by Bob Spitz
Nancy Reagan wasn’t at all happy. She thought she had married an actor and wasn’t prepared to pursue a political life. Even so, she’d seen the writing on the wall. “I knew those people were going to come up to the house after that disastrous election,” she said. “I knew it. And they did.”
Ronnie, for his part, took it in stride. This wasn’t the first time he’d been approached to run for office. In the past, he’d always been adamant: hands-on politics wasn’t for him. He reiterated his old line of defense, that he had neither the ambition nor the desire to represent the party in that capacity, but he also acknowledged that circumstances had changed. He was fifty-four. His movie career was finished. The Death Valley Days job wouldn’t last forever, and besides it had none of the prestige or range he’d explored while at General Electric. In any case, he agreed to think over the offer and continue discussing it with Tuttle and his colleagues.
Holmes Tuttle judged the response as an excuse to press on. He organized a meeting at one of his homes in Palm Springs to sound out the support of a handful of influential men—wealthy like-minded entrepreneurs who’d backed Barry Goldwater and were invested in furthering the conservative mission. They were a formidable group: men for whom power and privilege were second nature; men who saw politics as a way of protecting their interests; men who expected their opinions on issues to have an impact. So they put their money where their mouths were. It was an incestuous group. Most had known one another for a long time. They did business with one another. They’d often get together for cocktails or dinner parties; their wives were friendly. They considered themselves Los Angeles society, as opposed to the Hollywood showbiz crowd, whom they mostly shunned as riffraff. They made an exception, of course, for the Reagans, who were regular members of their crowd.
Aside from Cy Rubel and Henry Salvatori, this group of men included Leonard Firestone, president of the family tire company and an energetic philanthropist who’d served as chairman of the doomed Rockefeller campaign; Alfred Bloomingdale, co-founder of Diners Club and heir to the department store fortune, whose energy and charm made him an attractive figure on the New York–Los Angeles social circuit; Earle Jorgensen, a prominent steel magnate serving the aircraft industry, who sat on the board of half a dozen corporations and universities, yet was quick to stand on his head as a stunt at public gatherings; Jaquelin Hume, chairman of Basic American Foods, the world’s largest producer of dried onion and garlic; Leland Kaiser, an investment banker; Arch Monson Jr., the western director of Autocall, which specialized in fire protection equipment; and two Reagan intimates—his lawyer, William French Smith, and Taft Schreiber, his agent at MCA.
By the end of the meeting they had decided to make it official, calling themselves Friends of Ronald Reagan.
They still weren’t sure he would run for governor. Holmes Tuttle made that clear from the outset. But they were committed to backing him should he agree. They wanted someone in Sacramento who stood for the basic premises that Ronald Reagan was espousing. His belief system was their belief system, and they felt comfortable with him, they knew him. He was, in a way, one of them—maybe not in the business community, not even remotely on an income level, but in spirit, definitely in spirit.
Tuttle was given the assignment of leaning on Ronnie and soliciting a company to manage a political campaign. In only one of these endeavors was he soon successful. Friends pointed him to the Spencer-Roberts firm—Stuart Spencer and Bill Roberts—a pair of ballsy Republican operatives from Southern California who had nearly stolen the 1964 primary for Nelson Rockefeller. Before that, they’d enjoyed a spectacular string of victories in forty congressional races. They were the most aggressive strategists in the game, Tuttle learned, not least from Goldwater’s people, who had taken their lumps.
But Spencer and Roberts were even less willing than Ronnie to launch his campaign. “It was out of the blue,” said Spencer of a Reagan candidacy. “We didn’t even know the guy.” They’d heard through the grapevine he was “a real right-winger,” which, in their judgment, precluded any chance of success. There was also a rumor making the rounds that Ronnie was a member of the John Birch Society, which was too extreme for their tastes. “Birchers vilified people they didn’t like and started rumors that were untrue,” Spencer says. “That would have been a deal-breaker for us.” Anyway, their firm was in preliminary discussions with the former San Francisco mayor George Christopher, who’d already thrown his hat into the gubernatorial ring. Christopher was a well-liked moderate Republican who was capable of giving Governor Brown a run for his money. For Spencer and Roberts’s money, Christopher was the better bet.
