Joseph Canzeri, 74, Advance Man for Rockefeller, Reagan

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The New York Sun

Joseph Canzeri, who died Friday at age 74,was an earthy yet high-flying advance man for Governor Rockefeller in the 1960s and 1970s who later worked in the Reagan White House doing everything from arranging seating on Air Force One to directing traffic in white tie and tails.


“I don’t know what I do all day,” he told the Washington Post in 1981, in between carrying first lady Nancy Reagan’s purse and coat and producing a pyrotechnically assisted spectacle to mark the president’s visit to the USS Constitution. “I’m the highest-paid bellhop in North America,” he often said.


Among Canzeri’s career highlights was lighting Mount Rushmore so that Rockefeller could view it from the air at night; arranging a dinner for 3,000 to honor the crew of Apollo 9; and working with Frank Sinatra to stage an inaugural gala for President Reagan in 1986.Canzeri also organized the funerals of Rockefeller, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, for whom he arranged to have a mule-drawn cart carry the casket through the streets of Atlanta.


Canzeri was known for high spirits in the midst of keeping several balls in the air; in an interview with The New York Sun, a former Reagan deputy chief of staff, Michael Deaver, recalled Canzeri coordinating flight plans during the 1980 campaign, a time when the airplane served as their home and they visited several states each day. “There were several attempts in the campaign to have somebody throw a pastry on me,” Mr. Deaver said. “They never made it except one night in Ohio – a waiter came and shoved it right in my face. I’m sure he paid to have it done.”


Canzeri’s reputation for both fun and competence took him to the White House, where he coordinated Reagan’s schedule. People treasured his tendency to reply “done” before they had even finished making a request.


At 5 feet 6 1 /2, Canzeri was hardly tiny, but he was known as “Tattoo,” the dwarf on “Fantasy Island.” Other federal agencies he dealt with sometimes referred to him as the “mini guinea.” Reagan persisted in calling him “Canzoni,” and when the president realized his error, he gave Canzeri permission to call him “Regan.”


Canzeri was a native of Schuylerville, N.Y., where he studied hotel manage ment before being hired in the 1950s by Nelson Rockefeller to manage the huge family estate at Pocantico Hills. One of his main duties was moving trees. As Rockefeller angled for public office, Canzeri became his advance man, flying ahead to make arrangements.


“I can move the world in 48 hours,” Canzeri once boasted, and sometimes it took much less time to do the seemingly impossible. At a stop in Kansas City during Rockefeller’s 1964 presidential campaign, Canzeri convinced local police to break into a drug store because his boss had lost his Water Pik. In 1968, when Governor Rockefeller was engaged in all-night negotiations to end the New York City garbage strike, Canzeri broke into the Gotham Hotel kitchen at 5 a.m. and whipped up a solid breakfast for 30. When Rockefeller visited the former Shah of Iran, Canzeri was put in charge of bringing home volumes of the local delicacy in a project later dubbed “Operation Caviar.”


Canzeri could be brash with subordinates, but with his bosses he liked to affect near-invisibility. When Canzeri asked the mercurial Rockefeller how he had lasted so long in his employ, Rockefeller told him, “Because you never forgot whose name was on the door.”


When Rockefeller was named vice president under President Ford, Canzeri came along to Washington, where he made a good impression at the White House. Rockefeller died in 1979 in the arms of a woman who was not his wife, but Canzeri insisted to William O’Shaughnessy on Whitney Radio: “Never, ever was I in a situation in which he asked me to compromise myself.”


In 1980, Canzeri joined the Reagan campaign, and he subsequently was put in charge of scheduling at the White House. His tenure came to a premature end when an audit found he had submitted a $700 receipt for payment twice, and had accepted below market loans from Laurance Rockefeller and a California developer. Canzeri immediately resigned, saying, “You don’t drag your friends through the dirt.” A subsequent investigation exonerated him of wrongdoing, but by then Canzeri had opened a public relations firm in Washington, where he often undertook projects for the White House.


He continued to specialize in large-scale operations, describing himself as “coordinating producer” for Reagan’s inaugural galas and various charity functions. He later briefly joined Vice President Quayle’s campaign staff.


In the radio interview, Canzeri recalled taking off in Frank Sinatra’s Lear Jet. “It was just the two of us sitting there with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s – corked, because he had stopped drinking – and a package of Camels – unopened, because he had stopped smoking – and we were flying across the country to do some fund-raising events for the Reagans. He looked over to me and asked me what I was thinking about. I said, ‘I am thinking about Joe Canzeri, whose parents came out of Sicily on a mule in 1900, on a jet airplane with Frank Sinatra.’ He looked at me and said, ‘My parents came out of Sicily on a donkey in 1900. Here I am riding across the country with Joe Canzeri, assistant to the president of the United States.’ “


In recent years he had spent much time traveling with his wife to Italy, where he was received at his ancestral village like a lost son: the mayor, police, and a marching band turned up to greet them.



Joseph Canzeri
Born May 16, 1930, at Schuylerville, N.Y.; died November 19 at his son’s house in Atlanta of cancer; his marriage to Dorinda Procter ended in divorce, and in 1984 he was married to Tricia, who survives him, as does his son, Stuart.


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