

“We tried to work it out,” she explained at the time, “and I tried to be helpful, but by the time we got to New Hampshire, it was obvious to all of us that we were kind of applying Band-Aids. It was a situation that just wasn’t going to work. Ronnie decided that, before he knew what the results were, he would make a change, so that if he lost it wouldn’t seem that this had come about because he had lost—which I thought was very nice of Ronnie.”90

Reagan later discussed Sears with presidential historian Theodore White, saying, “I don’t fault his ability at political analysis, but he wanted to do
everything.
And when I wanted to bring someone in to really handle an office situation where the morale was at zero . . . he delivered an ulti-matum . . . that he would leave if that was done. So I just knew that it could not go on that way. . . . There was . . . a feeling that I was just kind of a spokesman for John Sears.”91

On the afternoon of February 26, while New Hampshire voters were still going to the polls, Reagan again summoned Sears, Black, and Lake to his hotel suite. As Nancy and Casey sat nearby, he handed Sears a statement that began, “Ronald Reagan today announced that William J. Casey 4 8 6

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House has been named campaign director . . . replacing John Sears, who has resigned to return to his law practice.”92 Sears’s two colleagues were also dismissed. Reagan announced later that day that Ed Meese had been promoted to chief of staff and Richard Wirthlin to chief of strategy and planning. The new triumvirate would soon be joined by Nofziger, who took over as press secretary; Anderson, who came back to oversee policy; and Deaver, who resumed traveling with the Reagans on the campaign plane, a Boeing 727 named
LeaderShip ’80.

Reagan overwhelmed Bush in New Hampshire, 50 percent to 23 percent.

Trailing behind were Howard Baker with 13 percent, John Anderson with 10 percent, and John Connally, Robert Dole, and Philip Crane with less than 3 percent each. These last three would soon drop out and endorse Reagan, who in this state had not only agreed to underwrite a debate with Bush but also generously invited the other candidates, who had been excluded by the newspaper sponsoring the event, to join them on the platform. When the moderator threatened to shut off Reagan’s microphone, he seized the moment and famously declared, “I
paid
for this microphone,” while Bush just stood there, not knowing what to do. It was in New Hampshire, too, that Bush coined the all-too-memorable phrase “voodoo economics” to put down Reagan’s supply-side-based promises of tax cuts, a balanced budget, and increased military spending.