Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [301]
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House How did Nancy perceive her role in this competitive cast of characters?
“I was always conscious of people who were trying to end-run Ronnie, who were trying to use him for their own agendas,” she told me. “And all my little antennae would go up. It never occurred to him, because he didn’t work that way. He wouldn’t think anybody would work that way.
But they do. So I’d point things out to him.”75
Now the only Californian left at the top of Reagan’s campaign was Ed Meese, and he was extremely upset over the departures of Nofziger, Deaver, and Anderson. In early December, Morgan Mason, the handsome young son of the actor James Mason and a favorite of Betsy Bloomingdale’s and Nancy Reagan’s, applied for a job at campaign headquarters in Los Angeles.
Among the restricted personal papers at the Reagan Library is a record of his interview with Mike Wallace, a staffer close to Sears. The handwritten notes make clear the extent to which Sears sought control of access to the Reagans: Mike Wallace said:
New team in ctrl here
Sears, Wallace, Black, Lake
“Meese if he comes out of his pout”
Conc. re allegiance to MKD [Deaver] & your relationship to NR
[Nancy Reagan]
JPS [Sears] wary of peo in contact w. Reagans That was MKD’s problem. Instead of fighting it out down here, he would just call the Reagans.
Anything said to Reagans must be cleared w. Wallace or Sears76
Morgan Mason did not get the job. A month later, however, he was hired as a consultant by the newly formed Reagan Executive Advisory Committee, which was comprised mainly of Kitchen Cabinet members who had decided that the time had come for them to get more involved. “The original group was Holmes Tuttle, Jack Wrather, Bill French Smith, Bill Wilson, Ted Cummings, Charles Wick, and me,” said Arthur Laffer, who was named the EAC’s secretary and kept minutes of its meetings, some of which can be found in the Reagans’ restricted papers. “The first meeting was in Justin Dart’s office, with all the eagles flying—Jus had big wooden eagles everywhere. All those guys just loved eagles.” According to Laffer, Dart was the driving force of the group, and he chose Bill Simon as the chairman. They Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980
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decided to keep the membership to about two dozen and to bring in prominent business leaders from other parts of the country, including David Packard of Hewlett-Packard, Bill Boeing of Boeing Aircraft, Don Kendall of Pepsico, and Joe Coors, the Colorado beer king who had been a major contributor to Reagan’s 1976 effort. “We had the word come down that Alfred Bloomingdale was also to be in the group,” recalled Laffer. “Betsy had asked Nancy, and Nancy asked Ronnie, and Ronnie said, ‘Yes, sir.’”77
The EAC’s mission, spelled out in notes from a meeting on February 5, 1980, was “to advise and assist RR on all aspects of the campaign, with particular attention to policy and issue positions and to recommending qualified individuals who might serve as advisors and consultants to RR and the campaign. The EAC will be organizationally responsible directly to RR.”
Among the illustrious figures the EAC would enlist as advisers were the economists Milton Friedman and George Shultz, former ambassador to South Vietnam Robert Ellsworth, and retired admiral Elmo Zumwalt.78
Michael Deaver wrote that, except for infrequent phone conversations with Nancy, he was out of touch with the Reagans for five months after he quit. But the February 5 notes say, “Michael K. Deaver has been appointed as his personal liaison to the E.A.C. by RR.” While Dart went on about the
“need to combat Soviets in Middle East by any means necessary,” the notes indicate that Deaver was suggesting “2 things this group can do—broad strategy priorities; get management into campaign.”79 Ed Meese was also involved with the EAC from the beginning, and as early as January 14 he was making sure that copies of his memos to Bill Simon went to Deaver.80
Around the same time, Nancy, who talked regularly with