Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  The offer appealed to Reagan. It entailed a regular paycheck and would keep his face in front of the public. The traveling was a drawback, but a person in his position couldn’t have everything he wanted. Reagan had always liked the personal appearance tours he had done to promote his films; he enjoyed the crowds and the celebrity treatment. He wasn’t the celebrity he had been or had hoped to become, but he would be a star to the GE workforce. He would have to preach the virtues of GE and capitalism, but this was no problem as he believed in capitalism and presumed he could come to believe in GE.

  And so The General Electric Theater was launched, with Ronald Reagan as host. His contract was “the fattest TV deal ever signed,” Hedda Hopper reported. This wasn’t saying much, given television’s youth. But Reagan could portray it as a forward step. “Best part of the deal: I can have my cake and eat it too,” he told Hopper. “My contract allows me to make motion pictures—all of them I want. So I can be a week-end TV actor and carry on my screen work too.”

  HE WAS TALKING fantasy about screen work. He made one film in 1955 and another in 1957. The latter, Hellcats of the Navy, included Nancy Reagan in her sole screen appearance after her marriage to Reagan. But beyond these, a couple of voice roles, and a small part in one last hurrah in 1964, Reagan’s film career ended when he signed with General Electric.

  He put the best face on his premature retirement from films. “In the old days I used to feel that Ronald Reagan was constantly on the soapbox, trying to change the world and doing his best to solve the problems of this complex motion picture industry,” Louella Parsons wrote in the spring of 1955. “Today, he is more fun and less serious about the world in general.” Reagan had sought out columnist Parsons, his old friend from Dixon, to tout the GE series. She inquired as to the source of his easier mien. “I suppose TV has done this for me,” he replied. “You know, I used to be president of the Screen Actors Guild, not only off the screen but on. I was never cast in a picture in which this position didn’t influence the producers. I was always given the role of a sedate, solid citizen, and if I was put in a Western I was sure to play an Eastern lawyer!” He hadn’t closed the door forever to movie roles. “If a good part comes along in either medium I’m going to grab it if I can,” he said. “But the beautiful thing about television is that you can pick and choose your stories, because you’re in a financial position to wait for what you want.” He granted that things weren’t what they once had been, and not for him alone. “Do you realize how this industry is changing? There are very few stars under contract these days. Many of the big ones free lance and are on television, too.”

  Several of those big ones landed on Reagan’s show. “We have Fred Astaire, Jimmy Stewart, Tony Curtis, Alan Ladd, Charles Laughton, Audie Murphy, Art Linkletter, Jeannie Carson and many others already on film or committed to do at least a half-hour episode for our series this season,” Reagan told journalist Walter Ames in 1957. Ames inquired how Reagan did it: How did he and General Electric entice such talent to television’s small screen? “Good stories, top direction, production quality,” Reagan answered. “An actor’s primary desire, and a necessary requisite in our industry, is to entertain to the best of his ability. General Electric Theater gives him, or her, that opportunity.” Reagan added that the program often cast actors against type, and that this appealed to them. Fred Astaire would perform in a nondancing role. Heartthrob Tony Curtis would battle bulls. Jimmy Stewart was going to star in Dickens’s Christmas Carol reimagined as a Western. Charles Laughton would become the coach of a Little League team.

  The General Electric Theater was more than an innovation in the new medium of television; it was also an experiment in the developing art of public relations. Since the dawn of American industrialism in the nineteenth century, corporations had pondered how to portray themselves to the individuals and groups who shaped their world. Customers and clients formed one important constituency, employees another, government officials and the voters who chose them still others. Customers were typically wooed, by advertising and commercial promotions. Employees might be coddled and patronized in company towns, or threatened and intimidated by wage cuts and private security forces when the employees went on strike. Government officials could be bribed, as in several scandals of the Gilded Age, or funded in election campaigns, until Congress outlawed most corporate contributions in the early twentieth century.