Still, they agreed to meet Ronald Reagan, to sound him out and judge for themselves. In April 1965, they had an exploratory lunch conference with him, Neil Reagan, and a Friends of Ronald Reagan intermediary named Thaxton Hanson at the Cave de Roy, a private club just above Beverly Boulevard that was founded by actors, among them Paul Newman and Tony Curtis. The meeting was less a lunch than a grilling. Spencer and Roberts bombarded Ronnie with nonstop questions: “Why are you doing this?” “What do you believe?” “How well informed are you on the issues?” It went on for several hours. Eventually they felt comfortable enough to ask the clincher: “Are you a Bircher?” Ronnie laughed uneasily. “I don’t think so,” he responded. The answer was artfully ambiguous. He had been a speaker at a 1962 fund-raiser for John Rousselot, a Republican congressman, who held prominent posts in the John Birch Society. And later, privately, he told Bill Roberts that “it was unfair to label all Birchers as ‘crazies.’” He agreed wholeheartedly with the organization’s underlying premise—that communism was the source of all evil. But was he a Bircher? I don’t think so. For now his answer had to suffice.
Spencer and Roberts left the meeting impressed with Ronald Reagan, but more undecided than ever. “This guy’s solid, he’s new, he’s articulate, and he’s got great name ID,” they agreed. He was also, Bill Roberts found, “a person of great compassion” with “a tremendous sense of humor,” all of which contributed to their rising interest. But they knew from doing research sampling that George Christopher would beat him when push came to shove. Spencer had also talked to George Murphy, who gave him enthusiastic feedback, but with reservations. Murphy raved about Ronnie’s ideology and work habits. “But he doesn’t have a grasp of politics,” he said, “and he can be prone to mistakes.” Spencer and Roberts had a decision to make. “We were two young guys who understood politics was a gamble,” Spencer says. “Every time you go to the mat you roll the dice.” Ronald Reagan, they felt, was a man with a future, a pretty good bet to put their money on. After weighing the odds, they looked at each other and said, “Let’s do it. Let’s roll the dice.”
Even with Roberts and Spencer on board, Holmes Tuttle couldn’t budge Ronnie one way or the other. He refused to either rule out a run or commit. Nancy’s father, Loyal Davis, had strongly advised him against it, and the prospect in general was daunting. “I kept saying no and Holmes Tuttle and his group kept coming back and saying they wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Reagan recalled. “They kept insisting that I offered the only chance of victory and to bring the party back into something viable.” If they were unable to wear him down, they at least managed to make a dent in his armor. He proposed that he spend six months on the road making speeches to ordinary Californians, to take their temperature, so to speak. It would allow him to gauge their impressions of him as a viable candidate. At the end of that time, he said, “I’ll make the decision whether you’re right or wrong. I think you are wrong about me being the candidate.” And he really meant that—at the time. No matter, by December 31, 1965, he promised to give the Friends of Reagan his decision.
Stu Spencer told him that if anyone asked if he was running for governor, he should say he’s exploring it. Spencer also warned him that they’d be monitoring his progress. “At the end of the year, if you’re not cutting it,” he said, “we’re going t
o tell you and you’ll have a decision to make.” Meanwhile, he and Bill Roberts would start laying the groundwork for a run so that the necessary machinery would be in place if they all decided to go forward.
