Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [209]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Holmby Hills, and they were very close to the Wilsons and the Jorgensens, as well as the Tuttles and Salvatoris.
“We all saw each other very often . . . at dinners and barbecues and cocktail parties and things,” Wrather recalled. “We’d sit and discuss what the hell happened to Barry, why, and how terrific that commercial was of Ron’s. . . . I remember one night at Bill Wilson’s . . . all the men were gathered kind of English-style after dinner together and the ladies were in the other room . . . and talk got around to Ron and how much we needed somebody like Ron in the governorship; Pat Brown had to be gotten out, that he was a disaster, a do-nothing and worse than that. . . . We just sat and talked to Ron and said, ‘Ron, God, you’ve got to run for governor.
You’ve just got to. And we talked and talked. The gals finally came in and said, ‘We’ve got to go home. It’s late.’
“We all assured Ron at one time or another that if he would run we’d be available to him, any of us or all of us,” Wrather continued, “for any kind of advice or help, or helping him put together any business plans or helping with personnel selection. And that we would obviously get behind him financially and that we would raise money for him; we’d do everything possible so that he wouldn’t have to worry about the campaign funds to run on—which, of course, even in those days, was a big worry. . . . In between these affairs, Holmes would get all hot and bothered and call Ron, like Holmes does. You know, he’s a great salesman!”97
By the end of the January, even The New York Times was asking Reagan if he was running. “I’m honored by all the interest,” he told them. “Politics is nothing I’d ever thought of as a career. But it’s something I’m going to give deep consideration and thought.”98
In February, Reagan finally made up his mind. “He called me and told me that he would run if we still felt the same way,” Tuttle said. “He and Nancy had discussed it and decided we should try it. He suggested that instead of announcing that he was going to run, we should just kind of put feelers out.”99 Tuttle, Salvatori, and Rubel formed an exploratory committee, which also included Tuttle’s longtime business partner, Charles Cook, chairman of the Community Bank; Ed Mills, the bank’s vice president and regional head of the Boy Scouts; and attorney William French Smith, who was brought in by Tuttle to oversee the campaign’s legal affairs. French Smith, a Mayflower descendent from Boston and a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, one of the largest law firms in Los Angeles, would soon The Kitchen Cabinet: 1963–1966
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become Reagan’s personal lawyer. His wife, Jean, a third-generation Angeleno whose family owned the city’s first lumber mill, had known the Tuttles for years, and she got along with Nancy right away.
Tuttle also sent Reagan to San Francisco to meet with Jaquelin Hume, the founder of Basic Vegetable Products, the world’s largest processor of dehydrated onions and garlic. Hume, who had been one of Goldwater’s key supporters in Northern California, immediately agreed to come on board and gave a breakfast for Reagan to meet other prominent San Francisco conservatives. “I thought he was as sound as he could be,” Hume said of his first meeting with Reagan. “He advocated the political and economic philosophy of which I approved and he seemed to have the ability to express it even better than Goldwater. . . . He is an