Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [229]
“Reagan agreed that Battaglia and Quinn would have to go.”68 But he wouldn’t confront Battaglia himself; he had Holmes Tuttle do it for him the next day. “You know who fired Phil Battaglia? Dad,” Robert Tuttle told me. “I remember hearing raised voices downstairs at our house in Hancock Park. Phil was trying to get a judgeship out of it, and my father told him, ‘Phil, when you walk out that door, you are no longer employed by Governor Reagan.’ ”69
Instead of disappearing, Battaglia remained in Sacramento and began using his Reagan connections on behalf of clients. Nofziger recalled,
“Battaglia’s behavior infuriated Nancy Reagan,” who asked in exasperation,
“Why doesn’t someone do something about Phil?” Nofziger set about “destroying Battaglia’s credibility” by confiding the details of his demise to several reporters he thought he could trust. In late September, Newsweek ran a blind item referring to a “top GOP presidential prospect” who had a “potentially sordid scandal on his hands,” and a month later syndicated columnist Drew Pearson broke the story. Pearson inaccurately claimed that Reagan’s security chief had a tape recording of a “sex orgy” at the Lake Tahoe cabin, and ominously asserted, “The most interesting speculation among political leaders in this key state of California is whether the magical charm of Governor Ronald Reagan can survive the discovery that a homosexual ring has been operating in his office.”70
Reagan denied the story with increasing indignation at his weekly press conferences well into November, despite articles in The New York Times and the Washington Star stating that Nofziger had indeed talked to at least three journalists. Nancy was so mad at Nofziger for mishandling the situation that she refused to speak to him for five months. She had never really approved of the press secretary because of his rumpled appearance, and 3 6 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House now she conspired with Stu Spencer, Tuttle, and Salvatori to get him fired.
Nofziger finally offered to resign, telling the Governor, “I’m tired of Nancy cutting me up. . . . It just isn’t worth it.” Reagan replied that Nancy was doing no such thing, and persuaded Nofziger to stay through the 1968 elections. “Those who think that Ronald Reagan is run by Nancy should know that almost immediately I ceased hearing about demands that I be fired,”
he later wrote. “In fact, it wasn’t long before she and I were back on speaking terms, where we have pretty much remained ever since.”71
This was apparently an instance where Reagan put his foot down with his wife, but even though she had to wait several more months, in the end she got her way. And the campaign against Nofziger may have continued without his knowing it. “We’d get phone calls from Henry Salvatori after he had seen Nofziger on the six o’clock news with his tie down and hair messed up,” said Battaglia’s successor, Bill Clark. “ ‘Can’t you straighten him up?’ Henry would say. I heard that from several of the Kitchen Cabinet—almost in concert. ‘Think about it for a moment,’ I’d say, ‘with Lyn standing there disheveled, doesn’t it make Ron look better?’ ”72
Battaglia’s downfall led to the rise of the team that would follow Reagan all the way to Washington: William P. Clark, Edwin Meese III, and Michael Deaver. As the Governor’s new chief of staff, Clark, a thirty-five-year-old county lawyer and rancher who loved horseback riding, would become closer to Reagan than any other aide. In 1969, when he was appointed to a judgeship, he was succeeded by Ed Meese, a former prosecu-tor from Oakland who had been the Governor’s legal affairs adviser. Mike Deaver served as deputy chief of staff to both Clark and Meese in Sacramento, where he became the personal favorite and political ally of Nancy Reagan. Then there was Helene von Damm, the Austrian-born dynamo who started out as Clark’s secretary and then became Reagan’s. Nancy