Ronald Reagan’s noncommittal stance was driving the Friends of Reagan crazy, but Spencer and Roberts plowed ahead. By October 1965 they had begun to see the basis for a candidacy taking shape. Money was flowing into a Reagan campaign chest, people were beating their doors down to pitch in on early strategy, and the media was drumming up speculation in the press, all while Ronnie zigzagged up and down the California coast, speaking to every Rotary Club, Chamber of Commerce, Lion’s Club, and United Way affiliate that would listen to another variation of the Speech. Observers at these functions noted that “his appearance is statuesque,” even that “he was heroic,” and above all that “he had done his homework.” Audiences were charmed by his “homespun spiel . . . spiced with wisecracks” about despotic Big Government. Occasionally reports filtered back that his exploratory work was encouraging and, as promised, he would issue his decision by December 31. But he’d already made up his mind. “They’re right,” he told Nancy about a month before the deadline. “I think I do offer the best chance of winning.”
Stuart Spencer recalls, “We said to ourselves very privately, ‘This exploratory thing is all bullshit.’ We knew better—he was running for governor.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE CITIZEN POLITICIAN
“Wait a minute! If I win this damn thing I’m out of show business! I’m in politics!”
—RONALD REAGAN
By the time Ronald Reagan hit the campaign’s “sawdust trail” in the spring of 1966, the landscape had shifted. He found he could no longer train his focus solely on burdensome taxation, reducing big government, and containing the spread of communism. Circumstances demanded that a candidate running for governor of California now weigh in on the various social outrages that were dividing the country. Like campus unrest. In late 1964, free-speech demonstrations at UC–Berkeley and elsewhere propelled him toward labeling them acts of “anarchy, with attempts to destroy the primary purpose of the university.” Sexual deviance. “Orgies . . . so vile I can not describe it to you.” Drugs. Marijuana and LSD alienated children from their parents, perhaps nowhere more obviously than on San Onofre Drive, where Patti Reagan’s rebellion raged in full force. Vietnam. American troops “are being denied the right to try for victory in that war.” Civil rights. He opposed as unconstitutional the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, as well as the Voting Rights Act and California’s Rumford Fair Housing Act, which prevented bias and discrimination in housing sales and rentals. Racial unrest. “Our city streets are jungle paths after dark,” he declared after a second wave of violence struck in riot-torn Watts.
These topics, and others like them, had insinuated themselves as prime sources of discussion among the agitated electorate. Wherever Ronald Reagan went, at rallies along the campaign trail, at cocktail parties and fund-raisers, even around dinner tables or in line at the bank, the conversation had shifted from sweeping generalities to specific hard-core “gut” issues and what to do about them. Public opinion was churning, and nowhere more tumultuously than in the middle- and working-class suburbs where traditional values had come under siege. His conservative views struck a chord with this dissatisfied constituency. Still, many of the questions being thrown, he found, were tricky to handle. He was still transitioning from one profession to the next, still learning, still making up his mind.
Stu Spencer and Bill Roberts felt some coaching was in order.
From the beginning, they’d stage-managed the campaign with precision and panache. The formal announcement, on January 4, 1966, was a televised half-hour special direct from the studio set of Death Valley Days, lit gorgeously and staged with bookcases and a crackling fire in the hearth behind Ronald Reagan. He and Nancy filled the frame like sweethearts in a locket. And when he looked into the camera, “tanned and meticulously groomed,” and described himself as a “citizen politician”—a citizen politician—it played like a Jimmy Stewart outtake from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Despite the makeup, the actor’s rapport with the camera, and his crackerjack delivery, there were cracks in the facade. During the broadcast, he mistakenly announced that 15.1 percent of Californians were on welfare—it was actually 5.1. And according to a political analyst, “He was overanswering every question.” There was also his myopic perspective. Most of his opinions, even his fundamental knowledge of politics, were developed by combing through Reader’s Digest and newspaper articles. This didn’t foster critical thinking. “On matters on which he had no background,” according to journalist Lou Cannon, “Reagan tended to believe anything he read without considering the source.” He didn’t consider, for example, that Reader’s Digest slanted its articles to a largely old-fashioned, conservative, alarmist audience. His handlers sought to broaden his approach.
