The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  He was forty-seven—a conservative now. Given the way he thought about the world, Boulwarism was the perfect conduit: through its sluices, he absorbed a right-wing politics that imagined no necessity for class conflict at all. A perfect conservatism for Ronald Reagan, who hated acknowledging friction—like when he said there need be no conflict in the Hollywood strike, that SAG could simply declare “neutrality” and be done with it; and when he called the blanket waiver he granted MCA a deal that helped everyone in Hollywood. Conflict was always, ever, just something introduced from the outside by alien forces (liberals, Communists), who revealed themselves, in that very act of disturbance, as aliens, enemies to all that was good and true, natural and right. That was how Reagan saw the world. This was how he radiated the aura that made others feel so good.

  THE TIMING OF HIS IDEOLOGICAL maturation was propitious. By 1958, the contradictions between the social vision of America’s ascendant labor movement—that the individual was best dignified by removing him from the vagaries of market competition—and the vision of corporate barons like GE’s—that market competition was precisely what produced individual dignity—seemed to be approaching a pitch near to civil war. Conservatives put antiunion “right to work” initiatives on the ballot in seven states; the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education promised its most aggressive electoral drive in history to defeat them. Lemuel Boulware, for his part, convened a historic meeting on a resort island off Florida with like-minded executives from a number of companies to strategize about how they might launch a coordinated national crusade to persuade “vast numbers of other businessmen to rise publicly to defend us when we are under attack,” to make producing a healthy “business climate” not just a question for siting General Electric factories, but part of a twilight struggle against the ruinous liberal demagogues in communities everywhere.

  For Boulware, moving businessmen into national politics fulfilled an ambition of long standing. “We businessmen are bold and imaginative before commercial competition,” as he put it in a widely republished 1949 speech. “We are cowardly and silent in public when confronted with union and other economic and political doctrines contrary to our belief.” He was determined they be cowardly no more. “No one,” he complained, “seems to be willing to go through the agony of trying to put what we think is right and what we instinctively know is right into language that is intelligible and convincing to the great mass of citizens who at the moment are being lied to by their government and by their unions.” Words like these made an enormous impression on his Hollywood ambassador, who was saying almost identical things decades later in speeches as governor to organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers: “It is time for business to start presenting the facts, because the facts are on your side. But, for heaven’s sake, don’t just repeat them to each other by way of your trade journals. Tell the people, and especially your customers and your employers—and usually they are one and the same—and tell our sons and daughters.”

  That was in 1972. But he said it first as General Electric’s coast-to-coast ambassador from Hollywood. His responsibilities for the company thus grew; the company’s relationship with the star became more intimate. More and more, broadcast episodes bore his personal stamp. For the Easter Sunday episode in 1958, for instance, he found a role he told the press was one of the three best he ever had. As the Miami News announced it, “Ronald Reagan, personification of the All-American male, gets a reprieve from ‘nice guy’ roles in the April 6 ‘General Electric Theater.’ He’ll play a Skid Row drunk.” In the episode, called “No Hiding Place” he played a real-life figure who picks himself out of the gutter and develops a 90 percent success rate saving others from alcoholism. (The script adamantly refused the teachings of his own mother concerning his father, and also the conclusion of Alcoholics Anonymous, that alcohol addiction was a disease. It also eschewed AA’s vision of recovery as a complex, fundamentally communal process, the hero preaching instead that addiction was a “a vice . . . acquired as any other vice is acquired,” that “you will it on yourself,” and that recovery was a simple matter of bootstrapping willpower—enabled, though, by the intervention of the character played by Ronald Reagan, achieving onscreen what he could not achieve as a child: a heroic rescue. It was perhaps the deepest reflection Reagan ever offered the public on his father’s affliction.) And, more and more, he was drafted as the company’s ideological ambassador in the media.

