Reagan: The Life

by H. W. Brands

  BY THE BEGINNING of 1966, Reagan was sufficiently confident of his chances to announce formally. He did so in a thirty-minute video recording released simultaneously to fifteen television stations around California. He identified himself as a “citizen politician,” distinct from the professional politicians he would face in the primary and general elections. He reiterated his belief in the rights of individuals and warned against the growth of “big brother, paternalistic government.” He pointed to the uproar at Berkeley as evidence that Brown and the Democrats were failing in their obligation to protect individual rights and preserve public order. “Will we allow a great university to be brought to its knees by a noisy, dissident minority? Will we meet their neurotic vulgarities with vacillation and weakness, or will we tell those entrusted with administering the university we expect them to enforce a code based on decency, common sense and dedication to the high and noble purpose of the university?” He opposed acceptance of federal aid to state education. “With federal aid goes federal control, and as the administration in Sacramento relinquishes state sovereignty to Washington, at the same time it takes more power from those who have been elected to run our towns and cities.” He lamented the politics of hyphenated Americanism, accusing the Democrats of pandering to “Negro-Americans,” “Mexican-Americans,” and other special groups whose interests were promoted for “political expediency so cynical men could make cynical promises in a hunt for votes.” He promised to run a clean campaign adhering to the “Eleventh Command ment” promoted by the Republican state chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, which forbade Republicans to attack fellow Republicans.

  Lyn Nofziger, a journalist who joined the Reagan campaign as press secretary, recalled the Parkinson commandment as specially favoring Reagan. “Of course, the chairman is supposed to be neutral, but they came up with this thing mainly to keep the other candidates from attacking Reagan for being ignorant and for not having any political experience and that sort of thing,” Nofziger said. “It worked very well because we’d say, ‘You can’t pick on Reagan because he’s a fellow Republican.’ ” Reagan was happy to play along. “I will have no word of criticism for any Republican,” he said.

  He didn’t quite live up to his promise. George Christopher and other moderate Republicans tried to rattle Reagan, pressing him to disavow endorsement by the John Birch Society, the neo-McCarthyist group that revered the Tenth Amendment and rejected every advance of federal authority since the eighteenth century. This conspicuously included federal laws intended to secure civil rights to minorities; as a result the Birchers were often branded racists by their many opponents. Some were racists, which made the charge plausible and required political candidates to keep their distance.

  Reagan recognized that the Birchers would vote for him if they voted for any candidate not on the unelectable fringe, and he didn’t want to alienate them. For months he dodged questions about the society, which naturally encouraged Christopher and the moderates to call him a fellow traveler and suggest that he was a closet racist. Still he resisted disavowal, saying he rejected “blanket indictments” of people for the company they kept. When the pressure increased, he issued a statement declaring himself in “great disagreement” with some of the words and actions of Birch founder Robert Welch. “I am not a member,” he added of the society. “I have no intention of becoming a member. I am not going to solicit their support.”

  This wasn’t good enough, and the needling from his left continued. In March 1966 he attended a forum of black Republicans at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. George Christopher and a couple of lesser candidates also attended, and someone said something that was too quiet for the audience and reporters to hear but that Reagan took sorely amiss. “I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature,” he responded angrily in a voice all present could hear. “Don’t anyone ever imply I lack integrity. I will not stand silent and let anyone imply that, in this or in any other group.” He stalked out of the ballroom, pounding one fist into the palm of the other hand. More than one reporter heard him say, “I’ll get that SOB,” but none of them could tell which SOB he was referring to.

  At once he realized he had misstepped. He returned to the meeting room and finished the session calmly. He released a statement clarifying his position on the Civil Rights Act and on civil rights generally. “I believe it was not as well written as it could have been,” he said of the act. For this reason he had opposed it. “But I’ve been, heart and soul all my life, active in promoting goals of that act. I regret the great bitterness that exists. I have repeatedly said that where the constitutional rights of citizens are violated for any reason, it is the responsibility of government, at bayonet point if necessary, to enforce those rights.” He said he would not patronize a business that discriminated. But he didn’t think the Constitution allowed the federal government to force a shop owner to stop discriminating on his own property. Nor did he think state governments should infringe upon the rights of property owners. He opposed a Democratically inspired and recently adopted California fair-housing law. “Freedom can’t survive in a nation that tolerates prejudice or bigotry,” he said. But neither could it survive ever-expanding government. Basic rights like those attached to ownership of property “cannot be submitted to majority rule,” he said. If they were, there would be no limit to government’s grasp. “Eventually it will be dangerous to all of us.”

