Reagan: The Life (23 page)

O
THER CHALLENGES TO
the status quo evoked a similar conservative response. For generations colleges and universities had acted in loco parentis—as surrogate parents—toward their students. But when the children born after World War II began arriving on campuses during the 1960s, they demanded greater autonomy than their elders had enjoyed. They protested restrictions on speech, contending that the
First Amendment applied to them as fully as to independent adults. The University of California
at Berkeley was the initial hotbed of the protests; leaders and members of the
Free Speech Movement there demanded the right to speak
their minds even when their speech irked or infuriated those individuals and groups who professed to run the state and the country. The student protesters were fully as arrogant as youth often is; they were often obscene and occasionally violent. They indicted the “establishment” for its complicity in racism; they condemned the “military-industrial complex”—a term they gleefully stole from Dwight Eisenhower—for America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam.

The antiwar protests particularly irked the conservatives, whose model war was World War II, when the country had been united in the all-out struggle against fascism. Many conservatives branded resistance to the draft as sedition; they judged obstruction of operations at military bases and depots as treason. The conservatives couldn’t decide who was more culpable, the protesters or the government officials who allowed the protests. Many couldn’t fathom why the Johnson administration didn’t insist on a war declaration from Congress and mobilize the country against Asian communism the way Franklin Roosevelt had mobilized the country against fascism—unless Johnson was as foolish or venal as liberals typically were.

While the protests outraged most conservatives, some concluded that they would be good for conservatism and the country in the long run. Liberals were a lost cause, these political strategists reasoned, but voters would respond to the riots and the student unrest by demanding a return to the verities that had made America great. The political tide would shift in a conservative direction. With the right candidate, conservatism would rule once more.

R
UNNING FOR GOVERNOR
—or not running for governor—was not a paying job, and Reagan needed to work. Finding a new gig took time, but eventually he landed another hosting role.
Death Valley Days
was a rare series with roots in radio that had successfully leaped the media divide into television.
Stanley Andrews, playing the part of the “Old Ranger,” had hosted the show since its television debut, but after thirteen years the producers wanted a fresher face. In 1965, Reagan got the part.

The job kept him in front of the viewing public while he tested the waters for a political run. He tramped about California and occasionally, but significantly, beyond the state speaking to the same kinds of councils, committees, chambers, and boards he had addressed under the
General Electric label, but this time in the service of his own brand. He told the Inglewood Chamber of Commerce that the philosophy behind the New Deal and every other attempt at social engineering was morally bankrupt. “
Each individual has inalienable rights,” he said. “The acceptance of the statement ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’ will not bear up under examination. Our country was founded on the belief in the individual.” He told the Republican Associates of Orange County, meeting at the Disneyland Hotel, that a proposal to withhold state
income taxes from California paychecks was designed to lull voters into complacency. “
I don’t believe in painless taxes. Everyone should know exactly when he is paying his taxes and how much he is paying.” Lyndon Johnson’s
War on Poverty was hopeless. “It’s just a new pork barrel and a rehash of old ideas that do not work.” The Civil Rights Act was misguided and illegitimate. Reagan didn’t oppose equal treatment for people of different races.
“
I’m all for it and have been all my life,” he said. But the federal law was “badly written” and trampled the rights of individuals and the states. He condemned
Medicare, approved by Congress and signed by Johnson in the summer of 1965, as “
socialized medicine.” It was another step down the road to collectivism. “If you can socialize the doctor, you can then socialize the patient.”

