Reagan: The Life (27 page)

The cleanup started sooner than he expected.
Clark Kerr had been chancellor at Berkeley and was president of the several-campus University of California system; he naturally concluded that Reagan’s criticisms were directed at him. Upon Reagan’s inauguration as governor he asked the board of regents for a vote of confidence. Several members of the board, which now included Reagan ex officio, had their own doubts about Kerr’s handling of the Berkeley turbulence, and they didn’t like being put on the
spot. To the surprise of both Kerr and Reagan, the latter’s first meeting with the regents resulted in the dismissal of the former.

Few beyond the board believed Reagan’s disclaimers of intent, which were accurate as to timing if not to eventual outcome. Liberals in California and around the country wrung their hands that the crown jewel of public higher education in America was being threatened by Reagan and the know-nothings. They lamented the more when Reagan’s first budget projected sharp cuts to the university, and California liberals in particular assailed his proposal to begin charging tuition at the university. The no-tuition policy possessed greater significance as symbol than as substance; student fees of hundreds of dollars served much the purpose of tuition in other states. But the symbol mattered to those many Californians who boasted that the finest higher education in the country was available to even students of the most modest means. Reagan countered that honesty was the best policy in government as in life; if a fee was the equivalent of tuition, it ought to be called tuition. And in the current state of financial distress, it ought to go up.

Reagan’s proposal ignited new protests, this time aimed directly at him. Ten thousand students and faculty descended on Sacramento. “
Don’t Loot the Colleges to Balance Your Budget,” their signs read. “Impeach Ronnie Reagan.” “Lousy, Just Like His Movies.” Reagan’s schedule had called for him to be in Oregon on this day, but he postponed his trip to meet the protesters. “
I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” he told
William Clark. He let the demonstration form outside his office, then he headed out to meet the protesters. Clark accompanied him. “We walked through the double doors to the steps where this man was carrying on, I think he was a student leader,” Clark recalled. “He couldn’t see us approach—his back was to us as we went out the doors—but this vast crowd suddenly spotted the governor and their shocked faces told the speaker that something was going on behind him. He turned around and saw the governor and in shock just handed him the mike as a matter of courtesy.”

“
A funny thing happened to me on the way to Oregon,” Reagan said to the students, who didn’t think it funny at all. They had read his schedule and were counting on his absence. “Hey, hey, what do you say? Ronald Reagan ran away!” they were chanting before he showed up. They booed and tried to shout him down when he explained his change of plans. “I don’t think any group of citizens should come to the capitol with the expressed purpose of delivering any message to the governor and have the governor be absent,” he said. When the booing persisted, he remarked, “I
believe nothing I can say would create an open mind in some of you.” He asserted his desire to keep politics out of education, but he added, “The people of California, who have contributed willingly and happily to educational growth, do have some right to have a voice in the philosophy and principles that will go along with the education they provide. As governor, I will never inject politics into the board of regents, but as governor I am going to represent the people of this state.”

T
HE COMPROMISE BUDGET
Reagan and
Jesse Unruh worked out spared the universities the worst of the cuts and postponed a decision on tuition. But higher education remained a polarizing issue.
African American students at
San Francisco State College had established the
Black Student Union, which in 1968 led a strike against the college administration, against Reagan and the state government, against the Vietnam War, and against the exploitation of the masses by the capitalist system. The strike and surrounding violence produced damage to property, arrests of perpetrators and passersby, the resignation of the college’s president, and his replacement by
S. I. Hayakawa, a faculty semanticist who wore a tam-o’-shanter to work and promised to bring the militants into line. “
You are a hero to some,” he said of himself, “and a son of a bitch to others.”

The strike in San Francisco challenged radicals across the bay
at Berkeley to match it. In February 1969 a group calling itself the
Third World Liberation Front attempted to close the Berkeley campus; students walking to their classes were threatened and in some cases assaulted.

