I’m sure that at this time Reagan had no notion that one day he would want to connect to American voters the way Roosevelt was connecting in the 1930s. But he developed a respect and admiration for Roosevelt’s ability to be president. Like a whole lot of people who inherit their political philosophy, Reagan hadn’t thought seriously about the essence of it.
He admitted—boasted sometimes—that he had voted for Franklin Roosevelt four times. But he never independently concluded that he agreed with Roosevelt’s politics. It was Roosevelt’s style of leadership he liked.
That’s part of it. The other part is that Reagan says he shifted from being a Roosevelt Democrat to being a Republican in the mid- and late 1940s, when the threat of Communism was becoming more apparent.
He felt it in a personal way as head of the Screen Actors Guild. There were bitter union disputes in Hollywood, and some of the unions were very clearly Communist-oriented, if not outright Communist-dominated.
Reagan, in making various decisions on behalf of the actors—that they would cross picket lines in these strikes—came under personal threat. He got a threat one day that said, “We’re going to end your career if you persist in this.” He didn’t know exactly what this meant, but when he told the police about it, they said, “What they do is they throw acid in your face and you’re never going to get an acting job again.”
Reagan claims that was the beginning of his turn from a Democrat to a Republican. That doesn’t entirely wash, because in the 1940s and 1950s the Democrats were fully as vigorous in opposing Communism as the Republicans were. The Cold War was originally a Democratic project. Conservatives like Robert Taft of Ohio were the ones who were laggards.
The other thing was—and I don’t know exactly how much credit to give this—Reagan was making a good salary at a time when the top marginal tax rate on personal income was 90 percent. You don’t have to be a raving reactionary to think that ninety cents of every dollar being taxed away is a bit much.
DR: His agent, Lew Wasserman, gets him a job as the host of General Electric Theater, which airs first on radio and then on TV. Does that make him a little bit more conservative? He goes and talks to GE employees all the time, and the head of GE was a very conservative Republican.
HWB: Reagan had had no particular interest or education in politics, and particularly in the policy side of politics, before he took this job with GE. He needed the job. He wasn’t getting any film roles. He had played through his years as the president of the Screen Actors Guild.
He needs work, and GE’s willing to hire him. This is an experiment in how to use television to market products, and the public face of GE is Reagan as the host of GE Theater. Every Sunday night, he spends two or three minutes introducing the made-for-TV play of the week.
But he spent the rest of the week traveling the country on behalf of the company. GE’s writing his check, and while it doesn’t exactly tell him what he’s supposed to say, people get influenced by the incentives they have and the work they are conducting.
Sometimes he spoke to groups of GE employees. He’s speaking on behalf of GE management and trying to convince the employees that they should avoid trade unions, they should accept what management offers.
Reagan is being educated in this by some of the folks who work at GE. There’s a coincidence between what works for Reagan in terms of his job and this dawning notion that the larger government enacted by the New Deal is too big, and furthermore that these high tax rates are really hitting him in the pocketbook. It’s a constellation of events that shifts Reagan in a rightward direction.
DR: His TV career ultimately goes away as well, and he’s not sure what to do. He makes the speech in ’64 that you talked about, and then all of a sudden people say, “You should run for governor,” and he decides to run in ’66. How did that campaign go?
HWB: Reagan ran for governor of California primarily because he needed to do something before he ran for president. It wasn’t that he really wanted to be governor of California. He was thinking bigger than that.
As governor of California, Reagan—photographed here with former pro football player Jack Kemp, circa 1967—strategized on how to win the presidency.
In fact, when Reagan became governor, he had to educate himself on a lot of the issues that a governor of California has to deal with. But he was thinking beyond that. In those days, anyway, you had to demonstrate that you could win elections before you got to run for president.
DR: In ’66 he runs and gets elected. He beats the incumbent governor, Pat Brown. Then, in ’68, although he’s only been governor for two years, he starts to run for president. Did he have a chance in ’68?
HWB: This demonstrates that Reagan was thinking about the presidency all along. As I said earlier, on the morning after that speech supporting Goldwater, there were Reagan for President committees established around the country.
He runs for president in 1968. He later would claim that he just ran as a favorite son from California, a placeholder so the state delegation wouldn’t be caught out when they couldn’t decide which of the major candidates they should support.
In fact, Reagan hoped that he could get the nomination, but he was ahead of himself in two respects. One, he wasn’t seasoned enough in politics to know what he was getting into. Two—and this is really important in understanding the Reagan phenomenon, and applies to the success of any individual president—has as much to do with the state of the country as with the character of the individual candidate.
In 1968, the Republican Party was not in a position to nominate someone like Ronald Reagan, and the country was not in a position to elect a Ronald Reagan. If he had somehow gotten the nomination in 1968, it might very well have ended his career.
But the fact is he couldn’t get the nomination. He realized before going very far that he wasn’t going to get very far, that the Republicans were going to nominate Richard Nixon, who gets elected in 1968.
