by Bret Baier
The election was a clash of ideologies, as Reagan biographer Matthew Dallek wrote:
Reagan was a card-carrying conservative, Brown a proud liberal. For Reagan, opposing communism was paramount. For Brown, anticommunism was but one issue in foreign affairs and a nonissue at home. Reagan saw the welfare-state policies of recent decades as a slippery slope toward socialism. Brown viewed governmental programs as the best way to achieve a “great society.”
Each was battling for the soul of the state and, at least in Reagan’s mind, the nation.
A month before the election, Time magazine published a cover story, “Ronald for Real,” which captured some of Reagan’s special campaign magic:
Crisscrossing California from Roubidoux to Rialto, from Taft to Twentynine Palms, Republican Ronald Reagan, 55, has been running 18 hours a day as if the Dead End Kids were after him (they were in at least two of his movies). And to the surprise of Republican pros and the chagrin of the Democratic hierarchy, the candidate from Warner Bros. has turned out to be the most magnetic crowd puller California has seen since John F. Kennedy first stumped the state in 1960. . . .
A polished orator with an unerring sense of timing and his listeners’ mood, Reagan can hold an audience entranced for 30 or 40 minutes while he plows through statistics, gags and homilies. At times—although there is only six years’ difference in their ages—he does a stagy caricature of an ancient-sounding Pat Brown that is true to the last creaky quaver.
On Election Day, November 6, Brown predicted he would win by more than the three hundred thousand votes he had defeated Richard Nixon by in 1962. The polls showed a tighter race. When the votes were counted, Reagan won by almost a million votes. On January 3, 1967, at one minute after midnight, he was sworn in as governor of California.
ONCE IN OFFICE, REAGAN surrounded himself with a tight group that stayed with him in one way or another for the rest of his political life. The team was headed in the first two years by Chief of Staff William Clark, a former Catholic seminarian and lawyer who had been drawn to Reagan after hearing his speech on behalf of Goldwater. Clark recruited a young Republican Party operative named Michael Deaver, who became so close to Reagan and Nancy that he was practically their alter ego. Press aide Lyn Nofziger became director of communications, and Caspar Weinberger, who would rise to prominence during Reagan’s presidency, was director of finance in the early years.
In the third year, Edwin Meese replaced Clark as chief of staff. Meese, the deputy district attorney of Alameda County in Northern California, had caught Reagan’s eye with his strong handling of campus unrest at Berkeley.
Reagan’s governing style, Meese said, was “government by cabinet.” He was not a lone wolf. Cabinet meetings were held several times a week, sometimes throughout the day. Also influential was his “kitchen cabinet,” a group of well-heeled advisors who had his ear and bolstered his political fortunes. These included, most prominently, Holmes Tuttle, who’d first convinced him to run; Henry Salvatori, a geophysicist and oil company founder; Justin Dart, a consumer products giant and chairman of the board of the University of California; and Alfred Bloomingdale, a department store magnate whose wife, Betsy, became Nancy’s best friend for life.
As governor, Reagan’s daily fare was made up of domestic issues. But he never lost sight of his global perspective and ideals. “He had to face up to a lot of dirty housekeeping problems as governor,” said Spencer. “But he had this vision of America that all these things we have—Democratic party, Republican party, this and that and everything, our warts and our good things—we’re not going to have any of those if this Communist threat proceeds through the world. . . . He never talked about his goals, but when you look back on it, his goals never changed. He only had one item that really bothered him, and that was the Communist threat. Everything else was second tier. He conducted himself with that in mind as governor as well as president.”
Chapter 3
The Greatest Stage
In 1962, after losing the California gubernatorial election to Pat Brown—his second electoral humiliation in three years—Richard Nixon had promised the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” The press and everyone else took him seriously. ABC aired a thirty-minute program entitled “Political Obituary of Richard Nixon.” But on February 1, 1968, Nixon announced that he was running for president for a second time. In an open letter to the people of New Hampshire, he wrote that his eight years out of government had allowed him a chance to reflect upon and study the nation’s issues, and he believed he was prepared with some answers.
“For these critical years, America needs new leadership,” he said, ignoring the fact that he was anything but a fresh face. His critics immediately began to joke about the “new” Nixon, the magically resurrected political figure from the Eisenhower era, and many Republicans were outspoken in their desire for an alternative. With Nixon’s record of losing elections, they were fearful of blowing their chance.
The Republicans had been strategizing for a long time about 1968 and thought that incumbent president Lyndon Johnson’s sagging popularity and the deep divisions in the Democratic Party presented a golden opportunity. But it was a complicated scenario. At the beginning of 1968, the political landscape was treacherous, filled with land mines: the increasingly disastrous war in Vietnam, the inflationary repercussions of that expensive war and an ambitious domestic agenda that could not be paid for, and a roiling cultural revolution growing louder, with protests by antiwar and civil rights demonstrators flooding streets and campuses. Partisans on both sides of the political divide were restless. And no one could foresee the events that would rattle the nation in the coming months: President Johnson’s surprise announcement that he would not seek reelection, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the tantalizing rise and shocking death of Robert F. Kennedy. RFK had been a Johnson nemesis and pied piper of young voters, and soon after his death a riotous Democratic National Convention in Chicago tore the party apart.
