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the most committed to the conservative cause. A founding investor in the National Review, Salvatori also funded Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and started his own Anti-Communism Voters League, “whose purpose was the evaluation of all candidates for all offices on the basis of how well they were aware of the Communist threat.”66 He was a major contributor to the American Security Council, which was founded by General Douglas MacArthur and Henry and Clare Booth Luce in 1954 and aided the U.S. government’s anti-Soviet efforts overseas. (It would be repeatedly branded a CIA front by its leftist critics.) In the early 1960s, the Salvatoris gave $1 million to the University of Southern California to establish the Research Institute of Communist Strategy and Propaganda. “My father was very proud of being an American,” Laurie Salvatori said. “He believed that capitalism and the freedoms we enjoy as Americans have to be defended at all costs.”67

Salvatori was a consistent supporter of opportunities for African-Americans, making six-figure donations to Howard University and the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education. After the 1965 Watts riot, 3 3 0

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House he anonymously gave $250,000 to rebuild community institutions. “I’m a member of a minority myself,” he liked to say, and his daughter pointed out that her parents had no hesitation about bringing the distinguished black architect Paul Williams to dinner at Chasen’s. “They didn’t get their usual table,” she said, “and there were quite a few people staring at them.”68

In 1964 the Salvatoris commissioned Williams, who had designed the MCA headquarters for Jules Stein and Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, to build their new house. Williams was popular with conservatives—one of his earliest clients was ZaSu Pitts—who loved his “historical revival fantasies.”69

Williams was actually quite conservative himself and kept his distance from the civil rights movement. (“I am an architect . . . I am a Negro,” he once wrote. “We march forward singly, not as a race. Deal with me, and with the other men and women of my race, as individual problems, not as a race problem, and the race problem will soon cease to exist!”)70

For the Salvatoris he created a $700,000, thirty-three-room, twelve-thousand-square-foot neo-Georgian colonial that looked like Mount Vernon transported to a Bel Air hilltop. Betsy Bloomingdale declared it the most beautiful house in Los Angeles. Billy Haines did the interiors and designed most of the furniture, but at one point he walked off the job because he found Salvatori overbearing. “He and Henry had words,” recalled Haines’s associate Jean Hayden Mathison, who conspired with Grace to persuade Haines to complete the project. “Grace Salvatori was a delight—

a crazy, wonderful lady, always enthused about everything,” Mathison added.71 “Oh, she was something,” a friend said. “She had this extremely outgoing personality.”

After the San Francisco convention, the Goldwater cause became something of a family affair for the Reagans. With Salvatori’s backing, Reagan was made co-chair of California Citizens for Goldwater-Miller, the campaign’s main volunteer organization. At Ronnie’s suggestion, Neil Reagan, who was West Coast vice president of the McCann-Erickson advertising agency, was hired to produce Goldwater’s TV and radio ads. In Phoenix, Edith threw herself into raising money for her neighbor Barry. Nancy did her bit, too, plastering “Vote Goldwater” bumper stickers on their station wagon and her late-model Lincoln Continental.

As Anne Douglas remembered, Nancy was at least as gung ho for Goldwater as Ronnie was. “Young Ron and my son Eric were best buddies at John Thomas Dye,” she told me. “They would spend one weekend with us The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966

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and one weekend with the Reagans at the ranch. You know how kids pick up what they hear at home—my husband and I didn’t care for Goldwater, and we must have discussed it. Anyway, I dropped Eric off at their house one Saturday morning, and