Reagan: The Life (20 page)

The techniques of
public relations grew more sophisticated during the 1920s, when a whole industry arose around the enterprise.
Bruce Barton became the face of the field, and his firm of
Barton, Durstine & Osborn gave guidance to such emerging powers as General Motors and General Electric. (Barton meanwhile won a following as a guru of self-improvement and the author of
The Man Nobody Knows
, which portrayed Jesus as the founder not merely of Christianity but of the culture of modern success.) The sell was softer but no less insistent than in the Gilded Age, and it made use of the modern media, especially radio. The private sector taught government a thing or two: Franklin Roosevelt manipulated radio in a manner to make Barton proud (though not happy: Barton was a Republican). During
World War II the government’s campaign to promote the war effort employed both personnel and ideas from the public relations industry.

General Electric’s hiring of Reagan represented another step forward for the industry. GE was one of the largest corporations in America, with manufacturing plants and research laboratories in dozens of states and a workforce that numbered more than 200,000. Its chief of public relations was
Lemuel Boulware, who had devoted decades to the study of corporate communications and devised a theory of the subject he intended for Reagan to put into practice. The theory operated at several levels.
The General Electric Theater
presented the company as a patron of the arts, not elitist arts like opera, but popular arts enjoyed by the company’s millions of current and prospective customers. Reagan’s handsome face, warm smile, and soothing voice made him just the person Boulware wanted those millions to see and hear every Sunday evening.

But Boulware had other audiences in mind as well. Like most corporations, GE disliked labor unions and sought to diminish their influence. Boulware believed that one way to accomplish this was to encourage the men and women who worked for the company to feel part of a community that shared the values of management. Reagan’s contract made him the point man of the company’s community building. He visited the plants and walked the factory floors; he shook hands with all who approached him and told stories of Hollywood. And he articulated the values of personal liberty and individual responsibility that Boulware hoped would inoculate the workers against the expansion of union influence.

There was risk and some irony in Boulware’s approach. Reagan was a union man, of course, the recent president of an AFL affiliate, no less.
Might he be emotionally tempted to side with the workers against management? If he did, would Boulware be able to dump him without embarrassing the company?

But Boulware, like every master of
public relations, was a student of personality. He understood that Reagan wasn’t the typical unionist. His union, the actors’ guild, wasn’t like the
International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, the principal group GE had to deal with. Reagan’s guild was more like a company union, one of those corporate-sponsored organizations established to fend off the real unions. Reagan had more often been a partner of the producers than their antagonist. And the political views he had revealed in congressional testimony and speeches to SAG members and other industry audiences made clear that he stood solidly behind the pro-business principles Boulware wanted him to espouse.

Reagan later boasted that every speech he gave for GE consisted of his words alone. The company’s leaders “
never suggested in any way what I should talk about,” he said. “Nor did they ever indicate I was singing the wrong song and should switch tunes.” They didn’t have to, for Reagan’s views reflected the company line as closely as Boulware could wish. And they grew closer the longer he took the company’s money. “As the years went on, my speeches underwent a kind of evolution, reflecting not only my changing philosophy but also the swiftly rising tide of collectivism that threatens to inundate what remains of our free economy,” he wrote in the mid-1960s. The Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower did not produce the dismantling of the New Deal conservatives hoped for; instead, Eisenhower’s Republicans endorsed and extended Social Security, lavished federal money on highways, launched an expensive
space program, and generally looked to conservatives like clones of the Democrats. When the Democrats retook the White House after the 1960 election, conservatives expected still worse. “I don’t believe it was all just a case of my becoming belatedly aware of something that already existed,” Reagan wrote. “The last decade has seen a quickening of tempo in our government’s race toward a controlled society.”

At times, however, Reagan carried his warnings against government too far. General Electric’s largest customer was the federal government, which purchased instruments for warplanes and other weapons systems, equipment for government labs, and especially generators for the power plants of the
Tennessee Valley Authority and other electrical installations. Reagan’s jeremiads against encroaching government cited the TVA as a
case in point—until he got wind that TVA executives were listening and wondering to General Electric’s boss,
Ralph Cordiner, why they shouldn’t shift their purchases to a more appreciative company.

