by Henry Olsen
Reagan and Goldwater disagreed fundamentally on what was wrong with the federal government. For Reagan, the problem was that a permanent bureaucracy had wrenched control of the people’s government from their hands. This had led to a steady expansion of governmental power, as bureaucrats concerned more with their livelihoods than with the well-being of their fellow citizens pushed to do more and more. For Goldwater, the people’s government itself was at fault. Goldwater’s critique was that the Constitution had established narrow powers for the new Congress. The people’s representatives could only legitimately deliberate, tax, and spend in the execution of these powers. Anything else was, without a constitutional amendment, an improper and illegal usurpation of power from the people and from the states.
Goldwater believed these powers were extremely narrow. “The legitimate functions of government are . . . maintaining internal order, keeping foreign foes at bay, administering justice, [and] removing obstacles to the free interchange of goods.”28 (Emphasis in the original.) The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reinforces this limitation of the federal government’s power by recognizing, in Goldwater’s words, “the States’ jurisdiction in certain areas. States’ Rights means that the States have a right to act or not to act, as they see fit, in the areas reserved for them.”29 (Again, the emphasis is Goldwater’s, not mine.) Accordingly, in this view, the federal government has no right, regardless of what the people and their representatives want, to legislate, tax, or spend in relation to a host of matters that had by 1960 become commonplace for it to act: welfare, health, education, labor relation, agriculture, and housing, to name only a few.
Reagan’s regular statements that some degree of federal action to place a floor underneath Americans’ standard of living were entirely inconsistent with Goldwater’s view of the Constitution. For Reagan, the problem with federal government programs was that they cost too much and had expanded beyond their legitimate, humanitarian goals. For Goldwater, those programs were inherently illegitimate. Goldwater had even started Conscience with an explicit criticism of former president Eisenhower and former vice president Nixon because they were willing to use the government to solve human problems.30 These programs were to Goldwater illegal no matter how well they were run or how legitimately needy their recipients were.
This sharp difference on the problem’s cause necessarily resulted in a sharp disagreement on the actions that should follow. Reagan urged citizens to lobby their congressmen, get involved, and try to take back control of their government by pruning the programs back to their proper scope and size. Goldwater urged immediate action to repeal as many of these programs as possible as soon as possible, and for such efforts to continue until the entire constitutional violation was mended. This led to his famous statement that
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden.31
Reagan’s standard speech regularly focused on waste and inefficiency rather than the heart of a program itself. He always called for ways to run something more cheaply, to use the knowledge of businesspeople instead of bureaucrats to ensure that legitimate recipients got what they needed and taxpayers got what they deserved. For Goldwater, this was simply wasted effort focusing on a symptom rather than the disease itself.
Their third important difference is subtle but crucial. It has to do with the fundamental nature of America’s promise. As we have seen, for Reagan that promise was one made to every man and woman regardless of talent or disposition. To be sure, he valued those with ambition and initiative. His standard speech in the late 1950s said that America could place a floor under every American’s standard of living without placing a ceiling above those who sought more. But he judged America by its ability to let the common person thrive.
Goldwater scoffed at such notions: “We have heard much in our time about ‘the common man.’ It is a concept that pays little attention to the history of a nation that grew great through the initiative and ambition of uncommon men.”32 And again: “A society progresses only to the extent that it produces leaders that are capable of guiding and inspiring progress.”33 Given these presumptions, it is only natural that Goldwater could write that “we are equal in the eyes of God but we are equal in no other respect.”34 (Emphasis in the original.) America was great for him because it enabled the exceptional to climb mountains, not because it enabled the average to live their lives according to their wishes, no matter how humble their aims or deep the valley in which they chose to dwell.
Contrast Goldwater’s views with the words Reagan chose as his epitaph. You can see them yourself, etched on the headstone above the grave he and Nancy share behind his presidential library in the stark, dry beauty of the California he so dearly loved. “I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will eventually triumph, and there is purpose and worth in each and every life.”35
I was surprised, as perhaps many of you are, when I first saw those words on his gravestone. I had eagerly awaited my visit to his graveside, wondering which of his incredible accomplishments were immortalized for all to recall. Thomas Jefferson had chosen his authorship of the Virginia Bill of Rights and the creation of the University of Virginia, for example, to color eternity’s view of his life. But Reagan chose something less selfish, but more important.
In a way, this is his interpretation of the Apostle Paul’s famous line from 1 Corinthians 13:13: “And now these three things remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.” “I know in my heart that man is good” (faith). “That what is right will always eventually triumph” (hope). “And there is purpose and worth to each and every life” (love). I left the gravesite shocked, amazed, impressed, and even more dedicated to discovering who Reagan really was.
These three differences in principle and outlook meant Reagan and Goldwater differed on many important issues. Perhaps the most obvious one regards the role of labor unions. Reagan, a former union head and the only president to date who was a lifetime member of the AFL-CIO, always supported labor’s right to organize. He supported this even when it required curbs on the employer’s liberty to bargain with unions, as was done in the Wagner Act. As we have seen, he even supported the union shop, an arrangement that forces employees to join a union that is legally empowered to bargain with an employer on their behalf.
