In a memo for his opposition research files at the President Ford Committee, Ford Campaign Manager Howard “Bo” Callaway wrote of Nofziger in July of 1975 that he was “very likeable, but a hard fighter and can be very caustic and divisive in the way that he goes about his business.”
22
Once, in frustration, Ford White House Chief of Staff Dick Cheney complained publicly that Nofziger was responsible for all the bad press Gerald Ford was getting. This was at a time when Nofziger was in Sacramento.
23
While Nofziger’s effectiveness and partisanship were legendary, he was also a genuine American hero. On June 6, 1944, Nofziger was an Army Ranger on Omaha Beach as part of the D-Day invasion. It is a testament to his own understated class and style that Nofziger never mentioned his service to his country in his own autobiography,
Nofziger
.
Meese, on the other hand, was a cerebral conservative. A former law professor at San Diego State University and part of the original Reagan inner circle, he helped develop the message and ideological underpinnings of the eventual Reagan campaign in 1976. They offset each other well. Where Nofziger was outspoken, Meese was soft spoken. Nofziger was the bomb thrower and Meese was the bomb catcher. Where Nofziger rarely wore a tie, Meese was always in a suit. Where Meese was diplomatic, Nofziger was the personification of the famous Winston Churchill quote, “He’s a bull who carries around his own china shop.” Despite these differences, they worked well together.
The meetings, often over Saturday morning breakfast or Friday night dinner, took place at the Sutter Club in Sacramento. They had no set agenda except the political and business future of Ronald Wilson Reagan. These meetings were fungible and various people came and went. Initially they were referred to as the “Forward Planning Club” or the “Nofziger Group.” Eventually they became known as “The National Political Group,” later still the “Madison Group,” and finally the “M Group.”
24
Other key members of the Reagan “committees” in 1973, 1974, and 1975 were Mike Deaver and Peter Hannaford, two talented young aides in the Governor’s office. Also involved were Bob Walker, Reagan’s political aide and sometimes eyes and ears in Washington, as well as Jim Lake, who ran the Washington office for the State of California. Some who also occasionally attended included Jim Jenkins of the Governor’s office, and David Packard of Hewlett-Packard fame. Packard, ironically, would later become Finance Director for the President Ford Committee.
Although the 1976 GOP nomination was on everybody’s mind, the meetings were mostly inconclusive. Therefore, the group retreated into endless discussions and speculations about national politics and Reagan’s chances. Reagan’s team had gained most of its experience in California politics and was frankly intimidated by Washington and national politics. They viewed the influence of the East Coast as being dominant in the Republican Party. National political reporters were the new “political bosses,” as eventual Reagan Campaign Manager John Sears described them.
25
None of the Californians, save Nofziger and Lake, had experience or regular contact with either the national Republicans or the national media. And none really knew any of the state leaders, some whom would become critical to the 1976 Reagan Presidential campaign.
With Agnew out of office and Ford becoming Vice President in the fall of 1973, the Reagan forces were initially crestfallen. They believed that Nixon would tough it out until the end of his term and that Ford would be in a position as Vice President to win the nomination. Reagan’s team had hoped both Agnew and Nixon would survive but as political cripples, thus opening the way for a Reagan Presidential bid in 1976.
But when Nixon left the scene, and Ford was firmly in place at the White House, Reagan kept his options open by meeting with prospective supporters and potential staff to help out with a campaign if he decided to pursue the White House. One very early supporter was Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who told Reagan he should run against Ford, and that he would do anything he could to help Reagan win the GOP nomination.
One of those potential staffers Reagan met with was John Sears. In 1974, Sears was with the firm Gadsby & Hanna. He was a young, rational lawyer with a biting wit and little patience for people he believed to be his intellectual inferiors. Originally from Syracuse, New York, he had attended Notre Dame as an undergraduate and received his law degree from Georgetown in the early sixties. He joined the law firm of Nixon, Mudge where he met the former Vice President in 1966. Nixon was immediately impressed with the agility of the young lawyer’s mind and turned to him more and more for assisting with advance work, writing and consultation as he hopscotched the country for Republican candidates in 1966, building up political chits for 1968.