  The techniques of public relations grew more sophisticated during the 1920s, when a whole industry arose around the enterprise. Bruce Barton became the face of the field, and his firm of Barton, Durstine & Osborn gave guidance to such emerging powers as General Motors and General Electric. (Barton meanwhile won a following as a guru of self-improvement and the author of The Man Nobody Knows, which portrayed Jesus as the founder not merely of Christianity but of the culture of modern success.) The sell was softer but no less insistent than in the Gilded Age, and it made use of the modern media, especially radio. The private sector taught government a thing or two: Franklin Roosevelt manipulated radio in a manner to make Barton proud (though not happy: Barton was a Republican). During World War II the government’s campaign to promote the war effort employed both personnel and ideas from the public relations industry.

  General Electric’s hiring of Reagan represented another step forward for the industry. GE was one of the largest corporations in America, with manufacturing plants and research laboratories in dozens of states and a workforce that numbered more than 200,000. Its chief of public relations was Lemuel Boulware, who had devoted decades to the study of corporate communications and devised a theory of the subject he intended for Reagan to put into practice. The theory operated at several levels. The General Electric Theater presented the company as a patron of the arts, not elitist arts like opera, but popular arts enjoyed by the company’s millions of current and prospective customers. Reagan’s handsome face, warm smile, and soothing voice made him just the person Boulware wanted those millions to see and hear every Sunday evening.

  But Boulware had other audiences in mind as well. Like most corporations, GE disliked labor unions and sought to diminish their influence. Boulware believed that one way to accomplish this was to encourage the men and women who worked for the company to feel part of a community that shared the values of management. Reagan’s contract made him the point man of the company’s community building. He visited the plants and walked the factory floors; he shook hands with all who approached him and told stories of Hollywood. And he articulated the values of personal liberty and individual responsibility that Boulware hoped would inoculate the workers against the expansion of union influence.

  There was risk and some irony in Boulware’s approach. Reagan was a union man, of course, the recent president of an AFL affiliate, no less. Might he be emotionally tempted to side with the workers against management? If he did, would Boulware be able to dump him without embarrassing the company?

  But Boulware, like every master of public relations, was a student of personality. He understood that Reagan wasn’t the typical unionist. His union, the actors’ guild, wasn’t like the International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, the principal group GE had to deal with. Reagan’s guild was more like a company union, one of those corporate-sponsored organizations established to fend off the real unions. Reagan had more often been a partner of the producers than their antagonist. And the political views he had revealed in congressional testimony and speeches to SAG members and other industry audiences made clear that he stood solidly behind the pro-business principles Boulware wanted him to espouse.

  Reagan later boasted that every speech he gave for GE consisted of his words alone. The company’s leaders “never suggested in any way what I should talk about,” he said. “Nor did they ever indicate I was singing the wrong song and should switch tunes.” They didn’t have to, for Reagan’s views reflected the company line as closely as Boulware could wish. And they grew closer the longer he took the company’s money. “As t
he years went on, my speeches underwent a kind of evolution, reflecting not only my changing philosophy but also the swiftly rising tide of collectivism that threatens to inundate what remains of our free economy,” he wrote in the mid-1960s. The Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower did not produce the dismantling of the New Deal conservatives hoped for; instead, Eisenhower’s Republicans endorsed and extended Social Security, lavished federal money on highways, launched an expensive space program, and generally looked to conservatives like clones of the Democrats. When the Democrats retook the White House after the 1960 election, conservatives expected still worse. “I don’t believe it was all just a case of my becoming belatedly aware of something that already existed,” Reagan wrote. “The last decade has seen a quickening of tempo in our government’s race toward a controlled society.”

  At times, however, Reagan carried his warnings against government too far. General Electric’s largest customer was the federal government, which purchased instruments for warplanes and other weapons systems, equipment for government labs, and especially generators for the power plants of the Tennessee Valley Authority and other electrical installations. Reagan’s jeremiads against encroaching government cited the TVA as a case in point—until he got wind that TVA executives were listening and wondering to General Electric’s boss, Ralph Cordiner, why they shouldn’t shift their purchases to a more appreciative company.

