GOP Activist Recalls Luck, Fate in Ties to Presidents

In 1972, while Thousand Oaks car dealer Robert Dean Nesen was awaiting confirmation of his appointment to the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy, former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell phoned to ask if he was interested in directing former President Nixon’s reelection campaign.

Nesen--who had served in every Nixon election campaign since 1950--declined the offer. “Jeb Magruder got my job, and thank goodness he did,” he said.

Thus Nesen, Ventura County’s largest car dealer, avoided the political calamities--including imprisonment--that befell Magruder and other former Nixon colleagues involved in the Watergate scandal. Instead, Nesen survived the Watergate era in relative anonymity, serving in the Navy post until 1974, when he returned to private business and his home in Hidden Valley.

Two Presidents

The 69-year-old car dealer, whose firms last year grossed $45 million in automobile sales, is among a small number of people holding close friendships with the two U.S. presidents from California. Nesen’s nearly 30-year friendship with President Reagan--”I’ve known the President since he was a Democrat”--landed him an appointment as ambassador to Australia from 1981 to 1985.

But after 40 years of working behind the scenes in county, state and federal politics, Nesen, a lifelong conservative Republican, says he doesn’t plan any more active political campaigning other than his endorsement of Vice President George Bush’s 1988 presidential bid. Recently, Nesen has been campaigning for another cause, however--the raising of $2.35 million in public and private funds for construction of a building in Thousand Oaks to house, rent-free, 20 to 25 social-service organizations that serve the poor, sick and elderly.

Nesen is honorary chairman of the cause, named Under One Roof, being sponsored by Community Conscience, a local, private nonprofit agency. The group has raised about half the amount needed for the 15,000-square-foot building, which will be called the Conejo Human Services Center, and has commitments for more funds. Construction is scheduled to begin in the next two weeks, agency officials said.

The City of Thousand Oaks donated $500,000 to buy the land for the project, Community Conscience President Fred Wilson said. About $50,000 was donated by the City of Westlake Village. The rest has come from private and corporate donors.

“Bob Nesen’s endorsement of the campaign has been very helpful in getting people interested in the project,” Wilson said.

For Nesen, projects such as Under One Roof are examples of how the needy can be provided for with minimum government help--one of the tenets of the Reagan philosophy. It was that philosophy that first attracted him to the former movie actor when the two met in 1960, Nesen said.

At the time, Nesen was Ventura County chairman of the Nixon presidential campaign and had recruited Reagan to speak at a county fund-raiser. During the drive between Reagan’s home and the speaking engagement, the two men discovered common political views and became friendly.

“Reagan was working as a kind of public relations man for General Electric, speaking out against big government and very pro-business,” Nesen said. “Of course, being in business myself, I am pro-business.”

Five years later, when Reagan sought support for his gubernatorial bid, his first stop on a drive through the state was at Nesen’s car dealership, which then was located in Oxnard, Nesen said.

“I was chairman of the Republican Central Committee in Ventura County, and I think he wanted to get ideas from different people on whether he should run,” Nesen said. “I am sure he knew that he was going to get encouraging remarks from me.”

After working on Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign, Nesen later served as chairman of the California delegation to the Republican National Convention in Kansas City in 1976, when President Gerald Ford won the nomination. “That was probably the best thing that ever happened to us because the public wasn’t ready for Reagan in 1976, and they were in 1980,” Nesen said.

During 1979 and 1980, Nesen was a staff member of the Reagan presidential campaign, spending six months flying cross-country with Reagan. In 1980, Nesen served as co-chairman, along with Michael Deaver, of the California delegation to the Republican National Convention when Reagan was nominated.

The day of Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, the President phoned Nesen to ask him to serve as ambassador to Australia.

A Personal Representative

“As ambassador you are the President’s personal representative; when you speak, it is the President speaking,” Nesen said. “I never got into any trouble because, I guess, I knew him well enough after some 20 years that I pretty well knew what he wanted.”

While he and his wife, Delta, lived in Australia, Nesen’s sons ran the family dealerships, which sell Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Subaru and Hyundai automobiles. The family shares ownership in the businesses, Nesen said.

“I probably would run the Presidency--if I was the President--like President Reagan, because that’s the way I run my business,” Nesen said. “I pick good people and have time to think.”

Nesen bought his first dealership, an Oldsmobile franchise in Oxnard, in 1948, after selling a flight school he had started there two years earlier. He had moved to Glendale from his hometown of St. Louis, Mich., in 1940 and earned a degree in aeronautical engineering before joining the Navy in World War II.

Nesen was a flight instructor in the Navy until he left active duty in 1946 and moved to Oxnard. For the next 22 years he remained in the Naval Reserve, retiring as a lieutenant commander in 1967. He moved his car dealerships from Oxnard to Thousand Oaks in 1970.

While in the Navy, Nesen became friends with Tom Ryan, former First Lady Patricia Nixon’s brother. Ryan introduced him to the Nixons at a dinner in 1949. “We became friends, and when he announced that he was going to run for the Senate I got involved in some of his staff activities and became county co-chairman for his campaign,” Nesen said.

In the years that followed, Nesen served as Ventura County chairman for the Eisenhower-Nixon presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956, as well as in Nixon’s unsuccessful campaigns for president and governor in 1960 and 1962.

It was Nesen’s longtime loyalty to Nixon and his political experience--including a job as Nixon’s California campaign director in the 1968 presidential race--that prompted the call from John Mitchell in 1972, Nesen said.

‘No Big Thing’

The subsequent break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, which led to the toppling of the Nixon Administration, “was no big thing,” Nesen said.

“It wasn’t the right to do; it was wrong,” Nesen said. “But, really, nobody got hurt. . . . The only people that got hurt were all my friends who went to jail and the President himself.”

Campaign “tricks,” which is how Nesen described the attempted bugging of Democratic headquarters, are common in election campaigns of both parties, he said. “I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.”

Had he taken Mitchell’s offer and overseen the Nixon campaign in 1972, could Nesen have prevented the Watergate scandal?

“I was older than the others involved; I probably had more experience,” Nesen said. “But whether I could have stopped that thing, whether I would have been smart enough to do it, I don’t know.”