Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  He’d heard a lot about Cordiner’s largesse and insight, but Ronnie considered his attitude beyond benevolent. He offered to “delete all references to TVA and public power” in the future, to make Cordiner’s job easier.

  But he didn’t—and it didn’t. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than Ronnie blasted the TVA all over again, in a scathing interview with the Los Angeles Mirror’s conservative syndicated columnist Hal Humphrey, who had goaded him into remarks seen as “lambasting venal big business.” No matter what Cordiner’s position was, the GE suits had had enough. “On future speaking engagements,” they declared, “Mr. Reagan will be accompanied by . . . a competent representative of the company who will take all necessary steps to insure that no further embarrassment on this subject” occurs.

  Embarrassment. It was a stigma Ronald Reagan wanted to avoid at all costs. Up until now, he had been GE’s celebrity pet pitchman. “The biggest problem we had was the occasional shopgirl who would bare her left breast and want him to autograph it,” Earl Dunckel recalled. But expressing political opinions at odds with the company’s, conservative or otherwise, veered into dangerous territory. It was of vital importance to Ronnie that nothing jeopardize this job. He enjoyed the work. It paid well—very well. The exposure he got from appearing on TV was perhaps even greater than what the movies had given him. A survey found he “had one of the most recognized names in the country.” As far as visibility and influence went, the payoff to him was incalculable. Although he was on the road an ungodly amount of time, away from his home and family, working sixteen-hour days, all in all it was an outstanding gig.

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  But he was now fired up with a fervent ideology that was informing every aspect of his life. Conservative journals like National Review, The Freeman, and Human Events fed his growing prejudices against government bloat and excessive regulation. Traveling between appearances, he pored over books like John Flynn’s rebuke of the New Deal, The Road Ahead; Lewis Haney’s How You Really Earn Your Living; Wilhelm Röpke’s Economics of the Free Society; and Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, which advocated free trade and opposition to price controls, inflation, and government stimulus. This was Ronald Reagan’s enlightenment, what he called his “postgraduate education in political science” and his “apprenticeship for public life.”

  It was primarily through the speeches Ronnie gave that word of his partisan conversion filtered to Republican operatives. The one-time New Dealer was an attractive addition to their ranks, especially in 1960, during a crucial election year. Initially, Ronald Reagan had been courted by Joseph Kennedy, whose son Jack was running for president against Richard Nixon. The elder Kennedy flew out to see him in Los Angeles to ask for his support, where Ronnie turned him down flat. Party affiliation aside—and that was a huge aside—he vehemently opposed JFK’s beneficence, spending taxpayers’ money to aid education (“the foot in the door to federal control”), unemployment insurance (“a prepaid vacation plan for freeloaders”), public housing, and especially his plan to provide government health insurance for the elderly. This last scheme particularly rankled. Ronnie’s father-in-law, Loyal Davis, regarded Medicare as an initiative emanating from the loins of Joseph Stalin himself. At Dr. Davis’s prompting, Ronnie volunteered his services to the plan’s chief opponent, the American Medical Association, for whom he recorded an incendiary spoken-word LP, “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” played at women’s organizations and social gatherings across the country. On it, he warned listeners that a program like Medicare was the portal to a government takeover of “every area of freedom as we have known in this country.”

  No, he wouldn’t be supporting John Kennedy in the forthcoming election. But—Richard Nixon? This was the scoundrel who did a hatchet job on Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, the man Ronnie regarded in his letter to Sam Harrod II as “less than honest and . . . an ambitious opportunist.” It would be an enormous leap of faith to endorse him now. He explained his misgivings in a phone call to Ralph Cordiner, GE’s president, who replied, “I think you may be wrong about Nixon.” Reagan regarded Cordiner as a man with a strong code of honor. If he thought Ronnie should give Nixon another look, he would.