  Cordiner said he wouldn’t censor Reagan—a move that caused Reagan to censor himself. “Suddenly, realization dawned,” Reagan recalled. “There wouldn’t be a word. Ralph Cordiner meant what he said and was prepared to back those words with $50,000,000 of business. Now the responsibility was mine. How free was I to embarrass or hurt the company, just because I had carte blanche to speak my mind?”

  Reagan called Cordiner. “I understand you have a problem and it concerns me,” he said.

  “I’m sorry you found out about that,” Cordiner answered. “It’s my problem and I’ve taken it on.”

  Reagan said he appreciated the support and freedom the company gave him. But he couldn’t abuse that freedom by making comments that might cost thousands of GE workers their jobs. “Mr. Cordiner, what would you say if I could make my speech just as effectively without mentioning TVA.”

  Reagan recalled the reaction: “There was a long pause. Then a very human voice said, ‘Well, it would make my job easier.’ ”

  Reagan concluded the story: “Dropping TVA from my speech was no problem. You can reach out blindfolded and grab a hundred examples of overgrown government. The whole attempt only served to illustrate how late it is if we are to save freedom.”

  REAGAN’S WORK FOR General Electric lasted eight years, interrupted once and briefly, at the end of the 1950s, by a pinch-hit reappearance with the actors’ guild. Reagan’s time with GE transformed him from a Hollywood figure into a national spokesman for conservative views. “Looking back now, I realize it wasn’t a bad apprenticeship for someone who’d someday enter public life—although believe me, that was the farthest thing from my mind in those days,” he wrote much later. “For eight years I hopscotched around the country by train and automobile for GE and visited every one of its 139 plants, some of them several times. Along the way I met more than 250,000 employees of GE—not just shaking their hands, but talking to them and listening to what was on their minds.” He met business leaders in the towns he visited, and he found that his tales of government meddling in the movie industry struck sympathetic notes. “No matter where I was, I’d find people from the audience waiting to talk to me after a speech and they’d all say, ‘Hey, if you think things are bad in your business, let me tell you what is happening in my business.’ I’d listen and they’d cite examples of government interference and snafus and complain how bureaucrats, through overregulation, were telling them how to run their businesses. Those GE tours became almost a postgraduate course in political science for me. I was seeing how government really operated and affected people in America, not how it was taught in school.”

  Earl Dunckel served as Reagan’s assistant and travel planner. He recalled how Reagan learned retail politics on the GE tours. At a typical plant, the women employees would gather around Reagan first, eager to meet the famous actor. Their male counterparts were less easily charmed. “The men would all stand over here, all together, looking at him, obviously saying something very derogatory—‘I bet he’s a fag,’ or something like that,” Dunckel recounted. “He would carry on a conversation with the girls just so long. He knew what was going on. Then he would leave them and walk over to these fellows and start talking to them. When he left them ten minutes later, they were all slapping him on the back saying, ‘That’s the way, Ron.’ ” Occasionally the women, or some of them, were the tougher sell. Dunckel remembered a large, formidable woman who heckled Reagan. “Buster, I’d like to back you up in a corner sometime,” she said. Reagan smiled and responded, “Well, it would have to be a pretty big corner.”

  The tours kept him busy but nonetheless afforded time for reflection and reading. He continued to avoid airplanes and so had many days in compartments and parlor cars of cross-country trains. “I still can’t think of a more comfortable way of travel than taking the Super Chief from Los Angeles to Chicago,” he reminisced. On the Super Chief and its counterparts he read materials Lem Boulware supplied on the meaning and purpose of General Electric and American capitalism. Earl Dunckel recalled him as an apt pupil. “He was interested very much in our employee relations philosophy, Boulwarism, because we were out there talking to the people who were affected by it,” Dunckel said. Reagan read the General Electric News, which covered company happenings that management wanted to publicize, including Reagan’s tours. He read the Supervisor’s Guide to General Electric Job Information. He read the numerous “Blue Books” in which Ralph Cordiner expounded the company’s philosophy. He read various titles Boulware recommended for GE employee book clubs; selections included Lewis Haney’s How You Really Earn Your Living and Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. The consistent theme was less government and more commercial and personal freedom.

