At Reagan’s Urging, Daughter in Line to Be GOP Co-Chairman

At President Reagan’s urging, his older daughter Maureen is in line for election next January to the largely ceremonial post of co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, the panel announced Friday.

The announcement was made after a meeting Thursday between Reagan and GOP National Chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. During the session, according to the committee statement, the President “indicated he was supportive of the candidacy of Maureen Reagan” for co-chairman. He had already endorsed Fahrenkopf for a third term.

The national committee customarily honors the wishes of a sitting Republican President and elects his candidates for chairman and co-chairman. Maureen Reagan would succeed Betty Green Heitman of Louisiana, who announced last June that she would not seek reelection to a fourth two-year term.

Maureen Reagan said she was “honored by the confidence shown in me by the President and the chairman” and said she hoped to “work closely with the entire membership” of the committee.

White House spokesman Larry Speakes, meanwhile, parried a suggestion that the appointment would reflect nepotism. He called the prospective co-chairman “a tireless worker on behalf of Republican causes” who has led women’s groups within and without the GOP and noted that she had been chairman of the U.S. delegation to the 1985 World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women, held in Nairobi, Kenya.