Reagan: The Life (28 page)

Reagan at once regretted the “bloodbath” remark. Later that day he qualified his comment. “
There comes a time when we must bite the bullet, so to speak, or take action when we know it is necessary to do so,” he said. “I certainly don’t think there should be a bloodbath on campus or anywhere else.”

“Biting the bullet” wasn’t a big improvement, and the comment came
back to haunt him. Violence erupted again in Isla Vista, and in the violence a student,
Kevin Moran, was killed, apparently by a policeman who was aiming elsewhere.

The killing shook Reagan badly. He fought back tears as he addressed reporters. “
It isn’t very important where the bullet came from,” he said. “The bullet was sent on its way several years ago when a certain element in our society decided they could take the law into their own hands. And every person that has aided and abetted them is equally guilty.” He renewed his call for an end to the violence, appealing to the memory of Kevin Moran. “If his death is not to be totally in vain, I hope this will bring some sober reflection and some common sense to the so-called silent majority of students, faculty and administrators to where they themselves will take a stand and say, ‘This is the end. No more attending rallies, no more even supporting with an expression of sympathy those who have resorted to this kind of violence.’ ”

T
HE TROUBLES IN
Santa Barbara didn’t end right away, but they were overshadowed by much larger protests elsewhere that spring. Campuses around the country erupted when Richard Nixon ordered the invasion of
Cambodia. The president’s strategic purpose was to deny the
North Vietnamese sanctuary in Vietnam’s neutral neighbor; his political achievement was to mobilize broader domestic protests than ever. At
Kent State University in Ohio, troops of the national guard fired on demonstrators, killing four students and wounding several others. At
Jackson State in Mississippi, police shot and killed two students and wounded a dozen.

The campus violence in California might have complicated Reagan’s reelection had the Democrats run a more compelling candidate.
Jesse Unruh tried to make the leap from the assembly to the governorship, but he had difficulty escaping his unsavory reputation as the “Big Daddy” of the legislature. His campaign stumbled and failed to raise the money he needed to challenge the incumbent effectively.

Reagan ran on his record as a budget balancer and a defender of law and order against radical challenge. The latter role lost some of its luster after the killings
at Berkeley and Isla Vista; more than a few voters asked if the authorities hadn’t gone too far. But others shared Reagan’s view that blame for the deaths lay with the radicals, not the authorities.

He also ran as a pragmatist who got things done. The University of California regents, after clawing back some of the revenues Reagan had
proposed to cut, accepted his demand that students start paying tuition. When a new budget stalled in the legislature, Reagan was the one who compromised, dropping his opposition to the withholding of state
income taxes. Acknowledging that he had previously said his feet were set in concrete on the withholding issue, he joked, “
That sound you hear is the concrete cracking around my feet.”

Voters liked Reagan’s principles; they also liked his pragmatism. But they weren’t nearly as enthusiastic as they had been four years earlier. His 53 percent of the vote fell substantially shy of the 58 percent he had polled then, and his margin of victory over Unruh was half his margin over Pat Brown. Yet a win was a win, and Reagan was happy to accept it.

R
EAGAN
’
S SLIPPAGE AT
the polls took some of the shine off his national appeal. The Republican Party wouldn’t be looking for presidential candidates until 1976, given Nixon’s certainty of renomination in 1972. And when the party did start looking, there was no guarantee it would be seeking conservatives. Nixon confused constituents and pundits by talking like a conservative but acting like a liberal. The law-and-order theme of his 1968 campaign appealed to conservatives and others distraught by the wave of big-city riots and the permissiveness of the counterculture, and the showpiece of his domestic policy, an approach he called the
New Federalism, appeared to reverse the centralizing tendencies of Lyndon Johnson’s
Great Society. But appearances deceived in this case, as in much Nixon did, for the essence of the New Federalism was the money Washington bestowed on the states for them to spend. What Washington gave, Washington could take away.