  Ronald Reagan never explained his reevaluation of Richard Nixon other than to say, “He wasn’t the villain I’d thought him to be.” Perhaps it came down to a rationalization: Nixon was the lesser of two evils. Or maybe he detected a promising statesman. In any case, Ronnie supported the Republican ticket. In fact, he’d go it one better. He wrote to Nixon after the Democratic convention, cautioning that Kennedy’s acceptance speech was “a frightening call to arms.” He assured Nixon that there was plenty in it to run against, notwithstanding JFK’s “idea of the ‘challenging new world,’ one in which the Federal Gov’t. will grow bigger & do more & and of course spend more.” The prospect appalled Ronnie, who concluded: “Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s ‘bold new imaginative’ program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.”

  Ronnie left little doubt that he would cross the aisle as a Democrat for Nixon, but he warned the candidate that he “cannot support the ticket if it includes Rockefeller.” New York governor Nelson Rockefeller was anathema to die-hard conservatives. He was a liberal Republican, and to true believers the only thing separating him from a liberal Democrat was “the difference between creeping socialism and galloping socialism.” Ronnie proposed a better number-two man: Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was a friend of his mother-in-law, Edith Luckett; they were next-door neighbors in Biltmore Estates. Ronnie had devoured the senator’s best-selling manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, cherry-picking lines from it to quote in his speeches.

  Nixon had no plans to anoint Goldwater. He was sending Goldwater to campaign for him in the South, where the senator’s stand against civil rights legislation would go far toward attracting longtime Democratic segregationists to the party. But Nixon now saw a strong ally in Ronald Reagan, and scrawled a note across the top of the letter, which he passed on to his campaign staff: “Use him as a speaker wherever possible. He used to be a liberal.”

  That should have come as no great revelation. No less a cultural bellwether than Time had pretty much called it in an earlier editorial. Admitting that the magazine had only ever viewed Ronald Reagan as a run-of-the-mill actor—“a pleasant young man in white ducks, whose deepest thought was reserved for the next dance”—it now offered a pithy new appraisal. “Once an outspoken Democrat,” its reporter observed, “Reagan is now a staunch Republican [and] has developed into a remarkably active spokesman for conservatism.”

  To former activist colleagues, this was a stunning piece of news. Olivia de Havilland found it “outrageous that he went over to the other side” after all their hard work for New Deal causes. Dana Andrews concluded Ronnie had been brainwashed by the “rich Republicans” running General Electric, stranding him “on the wrong side of the fence politically.” But conservatives had long seen this coming. William F. Buckley Jr., founder and editor of the National Review, had corresponded with Ronnie since the mid-1950s, parsing nuggets from his book Up from Liberalism as well as think pieces in the magazine. And his closest social friends—the really rich Republicans like publishing magnate Walter Annenberg, Alfred Bloomingdale, and industrialists Earle Jorgensen and William Wilson—knew how much his views corresponded with conservative causes they’d been promoting and underwriting actively for years.

  Jack Kennedy’s election pushed Ronnie across the threshold. The badly bungled Bay of Pigs invasion, the North Vietnamese army’s incursion into Laos, and the erection of the Berlin Wall were very discouraging developments, comingled with what he viewed as domestic boondoggles: the establishment of a food-stamp program, the raising of the minimum wage to $1.15 an hour under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the launch of the Peace Corps. The twin
screws of “socialism” and “communism” began to tighten in his chest. And yet, despite what Reagan saw as obvious misfires, Kennedy’s approval rating jumped to a mind-boggling 82 percent.

  In response, Reagan struck out on a new tour of speeches. He doubled down on opposing Kennedy, attacking his New Frontier initiatives as lapses in judgment that could lead to social “slavery.” Communists, he insisted, were still “infiltrating all phases of the government,” just as they’d edged their way back into the motion-picture industry.

  Taking on the administration was a natural course of action, but if his instincts were keen, his timing was unfortunate.

  During the fall of 1961, a commission headed by the president’s brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy began investigating MCA’s exclusive position as both a talent agency and a television film producer. Convinced that MCA had breached antitrust laws, the Justice Department launched a federal grand jury to probe the possibility of a conspiracy between MCA and the Screen Actors Guild, focusing on the blanket waiver that SAG had granted Lew Wasserman to expand his empire in 1952.