Reagan responded vigorously. He declared a state of “
extreme emergency” in Berkeley and dispatched state troopers to assist the local police. “We are winning the ball game at San Francisco,” he said, a bit prematurely; “they had to try someplace else.” Asked how long the troopers would remain on campus and in the neighborhood, he replied, “As long as may be necessary.” He elaborated: “The lives and safety of students and faculty, and the property of the university, must be protected. The campus must be free of violence, threats and intimidation.”

The property of the university became the flash point several weeks later. The Berkeley administration had acquired a piece of property south of campus for future expansion, but in the spring of 1969 it lay fallow. An alliance of
hippies—the countercultural dropouts who preached love, peace, and drugs—and political radicals determined to put the site to use. The hippies wanted to plant flowers and vegetables, the radicals to sow
seeds of confrontation. Together they christened the block “People’s Park” and proclaimed it a brave experiment in a new form of property relations.

Reagan didn’t care much about the hippies, but he was as eager to accept the radicals’ challenge as they were to pose it. His diffident campaign for president had cost him credibility as a decisive leader, and like the radicals he was looking for a chance to show he mattered. Over the heads of the university administrators, who didn’t want a confrontation they could avoid, he ordered the property cleared of unauthorized persons and a fence erected to keep additional intruders out.

Both Reagan and the radicals got what they wanted and then some. Before dawn on May 15 some 250 California state police arrived and ordered all those sleeping or loitering in the park to leave. All did, except for a few who were too drugged to know what was happening and had to be hauled away. The police sealed off several blocks around the park to prevent other people from getting close. A bulldozer arrived a short while later and began scraping the perimeter of the property for the fence. By noon the fence was completed and the site secured.

But only briefly, for at the same time a large crowd was gathering in
Sproul Plaza, the epicenter of campus protests. Student leaders denounced the seizure of People’s Park as in keeping with the fascist policies that had produced the imperialist war in Vietnam and were crushing individual rights in America. One speaker concluded with a call to reclaim the park. The crowd began chanting, “Take the park! Take the park!” They marched down Telegraph Avenue toward the park.

Blocks before they got there, they encountered the police cordon. Some protesters threw rocks, others pieces of concrete and metal. One person with obvious protest experience employed an oversized wrench to open a fire hydrant that flooded the street with water. The police responded with tear gas and then shotgun fire. Whether most of the guns were loaded with bird shot—light pellets that caused pain but not much damage unless they hit their targets in the eyes and face—or heavier and more lethal buckshot was a matter of subsequent dispute. In fact one crowd member was blinded and another killed. Dozens were wounded. As word of the fighting reached Sacramento, Reagan ordered troops of the state’s national guard to the scene. By the time they arrived, the fighting had ended, but the troops remained and clamped a curfew on the neighborhood.

R
EAGAN DEFENDED HIS
own actions and those of the local authorities. Recounting at a press conference the series of events leading up to the riot, he said, “
After the property was cleared, mob violence erupted and additional police were called to the scene. On that day, police took a tremendous and unprovoked beating from a well prepared and well armed mass of people who had stockpiled all kinds of weapons and missiles. They included pieces of steel rods as well as bricks, large rocks, chunks of cement, iron pipes, etc. Dissidents stood on fire escapes and roof tops and showered officers with steel bars, rocks and chunks of cement. One officer was stabbed in the chest with a thrown dagger.” Police responded appropriately with tear gas and bird shot, Reagan said. “This was done only to protect life and property and in response to felonious assaults with deadly weapons.” He regretted the injuries sustained by the demonstrators and especially the death of the one young man, a twenty-five-year-old named James Rector. Yet the blame lay not with the authorities but with the “street gangs” and “campus radicals” who had organized “this entire attempt at revolution.” The people of California needed to understand that demonstrations like this weren’t innocent pranks. “How much farther do we have to go to realize this is not just another panty raid?”