In certain areas Nixon didn’t even pretend to be conservative. He pushed environmental reforms harder than any president since
Theodore Roosevelt. The Clean Air Act
of 1970 dramatically expanded the power of the federal government to regulate emissions from vehicles and industrial plants. The
Environmental Protection Agency, created the same year, enforced the air act and comparable legislation covering water, land, and other resources, besides issuing binders full of regulations on its own authority. The
Occupational Safety and Health Administration, established in 1971, stuck the federal government’s nose into the affairs of nearly every employer in the country. Nixon’s was the first administration to push
affirmative action as a federal policy on race. His Labor Department applied a plan devised to remedy racial discrimination in Philadel
phia to cities across the country. Contractors doing work for the federal government were required to hire minimum numbers of black workers. Nixon boosted funding of the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and he furnished federal money to school districts striving to ensure compliance with court orders to desegregate.

Nixon’s most audacious initiative was also his most liberal. Or perhaps it was his most conservative. It certainly was his most confusing, receiving endorsements from both liberals and conservatives, as well as condemnations from both groups. The
Family Assistance Plan was designed to make federal aid to the poor more efficient and less costly. This aspect appealed to conservatives, including economist
Milton Friedman, who helped design it. But it would do so by means of a “
negative income tax”—a federal payment to families with incomes below a poverty threshold—without the onerous and often embarrassing investigations long required for welfare payments. This part appealed to liberals, as did the fact that the efficiencies of the new program would allow its coverage to be expanded to millions of people, especially children, previously uncovered.

R
EAGAN WOULD HAVE
saved himself a great deal of trouble had he followed Nixon’s lead and endorsed the Family Assistance Plan. Reagan made welfare reform a focus of his second term as governor, chiefly because California’s ballooning welfare rolls threatened to undo the progress he had made toward balancing the state’s budget. Reagan had railed against welfare cheats who lounged on the largesse of honest taxpayers and, he took pains to point out, deprived the truly needy of the help he thought they should receive. He launched his second administration with a promise to reform the welfare system. “
Mandated by statute and federal regulation,” he said, “welfare has proliferated and grown into a Leviathan of unsupportable dimensions. We have economized and even stripped essential public services to feed its appetite.” Liberals wanted to raise taxes to cover the shortfall. This path had no end, Reagan said. “Unless and until we face up to and effect complete reform of welfare, we will face a tax increase next year, the year after that, and the year after that—on into the future as far as we can see.”

The national economy had tipped into a mild recession after the
Federal Reserve raised interest rates to curb inflation; Reagan acknowledged the recession’s deleterious effect on California’s state budget. But he
rejected the pessimism many Americans felt as a result of the downturn and the disturbing events of the previous several years. “Those who whine of a sick society aren’t talking about
us
,” he declared for California. “Our young people seek a cause in which they can invest their idealism, their youth and their strength … As
Mark Twain once said, ‘The easy and slothful didn’t come to California. They stayed home.’ ” With the optimism that was becoming his trademark in politics, Reagan perorated, “It is time to ignore those who are obsessed with what is wrong. Concentrate our attention on what is right—on how great is our power and potential and how little we have to fear. As I told a group of your fellow citizens who visited this capitol last fall, if California’s problems and California’s people were put in a ring together, it would have to be declared a mismatch.”

Reagan sent the legislature a detailed proposal for revamping the welfare system. The twin goals of the plan were to boot unworthy recipients off the welfare rolls and to increase payments to people who really couldn’t fend for themselves. Critics accused him of being hard-hearted and of overreacting to the recession; the Democratic leadership in the legislature preferred handing the welfare problem to the federal government, under the terms of Nixon’s
Family Assistance Plan.

Nixon’s offer was tempting, but Reagan refused. A guaranteed income epitomized all that was wrong about the liberal approach to governing, he said. “
I believe that the government is supposed to promote the general welfare,” he quipped. “I don’t believe it is supposed to
provide
it.”