Goldwater, on the other hand, strenuously opposed the union shop. In Conscience he wrote, “Union shop agreements deny to those laboring men the right to decide for themselves what union they will join, or indeed, whether they will join at all.”36 He “strongly favor[ed] enactment of State right-to-work laws which forbid contracts that make union membership a condition of employment.”37 As we saw in the last chapter, Reagan opposed the California effort even as he was giving speeches nationally decrying the loss of freedom.
They also differed on the manner in which government spending and taxes should be reduced. Reagan always called for cutting taxes first, presenting the government with a set amount to spend and forcing it to cut what it otherwise would not.38 Goldwater believed the opposite. “I believe as a practical matter spending cuts must come before tax cuts,” he wrote in Conscience.39 He feared that cutting taxes “before firm, principled decisions are made about expenditures” would court deficit spending and inflation.40
Crucially for our story, the two men differed sharply on government’s role in providing support for the needy. Reagan always said that doing so was a legitimate function of government, even as he might have preferred such needs to be taken care of first through private charity and initiative. As his support of the Kerr-Mills Act and public housing shows, he was even supportive of federal government involvement
where necessary. Goldwater, on the other hand, was not. Here’s what he had to say about “welfare” in Conscience:
Let us, by all means, encourage, those who are fortunate and able to care for the needs of those who are unfortunate and unable. But let us do this in a way that is conducive to the spiritual as well as the material well-being of our citizens—and in a way that will preserve their freedom. Let welfare be a private concern. Let it be promoted by individuals and families, by churches, private hospitals, religious service organizations, community charities and other institutions that have been established for this practice. . . . Finally, if we deem public intervention necessary, let the job be done by local and state authorities that are incapable of accumulating the vast political power so inimitable to our liberties. [Emphasis added.]41
Goldwater left no doubt as to how seriously he took this principle. Elsewhere in Conscience he wrote:
The only way to curtail spending substantially, is to eliminate the programs on which excess spending is consumed. The government must begin to withdraw from a whole series of programs that are outside its constitutional mandate—from social welfare programs, education, public power, agriculture, public housing, urban renewal and all the other activities that can be better performed by lower levels of government or by private institutions or by individuals. [Emphasis in original.]42
The programs Goldwater identified were in essence everything that had been established since Franklin Roosevelt had been elected with the greatest landslide in American history. Goldwater was, therefore, essentially running to repeal the results of the 1932 election. Decades of prosperity had not changed the American people’s minds. He lost by an even greater margin in terms of the popular vote than did Herbert Hoover in the depths of the Great Depression.
Compare these words, and sentiment, dismissive at best of public involvement and inimical to any federal government involvement in alleviating the plight of the poor, with Reagan’s words from 1965 in a talk entitled “The Myth of the Great Society.”
We [Republicans] too want to solve to the best of our ability the problems of poverty, and hunger, health and old age and unemployment. We can put a floor below which no American will be asked to live in degradation without erecting a ceiling over which no citizen can fly without being penalized for his initiative and his effort.43
Lest anyone think this was a postelection shift, recall that Reagan had said much the same thing many times in his standard pre-1964 speech. The contrast between conservatism’s two heroes on this point cannot be starker. Reagan and Goldwater agreed on much, but they differed a lot on what each knew in his heart was right.
Goldwater’s defeat hit the young conservative movement hard. Its hero had been creamed by 22.5 percent in the popular vote and by over 430 electoral votes. Lyndon Johnson’s 61 percent of the vote remains to this day the highest percentage of the popular vote a presidential candidate has ever received. Goldwater had carried only his home state of Arizona, by a narrow margin, and five states in the Deep South whose opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 led them to abandon a century of Democratic Party loyalty.
The debacle also hurt Republicans at all levels of government, but it was particularly damaging in Congress. The GOP lost 36 House seats, reducing its share to a mere 140, less than one-third of the total and the smallest the party had held since after FDR’s 1936 Depression-era landslide. It lost only two seats in the Senate, but it had held only 34 seats before the election. That puny 32-seat total was also the smallest Republican share of the Senate since 1936. The Grand Old Party was now powerless to affect the course of national policy.
What had happened? Did conservatism have a future?
Reagan played his part in the postelection analysis, offering a characteristically optimistic take. But his words were as unconventional as they were reassuring. They again showed to those who had eyes to see that his conservatism was different.
Reagan’s handwritten thoughts were published in a December 1964 issue of National Review magazine, then at its height of influence among conservatives.44 He argued that Goldwater lost only because people “were scared of what they thought we represented.”45 Liberals, Reagan argued, had both “portray[ed] us as advancing a kind of radical departure from the status quo” as well as taking “for themselves a costume of comfortable conservatism.” “Unfortunately,” Reagan noted, “human nature resists change and goes over backward to avoid radical change.”