Public opinion polls showed him far ahead of
George Christopher and other potential Republican candidates, and the national press began to take notice. “
The most startling fact on the listless Republican horizon today is the emergence of Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan as the new messiah of the Goldwater movement,” columnists
Rowland Evans and
Robert Novak declared after a Reagan address in Cincinnati. “Indeed, many militant conservative Republicans who paid $100 a plate to swelter at the Cincinnati Gardens and hear Reagan excoriate the welfare state have all but forgotten
Barry Goldwater. They talked to us quite seriously of Ronald Reagan running for President in 1968 (though some would prefer Richard M. Nixon as a sacrificial lamb against President Johnson in 1968, saving Reagan for 1972). Preposterous? Not completely.” Evans and Novak explained that though Reagan hadn’t announced for California governor, he was widely expected to do so and to win the Republican nomination. Governor Brown’s fortunes were declining on account of an eighth-year itch in voters exacerbated by popular distress over the demonstrations on the state’s college campuses and especially the
Watts riot. Consequently, Reagan appeared, to Evans and Novak at any rate, a cinch to beat Brown in November 1966. And that might be just the start. “As governor of the nation’s most populous state and with the loyalty of the fanatical Goldwater movement behind him, Reagan would be a formidable figure in the Republican Party. This tends to prove that not nearly so much was settled last Nov. 3 as liberal Republicans once thought. Far from admitting that Goldwater-style conservatism spells disaster at the polls, the conservatives now contend all they need is a candidate to package the doctrine in more appetizing fashion. That candidate is Reagan.”

Evans and Novak profiled the former actor for their readers. “Reagan (though shaky in dealing personally with the press) is an absolute master of the banquet dais. Immaculately groomed and in superb physical condition, the 54-year-old movie hero could pass for 34 from a distance. But his greatest asset is his carefully polished basic speech. It amounts to Barry Goldwater’s doctrine with John F. Kennedy’s technique. Rather than coaxing applause in the time-honored manner, Reagan follows the JFK
system of spewing out a profusion of statistics, wit and literary allusions (including one quote from
Hilaire Belloc). The audience is too fascinated to clap.” His celebrity power was obvious. “Reagan has captured the same starry-eyed devotion from female Republicans that Goldwater enjoyed. One trim young Cincinnati matron confided that she sat entranced through the Reagan TV speech three times last year. A state government official revealed: ‘My wife says she’s going to vote for him for President whether he’s nominated or not.’ ” Yet the road to the top wouldn’t be completely smooth. “Inherent in Reagan’s meteoric rise are the same immutable factors that destroyed Goldwater. In a rambling press conference at Cincinnati, Reagan stumbled into the same ideological traps that undid Goldwater. He equivocated on the
John Birch Society, refused to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ about a voluntary approach to
Social Security and declared his opposition to the most important provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act … Reagan’s major goal in the California primary campaign will be to keep his devoted right wing militants happy without scaring the wits out of everybody else (a feat Goldwater never managed). For this reason, the coming struggle in California takes on national implications for the Republican Party.”

William F. Buckley Jr. thought so too. Buckley in the 1950s had laid the intellectual foundations for the modern conservative movement in America; his combative
National Review
lambasted liberals and provided a home for libertarians, McCarthyites, reformed leftists, and others convinced that America was headed toward collectivist perdition. As a result, he was inclined to approve of Reagan, whose performance during 1965 confirmed the inclination. “
He is developing a political know-how which astounds the professionals, who believe that it is immoral that an actor, as distinguished from a haberdasher, should be a good politician,” Buckley pronounced, referencing Harry Truman’s pre-political occupation. Buckley noted that
Jesse Unruh, the Democratic speaker of the California state assembly, was paying Reagan sufficient respect to have developed a plan for neutralizing him. “The Unruh strategy is to provoke Ronald Reagan so as to cause him to reveal his ‘mean streak,’ ” Buckley said. “The theory is that if a professionally good man like Ronald Reagan could be got to snarl, c-rrr-ack would go the image built up by 20 years of good-guying on the screen, and the public disillusion would be bitter and purposive.” Buckley was skeptical. “The difficulty with Unruh’s strategy is that if there is a mean streak in Ronald Reagan’s character, it is deeply buried. I have not gone spelunking into his depths, and I would suppose there is a certain
amount of bile in his system, as I suppose there was bile in the system of St. Francis of Assisi. But I should think it very unlikely that it would surface under even the severest political provocations.” Unruh and Reagan’s Republican opponents, notably
George Christopher, were painting him as an extremist, Buckley observed. Perhaps in the wake of the Goldwater defeat Reagan had spoken harshly of moderates in the party, but now he was the soul of discretion. “He has gone around the state uttering nothing but kindnesses concerning his Republican competitors, denying himself even the pleasure of flirtatious animadversions on the tactics of some of his Republican opponents who preach the necessity of Republican unity by blasting everyone to the right of their impeccable selves. Reagan smiles, continues to speak vigorously his dissent from the wild spending policies of Gov. Brown, and the creeping anarchy whose manifestations
at Berkeley and Watts are the big issue in California this year.”