  REAGAN’S EXPLANATION APPARENTLY satisfied Republican primary voters, who handed him a two-to-one victory over Christopher. The size of the win and the enthusiasm of Reagan’s supporters caused many California Republicans, discouraged after the party’s poor showing in 1964, to think there was hope for the GOP after all. “I was not a big fan of Reagan’s,” Michael Deaver remembered of his first impressions of the former actor. “I was a young guy in the Republican party in California, and I had worked in Santa Clara County as executive director of the party. I was a northern Californian in my politics, although I’d been a big Goldwater young person. But always being a pragmatist, when I woke up the morning after the Goldwater election and realized that we had carried five, six states, or whatever it was, I decided I was never going to do that again. I wanted to win elections.” Something about Goldwater’s version of conservatism brought out the mean streak in people, Deaver thought. “We had four or five Goldwater organizations that wouldn’t speak to each other in California. It was just terrible, and the whole Goldwater organization, you talk about right wing. These were scary people, when I look back on it now. It was the John Birch Society, and it was get us out of the U.N., and don’t let them fluoridate our water, and all that kind of stuff. Those were the people who were involved in it. So I just didn’t want to have anything more to do with that.”

  Deaver assumed Reagan was cut from the same off-putting cloth, until he encountered him personally. “I met him at a dinner when he had decided to go around the state and allegedly test the waters,” Deaver said. “He was coming into every town and meeting with the Republican leaders. At that time I was working for the Republican State Committee in Santa Barbara, and about thirty of us got together for dinner at the Talk of the Town restaurant there in Santa Barbara. He was very impressive because here you could ask him anything, and you could see how his mind worked. And he certainly was an agreeable guy. Because of his size, he was imposing in a room, but then when he spoke, he was even more unforgettable because he was such a nice guy. He really was a nice guy, and he was very bright. So that left me with a pretty good impression.”

  The impression improved the more when Reagan trounced Christopher. Deaver detected the winner he had been looking for and joined the Reagan campaign. He was utterly charmed by the candidate. “You wanted to help Reagan to float through life,” he said decades and several campaigns later. “You wanted to make it easy for him. You wanted to be sure that everything was taken care of. I can’t tell you why that was; everybody who has ever worked for him felt that way. He never asked for it, but it was just i
nstantly apparent that that was something that everybody was going to do. I think there are very few people around, certainly nobody in my life that I’ve ever met, whom you had this respect for. You wanted him to succeed, and you’d be willing to do whatever it took to take the load off him of all the shitty little things that normal people have to do.”

  Deaver was more smitten than most, but many observers saw in Reagan’s big primary win a sign of a Republican revival, and not in California alone. “The California primary results may prove prophetic,” political columnist David Lawrence wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “If a united Republican Party emerges in the state, and the bitterness of the 1964 campaign can be superseded by cooperation among the factions, California could become a strong Republican state.” And California could be a harbinger for the country at large. The key was the candidate. “It is the character of the man, rather than the position he takes on public issues, which so often wins an election,” Lawrence said. “In fact, there are many cases where the candidate who says less than his opponent on specific issues and sticks to general principles turns out to be the victor, very largely because of a winning personality.”

  Reagan possessed the winning personality, and Pat Brown didn’t. The incumbent had never set hearts aflutter, and next to Reagan he looked stodgy and slow. He sometimes tripped over his own tongue. “Pat is a nice man, but the reporters looked upon him as a kind of buffoon,” Lyn Nofziger recalled of Brown. Nofziger still chuckled, decades later, at a remark by Brown after he inspected the devastation to Crescent City from a tsunami: “This is the worst disaster since I was elected governor.” Nor did Brown win the confidence of baseball fans when he spoke hopefully of the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants: “I am looking forward to the day when these two teams meet in the World Series.” Both teams were in the National League, making a meeting in the World Series impossible.

  A June 1966 poll showed Reagan with an eleven-point lead over the governor, and in the five months of the general race Brown never closed the gap. Reagan evaded an ambush in Sacramento by Democrat Alan Cranston, the state controller, who confronted him physically and demanded a response to a report asserting that the John Birch Society was anti-Semitic, among its other sins. Reagan refused to take the report Cranston thrust in his face, and kept walking. He encountered labor-union hecklers in Oakland who shouted him down. “Boy, I dream of the day when I’m not a candidate and can answer these guys,” he muttered, loudly enough for reporters to hear. Subsequently asked his feelings about the heckling, he replied, “It didn’t bother me. This was the labor hierarchy. I don’t have them and frankly I don’t want them.” He received the endorsement of former president Eisenhower and of Pennsylvania’s William Scranton, who said Reagan could be in the running for the Republican nomination for president in 1968 if he won big in California. “He’s put on a very good campaign and is an attractive personality,” Scranton said. “The Republicans could use attractive personalities and I’m glad we have one.”