  “I have to say,” he said in 1958 on the country’s most respected syndicated radio interview program (whose host pronounced his name correctly), “from the standpoint of labor, that General Electric has issued quite a challenge. Organized labor had better look around and review their own attitudes, in the face of this very enlightened attitude toward the people who work for them.” He plied this ideology now in speaking assignments before civic clubs and for business organizations like the California Fertilizer Association and the National Electrical Contractors Association:

  “We can lose our freedom at once by succumbing to Russia or we can lose it gradually by installments—the end result is slavery.”

  “There can be no moral justification of the progressive tax—an idea hatched in the Communist revolution.”

  “Get any proposed program accepted, then with the participation of government in the field established, work for expansion, always aiming at the ultimate goal—a government that will someday be Big Brother to us all.”

  In another speech, this one to GE workers, he spoke of how there were more federal employees “than there are farmers in the U.S.”; that taxes ate up 27 percent of a gallon of gas and 34 percent of your phone bill—and that, yet, “we have been told by economists down through the years that if the total tax burden ever reaches 25 percent, we are in danger of undermining our private enterprise system.” The litany sounded a hell of a lot better when GE’s salaried, pompadoured charmer said it than when it came from some stern-sounding boss.

  “UNDERMININE OUR PRIVATE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM.” Here was an irony: the high tide of Boulwarism coincided, in the early 1950s and early ’60s, with a series of federal indictments of General Electric executives for a conspiracy to fix prices. They had schemed with other electrical manufacturing firms to remove from the exigencies of the marketplace the prices of everything from two-dollar insulators to multimillion-dollar hydroelectric turbines. As a historian of GE explained, the men who ran GE “took a dim view of competition.”

  In 1960, GE’s first strike since 1946 loomed. That same year Reagan earned a promotion. After years of enjoying an informal role in script selection and cast recruitment, he was officially named a producer. Simultaneously, his profile as a political troubador increased. “Boyish of face and gleaming of tooth, Ronald Reagan earned a reputation, among cinemagoers as a pleasant young man in white ducks, whose deepest thought was reserved for the next dance,” Time magazine explained four months into John F. Kennedy’s term, its first mention of Reagan outside the context of acting. “Once an outspoken Democrat, Reagan is now a staunch Republican [and] has developed into a remarkably active spokesman for conservatism.” More and more, he devoted his spare time to crisscrossing the nation preaching genial hellfire about the nine years America had left before it was all slave or all free, about federal aid to education as a “tool of tyranny,” and about welfare recipients as “a faceless mass waiting for a handout.” He also volunteered his services to the American Medical Association’s Boulware-style lobbying campaign against President Kennedy’s plan for government health insurance for the elderly. For what the AMA’s strategists labeled “Operation Coffee Cup,” Reagan recorded a speech on an LP to be played at housewives’ gatherings. In it, he proclaimed that “Medicare” was but an opening wedge for a government takeover of “every area of freedom as we have known in this country.” First the federal government would assign where doctors would be allowed to live. Then—who knows? “We are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children�
��s children what it was like in America when men were free.”

  But the company itself grew more cautious about taking on the government as its legal troubles deepened. And it was GE’s star propagandist who ended up in the crosshairs. Sometimes Reagan pointed to the Tennessee Valley Authority as the most glaring example available to those seeking to rescue a nation giving up its freedom on the installment plan, just as he’d learned from one of Lem Boulware’s favorite books, Economics in One Lesson. But the TVA bought its turbines for its massive dams from GE. In his first memoir Reagan describes an awkward conversation with GE’s CEO Ralph Cordiner, filled with long pauses, that concluded with Reagan asking, “Mr. Cordiner, what would you say if I said I could make my speech just as effectively without mentioning TVA?” He replied, “Well, it would make my job easier.” Reagan dropped TVA from the speech.

