Reagan: The Life (22 page)

No one realized at the time that Reagan had identified beliefs that would carry him to the highest office in the land and survive a quarter century’s hard use essentially unchanged. Reagan supporters would come to call his October 1964 performance “The Speech,” and its twin themes of smaller government at home and stronger defense abroad would provide the template for the most successful political career of the second half of America’s twentieth century.

What contemporary viewers
did
realize was that the former actor made a far more compelling political candidate than the actual candidate. And if Goldwater’s performance at the polls dispirited conservatives, Reagan’s speech gave them something to cheer about. They buried him in fan mail of a new sort. “
I’ve never had a mail reaction like this in all my years in show business,” he told a reporter. The consensus among his correspondents was that the Republicans should have nominated him. If Reagan had been on the ballot, the party and the conservative position might have fared better. And he
should
be on the ballot sometime soon, the writers said.

Conservatives in Michigan formed a Reagan-for-president committee; Republicans in other states began talking similarly. But a more realistic first race was for California governor. The second term of the incumbent, Democrat
Pat Brown, would expire in 1966, giving the Republicans what they considered a reasonable shot at replacing him. The handicapping had already begun, and Reagan’s stirring speech propelled him to the front of the small group of perceived hopefuls. “
It’s 14 months away from filing time, but already two prominent Republicans are beginning to think seriously about running for governor,” political analyst
Richard Bergholz wrote for the
Los Angeles Times
shortly after the Goldwater debacle. “One is Ronald Reagan, 53, actor and dyed-in-the-wool believer in Sen. Barry Goldwater’s brand of political conservatism.” The other was
George Christopher, formerly mayor of San Francisco and a Republican moderate. “Reagan is the hottest—and the newest—prospect,” Bergholz said. “Articulate, handsome, well-identified, the native of the little Illinois community of Tampico came on big toward the end of the recent presidential campaign … The response: tremendous.”

Bergholz acknowledged the challenges Reagan would face. George Murphy, the actor, had gone into politics and just been elected to the Senate; some voters might think his victory eased Reagan’s way, but Bergholz judged that it could instead inspire a feeling that one actor in politics was enough. Another handicap was Reagan’s background as a Roosevelt
Democrat. “Some of his detractors say his career as a Democrat was ‘pretty liberal,’ to the point where it might prove embarrassing.” And then there was his lack of experience. Would voters select someone who had never held public office? Perhaps he was too conservative for California, a state that had gone very heavily against Goldwater. “Some political ‘pros’ now are wondering whether Reagan could or would modify his views enough to reach the vast bulk of the Republican voters in California who have demonstrated they don’t want political extremes.” Finally, Reagan didn’t travel by plane. “In a state like this, and in a fast-moving gubernatorial campaign, that’s a severe problem.”

But Reagan had certain advantages, Bergholz said. His speech had been a huge hit and won him an instant following. His likely Republican opponent,
George Christopher, suffered from being from Northern California. “Reagan is a Southlander,” Bergholz said. “And this is where the votes are.” It was also the home of television, which Reagan used so well. “He would be expected to have his greatest pull where his televised image would have the greatest impact. And Southern California yields to no other area when it comes to taking its politics through the electronic tube.”

Reagan read the columns about him but was canny enough to be noncommittal. He spoke of principles rather than politics. The Goldwater defeat reinforced his conviction that conservatives must stand fast. “
The conservative philosophy was not repudiated,” he told a Los Angeles gathering of
Young Republicans. These were the zealots of the Republican right, and Reagan gave them what they wanted to hear. He laid the blame for Goldwater’s loss not on the conservatives but on party moderates. Calling the moderates “traitors” to the party, he declared, “We will have no more of those candidates who are pledged to the same socialist goals of our opposition and who seek our support. If after the California presidential primary our opponents had then joined Barry Goldwater at the national convention and pledged their support, we could very well be celebrating a complete victory tonight.” Reagan described the letters and calls he had been receiving from across the country; he said they told him and other conservatives, “Stay together and keep on working.”

He dodged questions as to whether he would run for governor. A reporter told him a movement was afoot to place his name on the ballot for 1966; if the movement gained strength and the Republicans made him an offer of the nomination, how would he react? Reagan replied, “
I hope I could turn it down.”

But he decided this sounded too negative, and when the enthusiasm
persisted, he rephrased his response. He still disclaimed a desire for office but said he couldn’t ignore the will of the people or the call of duty. “
I have some other thoughts about where an individual’s responsibility lies despite his tastes and personal desires.”

T
HE 1960S WERE
the worst of times for conservatives, and the best. Conservatives value tradition and stability, and during the 1960s a confluence of forces challenged tradition and stability in America as rarely before. A century after the Civil War, African Americans demanded that the nation honor the pledges of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth Amendments. The Supreme Court had knocked several bricks from the wall of the
Jim Crow system in 1954, when its decision in the case of
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
outlawed
segregation in schools. Congress loosened a couple more with the Civil Rights Act of 1957. But as the 1960s began, American blacks, especially in the South, remained largely segregated and disenfranchised.

They took measures into their own hands. A bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, had vaulted a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. into the national spotlight. Handsome, articulate, and charismatic, King became the face of the civil rights movement. Thousands of blacks, many of them students, rallied in protest of Jim Crow provisions in state laws, municipal codes, and corporate practices. They sat down at segregated lunch counters and refused to leave until arrested. They marched to state capitals and county courthouses to demand to be registered to vote. They endured taunts, threats, and physical violence that ranged from cuffs with fists and blasts from fire hoses to bullets and bombs.