Reagan’s opposition didn’t endear him to Nixon, but it did get the president’s attention. “
Nixon sent several people out to sit down with Reagan to shut him up on welfare reform,”
Michael Deaver recalled. They failed, so Nixon took matters into his own hands. The president kept a house in California, at San Clemente, where he sometimes vacationed. On one trip west he invited Reagan to drop by. Nixon apparently offered Reagan a deal: the governor would moderate his criticism of the Family Assistance Plan, and the president would relax federal welfare regulations sufficiently to allow California to experiment with work requirements for capable recipients of welfare checks.

Reagan evidently accepted the deal, for his criticism diminished and the experiment went forward. Meanwhile, he wrestled with the legislature, in the person of
Bob Moretti, the Democratic speaker of the assembly, over broader welfare reform. Moretti one day asked to see the governor. “
I remember he was sitting at his desk and there was a chair
right off to the right where I sat,” Moretti later remarked of the visit. “And he said, ‘Yeah, what do you want to talk to me about?’ And I said, ‘Look, governor, I don’t like you particularly and I know you don’t like me, but we don’t have to be in love to work together. If you’re serious about doing some things, then let’s sit down and start doing it.’ ”

And so they did. Both men took their task seriously; each understood he needed the other. Moretti could deliver the Democrats who controlled the legislature; Reagan could bring the Republicans and possessed a veto. Each was principled, but neither was ideological. For a week they met daily; for another week Reagan’s aides met with Moretti’s lieutenants and his allies in the legislature.

The result was a measure that reflected democratic politics at its best, which was to say welfare reform that made neither side ecstatic but that substantially improved on the status quo. Eligibility requirements were stiffened, reducing the number of recipients by hundreds of thousands. Payments to those remaining on the rolls were increased, to reflect more accurately the cost of California living. Taxpayers saved billions.

A
SECOND MEASURE
of his second term made Reagan almost equally proud. Real estate values had been rising in California for years, pushing up
property taxes, which became a heavy burden on pensioners and other owners whose incomes didn’t rise commensurately. Reagan wanted to provide relief. Meanwhile, he and the rest of the state’s elected officials found themselves under court order to make more equitable the state’s education spending, most of which came from property taxes. The desire for property tax relief and the need for equalization seemed at first to work at cross-purposes, but after some false starts Reagan and Moretti managed to produce another compromise. The measure reduced property taxes while boosting state support for schools, especially those in poorer districts.

N
IXON
’
S WELFARE PLAN
fared less well than Reagan’s, struggling in Congress for two years before the president set it aside ahead of the 1972 election. Nixon, anyway, had other priorities, starting with the most audacious restructuring of international affairs since the beginning of the
Cold War. Even casual observers of communist-bloc politics noted during the 1960s that the bloc wasn’t what it once had been. The Chinese
increasingly condemned what they called the Kremlin’s “revisionism”: its unwillingness to push world revolution in all places at any cost. By the decade’s end the acrimony had grown so virulent that Chinese and Soviet troops exchanged fire across the border their countries shared in northeast Asia. American and allied leaders didn’t have to be unduly Machiavellian to wonder if the Eastern troubles might be turned to Western benefit.

In fact Richard Nixon
was
Machiavellian, and turning those troubles to America’s benefit was precisely what he had in mind. Nixon understood that the enemy of an enemy can be, if not necessarily a friend, at least a useful associate. He proposed playing the Chinese against the Russians, and the Russians against the Chinese, to America’s advantage. He hoped the two communist powers could be persuaded to reduce their support for the communists of Vietnam, thereby easing an end to the war there. More broadly, he looked to augment America’s usable leverage in world affairs.

But it was tricky business. Americans like to believe that their country’s policies are rooted in principle. For a quarter century they had been told, and had been telling themselves, that America’s enemy in the Cold War was communism—godless, authoritarian communism. Neither Russia nor China had abandoned communism; neither had embraced God or democracy. But Nixon wanted to work with them nonetheless.