  The attractive personality triumphed in November. Reagan crushed Brown, piling up a million-vote margin while leading the Republicans to a near sweep of statewide offices. Republicans advanced throughout the country, benefitting from the typical sixth-year reaction against the party that holds the White House, from unease over the turbulence on campuses and in the cities, and from worries about the war in Vietnam. The Republicans gained eight governorships, three seats in the U.S. Senate, and forty-seven seats in the House.

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  REAGAN’S HUGE WIN made him the talk of the nation. Political analyst Warren Weaver Jr. of the New York Times projected the 1968 presidential race and put Reagan in the top four of Republican likelies, along with Richard Nixon, who had toured the country touting the virtues of Republican candidates in many states; Governor George Romney of Michigan, who had been reelected almost as handsomely as Reagan had been elected; and Illinois industrialist Charles Percy, who had just defeated a Democratic warhorse to claim a Senate seat from the state of that greatest of Republicans, Abraham Lincoln.

  Reagan dismissed the presidency talk. “I am honored and flattered that anyone would even link my name with the presidency,” he said on the ABC interview program Issues and Answers. “But I have a four-year contract with the people of California.”

  Yet he didn’t avoid topics more appropriate to a president than a governor. He urged an escalation of the war in Vietnam. “Once the killing starts and we send young American boys over there to die, the nation has a moral obligation to impose its full resources to end it as soon as possible,” he said. He wanted more bombing of North Vietnam, especially depots of weapons. “Knock them out where you get them in the biggest bunches, not just coming down some jungle trail on a coolie’s back.” He thought the army ought to be returned to volunteers. “I question this whole business of the draft,” he said. “Why can’t we evolve a program of voluntary service? I don’t want the uniform to become a symbol of servitude.” He called for complete revamping of federal welfare and poverty programs, which were full of “graft and outright misuse of funds.” He predicted that the national civil rights movement was entering a quieter, more peaceful phase. Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael would be left “more and more behind by his own people, who will determine there is a better way of achieving equality than friction and violence.”

  ALL THE SAME, he was eager to start work as governor. So eager, in fact, that he jumped the gun. His term was set to begin on Monday, January 2, the first workday of 1967. But he signed and orally swore the oath of office several days early. The California secretary of state subsequently claimed a paperwork mix-up and said it was his own fault. Yet the assistant secretary of state, who administered the oath and certified the signing, remembered telling Reagan, “This is the document that will officially make you governor.” The assistant secretary later fudged his recollection, in Reagan’s favor. “To be fair to Governor Reagan,” he amended, “I can quite understand in retrospect that it was not entirely made clear.”

  The kerfuffle was forgotten in the rush of the Republican takeover of California’s executive branch. Reagan was sworn in again a moment past midnight on the morning of January 2. He uttered some modest remarks about the need to reduce the size of government, and then the few people present went home to bed. He saved his energy and dramatic effort for the public inaugural ceremony, which took place three days later. “Government is the people’s business, and every man, woman and child becomes a shareholder with the first penny of tax paid,” he declared. Those taxes were too high and must come down; the ambitions of government must be curtailed. “The path we will chart is not an easy one. It demands much of those chosen to govern, but also from those who did the choosing. And let there be no mistake about this: we have come to a crossroad—a time of decision—and the path we follow turns away from any idea that government and those who serve it are omnipotent.”

  Certain functions of government were necessary, Reagan allowed. The government must keep the peace against people who would disrupt it. “Those with a grievance can seek redress in the courts or Legislature, but not in the streets. Lawlessness by the mob, as with the individual, will not be tolerated. We will act firmly and quickly to put down riot or insurrection wherever and whenever the situation requires.”

  Government should assist people who could not help themselves. But it must not coddle idlers and freeloaders. “We are a humane and generous people and we accept without reservation our obligation to help the aged, disabled and those unfortunates who, through no fault of their own, must depend on their fellow men. But we are not going to perpetuate poverty by substituting a permanent dole for a pay check. There is no humanity or charity in destroying self-reliance, dignity and self-respect, the very substance of moral fiber.”

  The colleges must shape up or their students must ship out. “Hundreds of thousands of young men and women will receive an education in our state colleges and universities. We are proud of our ability to
provide this opportunity for our youth and we believe it is no denial of academic freedom to provide this education within a framework of reasonable rules and expectations. Nor is it a violation of individual rights to require obedience to these rules and regulations or to insist that those unwilling to abide by them should get their education elsewhere. It does not constitute political interference with intellectual freedom for the tax-paying citizens, who support the college and university systems, to ask that, in addition to teaching, they build character on accepted moral and ethical standards.”