That demonstrated that as late as 1968, in fact as late as the 1970s, there was a substantial liberal wing in the Republican Party. Now, Republican liberals didn’t call themselves liberals, they called themselves moderates. But if you look at the presidency of Richard Nixon, in many ways it tracks the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. The country was not ready for Ronald Reagan in ’68 even if he had gotten the nomination.
DR: Reagan gets reelected as governor in 1970, and then his term is up in ’74. He then decides to run for president against the incumbent, Gerald Ford. What chance did he really have then? Why did it go so badly at the beginning, and how did he turn it around?
HWB: That Reagan would challenge an incumbent president of his own party demonstrated that Reagan realized or thought in ’76 this was his last chance.
DR: He was then sixty-five?
HWB: Yes. He was old by political standards. It was now or never.
Reagan, in various moments of his career, was able to convince himself that what he needed to believe was in fact right. He convinced himself that Ford was too moderate for the United States, that Ford was too squishy on détente, that he had never been elected president and therefore was vulnerable to challenge. [Ford became president when Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974.] I can’t disagree with that, and it certainly is what Reagan believed.
But he must have understood that, in challenging Ford the way he did, he was taking a long shot on getting the nomination. Even if he did get it, he might have sufficiently divided the party that it wouldn’t have been worth it, and that by challenging and weakening Ford, he might prevent him from getting elected in his own right in 1976, which is exactly what happened.
DR: Reagan lost all the early primaries, then wins in North Carolina, wins other primaries, and moves forward. He announces that Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania would be his vice president, thinking that would help win the Pennsylvania delegation. It didn’t really help.
HWB: The lesson is that if you’re running for president, don’t announce ahead of the
convention whom you’re going to choose for your vice-presidential candidate.
DR: At the convention, Ford gets the nomination. Apparently Reagan had said to somebody, “I don’t want to be vice president on that ticket.” In your book, you point out that Jim Baker, who later worked for Reagan as his White House chief of staff, was told by him at one point that if they’d offered him the vice-presidential slot in ’76, he would have taken it.
HWB: This is a case where memories differ, and the historian has to try to parse them. I don’t think Reagan would have taken it.
He disagreed with most of Ford’s policies, and he thought this was his last shot. When he didn’t get the nomination in ’76, he basically went home and sulked in his tent. This alienated Ford and caused a lot of Republicans to think that this guy, for all he talked about loyalty and solidarity of the Republican Party, was not a very loyal Republican. He challenges a Republican president, and then, when he loses, doesn’t go out and campaign for him. Then Ford loses, and the Ford camp held this against Reagan.
DR: In 1980 he runs for president, and he loses the Iowa caucuses, to the surprise of many people. Then he turns it around in New Hampshire. What happened there that became so famous?
HWB: What Reagan demonstrated is that if you have stage presence, if you know how to cultivate television cameras, if you know how to deal with the media, you can go far.
Reagan seizes the stage in one of the New Hampshire debates and shows this commanding presence. This wasn’t the first time, nor was it the last time, but he demonstrated that one-liners—sound bites—can take you a long way in politics.
Again and again, this would convince Americans that Reagan was the kind of guy they could identify with. Much of the support for him had very little to do with his policies per se. It had everything to do with Reagan’s personality—the notion that “this is a guy that I would like, this is a guy who has a sense of humor.”
I cannot overstate the importance of Reagan’s sense of humor in his political success. He used to open nearly every speech with a joke.
The jokes ranged from kind of banal to silly. They were never particularly profound. They were mildly clever at times. But there would be a ripple of laughter that would run through the audience. And as people laughed, they would think, “Maybe this guy’s not so bad after all.”
DR: He ultimately does get the nomination in 1980. All of a sudden there’s a discussion of making Gerald Ford the vice president, on the theory that Reagan isn’t really qualified to be president, because he doesn’t know enough. Why did that fall apart?
HWB: The idea that Jerry Ford might become the VP nominee was one of the worst ideas ever floated in modern American politics. It was also a demonstration of something that would become characteristic of Reagan’s presidency. He allowed bad ideas to develop below his level of recognition and consciousness.
Reagan went out to Palm Springs to talk to Jerry Ford at his home in Rancho Mirage, basically to mend fences. Ford was still sore at Reagan for not campaigning for him more vigorously in ’76. Ford and various people associated with him thought that Reagan’s challenge and the fact that he had not campaigned for Ford had cost him the election.
Reagan was an easygoing guy, not a political strategist. He didn’t think this stuff through. It’s unclear who first suggested it, but the idea was that they were going to have this super ticket with Reagan as the presidential nominee and Ford as the vice-presidential nominee.
Somehow word got out to the press. Once the people who were—I’ll call them the professionals in the campaign—started thinking it through, they realized there are some overwhelming stumbling blocks. For instance, we would have to address the presidential nominee as “Governor Reagan” and the vice-presidential nominee as “President Ford.” The adults on the campaign came to Reagan and said, “Governor, this isn’t going to work.”
