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By Root 3021 0

Tuttle was born in 1905 on a cattle ranch in the Indian Territory of Oklahoma; his mother was half Chickasaw. The family fell on hard times after World War I, and upon his father’s death in 1922, Holmes left high school to work on the assembly line at a Ford plant in Oklahoma City. Four years later he set out for California, hitchhiking part of the way and arriving, legend has it, in a boxcar. By the time he married Virginia Harris, a schoolteacher, in 1934, he had worked his way up to sales manager of Cook Brothers Ford in downtown Los Angeles. Charles and Howard Cook, who also owned the Community Bank, backed him in a dealership in West Hollywood in 1946, and by the 1960s, Tuttle had Ford and Lincoln-Mercury dealerships in Beverly Hills, Irvine, Tucson, and Spokane, making him one of the most successful automobile dealers in the country.

Tuttle was very much part of the downtown establishment—a director of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, a member of the California Club and the Los Angeles Country Club, and a bosom friend of the mighty Asa Call, whom he considered his political mentor. Virginia Tuttle was a founder of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Music Center, and socially the couple, who had lived in Pasadena before moving to Hancock Park, saw mostly a WASPy, conservative crowd. “Virginia was a very nice woman, and she did a lot for Holmes,” said a long-The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

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time friend from the business world. “Much as I hate to use the word, she was a little pushy, not ambitious exactly, but always very concerned about being in the right group. I don’t think the other ladies—Betsy, Marion, and Betty Wilson—were all that fond of Virginia.”56

Politically, Holmes Tuttle was not as conservative as he seemed. His father had been a Bull Moose Republican who supported Teddy Roosevelt against William Howard Taft in 1912, and Holmes himself got in trouble with his Pasadena cronies for switching his support from Senator Robert Taft (President Taft’s son) to Eisenhower when the general entered the race in 1952. Some even whispered that Tuttle was a liberal Republican. “I have never liked that, when they begin to put labels on you,” Tuttle later explained. “I was not a so-called liberal Republican; I was just a Republican. . . . Sure, I was a Taft man. I think he was a great man, a great senator, and would have made a great president. But I felt that Eisenhower . . .

certainly had a better chance to win. . . . So I changed.”57

Tuttle’s political involvement began in earnest with Eisenhower’s reelection campaign in 1956; that campaign also marked the beginning of his friendship with Justin Dart, who was Eisenhower’s chief fund-raiser in California. “I never will forget the day that ‘Jus’ walked into my office, closed the door, and said, ‘Holmes, I want a $5,000 contribution [for President Eisenhower].’ I said, ‘Jus, you’ve lost your cotton-pickin’ mind!’

Well, ‘Jus’ is a pretty persuasive person. He not only got the $5,000, but he put me to work. I was working morning, noon, and night assisting him in the fund-raising.”58

“They were a formidable fund-raising pair,” said Robert Tuttle.

“They’d sit in Justin’s office up on Beverly and La Cienega, get a guy on the speakerphone, and go to work on him. They’d play good cop, bad cop.

Millions and millions of dollars were raised in that office over the years.”59

Dart put Tuttle on the board of his drugstore conglomerate in 1958, and the two tycoons raised money for Nixon in 1960 and 1962. In the 1964

primary, however, Dart joined forces with tire king Leonard Firestone to co-chair Rockefeller’s campaign—“[Nelson] told me not to work too hard, because he financed most of it himself,” Dart recalled. He claimed he was too busy expanding his business to help Tuttle raise money for Goldwater in the general election.60 Tuttle, meanwhile, continued to give his all to the Goldwater campaign, even though he had been disappointed when the senator rejected his advice to balance the ticket by choosing the moderate Scranton as his running mate, instead