“His understanding of how government operated in California was next to nothing,” says Stu Spencer. To prepare Ronald Reagan for the scrutiny he’d face in the coming months, they hired Charles Conrad, a classic, old-time congressman from the San Fernando Valley who also happened to be a member of the Screen Actors Guild, to give him a crash tutorial in civics and parliamentary procedure. “Every Tuesday, for two or three months, Charlie would go out to the house and say, ‘Ron, here’s a bill. Here’s what happens when you take it through the process.’”
Those sessions primed him on basic logistics, but he required a much deeper grasp of legislation. More—an acuity that demonstrated his unique stand on individual issues and how it affected the welfare of the state, as well as the common man. To that end, two clinical psychologists—Stanley Plog and Kenneth Holden, who ran the Behavior Sciences Corporation, a West Coast think tank—were delegated to lay out a soup-to-nuts political program rich in populist themes. They identified eleven broad issues—such as transportation, agriculture, water, and the budget—and bombarded the candidate with data, background information, and position papers on which he could put his own spin.
That spin, they recognized soon enough, was Ronald Reagan’s greatest asset. His instincts and timing were impeccable. “He could read an audience as well as any man I’d ever met,” says Stu Spencer, who chaperoned him to events early on. “His short little one-liners . . . his ability to ad-lib” turned what could have been a dry stump speech into contextual stand-up. Audiences loved him. Even though he’d been a glamorous Hollywood star, people identified with his folksy demeanor. “Joe Dokes running for office,” as Bill Roberts put it. “[His] solutions to most problems,” Spencer adds, “were always the same as the guy in the bar.” He knew what played—and how to play it.
But dealing with the press was a whole other story. From the outset, Reagan’s interaction with the media troubled Stu Spencer. He recalled, “He was not being taken seriously by the press. To them, he remained a grade-B actor.” And worse. The day after his announcement, the San Francisco Chronicle, the house organ of Northern California, reported that Reagan represented “the right-wing conservatives of the Republican Party,” leaving no doubt it meant members of the extremist John Birch Society. The situation called for hiring an intermediary—someone with press credentials who could vouch for Ronald Reagan’s legitimacy and live with his belief system. “Wasn’t an easy person to find,” Spencer admitted. He worked the halls at the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, the San Jose Mercury News, the Sacramento Bee, even the Orange County Register—and was turned down by every person he approached. Bill Roberts remembered a guy who had been with Copley News in its Burbank bureau but had gone to Washington as the bureau chief. Franklyn “Lyn” Nofziger was a delightfully irreverent, perennially rumpled character with great wit—“some of it occasionally clean,” according to Paul Haerle, a Reagan colleague—who could have been lifted right out of a Damon Runyon scenario. “He was gregarious, savvy, impulsi
ve, ideologically to the right, tended to shoot from the hip, and drank too damn much,” Spencer says. Plus, he had no respect for the government. “A perfect candidate for our press secretary.”
Right off the bat, Nofziger turned him down—and, again, even after Spencer offered to double his salary. Taking yet another stab at it, they flew him out to Los Angeles to meet Ronald Reagan in order to see if they were simpatico. The two men had met before, at a reception near Columbus, Ohio, in the summer of 1965, but, at the time, as Nofziger recalled, “I was not sober.” Now, however, it was love at first sight. “Lyn attached himself like an abalone to a rock,” Spencer says. “You’d have to have used a crowbar to pry them apart.”
With Nofziger on board, the primary campaign officially kicked into high gear in late February 1966. But at the outset there were hurdles to overcome.
Ronald Reagan’s candidacy still sounded like the punch line to a joke. Why not Clark Gable, Cary Grant—or Lassie? Who would play the lieutenant governor? He “was looked upon as being a glamorous curiosity,” said William French Smith, Reagan’s lawyer, who later served as the head of his executive committee. Even the state party leaders didn’t know him or pay him much heed. They’d seen the “A Time for Choosing” speech, but that was about it. Reagan had been a Republican for all of three years. But now what? Was he one of them?—or one of them? Batting lefty or righty? The label “political switch-hitter” was starting to stick.