Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [289]
Three weeks after the election, the old Reagan team—Ed Meese, Deaver, Hannaford, and Nofziger—convened at the Pacific Palisades house to decide what to do with the $1.2 million left over from their 1976 campaign fund (which had been flooded with donations after the North Carolina victory). Conspicuously absent was John Sears, who had returned to his Washington law practice, having alienated the Kitchen Cabinet as well as most of the Sacramento staffers, who felt he had been condescending to them and to the candidate. Sears’s one ally, Mike Deaver, had unthinkingly okayed Nofziger’s offer to close down the convention operation. “My reason was simple: money,” said Nofziger. “I didn’t want Sears or one of his cronies controlling it. I didn’t like Sears, didn’t respect him, didn’t trust him; I’m confident the feeling was mutual. And I didn’t want him to have any say in how it was to be used.”13
At the meeting, Nofziger and Meese proposed using the money to form a political action committee, Citizens for the Republic, which was officially launched in early January 1977, with Nofziger in charge. Under federal campaign finance law, Reagan could have kept the money after paying taxes on it; the fact that he didn’t was seen as a sure sign that he had already made up his mind to run again. Nofziger, however, claimed that was not really the case:
I had given the situation a lot of thought, based on the belief that Reagan would not run again. Too old. Nor was I alone in this belief. Among others, it was shared by Deaver, who was closest to the Reagans. . . . On several occasions during the next two years, he was to confide to Meese, Hannaford, and me over breakfast that he thought Reagan was too old to run again. On my part, I thought that at age sixty-four [sic] he had had his shot at the Presidency and had missed. By the time he could run again he would be sixty-eight, an age which in general is a little long in the tooth to be seeking the presidency. But though I thought Reagan would not run again I was convinced he could continue to be an effective force in the Republican Party and a strong advocate for his philosophy of government. He was, after all, the unquestioned leader of the con-4 6 4
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House servative wing of the party, now the dominant wing. At our meeting we concluded that the best way to keep Reagan effective was to form a political action committee (PAC) with Reagan as chairman.
The leftover money would serve as seed money—a million bucks buys a lot of seed—and using Reagan’s name we could raise a lot more. The PAC would finance Reagan’s political activities—his speeches, appearances, travel—and allow him to support candidates who shared his political views. . . . My dream was to use it to build a political power base that would effectively carry on the Reagan philosophy long after he had retired to Rancho [del] Cielo in the mountains above Santa Barbara.14
According to Deaver, whose PR firm collected a monthly consulting fee from Citizens for the Republic, Reagan was simply doing what a candidate does: keeping his options open.15 For Nancy, a run in 1980 “seemed preordained, really, after the 1976 campaign. Ronnie was ready, and everything seemed to fall into place.”16 Reagan himself would write, “I think we both knew it wouldn’t—couldn’t—end in Kansas City. After committing ten years of our lives to what we believed in, I just couldn’t walk away and say, ‘I don’t care any more.’ ”17
All the Reagans’ closest friends seemed to feel he would run again.
Marion Jorgensen recalled, “We flew to Oklahoma City with Nancy and Ronnie and the Wilsons and the Tuttles—Holmes was being inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. Ronnie was giving a speech in honor of Holmes in this great big auditorium, and we had a table right in front of the podium. I went to the ladies’ room, and there, standing in the door to the auditorium,