B
Y THE BEGINNING
of 1966, Reagan was sufficiently confident of his chances to announce formally. He did so in a thirty-minute video recording released simultaneously to fifteen television stations around California. He identified himself as a “
citizen politician,” distinct from the professional politicians he would face in the primary and general elections. He reiterated his belief in the rights of individuals and warned against the growth of “big brother, paternalistic government.” He pointed to the uproar at Berkeley as evidence that Brown and the Democrats were failing in their obligation to protect individual rights and preserve public order. “Will we allow a great university to be brought to its knees by a noisy, dissident minority? Will we meet their neurotic vulgarities with vacillation and weakness, or will we tell those entrusted with administering the university we expect them to enforce a code based on decency, common sense and dedication to the high and noble purpose of the university?” He opposed acceptance of federal aid to state education. “With federal aid goes federal control, and as the administration in Sacramento relinquishes state sovereignty to Washington, at the same time it takes more power from those who have been elected to run our towns and cities.” He lamented the politics of hyphenated Americanism, accusing the Democrats of pandering to “Negro-Americans,” “Mexican-Americans,” and other special groups whose interests were promoted for “political expediency so cynical men could make cynical promises in a hunt for votes.” He promised to run a clean campaign adhering to the “Eleventh Command
ment” promoted by the Republican state chairman,
Gaylord Parkinson, which forbade Republicans to attack fellow Republicans.

Lyn Nofziger, a journalist who joined the Reagan campaign as press secretary, recalled the Parkinson commandment as specially favoring Reagan. “
Of course, the chairman is supposed to be neutral, but they came up with this thing mainly to keep the other candidates from attacking Reagan for being ignorant and for not having any political experience and that sort of thing,” Nofziger said. “It worked very well because we’d say, ‘You can’t pick on Reagan because he’s a fellow Republican.’ ” Reagan was happy to play along. “
I will have no word of criticism for any Republican,” he said.

He didn’t quite live up to his promise.
George Christopher and other moderate Republicans tried to rattle Reagan, pressing him to disavow endorsement by the
John Birch Society, the neo-McCarthyist group that revered the
Tenth Amendment and rejected every advance of federal authority since the eighteenth century. This conspicuously included federal laws intended to secure civil rights to minorities; as a result the Birchers were often branded racists by their many opponents. Some
were
racists, which made the charge plausible and required political candidates to keep their distance.

Reagan recognized that the Birchers would vote for him if they voted for any candidate not on the unelectable fringe, and he didn’t want to alienate them. For months he dodged questions about the society, which naturally encouraged Christopher and the moderates to call him a fellow traveler and suggest that he was a closet racist. Still he resisted disavowal, saying he rejected “
blanket indictments” of people for the company they kept. When the pressure increased, he issued a statement declaring himself in “great disagreement” with some of the words and actions of Birch founder
Robert Welch. “I am not a member,” he added of the society. “I have no intention of becoming a member. I am not going to solicit their support.”

This wasn’t good enough, and the needling from his left continued. In March 1966 he attended a forum of black Republicans at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. George Christopher and a couple of lesser candidates also attended, and someone said something that was too quiet for the audience and reporters to hear but that Reagan took sorely amiss. “
I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature,” he responded angrily in a voice all present
could
hear. “Don’t anyone ever imply I lack integrity. I will not stand silent and let anyone imply that, in this or in any
other group.” He stalked out of the ballroom, pounding one fist into the palm of the other hand. More than one reporter heard him say, “I’ll get that SOB,” but none of them could tell which SOB he was referring to.