Nixon’s carefully considered run had been in the works for years, at least since the 1966 midterms, but now there wasn’t much time. With only six months to the Republican National Convention and nine months to the general election, it was a compressed campaign season. But the Republican Party, too, was divided between the hard-line conservative heirs of Goldwater and the more liberal, often antiwar wing.
Early on, a liberal opponent to Nixon emerged in Michigan governor George Romney. Like his son Mitt forty-four years later, Romney was the picture of American rectitude, a devout Mormon with executive governing experience who looked and acted the part. But his candidacy did nothing to appeal to the growing conservative wing of the party. Romney was quickly eliminated after a fatal gaffe. Previously a strong supporter of the war in Vietnam, he now held the opposite position, explaining his flip-flop as being the result of a visit to Vietnam in 1965. “When I came back from Viet Nam, I’d just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get,” he told a Detroit television interviewer. The image stuck and took root, and the public never looked at him the same way again. He became the man who had been brainwashed in Vietnam. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller stepped into the liberal void with an antiwar platform that never gained traction.
Quietly, without much fanfare, a conservative dark horse was emerging. Ronald Reagan was in his second year as governor, and his closest allies had been strategizing about his presidential prospects since 1966. Indeed, “Reagan for President” signs had been seen on election night. There was no other candidate who appealed to Republican conservatives the way Reagan did. But was the party ready? Was Reagan ready?
The temptation to enter the fray was clearly there, debated frequently by Reagan’s advisors. Nofziger described two camps, one in favor of a run, one opposed:
There was a split in the Reagan team. I don’t mean that badly, but there are people who felt, You’ve been elected to be governor, stay here a
nd be governor. And there were people like me who thought, Well, this guy has got something, but if he’s governor for six years or whatever, who knows what will happen? It seems to me that he’s on a roll here right now. He’s won this governorship handily. He’s the governor of the biggest state. He’s well known across the country. Let’s go ahead and push him because we have a shot.
Reagan was convinced that he should at least dip a toe in as a “favorite son.” In the era before binding primaries, the favorite-son system was a way for states to gain influence in the national political process. Basically, a state anointed a favorite-son candidate, and only he was on the primary ballot. He would then arrive at the convention with the state’s votes in his pocket, which presumably he’d hand to the candidate of his choice. The favorite son was not considered to be a real candidate. When Reagan announced his candidacy, he made it clear that he wasn’t serious about challenging Nixon, only trying to avoid a bitter primary fight in California between Nixon and the other contenders. However, his insistence that his favorite-son candidacy was not real was not very convincing to the presumed head of the ticket, in this case Nixon. There was always the chance that the voters might fall in love with the insurgent and show up at the convention ready to do battle. A challenge is a challenge, no matter how you dress it up.
Reagan did have one thing going for him: unlike Nixon, he had no ugly political baggage. He was a fresh face, but he also had evolved as a public persona who could articulate the issues of the day. Paul Laxalt, the governor of the neighboring state of Nevada, had come to respect Reagan, and the two men had developed a close partnership. Laxalt called him an instinctive politician whose “motive was just as pure as it could be. No outside agenda. He had a fundamental philosophy, which evolved during the General Electric days when he went all around the country as a spokesman for them. He was a vehicle, their vehicle, for private enterprise, extolling the benefits of private enterprise and all the evils of excessive government. He had had a very simple philosophy that he had developed, and that made it very easy for him wherever he went. He never really had to remember what he said last.”
In fact, Laxalt noted, some of his stories were so well worn that those closest to Reagan would beg for mercy when he launched into one of them—Oh no, do we have to listen to this again? “He’d always remind us, as any good actor would, you’ve heard this before, many times—probably too many times, in your estimation—but that person in that group I’m talking to is hearing it for the first time.”
As a craftsman of politics, “he wasn’t even in the same league as Richard Nixon,” Laxalt said. “But in terms of having a message and communicating with the people? In my estimation, I’ve never seen anybody quite as effective as him.”
That said, Reagan had two challenges on the national stage. The first was the wide perception, largely based on his fiery support for Goldwater, that he was an extremist. The second was his history of vacillation. As Eisenhower put it in a letter to Walter Thayer, a close confidant, in late 1966, “His biggest trouble is that he has a past record that is rather checkered with flea hopping from one end of the political spectrum to the other.”
But Reagan continued to intrigue Eisenhower, and from Nixon’s perspective, the former president was sending mixed messages of his own. A story Eisenhower related in his diary is telling: In March 1967, soon after Reagan had become governor, he and Ike were together at the Eldorado Country Club when they decided to hold an impromptu press conference. One of the reporters asked Eisenhower his opinion of Nixon, and Ike replied that he was one of the ablest men he knew. The reporters gathered had not heard the question correctly, and they thought Ike’s words were describing Reagan. The story of Ike’s praise for Reagan even made it onto the evening news with Walter Cronkite. Eisenhower issued a correction, but Cronkite never did, so for most of the nation the original version stuck: Ike liked Reagan. He wasn’t so sure about Nixon.