  At first the company had appeared to be either indifferent to or approving of his extracurricular activities. And with his newfound power he began using GE Theater to aggressively evangelize the notion that the Red conspiracy was burrowing within America’s institutions as assiduously as it ever had been when he first took up arms against the Communist plot to take over Hollywood. The eighth season opened in September 1961 with Reagan starring as a Russian officer in Soviet-occupied Hungary ordered to break the spirit of a freedom-loving village. His conscience wracked, steely, trembling, Bogart-like, the officer announces his conversion in a melodramatic closing peroration: “In all my life I never knew freedom. Until I saw you lose yours. But you’ll win it again. And maybe next time—you’ll win it for all of us.”

  In March 1962 Reagan produced a two-part adaptation of a memoir, I Was a Spy: The Story of a Brave Housewife, which told the story a suburban mother, Marion Miller, who in 1950 stumbled into an apparently innocuous meeting of a “Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born” and discovered it was but a front for what Joseph McCarthy had called that year a “conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” The claim was absurd at the moment McCarthy made it: the American Communist Party that Miller went on to infiltrate on behalf of the FBI had long ago been all but abandoned by the USSR, which had entirely rolled up its espionage networks in America in the wake of the spy scandals of the late 1940s. American Communists were so diminished that soon after, by one estimate, such FBI infiltrators made up 17 percent of the total membership. It was even more absurd in its 1962 incarnation on GE Theater. The piece was set in the present, when there were practically no Communists left in America, but that didn’t matter; hadn’t Hoover said in 1947 that the number of Communists was not relevant, given “the enthusiasm and ironclad discipline under which they operate,” their ideology “a condition akin to a disease that spreads like an epidemic”?

  To those not inside the far right, “My Dark Days” must have resembled a Twilight Zone hijack of a situation comedy starring Donna Reed. A party leader pays the Millers’ home a visit just as their little girl comes out in her nightgown: “Mommy? You said you’d come out and listen to my prayers.” “Prayers?” the commissar storms, then interrogates the little girl to get her to rat out her parents’ ideological deviation.

  Next, a comrade is forced to choose between his party membership and his non-Communist girlfriend:

  “You can’t live without love,” she implores him.

  “I can’t quit the party. It would be like cutting out a piece of myself. I’d walk the earth like a ghost for the rest of my life.”

  He decides, once and for all, in favor of the revolution, and leaves his girlfriend’s apartment.

  “Jane!! No!!”

  She leaps from a window to her death.

  “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” Ronald Reagan used to like to say. “The Democratic Party left me.” It was another Reagan story that dissolved the more closely it was examined. Once again, the platform JFK ran on in 1960 was well to the right of the one Reagan eagerly boomed out on the radio in 1948. (Kennedy just wanted government health insurance for the aged; Truman wanted it to be universal.) Another major difference, however, between Democrats then and Democrats beginning with Joe McCarthy’s fall in the middle of the 1950s, when Reagan was joining up with GE, was that they had largely abandoned the good-versus-evil narrative of an invisible Bolshevik bacillus insinuating itself into a great but complacent nation’s bloodstream. Respectable Democrats by Kennedy’s day (those, at least, outside the reactionary Deep South) considered that an embarrassing relic of a too-paranoid time.

  Ronald Reagan did not. And it is hard to see how Reagan could feel at home in a party that had abandoned a core tenet in his moral vision of the world and his own heroic place in it. Instead, his was now the sort of conservatism associated with the John Birch Society, whose McCarthy-like claim that Dwight D. Eisenhower had been a “conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” had made that organization a national scandal, denounced by both Democrats and Republicans like Richard Nixon. But Reagan said he could find no “moral justification for repudiating” the Birchers. Indeed, he had adopted many of their nostrums as favorite speech lines. One was “The inescapable truth is that we are at war, and we are losing that war simply because we don’t or won’t realize we are in it. We have ten years. Not ten years to make up our mind, but ten years to win or lose—by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free.” Another was a bogus quote attributed to Nikita Khrushchev: “You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright. But we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you finally wake up and find you already have communism. We won’t have to fight you; we’ll so weaken your economy until you fall like overripe fruit into our hands.” Reagan gave one speech in 1961 insisting Communists were still “infiltrating all phases of the government.” Senator Frank Church of Idaho earnestly wrote to J. Edgar Hoover to ask if he had any information supporting Reagan’s charges. Reagan gave another speech to a convention of supermarket executives arguing that the Communist Party, “crawling out from under the rocks,” had “ordered once again the infiltration” of the movie industry. This time, it was Hoover himself making the inquiries—once more sending agents to Ronald Reagan’s home. He told the G-men he had been misquoted, but that there was still cause for concern—“one can smell a situation once it starts to develop.”