Of course, Barry Goldwater’s own words showed that he did advocate radical change. Goldwater had tried to back away from some of his words during the campaign, but there was no mistaking who thought the programs passed since 1932 were suspect and who thought they were just fine. Reagan here passes over Goldwater’s genuine extremism in the defense of liberty.
But if Reagan understandably soft-pedaled his differences with Goldwater and other conservatives, he was absolutely right about what would come next. He said that liberals would change from being defenders of the status quo to advocates for a radical expansion of government. “Our job beginning now is not so much to sell conservatism as to prove that our conservatism is in truth what a lot of people were voting for when they fell for the cornpone come-on.”
Reagan then ended with a paragraph crucial to understanding both his philosophy and his approach:
In short—time now for the soft sell to prove our radicalism was an optical illusion. We represent the forgotten American—that simple soul who goes to work, bucks for a raise, takes out insurance, pays for his kids’ schooling, contributes to his church and charity and knows there just “ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”
That last line says more than it lets on. Barry Goldwater had mocked the focus on “the common man” in his magnum opus. In contrast, “the forgotten American” is who FDR had said he sought to represent in 1932. Reagan here is making his intent clear: by not contesting the basic philosophical insights of the public New Deal, conservatives can win back the forgotten Americans who now had been forgotten by the leadership of the very party that had remembered them in the first place.
This approach can work only if conservatism is comfortable with at least the basic philosophy of the public New Deal. Conservatives may differ strenuously with liberals over the scope and size of major government programs, and often differ over the existence of some programs less essential to keeping Roosevelt’s and Truman’s promises that all Americans should have a respected place at America’s economic table. Certainly Reagan viewed the programs that had implemented the New Deal’s promises to be too large in either scope or in cost. But make no mistake about it: Reagan was not advocating a return to the Herbert Hoover’s GOP or the pugnacious conservatism of Goldwater’s Conscience. A victorious conservatism had to be of Reagan’s, not Goldwater’s, flavor.
Conservatism would begin to change in Reagan’s direction over the next few years. William F. Buckley, the founder and editor of National Review, had famously refused to endorse Dwight Eisenhower’s reelection because he was too committed to the existence of the New Deal. After 1964, however, Buckley began to advocate incrementalism in politics. It was only then that he adopted the mantra for which he is still known, that conservatives should support the most conservative electable candidate. His NR colleague Frank Meyer also began to move conservatism away from its staunch neolibertarianism into what became known as fusionism. This philosophy held that conservatives of all stripes could disagree about many things so long as they agreed on two: opposition to the rapid expansion of federal government power and staunch anti-communism. The early conservative emphasis on libertarianism was waning.
These changes within conservatism had an important unintended effect. Those who took Buckley’s early libertarianism most seriously began to leave the conservative movement, no longer satisfied by what they found there. In 1968 they founded their own magazine intended to compete with National Review for thought leadership on the right. Reason was inalterably committed to “free minds and fre
e markets,” and many of those active in its founding were also instrumental in the founding of a new political party, which would be dedicated to freedom above all else. Thus was born the Libertarian Party and the libertarian movement.
All that was in the future, set into motion by the events of 1964. Of more pressing import for Reagan was a meeting only a few days after his postmortem had appeared in print. In December, a few wealthy, largely self-made conservative businessmen went to Reagan’s home in Pacific Palisades. There they asked him to run for governor of California in the upcoming 1966 election. Reagan had been invited to run for public office many times before, both as a Democrat and as a Republican. He had always turned the offers down.46 But this time he did not, his head perhaps turned by the “heady wine” he had drunk from the excitement generated by his televised address.47 While it took him over a year to formally enter the race, his willingness to entertain his own candidacy was a turning point. The Reagan Era had begun.
Chapter 4
The Creative Society, Starring Ronald Reagan
Reagan’s old movie boss, Jack Warner, had a memorable response when he heard Reagan was running for governor. “Ronald Reagan for Governor? No. Jimmy Stewart for Governor, Ronald Reagan for best friend.”1
By 1965, however, Reagan’s career was no longer restrained by his former boss’s opinion. Like Sylvester Stallone, who vaulted himself to movie stardom with a self-authored script, the movie Rocky, Reagan had written his own leading role and had found producers willing to finance the venture. The object of his affection may have spurned his advances in his film career, but he was finally going to have a shot to get the girl.
The script, however, had to change as the show went into production. As an after-dinner speaker, Reagan had the luxury of being able to simply critique what was wrong. In his new role as a candidate, he had an obligation to answer the questions he had raised. Thus, the period between 1965 and early 1967 is crucial to understanding Reagan’s philosophy. He had the luxury to say anything he wanted. What he chose to say revealed what those who had been watching closely would have expected: his conservatism was less antigovernment and more accommodating to the public New Deal than anything Goldwater or other early 1960s conservatives had ever presented.