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Justin Dart, asked him to look into the campaign’s hemorrhaging finances. Dart turned to William Casey, who had co-chaired the announcement dinner in New York and had recently joined the EAC.81 Casey undertook an audit of Sears’s costly operation, which included eighteen regional offices with more than two hundred employees, and was said to be paying $50,000-a-year consulting fees to scholars for position papers. According to his biographer Joseph E. Persico, after Casey finished his “management audit,” he met with the Kitchen Cabinet at Tuttle’s house and told them, “Ronald Reagan hasn’t got a campaign organization. He’s got a civil war. There’s Ed Meese and the California guys in one camp. There’s John Sears and his technocrats on the other side. Between the two, the campaign’s paralyzed. I also looked at the books. You’re going broke.”82

Meanwhile, a few days after Reagan suffered a wholly unexpected early 4 8 4

Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House defeat to George Bush in Iowa, Casey sat down and wrote a six-page letter to the candidate urging him to rethink his entire campaign strategy. The letter ended with a call for “a sharp assertive stance.”83

The Iowa caucuses on January 21 were the first contest of the primary season, and Reagan had been expected to win handily in a state where he was still remembered fondly as the Des Moines sports announcer who had made it big in Hollywood. Following Sears’s above-it-all strategy, Reagan spent only six days in the state and refused to join six other candidates in a televised debate, which Iowans saw as a snub. Despite a precipitous drop in local polls within days of the debate, and a second-place finish six points behind Bush, Reagan refused to blame his campaign manager, telling reporters, “If I had to do it over I’d do it the same way again.”84 But even Sears conceded, “The public’s perception of the campaign has changed. People now think there’s a race where they didn’t think there was one before. In some ways, that’s sort of a relief for us. We won’t have a motivational problem anymore.”85

For all his spin, Sears was in trouble and he knew it. According to reporter Lally Weymouth, the daughter of Kay Graham, who wrote a profile of Nancy Reagan for The New York Times Magazine, Sears went to Nancy and told her that he had overheard Meese “telling some staff members that Sears would be fired the day after the New Hampshire primary, along with Lake and Black.” Sears said that put him in an intolerable position, and he suggested bringing in Bill Clark—whom Reagan had elevated to the California Supreme Court—presumably to ease out Meese, Sears’s archenemy. Nancy agreed to call Clark, but, according to the Judge, as he was known, she didn’t make the offer Sears had suggested.86

“On Lincoln’s Birthday,” Clark told me, “Nancy and Ron asked me to come to the ranch. I spent most of the day and the evening with them—

it was just the three of us. They wanted me to replace Sears. I didn’t say no, because you don’t say no to Ronald Reagan—or to Nancy—but, as the Irish would say, I sorted it out. I explained that my position on the Supreme Court was critical at the time, and if I left we would probably lose three or four cases that were under submission. Ron looked me in the eye and said, ‘Bill, I understand. But if I make it, you’re going to hear from me again.’ ” Furthermore, Clark disclosed, after the Reagans ran down a list of prospective replacements for Sears with him, “I suggested that Bill Casey be tagged.”87

Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980

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Matters came to a head at a Holiday Inn in Worcester, Massachusetts, three days later. That afternoon the Reagans held a meeting in their room with Casey, Meese, Richard Wirthlin, the campaign pollster, and Richard Allen, the foreign policy adviser, who had complained that he was being cut out of the loop by Sears. Casey’s report on the campaign’s finances and management so impressed everyone present that it was agreed that he should join the team immediately, though no announcement would be made until after New Hampshire.