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was a regular guest at Punky and Justin Dart’s dinner parties, where “he was always going on about cutting taxes.” According to Laffer, he was in and out of the Dart house almost every day, and he and his wife vacationed at the Darts’ place in Pebble Beach. “USC had the Dart Center for the Study of Private Enterprise, which I was head of,” Laffer explained. “And I got to know Jus. I adored that man. He was one of the neatest guys I ever met in my life, a guy who did things and was not afraid to overstep himself. His basic political principles were simply pro-growth, pro-business, supply-side intuitively. He was not Holmes Tuttle, who said balance the budget, don’t cut taxes. For a crusty old curmudgeon, Justin Dart got it.”39

Laffer’s heterodox views and brash personality made him a contentious figure within the Reagans’ inner circle. One who was not so sure about him was Nancy herself. He, in turn, found her impressive but intimidating. “She was very strong, and everyone knew how much influence she exerted,” Laffer told me. “There was no ambiguity ever with regard to her power—personally, socially, and on policy levels. If she really had a strong view on something, she could put it out there. If she thought someone was disloyal to her Ronnie, that was a nuclear holocaust! She was probably the most loyal wife that ever walked the planet—and you just love her for that. But any dealings with her were difficult at best.”40

To illustrate how tough Nancy could be, Laffer told me about a dinner at the Darts’ in the spring of 1978 with her and William E. Simon, the Wall Street wheeler-dealer who had been secretary of the treasury under Nixon and Ford. “It was just the five of us—Ronnie couldn’t make it,” Laffer said. “Jeff Bell, who had been a top policy guy on Reagan’s staff in the 1976 campaign, was running for senator in New Jersey in the primary against Clifford Case, the liberal Republican incumbent. I said, ‘Hey, what’s the boss doing? Is he supporting Jeff?’ ‘No, he’s not,’ she said. I said,

‘What? He’s not supporting Jeff?’ And I could tell she colored a little bit.

When you saw that you knew, ‘Stand down, officer, right now.’ So I shut up. Bill Simon, who was from New Jersey, said, ‘Yeah, what is this?’ He just goes right into it. And she gets up and walks around the table, and she’s got 4 7 2

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House her face this close to his. ‘Don’t you ever say anything nasty about my husband.’ Right in Simon’s face.”41

By 1977 the supply-side doctrine had been taken up in a big way by the Wall Street Journal as a miracle cure for stagflation—the combination of low growth and high inflation that plagued the economy for most of the decade. In early 1978, Representative Jack Kemp and Senator William Roth of Delaware introduced legislation to cut taxes by 30 percent over three years. Reagan, who had kept on friendly terms with his onetime staffer and football star turned politician, was one of the first Republican leaders to endorse the Kemp-Roth Bill, which was dismissed out of hand by congressional Democrats and President Carter. Reagan also lent his support that spring to Proposition 13, the California property-tax-limitation initiative, which was overwhelmingly approved by voters in June. Reagan, who as governor had watched a similar proposal of his go down to defeat—and who was not above seeing himself as a prophet ahead of his time—felt vindicated.

“By early 1978 we all thought he’d decided to run again,” said Lyn Nofziger.

“Not that he told us, because he didn’t. He had a thing about throwing his hat into the political ring too soon and his idea of too soon was a lot later than mine.”42 Following his usual pattern, Reagan finally allowed a so-called exploratory committee to be formed in the spring of 1979. The formal announcement of his last-chance quest for the presidency, and the forsak-ing of his very profitable private career, would not come for another nine months.

Until then Reagan continued to give speeches across the country to groups spanning the social spectrum from the