Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [298]
On August 24, Sears moved to strengthen his position even more by forcing Nofziger to quit. The “dirty work,” as Nofziger called it, was done by Deaver, who informed his old colleague that he would be taking over the fund-raising operation. Turning down the consolation prize of running the campaign in California and Texas, Nofziger resigned on the spot.
Reagan, who was spending most of that month vacationing at the ranch, called and told him, “I don’t want you to quit. . . . We’ve been together too long.” But, according to Nofziger, at a meeting held two days later at the Pacific Palisades house, Sears, Black, Lake, and Deaver voted to let him go, with only Meese and Reagan himself defending him. “I was an example of what could happen if you stood up to [Sears],” Nofziger said.61
Nancy didn’t cast a vote on Nofziger’s fate, but one can trace her invisible hand working in other ways. Two weeks before Nofziger’s ouster, Sears and Deaver had been asked by the Reagans to meet with Charlie Wick to discuss fund-raising ideas. “We had rented a place out in Malibu that summer,” Wick explained. “We’re walking on the beach, Nancy and Mary Jane in front and Ronnie and I in back. We’re talking about the campaign and when and where he was going to announce. I said, ‘I think you ought to announce in New York. That is the citadel of the world’s media. I’m sure we could do a Ground Floor Committee dinner there and get at least 250 people. That would take care of the whole week’s expenses.’ Ronnie said, ‘Let me talk to Mike and John Sears.’ We had lunch at the Beverly 4 7 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House Wilshire Hotel, and they thought it was a fabulous idea. They said, ‘The only way it can be done is if you go to New York for a couple of months to put it together.’ I said, ‘Forget it.’ Deaver and Sears then called Mary Jane, and that did it.”62
In September the Wicks took a suite at the Mayfair Regent on Park Avenue, the hotel that housed Le Cirque. “At eight o’clock in the morning it became the office,” said Mary Jane Wick. “It was just work, work, work all day long. We started by calling a number of the big CEOs in the city, and much to my surprise there weren’t too many of them who were interested in Reagan. Their feeling was that, even though he had been governor for eight years, he was still an actor, and they couldn’t quite see him as president. A lot of them preferred John Connally or George Bush.” Through Helene von Damm, who had been running the campaign’s fund-raising efforts in the Northeast, the Wicks found two prominent New York Republicans to co-chair the announcement dinner: William Casey, a Wall Street lawyer who had headed the Securities and Exchange Commission under Nixon, and Maxwell Rabb, who was also a lawyer and had served in Eisenhower’s cabinet.
“We had to get a ballroom in a hotel for the dinner, but there always was the money problem,” Mary Jane Wick told me. “Fortunately, Charlie had a friend from college who was president of Hilton Hotels, and he let us have the New York Hilton ballroom without a down payment. When we were planning the dinner, I called a florist we all knew in L.A., and he had all these tablecloths from a benefit he had done in Palm Springs. Anyhow, Marion Jorgensen and Betty Wilson put them in their luggage and brought them to New York.”63
“Little by little it looked like we could exceed 250,” said Charlie Wick.
“On the night of the dinner there were 1,800 people in the ballroom, and in the balcony there were 250 of the world’s press.” Mary Jane Wick added,
“Our daughter Cindy was going with this young man whose father was a political cartoonist for a well-known newspaper in Paris, so he came over to cover this. Of course, with his son going with our daughter, we knew he wouldn’t do anything that wouldn’t be acceptable. And our other daughter, Pam, is married to the son