  That put Ronald Reagan in the direct line of fire. As guild president when the waiver was requested, he had ushered it through the approval process with unusual finesse. Were there any irregularities behind the deal? A source for the government fingered Ronnie as “a complete slave of MCA who would do their bidding on anything.” There had to be some kind of quid pro quo, the source suggested, perhaps “some type of consideration” in the form of a promise for future work or an exchange of cash “between the top people in SAG and MCA.” As a result, Ronnie was subpoenaed to testify on February 5, 1962.

  Why, the government wanted to know, did the guild grant MCA a blanket waiver in opposition to its bylaws? And how did he later come to have part ownership in the TV shows he produced for MCA?

  Ronald Reagan’s testimony—a bravura two-hour burlesque of feints, dodges, and humbug—functioned as the rehearsal for a routine he perfected as governor and president. As John Fricano, the government’s point man, ran through his questions, Ronnie played the naïf, a bumpkin actor who, golly-gee, wasn’t sure of any specifics. While he could rattle off intricate sequences of plays that his Eureka football team ran twenty years earlier, the man who Earl Dunckel said could quote dates and places “like a computer,” that “virtually everything that went into [his] mind stayed there,” couldn’t name a single producer the Screen Actors Guild negotiated with in the residual dispute just four years earlier. “My memory would be pretty dim, I would think,” he hedged. “Maybe—I don’t honestly know.” He couldn’t recall if he even participated in the negotiations between SAG and MCA. Nor could he supply the number of waivers granted to other talent agents subsequent to MCA’s blanket waiver. (The answer, of course, was zero.) The evasions came one after the other. “My memory is a little hazy.” “I’m a little dim on that.” “I’ll have to take your word.” “You have me there.” “I’m not sure.” “I couldn’t say.” “I wouldn’t be able to tell you.” And dozens of times: “I don’t recall” and “I don’t know.” An observer was quick to put a name to it—“selective amnesia,” a strategy that confounded his inquisitor.

  After the testimony had concluded, the Justice Department suspected a sweetheart deal, concluding it was “likely that Reagan had been given a promise of the role of host of GE Theater as consideration for keeping his actors in line”—in other words, delivering the guild’s vote in favor of the blanket waiver. To determine if there was any financial payoff, the Antitrust Division subpoenaed Ronnie and Nancy’s tax returns for 1952 through 1955, as well as those of the members of the Screen Actors Guild’s executive board. Ultimately, no inconsistencies were discovered and no charges were filed, but reverberations from the investigation were felt in the executive suite of General Electric.

  It was alarming having your company spokesman dragged before a federal grand jury. GE was buttressed by lucrative government contracts. It couldn’t afford a sideshow that might threaten essential interests. The company was already fending off an indictment by the Justice Department for price fixing in the electrical industry. The fallout from an individual’s alleged indiscretions—legitimate or not—would only serve to bring unnecessary scrutiny.

  Ronnie’s politics had also become increasingly controversial. In a new round of speeches, he presented himself as “an orthodox and patriotic American, drawing attention to a problem of government growth that would destroy the country if it wasn’t corrected.” He refused to put the brakes on his repeated attacks of the Kennedy administration. And he’d undertaken what some considered an odious job—as campaign chairman for Loyd Wright,* an extremist who advocated an offensive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, in his bid for a California Senate seat against Thomas Kuchel. This was entirely too radical for a company like GE. By 1962, even the AFL-CIO, so receptive to Ronnie’s achievements as SAG president, had branded him “a right-wing zealot.”

  General Electric began to take a good, hard look at Ronald Reagan.

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  It didn’t help that GE Theater’s ratings had suffered a steep and steady slide. Since Bonanza’s weak debut in 1959, the NBC western had picked up steam and, by 1961, not only outperformed but decimated its anthology rival. CBS, GE’s network, “was deeply and justifiably disturbed by this development,” particularly since GE Theater followed The Ed Sullivan Show, its Sunday-night tent pole. That nine p.m. time slot was valuable real estate; the network had a franchise to maintain.

