Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [222]
Gordon Luce, a banker who had headed Reagan’s campaign in San Diego and who would soon be appointed secretary for business and transportation in Reagan’s cabinet, recalled attending several task force meetings in Los Angeles. “We used to meet at the California Club, which was a popular place for those gentlemen, have lunch, have an all-day meeting, go through boxes full of people’s names and personnel folders. Holmes Tuttle dominated those meetings. He was probably the closest of all the Kitchen Cabinet at that time to the Reagans. He gave it all day, all night—
I mean, he worked, worked, worked.”21
Jaquelin Hume outlined the criteria they set for appointees: “We were trying to find people who, if they took a political office, would do a good job rather than people with experience as political officeholders. And people who were philosophically dedicated to a private enterprise, conservative, profit-oriented society. . . . We felt that you do not get a clean house unless you clean house.”22
Meanwhile, two of the bright young men from Reagan’s campaign, Philip Battaglia and Thomas C. Reed, had set up a transition office at the IBM Building near the capitol in Sacramento and were also vetting applications. This parallel structure, pitting Reagan’s private court against his professional staff, would create some tensions but produce generally good results. Battaglia, a thirty-two-year-old lawyer from Los Angeles, had been hired as campaign chairman by Tuttle after Reagan won the primary. His résumé was impressive: accepted at USC law school at twenty; partner in a Sacramento: 1967–1968
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top-notch firm at twenty-seven; head of the L.A. Junior Chamber of Commerce. Battaglia made a point of being deferential to Reagan and Nancy; others found him high-handed and abrupt. By election day it was clear that he would be chief of staff for the new governor, who referred to him as “my strong right arm.”23
Reed, a millionaire land developer from Marin County in his early thirties, had been the campaign’s Northern California chairman. He, too, had the credentials: first in his class at Cornell’s engineering school and a master’s degree from USC; stints in the Air Force and at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, where he helped design the first hydrogen bomb. Reed had worked on Goldwater’s campaign, and began promoting Reagan as a candidate for the presidency in 1968, almost from the moment the governorship was won. When he was offered the job of appointments secretary in the new administration, he accepted on the condition that he would serve only for the first hundred days. Reed would remain a key political strategist for Reagan, however.24
The key post to fill was that of finance director, the most powerful executive position after governor. Battaglia, Lyn Nofziger, who stayed on as press secretary, and Stu Spencer, who continued to advise Reagan, recommended Caspar Weinberger, an attorney and former assemblyman from San Francisco, but he was blackballed by Salvatori because he had supported Rockefeller in 1964 and Christopher in the primary before joining the Reagan campaign. Salvatori’s personal choice for the job was Walt Disney, who declined. “We had set our sights entirely too high,” the oil tycoon later said. “Our group was a little unsophisticated to think that a fellow like Walt Disney would quit his job to accept the position of finance director simply because he was a strong Reagan supporter.”25
The $31,835 job went to Gordon Smith, who took a 75 percent cut in salary from his position at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the four head-hunting firms that had been asked to help the task force.26 The way Smith came to be hired says a lot about how the Kitchen Cabinet operated.
William French Smith was impressed by the recommendations Gordon Smith (no relation) had made for other positions, and suggested that he himself might be suited for the finance job. French Smith took the head-hunter for a drink at the home of Salvatori, who grilled him on a wide range of issues, including