WHO'S WHO in the Administration
WHO'S WHO in the Administration Back in March we predicted trouble for White House speech writer Bently T. Elliott if he kept up his battles with Donald Regan. We noted at the time that...
...Former Attorney General William French Smith, Reagan's longtime friend and personal attorney, is a senior partner in the firm, which is based in Los Angeles...
...Commission on Civil Rights, took a few he shouldn't have...
...Now we see that, while forcing Fielding to walk the plank, Donald Regan gave him one last wish: he sent him to Australia as presidential envoy for the celebration of AustralianAmerican Friendship Week . . . . Speaking of junkets, it appears Clarence Pendleton Jr., chairman of the U.S...
...Haldeman was Nixon's chief of staff when Buchanan first served in the White House...
...The appointment of Peter J. Wallison as White House counsel shows that Reagan's California connections are still strong...
...Haldeman...
...That was back in 1982, when James Watt unsuccessfully tried to sell off governmental lands to the highest bidder...
...This revelation adds to Pendleton's mounting woes: he is already under investigation by the Small Business Administration for arranging a $60,000 no-bid contract for his special assistant, Sydney Novell . . . . It comes as no surprise that NASA's George Hardy, the man who told Morton Thiokol engineers that he was "appalled" by their recommendation that the launch of the ill-fated space shuttle Challenger be postponed, has retired less than four months after the disaster...
...We noted at the time that Elliott's victory over Regan concerning the contents of the president's State of the Union address was pyrrhic and that it would be prudent to fear Regan's influence...
...What former OMB director David Stockman and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle won't tell you when you're on deadline, they seem more than willing to talk about in book form, whether fiction or nonfiction...
...Apparently he didn't take our advice...
...For the rights to publish the novel based on Perle's six-page proposal, publishers have reportedly offered advances in excess of $300,000 . . Reagan's new high priest of privatization is Thomas Moore, a University of Chicago economics professor...
...A former senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Moore now heads up a cabinet-level working group on privatization...
...on May 30, Elliott left the White House...
...This is Reagan's second attempt at pushing privatization...
...Buchanan seems to be identifying Regan with his old nemesis H.R...
...Now we know a much better way: offer every Washington insider a book contract...
...Remember the first try...
...Before coming to the White House, Wallison was a partner in the law firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher in Washington...
...The only problem with this system is that it is expensive...
...The same advice was extended to Elliott ally Pat Buchanan...
...We stand corrected: For years we've thought that the best way to learn the dirty secrets of government was to do a lot of legwork...
...Buchanan remains, but if he keeps fighting with Regan . . . . During his five-year tenure as White House counsel, Fred Fielding was infamous for eagerly checking to see if his name was on the passenger manifesto whenever Air Force One was headed abroad...
...According to a recent GAO report, political groups, oil companies, television stations, and others improperly paid for some of Pendleton's travel...
Vol. 18 • June 1986 • No. 5