  And in the spring of 1962, the place he smelled it was in Hollywood’s reaction to “My Dark Days.”

  An FBI document recorded that Reagan was the only producer to show interest in Marion Miller’s story; its absurd excesses were surely the reason (the episode’s director was so embarrassed by the prayer scene he fought unsuccessfully to have it cut), but Reagan blamed Reds. “On our producing staff the liberal view that communism is only something the ‘Right-wingers’ dreamed up prevails and they literally resorted to sabotage to pull the punch out of the show,” he wrote to Lorraine Wagner. Even worse, someone sabotaged the broadcast. “In one place,” he wrote to her, “there was sound but no picture.”

  Reagan was now a first citizen in the sort of circles that lionized Marion Miller and her husband (who had actually himself, the show did not reveal, been an undercover federal agent since 1939). They showered her with so many testimonials, awards, and patriotic medals that an ad for the next edition of her book called her “the most decorated housewife in the nation.” She was one of those “professional patriots” he had tongue-lashed so passionately in 1954. And now, so was he. They shared stages, especially in the McCarthyite petri dish of Orange County, California—for instance, before 17,500 on “youth night” of the Southern California School of Anti-Communism, sponsored by the Australian physician Dr. Fred Schwartz, who preached how the Russians had mastered the techniques of animal husbandry to addle the will of their subject populations. Another man who spoke at the rally was a lawyer—Jane Wyman’s divorce lawyer, as it happened—named Loyd Wright, who raised the roof by demanding a “preventive war”: issue an ultimatum to the Soviet Union to le
ave Eastern Europe by a certain date, he proposed; and if it didn’t, unleash the nuclear arsenal. “If we have to blow up Moscow, that’s too bad.”

  It was around then that the star’s next humiliation unfolded.

  BY THE WEEK OF THE Broadcast of the first of two episodes of “My Dark Days,” Reagan learned General Electric Theater was in danger of not being renewed for its ninth season. In an interview with the Boston Globe’s TV columnist, he blithely chalked it up to vagaries in the executive suites: “CBS is doing all sorts of shuffling of schedules and feels we should move to another day.” Instead, it ended up canceled altogether. What was really being discussed in those executive suites? No one ever came to know. There was the story, endlessly recycled, that made of Ronald Reagan a heroic martyr to principle: that he kept on hammering the Tennessee Valley Authority, until his bosses had no choice but to fire him. There is no evidence this was ever the case—not even from Ronald Reagan, who related in Where’s the Rest of Me? how he obediently began omitting mention of TVA in his speeches the first time that his bosses asked.

  A better explanation is Medicare. In June 1961, when Democrats in Congress decided to postpone action on Kennedy’s bill because of the volume of angry constituent mail against it, the muckraking columnist Drew Pearson sourced the flood tide directly to Operation Coffee Cup, and claimed that “thanks to a deal with the AMA and the acquiescence of General Electric, Ronald Reagan may be able to out-influence the President of the United States.” Reagan wrote an angry letter to Pearson: “I told your representative clearly and categorically that General Electric was not consulted in the matter, did not ‘acquiesce’ and in short had nothing at all to do with it.” It was a very sensitive moment in the history of General Electric’s relations with Washington: that summer, the company agreed to pay $7,448,000 in damages to the federal government to settle price-fixing suits.