  “The time had come to make a decision,” recalled Paul Wassmansdorf. In early March 1962, he attended an after-hours meeting in the company’s New York headquarters with Gerald Phillippi, GE’s president, and Stanley Smith, the marketing vice president, specifically to decide the show’s fate. But going in, it was a fait accompli. The ratings had dipped so low that they “couldn’t see a future in it.” GE Theater had run its course. They decided to replace the show with another Revue series, GE True, hosted by Jack Webb. The tribunal delivered its verdict to Ronnie, who was traveling at the time, and offered him an alternative, Wassmansdorf said. “Would he consider being just a spokesman for General Electric?”

  Ronnie heard it as a sop—that any speeches he made on the company’s behalf from then on “would be sales pitches for GE products,” free of political substance. It didn’t suit him to hawk appliances such as “the new 1963 coffee pot” or to “peddle toasters.” “I’m not interested anymore,” he told them.

  The show’s cancellation disappointed and embittered him. He was convinced it had nothing to do with ratings. “The government is trying to control everything,” he disclosed to his family over dinner. Someone high-placed in the administration, he’d heard, had written a letter to General Electric threatening to cancel its contracts unless GE got rid of him as a spokesman. He had a pretty good idea who it was. “Robert Kennedy is behind this attack on me.”

  This notion surfaced again months later, after Ronnie sought Lew Wasserman’s assistance in resurrecting his acting career. A comeback wasn’t that much of a pipe dream. The majority of his friends were still making pictures—William Holden, Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Gregory Peck. “Like any actor,” he rationalized, “I keep thinking that the big picture is still ahead of me.” But weeks passed without an offer for his services. The opportunities were sparse for a fifty-one-year-old actor. He appeared in a segment of the Wagon Train TV series while waiting for a movie. Otherwise the phone never rang.

  By the summer, frustrated by the radio silence and desperate to work, he confronted Wasserman, who advised him to modify his options, perhaps by doing more television. This wasn’t the response Ronnie expected. “You told me to wait for the right movie script,” he argued. Lew should know: Ronnie had always done everything that was asked of him. It was finally time for the agent to come through. There was a bit part for him in an upcoming Don Siegel film at Universal; otherwise no on
e in Hollywood expressed an interest in hiring Ronald Reagan. In his most patronizing voice, Wasserman said, “You’ve been around this business long enough to know that I can’t force someone on [a producer] if he doesn’t want to use them.”

  Ronnie stormed out of the office. “I felt that I had been betrayed,” he said, “and I guess Lew felt that he was doing what he had to do.” But deep down, he suspected it had more to do with politics. Wasserman, long active in Democratic causes, made no secret that he was a staunch Kennedy advocate. The long arm of government, Ronnie thought, was reaching out to silence him. If that was its objective, it had another thing coming.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE FRIENDS OF RONALD REAGAN

  “Man is by nature a political animal.”

  —ARISTOTLE

  Holmes Tuttle, the hard-charging Oklahoman who presided over the splashy Ford showroom bearing his name at the corner of La Brea Avenue and Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, could hardly keep his mind on the business of car sales. He had a full lot of gleaming new Galaxies, Thunderbirds, Falcon Futuras, and Sunliners that needed clearing to make way for the revolutionary new Mustang promised later in 1964, but all he could think about was presidential politics. As the western financial chairman for Barry Goldwater’s campaign, Tuttle was scrambling to right a leaky ship. Republican support was lukewarm for the candidate whose pugnacious, profane talk had alienated party moderates. The fund-raising spigot had just about run dry. An immediate infusion of cash was essential for the ticket to remain competitive.

  Tuttle resorted to a fail-safe charity ploy: throw a posh dinner with a celebrity speaker and lean on guests to write big checks. He and two friends—Henry Salvatori and Cy Rubel, like-minded conservative millionaire entrepreneurs—swung into action. They rented out the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel and dusted off their list of local donors. But what attraction could they rely on to draw the city’s wealthiest angels? John Wayne was off filming on location. Robert Montgomery hosted an eponymous TV anthology necessitating his round-the-clock presence. “We didn’t have anybody,” Tuttle recalled, “so I called up Ron and asked if he wouldn’t give a twenty-minute talk.”