Cordiner said he wouldn’t censor Reagan—a move that caused Reagan to censor himself. “
Suddenly, realization dawned,” Reagan recalled. “There wouldn’t be a word. Ralph Cordiner meant what he said and was prepared to back those words with $50,000,000 of business. Now the responsibility was mine. How free was I to embarrass or hurt the company, just because I had carte blanche to speak my mind?”

Reagan called Cordiner. “I understand you have a problem and it concerns me,” he said.

“I’m sorry you found out about that,” Cordiner answered. “It’s my problem and I’ve taken it on.”

Reagan said he appreciated the support and freedom the company gave him. But he couldn’t abuse that freedom by making comments that might cost thousands of GE workers their jobs. “Mr. Cordiner, what would you say if I could make my speech just as effectively without mentioning TVA.”

Reagan recalled the reaction: “There was a long pause. Then a very human voice said, ‘Well, it would make my job easier.’ ”

Reagan concluded the story: “Dropping TVA from my speech was no problem. You can reach out blindfolded and grab a hundred examples of overgrown government. The whole attempt only served to illustrate how late it is if we are to save freedom.”

R
EAGAN
’
S WORK FOR
General Electric lasted eight years, interrupted once and briefly, at the end of the 1950s, by a pinch-hit reappearance with the actors’ guild. Reagan’s time with GE transformed him from a Hollywood figure into a national spokesman for conservative views. “
Looking back now, I realize it wasn’t a bad apprenticeship for someone who’d someday enter public life—although believe me, that was the farthest thing from my mind in those days,” he wrote much later. “For eight years I hopscotched around the country by train and automobile for GE and visited every one of its 139 plants, some of them several times. Along the way I met more than 250,000 employees of GE—not just shaking their hands, but talking to them and listening to what was on their minds.” He met business leaders in the towns he visited, and he found that his tales of government meddling in the movie industry struck sympathetic
notes. “No matter where I was, I’d find people from the audience waiting to talk to me after a speech and they’d all say, ‘Hey, if you think things are bad in your business, let me tell you what is happening in my business.’ I’d listen and they’d cite examples of government interference and snafus and complain how bureaucrats, through overregulation, were telling them how to run their businesses. Those GE tours became almost a postgraduate course in political science for me. I was seeing how government really operated and affected people in America, not how it was taught in school.”

Earl Dunckel served as Reagan’s assistant and travel planner. He recalled how Reagan learned retail politics on the GE tours. At a typical plant, the women employees would gather around Reagan first, eager to meet the famous actor. Their male counterparts were less easily charmed. “
The men would all stand over here, all together, looking at him, obviously saying something very derogatory—‘I bet he’s a fag,’ or something like that,” Dunckel recounted. “He would carry on a conversation with the girls just so long. He knew what was going on. Then he would leave them and walk over to these fellows and start talking to them. When he left them ten minutes later, they were all slapping him on the back saying, ‘That’s the way, Ron.’ ” Occasionally the women, or some of them, were the tougher sell. Dunckel remembered a large, formidable woman who heckled Reagan. “Buster, I’d like to back you up in a corner sometime,” she said. Reagan smiled and responded, “Well, it would have to be a pretty big corner.”

The tours kept him busy but nonetheless afforded time for reflection and reading. He continued to avoid airplanes and so had many days in compartments and parlor cars of cross-country trains. “
I still can’t think of a more comfortable way of travel than taking the Super Chief from Los Angeles to Chicago,” he reminisced. On the Super Chief and its counterparts he read materials Lem Boulware supplied on the meaning and purpose of General Electric and American capitalism. Earl Dunckel recalled him as an apt pupil. “
He was interested very much in our employee relations philosophy, Boulwarism, because we were out there talking to the people who were affected by it,” Dunckel said. Reagan read the
General Electric News
, which covered company happenings that management wanted to publicize, including Reagan’s tours. He read the
Supervisor’s Guide to General Electric Job Information
. He read the numerous “Blue Books” in which
Ralph Cordiner expounded the company’s philosophy. He read various titles Boulware recommended for GE employee book clubs; selections included
Lewis Haney’s
How You Really Earn Your Living
and
Henry Hazlitt’s
Economics in One Lesson
. The consistent theme was less government and more commercial and personal freedom.