Their movement would not have succeeded without the modern media, especially television. Americans in the North had long read about Jim Crow in newspapers, magazines, and books, but words on a page, and even photographs, had limited emotional impact. Television dramatically reduced the felt distance between the South and the rest of the country, and it brought the violence visited upon the black protesters into living rooms throughout the land.

Television never operated more effectively in favor of civil rights than during the summer of 1963. For decades black leaders had tried to organize a protest march to Washington to highlight discrimination in the workplace, in public accommodations, in education, and elsewhere in American life. One thing and then another had postponed the march,
but in the centennial year of the 1863
Emancipation Proclamation, several civil rights groups collaborated to bring it about. The event drew some 200,000 to the National Mall; the highlight was a riveting address by Martin Luther King. “
I have a dream,” King said, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” The crowd, silent at first, fell into King’s rhythm; millions watching on television were mesmerized and then moved to tears as he riffed on “America the Beautiful” in calling for freedom to ring out across the country. “And when this happens,” he concluded, “when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when
all
of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank
God
Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”

King’s speech lit a fire under the Kennedy administration, which had hesitated to make civil rights a priority lest the president lose the support of white southerners, who had formed a critical element of the Democratic coalition since the Civil War. Kennedy’s allies in Congress advanced a civil rights bill in the autumn of 1963, but the measure had far to go when Kennedy was assassinated that November. Lyndon Johnson inherited the bill, and he brought to civil rights both a passion and a credibility Kennedy had lacked. Johnson’s passion arose from experience teaching Mexican American children in the small town of Cotulla, Texas, where he saw how racial prejudice stunted his pupils’ opportunities and sapped their self-confidence. His credibility came from his southern roots, which let him speak to southerners on their own terms and in their own language.

It didn’t hurt that Johnson was a master legislator. As Senate majority leader in the 1950s he had perfected the arts of persuasion and coercion essential to successful lawmaking; as president he employed those arts
along with the powers of the presidency on behalf of the civil rights bill. Victory came within months, when Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The new law barred most forms of public racial discrimination, opening restaurants, hotels, theaters, and stores to patrons of all races and reinforcing existing laws and rulings mandating equal treatment in schools and the military and at the ballot box. Bolstered by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the new law kicked the props from under the Jim Crow system and guaranteed its rapid dismantling.

In so doing, it simultaneously laid the groundwork for the resurgence of the party that would make Ronald Reagan president. Hours after signing the civil rights law, Johnson seemed less elated than aide
Bill Moyers thought he ought to be. Moyers asked him why. “
Because, Bill,” Johnson said, “I think we just delivered the South to the Republican party for a long time to come.”

O
THER EVENTS DELIVERED
California to the Republicans. The civil rights reforms of the Johnson administration moved too slowly for many blacks who lived in America’s large cities, and their frustration and anger at continuing inequality burst into violence. The first wave hit Harlem in the summer of 1964, just days after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. A white policeman fatally shot a black teenager, touching off
rioting that lasted five days and caused hundreds of injuries and one death. In the following weeks similar eruptions occurred in Philadelphia, Rochester, and Jersey City.

The violence leaped to the West Coast, to Reagan’s backyard, the next year. In August 1965 the black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles exploded after police arrested a black motorist for drunk driving. City and state officials hoped to forestall anything like the eastern violence by flooding the neighborhood with police and national guard troops, but the show of force simply elevated the tension. Many thousands of blacks took to the streets; whole blocks went up in flames as arsonists torched white-owned buildings. The local press hesitated to send white reporters into the battle zone, but the
Los Angeles Times
pulled a black man from its advertising department to cover the story. He quickly realized he needed to act like one of the rioters. “
I, too, learned to shout, ‘Burn, baby, burn’ ”—the slogan of the rioters—“after several shots were fired at me,” he wrote. “Luckily none of the bullets hit my car, and luckier still, none hit me.” The destruction was as mystifying as it was appalling. “The rioters
were burning their city now, as the insane sometimes mutilate themselves. A great section of Los Angeles was burning, and anyone who didn’t return the crazy password was in danger.” He could gather impressions from his car, but filing his story required him to phone the paper. “I had to do all of my telephoning from street-corner booths in gas stations,” he explained. “You have no idea how naked you can feel in an exposed, lighted telephone booth. But I was hep by that time. Whenever a group of Negroes approached to look me over I knew what to do. You open the door, stick your head out, and shout, ‘Burn, baby, burn.’ Then you are safe.” Many locals who didn’t participate in the violence, which ultimately exacted 34 deaths and more than a thousand injuries, not to mention tens of millions of dollars in property damage, professed to understand the feelings of the rioters and sympathized. “That’s the hate that hate produced, white man,” a black service station owner told a white reporter. “This ain’t hurting us none. We have nothing to lose. Negroes don’t own the buildings. You never did a decent thing in your life for us, white man.” Another black man said, “This is a grass roots thing, white devil. Negro leaders can’t stop this. The U.S. Army can’t stop this. It just has to run its course.”

Until the mid-1960s the principal complaint of conservatives against government was that it was growing too large; the riots in Harlem, Watts, and the other cities made them think it was sometimes too small. They demanded stricter enforcement of laws and an increase in the number and power of the police, augmented if necessary by state and federal troops. Meanwhile, they interpreted the riots as another manifestation of the bleeding-heart liberalism that blamed bad behavior not on the misbehavers but on social conditions, in this case poverty and inequality. The conservatives had long alleged that liberalism corroded the American character; they interpreted the riots as confirming evidence.