Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [223]
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House reservations about him and asked for two or three more choices. But Tuttle persisted, and Gordon Smith was hired. “As it turned out Reagan’s perception was right,” Salvatori conceded. “Gordon Smith had all the necessary qualifications but he did not know how to handle people and he had no political know-how.”27
The Kitchen Cabinet’s choice, in Spencer’s word, was a “disaster. They got practical when they realized, Whoa, got a problem! This guy can’t even add up what the deficit is.” 28 Smith resigned a year later and was replaced by the pros’ choice, Weinberger, who would earn Reagan’s unshakable respect for his intellectual perspicacity and diligence. “Cap [is] an unusual man,”
Reagan said in 1979. “It is absolutely true when Cap Weinberger was only fourteen years old, he used to read the Congressional Record for pleasure. Cap has a mind, and a mind for finance; I’ve never seen anything like it.”29
Nonetheless, Reagan continued to rely heavily on his rich backers for advice and support. Ronnie and Nancy returned to Pacific Palisades almost every weekend during their first two years in Sacramento, and while Nancy had fittings at Galanos or lunched at the Bistro with the gals from the Group, Reagan got together with the Kitchen Cabinet. “They would meet on Saturdays up at the Reagan home,” Robert Tuttle said. “They’d just sit around and talk. They were a very congenial group of strong-willed guys. They would argue over things, there were disagreements, but basically they were all strong economic conservatives. Dad actually became assistant chief of protocol for the state. He didn’t really want the job, and sure enough along comes his first duty and he has a stomach attack and couldn’t fulfill it. We always teased him about it. So he promptly resigned.”
According to his son, Holmes Tuttle continued to spend at least half his time on politics all through Reagan’s time in Sacramento. “It got to the point,” Robert Tuttle said, “where our business was actually suffering because of it.”30
Stu Spencer elaborated: “Holmes did the things that had to be done.
During the first term, for example, when I said, ‘Hey, we got to get the legislature back,’ Holmes raised the money to let us go out and do the job.
And we got it and we won it. . . . He spent a lot of time. I mean, I’d come to him at midnight and say, ‘I need thirty grand for something.’ He’d say,
‘Go spend it!’ That’s the way he was.”31
“We were in and out of Sacramento fairly often,” said Hume,32 who, along with Tuttle, became heavily involved in the Task Force on Govern-Sacramento: 1967–1968
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ment Efficiency and Economy, which was established shortly after Reagan took office. This project, which brought some two hundred corporate executives to government agencies for six months to find ways to cut spending on everything from telephone bills to use of office space, was the flagship of Reagan’s promised Creative Society. It was also one of the more public ways in which the Kitchen Cabinet made its influence felt in Sacramento.
In April 1967, the Los Angeles Times ran an article by Carl Greenberg titled “Ronald Reagan’s ‘Kitchen Cabinet’ ”—the first documented use of this term in reference to the tycoons behind Reagan. Salvatori boasted that he talked to Reagan’s chief of staff, Phil Battaglia, once a week, and Tuttle, French Smith, Schreiber, and Monson admitted to frequent phone calls and meetings with the Governor. But each assured the Times that, as Leland Kaiser put it, “There’s one boss—and that’s Reagan. Nobody is controlling him.”33 Still, the impression lingered that somehow they were.
“When I got in office then, I must say those first days were very dreary, very dark,” Reagan recalled. “First of all, January and February in Sacramento are dreary and dull. Those damn tule fogs! And Nancy had to stay
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