Joseph Coors: Joseph Coors, who died at the age of 85, was a fabulously rich member of one of America's leading brewing families, and one of the ultra-conservative businessmen who, for all practical purposes, bought the White House for Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The two men first met in 1967 after Reagan, then governor of California, had become the darling of the Republican right for his support of Senator Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign.
Coors, whose grandfather founded the business in 1873, had long supported extreme rightwing causes; even his elder brother William described him as "a little bit right of Attila the Hun". After Goldwater's crushing defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, he was looking for another reliable candidate to pursue his political and business agenda.
Richard Nixon, an obvious frontrunner, had blotted his copybook through his readiness to deal with Nelson Rockefeller, the moderate Republican governor of New York, who was viewed as a class traitor by Coors and his associates. The key figures in this group were Alfred Bloomingdale, owner of the department store chain, Justin Dart, a pharmaceutical retailer, and Holmes Tuttle, a car dealer in the western states. Instead, they decided that Reagan was the man they needed, and embarked on a long campaign to secure his election as president.
To start, they arranged for the Coors company to sponsor Reagan's political radio shows, which deployed his undoubted presentational skills to a national audience. Coors then donated $250,000 as seed money for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think-tank that generated many of Reagan's campaign ideas, and persuaded him to adopt the Star Wars anti-missile system once he got to the White House. Coors supported the foundation for years with an annual subsidy of $300,000.
The initial outings for his new candidate came in 1968, when Reagan unsuccessfully challenged Nixon for the presidential nomination. Another attempt followed in 1976 but, in the aftermath of the Watergate trauma, Republicans opted for Gerald Ford. Coors and his friends bore it all with patience, convinced they would triumph in the end.
Meanwhile, Coors had more immediate business problems at home in Colorado. Among the byproducts of his vast beer output were the toxic aluminium tailings left over from the production of the cans. A regional agreement prevented the movement of this waste across adjacent state borders, so Coors set up the Mountain States Legal Foundation, headed by James Watt, a local lawyer, to fight the environmental constraints in the courts.
In the lead-up to the 1980 presidential race, Coors and his associates used every loophole to pour money into Reagan's campaign. Events played into their hands when revolutionary Iranian students in Tehran seized the US embassy, held its diplomats hostage, and brought about the disintegration of the Carter presidency.
Reagan's victory duly brought rewards to the Coors group. They became highly influential members of his kitchen cabinet and secured, among many other appointments, the job of secretary of the interior for James Watt. He immediately chose Anne Gorsuch, a Colorado legal acolyte, as head of the environmental protection agency, and, with no experience, she embarked on the dismantling of many laws on toxic waste disposal.
Gorsuch's appointment, however, became a political disaster. She ran foul of Democratic and Republican politicians as voters howled about the renewed pollution threats to their localities. Her fate was sealed when the US Justice Department claimed her administrative actions had raised serious conflicts of interest. After 22 calamitous months, Reagan was forced to sack her.
James Watt attempted to carry on the Coors agenda but, after falling foul of Congress through his extraordinary political insensitivity, was also forced to quit. In the end, a score of the appointees pushed on to the administration by the Coors group were criminally convicted for their part in the environmental fiasco.
Coors's business career suffered similarly. The federal trade commission won a case against him for illegal practices, including price-fixing and the unlawful limitation of competition. In the 1970s, he decided to bar trade unions from his plants, precipitating a 20-month strike. The company won, but then suffered a 10-year boycott of its beers by members of the AFL-CIO confederation. Afterwards, Coors required new employees to take lie detector tests.
In 1987, after a marriage of 46 years, he divorced his wife Edith. He is survived by their five sons, and by his second wife, Anne.
Joseph Coors, brewer and political benefactor, born November, 1917; died March, 2003