Sears became Executive Director of Nixon for President in 1968 and was widely credited with running Nixon’s successful delegate operation. As a reward, Nixon brought Sears into the White House in 1969. He served first as a Deputy Counsel and later Counsel to the President. “It was just a title though. I wasn’t practicing any law,” remembered Sears. “We were just giving away political favors.”
26
Nixon’s Attorney General and longtime friend, John Mitchell, was deeply resentful of the close relationship between the new President and the young aide and eventually forced Sears to resign from the White House, but only after ordering the FBI to bug Sears’s office. According to Sears, “It was all kind of a look into the mind of Richard Nixon. Mitchell would try to get a meeting or some memo to Nixon, and Nixon would reply, ‘send it to Sears,’ which just served to antagonize Mitchell even more. It just drove him bananas.”
27
When Sears left Nixon, he went to Gadsby & Hanna to replace Charles Colson, who had departed the firm for the White House.
But Sears’s thirst for another national campaign was unquenched. Early on, he was cozying up to Agnew, expecting him to be the GOP nominee in 1976 and also expecting to run the campaign. But this plan hit the skids in October of 1973 when Agnew resigned. The Ford people later made overtures to him about 1976, but nothing was ever firm except that it was clear to Sears that he would not be the number one guy.
Also, the prospect of managing a Rockefeller Presidential candidacy intrigued him, but Sears says he told “Rocky” not to accept Ford’s offer to become his Vice President in August of 1974, telling him “If you want to be President, then run for President.” But Rockefeller didn’t take his advice, and Sears was a jockey without a horse.
28
Ideology was not an issue with Sears. He was from the Republican area of Upstate New York, where being a Republican at that time was like drinking water. It was just something you did. But Sears quickly established himself as someone whose opinions mattered greatly in any political meeting in which he was involved.
Sears’s first meeting with the Reagan team in 1974, at the invitation of Walker, did not go according to plan. He flew across the country the day of the planned dinner and on the plane ride had a few drinks too many. By the time he got to the Firehouse Restaurant to huddle with Meese, Nofziger, and company, he was pretty well smashed and, in the words of Hannaford, “just babbled.”
29
The Reagan group was unimpressed with Sears’s performance and with Walker’s recommendation. However, by the time of his appointment the next morning with the Reagans, Sears had sobered up and acquitted himself well. “Sears was seen as the answer to our ‘Western inferiority complex,’” said Deaver.
30
“I realized that they were of the belief that Nixon was going to survive Watergate,” Sears recounted.
31
Difficult as it is to believe now, there were people who took Richard Nixon at his word that he was “no quitter” and would tough out the remainder of his Presidency. Sears remembered, “First thing I told them was that Nixon would be out of office one way or the other by fall, and Ford would become President. But while Ford had all the powers of the office, he would not have what was most compelling—a large base of support.”
32
Nixon might have been counting on it. “Nixon hated the idea [of selecting Ford] but he had to go along,” said one White House staffer, quoted by Reeves. “There was also the other thing—that so many people thought Ford was too dumb to be President. Impeachment didn’t seem possible then, but certainly no one would think of doing it if it was going to put Jerry Ford in the White House. It seemed perfect.”
33
Nonetheless, the events of August 9, 1974, did propel Ford into the Oval Office. Ford proved not to be the buffer against impeachment as Nixon and his people had hoped. Sears advised Reagan and his team that they not give up on running in 1976; however things would not be easy. As longtime Reagan chronicler Lou Cannon wrote in his book,
Reagan
, “What Sears was suggesting was the heretical notion that loyalist Reagan could run for President in 1976 no matter what happened. If Nixon lasted, there would be an open run for the nomination. If Ford inherited the Presidency, then Reagan could seek the Republican nomination against him in the primaries.”
