Donald Regan

Donald Thomas "Don" Regan (December 21, 1918 – June 10, 2003) was the 66th United States Secretary of the Treasury, from 1981 to 1985, and White House Chief of Staff from 1985 to 1987 in the Ronald Reagan Administration, where he advocated "Reaganomics" and tax cuts to create jobs and stimulate production. Before serving in the Reagan administration, Regan served as Chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch from 1971 to 1980. He had worked at Merrill Lynch since 1946 and before this he had studied at Harvard University and served in the United States Marine Corps, achieving the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Kathleen (née Ahearn) and William Francis Regan, he was of Irish Catholic origins. Regan earned his Bachelor of Arts in English from Harvard College in 1940 and attended Harvard Law School before dropping out to join the United States Marine Corps at the outset of World War II. He reached the rank of lieutenant colonel while serving in the Pacific theater, and was involved in five major campaigns including Guadalcanal and Okinawa. In 1942, Regan married the former Ann George Buchanan (1921–2006), with whom he had four children: Donna Regan Lefeve, Donald T. Regan, Jr., Richard William Regan, and Diane Regan Doniger.

After the war, he joined Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. in 1946, as an account executive trainee, working up through the ranks, eventually taking over as Merrill Lynch's chairman and CEO in 1971, the year the company went public. He held those positions until 1980.

Regan was one of the original directors of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation and was vice chairman of the New York Stock Exchange from 1973 to 1975. Regan was a major proponent of brokerage firms going public, which he viewed as an important step in the modernization of Wall Street; under his supervision, Merrill Lynch had its IPO on June 23, 1971, becoming only the second Wall Street firm to go public, after Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.

During his tenure in these two positions, Regan also pushed hard for an end to minimum fixed commissions for brokers, which were fees that brokerage companies had to charge clients for every transaction they made on the clients' behalf; Regan saw them as a cartel-like restriction. In large part thanks to his lobbying, fixed commissions were abolished in 1975.

President Ronald Reagan selected Donald Regan in 1981 to serve as Treasury Secretary, marking him as a spokesman for his economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomics." He helped engineer changes in the tax code, reduce income tax rates and decrease taxes for corporations. Regan unexpectedly swapped jobs with then White House Chief of Staff James Baker in 1985. As Chief of Staff, Regan was closely involved in the day-to-day management of White House policy, which led Howard Baker, Regan's successor as Chief of Staff, to give a rebuke that Regan was becoming a "Prime Minister" inside an increasingly complex Imperial Presidency. Regan was eventually forced to resign because he was unable to contain the continuing political damage being done to President Reagan by public exposure of the Iran–Contra affair.

Regan's 1988 memoir, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington, exposes his disagreements with First Lady Nancy Reagan, for the first time revealing publicly that Nancy Reagan had a personal astrologer (then-yet-unnamed Joan Quigley), with whom she consulted and who helped steer the President's decisions. Regan wrote:

Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco [Quigley] who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.

"And the horse you rode in on" was a favorite of Regan's. He learned it from a poker buddy in Texas who said "fuck you and the horse you rode in on." Regan adopted the latter part of the phrase. In the portrait of Regan that hangs on the third floor of the treasury, the title of a book in the background reads And the Horse You Rode In On.

"You've got to give loyalty down if you want loyalty up."

"Speed it up" was a phrase that Regan infamously said to Ronald Reagan during one of his speeches, effectively ordering the President of the United States to hurry up, as shown in Michael Moore's documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story.

Regan retired quietly in Virginia with Ann Regan, his wife of over sixty years. Late in life, he spent nearly ten hours a day in his art studio painting landscapes, some of which sold for thousands of dollars and still hang in museums. Regan had four children and nine grandchildren.

He died of cancer on June 10, 2003, at age 84, in a hospital near his home in Williamsburg, Virginia, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.