  And he read a miscellany of books and articles he found on his own. He had a magpie’s eye for the glittering tidbit and a storyteller’s memory for material he could weave into his speeches. “Ron had the dope on just about everything,” a Hollywood acquaintance recalled: “this quarter’s up-or-down figures on GNP growth, V. I. Lenin’s grandfather’s occupation, all history’s baseball pitchers’ ERAs, the optimistic outlook for sugar beet production in the year 2000, the recent diminution of the rainfall level causing everything to go to hell in summer in Kansas and so on. One could not help but be impressed.”

  The more he read, and the more he traveled and spoke, the more he recognized that his formal political affiliation no longer suited his evolving beliefs. “One day I came home and said to Nancy, ‘You know, something just dawned on me,’ ” he recalled later. “ ‘All these things I’ve been saying about government in my speeches (I wasn’t just making speeches—I was preaching a sermon), all these things I’ve been criticizing about government getting too big, well, it just dawned on me that every four years when an election comes along, I go out and support the people who are responsible for the things I’m criticizing.’ ”

  This wasn’t quite true. Reagan had joined some other Democrats in urging Dwight Eisenhower to run for president in 1952 as a Democrat; when the previously unpartied general opted for the Republicans, Reagan still thought he was the best man for the job and voted for him over Democrat Adlai Stevenson. He voted for Eisenhower over Stevenson again in 1956.

  Yet he remained a registered Democrat. In 1960, John Kennedy ran for president on the Democratic ticket. Kennedy’s father, Boston tycoon and Democratic donor Joseph Kennedy, had produced movies, among other ventures, and he pressured Hollywood to get behind his son. He appealed to Reagan on grounds of shared Irishness as well. Reagan refused, having decided that the Democrats were the party of egre
gious government, and he endorsed Richard Nixon instead. He didn’t campaign actively for Nixon, as that would have undermined the nonpartisan face he and General Electric presented to the country. Nixon meanwhile discouraged Reagan and other anti-Kennedy Democrats from switching parties, reckoning that a strong contingent of “Democrats for Nixon” would more effectively undermine Kennedy than a bolt of the disaffected to the Republicans.

  If it did, it didn’t undermine Kennedy enough, for Joe Kennedy’s boy beat Nixon in a close contest. Yet Reagan still admired Nixon sufficiently to endorse him in 1962 when he ran for California governor. Amid that race Reagan was saying nice things about Nixon and his Republican views when a woman in his audience stood up and asked if he had registered as a Republican.

  “Well, no, I haven’t,” he replied. “But I intend to.”

  The woman announced to the crowd, “I’m a registrar.” She strode to the platform where Reagan was speaking and thrust out a registration form.

  “I signed it and became a Republican,” Reagan later recounted.

  PART THREE

  A TIME FOR CHOOSING

  1962–1980

  16

  SOME PEOPLE ENTER politics seeking power; Reagan wanted attention. The political dynamo of the 1960s was Lyndon Johnson, whose hunger for power had been evident from the moment he set foot in Congress in the 1930s. Johnson was hell-bent to make his mark on the world, and he spared no effort or principle in his drive to do so. Reagan wasn’t like that. Reagan wanted an audience. He wanted the notice and the applause he had learned to crave as a youth. He wanted a stage. He always wanted a stage.

  He might have been happy remaining with General Electric if GE had been happy remaining with him. But by the early 1960s the hold of The General Electric Theater on the Sunday evening television audience was slipping. The format seemed creaky, and the country had new small-screen favorites, including the four male stars of the top-rated Sunday show, Bonanza.