Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [221]
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it and still have it.”)14 The Union’s reporter was not alone in observing that the former actress, with her size-five figure, perfect tan, and stylish “arti-choke” hairdo, looked a good ten years younger than her official forty-three years.15 Others noted the resemblance to Jacqueline Kennedy, particularly in the wide-spaced eyes, the full eyebrows, the chestnut-brown bouffant, the consciously elegant clothes. And just as Jackie had had her New York hairdresser, Kenneth Battelle, fly down to Washington regularly, Nancy had Julius Bengtsson from Saks Fifth Avenue Beverly Hills spend the week in Sacramento.
In a 1979 interview for a University of California oral history project on his governorship, Reagan looked back on this first inauguration with humble pride. He recalled that after the swearing in, he took Holmes Tuttle to see the governor’s office in the east wing of the capitol. Speaking on behalf of the Kitchen Cabinet, Tuttle told Reagan “to sit down in the governor’s chair there, at the desk, and I did. Then he said, ‘I don’t know whether anyone has ever been able to say this before to a governor of California. But now you are sitting in that chair. And you don’t owe any of us anything.’
He said, ‘All we wanted was good government. We believed that you could do that. You have no commitment, no promise to keep to anyone at all.
You just do what you believe should be done.’”16
“And, by that time, I must say, I was eager to deal with the things that up to then I’d only been talking about,” Reagan continued. “I also have to say that it wasn’t too long after that Nancy and I looked at each other and said that this made anything else we’d ever done in our lives seem dull as dishwater. It was the most personally fulfilling experience I’ve ever had.
Some nights you come home feeling ten feet tall.”17
During the transition period between the election and the inauguration, the Friends of Ronald Reagan’s executive committee had renamed itself the Major Appointments Task Force—with Cy Rubel staying on as chairman—and at Reagan’s behest set about recruiting managers and administrators from the business world to fill the cabinet and other high positions.
As Reagan explained, “I went to some of the people who had talked me into running after I was elected and I said, ‘Look, I told you all I don’t want to go up there alone. Now, you know where the bodies are. You know where the talent in California is. I don’t want a screening committee to screen applicants for jobs. I want a recruiting committee.’ ”18
In addition to Rubel, the task force included Tuttle, Salvatori, Ed Mills, 3 5 6
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Jaquelin Hume, Leonard Firestone, Taft Schreiber, Arch Monson, and Leland Kaiser, a retired investment banker and self-described “card-carrying capitalist” from San Francisco.19 Two weeks into their delibera-tions, Rubel fell seriously ill and was replaced as chairman by William French Smith, who at forty-nine was the youngest of the group. (Rubel died in June 1967.) Contrary to later accounts, Justin Dart was not a leading player at that point. Explaining that his still-growing business required his full attention, Dart said in a 1981 interview, “I was not involved with the ‘nitty-gritty’ of Ronald Reagan’s state government anything like Holmes or Ed Mills.” (Mills had recently gone to work for Holmes Tuttle Enterprises, as vice president, and was also made treasurer of the California Republican Party, part of the takeover of the party ap-paratus by the Kitchen Cabinet.) Dart couldn’t resist adding, “I could get Ronald Reagan on the telephone any time of the day or night. He