Reagan’s words did nothing to calm the situation. More protests broke out in Berkeley, prompting the police, with Reagan’s approval, to deploy a helicopter that sprayed tear gas on the heads of the protesters. An angry delegation of Berkeley faculty traveled to Sacramento and demanded to see the governor; when Reagan invited them into his office, they denounced him for the military occupation of their city and insisted on its lifting.

Reagan stood fast. He defended his actions to the professors and to anyone else who would listen. A live audience of a thousand heard him address the
Commonwealth Club of San Francisco; many more watched the speech on television. “
In the past eleven months four major riots have erupted in Berkeley,” he explained. “All of them involve militants from the south campus area”—Telegraph Avenue and People’s Park. “In these eleven months there have been eight major bombings or attempted bombings, nearly 1100 drug arrests, 750 in the south campus area alone.” The police and national guardsmen, he said, had confiscated numerous explosives and hundreds of firearms. They hadn’t always acted soon enough. “There have been dozens of arson attempts resulting in more than $800,000 damage … One policeman has been ambushed and shot
and a dozen others fired upon.” The big riot on May 15 was part of the broader pattern. “This was no spontaneous eruption. The rooftops had been stockpiled with rocks and other missiles.” Only after the riot got out of control of the police on hand did the Alameda County sheriff send in deputies with shotguns. “When they arrived, they literally had to step over the bodies of injured officers who couldn’t be helped or moved because the few left standing were under severe assault and literally fighting for their lives.”

Reagan distinguished between the motives of the leaders of the protest and those of the followers. “The leaders of this property takeover have made it plain their only purpose was political,” he said. “They were challenging the right of private ownership of land in this country.” The followers were mostly well-meaning students alienated by the culture and practices of a large university. They wanted to learn from the great minds of the age but found themselves in oversized courses conducted by teaching assistants. “The feeling comes that they are nameless, faceless numbers on an assembly line—green cap at one end and cap, gown and automated diploma at the other. They want someone to know they are there—they aren’t even missed and recorded as absent when they aren’t there. The majority of faculty are scholars too busy with their own research and writing.” Reagan sympathized with the students against both the radicals and the faculty. “This generation of students—better informed, more aware—deserves much more.” If they didn’t get it, the entire state would suffer. “The challenge to us is to establish contact with these frustrated young people and to join in finding answers before they fall to the mob by default. At this moment in California, the danger of this happening is very real.”

Reagan typically enjoyed taking on protesters: trading verbal blows with hecklers, giving as good as he got. But one experience disturbed him. He told reporters of visiting a campus for a regents meeting. “
I remember one very nice looking little girl, who stood in the crowd of students as I walked to my car and who kept shouting, ‘Fuck you. Fuck you.’ She practically spit at me. I walked over to her and asked her if she didn’t think that when she was a few years older she would be ashamed of what she was doing. She just looked at me and spit another ‘Fuck you.’ ”

S
UMMER AND THE
departure of most students eased the troubles at Berkeley, but renewed protests provided the backdrop to Reagan’s reelection campaign in 1970. The hot spot this time was the University of California
at Santa Barbara, a campus better known for parties than for protests. Militants rejected the surfer image and battled police over university policies; they then carried their fight to the neighborhood of Isla Vista, where they besieged a branch of the Bank of America, the most convenient symbol of the military-corporate complex.

Reagan again reacted quickly. He flew to Santa Barbara to confront the protesters. Branding them “
cowardly little bums,” he declared another state of emergency and called in the national guard.

His action contained the violence without alleviating its underlying cause. Reagan thought he knew what that cause was: the desire of a small group of revolutionaries to radicalize the rest of the campus community by provoking the police and state authorities to violence. Some on campus agreed and said his use of force was playing into the militants’ hands. But Reagan refused to be deterred. “
Appeasement is not the answer,” he declared. The radicals didn’t want solutions; they wanted disruption. If they weren’t careful, they would get what they wanted and more. “If it’s to be a bloodbath, let it be now.”