DR: The person he ultimately picked as his vice president was somebody who had criticized him for “voodoo economics,” and who, in Reagan’s view, had not done a very good job at that New Hampshire debate. Why did he pick George H. W. Bush?
HWB: In large part because they needed somebody really fast. They have to get rid of the story about Ford and, almost in the same news cycle, come up with a nominee. Reagan and the people around him are thinking, “Who’s available and credible? Who’s not going to cause us any trouble?” Bush was the name that came up and he was willing, so he gets the nomination.
DR: In the general election, there’s one debate with Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee. Was Reagan a skilled debater? That famous line he came up with—“There you go again”—did he think of that in advance?
HWB: Reagan was a master of one-liners, and he had thought this one through. He was trying to figure out where he would drop it in.
He was not a particularly skilled debater, and understood that his strengths probably didn’t show up particularly well in debates. He recognized that Jimmy Carter was a master of policy to a degree that he never was, and that Carter might very well best him in a debate.
I told you at the very beginning that the thing I had to figure out was not what made Reagan tick but what made him successful. One of the things he realized was that a president does not have to master all the details of every policy. He has to establish an atmosphere, a sense of leadership, some guiding principles.
Reagan also recognized that things were moving in his favor. He had been trying for the presidency since 1964, in a formal way since 1968, and he realized that by 1980 the country had shifted in his direction.
He’s going to say in his first inaugural address that “in this present crisis”—and I have to stress the phrase “in this present crisis”—government is not the solution, it is the problem. The initial phrase is often ignored, with people saying that Reagan was the enemy of government forever and ever, which is not true. When I was interviewing people for the book, one of them said, “We were conservatives. We were not anarchists.”
Anyway, so Reagan realized that things are moving in his direction. The 1960s and ’70s were a hard period for the American dream—the idea that this country is getting better all the time. The 1960s and ’70s were decades of riots in the cities, of Vietnam, and the stumbling of the economy.
President Reagan in the Oval Office, 1986.
At the end of the 1970s, we had the American hostage crisis in Iran, and the perceived notion that America was weak and unable to deal with its problems around the world. Jimmy Carter was in deep trouble, and Reagan knew that all he had to do was to present an alternative, a notion that America is actually getting better.
I’m not going to say to this audience that Reagan was the only American conservative who was at the same time an optimist. But if you think about it for a minute, conservatives by nature tend to be pessimists. The reason you’re conservative is that you think change is usually for the worse.
Reagan was a conservative and his philosophy was 100 percent Barry Goldwater’s, but he was also an optimist. He had as much faith in the American future as anybody in American politics. In some ways, what Reagan did was to marry the political philosophy of Barry Goldwater with the political style of Hubert Humphrey. It’s a formula for victory, as Reagan won in 1980.
DR: He gets elected overwhelmingly. He then names, as his chief of staff, Jim Baker, the man who had been Bush’s campaign manager and previously Ford’s campaign manager. Where did that idea come from?
HWB: Reagan was not one who overthought personnel decisions, but at times he had good instincts. He observed that Jimmy Carter brought his “Georgia Mafia” with him to Washington, and they basically spurned the idea that they had to have any Washington expertise.
Reagan usually measured his presidency by what he perceived as the failure of the Carter presidency. Something in Reagan, and some of the advice that he got, said, “We need somebody who knows the ways of Washington, somebody who’s not a true believer, somebody who will not accept what Reagan says simply b
ecause he says it.” James Baker was somebody who fit that bill. In some ways Baker became the model of a White House chief of staff.
DR: Was it Nancy Reagan’s idea?
HWB: It’s not at all clear that Nancy chose Jim Baker. But she wanted someone who was more of a professional than the true believers from California.
DR: At the beginning of the Reagan administration, his highest priority is the tax-cut legislation. How did he get through a Democratic Congress a massive tax cut that was against what many Democrats wanted?
HWB: Reagan campaigned on and promoted the idea of tax cuts and spending cuts. When he became president, the litmus test for conservatives, especially Republican conservatives, was the balanced budget. The way you balance the budget, especially if you’re a conservative, is you can cut taxes but you have to cut spending as well.
Reagan runs for office on this idea: we’re going to shrink government and we’re going to balance the budget. He pointed to the deficits that dated from the Great Society days of the 1960s as something that needed to be fixed.
But he made what I would call a tactical decision. He didn’t think of it as a strategic decision in 1981.
He realized that the nature of politics was such that he could get the tax cuts through but he couldn’t get all the spending cuts through, in part because he exempted defense, he exempted Social Security, he exempted the big-ticket items, so he really had to gouge the discretionary spending. Even that was a stretch, a tough haul.
What Reagan eventually got in 1981 was tax cuts written in stone and spending cuts to be determined. I still haven’t figured out whether Reagan simply overestimated his persuasiveness or underestimated the stubbornness of Tip O’Neill and the Democrats on the spending side. For the rest of his presidency and indeed until the end of his life, Reagan said, “I’m still a balanced-budget guy. It was just those profligate Democrats who insisted on their big spending programs.”
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