And he read a miscellany of books and articles he found on his own. He had a magpie’s eye for the glittering tidbit and a storyteller’s memory for material he could weave into his speeches. “
Ron had the dope on just about everything,” a Hollywood acquaintance recalled: “this quarter’s up-or-down figures on GNP growth, V. I. Lenin’s grandfather’s occupation, all history’s baseball pitchers’ ERAs, the optimistic outlook for sugar beet production in the year 2000, the recent diminution of the rainfall level causing everything to go to hell in summer in Kansas and so on. One could not help but be impressed.”

The more he read, and the more he traveled and spoke, the more he recognized that his formal political affiliation no longer suited his evolving beliefs. “
One day I came home and said to Nancy, ‘You know, something just dawned on me,’ ” he recalled later. “ ‘All these things I’ve been saying about government in my speeches (I wasn’t just making speeches—I was preaching a sermon), all these things I’ve been criticizing about government getting too big, well, it just dawned on me that every four years when an election comes along, I go out and support the people who are responsible for the things I’m criticizing.’ ”

This wasn’t quite true. Reagan had joined some other Democrats in urging Dwight Eisenhower to run for president in 1952 as a Democrat; when the previously unpartied general opted for the Republicans, Reagan still thought he was the best man for the job and voted for him over Democrat
Adlai Stevenson. He voted for Eisenhower over Stevenson again in 1956.

Yet he remained a registered Democrat. In 1960, John Kennedy ran for president on the Democratic ticket. Kennedy’s father, Boston tycoon and Democratic donor Joseph Kennedy, had produced movies, among other ventures, and he pressured Hollywood to get behind his son. He appealed to Reagan on grounds of shared Irishness as well. Reagan refused, having decided that the Democrats were the party of egregious government, and he endorsed Richard Nixon instead. He didn’t campaign actively for Nixon, as that would have undermined the nonpartisan face he and
General Electric presented to the country. Nixon meanwhile discouraged Reagan and other anti-Kennedy Democrats from switching parties, reckoning that a strong contingent of “Democrats for Nixon” would more effectively undermine Kennedy than a bolt of the disaffected to the Republicans.

If it did, it didn’t undermine Kennedy enough, for Joe Kennedy’s boy
beat Nixon in a close contest. Yet Reagan still admired Nixon sufficiently to endorse him in 1962 when he ran for California governor. Amid that race Reagan was saying nice things about Nixon and his Republican views when a woman in his audience stood up and asked if he had registered as a Republican.

“
Well, no, I haven’t,” he replied. “But I intend to.”

The woman announced to the crowd, “I’m a registrar.” She strode to the platform where Reagan was speaking and thrust out a registration form.

“I signed it and became a Republican,” Reagan later recounted.

S
OME PEOPLE ENTER
politics seeking power; Reagan wanted attention. The political dynamo of the 1960s was Lyndon Johnson, whose hunger for power had been evident from the moment he set foot in Congress in the 1930s. Johnson was hell-bent to make his mark on the world, and he spared no effort or principle in his drive to do so. Reagan wasn’t like that. Reagan wanted an audience. He wanted the notice and the applause he had learned to crave as a youth. He wanted a stage. He always wanted a stage.

He might have been happy remaining with
General Electric if GE had been happy remaining with him. But by the early 1960s the hold of
The General Electric Theater
on the Sunday evening television audience was slipping. The format seemed creaky, and the country had new small-screen favorites, including the four male stars of the top-rated Sunday show,
Bonanza
.