It’s especially notable that Eisenhower did not publicly endorse Nixon until right before the Republican National Convention, perhaps leaving himself room to change his mind. Intimidated by this silence and possibly fearing a negative answer if he made a direct request, Nixon never asked for his backing. By then Eisenhower was gravely ill, living in a hospital suite at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Eisenhower, the only living Republican ex-president (Herbert Hoover having died in 1964), perhaps gave a thought to his own legacy and was no longer certain that Nixon was the man to carry the party forward. A lot of time had passed since Nixon’s failed campaign of 1960.
In the end, Nixon never had an opponent who could mount a real challenge. The party establishment was behind him, and the decisive action that earned important support on the right was his selection of the conservative Spiro Agnew as his running mate. Southern delegates had made it clear that if he chose a moderate or liberal, they would abandon him for Reagan.
At the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach in August, Nixon easily captured the nomination. As balloons cascaded down on the delegates and horns blared, Reagan might have felt disappointed that he hadn’t made a stronger showing. But he told his aides he didn’t feel bad about it. He just hadn’t been ready. In the meantime, he said, party unity was the most important thing.
Writing about the political convention later that year, Norman Mailer had a prophecy: “For years in the movies Reagan had played the good guy and been proud of it. If he didn’t get the girl, it was because he was too good a guy to be overwhelmingly attractive. That was all right. He would grit his teeth and get the girl the next time out.”
BACK TO WORK IN California, Reagan honed a governing style that was part staunch conservatism and part idealism—thus his fondness for John Winthrop’s image of a “city upon a hill,” a posture Steven Hayward of the Heritage Foundation refers to as his “idiosyncratic conservatism.” Reagan had showed his unconventional conservatism almost right out of the gate. In their first year in office, he and Laxalt bonded over, of all things, a tax increase. “I’ll never forget it,” Laxalt later said, recalling the irony of two conservative governors making such a pact. “First I told him, ‘Ron, I’ve come to a real bad conclusion here, but I don’t think I can avoid it. I think we’re going to have to go for a tax increase.’ He said, ‘You know, Paul, we’ve come to the same conclusion.’ So we both went for a tax increase, and we used to joke about it because the tax increase rejuvenated our respective economies, and the people who succeeded us as governor had all the money in the world for years. But we bit that bullet.”
One of Reagan’s main goals as governor was welfare reform, and California was one of the first states to tackle it on a massive level. Even here, he operated more pragmatically than ideologically. Peter Hannaford, a public relations specialist and close aide of Reagan toward the end of his second term, recalled that Reagan once told him his strategy on welfare reform: “You know, if I can get 70 percent of what I want on a particular program, I’ll take it, because I figure it will work well enough that I can go back next year and get the other thirty.” That strategy, Hannaford said, was quite effective in that Reagan got a lot more than he gave. In the process, the welfare system became more efficient. “It became a model for many other states and was really the bellwether for his constant call as president for welfare reform on a federal level.”
Hannaford had an interesting insight into Reagan’s governing style, which he believed was honed in his years as president of the Screen Actors Guild. During his tenure, there had been some very intense negotiations with the studios and their high-powered lawyers, while the Guild had had just Reagan, a couple of officers, and a lawyer. Reagan told Hannaford:
An interesting thing about negotiating I discovered was you’d go at it hammer and tongs. And one side would say, “We can’t possibly accept that proposal under any circumstances.” You’d reach some point—you could just sense it in the room—when the moment was ripe for a compromise. But the tempers had been so strong, and the declarations so st
rong, that you couldn’t do it right then and there. So, somebody would say, “Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.” And someone would go to the bathroom. Then somebody on the other side would go to the bathroom. And in the bathroom, they’d say, “What do you think about so-and-so?” And first thing you know, we’ve got the beginnings of a settlement. You’d have to sense when the moment is to make the break in the tough position that you’ve taken and when the other side is willing to do the same thing. A lot of it is a matter of face—in other words, how it’s going to look.
In 1974, as he was nearing the end of his second term as governor, Reagan was considering his next act. He had decided not to seek a third term. (He was succeeded by his secretary of state, Jerry Brown, the only son of Pat Brown. As of this writing Brown is governor for a second time; he succeeded Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010. Term limits will prevent him from running again in 2018.) Out of the governor’s office, Reagan was looking for a strategic way to stay in the public eye. An old radio guy from Hollywood named Harry O’Connor had been whispering in his ear. He told Reagan he could get him onto the radio for a five-minute daily commentary, and Reagan liked the idea. But while he was considering it, Michael Deaver got a phone call from Walter Cronkite. He proposed a slot for Reagan on CBS, doing a five-minute commentary on the evening news twice a week, alternating with Eric Sevareid. Deaver thought it was an incredible offer and he enthusiastically presented it to Reagan.
When the time came to make a decision, Deaver thought it was going to be “a slam dunk” in favor of the TV show. Who would turn down a chance to appear on the CBS Evening News twice a week? But Reagan said, “I’m not going to do it. I’m going to do the radio show.”