34
It was not that the sunny Reaganites did not envision their man someday in the Oval Office; they certainly did. But no one had articulated how to do it like Sears, no one had made the case like Sears, no one had the national political experience like Sears, no one had the contacts and friendship with the national media like Sears, and no one understood Nixon like Sears. Years later, when asked why he believed Nixon would leave office before the end of his term, Sears said,
Because I knew him. Because nothing happened around his White House that he didn’t know about. And when four days had elapsed after the break-in, and no one was fired, I knew. Nixon fired people for no reason . . . no one had accused him of being involved in the beginning but he was.
He still might have beaten [Watergate] if he’d destroyed the tapes, but he was always postponing things until tomorrow and didn’t want to have tomorrow’s bad day today. He was a fatalist and [his resignation] was the fulfillment of what he thought would happen.
35
Sears had met Reagan once or twice before, including when Nixon campaigned for Reagan in 1966, but those encounters were cursory. This was the first time he had spent any real time with Reagan, and he came away impressed. “He was a great piece of horseflesh . . . properly trained, properly working,” Sears said somewhat patronizingly.
36
When Nixon did indeed resign on August 9, 1974, the Reagan team’s estimation of Sears—especially Nancy Reagan’s—grew by leaps and bounds. Reagan had been one of the last holdouts in the GOP to support Nixon. Shaking his head in private about the Dick Nixon he knew, Governor Reagan always publicly supported the President. Reagan only broke with him after the “smoking gun” tape was released on August 5, 1974. The recording clearly showed Nixon had orchestrated a cover-up of the break-in, including ordering his men to try to block the FBI’s investigation of the crime. When Nixon finally resigned, he had the support of only 18 percent of the American people. Articles of impeachment had already been passed by the House Judiciary Committee.
Sears was summoned immediately to Sacramento for a meeting with the Reagan high command “to discuss whether he should run for VP and I said ‘no.’ ‘What do we do if we’re offered a Cabinet post?’ ‘Don’t take it.’”
37
Shortly after Ford became President, Governor Reagan received a phone call from Bob Hartmann, counselor to President Ford, telling him that an informal survey of GOP leaders around the country had emerged with a list of men who would be acceptable as Vice President. Naturally, Reagan’s name was on the list. Although he was not at the top, would Reagan be interested in being Vice President? Reagan’s reply was not enthusiastic, but he answered in the affirmative, according to Lake.
38
Hours after the call ended, rumors began emanating from the Ford White House that were floating back to Sacramento suggesting that Reagan was campaigning to be Vice President. Other whispers said that Ford and his people did not want Reagan for Vice President because he was “too reactionary.”
39
Reagan, Mrs. Reagan, and their friends and supporters were furious. They smelled a rat in Hartmann and believed Reagan had been duped. Hartmann was an acidulous man who held Reagan and most conservatives in complete contempt. He also made a habit of making nasty jokes at Reagan’s expense in the Ford White House.
The State Chairman of the California Republican Party at the time, Gordon Luce, had sent telegrams to other state party chairmen urging them to contact the White House and voice their support for Reagan. But Reagan never asked for Luce to do this or knew about it until afterwards. Some chairmen did send telegrams, but their endorsements of Reagan were never answered.
“Within hours after Nixon’s resignation, Reagan’s political operatives were phoning congressional conservatives with sneering asides on Ford’s ability and acumen,” Hartmann charged in his book,
Palace Politics
. “When the President named Rocky [Nelson Rockefeller] and proposed amnesty for the same kids who razed California campuses, the Reaganite whispering campaign became a shout.”
40
Hartmann never sourced the accusations, the name of the person who called from the Reagan team, or which members of Congress received the calls. But Hartmann’s paranoia well summed up the mindset of the Ford White House when it came to Ronald Reagan.
The eventual list of men presented to Ford “boiled down to three possibilities: Rockefeller, Rumsfeld, and George Bush,” Cheney said.
41
It was culled from the larger list that included Reagan, Senators Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker, Bill Brock and Chuck Percy, and Ambassador Anne Armstrong. Ford asked the FBI to do background checks on all the men from the short list.