Craig Shirley

Shirley is the second son of Edward Bruce Shirley and Barbara Cone Shirley. His father was a founding member of the New York State Conservative Party.[2] In 1964, he went door to door with his parents, campaigning for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. And, in 1978, Shirley graduated from Springfield College in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he majored in history and political science.[3]

In the 1970s, he was on the staff of Senator Jacob Javits of New York, the John N. Dalton campaign for governor of Virginia,[4] and Senator Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire.[5] Ronald Reagan came into New Hampshire to campaign for Humphrey, where Shirley first met Governor Reagan.[6]

In 1980, he ran an independent expenditure campaign in support of former California governor Ronald Reagan's presidential bid in the first six primary states on behalf of the Fund for a Conservative Majority. Shirley produced and placed radio and newspaper ads in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and three other states maximizing the three quarters of a million dollars FCM budgeted for the campaign to help Reagan at a time when his campaign was short on funds.[7]

He joined the staff of the Republican National Committee in 1982. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Shirley was the Director of Communications for the National Conservative Political Action Committee, America's largest independent political committee, which spent over $14 million on behalf of President Ronald Reagan's re-election.[8] After the election, Shirley opened his own firm[9] and worked on numerous matters in co-ordination with the Reagan White House, including aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, support for the Strategic Defensive Initiative, support for the Afghanistan Mujahideen, support for Jonas Savimbi's UNITA, and support for the Tax Reform Act of 1986. He also worked on the White House Conference on Small Business in 1985.

In 1986, he became a consultant to the Fund for America's Future, the political action committee of Vice President George H. W. Bush and worked on George H. W. Bush's 1988 presidential bid.[10] In 1991, Shirley ran a major advertising and public affairs campaign supporting President Bush and Operation Desert Storm, later represented the Embassy of the State of Kuwait and was placed in charge of public relations for an international conference on democracy hosted in Prague by President Václav Havel of then Czechoslovakia. For a short time, Shirley and David Keene partnered in a firm, but that association ended in 1992.[11]

During the 1990s, Shirley conceived and created Citizens for State Power, which represented small investor-owned utilities and they successfully stopped the attempts by Enron to nationalize the electricity grid.[12] In 2000, Craig Shirley & Associates became Shirley & Banister Public Affairs. In 2019, it became Shirley & McVicker Public Affairs. Shirley is the acting chairman of the political action committee, Citizens for the Republic.[13][14]

Shirley is a former member of the Board of Governors of the Reagan Ranch[15] and has lectured at the Reagan Library.[16] He was chosen in 2005 by Springfield College as their Outstanding Alumnus[17] and has been named the Visiting Reagan Scholar at Eureka College, Ronald Reagan's alma mater. He taught a weeklong class, "Reagan 101" at Eureka College in 2012.[18] He was also appointed as a Trustee of Eureka.[19] He is also a member of the school's Reagan Forward Advisory Council.

• Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All (Thomas Nelson, 2005)[20]
• Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2009)[21]
• December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World (Thomas Nelson, 2011)[22]
• Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan (Thomas Nelson, 2015)[23]
• Reagan Rising: The Decisive Years, 1976-1980 (HarperCollins, 2017)
• Citizen Newt: The Making of a Reagan Conservative (Thomas Nelson, 2017)[24]
• Mary Ball Washington: The Untold Story of George Washington's Mother (Harper Collins 2019)[25]
• April 1945: The Hinge of History (Thomas Nelson, 2022)[26]

His book December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World (2011), was a New York Times bestseller.[27] His book, Last Act, was named best narrative in the non-fiction category by USA Book News for 2015. His book Rendezvous with Destiny about the 1980 Reagan campaign was named as one of the five best campaign books of all time by the Wall Street Journal.